Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show (35 page)

There was a pause, a fleeting sense of things reordered, before, though her pull remained slight, he came to her as if it were insistent. She used her free arm, first to brace herself against the tatami, then to encircle his neck, thus, as she had always been able to do with words, both resisting him and pulling him down upon her at the same time.

Manjiro thought to protest as entirely too unbearable that his heart's greatest wish should be granted only now, when the last bits of sand leaked from his hourglass, and he did try to rise above it for a moment, like a phoenix from the ashes. But when he opened his mouth to speak, all such thoughts were gone, leaving only the singular idea that there was no sight more beautiful on this failing earth than that of Tsune's legs, bent at the knees and turning darkness into light, coming through the seams of her kimono and slowly parting.

Sex and grief! Oh, it was strange! What could they possibly have in common?

LIKE A PHOENIX
from the ashes? He had learned the myth from his tutor, but was he capable of such a foreign leaning on this, the last day of his life?

She was both the most modern, the freest of women, and at the same time a throwback to another era, to the days of Prince Genji, when courtiers visited noblewomen at night or delivered, through diaphanous curtains, poems inscribed upon fans.

Such were the lines that Manjiro remembered, the lines that seemed to capture Tsune for him as he sat watching her sleep, some ninety minutes later. He had dressed again and was about to leave to find Keiki. He had continued his fast from food, at least, and had ordered his swords resharpened. He'd intended to spend these last few hours before Ueno's arrival in seclusion and meditation, but instead all he truly wanted to do was sit where he was and watch Tsune. He reached out to pull her blanket into place, a universal gesture, but even if he survived this night he was too weak a man, he finally knew, to ever survive a life with Tsune as his wife. That it was she who had fueled his dreams when his studies forged a path through Western thought, he had always considered ironic, but now he understood that she could find her way in uncharted lands far better than he, that she might one day lie like this, sated and sleeping beside a Shogun, or even a conqueror, who in turn would sit in the muddle of his manliness, unaware that he was the one who had been unalterably conquered.

Manjiro wanted to extract himself, to expel her with a great loud sigh, reciting the names of the great men from whom he had learned—Tu Fu, Murasaki, Bash, Shakespeare, Goethe, even Niccolò—but none could find a seat at the center of his thoughts so long as Tsune's bare shoulder refused the enticement of her covers.

He could laugh at himself, for this one moment free of that inevitable tide-pull, but he could not perform the simple act of going to speak with Keiki, without also knowing that if blood still pumped through his veins by morning, it would pump for Tsune alone.

44
.
Life Is Short. Fall in Love

THOUGH SHE'D BEEN SITTING
at the edge of a first floor garden room, absently watching the arrival of Keiki and Kyuzo and the young man whose eyes rarely left Keiko—and watching, also, her father-in-law's eccentric battle with the crows—as darkness descended upon the inn Fumiko suddenly stood and shook herself out of her listlessness, and went out into the hallway, to try and find relief by giving away little bits of Einosuke, a few of his personal belongings.

The floorboards felt good beneath her feet, smooth, like the passage of her life had been before the American arrival had sent them all to hell. He was down the hall from her now, that man whose face she had touched, whose cheek she had found herself touching at the instant of her good and loyal husband's beheading. Einosuke had been fighting for his life, with her and their children no doubt at the center of his thoughts, while she had allowed herself to loiter in some childhood fantasy, loaning her heart out to the strangest kind of stranger. And she would have pursued it, too! She would have continued! Had she not told him
we must be extra circumspect from now on?
Had she really spoken such words, or had she only thought them? She wondered if he knew what turmoil he had caused, how dramatically his arrival had altered everything for everyone. She would have asked him had she been able, she would have said in English, “Have you any idea what damage you have done?”

