Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show (11 page)

“Please,” he said, “there have been so many advances recently, let me give my litde talk. There is nothing for you to spend on it except time.”

He bowed, in respect for Tsune's station, but he also waved his hands in the air in the way certain merchants had recendy found to somehow garner authority. Tsune knew that Manjiro's papers would not allow him to take her, wife or not, into the Barbarian Book Room with him. Her idea had simply been to engage the room's attendant in small talk so that Manjiro could search in peace. She was therefore hesitant to go with the herb man until she saw that the book attendant followed right along behind them, a little like a dog in heat. He, too, had also taken up the habit of pressing against the edges of his table while the herb man gave his talk, it seemed, and he left Manjiro fast, saying only, “Read at your leisure, sir, I know you have the verifications. I remember you from before.”

So that is how Manjiro was able to mirror Lord Abe's time in the Barbarian Book Room alone. He remembered the room exactly. During the first thirty years of its existence books had been translated and added to the collection regularly, but it had stopped growing a decade ago. Now there were forty strange and wonderful foreign titles, each arranged on its own low table.

He could see in an instant that no book was missing. To speak precisely there were eighty books, for in every case the Japanese translation and the original text lay together, the Japanese version inevitably larger, as if the information contained in each volume had been augmented by its translator, exploded by Japanese grammar and syntax. While Manjiro gazed at the books he thought again of his tutor, an ex-priest and wayward intellectual named Wilhelm Mundt, whom he had rescued from Nagasaki some five years ago, and who had finally been forced to leave Japan only six months earlier, at the beginning of this current antiforeign furor. His tutor's dream had been to add another book to the collection in this marvelous room. He had completed his work before he left, and it sat in their study in Shimoda, silent in both its languages, waiting for Manjiro to collect it and bring it to this room. Its title was
Faust
, and Manjiro loved a particular line from it that read,
“If ever I lay down in sloth and base inaction, then let that moment be my end.”
It was how he hoped to live his life—with that thought as his admonition.

Manjiro glanced back out at the men before going over to the book attendant's table and turning the ledger around. The ledger recorded the names and interests of all visitors to the room, but though it went back more than forty years, it was still only one-third full. He found his own name, with notations next to it telling how long he had stayed and what he had done, and he saw that after him no more than a half dozen people had visited the room. Lord Abe's name was not among them. Now what would he do? He could tell from the quickening pace of the herb official's monologue that his time alone might be short.

Starting on the left side of the room, Manjiro opened each book in the wild hope that he would be able to guess Lord Abe's interest from the title or the first few lines, when suddenly he remembered Einosuke saying that the book Lord Abe took with him had been small, that Lord Abe had held the volume in one hand. He picked up the nearest book and found that he could only carry it comfortably under his arm, so he put it down again and stood in the middle of the room, surveying all of the books, this time forgetting content and paying attention only to size. The largest book, rising off the floor to mid-calf level, was the Christian Bible, and the smallest, which he knew immediately could not be the one, was a volume of sonnets by the English poet William Shakespeare.

Manjiro crossed the room to the only other book that could be taken out of the room in one hand, but before opening it he parted the
shoji
a little, so that he could see the backs of the caretakers again, a dozen feet away. He could also see Tsune, who had drawn her kimono sleeve back and was just then pulling a ginseng root out of a large-mouthed jar. It was a gesture that made his mouth water.

“Show me,” she was saying. “Can you cut it a little? I have never seen it before.”

Manjiro closed the
shoji
and picked the book up off the floor. The original volume was in Spanish, or perhaps Italian. The Japanese title was
Ooji
, Prince, and it had been written by someone named Niccolò. Manjiro still had the intention of reading a little bit from the book's beginning, to see what he could learn, but the book opened at its middle where a thin sheet of paper fell out. The paper was covered with Japanese words, with lines of expert calligraphy. He was at first indignant, nearly ready to call that lax attendant back into the room and complain. What if the ink on this paper had not been sufficiently dried and had marked the pages of the book with little half circles or parts of a phrase? There were only forty books and each was a treasure, fashioned with grace and care; each a work of art. What was this attendant's job, then, if not to keep the books safe, if not to walk among them looking for such problems as this, to open and close them occasionally so that their unread pages got air?

His anger would have gotten the best of him on another occasion, but in fact the book had not been dirtied and for an instant his new fear was that an actual page had come loose in his hands. Manjiro opened the
shoji
again, an inch or two. How could this be? There was no question that the loose page and the one it marked contained precisely the same words, and there was also no question that they had been written by different hands. Had Lord Abe, then, or someone else, copied the words out and then inexplicably forgot them when he returned the book, or, for some even more unfathomable reason, purposefully left them behind? Manjiro stood against the flow of such thoughts until his eye was caught by the flourish of Tsune's sleeve and he saw that the Chinese ganglion was sliding back through the mouth of its jar. The prurient party was breaking up. He had just put the book back down, in fact, and tucked the loose page up his sleeve, when the barbarian book man came back.

“Tell me,” asked Manjiro, “who cares for these volumes? How often does someone dust them, how often does someone clean?”

He had intended to sound merely curious, but had not been able to hide his irritation. The book room man's face was red. “I do, sir,” was his reply.

When Manjiro turned back into the room and pointed, both men saw that everything before them was in order. “I meant to ask how of ten their pages are aired,” said Manjiro. “I thought I saw a bit of yellow in the
Sonnets
of Shakespeare just now.”

