Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show (28 page)

Inside the castle, still quite stunned from her moment alone with Ace, Fumiko was directing the cleaners on the second floor when she heard the arrival commotion. Her first thought, oddly enough, was that maybe Ueno had come, in hopes of cutting his losses, and she should send a runner for Einosuke. Her second thought was to find Masako, so the girl wouldn't climb upon the gate, look down at the horrible man, and get in everyone's way.

Fumiko came downstairs in a hurry, but there were no guards at the door, and no Masako in any of the first floor rooms where she most often liked to play. From the top of the outside stone stairway she could normally see the gate well, but so many people had run over there now that she could tell only that the gate was open and that a party of riders had come inside. She didn't like that. She did not want strangers given access to the castle when none of the men was at home, so though she was dressed for work and not for greetings, she went across the intervening ground to investigate. Surely it wasn't Ueno; only some interloper, some quasi-aristocrat, smoothly talking his way inside.

Masako had twice been to her marsh that day, both before and after her mother and Ace, but when the ruckus began she was close to the gate, standing outside one of the castle's side doors with Junichiro, trying to make him do his walking trick over and over. She waited a moment, sure, at first, that what she was doing was more interesting than whatever else might be going on, but when others ran past her she finally picked her brother up and hurried after them, coming into the rear of the crowd just at the time her mother got there.

“Good,” said Fumiko, “stay beside me. I'm not putting up with nonsense from anyone.”

She looked toward the side of the castle for Ace, but the stool he had formerly sat upon was empty. Had he gone to his room to think things over, then, or followed that drifting bit of sunlight, around to the casdtle's back? She wondered what he was thinking, and wanted to see his face.

There was so much noise, were so many shrieks and unwieldy voices, that Fumiko thought a fight had broken out, that maybe, after all, the guards were trying to do their jobs. Many of those in the crowd were turning now to look at her, but Fumiko misread their expressions, thinking they were asking her to settle the argument.

“Let me through, then,” she said. “We can't have this. When the masters are gone we want this gate closed, is that so hard to understand?” She could hear the curtness in her voice but didn't care.

“We can't have this,” Masako told Junichiro.

The crowd held for a moment, then parted despite itself. Fumiko could see the top of the gate now, the place where the guards usually stood, but there were no guards there to yell at. The first sense she had that she was wrong about what was happening did not come until Masako pulled her back a little and told her so.

“Someone's injured, Mama,” she said. “I can see his feet, he's slumped across a horse.”

From her lower position Masako could indeed see two feet wrapped together, but little more than that. She wasn't as interested in seeing someone who was already hurt as she would have been in watching an actual fight, but Fumiko's reaction was just the opposite. What injured person could force the gates of Odawara Castle so easily open? She imagined again that it might be Ueno, humbled first by Lord Abe's demise and again by some crippling road accident. “Let me through,” she said. “Stand aside.”

But the crowd didn't want to part and did so only stubbornly. She saw the horse's muzzle first, and then those tied-together feet, and then a hand flung back against the nearest leg as if it were trying to scratch something. That hand, she suddenly knew, did not belong to Ueno.

“Go back, my dear,” she told her daughter. “Take your brother and get out of here right now. Go back inside the castle and close the door.”

“Why?” asked Masako, but her mother said, “Don't ask questions. Go to our private quarters. Do so quickly and do not turn around.”

Fumiko could hear herself as if from a distance. She knew she had found the proper tone of voice to make Masako obey, but she did not know how long she could maintain it. Masako might go only partway back and then turn to ask another question, and if that happened Fumiko didn't think she could find the power, again, to make her daughter keep going. For the moment, however, she only stood there, her back toward the horse.

“Come on, baby brother,” Masako said, “if we're not wanted here let's go practice our walking somewhere else.”

Fumiko could feel the crowd's silence, a breathless kind of thing that would go on forever if she didn't turn around. But she commanded herself to wait until Masako was at the base of the stairs, until she had carried her brother up those stairs and stepped inside the castle and softly closed the door. And when she finally did turn around it was only through divining a strength that she had always known she had, but had never used before.

