The old fisherman brushed the snow off Konnai’s shoulders as he delivered these naive yet earnest words of encouragement, but his kindness only left the samurai feeling all the more forlorn. Alas! Has it come to this? Have I fallen so far as to receive the pity of an old and ignorant fisherman? Thus Konnai asked himself bitterly, even twisting the old man’s meaning, convincing himself that behind his kind words was a sense of hopelessness and resignation. “I beg of you!” he shouted, scrambling to his feet. “I really did shoot a monstrous fish in the waters of this inlet. I swear by the God of Arms I did! I implore you. Please don’t give up until you’ve found at least a strand of that mermaid’s hair, or a scale from her freakish body!”
And with that he kicked at a pile of drifted snow and ran off down the beach to where the fishermen were packing up their things and preparing to call it a day. “I beg you!” he cried, grabbing one of them by the arm, his eyes wild and desperate. “Just a short while longer!” But the fishermen, having been paid beforehand, were running out of enthusiasm; they halfheartedly tossed their nets in the shallows near the shore a few more times, then began disappearing by ones and twos until there was not so much as a stray dog left on the beach.
Even after the sun went down and the north wind began to blow with still greater force, whipping the snow into a blinding blizzard, Konnai continued to pace back and forth, stamping his feet on the deserted shoreline until long after midnight, when, rather than retreating to the village, he took shelter as he had each night from the start in a little boathouse next to the water, dozing there for only a short time and then, well before dawn, running back out again to the beach. Spying a drifting tangle of seaweed and mistaking it for his prey, he would rejoice momentarily, only to shed bitter tears when, soon enough, he realized his mistake. Then, spotting a piece of driftwood near the shore, he would splash out into the surf with a glimmer of hope, only to return to the beach with a sinking heart. Since arriving at Sakegawa he had been intent only on finding the mermaid’s remains and had scarcely eaten, as a result of which his mind had grown so beclouded that he now began to wonder if he really had seen a mermaid that time, if he wasn’t merely deceiving himself into thinking that he’d shot such a creature, or if it hadn’t been only a dream after all—doubts that left him laughing madly, deliriously, as he stood there alone on the snow-covered beach. Ah, he thought, if only I had fainted dead away like the other passengers on the boat and had never laid eyes on that cursed creature; it is simply because of my reckless indifference to peril that I witnessed such a wonder of nature and must suffer like this! How I envy those self-satisfied commoners who, seeing nothing and comprehending nothing, are convinced they know it all! There are in this world things of such mystery and awesome beauty that the small-minded cannot even imagine them. There are, yet he who discovers them risks falling into a bottomless hell. I must have done something heinous in a previous life, to have accumulated such karma. Or perhaps I was born beneath an evil star that destined me to a wretched and ignominious death. If so, why delay it any longer? Why not just throw myself into these crashing, rocky waters and hope to be reborn a mermaid?
With head bowed, he stumbled along the beach, seemingly already in Death’s grasp yet still unable to abandon hope of finding the mermaid’s carcass. As the sky became imbued with the pale first light of dawn, he sighed heavily and thought, in all seriousness: Ah, if nothing else, let me at least behold that okina of which the old man spoke!
And so we leave our unfortunate hero, confused and ranting incoherently, apparently out of his senses and, from the look of things, unlikely to live much longer.
Back at home, Yaé had been offering constant prayers to all gods and buddhas for the safe return of her father, but when three days, then four days passed without any hint as to his fate, save for a series of minor but ominous mishaps—a teacup dropped and smashed, the breaking of a sandal thong, a pine branch in the garden snapping under the weight of only a thin layer of snow—she found herself unable to remain sitting at home, and when the sun went down she stole to Musashi’s house, where she ascertained that her father’s destination had been the inlet at Sakegawa. That same night she made preparations and set out with the maidservant Mari to find him. Making their way along the midnight road by the light of a freshly fallen snow, resting under the eaves of houses or snuggling together for warmth in caves by the sea, dozing off to the sound of the waves before once again leaping up to continue their journey, urging each other on but, being women, making slow progress, the mistress and her servant did not reach Sakegawa until the evening of the third day. There, they staggered to the seashore only to find, to their unspeakable horror, Konnai, now a cold and withered corpse, stretched out on a mat of coarse straw. They were told that his body had been discovered drifting near the shore that morning, his head so entangled with seaweed that at first he was mistaken for the mermaid he’d claimed to have shot.
