Fudoki Read online

  For Chris and for my parents: a tale told under your eaves

  These times have passed, and there was one who drifted uncertainly through them, scarcely knowing where she was…. Yet, as the days went by in monotonous succession, she had occasion to look at the old romances, and found them masses of the rankest fabrication. Perhaps, she said to herself, even the story of her own dreary life, set down in a journal, might be of interest; and it might also answer a question: had that life been one befitting a well-born lady? But they must all be recounted, events of long ago, events of but yesterday. She was by no means certain that she could bring them to order.

  —Kager nikki (The Gossamer Years) translated by Edward Seidensticker

  MAP TK

  Characters in the Princess Harueme’s Tale

  Fumiya no Shigeko, Harueme’s primary attendant

  The emperor Shirakawa, now dead: formerly the prince Sadahito; Harueme’s half-brother

  The emperor Horikawa, now dead: formerly the prince Taruhito; Shirakawa’s son; Harueme’s nephew

  The emperor Sutoku: formerly the prince Atsuhito; Shirakawa’s great-grandson; Harueme’s great-grandnephew

  Fujiwara sammi no Kenshi: Shirakawa’s consort; mother of Horikawa

  Fujiwara no Yorimichi: Harueme’s maternal grandfather; her foster father

  Fujiwara no Morozane: Harueme’s uncle

  Mononobe no Dmei, a guardsman from Mutsu province

  Shisutko: Harueme’s first cat

  Myb: Harueme’s current cat

  The cat Kagaya-hime

  Osa Hitachi no Nakara: a road-met companion to Kagaya-hime

  Osa Hitachi no Kitsune: Nakara’s adopted brother

  Junshi: Nakara’s primary attendant

  Seiwa Minamoto no Takase: commander of the war band

  Suwa: Takase’s attendant

  Onobe no Kesuko: priestess with the war band

  Abe no Norit: head of the Norit clan

  Uona and Otoko: Kagaya-hime’s female and male human attendants

  Contents

  1. The Cloud-Paper Notebook

  2. The Plum-Colored Notebook

  3. The Grass-Character Notebook

  4. The Butterfly-Printed Notebook

  5. The Kihada-Dyed Notebook

  6. The Genji-Poem Scroll

  7. The Michinoka-Paper Notebook

  8. The Fan-Fold Notebook

  9. The Shobu Notebook

  10. The Chang-An Notebook

  11. The Ten-Ox Notebook

  12. The Mashi-Hemp Notebook

  13. The Blue-Green Notebook

  14. The Bamboo-Paper Notebook

  15. The Silver-Foil Notebook

  16. The Last Notebook

  Author’s Note

  1. The Cloud-Paper Notebook

  I am the princess Harueme, daughter of Fujiwara no Enyu and the emperor we now call Go-Sanj. More to the point, I am old and I am dying.

  My life (what remains of it) does not look so different from the outside than it has anytime in the past fifty years, since I first came to court. I kneel on a straw mat laid on my oh, so familiar boxwood floors, though the padding is thicker than it was when I was young, and despite it my knees hurt rather more. I wear silk as I have since I was a child today; my robes are the susuki grass color combination, a private favorite of mine. My screens and curtains of state and eye-blinds are elegant but worn—but so they have been through all these years. I cannot recall ever having completely new hangings.

  And there is a cat watching me as I write, a tabby female with green eyes whom we call Myb for her grand-lady manners. Before her there were others, but she fills the same place in my life that they did. The individuals may change, but there are always cats, there are always robes, there are always mats. These do not change.

  I am old, but it is not age that kills me. There is a pressure deep in my chest, as if my liver and lungs are pushed aside by new and unknown organs. To breathe, my lungs steal back territory from these encroaching organs, and then they must do it again for the next breath. Each time they reclaim less and retreat sooner, so that I see a day when they find the price of this war too high, and we will die, my lungs and I. I can only hope that these usurping organs will be required in the Pure Land, and my body is simply premature in generating them. Even in hoping this, I grasp for a reason, like a falling monkey catching at vines. My half-brother who was the emperor died some months ago; I follow him rather sooner than either of us expected.

