(Note: Here’s the rest of the Hungry Ghosts short story from two weeks ago!
If you missed reading the first half two weeks ago, go here and read it now!
Okay, so now, here’s the conclusion (read below)! )
~~~~~~~~~~
“I tried to see Tokubei, but he was off inspecting his lands and attending to business,” said Eisai-sama. “So I asked to see Osono. I was told that she would not see me. So, I asked to see her father, a man named Mosaku. I was led to his quarters… I was surprised to see prayer sutras all over his room… and he looked scared of something. When he found out that I was a monk and that I had seen a face in the well water, he begged me to say prayers over the well. I did so…”
“It didn’t work,” I guessed, although since I knew the well was still haunted, it was a pretty easy guess.
“Indeed, it didn’t work,” Eisai-sama confirmed. “The face looked even angrier than before. When I informed Mosaku about my failure, he yelled at me. He said that I’d just made matters worse. By that time, Osono had come into her father’s room. She said, ‘He did his best. He doesn’t know…’ I asked what I didn’t know. Osono asked me to pray with her in her room. Mosaku said that I would only make matters worse. She said that maybe matters should become worse, since she was tired of the way things were. She said that she was tired of being afraid.”
“You went to pray with her in private?” I said.
“She had two servants with her who prayed as well. I did not compromise the woman’s reputation,” said Eisai-sama.
“Of course not. Takeshi, you can be so suspicious sometimes,” Kiyoko said.
“After the prayer service,” Eisai-sama continued, “I walked with her in the garden—accompanied by the servants, of course. She walked with a limp… Soon she grew tired, so we sat in the shade… and she began to tell me her story.”
“I bet she had things to say to you that she didn’t want her father to hear,” Kiyoko said.
“Smart girl—you’re right. I started the conversation by saying that I thought that the young man she’d loved had been drowned in the well and that she must have the well dug up in order to find the body. She smiled a sad little smile and said: ‘We’ve already done that. Yes, his body was there. We sent for a monk to say prayers and to help give Minokichi a decent burial… but we shouldn’t have done it.’”
“What?” said Kiyoko. “Of course that was the right thing to do! —Wait, unless…”
“—I love how smart this girl is,” Eisai-sama said, watching her think. He turned to me. “You could learn a few things from her.”
“Yeah, I’m lost,” I said. “The well was dug up? How could it have been dug up when it’s still here?”
“They rebuilt the well there,” Eisai-sama said, “since it was the only location where water was. The other places on the estate had dried up.”
“With you so far, but I also don’t see why it wasn’t the right thing to do,” I said.
“I think I know,” Kiyoko said, “I bet it wasn’t the right thing to do because Minokichi’s soul was trapped in the well. He was angry, but his soul couldn’t get out of the well. By digging up the body, he was free to walk the estate, seeking vengeance or whatever else he felt like doing.”
“Exactly,” Eisai-sama said.
“Vengeance? You mean, it wasn’t a suicide?” I asked.
“I never said it was a suicide,” Eisai-sama said, “although that was what the authorities were persuaded to believe…”
“I bet they bribed the authorities,” Kiyoko said.
“Possibly, but I don’t think so,” said Eisai-sama. “Minokichi was a man of no importance. Osono’s family were nobility and Tokubei was a wealthy man. The authorities probably felt it was best to let the world think that Minokichi had committed suicide.”
“Well, no wonder he was angry,” I said. “He wasn’t getting justice.”
“Many people do not get justice in the world,” said Eisai-sama, “but they do not go around killing their own child in a fit of anger.”
“…Well don’t look at me to explain it, because I’m totally lost again,” I said.
“Me too,” said Kiyoko.
“Osono confessed to me that she was pregnant with Minokichi’s child when she married Tokubei. Tokubei was an older man who was not sure he could have children. He needed an heir… and was willing to say that Minokichi’s child was his own,” Eisai-sama said.
“Wait, Minokichi killed his own child? A child who would’ve inherited a huge estate?” said Kiyoko.
“A child who was being passed off as Tokubei’s heir,” Eisai-sama reminded us.
“And yet Osono was still in love with Minokichi after that?!” Kiyoko said.
“Did I say that she was?” Eisai-sama said.
“…No…” Kiyoko said.
“You are smart, my child, but the world is not as romantic as you might think,” Eisai-sama said.
“You said that Tokubei might not be able to produce an heir…” I said.
“Might is, indeed, the key word,” Eisai-sama said.
“He killed…?” Kiyoko half-asked.
“Osono had relations with her husband. An heir was needed. Osono became pregnant… but she lost the child,” Eisai-sama said.
“What happened?” Kiyoko asked.
“She was riding in a carriage. The horses were spooked. Somehow, a carriage wheel was lost… Osono tried to hold on, but was dragged… I don’t want to go into details, because they were horrible,” Eisai-sama said.