“Get back,” she said calmly. “Stand back away from there now.”

The crowd moved like her daughter had, heads down and grudgingly. Only the guard who led the horse stayed close to her. She looked at that hand again and then stepped up to touch it, actually reaching under it to draw her fingernails across its palm. That the hand was cold did not surprise her, but she had to close her eyes in order to release it, and find the courage to walk around to the other side of the horse. She didn't let herself imagine anything, not what had happened, not whether he had slipped and fallen on the boulder or whether the boulder had plunged from its net and crushed his skull. She did not let herself imagine the look in Einosuke's eyes.

The crowd had stepped out to form a crescent, its back to the castle, so when Fumiko went around to face the end of the world as she knew it, she was alone. At first, however, she could not make out what she saw, could not understand the sight before her. She even felt relief, for a second, as if there had been some hideous mistake. It was odd because even as she fell, even as she clutched the horse's riggings, to keep herself from going all the way down, the thought stayed with her that if this was not Einosuke, then the bile in her mouth, her locked-up jaw, and the streaming flow of her saliva were all unnecessary, all wrong. She screamed but stopped the sound immediately and whipped her head sideways so that an arc of her saliva wet the horse and laced her husband's clothing, like Junichiro's had the chocolate not so very long ago. She reached out and pulled Einosuke's short sword from his belt and pressed it against the soft flesh under her chin and felt the tip go in and would have driven it all the way home had not the horse jumped, in its own renewed terror, turning her and letting her see Masako's headlong rush back down the castle stairs, screaming bloody murder with Junichiro in her arms.

“MOTHER!”

Fumiko dropped the blade and ran toward her running daughter, both of them screaming now. Her arms tore her
obi
off and pulled at the sides of her kimono, flinging them out, as if trying to make wings of them, as if trying to turn her kimono into a cape with which she could block her daughter's view of this absolute horror. She felt the wind of her running and saw the ground surge upward and the castle swirl above her and crash down upon them both.

“AIAIAI!”

Mother and daughter came together with such force that Junichiro popped out of Masako's grasp and tottered off by himself, going toward his father and the horse and the crowd. The laborers fell on their faces again, beating the ground around them with fists like hail, and the guards marched around. “Revenge!” they screamed. “War against the enemies of Odawara!”

Those words moved everyone else, but it was the vision of Junichiro staring at the covered neck of his dead and headless father that made Fumiko jump up again, finding herself. She ran back and scooped him up like an eagle might a kitten and clutched him to her and spun around, drops of blood from her own wounded chin surprising and quieting him by spilling into his mouth. And when she got to Masako again she picked her up too, tucked her under her other arm and staggered off with both her children, raging madly back toward the castle.

It was the end of the world as she knew it, it was true, but as soon as the door closed behind them Fumiko knelt and looked at Masako. “Go and wash,” she said. “And change your clothes and find someone to take your brother. Where is O-bata? If you see her send her to me. And tell the guards to keep the American away. We cannot see him now.”

She hardly knew what she was saying and knew less what might await her in the weeks and months to come, but her intention, as soon as she was alone, was to write a note to Lord Okubo, calling him home. When O-bata came she would send her for a runner, and then she would have Einosuke brought inside the castle and kneel beside him, in a vigil that would last until her own life left her body, and all thoughts save those of him were once and forever washed away.

She stood and started walking and was surprised when her movement was encumbered by Masako, who had not done anything she'd been told to do but clung to her mother, her mouth wide and silent, tears flowing like rivers from her eyes.

So Fumiko knelt again then, and held her daughter, until so much darkness descended that they couldn't see each other. No one interrupted them, no one came from the upper floors of the castle or from outside.

And though they surely wanted to, no one asked what should be done with the waiting corpse of their husband and father, of Lord Okubo's eldest son and heir, of Einosuke, Manjiro's difficult and beloved older brother.

35
.
Is It Easier to Go or Be Left Behind?

THE NOTE WAS ON
a single sheet of crumpled paper. Fumiko's calligraphy wasn't elegant like Lord Abe's. It had, in fact, so much shock in it that her characters ran down the page like words escaping a fire.

