Tails of Wonder and Imagination

THE POET AND THE INKMAKER’S DAUGHTER Elizabeth Hand

Heian Japan

In the reign of she who became known as the Dark Willow Empress, there lived in a far-off city a poet by the name of Ga-sho. He lived as all poor poets do, upon memories and tea-dregs, but what sustained him most of all were thoughts of a certain young woman, a maid to a lady-in-waiting to the Dark Willow Empress. This young woman had no name, at least none that Ga-sho knew of. He had glimpsed her only once, as she followed the litter bearing her mistress along a canal and then over a bridge at the city’s edge. The hem of her kimono was spattered with mud and rotten waterweeds, but her face—what he could see of it, anyway, as she kept her head down and her long sleeve held before her cheeks—was exquisite, with skin as fine and white as rice paper and long-lashed eyes like chrysanthemum blossoms. As he stood aside on the bridge to let her pass, he caught the strong fragrance of kurobo, sweet incense, trailing her like a warm wind. For this reason, and the beauty of her eyes, in his thoughts he called her Fair Flower.

Ga-sho had inherited a small sum after his father’s death, enough to keep a tiny room in the very darkest quarter of the city. Here, before a brazier no bigger than his cupped hands, Ga-sho wrote his poems upon scrolls of rice paper. All of his verses praised Fair Flower’s beauty, her gentleness, her devotion and her virtue (though mostly he wrote of her beauty). He did not know that the young woman he loved was in fact bad-tempered and shrill, with a voice like green sticks breaking; that she gambled with the other maids and had amassed a considerable debt, which she had absolutely no intention of paying; that she snored, and her breath often stank of plum wine, even in the morning; that she had for some time now been trysting with a handsome gardener in the Dark Willow Empress’s employ; and that she dallied also with the gardener’s cousin, and occasionally with the cousin’s best friend, who worked in the lower kitchen. (The name they had for her was less flattering than “Fair Flower,” and I will not reveal it here.)

No, Ga-sho’s poems took none of this into account, and that is perhaps for the best. That which is true often makes for very dull reading.

Poor as he was, Ga-sho kept a cat. She was a fastidious creature, bobtailed as cats of that time and place were, with pale grey eyes and black front paws; not as beautiful as Fair Flower, perhaps, but with far better manners. The most remarkable thing about her was her color: a strange, deep reddish brown, the color of new bronze tinged with blood. Such red cats were considered to have special powers by the superstitious, and were called Kinkwaneko, Golden Flower, but Ga-Sho, while a sentimental sort when it came to women, was not particularly superstitious. He called her Clean-ears.

The red cat slept beside Ga-sho and kept him warm at night. In the morning, she gently woke him by nudging his cheek. When the poet ate, he always saved bits of fish for his companion. When he had little money for food, or forgot to eat, Clean-ears would slip silently as a sigh from his tiny room and make her way to the city docks. An hour or so later she would return, bearing a fish, or perhaps a prawn, that she would lay upon the poet’s wooden pillow. Always she would politely refuse to dine until he was finished, and in return he was careful to save for her the choicest parts of the head, particularly the eyes, to which the red cat was very partial.

One of the few people Ga-sho could afford to do business with was an inkmaker whose shop was not far from the poet’s cramped room. The inkmaker was a poor man himself, but poverty had made him neither kindly nor patient toward those who owed him money. Rather, he was mean-spirited, craven to those with more wealth than his meager savings, and to one person at least he was downright cruel.

This was his stepdaughter, Ukon. He had married her mother under the misprision that she had a small fortune; upon discovering that she did not, he had hounded her to her death (or so it was believed in that part of the city, where gossip ran hot and destructive as the fires that often broke out during the winter months). Ukon’s mother was also reputed to have been a fox-fairy, and for several weeks after she died the inkmaker kept a cudgel by his bed, in case her vengeful spirit returned to harm him.

But either because she was not a fairy, or because she feared for her daughter’s well-being, the ghost did not appear, and poor Ukon was left alone to her fate. Neighbors could hear her piteous cries late at night when her stepfather beat her—bamboo-and rice-paper walls do little to hide such things—but no one moved to help her. A man’s daughter, even a stepdaughter, was his own concern. So, as her father spent his days and nights drinking with his customers and creditors, the brunt of the work of making ink was left to his stepdaughter.