  I know I am dying, though my great-grandnephew the emperor and a thousand medical men—herbalists, diviners, eccentrics of every stamp—do not seem to believe me when I tell them. Or perhaps they do not choose to believe. Believing in a thing can make it so; how could they risk such a thing? If it is possible, what else might be, as well?

  I cannot die here in the palace, of course—to do so would stain the purity of the sacred enclosure, and therefore it would be bad for my great-grandnephew the emperor—so I have already made my plans. Soon a priest will administer certain vows, give to me a new name and cut my long hair, and I will be a nun. It is as simple as that.

  Not quite so simple: in my lifetime I have acquired and filled what seem to be a thousand trunks, and these must be emptied and removed. Their contents comprise an odd sort of midden heap: close-writ diaries; broken antiques from China or beyond, their value only in their provenance; a half-finished translation of The Thousand-Character Classic; torn robes in no-longer-fashionable color combinations; love letters twisted into the clever little knots that girls think can conceal secrets. And there are notebooks I have never gotten around to filling, their pages full of promise, or emptiness.

  Pick up a biwa-lute, and you can’t help but strike a note or two. Watch a cat sleep and you long to touch it (often to the cat’s annoyance). A new brush begs you to grind ink. A cup makes you thirsty; dice in your hand demand to be thrown. The mind follows what the hand touches.

  A blank notebook demands words. Which words? I wonder.

  At a time now past, a cat was born. The emperor Ichij brought the first cats from Korea—my great-grandfather, though this was long before I was born. This was not so long after that, when cats were still rare, and all in the inner provinces near the capital.

  This cat was a female, the smallest of her litter of four, and her fur was at first a blurred darkness. As she grew it changed to black flecked with gold and cinnamon and ivory, like the tortoiseshell of a hair ornament. Her eyes when they opened were gold, like a fox’s. She was small but fierce: in no way but size a runt, for she lacked the gentle resignation of the weak.

  She lived on the grounds of a shinden residence on Nij avenue, in the capital’s west side. It filled a city block, and it had once been very fine, though that had been before even the emperor Ichij’s time. The owners abandoned it to build a house closer to the heart of things (and that heart had moved east, to where the retired emperors lived); there were fires and droughts and earthquakes; there was the slow erosion of apathy. The main house with its three wings still stood, but the roofs leaked and had fallen in places; the walls were furred with mosses. Some outbuildings were no more than piles of wood and cedar shakes. The grounds were overrun with ivy and weeds, and the three little lakes and the stream that joined them were green with neglect.

  Three people lived here. They called themselves servants to justify their presence, but they were no more than cuckoos squatting in a nest that did not belong to them. They lived in the north wing, what had once been the primary wife’s rooms, and cooked on the pavement of what had once been the bamboo courtyard. Their trash they tossed into a heap beside the covered walkway to the west wing. A goat also lived here, too wily to catch and be eaten.

  Cats have their estates, as well: their gathering places and private wings.
A handful of females, fellow-wives and sisters, shared the residence’s grounds, which had not inconsiderable resources viewed from the perspective of a cat’s tastes. The ruined garden and the kitchen yard seethed with mice and small edible things, and the brook and the lakes contained slow, fat frogs that attracted what seemed consistently stupid birds.

  Each adult claimed her slice of the grounds, where she hunted and mated and bore kittens in solitude. These private spaces met at the center, like the petals of a dogwood bloom, and on pleasant days when the sun was warm the cats gathered at the midden heap and the space around it, matrons dozing as the kittens chased one another.

  Most kittens were sired by one of two toms, each of whom claimed half the grounds (and sometimes more) and visited when their responsibilities permitted. Sometimes a strange male infiltrated, like a guardsman secretly visiting a nobleman’s wife, and there would be a kitten with unusual markings or strangely colored eyes. Apart from these occasional visits, toms had no part of the cats’ lives: were irrelevant, in fact.

