I Parker: The Masuda Affair

Akitada followed them out, then stopped to watch them walk away. When they had gone a little way, the woman put the child down roughly. The father’s broad back blocked Akitada’s view, but he heard the boy cry out in pain and he clenched his fists. Both parents took the child’s hands and disappeared into the crowd.

It had been foolish to give his affection so quickly and deeply to a strange child. Akitada’s heart ached to see him dragged away, whimpering. The brutes had abused him and would do so again, but he had no right to interfere between parent and child. He hated this helplessness. He hated seeing the boy’s hope crushed so suddenly and completely. And he ached because he had failed the child just as he had failed his own son.

For the next hour, he wandered despairingly about town, trying to think of a way to rescue the boy, knowing he should return to the inn, saddle his horse, and go home to be with his wife.

And then he saw the cat again.

He recognized it immediately: the brown and white fur arranged in irregular patches; the scarred face with one eye half closed so that it seemed to be winking; the tear in the right ear. It sat on an upturned basket behind a vegetable stall, looking at him and twitching its tail.

Perhaps it was the festival’s peculiar atmosphere, or his own confused emotions, but Akitada was suddenly convinced that the cat was his link to the boy. This time he knew better than to rush the animal. He approached slowly, making soft clicking noises with his tongue as he had heard his sisters do when they called their kitten. The cat winked, slipped down from the basket in one fluid motion, and strolled away.

Akitada followed, keeping his distance, waiting as the animal stopped to examine garbage in gutters and alleyways for bits of food. He had no idea what he would do if he caught the cat, and he did not worry about the peculiar figure he made, following a mangy cat up and down dark alleys in his heavy silk hunting robe and stiff hat. At one point the cat paused to consume a large fish head someone had tossed out of a restaurant. Akitada hurriedly purchased a lantern from the shopkeeper next door, overpaying the man in his haste not to lose the cat. Eventually, the animal stopped scavenging and moved on more purposefully.

They left the business district behind. The streets grew darker, there were fewer people about, and the sounds of the market receded until they were alone on a residential street, the cat a pale shadow in the distance. A pearly moon cast its uncertain light as remnants of clouds moved slowly across it. Akitada picked up his pace. Occasionally, the light of lanterns or torches inside a walled compound threw weird shadows through the intervening trees. Puddles still glinted here and there in the potholes and cart tracks of the road, and Akitada hoped it would not start to rain again. He had the strangest sense that he and the cat moved towards some unearthly place, that the cat was leading him among the ghosts. He was being foolish, but in his misery, he relinquished his common sense willingly. It was a faculty that had never been particularly useful when it came to human emotions.

The cat appeared to have a definite destination. It kept up a steady and direct route towards the lake. The streets became darker, the lights from dwellings fewer. When they reached the road along the lake, Akitada saw that the wealthy people of Otsu and summer visitors from the capital had built their villas here to catch the cool breezes and have a view of the distant mountains. Their gardens were large, and the walls and gates in good repair. The sweet scent of flowers came over the walls, made sweeter by the moisture which still lingered from the rain. Somewhere a reed warbler called and was answered. Charming rustic roofs peeked from the trees, or elegantly tiled ones, and occasionally, where a wall was low and the trees not dense, he caught a gleam of the moon-silvered lake.

Imperceptibly he relaxed and smiled to find himself on this adventure with a cat. Then, abruptly, the moon disappeared behind clouds, the street was plunged into sudden darkness, and he could no longer see the cat. When the moon came out again, he strained his eyes and started to run. The street lay before him, long, straight, and empty. The cat was gone. With a ghostlike suddenness it had disappeared into the darkness as if it had never been.

Akitada stopped and looked everywhere. Nothing. Panic rose for a moment, then abated into defeat. In the distance sounded a temple bell. He turned to go back to the inn.

When the ringing of the bell stopped, he heard the slow clacking of wooden sandals. An old man approached, paused, and produced a pair of wooden clappers which he beat together vigorously, calling out in a reedy voice, ‘The Rat… The hour of the rat… The Rat.’

A night watchman. And it was the middle of the night already. Most decent people were in their beds.

Akitada called out, ‘Do you happen to know who owns a brown-and-white cat hereabout?’

The watchman raised his lantern to look at him. ‘You mean Patch, sir? Nobody owns him. He lives in the dead courtesan’s house.’ The watchman pointed to the gate of one of the lakeside villas. ‘A visitor in town, sir?’ he asked.

‘Yes, a visitor.’ Akitada looked at the wall and gate and saw that it did not match the neat appearance of the rest of the street. Plaster had fallen, exposing the wood and mud construction, and in one place a large section had collapsed, mocking the heavily barred wooden gate by allowing easy access to cats and humans alike.

Patch? The cat was spotted. Surely, the boy had recognized the cat and tried to call its name. ‘The dead courtesan’s house?’ he asked the watchman, who seemed amused by the odd encounter on the moonlit street.

‘Nobody lives there anymore,’ the watchman said. ‘It’s a sad ruin. The cat belonged to her.’

‘Really? Who owns the property? I might want to buy it.’

‘Ah.’ The watchman’s curiosity was satisfied. The rich, not having regular work, kept peculiar hours, but that was not his concern. He shook his head. ‘Dear me, not that place, sir. She killed herself because her lover left her to starve. They say her angry ghost roams the garden to catch unwary men to have her revenge on. I never go near it myself’ He produced a wheezing laugh. ‘Not that she’ll have much use for an old stick like me, but you’d better keep your distance, sir.’

Akitada looked at the watchman. It was the middle of the O-bon festival, and the old man was clearly superstitious, but somehow the tale of a haunted house fitted his own mood. ‘How did she die?’

‘Drowned herself in the lake. Pity. They say she was a rare beauty.’

‘Were there any children?’

‘If so, they’re long gone. The house belongs to the Masudas now.’

Akitada thanked him, and the man resumed his rounds, making a wide detour around the broken wall and barred gate.

Akitada walked to the collapsed wall and peered into the overgrown garden. Trees and shrubs hid all but the corner of an elegantly curved roof. Up ahead the night watchman looked back and shook his head at such foolhardiness. Akitada waved and waited for him to disappear before scrambling over the rubble into the garden. He was trespassing and felt foolish, but was more determined to find the cat than ever.

A humid, stagnant atmosphere received him. Dripping vines, brambles, and creepers covered shrubs and trees. His feeble lantern gilded wet leaves and picked out a stone Buddha, half-hidden beneath a blanket of ivy. Strange rustlings, squeaks, and creaks sounded everywhere, and clouds of small gnats hovered in the beam of his light. The air was oppressive and vaguely threatening. The cat’s coming and going had left a narrow track which soon disappeared under dense vegetation. Akitada followed it, but had to take detours and lost the way. His progress was noisy with snapping twigs, and he wondered vaguely about the neighbors. Surely no one else was out at this time. When he felt a tug at his sleeve, he swung around, his heart beating, but he had only brushed the branch of a gaunt cedar.