It was Ukon who tended to the small stove where red pine wood and red pine resin were burned, all through the autumn and winter months. It was Ukon who then scraped the resulting soot from inside the stove, placing it in a bowl to which she added fish glue. The fish glue she made herself, begging fish bones from the docks, then boiling them on another stove. It smelled horrible, so she added plum and peony blossoms, and sometimes even sandalwood, if she could afford it. She mixed the fish glue and the soot together on a wide wooden plank, kneading the thick paste until it became soft and pliable as sweet rice cakes, then pressed the soft ink into wooden pattern blocks, square and round and rectangular. But the ink could not be left in the pattern molds, or it would crack as it dried. Ukon had to very carefully remove the blocks of ink, transferring them to wooden boxes filled with damp charcoal. Here the sumi ink would dry slowly, for days or even weeks, and Ukon had to replace the charcoal as it dried. Finally the sumi was dry enough to be wrapped in rice paper and hung to cure for another month, in the little shed in the alley behind the shop where she and her stepfather lived. Only then would Ukon carefully mark each sumi stick with her stepfather’s mark, wrap it in fine paper, and pile them all in neat stacks in the rear of the little shop. Her hands and fingers had become so stained by sumi ink that they never washed clean, nor did the rank smell of fish bones ever leave her skin; rather than help her, though, her drunken stepfather only mocked the girl.

“You will never win a suitor,” he said disdainfully, staring at her black hands. “I will be lucky if you don’t frighten away the few customers we have—”

And he cuffed her fiercely on the cheek, sending her reeling back to where the largest ink blocks awaited cutting.

Now, I have written that no one ever moved to help Ukon, but that is not quite true. Because the girl, poor and miserable as she was, yet possessed a kind heart, and like the half-strangled rosebush that still reaches toward a thread of sunlight, so did Ukon strive toward charity. As there was not a single human being in that quarter as poor and unhappy as she, Ukon’s kindnesses by necessity were directed toward other creatures, smaller and even hungrier than herself. So she would rescue crippled crickets trapped in their bamboo cages when the boys grew bored with them and tossed them aside, and save grains of rice to feed half-starved sparrows in the winter snow. And she would secretly feed a cat that often showed up in the alley behind the shop, a small red cat with a puffy bobbed tail like a blossom past its prime. It was drawn like other strays by the smell of rotting fish that rose from the ink shed. But it was smaller than the other cats, and milder-tempered, and Ukon made a point of saving fishtails for it, and fish bones with bits of flesh still adhering to them like hairs to a brittle comb.

It was on one such afternoon, late of a winter day in the Eleventh, or Frosty, Month, that Ukon made one of her furtive forays into the alleyway.

“Ah, suteneko,” she crooned, stooping to stroke the red cat behind its ears. “Poor suteneko, pretty Kinkwa-neko—you are so cold! Here—there is hardly anything, but…”

She held out her ink-blackened fingers, and the cat licked the flakes of fish from them gratefully.

“She’s not a stray, you know.”

Ukon whirled, frightened, and backed against the flimsy wall of the shed. She lowered her head automatically, as she would in deference to any customer, but she also raised her arm, as though to protect herself from a blow.

Peering through her fingers she saw not the threatening figure of her drunken father, but a young man in frayed robes and worn wooden shoes.

The poet, she thought, recognizing him by the ink stains on his sleeves and his hollow cheeks. Slowly she lowered her hand, but remained where she huddled against the wall, heedless of the sleet pelting down on her bare head.

“She stays with me,” the poet went on matter-of-factly. “Suteneko!” he said chidingly, and bent to pick up the cat. “She thinks you’re a stray!”

He stroked her head, blowing into her pointed ears, then looked at Ukon. “I call her Kuri-ryoumimi,” he said. “Kury-ri.”

“Ah.” Ukon smiled tentatively “‘Clean-ears.’”

The poet smiled back at her. But his smile died as he took in her blackened hands and red face—red and chafed from crying, and still bearing the marks of her stepfather’s blows. “I… I was in the shop, but saw no one,” he said apologetically. “I need some more ink. But I can come back tomorrow—”

“No, no,” Ukon cried, and hurried back inside. “My father is gone on an errand”—in fact, he was drinking at the tavern—“but I will get whatever you need.”