Yaé and Mari fell upon Konnai’s body from either side and clung to him, too grief-stricken to speak and sobbing with such passion that even the thick-skinned fishermen turned away, unable to watch. Yaé, whose mother was long dead and who now found herself abandoned by her father as well, wept uncontrollably, nearly out of her mind with grief. But finally, having come to a great resolve in her heart, she lifted her pale face and said: “Mari. We too must die.”
“Yes,” Mari said, nodding.
They stood up quietly, and just then there came to their ears the thunder of a horse’s hooves and the powerful voice of Noda Musashi calling to them as he galloped down to the seashore. Dismounting, Musashi stood over the body of Konnai and hung his head.
“What an abominable waste. Has it come to this, then? Shit! What care I for mermaids now? Musashi is not amused; Musashi is very, very angry, and when Musashi is angry, he is not to be reasoned with. He can be the most unreasonable of men. Whether mermaids exist or not is of no importance now. All that matters is that a certain vile bastard be punished. You, fishermen! Bring horses for these two women. Now! Find a pair of horses and bring them here, damn you!”
After thus directing his rage at the commoners milling about nearby, Musashi turned to glare at Yaé.
“And you! Stop that sobbing! There is work to do, revenge to be exacted. If we don’t return immediately, burst into Hyakuemon’s home, relieve him of his foul head, and bring it back to present to Konnai, I shall not permit you to refer to yourself as the daughter of a samurai. Enough of your sniveling!”
“Hyakuemon?” Mari took a step forward and cocked her head to one side. “Do you mean Aosaki Hyakuemon?”
“Of course. Who else would it be?”
“In that case,” Mari said calmly, “I begin to see... For some time now this Aosaki, old as he is, has had his heart set on my mistress. He’s been very insistent that she become his bride. My mistress, naturally, says that she would die before she’d marry a man with a nose like that. Not, of course, that the master was about to permit such a—”
“So that’s it. That explains everything. The worm had the temerity to claim to be a confirmed bachelor, a woman hater, when in fact he was a rejected lover all along. How despicable. The man is absolutely beneath contempt. To lash out at Konnai in retaliation for his own wounded feelings is worse than loathsome—it’s ludicrous. Ha!” Musashi shouted triumphantly. “The preposterous fool!”
That night, with Musashi leading the way, the two young women stole into Hyakuemon’s home, halberds in hand. They found their enemy in a room in the rear, drinking saké with a concubine. Musashi, with one stroke of his sword, lopped off Hyakuemon’s long and spindly right arm. Hyakuemon didn’t so much as wince, however, even as his severed arm dropped to the floor, but made to unsheathe his own sword with his left hand. Mari stepped in from the side and kicked his legs out from under him, but he rose to his knees, still undaunted, and thrust his sword at Yaé. With a gasp of astonishment, Musashi sank his own blade into Hyakuemon’s shoulder, and he fell, sprawling backward but, far
from giving up the ghost, writhed about on the floor like a snake, pulled a dagger from his sash, and hurled it with vicious force at Yaé, who barely managed to dodge its path. She and Musashi exchanged a dumbfounded glance, amazed at the tenacity of their foe, before finishing him off.
Once they’d accomplished their mission, Yaé and Mari hurried with Hyakuemon’s head to Sakegawa, where Konnai’s body still lay. Musashi, meanwhile, returned to his home and wrote out the details of the entire vendetta, expressing remorse for the great crime of putting Hyakuemon to death without first receiving permission from the daimyo, and claiming all responsibility for what had occurred. Then, after commanding his servant to deliver the document to the castle first thing in the morning, he performed seppuku without the least hesitation, thus ending his life in a manner worthy of the excellent and admirable samurai that he was.
