After the incident with the mooching young lady, our two travelers came to the realization pretty quick that they had to be especially frugal with the remainder of their pocket money if they were going to make it to Ise. They considered pawning some of their belongings for some extra dough, but other than the clothes on their backs they didn't have much to begin with, let alone anything people from two hundred years in the past would want, such as a cell phone with a dying battery and no reception. Consequently, they determined they only had enough to spare for lunch on a couple of rice cakes, which kept them satisfied, oh, for about as long as it took to finish the things.

Presently the duo arrived in the Shizuoka area, where Mt Fuji loomed large over the wide, open plains of the countryside. The boys might have been beginning to get used to life on the road Edo style, but they still missed the convenience of the twenty-first century on long stretches of road like this, particularly the convenience of not having to go more than one hundred meters in any direction without coming across a vending machine, and all the refreshingly cool drinks inside.

They began to think they were wishing so hard they were hallucinating when they crested the hill to find a strawberry field laid out below them. The straight rows ran out so far they couldn't see the end of them, and each plant was laden with fat, red berries that glistened in the sun.

"It's got to be a mirage or a dream or something," Tetsuya said, staring, mouth agape, at all the goodness around them.

Because he was staring, he wasn't paying the best attention to where he was going. When the young master stopped abruptly in front of him, he ran into Kasanoda's back.

But Kasanoda hardly noticed. He was too busy staring himself.

"Yeah. A dream. . . . Tetsuya, are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

It went without saying. The two only needed to exchange a look, then both took off down the hill for the strawberry field. Both were so thrilled with their discovery that they were too busy laughing at their good fortune and chasing one another down the rows between the berries that they couldn't be bothered to stop and pick any.

Then, sitting smack-dab in the center of the field and seeming to have risen up out of nowhere, they came upon a wrought-iron patio set with seating for two. Kasanoda and Tetsuya could hardly believe their eyes, and not because there was a whole little patio built up around it, complete with a tiled floor and sculpted potted plants and an arbor of bougainvillea, and smooth accordion music emanating from some unknown location, all sitting mysteriously in the center of a monstrous strawberry field. No, their eyes were drawn to the table itself, which was all but overflowing with delicious cakes and pastries and sweet drinks of all sizes and varieties—indeed, anything that one could imagine could be made out of strawberries was represented there, and some things neither of them had ever imagined. It was a veritable hanging garden of strawberry desserts.

It was too good to be true. But the tile felt real under their feet; and when they waved their hands over the table, it didn't dissipate like a mirage. So it wasn't a hunger hallucination. Tetsuya's stomach was suddenly growling like the MGM lion at the idea that this spread was actually real. And, seeing as there was no one around to enjoy it but the two of them, he grabbed the back of one of the chairs to pull it away from the table.

Kasanoda grabbed his arm before he could do so. "Wait."

"Why?"

He pointed to a sign sticking up from the center of the table and written in cursive script like a formal place card. It read: Do not eat by order of Lord Usagizuka no Haninosuke. Violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Despite the threat in its wording, it at least looked to be the most polite warning the two had ever read.

Tetsuya scanned the field all around them. Above the foot-high strawberry vines, they could easily see there was no one in the vicinity. "Come on, Waka. No one's going to know. Besides, there's lots more here than the two of us can eat."

"I don't know. The sign says violators will be prosecuted."

"Yeah? And since when did you start caring about the rules? If we see anyone coming, we'll just make sure to be long gone before they get here."

"But—"

"Take a look, Waka. Do you see anyone around?"

Kasanoda didn't, but that still didn't quell the unease he felt about this whole thing. "No, but—"

"Well, you can starve if you want to, but I'm helping myself."

Kasanoda couldn't really stop him, either. It did look as though the table had just been waiting for the likes of them; and even if his gut instinct was telling him it could be a trap, his gut itself was siding with Tetsuya on this one.

"Pardon the intrusion," Tetsuya said out of force of habit, and reached over the table for a fat, juicy strawberry perched on a whipped cream dollop in the center of a cake—

A blare of sirens made them both jump.

