The Mother Outside the Earthen Wall, and the Single Kaji Leaf Her Daughter Wrote

Down the shopping street, some two hundred paper strips hang from the bamboo. I counted them one by one. Each is a long, narrow slip of paper; some carry a name, some only a wish.

A thousand years or so ago, in the capital, what people held in their hands on this same night was a single needle and a single thread. At the palace, in the rite called kikkōden, it is said, a needle strung with threads of five colours was stuck into a kaji leaf, the leaf of the paper mulberry, and set out as an offering. Threading the eye came first. All it took was good eyes and a steady fingertip. The eye of a needle is less than half the width of a grain of rice. You stiffen the end of the thread with spit, hold your breath, and bring it close. The children on the shopping street do not make that motion now. Instead of making it, they hang up two hundred pieces of paper.

That night I was walking along an earthen wall at the northern edge of the capital.

The seventh month of 1054 (Tengi 2), in the capital.

The sun was sinking to the west. The heat of the day clung to the road, and the dust rose white and wrapped itself about my knees. I was a man who carried a pack from province to province, and I hurried along beneath the tsuijibei, the earthen wall, hoping to find a lodging for the night before the light was quite gone. My feet kept quickening of their own accord. Not that anything would catch up with me however fast I went.

The market was already closing. People folded up their straw mats, or poured unsold melons back into their tubs, and cut hurriedly across the road. From the direction of the river came the voices of children; I looked, and one or two had come out onto the gravel bank and were gazing up at the sky. It was an evening on which the stars showed well.

The wall was tall, and its white earthen skin was red in the setting sun. Above the tiled coping the tops of garden trees were visible, and on the wind a flute came thinly drifting. Of what lay inside the gate, nothing reached my eyes but the treetops and that sound.

By a small door at the back, where the servants came and went, a woman sat on the ground. Forty or so, by the look of her. She had spread a scrap of hemp cloth across her knees and was holding a needle. Mending.

Even at a glance I could tell she was good at it. The stitches at the cuff were even, grain for grain like rice. The cloth on her knees was patched upon patches, and yet every seam ran in the same fine line.

Her hand had stopped.

She brought the end of the thread to the eye. It would not go in. She narrowed her eyes, drew the needle away, brought it close again. It would not go in. Three times she tried, and on the fourth the tip of the thread split and frayed. The woman wet the thread with her teeth and twisted it again.

I did not slow my steps. There was no reason to stop. Only I set down my pack on a stone at the corner across the road and pretended to adjust the strap on my shoulder. The soles of my feet were hot. From within the wall the flute came now and then, torn off by the wind. My back had turned first. High in the sky one pale blue star had come out. My neck, too, had tipped toward that star before the rest of me.

The door creaked open.

Inside was an earthen floor, and that was all there was to see. A basin of water stood there, and a bundle of kaji leaves lay soaking in it. From the dark at the back came the smell of incense and the rustle of someone's robes. After a while a manservant crossed the floor, carrying a low stand in both hands. On the stand were heaped melon and pear, with one small cup. When it had vanished inside, the doorway was once more only darkness.

The one who came out was a girl of fourteen or fifteen, her sleeves, tied back with a tasuki cord, wet to the cuff. Hands that had just wiped the water from the leaves, I supposed. The pad of her right forefinger was black with ink. She might have been a maid given the task, at some gathering of poetry in the house, of taking brush to the leaves. In her hand she held a leaf. A kaji leaf: rough, a size larger than a palm, with lines of ink running across it, line after line.

The girl said nothing; she held out the leaf to her mother. The mother looked up. Her eyes went once, between the leaf and her daughter's face.

She took it, looked at the front, looked at the back, and held it up against the evening sun. Then, with the tip of her fingernail, she began gently to follow the topmost line of ink. She was not reading it. She was tracing it. She went to the end of the line and returned to the head of the next. One line at a time, slowly. The daughter's black finger and the mother's nail were so close above the leaf that they all but touched.