After presenting Konnai with his enemy’s severed head and then seeing him buried with due ceremony, the two women returned home, where they closed the front gate and ensconced themselves within the house to await the daimyo’s verdict. Dressed in immaculate white kimono, they too were prepared to take their own lives should that be the judgment. In due time a council of chief retainers announced their decision: Hyakuemon himself had been such a perverse man as to qualify as an unnatural monster of this world; and since Musashi had taken responsibility for the incident and had already carried out his own punishment, there was nothing untoward in considering the affair a private dispute that had been settled in a satisfactory manner. The daimyo approved this decision and even praised the two women for the laudable manner in which they’d avenged their father and master. Shortly thereafter, Yaé was wed to Imura Sakunosuke, youngest son of the ranking retainer Sakuemon. Her groom took the Chudo family name as his own, thereby assuring the continuation of Konnai’s lineage. Soon thereafter, the maidservant Mari became the bride of a handsome young assistant law enforcement official named Toi Ichizaemon.
Late one night about a hundred days after Konnai’s death, a dispatch arrived at the castle from Kasuga Shrine, located at the seaside in Kitaura:
A most peculiar skeleton was discovered washed up on the shore here today. The flesh has rotted away, leaving only bones, but the upper half of the body is very much like that of a human being, while the lower half is unmistakably that of a fish. Although no explanation is yet available, it was deemed that such an extraordinary discovery should be reported at once...
An administrator was immediately sent to Kitaura to investigate. He ascertained that the strange skeleton was indeed that of a mermaid, and that embedded in its shoulder was the tip of one of Chudo Konnai’s famous arrows. Thus that spring was a season of twofold joy for Yaé, and thus ends this story affirming certain victory for those with the power to believe.
nce upon a time, in a certain district in Hunan, there lived an impoverished scholar named Yu Jung. Poverty and scholarship have always gone hand in hand, it seems, and one can’t help but wonder why that might be. Consider Yu Jung for example. Far from being of low birth or inferior breeding, he was in fact a man of rather handsome features with an air of genuine refinement. And though it might be overstating things to claim that he loved books the way some men love love, he had faithfully followed the path of learning since his earliest days, never engaging in any improper behavior to speak of. Yet he was simply not one of those upon whom fortune had ever seen fit to smile.
Yu Jung’s parents had both passed away when he was a child, and he had been brought up in the care of a succession of relatives who shuttled him from one home to the next. Once his inheritance was exhausted, however, these relatives began to look upon him as little more than a nuisance, and finally one of his uncles, a drunkard who was well in his cups at the time, pressed upon the young man a dark-complected, skinny, and uneducated maidservant from his own home, arrogantly ordering him to take her as his bride and pronouncing it an excellent match. Yu Jung was thoroughly repulsed by the proposition, but the uncle was, after all, one of the relatives who’d raised him and a person to whom he therefore felt a lifelong obligation. Being a man for whom filial piety was the highest law, Yu Jung could scarcely vent his anger at this outrageous imposition, and so, fighting back the tears and feeling more dead than alive, he meekly suffered himself to be wed to that skinny, withered, hideous woman two years his senior who, to add insult to injury, was rumored to be the drunken uncle’s mistress.
Ugly as this woman may have been, by no means did she compensate for it with a gentle heart. She had nothing but scorn for Yu Jung’s scholarship, and when she heard him muttering something to the effect that “The Way of Great Learning leads to the highest excellence,” she laughed through her nose and said, with all the sarcasm and malice she could muster, “Excellence? Better a way that leads to a little money, or a decent meal,” then slapped a bundle of her own dirty laundry in his face and added: “Look here, these need washing. It wouldn’t hurt you to help me out around here now and then.”
Yu Jung tucked the clothing under his arm and headed for the riverbed behind the house, reciting a poem beneath his breath as he went:
A whinnying of horses
As daylight wanes.
A clash of swords;
The first breath of autumn.
The poem did little to relieve his sense of the dreariness of life, however, or the feeling that he was an exile in the land of his own birth, and with a great, gaping emptiness in his heart he wandered aimlessly up and down the riverbank, like a man bereft of his wits.
