Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show (29 page)

Outside the workshop, when they finally left poor Ned alone with Denzaimon, Lord Okubo walked away from the group, in order to relieve himself in the stream at the back of the building. He stood at its edge, and when he undid his clothing he could not help noticing that his own slight wounds, those minor cuts and scratches he had recently made in his abdomen, were already healing well. That was the nature of things, he supposed, they would often get better if you left them alone. And though he didn't believe that Ned would grow another nose, he wished now that they'd been satisfied with the precautions they had taken in the stables, with guarding against infection and clearing those two incredible blow holes. As he tied up his pants again, he even had the thought that incense, after all, probably provided a greater overall social good than prosthetics. If one had to make such a choice.

In front of the workshop Tsune and Manjiro were standing together with their fingers touching while Keiko and Ichiro strolled and chatted timidly nearby, when Fumiko's exhausted runner arrived in the village. He called out Lord Okubo's name first, and then Manjiro's. Lord Okubo had just come to join the others, so it was Manjiro who took the message and opened it, somehow thinking it would be further evidence of a mending, perhaps a word of kindness from Einosuke.

The note was on a single sheet of paper and crumpled in a way that reminded both Manjiro and Tsune, who continued to touch his arm as he read it, of that other sheet of paper, the one with Lord Abe's offending paragraphs on it. Fumiko's hand wasn't elegant like Lord Abe's, her characters, in fact, had so much shock in them that they shook and wandered down the page, but their message was more powerful than anyone's philosophy.

“Einosuke monstrously killed. Come back to the castle with your swords out!”

Manjiro moaned and his knees weakened, and Tsune saw her sister's face quite clearly, her calligraphy brush held out in front of her like a dagger. She grasped Manjiro's arm, to keep them both from falling, but when a curious Keiko came over to read what had arrived Tsune regained herself enough to push her roughly back again, surprising her niece.

“Auntie, my goodness,” said Keiko, embarrassed and glancing at Ichiro. She considered herself an adult now, and would not be treated like Masako.

It was only when Tsune cried out, “Oh evil world, leave this child alone!” that Kyuzo, who had been standing a few yards off watching both the young couples, came forward and took the paper from Manjiro and read its message aloud. “Einosuke monstrously murdered. Come back to the castle with your swords out.”

He read so quietly that it took a second for Keiko's irritation to freeze on her face, and shatter and fall.

Lord Okubo took the note from Kyuzo and
folded
it and slipped it into his kimono until its sharp corners poked against his healing abdomen.

“Prepare our horses,” he told Kyuzo. “We will go back to the castle, but will keep our swords sheathed for a while.”

Kyuzo bowed and when he moved to follow the old lord's order he pulled Ichiro with him, not because he needed help, but lest the younger man make the mistake of trying to approach Keiko.

Lord Okubo himself was chilled by the news of Einosuke's death, but otherwise oddly distant from it, though at the same time he knew that when the pain finally did arrive it would be his constant companion for the rest of his life. He began doing calculations, trying to remember how long it had been since he'd raised a sword in anger, while Manjiro knelt in front of him, piteously crying, blaming himself. When Lord Okubo put a hand on his head, however, it was not so much to console Manjiro as to steady himself, to keep from joining his sole remaining son on the ground.

“Not yet, not yet,” said a voice within him. “Now is the time to act.”

“Come,” he told the others. “We mustn't leave Fumiko alone.”

When the horses were assembled the men left quickly, and when the workshop doors opened a short time later, and Denzaimon and Ned came out, they were greeted only by a cloud of dust and a grieving aunt standing beside a grieving daughter, and a bunch of bearers, ready to take them off again in the waiting palanquins and sedan chairs.

THE NOSE DENZAIMON
had made for Ned came more from the carver's imagination than from any of the measurements he had taken. Still, it was a fine nose, the length of it derived from his sense of Americans, its shape from one of the most beloved Kabuki characters of the era. He would continue his work on a more precise product; he saw no reason, in fact, why Ned shouldn't have several more noses at his disposal, for use on various occasions. But for now there had only been time to make this one, from selected scraps of quality Japanese cypress, and glue it to the end of a long stick.