She busied herself with finding and wrapping several rectangular blocks of ink. The poet had asked for the cheapest kind, which was all he could afford, but as she began to pull the ink from its shelf, Ukon suddenly hesitated. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure he could not see, and that no other customers had entered the shop. Then she swiftly replaced the inexpensive sumi stick with a chrysanthemum-shaped block of the most expensive ink her stepfather sold, scented with geranium leaves, and tinted a deep vermillion. She wrapped it in a second sheet of rice paper, so that the poet would not see its value and refuse it. Then she hurried back to the front of the shop.

“Here,” she said, bowing as she handed it to him.

And as she gazed at him, her face reddened even more, though not from fear or pain. The poet took the sumi ink and stared back at her musingly.

She is nothing like Fair Flower, Ga-sho thought. There is no fragrance here but the reek of boiling fish guts, and her hands are black as my cat’s paws, and her skin is as red as—well, as red as Clean-ears’s fur. And everyone says the old man beats her…

And yet her smile was sweet, her voice low, her gaze gentle. And she had shown kindness to a stray cat….

“Thank you,” he said, too quickly, then turned and left.

That night Ga-sho wrote a poem in praise of the inkmaker’s daughter. He could not, in good conscience, compare her to a flower, or even a blossoming weed. But the Japanese have many poems that honor cats, and so he began by comparing her to Clean-ears. After some time spent thus, his thoughts began to move from feline virtues to more feminine ones, and he found himself composing verse that (to his own mind, at least) was at least as fine as those poems inspired by Fair Flower. He recited the best of these several times to Clean-ears, who sat washing her paws (which became no whiter than Ukon’s palms) beside the lamp.

He took a sheet of paper, withdrew the sumi stick he had bought that afternoon, and unwrapped it.

“Ah!”

The poet’s eyes grew wide and wondering. He held up the blossom-shaped ink block, glossy, with a telltale reddish tinge. He felt his cheeks grow hot, and looked furtively aside at the cat, as though to make sure she did not notice his blush.

But the cat was gone. And so, smiling to himself as he ground the vermillion ink on his inkstone and licked the sable tip of his brush, Ga-sho began to record his poem.

Meanwhile, Ukon was waiting up for her stepfather in the back of the shop, where her bed was a thin pallet on the floor. She dared not sleep before he returned; in any event, her thoughts were too full of the young poet to be at rest. So she busied herself tending the small hearth that heated the shop, and removing dry sumi sticks from their rice husks and wrapping them in paper.

It was past midnight when she heard the sound of stumbling footsteps in the alley, followed by the creaking of the door as it was pulled open.

“Father,” she called softly, going to greet him.

Her stepfather stumbled into the room, robes awry and his thin hair disheveled. Ukon drew up alongside him, trying to help him keep from falling.

“Lazy bitch!”

He struck at her furiously, but in his drunkenness he went flailing wildly, bashing against one thin wall. Ukon ran to his side, but he lashed out at her again, striking her so that she fell, weeping, by the hearth.

“You have been seeing men in here,” he gasped, struggling to his feet. “The old woman next door said she saw that layabout from the next street—”

“He was a customer, most watchful of stepfathers,” Ukon pleaded. “You must remember him, he is the poet—”

“Poet! He is worthless, as you are! Whoring like your mother before you!”

But at the word “customer” his eyes had gone to the metal strongbox where each day’s accounts were kept. He grabbed it, shaking it; opened it, then glared accusingly at Ukon.

Oh no! She covered her face with her hands. Her delight in serving the young poet had blinded her to duty—she had forgotten to get payment for the ink stick!

“Father,” she stammered, but it was too late. He began beating her with the strongbox, battering at the poor girl’s face and shoulders until she collapsed onto the floor in a heap.

“I will find this poet and kill him,” she heard her stepfather mutter thickly as he flung the metal box aside. “That I will…”

Ukon was too weak to do more than pull herself to a corner, watching through swollen eyes as her stepfather lurched out the back door into the alley. But soon sheer exhaustion washed over her pain, as with time the tide will cover a littered beach, smoothing out the soiled sand and, for a little while at least, making the world seem at peace. So it was that Ukon fell into fitful sleep upon the dirt floor, one arm still flung protectively over her poor battered face.