"Stop right there, vile trespassers!"

If they weren't hallucinating before, the two were sure they were now. A traffic cop scooter pulled up fast beside the patio, and a boy who looked to be about ten years old dismounted, wearing an official's jacket and a helmet on his fair head, both of which sported a crest of a rabbit. He pointed his bokken at Tetsuya.

"I hereby arrest you for eating my strawberries, which you have been clearly informed is against the law!"

Tetsuya put his hands up. "But I didn't eat any! I didn't even touch one!"

"But you were gonna. Weren't you?"

"Well, I—"

"Which shows intent! That's just as bad! If I hadn't shown up when I did, you would have eaten one for sure! And if you ate one, then you would have eaten ten, and twenty, and then who knows where it would end!"

"But I didn't! Isn't that the whole issue here? Waka, help me out here!"

Kasanoda was paying less than satisfactory attention to their conversation, however. "Haninozuka-sempai? Is that you?" he asked the person trying to place his friend under arrest.

He tilted up the helmet's bill for a better look.

And had his hand swatted away. "What the heck? No touchy! You want me to arrest you, too?"

"Kid, how old are you?" Tetsuya said. "Are your parents around, or—"

"We-e-ell, looks like we got us a couple of real smart-alecks here. I'm eighteen and a half, I'll have you know! And you oughtta watch your language. Do you even know who you're insulting? I am the fourteenth daimyo of—"

"—waving this stick around here— You're going to poke someone's eye out!"

That was when Tetsuya made his fatal mistake, because he grabbed the so-called daimyo's bokken from right out of his hand.

Kasanoda didn't even have time to warn him that might not be the most brilliant idea when the strawberry field around them suddenly sprouted full-grown and fully armed samurai. And the swords they had drawn were not made of wood, and in fact looked very sharp. Tetsuya decided, rather judiciously this time, to hand the bokken back. Slowly.

"Now," said the fourteenth daimyo Haninosuke, "you're going to come back with us nice and quiet, aren't you?"

Tetsuya managed one last defiant, "But I didn't eat anything," before he was led away by the daimyo's guard, leaving a stunned Kasanoda staring uselessly after them.

After recovering his shock, he trudged after them. No one paid him any heed.

They took Tetsuya back to their castle and threw him into a prison cell. Apparently people around here relied on the honor system of criminal justice, because the wooden bars were spaced such that if Tetsuya sucked in his stomach really hard, he could probably squeeze between them. Not to mention, they had place him in the same cell as a tanuki and . . .

Tetsuya had to rub his eyes just to make sure. It was the old man they'd met on the road their first morning in the Edo period, the one Kasanoda thought looked like his school's vice principal.

The old man whose oranges they had stolen and replaced with Cup Noodles. Maybe he wouldn't recognize Tetsuya if he looked the other way. . . .

"A newcomer, eh? So, you ate one of the daimyo's strawberries, didn't you?" the old man asked him.

"Um . . . yeah. Well, actually, no, but I wanted to. I was really hungry." Tetsuya tried not to face him full on. "What about you?"

"I picked some thinking they might make a nice stew base, but alas, it was actually quite disgusting, and I was caught and thrown in here. On the whole, though, I believe it was a valuable learning experience."

"What about him?" Tetsuya pointed at the tanuki. "Tanuki don't eat strawberries. They eat yams and mushrooms and stuff."

"Then you should tell that to the daimyo," said the old man.

The tanuki just blinked at Tetsuya with little black, wrongly-accused eyes.

Speaking of the daimyo, he had disappeared sometime before Tetsuya was thrown in the slammer and had not been seen since. His men, though, were rushing about like so many ants, carrying in loads of sweets which they arranged in a gorgeous banquet and divided into servings for all the place settings. Except for the table at the head of the arrangement, that was, which was given whole cakes instead of slices.

Considering they had just come from an arrest—his arrest, Tetsuya thought bitterly, and no less hungry than he was before—they seemed in incredibly good spirits, joking raucously as they sat down to enjoy their dessert.

"What is this?"