The nose was not designed to touch Ned's face. He was to peer from behind it delicately, which he did now for those who awaited him, like a court lady might from behind a fan.

37
.
Irony Provides Relief

“TAKE A LETTER
,” said Lord Okubo, in a loud voice.

His scribe was surprised for it was five o'clock the following morning and Lord Okubo himself had awakened him. But he dressed quickly and brought his brushes to the castle office, where he hurriedly ground his inkstones. Manjiro was there, too, waiting with his head bowed, but Lord Okubo only spoke to him to ask, “Do you still have those paragraphs you told me about, the ones which encourage deceit, the ones Lord Abe so stealthily copied down?”

The paragraphs had been pestering Manjiro, certain words and phrases from them running through his mind ever since the arrival of Fumiko's note in the village, so he was surprised.

“Tsune had them last, I think,” he said, but he really had no idea where the copied page had gone.

The scribe had his brush ready, with clean paper on the table before him, but Lord Okubo kept his eyes on Manjiro. He knew his son was beset with the idea of killing himself, that were he to speak harshly to him now he might leave the room and pitch himself from the roof of the castle. He knew it and was of two minds; first understanding that he had but one remaining son in this world, and should do what he could to keep him alive, and second that they both ought to do it, that he really should take Manjiro into that secret room, and show him its pair of waiting knives.

Lord Okubo turned to face the castle wall, not speaking for some minutes, and when he turned back again he looked only at the scribe. “This letter is addressed to Lord Abe's erstwhile aide, Ueno,” he said. “Stop me if I go too quickly, we have to get it right.”

He walked to the room's window and looked out at the dark forest, suddenly remembering Masako's marsh and the odd fact that, since he'd ordered its gates repaired a year ago, he had not been there to inspect them. He started dictating without a salutation:

“I believe that things have gone too far concerning the Americans,” he said. “I also believe that no one, not Lord Abe in the beginning, nor any of the members of the Great Council, not your worthy self, nor even my pitiable and recalcitrant son, Manjiro, could have foreseen how far they would go. Indeed, if anyone should have done so it was I…”

He paused when he heard Manjiro's breath catch behind him, but continued without looking around.

“Though my mistakes weigh heavily on my heart, however, confessing them is not the purpose of this letter. Its purpose, rather, is to propose that we work toward the return of the Americans to their ships without further embarrassment to anyone. The government needs that to happen, I do not, that is the truth of the matter as it stands now.

“Therefore I will be traveling to Shimoda soon, where I will deliver the Americans to some representative of the realm, just as you will, at that same instant, deliver to me my eldest son's severed head, as well as the man or men who murdered him.”

Lord Okubo stopped again, shocked at the sound of his own voice. He asked the scribe to read back what he had written. Except for the words “your worthy self” in the first paragraph, however, he thought the whole thing read well enough. He had the scribe remove those words and went on:

“I propose we meet four days hence and a day or two after Commodore Perry's arrival in that rainy and overburdened town. I did not choose Shimoda because of the American arrival, but because it is close and I am too overburdened with grief and rage not to take ease where I can find it.”

When he stopped this second time Lord Okubo was wounded anew by the visions his words brought into focus. He drank some cold tea and stared at the scribe but could not go on. Rather, he saw Einosuke as a young boy leaning over his books in the castle; as a young and serious man, awaiting his father in the Great Council corridor. He had been strong when receiving the heinous news, but to actually speak the words, to put it all down on paper—this was more than the old lord could bear.

As the silence extended, from one minute to three and then longer, and as the first dead streaks of dawn came up through the rain, it was Manjiro, therefore, not Lord Okubo, who braved his own unending sorrow, cleared his throat, and spoke a few lines to finish the letter:

“We can no longer be held responsible for the safety of the two Americans, if Einosuke's murderers, as well as his missing part, are not delivered to us,” he said. “The details of everything can be worked out later, by a personal meeting if necessary, but preferably by runner.”