Ah, but it wasn't his fault, she knew whose fault it was! In all likelihood he'd been indifferent to her, even unaware of her existence before she made him walk along that forest path, before she lifted her horrid eyes to him and found enough deceit in her soul to push her hand out and touch him, and say the words she said! Oh, she could not stop thinking of how these same three fingers that she held in front of her now had reached up and felt the foreigner's blood pulsing beneath his skin just as some rogue's vile blade had severed Einosuke's head from his body, letting his own precious blood seep into the shoreline's dark sand. Oh, how hard her heart was, how hard and how cold, how much like the steel of that rogue's blade itself!

Fumiko stepped past the door to Ace's room, thinking to find a knife and cut her offending fingers from her hand and leave them there as a ghastly souvenir, but in fact the fingers of both her hands were holding things, objects that had once belonged to Einosuke, so she passed by Ace's room with her breath trapped inside of her and stopped instead at the room that caged O-bata and Ned. She hadn't the strength to question why she had so readily delivered her maid into the hands of this second American, when regret concerning her own despicable actions raged inside of her, and she didn't knock, lest the man next door hear it and come out to look at her. Rather she slid the door open unbidden and pushed that package of ginseng powder inside, the one Einosuke had bought from the Chinese herb man on the day he followed Lord Abe. If it had some power to increase the sexual appetite why not let it be for her already wanton maid, lest her already wanton self eat it all and die in the throes of her licentiousness?

She closed the door again and released the breath she'd been holding, and went upstairs as quickly as she could, trying to think of others, to dismiss her horrible self. In Lord Okubo's room, beside her father-in-law's snoring head, she placed one of Einosuke's earliest diaries, with poems of love and filial piety. Her husband's constancy was evident in them, his unity of purpose and mind. When the old man awakened and picked up the volume, it mattered not where he opened it, for Einosuke's devotion to him would fall out of any page.

She stopped at Manjiro's room last, not because she had little to give him, but because, almost as much as she feared seeing Ace, she feared seeing her sister, whom she knew to be in there, extolling Manjiro, courting him, warping his sense of everything until it matched her own. Oh, she and Tsune were born of the same rift fabric, formed from the same static mud, that was something she had denied for far too long! Her sister was more honest than she, though, for Tsune, at least, embraced her inborn selfishness, wrapping herself around it as if it were a mark of beauty and not a horrid scar.

Fumiko would have slipped her offerings inside this door, too, just like she had downstairs, but Manjiro flung the door open as she was kneeling before it, heading for the inn's shrine to say his prayers. He was surprised to see her and stood there speechless for a moment, before he asked, “Where is Keiki? I understand he has arrived.”

“I believe he is downstairs,” said Fumiko, her voice a hoarse whisper. “Perhaps he is taking advantage of this inn's famous bath.” She had not truly spoken, she realized, since before they left Odawara, twelve hours earlier.

Manjiro was chagrined to have met his sister-in-law, for he was no more interested in intercourse with family members than she was. He would have left her as fast as she wanted to leave him, in fact, had Tsune's voice not come from inside the room, calling like a sorceress. “Won't you pause a moment, Fumiko? And let me ask a question?”

“I am only delivering gifts,” Fumiko mumbled, “so he won't be forgotten so quickly as he otherwise might be.”

To hear herself say such a thing made the gesture itself seem self-serving, and once more she tried to retreat. She would throw the gifts into the nearby river, and throw herself in after them!

“Please,” said Tsune, in a calm and kind voice. “I've just been asking Manjiro something that neither of us can answer, but I know you can. Come in, my dear, sit beside me for a moment.”

That Tsune was unclothed and huddled beneath a light blanket, behind the fully dressed Manjiro, did not bother Fumiko nearly so much as the prospect of once again being asked to have an opinion on anything at all. Let the fornicators take over the earth, she thought, the fornicators and the foreigners and those who could go blithely on. She felt her sorrow returning, and would have denied her sister's request by simply turning and going back down the stairs, had not Tsune, as had always been her practice about everything, gone ahead and asked her question without waiting for Fumiko's response.

“What would Einosuke's attitude have been were he about to avenge the murder of his own older brother? How would he have acted? What would he have done?”

