By the end of the afternoon, the sorting process had been completed. The undecided pile was larger than the senior editor would have preferred, but he had won debates he’d anticipated losing and retained submissions he’d thought doomed. Disputatious camps had formed within the “return to profundity” clique; small differences had become magnified; egos had swollen; and certain attributes of the profound manner of linked poetry had so risen in importance in the minds of its defenders that the acrimony which billowed up around the appropriateness of including the image of a pine tree in a vision of autumn hills trembling with colored leaves seethed violently, grew in intensity, and almost destroyed the work that had gone before as one group of disgruntled conservatives threatened to renounce all further cooperation and return immediately to Edo. A compromise was reached finally, and an otherwise inoffensive poem about weepy lovers watching the wake of a boat disappear into spring mist was sacrificed as a gesture of amelioration.

The day’s work done, some of the poet-editors hiked up to a small viewing platform perched higher in the mountains while others strolled down to the thermal baths, where a few of the bolder pleasure providers were known to be awaiting them, naked as peeled willow wands. Only the senior editor remained on the terrace, assisted by a scribe and, at his request, the youngest and least experienced of the pleasure providers, a weedy little creature whose nose was pink with inflammation.

Ox-Blossom was near the end of his review of the submissions still in dispute when he came to a single hand scroll containing a series of his own poems composed one summer afternoon while visiting his lost peony girl. He scanned through the sequence until he found one that she herself had suggested and recited it to the girl kneeling forlornly in the corner.

She said she thought it was nice.

And this? He read another one, also by his lost friend.

It’s nice too, replied the young pleasure provider, twin pearls of mucus expanding and contracting on the bottom rims of her nostrils as she sniffled in quick little snorts.

Ox-Blossom wondered if the peony girl’s stanzas didn’t characterize his teacher’s late manner, more so even than did his own. He held the scroll for a moment longer then placed it on the alcove shelf behind him rather than consigning it to one of the piles in the middle of the room.

The evening banquet began with rare delicacies, and it rumbled forward in a spirit of fellowship. Wine flowed and agreements were reached, ruffled feathers smoothed, slights forgotten. The night wore to its conclusion with some matters left unresolved, however. Was, or was not, low diction to be condemned? All recognized the factuality of a nightingale shitting on rice cakes on a veranda,^[4] but was that in itself sufficient? The celebrants pondered the imponderable, held their wine cups up to be refilled, and eventually tottered off to the various cottages and pavilions they had been assigned, some accompanied by pleasure providers and some not.

Ox-Blossom ordered paper lanterns placed along the path leading out to one of the more secluded thermal pools. Pale wisps of steam rose from the dark surface of the sulfurous water and dissolved into the inky blackness of the night’s sky. He hung his clothing on the stubs of branches on a nearby pine which had been trimmed for that purpose then used the old-fashioned dipping gourd to rinse himself and warm his skin before settling into the murky pool, clutching himself against the heat of the water. The autumn night was cold and clear and bright with stars, and the uncertain young pleasure provider stood hovering in the glow of the nearest paper lantern. She said everybody else was tucked in their quilts. She said she didn’t know what she was supposed to do. She said she was called the Princess of the Chamber of Fragrant Lilies although that wasn’t her real name; and she struggled with the multiple layers of her unfamiliar costume and the various sashes and ties that held it all together, searching out a separate branch stub for each garment so that the edge of the thermal pool took on an exotic ambience, with the silk robes and underskirts and dangling sashes forming a polychrome backdrop to the austere simplicity of the mountain grotto.