“Such a wretched way of life is an insult to my august ancestors,” he thought. “This fall I will be thirty—the time when a man must stand firm. By heaven, I shall. I shall rise to the challenge and spare no effort until I have made a great name for myself!”
Having arrived at this momentous decision, Yu Jung strode back to his house, dealt his wife a resounding blow, and marched off to the capital, brimming with confidence, to sit for the government service examination. Unfortunately, his many years as a starving scholar had robbed him of strength and focus; the answers he wrote were hopelessly garbled, and he failed the exam spectacularly. His sorrow, as he trudged wearily homeward, was more than mere words can convey, and since he hadn’t eaten for some time, he was soon so famished he could scarcely walk. When he reached the King Wu Shrine, on the shore of Lake Tung-t’ing, he collapsed on the balcony in front of the main hall, sprawled on his back, and moaned.
“Ah, what is this world but a realm of meaningless suffering? Since childhood I have devoted myself to studying the Way of the ancient sages and have remained ever vigilant, even in solitude, against unworthy thoughts. And yet, though I may have grasped a truth or two from time to time, I have been granted none of heaven’s blessings. Far from it: I’ve been subjected to ridicule and derision every day of my life. In spite of which, did I not take courage and boldly present myself at that examination? Yes! Only to fail miserably... In a world like this, where the brazen, the shameless, the evil-hearted alone prosper, a weak and penniless scholar like myself is destined forever to be a failure and a laughingstock. I struck my wife and dashed gallantly out of the house: that much was all to the good, but heaven knows how she’ll lay into me when I return after failing in my heroic quest. Woe is me! I’d just as soon end it all right here and now.”
Such was Yu Jung’s exhaustion that his mind had become thoroughly befuddled, and thus, unworthy though it was of one who had studied the Way of the sages, he cursed the world and lamented his fate. Peering through droopy-lidded eyes at a great flock of crows that whirled about in the sky above him, he sighed and muttered: “Ah, to be one of those crows, who know nothing of wealth and poverty!” Then he closed his eyes and lay there as still as a corpse on the balcony of the King Wu Shrine.
Now, King Wu, you must know, was the posthumous title given to a great military leader of the Three Kingdoms era. After his death he was deified as the guardian spirit of waterways, which was why this shrine on the shore of Lake Tung-
t’ing was dedicated to him. As deities go, King Wu was said to be remarkably responsive to prayers, and each time a ship passed his shrine the crew would bow their heads in worship. In the woods next to the shrine lived a flock of hundreds of crows, and whenever a ship appeared, the entire flock would take wing with a deafening din of caws and squawks to circle above the mast. The crew and passengers considered the crows sacred emissaries of the deity king and would fling scraps of mutton and other meats up into the air for them to catch in their beaks.
It was the sight of these birds frolicking merrily about in the great blue sky that had inspired Yu Jung’s envy. “Ah, to be a crow...” He muttered the words in a feeble, doleful voice, and he was just beginning to nod off when someone tapped him on the shoulder.
“Hello, there,” said a man dressed in a thin black robe. Yu Jung, still half asleep, peered up at him.
“I’m sorry. Please don’t yell at me. I meant no harm. So sorry...”
Apologizing to others for no reason whatsoever was second nature to Yu Jung, an ignoble habit born of having been scolded incessantly since childhood, and as he rolled over on his side and closed his eyes again he continued to mutter, “So sorry, so sorry,” as if in a delirium.
“No one’s going to yell at you,” said the man in the black robe. His voice was a strange, hoarse sort of cackle. “I’ve been sent by King Wu. His Majesty wishes me to inform you that if you find the world of human beings so disagreeable, and so envy these crows the life they lead, then you’re just the man we’ve been looking for. It happens that there is a vacancy among the Black Robes, and His Majesty has condescended to bestow the appointment upon you. Here.”
So saying, the man covered Yu Jung with a thin black garment exactly like his own, and in less time than it takes to say it, Yu Jung was transformed into a crow. He blinked, hopped up onto the balustrade, and began to comb out his feathers with his beak. Then he spread his wings and flew off, somewhat falteringly at first, to join the flock swirling in the air above a passing ship whose sails shone white in the light of the setting sun.