  The cats (the female cats) of the residence’s grounds shared another thing, their fudoki, which is self and soul and home and shrine, all in one to a cat. The fudoki is the chronicle of the females who have claimed a place, a river of cats that starts with the first to come to that place, and ends with oneself—when one grows experienced enough to have a tale to tell. It is also the place itself, and the cat whose story it is, and the immaterial shrine in which the household is honored. A cat may lose her tale by leaving her family and place, but then she is not the same cat. Mothers taught their daughters the fudoki; if the mother died too soon, the cousins and aunts and fellow-wives did so. Some (though not all) of the kittens would live; the tale would go on, an unbroken stream.

  Though she was fairly young, the tortoiseshell cat had survived kittenhood and not run away. She had not yet earned a place in her tale, though her aunts and cousins had taken to calling her The Small Cat. This would change when she had earned a true name and a longer story. The tortoiseshell’s fudoki was many cats long, and she knew them all—The Cat with a Litter of Ten, The Cat Born the Year the Star Fell, The Fire-Tailed Cat.

  The Fire-Tailed Cat. I wrote those characters as my woman Shigeko came to me, to warn me of the impending visit from the latest healer my great-grandnephew has sent—a yin-yang diviner this time, with the good looks and arrogance that mean he will go far in his profession. He wasted half a day of my none-too-long life, but as I waited for his rather silly rituals to be completed I at least had ample time to ask myself why I am writing in this notebook. For the pleasure of watching the characters shape themselves under my hand? Do I distract myself from pain or boredom or fears for the future (for of course I am afraid. I am not so enlightened as all that)? I know the ending of my own story: do I long for a tale with an end I do not yet see?

  I have written much before this but always notes about things I have observed. Never a tale (which is, after all, a lie, without proof or relevance). And why a cat?—Which is the easiest of all these to answer, for Myb sat beside me, sunlight in her green eyes as she stared into air, or nothing. What does she see? And when I look at her, what do I see? Cats. Who can tell?

  There was a day, beautiful and very hot: summer, though autumn would begin soon enough. The first gingko leaf had turned, a surprising brilliant gold fan against dusty, dry green. Ducks slept on a pond as still as enamel, out of reach of ambitious cats. Pollen choked the air with a haze like smoke. The afternoon sky had leached to the color of tin in the heat.

  The cats were gathered at the midden, five adults and a handful of half-grown kittens. There were not many, because it was not a good summer for cats: the cat distemper had killed some, and a stray dog others including the oldest female, The Cat Who Found the Jewel. Most of her kittens—too young to have earned places in the fudoki—died, but one survived, the small golden-eyed tortoiseshell. She sat on a wall, looking down at the courtyard, blinking as the sun moved into her eyes.

  Adults dozed tight-muscled in the dappled shadows cast by the garden’s trees, or stretched out on the gravel under the sun, looking dead. The kittens played idly with fishes’ tails retrieved from the midden, pausing to rest in the shade of the raised walkway and buildings that formed three sides of the space. One cat licked clean the ears of her half-grown daughter. The fudoki rippled over them all, slow and warm as a summer brook. A wind started.

  The ducks panicked suddenly: awoke and whirled up from the lake in a ragged spiral like a dust devil. The cats did not move from their places, but in a blink slipped from sleep to hunters’ wakefulness. They watched the wheeling ducks, all thrashing wings and strange cries. The air had changed; or something.

  A duck broke from the spiral and arrowed toward the cats. The others followed her; and when the first duck slammed into the side of a storehouse they followed her there, too, and died with her. The last broken-necked duck had not hit the ground when the earthquake struck.

  It was not a large quake, nor a long one. Across the capital, screens and cooking braziers rattled or fell. Humans and animals screamed in their various ways. Tree branches tossed; leaves rustled as if in a gale. Temple and shrine bells jangled in their frames without rhythm.

  The ground shuddered and gave a deep sound the cats felt through their paws. Some had experienced earthquakes and hunkered down, ears flat and eyes wide. Some bolted for safe places, under buildings or up trees.

