“I will hand you a letter. You will deliver it or die in the attempt. Bushido asks no less of you.”
“Bah! Are you my liege lord? No. You came here in a wheelbarrow. That brigand Katsushima could have delivered a load of manure the same way. Why should I give a moment’s thought to you and your oh-so-important message?”
In an act of surpassing generosity, Daigoro did not cut him in half. Instead, in a low, measured voice, he said, “If I were to set fire to your house, it would be my duty to put it out, neh?”
“Do you threaten me, boy?”
Daigoro ignored the question. “Suppose the house burned down. Would you agree that it is my duty to build you a new one?”
“Yes. What of it?”
“Suppose it were not me, but rather my son who burned your house down. Whose duty is it to rebuild it for you?”
Oda grumbled and steamed. “Whatever your point is, please make it soon.”
“You cannot begin to imagine all of the things your son cost my family when he killed Ichiro. If he had simply burned our house to the ground, he would have done less damage. And if that were all he had done, my lord, you would not have to be samurai to recognize your duty to set matters right. Even merchants and yakuzas teach their sons as much: if the child will not atone for his wrongs, then his parents must do it for him. Without that bond of shame, our society would fall apart.”
“So what if it would?”
“Your son owes my family a devastating debt. In repayment I ask you the simplest favor. I could demand that you beggar your own clan to build a new house for mine. Instead I only ask you to carry a letter to someone, and to let no one read it but her. If you will not do that, are you even worthy of the name ‘samurai’? Or are you just a coward with a topknot?”
Daigoro’s words stung Oda like wasps. Daigoro could see him flinch. Lord Oda did not care to hear about his son’s offenses, nor of the debt he’d incurred. He certainly didn’t care to suffer an assault to his honor as a samurai. But the reason he felt the words sting was that they were envenomed with truth.
“Your letter,” Oda said, his eyes vacant. He seemed to be speaking to a ghost. “Your letter . . .”
He returned to the shrine and uprooted a weather-beaten stele that stood next to his wife’s. Watching him tug at it reminded Daigoro of pulling a sword out of a dying man’s belly. The ground seemed to cling to the wooden stele, just as a body clutched jealously to the weapon that pierced it. At last he pulled it free and handed it to Daigoro.
Daigoro could barely make out the writing on its dried, grayed face. Yoshitomo no Mikoto, it read. It was his son’s grave marker. Below his name ran a haiku:
Stones cannot climb up;
A boar will never back down.
Some can only fall.
“Do you recognize the poem?” said Oda.
“Of course.” Daigoro hadn’t thought about those lines for a long time. Reading them now made him blink back tears. “I . . . I wrote it for your son and my brother. It was their death poem.”
Oda closed his eyes and swallowed. “You wrote it in a letter too, the one that accompanied Yoshitomo when you sent him home with his swords. Is it true that you engraved it on a stupa to hallow where they fell?”
“I did.”
“Do you remember how you closed that letter?” Daigoro thought about it a moment and had to confess he did not. “You invited us to send a portion of Yoshitomo’s ashes to you, and promised to bury them at the stupa. That was the sentence that made my wife rip your letter to shreds. My scribe had to piece the scraps back together to copy the death poem just as you’d written it.”
Oda’s words fluttered in his throat. “I told my wife I would send you a bottle of my own piss before I sent you a single speck of her beloved son’s ashes. Now I break my vow to her. I refuse to recognize this debt you say my son incurred against your house. If he ruined your clan, you ruined mine. We are even. But I would not have Yoshitomo’s spirit wandering the earth