“Did the horses see the ghost?” I asked.
“Who knows? The horses had to be put down, because they were crazy with fear,” Eisai-sama said.
“Even just that part’s horrible!” said Kiyoko.
“Yes,” said Eisai-sama. “The Buddha teaches love for all living things. It is a sad thing, therefore, when an animal must be put out of its misery.”
“At least then the creatures didn’t have to suffer any more,” I said…
Eisai-sama nodded.
“I’m starting to hate this story,” Kiyoko said.
“I feel the same,” said Eisai-sama. “Perhaps we should talk of less negative matters…”
“Not on your Buddha-loving life,” I said, “you started this story, and we’re going to sit here until you finish it!”
“He’s right—please do,” Kiyoko said to Eisai-sama, “We’ll just keep thinking about it if you don’t finish.”
“Well. As the lady of the house was telling me her story, a messenger came to talk to her. The messenger was told that anything he had to say to her, he could say in front of me as well. He swallowed, hard, and reluctantly said: ‘…The master of the house has died.’”
“…Did he die of natural causes?” Kiyoko asked.
“Only in a manner of speaking. He had been drowned.”
“How?” I asked.
“An odd business. He was thrown from his horse…” Eisai-sama said.
“It happens… sounds natural…” I said…
“It wasn’t the fall that did it, though. The fall didn’t even knock him unconscious. He landed in a small creek, face down,” Eisai-sama said.
“Are you telling me—” I said.
“—He was drowned in what was essentially a puddle of water,” Eisai-sama said.
“That’s impossible,” I said.
“Witnesses saw it happen, people who had no reason to lie. It was as if an invisible force was holding his head down in the puddle. The man struggled, but could not lift his head,” Eisai-sama said.
“Couldn’t they have dragged him out of the creek?” Kiyoko asked.
“They said that they felt frozen to the ground they were standing on. They could do nothing but watch the tragedy unfold,” Eisai-sama said.
Kiyoko shuddered. I put my arm around her. “It’s all in the past,” I told her. “Don’t allow yourself to get too emotionally involved in it.”
“But it’s awful!” she said.
“I’ve seen worse things happen,” I said.
“May I proceed,” Eisai-sama said, “or do I have to watch you two cuddle?”
Kiyoko gently but firmly took my arm off of her shoulder. “Please continue,” she said to Eisai-sama.
“Osono grew pale when she heard the news. She started saying, over and over again, that it was ‘all her fault.’ Well, I felt I had to do something, so I offered to have an all-night prayer vigil that evening. She agreed. How arrogant I was…”
“Arrogant? You? You were just trying to help,” Kiyoko said.
“Yes, arrogant,” Eisai-sama said. “When one aligns oneself with the wise, compassionate Buddha, one sometimes thinks that one knows what Buddha might say in a given situation. That is simply vanity talking. And vanity makes mistakes that the true spiritual self would never make.”
“What sort of mistakes?” Kiyoko asked.
“One presumes that one is automatically stronger than evil,” said Eisai-sama. “One thinks that if one chants and prays and believes, that evil can never win. Sometimes, though, a human emotion is stronger than even one’s belief in the all-knowing oneness that the Buddha’s teachings represent.”
“Is this a Zen riddle? Because I’m tired of those,” I said.
“No, I am just stating facts. I was just starting out as a monk. The Buddha within oneself is only as strong as one’s wisdom and compassion and one’s life experiences. I knew the prayers. I had the faith. But I did not have the wisdom I needed. I did not understand human nature. I did not understand the power of love… and hate… and guilt…”
“Enough with the philosophy lesson—what happened next?” I asked.
“….That evening, I sat in the altar room with my prayer beads. I tried hard not to look at the large picture of Minokichi. And I succeeded for, oh, more than a dozen minutes, I suppose… when I heard a man’s voice say, ‘You know nothing.’ I looked up to see who had spoken to me. Minokichi’s face glared at me from the picture. I could not look away… nor could I pray, nor yell, nor scream, nor even speak. I wished I could have yelled or screamed… Those things might have been a comfort to me as I saw the scene that then played out in front of me…”
“What scene?” I asked.
“The young man crawled out of his portrait. Then he stood up, bowed to me, checked his sword, and he walked on past me. There was an almost ridiculous sort of sloshing sound as he walked, as if he were stepping in puddles with each step… I could smell rotting flesh… and something more, a smell of fetid, stagnant water…”
Kiyoko and I looked at each other.
“There’s nothing wrong with cuddling,” she said in a very soft voice.
I nodded, then put my arm around her.
