One Morning a Snake .

1

In the domain of Unasaka, the residential quarter assigned to samurai of the Defense Works Unit was favored in a way that neither the homes of other samurai nor the barracks of the foot soldiers were. Along the rear of the quarter flowed a rivulet, which, though less than six feet broad, the residents regarded as their supreme treasure.

Not far from the castle town, off to the southwest, lay a range of rolling hills. Down from the depths of those hills flowed a network of little streams, of which this was one. It flowed out across a broad expanse of rice land until it came up to this quarter, at the northwest corner of the town, then turned sharply and wound its way off to the northeast.

Eventually, it emptied into the Goken River, downstream from the town. But along the way, the residents of the Defense Works quarter could wash their clothes in it and dip into it to water their gardens or clean their houses. The shallow stream flowed constantly, so that the faint trickle of its current was always to be heard, while the sandy patches and small stones beneath the water, and sometimes even the dark backs of little fish swimming upstream, were clearly visible. In the warmer seasons it was not at all unusual to see people on the banks of the stream washing their faces in the morning.

The Goken River that flowed through town was large enough to accommodate the traffic of small freight boats. At the water's edge, wherever the river was deep enough, stone-paved cargo landings had been constructed, which people from the merchant houses could use to wash their clothes. But the water there, whether from the nature of the soil or because it had passed through the town, was always murky. No one ever came to wash their face in this water.

By comparison then, at least so far as water was concerned, members of the Defense Works Unit having a stream just behind their homes so clean they could wash their faces in it, enjoyed, one might say, a heaven-sent blessing. It was nothing they boasted about to others; but inwardly and secretly, they were quite pleased to be the beneficiaries of Heaven. Maki Bunshiro was one of those who felt this way.

When Bunshiro stepped out of the vestibule, towel in hand, he circled around to the rear of the house. His mother, always so strict and proper, said it was uncouth to wash one's face in the stream rather than at the well. It would not please her, he knew, but it was a beautiful day, and he was drawn instead to the bank of the rivulet. Even his father would occasionally wash his face in the stream, exchanging greetings with one of the neighbors in a loud voice, so Bunshiro told himself it was all right.

Bunshiro had been adopted into the Maki family. His adoptive mother was the younger sister of his real father-actually his aunt. But Bunshiro felt much greater affection and respect for his father, with whom he shared no blood relationship, than for his painfully proper mother. His father, Sukezaemon, was a man of few words, but very manly.

The residential quarter of the Defense Works Unit was where the lower ranking samurai lived-those paid thirty koku per year or less-so the houses themselves were small. But they were on the outskirts of town, and so the lots upon which they were built were large, from 250 to 300 tsubo, more land than anyone would need even if they kept a vegetable garden. And between the houses, as well as at the rear, large trees grew here and there: zelkovas, oaks, maples, magnolias, cypress, damsons. In winter, when the zelkovas and oaks had lost their leaves, it did not seem such a thicket; but in summer it was transformed into a forest so dark one could hardly even see the house on the far side of the hedge.

When Bunshiro reached the bank of the stream, Fuku, the girl who lived next door, was there washing clothes.

"Good morning," Bunshiro said.

Fuku turned and glanced toward him, then rose and nodded her head, but said nothing. Then she turned away, crouching again, so as to hide her face from him. Now, in place of her pale visage, it was the soft curve of her bottom that faced him.

"Hmm!" Bunshiro smiled. Even when she was much younger, the daughter of their neighbor Koyanagi Jinbei had always been a quiet child. But whenever Fuku would see Bunshiro, morning or evening, she would always greet him properly. When was it, Bunshiro wondered, that she had begun to be so short with him? A year or so ago, it must have been. It was about then he began to feel that Fuku might be trying to avoid him; but he hadn't the slightest idea why.

"No need to wonder about that!" his good friend Owada Ippei had told him. "Just a girl becoming a woman." Ippei had spoken in his mock know-it-all manner; but their deadly serious friend Shimazaki Yonosuke had been with them, and he just couldn't understand what "becoming a woman" meant. Bunshiro could remember what a sweat he and Ippei had been in trying to explain. But even now Bunshiro had his doubts about Ippei's conclusion. Fuku was still only twelve.

His mother, Toyo, had been thirteen when she was married to Sukezaemon; it was perfectly normal in those days, people said, for girls to marry at that age. But things were different now. Bunshiro knew that nowadays, so long as a girl was married before she was twenty, that was fine. In fact his own elder sister Kie had not been married to Ishizuka Hannojo until the autumn of last year, when she was eighteen. Fuku was still too young to be "becoming a woman."

Bunshiro washed his face with a great deal of noisy splashing. If his mother had been there, he would have been scolded for his bad manners. But it was not his mother who was there; it was only Fuku, whose recent reticence, according to Owada Ippei, meant she was "becoming a woman."

After Bunshiro had washed his face, he sponged himself with the wet towel from his neck down to his chest and arms. Now he felt refreshed, the sweat of the hot, humid night cleansed from his skin. Filled with a wonderful sense of liberation, he gazed across the stream at the rice fields spread out beyond its banks. That broad expanse of green was tinged a pale pink in the morning sun, but out where the fields met the dark green of a grove around a distant village, a bank of mist still lingered from the night. And then that motionless bank of mist too was tinged by the sun. Even at that early hour, someone was out inspecting the crop. The dark shadow of a man, sunk up to his thighs in the rice, slowly receded into the distance. Above, in the leafy shade of the zelkovas, the cicadas were shrilling. For a moment, the pleasure of it all engulfed Bunshiro in a reverie. Then suddenly, his reverie was shattered by a scream of pain.

Behind every house, at the water's edge, there was a little dam, built to make a place where they could launder their clothes. Beginning from the bank and out toward the middle of the stream, they would hammer in three or four stakes, then place planks against those stakes reaching down to the bed of the stream and damming the flow. Then, in front of the dam, they would lay down planking or sink a large flat stone there. The members of the Defense Works Unit were very skilled at this sort of work.

There was one of these washing platforms behind each and every house; and the water in front of them, that had grown deep over the years, made a pleasant trickling sound the whole day through as it spilled over the dams. But every family seemed to have had a different idea where they would place their dam; some stood midway along their stretch of stream, some near a corner of the property. Bunshiro's family had built their dam at the right-hand corner of their lot, immediately adjacent to that of their neighbors the Koyanagi, from which it was separated by a simple fence.

It was Fuku who screamed. Bunshiro immediately leapt the fence between them. No sooner had he landed on the Koyanagi side than he spied a snake, slithering away from the place where Fuku stood, frozen with fright. It looked to be a tiger snake, about two feet, four or five inches long. Fuku, blue in the face, was squeezing a finger.

"What happened? Did it bite you?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

He reached for her hands and saw that the tip of the middle finger on her right hand had gone bright red, and a very small drop of blood welled up from it. Bunshiro did not hesitate. He took her finger in his mouth and sucked hard at the wound. The faint scent of blood filled his mouth. Fuku had yielded her hand to him unconsciously, but now began softly to cry. Thoughts of poison and the snake must have filled her with fear.

"Don't cry!" Bunshiro spat. His saliva was red. "A tiger snake is not as dangerous as a viper. There's no need to worry. Besides, no child of a warrior house should cry about anything this slight."

After he had sucked enough blood from the wound to make her finger turn whitish again, Bunshiro released Fuku.

"I think you're safe now," Bunshiro said. "But be sure to tell them you've been bitten by a snake...