Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show (40 page)

When he first saw Einosuke's head in the hallway Lord Okubo believed it was an animal, some wounded forest creature come in through the side door, and he feared it might bite him if he tried to pass it by. He spoke to it once, saying, “Get away!” but when it neither ran nor prepared to attack him, he took an unlit torch from its place by the bath and shook it as if it were his sword. And then he had a memory he hadn't had in years, of his first son, Toshiro, and Einosuke, too, stomping through the woods behind his castle, in search of mushrooms one late autumn day. Einosuke, only about six at the time, had come across a
tanuki
, a badger, who would also neither run nor get off the path. He had said “Get away!” then, too, much as his father did now, until the badger grew tired of him and departed.

“I will emulate you now, Einosuke” muttered his father, “so if you are watching from the grave you will be proud.”

But the instant he stepped forward with his unlit torch he knew it wasn't a badger in the hallway. And as gently as he'd once taught all of his sons to brush twigs aside when searching for mushrooms, he knelt to sweep the hair away from Einosuke's missing yet bottomless eyes. There were scratches on Einosuke's cheeks and a bloodless rift in his forehead, and the straight white line of his teeth with his tongue sticking out.

“Oh wretched life that sends a father such a message,” said a voice in Lord Okubo's head, but he quieted the voice with all of his will and, with all of his strength, wrapped his fist around Einosuke's somehow still combed hair and lifted his head from the floor, letting it swing from his hand as he walked.

That is how he presented himself to the weary gathering outside.

Ace saw him first and whispered, “Ah, Diogenes,” and when Manjiro looked where he pointed, and beheld what his father carried, he ran toward Fumiko and his nieces, giving up, for yet another moment, the firmest resolve he had ever known, in order to spare them the sight. Ace looked toward Fumiko, too, but stayed where he was.

Lord Okubo, in turn, brought Einosuke's head to his chest and held his left palm out in front of him, obscuring the view of everyone else. He wanted to find a seat of honor for it, like the one Momo and Manzo's father had intended the wagon to provide, and when he couldn't easily find something better he climbed upon that wrecked wagon itself, placed the head in his lap, and covered it entirely with his robe. His own head hung down so his face wasn't visible, but his legs were there for everyone to see, bowed and naked, as pale as the quality of all human life.

“It is the price one pays to live in this world,” he said. “I hope things will be better in the next one.”

No one knew how to act anymore, not even Ueno. At first he thought to simply leave with his troops, fading back into the fog. And then he thought to step silently forward and slit the throats of the prisoners himself, before they could find their voices and tell the truth about what had happened at the seashore that day. He felt an unwanted pity for Lord Okubo, miserable upon that wagon, contempt for Manjiro, cowering up against the wall with his women, and finally a distilled and focused hatred of himself, for disorder was at his heart's cold center now and disorder was what he thought he'd cast out of it, many years ago when he'd first left home, and time and time again thereafter.

It was such a distressing moment for him that he might have stayed that way, caught in the web of his uncertainty, had Kyuzo not read his mind and spoken.

“There is order in battle, sir,” he said, “and I think we should try to retrieve a little of it before we die.”

He had been watching only Ueno all this time, and was standing in the center of everything with his sword out.

Fumiko was still in Manjiro's arms, her daughters well behind them now, but when Tsune heard her lover's words, and saw Ueno turn toward him, his ugly lips pursed, she moved away from the rest of her family, came out from under the eve of the inn, and stepped toward Kyuzo, really floating toward him, as if on a stage built for only the two of them. She said quite softly, “With frozen water that tastes painfully bitter, a sewer rat relieves in vain his parched throat.”

In the history of life itself, no expression of love had ever been so strange.

Kyuzo smiled, briefly considering that if he had Tsune to live for he might not fight Ueno after all. He could feel his arthritic knees and oft-sprung toenail, but he also remembered what his father's ghost had told him at that small Buddhist temple behind Lord Tokugawa's lodge.
“In the rain near Nijo Castle, under the falling wisteria
. “So he did not think he would die here, for though there was certainly rain, it was a month too soon for wisteria and Kyoto was a great distance off. Without anyone moving very much, the two men found themselves inside a newly formed circle, with everyone who composed it, save Manjiro, content to let whatever happened now be final. The innkeeper's widow was once again watching from the doorway, her hands tightly holding one of Ichiro's arms, and Lord Okubo peeked up from his perch atop the wagon, like a senile old god lowered down from the heavens on ropes.

With an impertinent wiggle of his hips Kyuzo let Ueno know that he could attack first, if he wished, but it did not, as he hoped it would, make Ueno angry. Rather, he accepted the offer as if it were due his higher rank, and ran at Kyuzo fast, to slash his blade under the older man's arms. It did not come close to working. Kyuzo simply paused until the last possible second, then parried with an ease and grace that everyone watching had to admire.

But to everyone's surprise, as well, he did not immediately strike his own blade home. Instead, he let Ueno turn to face him one more time. It worried Ichiro to see such a thing, for he was beginning to understand the value of economy.

Ueno's second charge was even less effecdve than his first, and when Kyuzo stepped aside again, dancing out of his way like a matador, Ueno came face-to-face with Momo, the frightened little shit man, who, in order to try to compensate for his own disastrous entry, had been trailing the action with his bow and arrow, pretending that he would be allowed to fight next, to take on the winner, just as he always did at home.

Ueno stopped and smiled at Momo, muddy in his purloined samurai clothes, then laughed at an idea that came to him, perching upon the wires that strung his mind together like the body of a legless crow. He pointed his sword at Momo's chest, and utterly ignoring Kyuzo for a moment, turned to speak to Manjiro. “Behold the third murderer of Einosuke,” he shouted, “the slothful and defeated spirit who dispatched your elder brother with his sword!”