Then the girl searched in her sleeve and held out a closed fist to her mother. Opened, it held bits of thread, five of them: blue, yellow, red, white, black. None longer than a finger. Leftovers, I supposed, from what had been used inside. The mother took them up one at a time between her fingers and held them to the light. The black one alone she looked at for a while. Then she lined up all five, wound them twice about her forefinger, and tucked them into the fold of her collar. The motion was as practised as in the midst of her mending, and not in the least careless.

Then the girl's eyes fell on what lay in her mother's lap. The needle, and the split thread.

The girl picked up the needle. She held it at the height of her eyes, turned it to the sun, and in one breath passed the thread through. The tip of the thread went through the eye and drew out taut. She gave it back into her mother's hand.

The mother looked for a while at the threaded needle. Its head was worn round and shining. A needle that must have travelled between these fingers for decades. The thread stood straight, exactly as far as the girl had drawn it.

From inside, a voice called someone. The girl turned toward the door, gave her mother a small nod, and ran in. The run of her feet was light. The mother watched her back until the door closed. The door closed.

The woman stayed where she was, leaf in hand, for a while. Beyond the wall the flute rose for a time and sank again. As if waiting for its tune to settle, the woman watched the door. Only when she knew the girl would not come out again did she at last stand up.

She went close to the wall and raised the hand that held the leaf, high. It did not reach. The edge of the tiles was above even her outstretched fingertips. She rose on her toes, stretched out her elbow, and tried again. The rim of the leaf grazed the tiles with a dry sound. It did not reach.

The third time she gave a little jump. Her hem flew up, and the gravel crunched under her feet. Even so the leaf did not so much as touch the edge of the tiles. The woman, panting, looked down at the leaf in her hand. It was still a little damp in her palm, a remnant of the water it had been washed in, I suppose. At any rate, with the way she had clenched it so as not to drop it, the edge had torn slightly.

By the door and by the wall, there was nothing to stand on. The woman looked about, and her eyes stopped on me, there at the roadside.

I set down my pack and went over. The woman's height did not reach my shoulder. In the eyes that looked up at me was the reserve of one who has a favour to ask.

"Excuse me. Would you lend me a shoulder?"

That was all she said. Nothing else.

I nodded, turned half-sideways to the wall, and bent my knees. The woman's hand came to rest on my shoulder. A coarse palm. The pads of the fingers were hard, with the hardness of needle calluses. Her weight came down from that palm to my shoulder, from my shoulder to my back, slowly. It was far heavier than I had thought.

I stood up. The woman's body rose along my shoulder, stretching up with me.

There was a rustle.

My shoulder grew light. The woman had come down to the ground and was looking up at the top of the wall. I looked up too. On the rim of the tiles lay a single kaji leaf, the inked side turned to the sky. A wind blew once; the edge of the leaf lifted a little, and settled again.

The woman bowed deeply to me. "I am obliged to you," she said. That was all. She tucked the threaded needle into her collar and went back into the shadow before the door.

I shouldered my pack again. On my shoulder the mark of that weight was still there.

I turned one corner and the road opened suddenly onto the embankment that goes down to the river. On the gravel bank two or three more figures had appeared. One sat on a spread mat; one stood with head thrown back, not moving. Both had their faces turned the same way. Their voices were low.

After a few paces I looked back. The woman was gone, and only the leaf on the wall remained, against the faint red at the edge of the evening sky. From the river the children's voices rose again. Another star must have come out. I quickened my steps. I had not yet found a lodging.

At the foot of the bamboo on the shopping street, a mother has laid her hand on her child's shoulder, and together they are drawing the first stroke of a strip of paper.

The characters on that leaf that night only passed before my eyes. Whether the girl's name was written there, or what poem, I do not know. Nor how long the leaf stayed on the rim of the tiles.

A paper strip, if you botch the writing, you can simply be given another. The kaji leaf of that night was the only one in the world.

Of the two hundred paper strips, many bear a name.

On my shoulder, the hardness of a palm calloused by the needle. On my back, the weight that came down.

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