“I heard the watery footsteps walk away,” Eisai-sama continued, “and then I heard a man’s scream. Then, I remembered nothing… I apparently passed out. When I awoke, I was sick with fever. I spent several days in bed being tended to by Osono’s servants. I could not eat… I lost weight… I often was plagued by chill… I threw up quite a bit… I would call it a case of the dry heaves, but they weren’t exactly dry… I kept on throwing up fetid water…”
“Ew,” I said.
“‘Ew,’ you say?” said Eisai-sama. “Imagine what it was like for the servants. Imagine what it was like for me, especially with the delirious dreams I had. I kept seeing Minokichi. In my feverish visions, I saw him come back to the altar room. His sword was bloody. He threw a sack at me. It landed in front of me. I saw him bow to me, give me a sardonic smile, and then I saw him disappear into the portrait. I found that I could move, so I opened the bag. I saw the head of Osono’s father in it. I had often, in my time as a samurai, seen men killed in battle. I’d even seen men beheaded. I have even, from time to time, beheaded men with my sword. But in all of that time, I never saw such a haunted look on a dead man’s face. He must have died of fright. The head being cut off must have just been an afterthought.”
We fell into a stunned silence. It was as if Eisai-sama could see the scene in front of his eyes at that very moment. He, himself, looked haunted as a sinner in Jigoku itself. I knew I had to say something. “…But you recovered,” I finally said.
Eisai-sama looked at me as if he had forgotten I was there. “Yes, I recovered,” he said, in a soft, defeated voice.
We fell into silence again.
Finally, Kiyoko said, “…And that was the end of the story?”
Eisai-sama shook his head. “No. While I was recovering my strength and health, I had a lot of time to think. Osono’s father was dead. I’d asked the servants about it, and my worst fears were confirmed. Osono’s father did not want a funeral… He’d grown to distrust monks, and religion in general. I don’t blame him, really. The spiritual side of life did nothing to prevent the tragedies he’d seen…”
“The wise teachings of Buddha do not prevent tragedies. They only offer us a way to deal with them,” I said.
Eisai-sama looked at me. “You’re learning, Takeshi-kun.”
“Yeah, whatever. So, you had time to think… did you come to any conclusion?” I asked him.
“I realized that to get answers, one must start by asking oneself questions,” he said.
“What questions?” Kiyoko asked.
“What, exactly, happened the night that Minokichi died?” he said. “In other words, who killed Minokichi, and why did it happen?”
“I assumed that the husband or the father planned it, or both of them together. I assumed that Minokichi had been attacked without warning and… is that not how it happened…?” I asked.
“I asked myself,” he said, “if it was a planned attack, why didn’t they dump the body elsewhere? Why didn’t they make it look like bandits had killed the young man along a deserted road?”
We sat thinking for a minute. Then Kiyoko said, “They didn’t do that because it wasn’t a planned attack. They didn’t plot a murder. It was… something else.”
“Ah, the eyes of youth sometimes see more clearly than the eyes of even the most experienced monk,” he said to her. “My dear, you are exactly right.”
“He thinks I’m smart,” Kiyoko said to me. Her face lit up and she was smiling broadly. She looked so cute, I almost blushed.
I didn’t want to let her see me that way, so I took back my arm, and looked at Eisai-sama. “So, if it wasn’t planned, what happened?” I asked.
“That’s what I had to find out. As soon as I recovered, I asked to see Osono. They led me to where she was sitting in her garden. She looked too stunned to cry. It was as if she was all mourned out. I asked her who really killed Minokichi, and in a dead voice, she said: ‘I did.’ I nodded sagely, even though I didn’t feel very wise. In fact, I was totally shocked. She didn’t seem to be an evil woman, yet she had killed the man she’d loved.”
“Killing isn’t evil if one has a justification for it,” I said.
Kiyoko didn’t see it that way. “She killed the man she loved?! There’s no justification for—”
“—Not even in self-defense?” said Eisai-sama. “Not even to save the life of her unborn child?”
“What? You just lost me yet again,” I said.
Eisai-sama sighed. “You’ve heard of the concept of a double suicide?”
“…Osono and Minokichi were going to kill themselves because they couldn’t be together…?” Kiyoko asked.
“Not exactly. Minokichi had decided that a double suicide was the only way out of his pain. Osono, on the other hand, refused. She said that the unborn child was the fruit of their love, and deserved a chance to live. Minokichi couldn’t see the truth of that. All he could see was the endless years he’d have to live without Osono. They’d met outside, whispering near the well. He grabbed her. She pushed him away… and he fell and hit his head against a stone. Osono wanted to go to the authorities about his death, but her father didn’t want the scandal… and he didn’t like the possibility of his grandson being born in prison… So, Osono’s father and Tokubei, in a panic, dumped Minokichi’s body down the well.”
“So… Minokichi died accidentally?” Kiyoko asked.
“Wait, it gets worse,” said Eisai-sama.
A look of absolute horror came upon Kiyoko’s face. “What… what’s scaring you…?” I asked her.