The laughter suddenly died on all the samurai's lips, their forkloads of cake went uneaten, and they looked up to see the daimyo glaring down at them with tiny hands on his hips. "I thought this was supposed to be a manly dinner party!"

"Uh, um—Forgive us, your lordship!" one of the samurai burst out, pressing his forehead to the floor. "We didn't get the memo! We fail epically!"

"We'll have twenty kilos of the finest stripped beef around brought in immediately, if your lordship will just be patient while the broth boils!"

"And cheese fondue!"

"Fondue isn't manly, you idiot! Are you trying to doom us all? Unless, of course, Lord Haninosuke thinks it is, in which case please allow me to pay for my presumptuousness with my life!"

The samurai were silent in the tensest anticipation as they waited for the little daimyo to unleash his fury on all of them.

Instead, a huge grin broke out on his face, and he practically bubbled as he told them sweetly, "Just kidding, just kidding. Who wants to eat meat, anyway? Let's have cake!"

The samurai let out a collective sigh, laughing nervously. "You had us that time, lordship. No, really, you really had us that time."

While the old man lounged back and contemplated the errors of his strawberry stew, Tetsuya and the tanuki could do nothing but watch helplessly through the bars as the daimyo and his men gorged themselves on cake, and wonder if they had not unknowingly died and been placed in a special corner of hell for gluttons. If he was just going to be arrested one way or another, Tetsuya thought, he should have stuffed his pockets with whatever he could grab while he'd had the chance.

As he was regretting that, he heard a strange, quiet strain of "Ca-caw, ca-caw!"

It sounded like the weirdest crow he had ever heard.

He looked up to see if one had flown in and perched itself in the rafters, but saw the young master there instead, straddling a beam and holding on for his dear life.

"Waka!" It was all Tetsuya could do to contain his excitement. He hissed: "How did you get up there?"

"Shh. Never mind that. I've come to break you out of here."

"Great! But how? This place is swarming with samurai. You'll never make it out alive!"

As if on cue, some of said hardened samurai suddenly started a fan dance, peculiar only in that none of them had been drinking previous to this point.

"Relax. Everything is going to go exactly according to plan."

"What is the plan?"

"I don't know yet." (Tetsuya rubbed the bridge of his nose.) "But trust me on this, Tetsuya, I'm not gonna let you down. It'll be like fish in a barrel."

"Waka, do you even know what that means? Get the keys to the cell, then we can just sneak out while they're eating."

"Good plan! Where are the keys?"

The two and the tanuki scanned the place, then spotted the keys hanging unguarded on a hook on the opposite wall. Unfortunately for Kasanoda, however, he would have to pass right over the daimyo's "manly" party to get it. The three's spirits sank.

But Kasanoda was determined to try it anyway. With Tetsuya cheering him quietly on from inside the prison cell, he scooted himself out over the daimyo's party inch by careful inch. Now was not a great time to remember that he never particularly liked heights. Tetsuya was counting on him. He had to make it. He visualized himself making his way to the key, lifting it from its hook with his wallet chain, and making his way back to the cell, all with perfect ninja stealth. Yeah, that could work.

It might have, too. Unfortunately, Kasanoda never got the chance to find out. His balance shifted and his grip slipped, and all of a sudden, as though it were all happening in slow motion, he was sliding sideways off the beam into thin air.

Thankfully, the mountain of sweets in the middle of the daimyo's party broke his fall.

Everyone froze. Silence fell. The samurai who had gotten up to dance with fans stopped mid-pose and everyone stared at Kasanoda, covered in pound cake and cheesecake and frosting, who could only stare back. As far as humiliation went, this one was definitely higher than Tetsuya catching him in the cat-maid outfit. Higher even than catching Haruhi in her underwear, he decided, and possibly outdone only by a slim margin by the host club's fans thinking he was gay. Somewhere, a fork fell, shattering the tenuous silence, and that was when he realized he had to move to save his own skin. And fast.

"Seize him!" Haninosuke ordered, and a dozen or so samurai rushed forward to apprehend Kasanoda.

