Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show (13 page)

But while Keiki seemed to have risen from his futon as a beaming sun rises in the sky, all Lord Tokugawa could manage was a nod and a groan. His intelligence was a good deal sharper than his son's, but he couldn't easily find it so early in the day.

Manjiro, nervous and solemn, bowed when Tsune introduced him, pulling the sheet of paper from his sleeve even before he sat down. To meet this great lord in such a private way was as fine an honor as being among the first to visit the American fleet, but the lord seemed only peeved, his eyes still half closed. Manjiro had no idea of the exact time, but he knew that in his life he had never slept so late. This, plus that old warrior Kyuzo's strange attitude toward him, made him try to remember what he was doing there in the first place. His own father, though he admired Lord Tokugawa, had always been firmly pledged to the Shogun, and thus to the Great Council and Lord Abe. What had made Manjiro forget it for a while was the shock of reading the horrible paragraphs with Tsune.

He was on the point of picking up his paper again and making his apologies, when Lord Tokugawa spoke for the first time. “What's that?” he asked. “What do you have there, young man?”

“That is the reason we are troubling you like this at the crack of dawn,” said Tsune, her buoyancy regained. “That is the fly in the ointment, the chink in someone's armor that you have searched for for so long.”

“It doesn't look like a chink,” said Keiki, but his humor was ill timed.

“Don't speak in riddles. Give it here,” said Lord Tokugawa.

Manjiro wanted to take a moment to explain, but all he could do was push the paper across the table. Lord Tokugawa read it and handed it to Keiki. “It's Lord Abe's handwriting,” he said. “After all these years of sparring with the man I know that much, but what has he written? Is it a novel? I hope not, I don't like it when politicians are of two minds.”

Lord Tokugawa was looking at Manjiro, but this was Tsune's domain, and Manjiro was grateful when she spoke, telling the story of what had happened in the Barbarian Book Room, yet careful not to violate her promise to Einosuke.

“I don't trust it very much,” said Keiki. “Was Lord Abe really this careless? Are you saying that he went to the trouble of copying a page from a banned book and then left it there for you to find?”

It had at first seemed unlikely to Manjiro, too, but upon reading the paper he had noticed that the brushstrokes on some of the characters were sloppy, one or two of them entirely wrong.

“I think this was a kind of draft,” he said. “I think he's in possession of another copy, one with more perfection in the writing.”

Lord Tokugawa got to his knees, looming over them. “It is late in the game since the treaty is already signed, but do you think Lord Abe intends to try to use this piece of thinking against the Americans in some way? Do you think that's what was behind his stupid invitation, what he was trying to tell your father and me in the treaty house the other night?”

Manjiro was perplexed. He didn't think anything, and he hadn't the slightest notion what Lord Abe's intentions might be. But while he was wondering how best to answer, Keiki posed a question of his own.

“In the old days if some lord were carrying out a plan against another, if the two lords were, let's say, on the brink of war, what would the second lord's reaction be if the first one were to capture a few of his musicians and refuse to let them go?”

Manjiro could not see how Keiki's question related to the paper, but he was glad to have an easy one to answer. Not only in the old days, but in these current days as well, it would be unlikely that the second lord would care. Musicians were expendable, and so, for that matter, were samurai warriors. Lord Tokugawa, however, seemed to see more relevance in his son's question than did Manjiro.

“Lord Abe's no fool,” he said. “Someone read it aloud. Let's try to better understand what we have here.”

Keiki was a good reader and was pleased to show off. He took the paper and sat up straight, trying to make the words sound ominous.

When he finished, his listeners were no closer to understanding the thing than they had been previously, no closer to seeing how Lord Abe might use it to his advantage.

“It's intriguing,” Lord Tokugawa finally said, “and it's quite like Lord Abe to find his poison in the medicine chest of his enemy. Someone say, in plainer words, the meaning of these paragraphs.”

“One must appear to be acting in the common good while using whatever means necessary to achieve one's goal,” Tsune said, but Lord Tokugawa ignored her. He had fixed his eyes on Manjiro, asking, “Where do you find the crux of the matter, young man?”

