Heaven's Net Is Wide

36

Moe’s fears increased as the child grew. Everything conspired to alarm her. It was common knowledge in the city that Shigeru’s uncles were not pleased by the prospect of the birth: people whispered of plots to poison mother and child, to assassinate Shigeru and Takeshi, to bring about Moe’s death by spells and sorcery. The winter was unusually bitter, the snows coming early and lasting into the third month, the wind howling from the northwest, bringing freezing temperatures and fresh blizzards. Food and firewood became scarce, charcoal hardly obtainable; the ground was frozen hard as stone, and the weight of icicles broke roofs and trees.

Despite Shigeru’s efforts the previous summer, the harvest had suffered from the setbacks of the defeat and its aftermath. Food was running short; beggars flocked to the city, where they died in the streets from starvation or cold. Moe did not dare step outside. It seemed death was everywhere, stalking her and her child. She rarely felt safe, except in the deep recesses of the house where Chiyo sat with her, massaged her shoulders and legs to relax her, and, to allay her fears, told her gentle tales about tiny magical children born from peach stones or bamboo trunks.

But neither the safety of the house nor all Chiyo’s skill could protect her in the end. Her time was overdue: the baby was awkwardly placed, her labor prolonged and yet ineffective. Her screams went on for a day and a night, but before the end of the next chill day they were stilled. The child, a girl, never cried at all but died at the same time as her mother and was buried with her.

The passing of the young woman whom no one had particularly liked plunged the whole household into deepest sorrow. The deaths were trivial-a woman, a girl child-compared to the losses already sustained, yet they inspired almost inconsolable grief. Maybe it was felt that the child had promised a new life, a new start; and now even this small comfort had been denied. Maybe his own family began to believe that the house of Otori Shigeru was cursed.

Shigeru’s grief, compounded as it was by remorse and regret, was the heaviest and most intractable. For several weeks he did not leave the house, except to attend the necessary ceremonies. He drank no wine and ate very little and spent long hours in silent meditation, recalling everything about his wife and the distorted love they had crafted from their marriage. He remembered with shame how he had wished for her death; he had wanted to remove her from his life as one would slap a mosquito: she had been an irritation to him; more, they had hated each other, but they had lain together to make the child that had killed her. They had both been forced down this path: they were husband and wife; their marriage had been designed to produce legitimate children. No one could blame him for giving his wife a child: it was the function of women to bear children.

However, it was his first experience of the danger and pain of childbirth. He knew how much Moe had feared it: though he had been kept from the room, he could not remain unaware of her terror and agony. It amazed and saddened him that women should endure such things: they carried the full result of men’s desire for their bodies; they went to the edge of the world and brought back sons and daughters. And often they did not come back but were pulled, struggling vainly to live, into the darkness, their young, fragile bodies torn apart.

He dreamed of his daughter often, once most vividly of her body in the earth: as spring warmed the cold limbs, pale green plants sprouted from them like young ferns.

Both Akane and Moe had been given to him. Akane he had asked for and got; Moe had been supplied. And now both of them were dead, at just over twenty years old. He thought often about all that Akane had taught him; he wished he had told her that he loved her, that he had let his love for her flower instead of denying it; he wished he had loved his wife, that she had given herself to him willingly and ardently because she loved him. Maybe if they had lived… but they were both gone. He would never see either of them again.

Then his grief would be intensified by longing. After a few weeks, Chiyo, with her usual practicality, arranged for one or another of the maids to linger after they had spread out the bedding, but Shigeru could not bring himself to touch them, telling himself he would never sleep with a woman again.

SPRING CAME LATE but with all the more intensity. The southerly breezes had never been so welcomed for their soft warmth; the sky had never seemed so deeply blue; nor had the new leaves ever been such a brilliant green against it. As the days lengthened, Shigeru mastered his grief, realizing that even though he no longer had any definable role in the clan, he still had a part to plan in its recovery. If he could reshape his life, then so could the Otori clan.

In his time of meditation, he had thought much about his future. He would never give up the intention to confront and kill Sadamu, avenge his father’s death and his clan’s defeat; but in order to achieve this, he knew he must keep it completely hidden. He would make the world think he had genuinely retired, that he was no more than a farmer; he would be innocuous and blameless, and he would wait patiently for as long as he had to, hoping and praying that some opportunity would present itself.

He began practicing this role at home. He dispensed with all formality in the house, somewhat to his mother’s displeasure, took to wearing old, simple clothes, and concerned himself with the development of the garden and of his mother’s estate. He talked to anyone who would listen about experimental farming, when the rains would come, how best to deter caterpillars, moths, and locusts; such work was patently necessary, for the whole country had suffered the previous winter and food stores were almost completely depleted. It did not escape notice that while Shigeru was concerning himself with restoring the land in order that the people might be fed, Shoichi and Masahiro were living in luxury in the castle, expanding and redecorating the residence and making no concessions in their demands for taxation. Craftsmen and painters worked with gold leaf, ebony, and mother-of-pearl while five hundred people died in a week on the streets of Hagi.