Luckily, they slid on the cake and whipped cream as much as he did, and he was able to make it back to the cell before they could lay a finger on him. He grabbed hold of the bars, suddenly thinking he would have been better off on the other side of them.

"Where's the key?" Tetsuya shouted.

"Shit, I forgot!"

"Trying to break your partner in crime out of jail, huh?"

Kasanoda spun to face the daimyo. Somehow the incongruous seriousness in his little voice chilled him like few things in this world had the power to, including the threatening men standing around them.

"Should we have him executed, lordship?" they offered.

Kasanoda gulped. As did Tetsuya, before scooping some cheesecake off the young master's shoulder and putting it in his mouth.

"Don't be ridiculous," said Haninosuke.

"But he ruined your cake, your lordship!"

"I know. But new cakes can be baked. Perhaps we can find some other way of making him pay for his crime."

"Look," Kasanoda said, "I'll pay for the cake or . . . or work in the field or something. I'm pretty good with plants. But let Tetsuya go. He didn't do anything wrong."

"I don't know. He did try to break the law. . . ."

"Come on. I'll do anything you want, just let him out."

That got the daimyo's attention. "Anything, you said?"

"Uh. . . ." Now that Kasanoda actually had a moment to think about it, he wasn't sure that was the word he should have used. All of a sudden, he could think up a lot of things he really wouldn't want to do, even for Tetsuya. Sensing just the nature of his hesitation, Tetsuya punched his shoulder. Kasanoda started. "Yeah, sure. Anything. Do we have a deal?"

Haninosuke thought about that for a long moment, during which time the two travelers, the tanuki, and the dozen or so samurai were left hanging on the edges of their seats.

Then: "Okay. It's a deal. Now, here's what you can do to make this up to me:

"There's this witch who lives in an old run-down hut up in the foothills who's been a real thorn in my side lately. She keeps trying to put a curse on me, and I'm afraid one day she might actually succeed. So far her efforts have been foiled, but she keeps upping the ante to dangerous levels. Like when I was dining in my strawberry patch the other week, just minding my own business with a baker's dozen of tarts, she sicced a swarm of killer bees on me!"

"His lordship barely escaped with his life," one of the samurai said.

"Then last week, she sent me a cake, knowing my fondness for them. It was devil's food cake, too. The kind with the powdered sugar on top and these big, juicy blackberries. Super-delicious. Anyway, it was lucky for me that one of my men got to it first, because if he hadn't, I might have ended up like him!"

He pointed to a samurai lying on his side in the corner, looking up at the ceiling and sighing deeply, completely oblivious to what had happened with Kasanoda and the cake.

"What's wrong with him?"

"No one knows!" said Haninosuke. "He just sits around like that all day, completely unresponsive! It's horrible! And to make matters worse, she's just pulled off her most heinous stunt yet. She's kidnapped Usa-chan!"

"Who's Usa-chan?" said Tetsuya.

"Who's Usa-chan?" said an aghast samurai. "Only Lord Haninosuke's most prized possession!"

"Made for him with love by his most august and beloved grandmother, who just passed away last year, may her soul rest in peace! He's irreplaceable!"

Kasanoda found a flier for a missing child shoved in his face. Except instead of a child's picture in the center, there was a drawing of a stuffed rabbit.

Beneath the shortcake stuck to his face, his eyelid twitched. "Let me get this straight. You want me to get your stuffed animal back for you?"

"Yep! Well, no," Haninosuke said. "Not exactly. I want you to go to the witch's place and rescue Usa-chan from her clutches, and then I want you to bring me her writing brush! So no one else can ever be hurt by her evil curses again."

Right, no one except me, thought Kasanoda, who was not entirely looking forward to being sent up there alone. However, "If I do that, I won't be punished and you'll let Tetsuya out of this cell?"

"Sure!"

The daimyo's bubbly grin might not have been the most reassuring, er, reassurance, but it was the best Kasanoda was going to get. Plus, with Tetsuya stuck behind bars, it didn't seem like he had much of a choice. Damn, he thought: all this trouble and neither of them had even had the pleasure of eating a single strawberry.