Tokyo Bay Read Online Free Page A

lost in a reverie, gazing reflectively at the tiny pearls of condensation that shimmered on her bare arms and shoulders. In the gentle lantern light, she thought, they glowed like miniature teardrops against her golden skin. Looking absently down at her youthfully pointed breasts, her shadowed flanks and the flattened curve of her belly, she noticed other such beads of tear-like moisture. Could it be, she wondered, that her soul was always silently weeping within her? Was her spirit sobbing soundlessly and invisibly all the time she smiled her bright, professional smiles, recited haiku verses, or played her plangent three- stringed samisen? Thinking these melancholy thoughts she moved gracefully across the soft tatami f lo or mats to where she had laid out her favourite kimono of midnight blue silk. Worn only on special nights, this kimono was decorated with silver stars that glistened luminously amongst its silken folds. Although not yet ready to put the garment on, she reached out a hand towards its shimmering fabric, anticipating the familiar sensual pleasure of close contact with its smooth richness. It was in that moment that she first registered fully the frantic sounds of raised voices and running feet from beyond the wood and rice paper shoji that separated the room from a balcony overlooking the narrow, flagstoned street outside.
The excited night-time murmur and bustle of the Yoshiwara - the walled-in entertainment and pleasure district of Yedo - was not in any way strange to her ears, despite the fresh bloom of youth on her cheeks. Although not yet twenty; she had already spent three years delighting the high-ranking clientele of the Golden Pavilion geisha house. The distaste she felt for her current role in the Yoshiwara had always been successfully masked behind her smiling professional poise; for she had entered the Golden Pavilion reluctantly, to gain for her ruined father the high lump-sum payment that beauty such as hers commanded. A former samurai who had turned merchant, he had recklessly gambled away a fortune in the Yoshiwara’s gaming houses, and Tokiwa’s reluctant sacrifice had been made solely to help ward off the total impoverishment of her family. She had long since learned to close her ears to the harsh and boisterous sounds which nightly filled the street outside - but never before had she heard anything like the hysterical din now rising towards her balcony.
Still naked, she carefully drew back the nearest shoji and peered discreetly down into the street. Amidst the seething crowd her eye fell first on a man who was stumbling under the weight of a frail, white-haired woman clinging to his back. Fear was etched deep in the face of the woman, who Tokiwa guessed was his mother, and, as he staggered along, she peered constantly backward, as though fearing pursuit by all the demons of hell. Tokiwa also saw younger women casting terrified glances over their shoulders as they hurried past with babies clasped in their arms. Weeping children clung to their fathers, and several families were frantically trying to push handcarts piled high with their meagre belongings through the milling throng.
From all over the city temple bells were beginning to toll with an unfamiliar urgency, and men and women called out panicky warnings to one another as they ran. In an effort to hear what they were saying, Tokiwa clasped her arms about her naked breasts and took half a pace out onto the balcony.
‘The barbarians are sending floating volcanoes to destroy us!’ shrieked one man to another as they passed beneath her. ‘They’ve been seen from Cape Idzu. .. belching great clouds of black smoke!’
‘Twenty thousand brave samurai are already manning the cliffs!’ yelled another. ‘But they’re all doomed.’
‘Hundreds of hairy barbarian giants are following the volcanoes called another male voice desperately.
‘They’ll burn and rape all Yedo screamed a despairing female. ‘Nothing can save us!’
Tokiwa