  The tortoiseshell did not know earthquakes; her fudoki (and there were quakes in the fudoki) could not prepare her for the ground moving. She jumped to her feet, teetered, and lost her balance, falling to the wall’s base in an awkward heap. Plaster fell around her in heavy flakes. She staggered to the courtyard’s center, braced her legs against the bucking ground, and hissed.

  The residence’s main house collapsed slowly, almost painstakingly. Old timbers groaned and broke like river ice. With odd musical noises, cracked roof tiles shook free, slid, and shattered on the dirt. More fell; they sloughed in sheets like snakeskin as supporting pillars flexed. A dislodged beam crashed down. Another splintered with a noise like fireworks, or thunder. Slowly, the roof crumpled in on itself, vanished into the building with a wave of white dust and a sound so loud that the tortoiseshell fell, stunned with the weight of it.

  She could not tell when the shaking stopped being the earth and became instead the falling building. She streaked up the ragged bark of a hinoki cedar, to an abandoned squirrel’s nest she knew. She heard noises outside the grounds: shouts, cries; on the street to the west, frightened horses that had kicked down their stable doors; the frightened (or irritated) bleating of the estate’s goat, fading as it bolted away. The last cat she saw was an aunt vanishing beneath the west walkway.

  The bells chimed randomly for a long time after the earthquake ended.

  Despite the earthquake’s damage, it was the fire that destroyed the shinden residence and its grounds. The eighth month is a dangerous month: the gardens are dry, and wood-and-paper houses catch fire as quickly as brazier coals. In the capital’s southeast quarter, a tipped lantern set fire to a floor mat. A length of summer gauze hanging from a curtain stand flared up and lit an old reed eye-blind, and that was the first house to burn. In the afternoon’s rising breeze, flames spread to the north and west, a bright fan across the city.

  Crouched in her tree, the tortoiseshell smelled the fire before she saw or heard anything. The air grew sharp and stung her eyes, made her wrinkle her nose and sneeze: a greasy, complicated smell. She shook her head to dislodge the tang.

  There were more shouts outside the grounds, more hoofbeats, wagon wheels screaming under weight. Bells rang again, their discord rhythmic, in earnest this time. Behind all was a steady roar, like a festival crowd cheering.

  The heart of a hinoki cedar is not a good vantage point, and the tortoiseshell crept along a limb until she could see out through the needles, over the broken outer walls. Through the dirty air she saw that everywhere to the south and eas
t was smoke. Where buildings burned, thick dark plumes seethed upward; where there was grass or gardens, pale shreds crawled toward her. And there were flames.

  She knew fire, convenient little blazes that the residence’s people used for their mysterious purposes, but this was not the well-mannered glow of charcoal or lamplight. This was chaotic, full of angry colors: the source of the roar she had heard, the shouting crowd. A sudden gust of hot wind slammed into her. She retreated along her branch.

  When she was small, she fit into the squirrel’s nest, had hidden here as the dog killed her mother. But she was larger now, and it was no longer a refuge. She climbed as high as she safely could, and pressed herself into a little hollow where a branch joined the trunk. And then she waited, panting, for the fire.

  We—humans I mean, peasants and nobles alike—know about the fires. I had not lived more than a few summers before I had learned of them. They always start with something small, but if the weather is dry or the wind is strong, they can destroy everything—or nearly everything; fire is as whimsical as the gods. Flames settle into one place, burning for days with choking black smoke and leaving the ground too hot to touch, mysteriously poisoned for years afterward. Across the street, they cross another residence with no more damage than black-scorched tips to the banquet field’s grass. The flames disregard entirely the gardens of a third residence, happily beyond the range of the winds’ vagaries. Within a few streets one may see all of these, and more besides: a thatched stable with a roof like a pillar of flame, its walls hidden in the smoke that pours downward; a storehouse half-burned, half-untouched; a garden pond filled with boiled, once-ornamental fish. One shop is abandoned, screens and grilles gaping as the owners flee with the best of their stock in a wagon pulled by their strong-legged sons. A shop next door remains open, and a woman buys gourds in a net from an old man. Except for the cloths over their mouths, they seem oblivious to the burning city.