She sent the note by runner, after all, and while she waited she tried to think of nothing save its progress, and then, when she felt sure it was in Lord Okubo's hands, she occupied her mind by trying to decide whether it was better to give tragic news or to receive it, whether the sharper pain involved opening such a note, or if the purest agony resided in writing the words down in the first place.

As she thought about it she also watched Masako, who had taken a sleeping potion and lay at her feet, like the corpse of her father, which had finally been brought into the castle and resided in the next room, the one in which they had first heard news of Manjiro from Tsune. Fumiko had bathed and insisted that Masako bathe, too, and now, like two of death's brides, they were dressed in fresh kimono.

There happened to be a collection of ancient battle implements at the far side of the room where Einosuke rested, an entire shelf of helmets and lances and swords. Fumiko's intention had been, when earlier she went into that room alone, to place one of the helmets where her husband's head had been, and then to kneel and speak her farewells through its faceplate, asking his forgiveness for her recent betrayal. But when she got close enough to do it, she saw that her husband had been laid out well, his hands folded across his middle, his bare feet side by side. So instead of kneeling at the top of his body, she was drawn to his hands again, as she had been outside. There, on the one closest to her, she could see the odd angle that his little finger always seemed to want to take, caused by a childhood injury, and there, all across that same hand's back, stood a random line of emerging liver spots, which Einosuke used to insist represented the arguments and troubles he had had, over the years, with Manjiro. There was no facility in these hands, nothing of the living one that scorched her memory now, with its fine and foreign dexterity.

When she touched his nearest forearm it was warmer than she thought it would be, and when she closed her eyes and walked her fingers along his lower body she could feel his presence growing. His legs seemed solid to her, not stiff but muscular, and when she bent to kiss his feet the room became infused with the distinct and pleasant odor of flowers.

Fumiko was meditating, praying, searching for the strength to move up again, to properly fix that helmet at the top of her husband's shoulders, when she felt herself transported out of this death room and placed before the open
shoji
above their newly built garden room, back in their house in Edo. The garden was littered with leaves from their neighbor's tree and Einosuke was before her, bending and standing, bending and standing, throwing the leaves back over the wall.

“It would have been an unending battle,” he said.

He showed her wet leaves but she knew he was speaking of everything in life. All that had gone between them, all they had left unsaid.

“Is it easier to go or to be left behind?” she asked her husband.

“It is easier to go, of course,” he said. “That's what I have always done, is it not, put the greater part of the burden on you? I was lucky to have had such good children, such a fine and understanding wife.”

“I have not understood much,” Fumiko admitted. “All this newness, all these recent alterations. I should not have been born on time's cusp like this, but would have better done my duty had I lived a century ago, when our country was insulated. Is that not true for both of us?”

It wasn't nearly so true for Fumiko as it had been for Einosuke, but he nodded, agreeing, taking his way of seeing things from her one last time.

That was all. He seemed about to speak again, but the clarity of her vision faded and when she opened her eyes she was back in his death room, everything but the scent of flowers gone.

So she closed her eyes again and let the flowers guide her.

She put the helmet where her husband's head had been and went to sit beside her sleeping daughter.

36
.
Incense or Prosthetics

AT HIS WORKSHOP
, which was housed in an old incense factory at the edge of another of the Izu Peninsula's ubiquitous streams, Denzaimon the prosthetics artisan had been showing examples of his work to Lord Okubo's assembled entourage. He talked for a while about its intricacies and then opened dozens of boxes and drawers, exposing a series of prototypes. In one there were ears, larger than life but so perfectly rendered that light showed through their delicate membranes, and in another there were feet, this time done in miniature, as if for Chinese women or children. He opened a third box to show them hands, with various lengths of blanched-wood forearms, and in others they saw teeth and eyes, fingers and toes. He found examples from everywhere and put them on the table, as if laying out an abstract human form. But there were no noses. He had carved only two in his life and they were sniffing out the world—who knew where?—on living human faces.