Meeting for Making Poems
at Shirakawa, Late Edo era
BY Ukita Ikkei
(Color on silk, hanging scroll)

I would imagine you have heard of the tail-bobbing disease? said the young wife.

Tail-bobbing?

Wheezing is another symptom.

I see, said Ox-Blossom thoughtfully.

Maggoty vent, too, although by then it’s too late.

His little peony girl had told him once of her hope to learn to read and write, and he had spent pleasant evenings showing her how to draw simple characters, watching her clumsy attempts with good-humored tolerance. Probably the need to maintain herself would make further attempts impractical. Still, he had enjoyed the way her little pink tongue protruded between her lips as she struggled to copy his model and write out the word for “eternity.”

And castor beans! Do not say a word to me about castor beans!

No. But he had to say something. You raise them for their eggs then?

Eggs and feathers for now. Then later duck meat. Her small face shone serenely, all fear of the river current forgotten. I will get a good price in the city.

You will take them there yourself?

I will. For my husband would not make it past the first wine shop.

A difficult situation.

Difficult, yes. But she would be the one in the city visiting the new dry goods emporiums with cash to spend while her husband remained behind in the village, with one sniveling child tied on his back and the other stumbling along whining for his suck dummy. An obi in the new, extra-wide style will be my first purchase, and perhaps even a gaudy robe like the kind they wear in the pleasure quarters.

I see.

And tortoiseshell hair ornaments, mottled yellow and brown. I know exactly the ones I want.

Indeed. And he too knew them, decorations like those his little peony girl had shown him shyly; and it occurred to Ox-Blossom that this too was a kind of lightness, these simple correspondences, things as they were without embellishment.

Ox-Blossom had always assumed that he understood Old Master Bashō’s way of linking in his late manner because his descriptions of it were so simple. In fact, all he’d done was understand the words he had used.

Ox-Blossom had always assumed that he understood Old Master Bashō’s way of linking in his late manner because his descriptions of it were so simple. In fact, all he’d done was understand the words he had used. But now as he was able at last to recall with tranquility his days and nights of doubt and desire in the pleasure quarters, he detected within his reconfiguration of what had been endured an abrupt easing of the pain of it, like the moment when after a protracted struggle, the curved worm is at last extracted from the tight spiral of the winkle shell.

And clogs with scarlet toe cords! Can you imagine?

He could; and after wishing the young wife a safe journey, he set off on the road to the remote mountain villa where the final edit of the Bashō Group Compendium would be made, hiking up through the dry afternoon heat until he reached a roadside rest shelter. He drank deeply from his water gourd then held it cradled in his palms, the damp surface slick as catfish skin. The idea of the sadness of lost love was in many ways more satisfying than the peony girl herself had been. He drank again then got out his writing kit and sketched a prose heading:

The true image of things: a bird in a cage and a skiff on a river. What else is there but this? Unsure of my feelings, and unable to seek the advice of my little friend left behind in Edo, I devised this poor offering for her.

Then he dashed off a quick hokku opening-stanza, the words dropping down each out of the one before in a single, sinuous line of black ink:

Clogs with scarlet toe cords left under a lacquer tree; autumn arrives early in the barrier mountains.

The Cloud Terrace Pavilion was a medieval villa perched high on the southernmost peaks of the mountains that formed the central spine of the main island of the archipelago. It had been constructed by a family whose descendants chose the wrong side during the civil war, resulting in the slaughter of their persons and the forfeiture of their estates. In the decades that followed the establishment of the Tokugawa Great Peace, the Cloud Terrace had become a favorite venue for connoisseurs in search of the subtleties of the pleasures of the past.