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.
Swooping left and right, he deftly caught the scraps of meat sailors flung up; soon his stomach was fuller than he could recall it ever having been in his life, and he flew back to the woods beside the temple and perched on the branch of a tree. As he sharpened his beak on the branch, he gazed at the late afternoon sunlight glittering like gold on the surface of Lake Tung-t’ing. The sight moved him to recite a poem in the manner of the ancient sages:
Like a thousand golden petals:
Wavelets scattered