She woke to a low voice calling her name.

“Ukon… Ukon, you must wake!”

She raised her head groggily, the torn sleeve of her robe catching on the edge of a small table, and looked up. In her dreaming she had half-imagined the voice belonged to the young poet.

But as she blinked in the darkness she saw a woman standing before her. She was older than Ukon, her neat coif showing wisps of gray beneath thick black hair lacquer; for an instant, Ukon thought it was her mother. Then she saw that while the woman’s pointed face had the same piquance as her mother’s, her eyes were a very pale gray, like seawater, and she wore a kimono of deep scarlet silk, a color her mother would never have worn.

“You must come with me,” the woman said, calmly but with great urgency. As Ukon began to stammer a question, she raised a hand, its palm smudged as black as Ukon’s own. “There is no time—come!”

Ukon got to her feet. Her ears rang from the blows her stepfather had given her, and she thought she could hear another sound, oddly familiar, but the strange woman did not give her the opportunity to look around the shop for its source.

“This way!” she hissed; grabbing Ukon’s wrist, she dragged her out to the street. They began running along the narrow way, their wooden shoes sliding in the sleet and dirty snow. As they ran, Ukon began to hear agitated voices behind her, and then a sudden shout.

“Fire! The inkmaker’s shop is on fire!”

“Aiie!” With a cry, Ukon stopped and looked back. From the alley behind her stepfather’s shop rose a plume of smoke. Abruptly the wind shifted, carrying the smell of burning pine. “He must have overfilled the stove in the shed! I must go—”

“No.” This time the woman’s voice was a command. Her hold on Ukon’s wrist tightened. Her breath as she pulled the girl to her smelled of rotting fish. “Your life there is over. You will come with me now. Do not look back again.”

In a daze, Ukon turned and let herself be led along twisting alleys, away from the inkmaker’s shop. A great clamor of gongs and bells now arose from the streets, as people signaled that the quarter was in danger of burning; as dozens of men raced toward the shop carrying wooden buckets of water and sand, few noted the inkmaker’s stepdaughter hurrying in the opposite direction, a small red cat at her side. Afterward, those who had seen her running displayed neither recrimination nor much remorse for her leaving her stepfather to perish in the flames. His cruelty and drunkenness were well-known; the fire, which had indeed started in the shed, was contained to his quarters, and no one else was harmed.

Ukon followed the strange woman to a narrow street where she had never been.

“Here,” the woman said, bowing as she gestured at the door. “Here you will find safety.”

And before Ukon could protest, or give voice to her questions, the woman was gone. The poor girl stood shivering in the snow, tears once more springing to her eyes, when suddenly the little door slid open, and who should be standing there, yawning and rubbing his face, but the young poet, Ga-sho.

“Why…?” He stared at her in disbelief. Ukon dropped her head, abashed and ashamed, and had begun to turn away when he grabbed her hand. “Don’t go! Please, come in. You look half frozen, and”—his voice dropped, and he chuckled—“and look who you’ve found! Kury-ri, you naughty creature…”

He bent to pick up the red cat, which had appeared out of nowhere to rub against the filthy hem of Ukon’s kimono. “Where have you been?”

He held the cat to his breast and looked at Ukon. “She ran off after I saw you—she’s been out all night! But please, come in.”

And he stood aside so that Ukon could enter.

They did not marry immediately, and for a while there was some mild scandal over the fact that the inkmaker’s stepdaughter had found a home in the poor poet’s rooms. But the tongues of that quarter soon enough found other tales to wag about, and by the time Ukon and Ga-sho were wed and had a baby due, the red cat had given birth to a litter of kittens of her own.

And, while the strange woman who had saved Ukon was never seen again in that district, for years afterward the descendants of the cat called Cleanears—red-furred, black-pawed, gray-eyed like their mother—were said to be lucky. Because how otherwise to account for the success the poet had, and the long and happy marriage he and Ukon endured? Such things did not come often to the poor people of that time, any more than they do to us today!

In medieval Japan, red bobtailed cats were known as Kinkwa-neko, “Golden Flower.” They were thought to assume the forms of beautiful young women, and to help young girls in distress.