Manjiro closed the letter with a high degree of formality, then waited until his father came back to himself, found his seal on the scribe's table, and applied it to the paper.

So it was that while once Lord Abe threatened the foreigners' lives, now it was they who were doing it, this pitiable father and son. Oddly, it was that very irony that seemed to provide some measure of relief, giving both men the will to go and rest for a few hours; to agree without speaking about it that, for these next few days at least, they would put their despair aside, stay alive in the world, and concentrate on that sweetest of all man's follies: Revenge.

38
.
A Fetish without Many Followers

THE FISH SELLER'S SON
back in Edo had had a missing thumb. That was why O-bata had been drawn to him.

Before his accident if O-bata had thought of him at all it was as a gross kind of fellow, overly leering and loud, but when she saw him after his accident he was quiet, sitting on a stool in front of his father's empty stall.

“What's the matter with you?” she had asked him. “Are you closed?”

He looked up and slowly pulled the hand with the missing thumb into the air between them. His thumb was gone, not just to its first or second joint, but all the way to his wrist, and it still bore the craggy redness of something sore. He was in a foul mood, lonely and depressed, and meant to send O-bata running by showing her his scars. But instead of being repulsed, she was moved to a surprising sympathy by his misfortune. She knew it was abnormal, a fetish without many followers, but a fair amount of ardor rose within her as soon as she saw it.

And when she felt that ardor rise again, upon being assigned the job of caring for the two Americans, while the family was embroiled in its tragedy, she did not deny it. Rather, as she watched Ned's new wooden nose sway in front of her one evening—Ace had gone for a walk in the woods, working out his own sense of how he ought to behave from then on—she let him see her in her bath
yukata
, her body still wet and her hair undone. Her nipples showed right through the fabric, as if she didn't have a fabric on. She spoke to him, saying, “Everyone's sad. My mistress and her daughters will never be the same again, and the baby will never know his father. Don't you think there is too much misfortune in this world of ours?”

“It don't hurt a bit,” said Ned. “As I was tryin' to tell Mangy before all this new bad stuff happened, I keep waitin' for the pain, but it just won't come.”

He took one hand, off the stick to which his new nose was glued and pointed behind it, at the spot O-bata was drawn to, and when she came over to touch his ruined face he let his prosthesis fall.

“What's this?” he asked. “Some newfangled kind of Japanese hospitality?”

O-bata took him into her room and closed the door. “I like my men wounded,” she said. “Don't ask me why.”

She smiled, for in truth she had hardly ever spoken to a man before, let alone uttered anything so provocative. But she seemed to know that with Ned she could say whatever she pleased because he didn't understand. Unlike Fumiko with Ace, she had no sense of intuition, not much sense that they understood each other, at all. She only knew that Ned was someone who would let her talk. Maybe that's what she'd been waiting for.

“Hana,” she
told him, rubbing the nose on the end of his stick.
“Hana
is what you don't have anymore.”

“Angelface,” said Ned. “I forget the word for ‘angel,' but face is
‘cow
.' You got the
‘cow' of
an angel, just like my old wife.”

And with that, though a thick cloud of mourning filled all the other rooms of the castle, there was a small amount of light in the maids' quarters, a pinprick for Ned, a shaft for O-bata.

Ace understood and stayed away from them, walking and thinking about Fumiko.

He felt an abiding sympathy for Ned, who, he remembered, had only come ashore to please him, while he, Ace, had known in his bones that everything he'd done so far had led him here, that his life's true purpose resided on these shores.

He touched his face where Fumiko had touched it, and even closed his eyes, but try as he might he could not recapture the look she had had when she'd left him, and had no idea what she felt about things now that her husband was dead.

He thought about it and thought about it, and walked so quietly through the forest that the frogs didn't stop singing when he arrived at the marsh.