Fumiko was stunned by Tsune's crudeness, by such a casual invocation of Einosuke's name, and the questions, all three of them, hit her like blows. If Tsune remembered that there had, in fact, been an older brother—Toshiro was his name—it didn't show in the manner in which she spoke. She only leaned against Manjiro, who had sat down beside her again, beautiful and naked and hoping for answers that would save him from the blows he intended, once he succeeded in dispatching Ueno, to rain upon himself.

“I only wanted to leave these trifles,” murmured Fumiko. “There is nothing here of consequence, just an old comb he liked and this erotic little
netsuke
carving he sometimes got pleasure from wearing.”

She let her hand open to release the gifts but only the comb fell out. The
netsuke
stuck to those three offending fingers, shaking slightly in her palm. She felt consumed with hopelessness coming here like this, but Manjiro cried when he saw the carving, for a time, at least, regaining himself. The
netsuke
depicted two lovers falling off an animal, some mythical bear or lion, their robes parted and their body parts stuck together, and continuing their coitus through a fine midair contortion. Einosuke, normally the most decorous of men, used to wear the little carving on the drawstrings of his pouch, hanging under his jacket, while he waited for an audience at the castle.

“He loved this so much!” Manjiro cried, energy surging back into his voice. “When he wore it he used to say he felt weighted down, for once in his life, by frivolity.”

Fumiko let Manjiro pull the carving from her palm. She smiled. “It is true he had a frivolous side,” she found herself saying. “He not only loved this carving, but was fonder of the act it depicts than you might imagine.”

She looked at her sister as if to say that that, at least, was something Einosuke and Tsune had in common. She tried to put her own act in perspective. It was only a touch, after all, just three fingers gracing the contours of a face.

“I remember it, too,” said Tsune. “But not from his drawstring. I remember it sat atop a box in a shop in Kyoto, displayed with great pride. Do you recall that day, Fumiko? The girls were still young. We were on a cherry blossom viewing trip and we had all had too much saké.”

“Of course I recall it,” said Fumiko. “That was when I bought it for him. That day or the very next morning.”

“I will wear it tonight!” said Manjiro. “It is the best way I can think of to represent my brother's spirit while avenging his death!”

He spoke as if he had suddenly found the key to something, but since they all knew that by far the larger part of Einosuke's spirit had been somber it was a strange thing to say. Nevertheless, it served to lighten Fumiko's heart more than anything else had since her husband's death. Until that moment she had hoped to escape this room and the tyranny of her sister's cheerfulness as soon as possible, but now she picked up the comb again. It was made of wood but soft and broad at its base, with two dozen finely carved teeth, each perhaps five inches long.

“He used this less often than he might have,” she said, “because he feared it would break.” She bent the teeth of the comb and let them go, bent them and let them go, watching them spring back into place.

“One of my husband's blind spots was that he sometimes saw only the surfaces of things,” she said, “believing strength was weakness and weakness strength.”

Was that what had caused her to do what she'd done? Was that what had kept her separate from him all these years? She recognized that she had heard Kyuzo say something similar, not two hours earlier, when listening to him talking to Lord Okubo in the garden, and she had the thought that there were probably only a few real ideas in the world, and that they floated through the air like pollen.

Tsune took the comb and placed it next to the carving. The carving had a high sheen to it, an almost brilliant look, while the comb was dull, with a delicate inlaid pattern cutting easily through the wood. “Each serves its function,” Tsune said. “And we should remember to be both soft and hard, to use all of the weapons at our disposal when we meet our enemy tonight. And let us hope that we are survived by more than artifacts in the morning.”

There was a moment of reflection, while the sisters breathed evenly and Manjiro stared at them both, steeling himself again in his determination not to talk about survival, his own or anyone else's. They could all hear Lord Okubo coughing down the hall.

“Everything begins when he wakes up,” said Fumiko. “There must be a start to these last difficulties which lie before us, if there is ever to be an end.”