“He… Monokichi wasn’t dead when he was pushed down into the well, was he?” Kiyoko asked.
“They thought he was dead,” said Eisai-sama, “but he was only gravely wounded. He woke up in the water… He yelled for help… Osono pleaded with her father to send for servants… She begged them to hurry and go and try and get him out of the well… Her father told her to go to her room. Before she could argue any more, the screaming and yelling stopped. Minokichi was dead—er, truly dead.”
“He blamed all of them, didn’t he?” Kiyoko asked.
“Perhaps…” said Eisai-sama.
“No, he blamed her and only her!” I said. “Everything he did was to hurt her.”
Eisai-sama gave me a small nod.
“He’d go that far? He’d kill his own child?” Kiyoko said.
“Her child,” I said.
“Buddhism tells us not to attach ourselves too much to the passions of this world,” said Eisai-sama. “And this is one of the reasons why. Romantic love can so easily turn to jealousy and hate…”
“Another lecture about Buddhism,” Kiyoko sighed.
“He’s like a merchant in the streets. They yell about their fish and their pots and their pans, their silks and their spices… The only difference is that he’s selling the Buddha,” I said.
To my surprise, Eisai-sama laughed. “I can seem that way, I admit,” he said after he stopped laughing.
“What happened to Osono?” Kiyoko asked.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, “did he try to kill her next?”
“I honestly don’t know,” said Eisai-sama.
“Huh?” I said. “How can you not know a thing like that?”
“I convinced Osono to ride with me to my temple. It was a few days’ journey, but we could not allow ourselves to rest, because every time we did, we saw him walking about half a mile behind us. We even had to travel at night, with torches. The horses were half-dead with exhaustion, but they refused to rest… because even when we traveled at night, even when we could not see him, we could hear his footsteps… his wet, watery footsteps…”
“He had to stop when he reached the Temple, though, right?” Kiyoko said.
“Yes, but you could still hear his footsteps at night, walking around and around the temple…”
Kiyoko shuddered. “How could that… how could such a horrible thing be allowed…?”
“Fate and karma have their reasons. It is not for me to question them. Now, there is very little left to the story, but I will tell it if you don’t mind…”
“Yes, please…” said Kiyoko…
“The monks did prayers and rituals to try and send the angry spirit into the afterlife. They were not successful. Then, they decided that all they could do was to try and bind the spirit to the well, and to confine him to the property itself. After that, I was sent back out into the world. I continued on with my work. When I returned to the temple again, I was given the task of coming back to the house every so often, to see if the angry spirit was still here… It is always here. I do my prayers. I do my rituals. But it is still there, angry and frustrated. He is bound to me, in a way; bound to my mistake.”
“What was your mistake, exactly?” I asked.
“I asked the head of the Temple just that. He said, ‘Haven’t you ever heard of the phrase ‘An undisturbed god wreaks no vengeance’? You disturbed a spirit… and that spirit came back to cause even more pain than before.”
“In other words, the head monk thought you should have left bad enough alone,” Kiyoko said.
“In my attempts to heal the sorrows of the past, I just made matters worse. It’s like throwing a pebble into a muddy stream. It just makes more dirt come to the surface. I apologized to my superior, but he only said, ‘Even monkeys fall from trees…’ meaning, even the most experienced of us make mistakes, and I certainly wasn’t a very experienced monk… nor monkey…”
Kiyoko and I laughed. “And you really never found out what happened to Osono?” Kiyoko asked.
“No, I didn’t,” he said.
“You weren’t even curious?” I asked.
“Curiosity is a form of desire. I often desired to know if she was all right, but I deliberately chose to never find out. …But I will admit this. Every time I come here, I look for Osono’s name amongst the graves. So far, I haven’t seen it. Maybe she became a Buddhist nun. Maybe she moved to another city. Maybe she married again, although I doubt it. Wherever she is, and whatever happened to her, I always pray for her. To me, she represents life’s complexities. She killed the man she loved, but she did so accidentally. She was honor-bound to another man, but really, the accident happened because of a gentle shove to a man who was already off-balance, a shove which caused a death she did not wish to happen. Our actions, even those we think are innocent, even those which we do to protect ourselves or others, can sometimes cause great pain to ourselves and to others,” Eisai-sama said.
“Yeah, life stinks like rotten fish sometimes,” I said.
We sat in silence for a minute, then Kiyoko said: “…Maybe that’s why we’re here together on this journey. Even monkeys fall from trees, but three gathered together have the wisdom of Manjusri, Bodisattva of Wisdom…”
Eisai-sama nodded, then said: “Children, it’s time to leave the past in the past. We have miles to go before we reach the next town, and we’ve already wasted enough time.”
Seeing that there was nothing to be gained from talking philosophy and reciting old proverbs, we got up, packed our things, and moved on.