Dale Furutani - Death at the Crossroads

The Magistrate stared at the body for several minutes. Jiro also looked. A long sash was wrapped several times around the body. Despite its length, it seemed to be a little loose. Jiro wasn’t sure what the samurai was talking about. The Magistrate echoed Jiro’s bafflement. “I don’t see anything,” he said.

The samurai sighed. “You can hold a lighted candle to a man’s face, but even if he feels the heat, you can’t make him open his eyes to look at the flame.”

“Here, here,” the Magistrate said. “I’m getting tired of these remarks of yours. They don’t make sense, and I think they might be disrespectful.”

The samurai gave a short bow. “I have the deepest respect for the position of Magistrate,” he said. “It is an important function and vital to keeping order in a district. If any of my remarks have offended you, I am sorry. They are simply reflective of the caliber of the actions and words I’ve seen before me.”

The Magistrate blinked a few times, not sure if he had been apologized to or insulted again. Finally he said, “Yes, yes, well, I’ll have to report this to the District Lord to see what he thinks. His manor is next to Suzaka village. This is all very unusual, very unusual. Samurai, I’ll require you to stay until our Lord decides what to do about this whole situation.”

“Is there a teahouse in Suzaka?”

“No, but you can stay with the charcoal seller.”

Jiro didn’t want the Magistrate extending an invitation to this ronin. He didn’t want a guest imposed on him, especially a strange ronin. “Excuse me, Magistrate-sama, but my house is too meager for a samurai.”

“Nonsense,” the Magistrate said. “He has to stay someplace. He certainly can’t stay with me or at the Lord’s manor. Your farmhouse is as good as any.”

“But perhaps the samurai would object to staying at such a lowly dwelling?”

“Oh no,” Kaze said with a smile. “Two nights ago I slept in the bottom of a boat I was in, and last night I slept in an open field. I’m sure your house will be quite adequate.”

“But-”

Jiro’s last try at an indirect protest was cut off by the Magistrate, who said, “Good, good. It’s all settled then. Let’s go into the village. I have to report this to the Lord. You two men stay here and bury the corpse,” the Magistrate said to the guards.

“You’re not going to take the body into Suzaka? Maybe someone in the village will know this man. Just because he’s a stranger to you, that doesn’t mean others won’t know him,” Kaze said.

“What for? It’s a needless effort. Here we just bury dead strangers by the side of the road. That’s our custom. Yes, yes, that’s the proper thing to do.” The Magistrate started waddling off toward the village.

The samurai didn’t immediately follow, and both Jiro and Ichiro were torn between trailing after the Magistrate and making sure the samurai would go.

Almost to himself, the samurai said, “What kind of place is this, where the bodies of strange men are so common that you have a custom for how you bury them?”

He stuck his sword into his sash, adjusting it carefully, then started down the path toward the village with the headman Ichiro trailing. Curious, Jiro looked up the hillside, then down the path at the retreating figures of the Magistrate, the ronin, and the village headman. He decided to satisfy his curiosity and started scrambling up the hillside to the place where the samurai had been sitting.

When he got to the tree trunk, he picked up the piece of wood the samurai had been carving. It was a piece of a limb as tall as a hand and as big around as a spear butt. From this hunk of wood, the samurai had carved a statue of Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy. The statue wasn’t finished. Only her face and shoulders were emerging from the rough bark, but Jiro marveled at the delicate beauty and serene expression staring up at him.

Kannon’s eyes were lidded slits, and her smooth cheekbones framed a tiny mouth with perfectly formed lips. As always, she was patient and inviting, ready to extend her mercy to any supplicant sincere enough to ask for it. That the hands of a man could evoke a living representation of the Goddess from a common piece of wood was a source of wonder for Jiro, who was used to much cruder representations of the Gods and Goddesses that inhabit the Land of the Gods.

Jiro looked down the slope and saw the two soldiers scraping out a shallow grave by the side of the road. From his vantage point the crossroads and all that occurred there was spread before him like a scene framed by tree trunks and branches. Where the samurai had placed the Kannon, the Goddess could look down on the slain man and all who traveled this place, extending her mercy to weary travelers on dangerous roads. Jiro placed the half-formed statue back on the branch, just where the samurai had left her. He clapped his hands together and bowed, asking the Goddess to extend her benevolence to him, too.

The men digging the grave looked up at Jiro’s clap, but didn’t have enough curiosity to see what the charcoal seller was doing. Slipping and sliding, Jiro made his way down the slope that the samurai had so nimbly navigated just a few minutes before. After loading the spilled charcoal into his basket and hoisting the basket on his back, Jiro scurried down the path that led to Suzaka village.

“Sooooo?”

Nagato hated this. Lord Manase loved subtlety and indirectness. Nagato was just a rough country samurai, and he knew it. He was at a loss as to how to deal with this peculiar master, who kept such strange customs and who talked with such an odd accent. Now, after reporting the murder at the crossroads and the encounter with the samurai, the Lord was expecting Nagato to make some comment, but Nagato could get no hint of what kind of comment the Lord was expecting from his one-word question.

“It was probably the work of Boss Kuemon, Manase-sama,” Nagato said.

“Sooooo?”

That response again. They were sitting in the Lord’s study. For some reason, Lord Manase preferred a study with sturdy wooden shutters, instead of the usual paper shoji screens. The result was a dark and gloomy place, with deep shadows like a cave. Lord Manase sat in the center of the room, surrounded by books and trinkets. When the servants of the manor gossiped with village people, they talked of the Lord’s scholarship, how he would sit in his study late into the night, as a single candle flickered in a large metal candlestick sitting on the floor, and peruse ancient texts. The Lord loved fine things and lived and dressed in opulence, but his habits were monkish and austere. Past lords of the small district had always been rough country samurai, interested in hunting, eating, and gathering concubines. A bookish lord was something outside the realm of experience.

Nagato always found the effect of the dark study, crammed with books, unsettling. It was made all the more unsettling by the strong perfume the Lord wore. The servants said that Lord Manase seldom bathed. In this, he was just like the hairy barbarians from the far-off country of Europe, creatures that Nagato had heard of, but never seen. Lord Manase used a variety of perfumes, both purchased and invented by himself. The perfume combined with the memory of candle smoke and the grassy smell of old tatami mats made a suffocating, heavy, and complex atmosphere that Nagato found quite unbearable.

Nagato knew enough not to mention this to his master, but when they were locked together in the small, closed study, the pungent scents assaulted his nose. Nagato was desperate to say the right things to his master for many reasons. First, he wanted leave to escape the claustrophobic study. Next, the Lord’s strange speech behavior always made him uncomfortable in any circumstances. And last, and most important, this murder was one he didn’t want his Lord taking an interest in.