Fudoki Read Online Free

you’ll wake up from that.”
    “I have to,” the ghost said. “Where will I go? I was a bad Buddhist, but I don’t want to go to Hell. I won’t have to, if I can just wake up.” It shook its corpse, and ash flew from its clothes.
    A flake fell on the tortoiseshell’s nose, and she shook her head to dislodge it. “Where are the cats, my cousins and aunts?”
    The ghost stopped shaking. The tears that fell from its eyes were blood. “They are all gone. Cats and mice, people and kami. I am all that’s left.”
    “No,” the tortoiseshell said. “ I am left. You’re a ghost. If my kin are dead, where are their ghosts, then?”
    “Why would I know?” the ghost said bitterly. “I am no cat. If cats go to Hell perhaps I will meet them there. Unless I can wake up.”
    The tortoiseshell returned to the midden heap to think.
    Individual cats are not important. Even if the other females were gone, she lived, and the fudoki continued. Grass and bushes would grow again, and mice would crawl from their holes or move from other, less damaged residences. Humans might or might not return, but they were of only minor usefulness. Perhaps other females would find the grounds and become part of the tortoiseshell’s fudoki . Eventually, the males would visit again. If they did not, new males would take their place. She would have kittens, perhaps many litters, and some would be daughters. The tale would continue, and she would take her place in it: The Surviving Cat. She was frightened and alone, but the tale remained, and this comforted her.
    There were sounds within the grounds: men’s voices, heavy footsteps. The fire left a thousand new hiding spots, but they were unfamiliar and frightening, so she leapt for the top of a wall. Up had always been safe; had been safe through the night’s fire.
    She landed with her full weight on her front paws, driving them down onto the still-smoking top edge. She screamed and twisted sideways in the air, fell full length onto a raised stone walkway, still scorchingly hot. The pain closed down her mind, and she ran.
     
     
    All through the night, when her life depended on it, the tortoiseshell had not panicked. With morning, the enemy was no longer immediate and all-threatening. It could be avoided, and so there was no longer a reason to panic. But she was weary to staggering, and queasy with the poisons of the night’s unused fear. When she burned herself, the pain overwhelmed what strength she still had.
    Cats do not like to run far at a time—their strength is in their patience, not their legs—but she could not stop herself. She was past the wall in a flash, and streaked south, in the shadow of the weeds along Sai avenue’s western ditch. Everything was strange. The noises that had whispered at the fringes of the frightening silence were all around her now, and they were all made by things, blundering objects that moved unpredictably, any one of which might be a threat. There were horses and oxen, dogs and carts and people. Smoke still choked the streets, and she smelled fire, old and new, everywhere around her, and she could not tell what was dead and what still lived. With each step, new pain seared her feet. She jumped forward, away from the pain, but it stabbed at her with the next step. Whenever she managed to overcome the reaction caused by the pain, a noise or blundering thing would startle her, and she would run again.
    In the end, the exhaustion that began her flight also ended it. She missed a step and sprawled. Because she fell on her uninjured side, for a moment there was no sharp shock of pain. In that moment, the goddess Kannon was merciful, and the tortoiseshell fainted. Small and injured as she was, she had crossed more than a mile of the capital.
    It was not, perhaps, the ideal place to fall: in the center of the dog-walk, the walkway that ran alongside Rokujavenue, which is always busy with the doings of the common people who live in the south of the capital. But