“I’m frightened.” Yaé placed her hands over her breast. “My heart is pounding.”
“There’s no telling what might happen,” Mari said. “We must prepare the house for any eventuality.”
They were rolling up their sleeves to begin cleaning the house when Noda Musashi slipped in through the back door, unaccompanied and dressed in a plain kimono.
“Has your father left already?” he whispered to Yaé.
“Yes. And he took all his gold and silver with him.”
Musashi forced a grim smile. “It may be a rather long trip. If you should need anything at all while he’s gone, you mustn’t hesitate to come to me.” He pressed a large sum of money into her hands. “This should hold you for the time being.”
Certain now that her father was in some sort of trouble, Yaé, samurai child that she was, slept that night in her kimono, with the sash firmly tied, hugging a dagger to her breast.
Konnai reached Sakegawa the following morning. His first order of business was to assemble all the fishermen in the village and distribute among them every last piece of the silver and gold he’d brought.
“I speak to you not in my official capacity, but as an individual in a difficult predicament,” he began, dutifully making that important distinction. “It is in regard to a personal and confidential matter,” he continued, then faltered and blushed. With a rueful smile, prefacing his remarks with a defensive “You may not believe what I’m about to tell you,” and shouting to be heard over the howling wind that pelted the seashore with snow, he proceeded to recount the entire affair of the mermaid, ending with a desperate plea: “This is the request of a lifetime. I beseech you to recover that mermaid’s carcass for me. If I do not present it to a certain man, I, Konnai, will lose face as a samurai, and my honor will be blighted forever. It’s cold weather for such work, I know, but I beg you to spare no efforts until we’ve retrieved that monster’s body.”
The elderly fishermen sympathized, believing Konnai’s story without question, and while it must be admitted that the younger men had their doubts about mermaids and such, they too were at least curious enough to join in casting the great nets and dragging the bottom of the inlet. Unfortunately, all they managed to snag that day were common herring, cod, crabs, sardines, and flatfish—nothing the least bit out of the ordinary—and the same was true the following day and the day after that. Though every man in the village participated, enduring all manner of hardship, bobbing about in their boats, battered by wind and waves, casting their nets, and diving into the icy waters, it was all in vain, and finally, toward the end of the third day, the younger men began to complain as they stood around the fires on the beach, making loud, vulgar jokes—“Just look at that samurai’s eyes, he ain’t normal I tell you, he’s loony is what he is, and we’re crazy for takin’ a lunatic at his word and divin’ into that freezin’ water. Me, I’ve had enough, I quit. Why should I be out here lookin’ for some sea mermaid we’ll never find when I could be gettin’ warm in the arms of my land mermaid back in the village?”
As the young men roared with laughter, Konnai sat a short distance away, alone in his torment, pretending not to hear and concentrating his entire being on the fervent prayers he offered up to the deities of the sea. “Let me retrieve but a single golden scale or a single strand of hair from that monster,” he prayed, “so that I may preserve my honor, and that of Musashi as well, and together we can reproach Hyakuemon to our heart’s content, after which I shall give him a taste of the blade of truth, del
iver him his just punishment, and dispel from my heart these bitter clouds of rancor.”
Moved by the pathetic sight of Konnai forlornly stretching his neck to peer from one end of the inlet to the other, an elderly fisherman approached with tears of pity welling up in his eyes. “Now, now,” he said. “Everything’ll work out just fine, don’t you worry, mister samurai, sir. Those youngsters don’t know what they’re talkin’ about, but we older fellows, we figure there’s sure enough a mermaid down there with the good samurai’s arrow stickin’ out of her, because, see, the seas around here, hell, they’ve always been full of the strangest fish, ever since way back when. Why, when we were boys, listen, right here off this shore, we sometimes used to see this giant old fish that people called the okina, and, oh my, what a commotion there used to be over that! I’m not lyin’ when I tell you the damn thing was five, six miles long, maybe longer—nobody knows for sure how big it was ’cause nobody ever saw it all in one piece—but when that monster come around, why, the sea would start a-rumblin’ like a thunderstorm and the waves would swell up like mountains, even if there weren’t no wind, and all the whales, why, they’d scatter in every direction, fleein’ for their lives, and the fishermen would start screamin’ ‘Okina! Yah! It’s the okina!’ and row toward shore as fast as they could, and then finally that fish would rise to the surface, and I’m tellin’ you it looked like a whole string of islands had suddenly popped out of the sea. Yes, sir, there’s some frightenin’ strange fish and monsters out in these waters, always has been, just ask anybody who’s lived around here long enough, which is why there’s no doubt in our minds that you saw what you say you saw, and I’ll tell you one thing for sure: We’re goin’ to find that mermaid’s body for you. You won’t have to lose your face or nothin’ like that.”
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