He was still pointing, though he couldn't even remember where the sonnets of Shakespeare resided.

“I assure you, sir, not only do I air the pages of these books, but I actually read them, one after another, over and over again, year after year. I believe it is the act of reading, not the air, that keeps the yellow out.”

The man was small, but his voice and bearing were not. He looked directly at Manjiro and began to recite:

“That's Shakespeare,” he said. “Isn't it beautiful? It's meaning comes clearer if you read it more than once or twice.”

Manjiro was so taken by the words that he might have stayed, turning back to Shakespeare to read for a while, had he not seen Tsune again, this time at the book room door. “My husband we must go now,” she said. Her eyes flashed at him, dimming the book attendant's quote.

It only took another minute for the attendant to stamp Manjiro's papers, and when he reentered the larger room the herb man was in its most distant corner and Tsune was gone. Seeing him standing there so filled Manjiro with fury at how he had used the woman he loved, that his right hand actually touched the shaft of his sword. He would teach the man a lesson he would not soon forget! Never in his life had he known civil servants to be so bold!

But behind his anger Manjiro understood that no one was less likely than Tsune to act as someone's pawn, that far from having been used, it was she who had engineered everything, carefully and well. He might have drawn his sword anyway, or cut the man with words, at least, had that single sheet of paper not slipped out of his kimono sleeve and scratched his arm. He bolted from the library then with such quickness that the cold morning sun hurt his eyes.

“Ah!” he said. “Ouch! It is bright!”

She was sitting in a partially opened palanquin, its bearers below her on the ground. The other palanquin, the one Manjiro had come in, was gone. She told him to get in, and when he was beside her in the crowded space, the soft material of her kimono touching him, she lowered the palanquin's side panels. Such closeness unbalanced Manjiro more than the sharp-edged sun, but he ordered himself to be calm, determined not to push up against her, as, through that surrogate table, those abhorrent custodians had done.

NEITHER OF THEM
spoke again until they were halfway across Edo and began to hear the bearers' efforts as they ascended a hill.

“But where are we going?” asked Manjiro. “Have you not instructed them to take us home?”

“I have told them to bring us here as a precaution,” said Tsune, leaning over to turn the side panel nearest Manjiro up again. “If you have discovered that Lord Abe's activities are suspect, then you might also decide that you need to inform another powerful lord. And if not, then I brought you here because I wanted to show you Lord Tokugawa's beautiful forest and hunting lodge. They are quite exquisite. The lodge is modeled after Nijo Castle in Kyoto, you know, the famous one with the chirping floors.”

Lord Tokugawa's hunting lodge? How strange that they should come here instead of home, to bring the news of what they had found to Einosuke. Was he also in trouble with Lord Tokugawa, Manjiro wondered again, for the same reasons he had been in trouble with his father? And was Tsune therefore bringing him here to save their chances of marriage? Manjiro sighed. Was it due to strength or weakness that he could not decide whether or not Tsune had gone too far?

“Are you carrying any coins,” she asked him, when they stepped out into a dimmer daylight than the one outside the library, “or shall I fetch some inside?”

Manjiro found a few coppers for the exhausted palanquin men, who had fallen down around them on the ground, and when he returned his purse to his sash the stolen paper touched his arm again. He had no intention of showing it to Lord Tokugawa—on the point of Lord Abe's activities he was sure that Tsune was wrong—but he revealed the paper anyway, smoothing it against his chest.

“I found this,” he told her quietly. “I took it from a book in the library.”

He had not read the paper yet, and in his mind's eye he saw Tsune sitting beside him, faces touching while they puzzled it out.

“What could you have been thinking?” she said. “Surely you didn't cut it?”

She had turned him up the path to the lodge, but when Manjiro handed her the paper she turned him again, down toward a teahouse at the center of a bamboo grove. She lifted her head from the paper long enough to order tea from the attendant at the door, but even after they entered the building, which had the words “Pavilion of Timelessness” cut onto a sign above its arch, she studied the paper for a long time.

“I don't understand this very well,” she finally said.

“I found it tucked inside what I think was Lord Abe's volume,” Manjiro said. “Someone had copied it and left it there. It marked an identically worded page.”

“Read it to me,” Tsune ordered. “It will be clearer, maybe, if you say the words out loud.”

So while the tearoom girl poured tea, Manjiro took the paper back and leaned away from Tsune toward the light.

Though he was only half done, Manjiro stopped. It was no doubt philosophy, for he recognized, in it, some of his tutor's argumentative tone, but who could think such a thing, what breed of man would subscribe to such beliefs? If this was American philosophy then maybe he and the others on his side had been wrong about wanting to engage them.

“Does it seem correct to you,” asked Tsune, “or does it seem wrong? And whose thinking does this document represent? Is it the belief of the outside world that a man must pretend to honor but not of necessity have it? Do I understand it correcdy or not?”

If Manjiro had learned anything in his years of study with his tutor it was that philosophy was difficult. His tutor would often trap him, sometimes even arguing the opposite of what he believed in order to force Manjiro into thinking well. So he said, “Let me read the rest before we decide.” He took a sip of tea, cleared his throat, and read on:

When he finished Manjiro sat there for a long time, the paper on the table next to his hand.

“I am glad we came here instead of returning to Einosuke's house,” Tsune finally said. “You will, of course, decide for yourself, Manjiro-san, but I think we have no choice now but to share your strange discovery with Lord Tokugawa.”