text: Jiro and Tatsunoyama had drunk deeply, enjoying one another's company. Jiro found the wrestler odd. He combined a formal mien with an assumption of equality that roused the samurai in Jiro's makeup. At the same time that he was a humorous and considerate companion, he could be entirely oblivious of admiring glances and the outstretched hands of wrestling fans. He responded only rarely to any of the messages that the room maid brought from time to time. When he did respond, it was usually by scrawling his name on a plaque presented for the purpose by some admirer, or more rarely by pressing his hand into an ink stone loaded with red ink and imprinting his palm on a sheet of paper. His apprentice would take the paper reverently and rush off to present it to the delighted follower of the sport.
  
  At length they went off to the bath. The bathroom was spacious, with a cedar-lined tub and well-appointed fittings. They talked leisurely while Tatsunoyama's apprentice scrubbed their backs and they rinsed with the sulfury-smelling waters. They watched the crowd of humanity that had come for a late-night soak. Some of the women, Jiro decided, were quite pleasantly shaped. None, of course, like his own Okiku and Rosamund, but pleasing nonetheless. There was a group of several women pilgrims who had monopolized one corner of the huge sunken tub. In another corner an elderly samurai dozed, cold towel folded on his head. Two men, local farmers by their accents and hairdos, talked of crops. A father and two young sons scrubbed themselves in another corner. Someone sang softly in the candlelit steamy gloom.
  
  They lowered themselves into the tub, each covertly examining the other. The wrestler saw a large, heavily muscled samurai with peculiarly sallow skin and light, almost greyish eyes. Jiro was taller than the wrestler. His wrists were thicker than a samurai's should be. Jiro's father, Tatsunoyama knew, had been a foreigner. As the Shogun's admiral and shipwright, he had trained his second son in his own craft, owning it no shame for his youngest son, who could never inherit his position, to learn a trade. Miura Anjin's son Jiro had not, however, become a shipwright like his English father. Instead, he taught letters to young children and foreign knowledge to whoever would hear.
  
  Jiro saw a massive mountain of fat descending into the steaming pool beside him. Under the fat, however, his warrior's eye saw layers of muscle and brawn. And the wrestler's hands, he knew from report, could crush a man's head like a melon. Both massive bodies subsided beneath the hot waters with a sigh, causing a small tidal wave in the crowded pool. Some of the pilgrims in the far corner who had been chatting animatedly glanced at the two massive bodies, whose maleness was inadequately hidden by tiny towels, then returned to their conversations.