Manjiro didn't want to comment again, since he was remembering his father's loyalty to Lord Abe more clearly with every passing second, but he found himself answering anyway. “I think Lord Abe has not so much devised a plan as a frame of mind,” he said. “Previous to reading the book from which these paragraphs came, I think he felt that however loath he was to perform them, his dealings with the Americans had to be honorable. Now maybe he has changed his mind.”

Tsune and Keiki sat in silence but Lord Tokugawa was engaged. “Do you think he means harm to the musicians he so brashly decided to invite ashore?”

He was looking at Keiki, but all his son could do was shrug. “Maybe Lord Abe has not yet decided how to act and has invited them so that, when he finally does decide, he'll have someone to act upon.”

But Lord Tokugawa rapped his knuckles on the tabletop. “Come, Keiki, this is Lord Abe we are discussing, not some Confucian scholar! He's less philosophically minded than anyone I know.”

That sounded right to Manjiro, too, not only because Lord Tokugawa said so, but because Lord Abe's methods had proven it. Lord Abe was a strong leader precisely because of his predictability, precisely because the other lords knew he was someone who wasn't frivolous, someone they could count on.

All three men felt relieved, glad to properly pigeonhole Lord Abe again, until Tsune said, “If that's the case then why didn't he ask for the Great Council's approval?”

Lord Tokugawa looked at her meanly but she went on. “I am suggesting only that because you do not know what he is up to, rather than guess at it, you should meet with Lord Abe and ask him. After all, our two most powerful lords aren't enemies but allies who speak together
often.”

“But how am I to know he's up to anything but the desire to hear these minstrels sing?” asked Lord Tokugawa. “Am I to say that it is because you two have brought me this copied page?”

Manjiro and Tsune would have urged against that, but this time it was Keiki who spoke. “Yes, father, just so, only tell him it was delivered to you in confidence. And tell him you knew it was his because his calligraphy is among the finest in the land.”

Keiki was cheerful again, insisting it was the best course of action because, while it included only true statements, it would at the same time force Lord Abe either to lie or to tell Lord Tokugawa of his plan.

“Ah, yes,” said Tsune, touching Manjiro's fingers under the table, “don't you agree Manjiro-san? Doesn't Keiki's idea have the simple elegance of which you and I have so long been fond?”

She smiled, but could not help wishing for such simplicity in love.

13
.
Three Tulips in a Boat

IMMEDIATELY AFTER
returning home Tsune and Manjiro had to leave again. They knew perfectly well (said Masako) that they were expected to attend Keiko's dance recital, which had been scheduled for months, and was to begin in the entertainment district at four that afternoon. Everyone had waited at the house, but if not for the fact that Keiko's teacher, a retired geisha and dancer of the Fujima school, had already been told how many family members would attend, they would not have done so. Masako was adamant on her sister's behalf. “I'm no admirer of Keiko, but even I understand the meaning of family obligations,” she said.

Fumiko was angry, too. It was true that she was exhausted from the difficult family dynamics of having both Manjiro and Tsune with them at the same time, as well as from constantly having to think about this impending trip back to Odawara, but she would have been angry anyway. She could forgive anything in those she loved except thoughtlessness, and though thoughdessness had been an occasional visitor to Tsune since childhood, she was worried now to see it rubbing off on Manjiro. If he was dedicated to one member of her family over the others it was to Keiko, and this was Keiko's day!

Keiko herself tried not to show her disappointment, but she didn't succeed very well, and once Lord Okubo saw the face of worry through her dance makeup, even he grumbled. Only Einosuke, who had waited all day to hear what had happened at the Barbarian Book Library, was easy on his brother and sister-in-law.

“You know these Edo crowds,” he told the others. “Sometimes it is hard to be on time.”

Four o'clock was the last hour that it was possible to schedule recitals in the entertainment district, for by six the geisha houses opened to their nighttime customers and the teaching geisha, who were almost always retired, had to be out of sight. It was a common belief among working geisha and their
maiko
apprentices that men did not like to see old faces among the younger ones any more than they liked viewing cherry blossoms the week after the first flush of beauty had spread across the trees. It was too reminiscent of life's brevity, of the walker's shadow passing by him as the sun sets on his walk.

“I wanted to be here to watch the smaller children dance, too,” Masako said, when they all stepped out of their palanquins in front of a house called “The Thousand Cranes.” She had ridden across Edo with her Aunt Tsune and Keiko, and had lost most of her anger during the ride, but it came back now. The Thousand Cranes sat on the edge of the Sumida River where it wound through Asakusa. It was a part of town she rarely got to see, and the famous street, lined as it was with closed building fronts and mysterious mauve walls, would have supplied her with daydreams for months had she been allowed to walk along it at leisure, as she surely would have had they arrived on time. Even now her eyes were wide as they took in the building and the river behind it and the other guests who milled about in fine kimonos.

“Come,” said Tsune, touching Masako but speaking to Keiko, “there is still almost an hour remaining, is there not, before you perform? Let's go in and watch the others, see if we can spot their mistakes.”

The schedule was such that during the early morning hours the beginners had performed, then from after lunch the professionals who had studied with the teacher and come back to honor her. In the late afternoon the teacher herself was to dance with an ex-student who was now a famous Kabuki actor, and the final dance was to be by a select group of her best students, with the seventeen-year-old Keiko as the principal dancer.

When Fumiko and O-bata, who held onto the squirming Junichiro, stepped from the second palanquin, the five of them hurried into the geisha house without waiting for the men, who, at the time the women had left the house, had still not found palanquins.

“If anybody misses my dance I will never forgive them,” Keiko said, but when she heard the music she followed the others inside.

“Listen, my dear,” said her mother, “I can hear the summer rain in the
shamisen
. Can't you hear it, too? Can't you, Masako?”

Because the partitions had been removed to make the room large, they were easily able to join the audience. Keiko's teacher, in a pure white kimono, had just finished her individual dance. Keiko and Masako and Fumiko feigned disappointment at having missed it, but all three had seen it enough in practice and were secretly glad. When the teacher looked their way Fumiko bowed and then sat with her sister and younger daughter while Keiko hurried off to join the other students, all of them sitting together across the room. O-bata had stayed at the back with the baby, standing among a scrubby forest of maids.

The recital was well attended, with most of the children from the morning still there, no doubt because their mothers and fathers wanted to see the famous Kabuki actor, Morita Kan'ya, who was scheduled to dance with the teacher next but had not arrived. As the musicians continued their interlude the teacher suddenly left her spot in the middle of everything, threading the same careful path the five family members had just found when coming into the place. “I hear a palanquin,” she said, as she passed Fumiko. “Morita's lateness can only be forgiven if it is he who is inside.”

It was a family joke that when Keiko's teacher had been young enough to work as a real geisha even Lord Okubo had been a boy, and now, as Fumiko followed her back out of the building, to apologize for their own lateness, it was not the famous Kabuki actor, but that very same Lord Okubo, who stepped with his sons from the three arriving palanquins.

“We haven't missed it,” he announced, “or if we have surely you can do it again.”

“Do you know the difference between an actor and a dancer?” the old teacher asked him in a wretched voice. Lord Okubo said he did not, and when Fumiko said that the answer must be that an actor retains the vanity necessary to forget a promised appointment, the teacher bowed her head. “That is correct. He was my student as a boy some forty years ago. When dance was his first love there was no vanity in him, but now…” She sighed. “To dance with him today would have been the highlight of my season.”

Fumiko believed it was a shame, too, but anger over the earlier lateness of her sister and brother-in-law had used up her store of energy for such things. The teacher might have been forgotten by the famous actor, but she would make it her job to see that Keiko was not forgotten by this teacher in turn. After all, with most of them leaving for Odawara shortly and with everything else in constant turmoil, who knew when her eldest daughter would return to such a study?