“Huh?” said Momo, but Manjiro stepped away from his place by his nieces and sister-in-law, walking between the fighters toward Momo. To be easily fooled is a common symptom of grief gone crazy, though it is not so commonly recognized as such.

“Were you on the beach that day,
ronin?” he
shouted.

“Ronin?
Who, me? I am Momo of Shimoda, not selling chestnuts!”

Even in his terror Momo was pleased to be mistaken for a samurai,
ronin
or not. But an unfortunate by-product of that pleasure was that he did not in the least remember that he still had his bow up and was pointing his decrepit arrow at Manjiro, whose sword was loosed from its scabbard by then and swinging between Momo and the other two captives. “All three killers are before us now!” he shouted. “And I will dispatch them, one at a time!”

“Who, me? Who, me?” said Momo.

Kyuzo, however, smiled at him, held up his hands, and began walking toward him, for he not only understood that this was wrong, but also that Momo's growing panic would soon move from his heart and mouth to his fingers, and he would momentarily release his arrow. Lord Okubo saw it too and said, “Uh, oh,” just as Kyuzo dove toward Manjiro, shoving him out of the way. So when Momo did, in fact, release his arrow, it missed Manjiro entirely but came into perfect contact with Kyuzo's forehead, as if that were its target in the first place. It planted itself deeply, like a foreign flag into Japanese soil, erasing the worry lines that furrowed Kyuzo's brow, cutting through his current thoughts of saving the life of his lover's fiancé, and embedding itself in the center of his brain. Since it was a particularly sharp arrow, lovingly honed by Momo each evening, it pruned Kyuzo's memories of his childhood in Kyoto and his years of happy study with his father, and pushed up against his cache of Zen koan and poems. His love for Tsune disappeared beside his recent theories on the wind and intransigence, and he forgot his anxiety over Ichiro's defection as easily as he might have were it an errant and unnoticed cicada, singing in a tree at night.

There was one set of memories, though, one set of impulses, that the arrow could not have purged had it exploded in Kyuzo's brain like a bomb, and those were the ones that defined his skill as a fighter. He did hesitate, for his vision flew from him and his hearing went off in a roar, but his arms and legs changed direction in an instant, away from their original trajectory, and he plunged his sword into Ueno's chest, easily piercing his heart.

“MURDER!” Tsune screamed, falling beneath Kyuzo's falling body, and when Momo slumped beside them both, shaking and shitting and howling, Manzo fell on top of him, lest Manjiro still not understand the mistake he had made and try to take his brother's life. “He has come with salvaged plunder,” he cried, “to honor the Okubo family and the dead!”

Ichiro and Keiki came fast after that, joining Manjiro at the center of the clearing with their swords up, but by then Ueno's soldiers had put theirs back into scabbards that fit them, or simply laid them on the ground, too stunned to act, or too tired, or not enough compelled by loyalty.

And a second later they disappeared into the fog and the dark.

“‘How dead the world is, how bleak this day,'” Keiki whispered, but the eyes of all the others were on Lord Okubo as he climbed down off the wagon, placed his son's head on the seat he'd just vacated, leaned past Manzo, and put a hand on Momo's shoulder. “Thank you young man,” he said, “I appreciate the sentiment. No one has honored our family in a good long time.”

Some of the men went to their women after that, as men always seem to do when battle is done; Ned to O-bata, his muddy prosthesis back in front of him, and Ichiro, though far more circumspectly, to the general vicinity of Keiko. Keiki turned toward Tsune, who was like a sister to him, while Manjiro walked to the damaged wagon, removed the upper garment he was wearing, and placed it over his beloved brother's head.

“Good-bye, dear Einosuke,” he said. “Remember me to our ancestors. Tell them I am coming, but not now.”

He, too, went to Tsune then. Her hands were drenched in Kyuzo's blood, but her eyes were steady as she watched him come.

“Alas, I have survived,” he said.

“Alas, we are defeated,” she replied.

Ace, in the meantime, walked directly over to Fumiko and looked into her eyes. A line that had been plaguing him from the essay he was always reading, the one he had quoted to her in the woods,
“Accept the place the divine providence has found for you…
“was in truth followed by the words, “.…
the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.”
And though he had dismissed it entirely in the bath, he understood that the society of her contemporaries was what she needed right then. And by extension, of course, what she didn't need was him.

That was all. Einosuke's true murderer lay dead before them—Numbers 75 and 111 soon spewed the real story out—and the rain started coming down in sheets again.

As the evening turned to night, however, after less than an hour had passed, some of them went back inside to eat, others to sleep, while still others removed their bloody clothing and sank into the inn's miraculous bath. Fumiko took Junichiro there, when he awoke, yawning, as if nothing at all had happened. Keiko and Masako followed them, and eventually even Lord Okubo. They bathed by themselves, as families often tended to do, in that beautiful outside section of the bath, directly over a hot springs that came to warm them from the center of the earth.

Afterword

BUT IF, IN LESS THAN AN HOUR
, they could eat and sleep and bathe, think what the coming days and weeks and months could do.

Lord Okubo was so moved by Manzo's words on behalf of his brother that he went with them the next morning to meet their father, not only in order to praise his sons, but to offer to pay for the repairs to their wagon. And when he returned to the inn he ordered the innkeeper's corpse removed to the garden, in preparation for his funeral pyre. It had been a bad business, and he wondered at his surprising optimism. He continued to believe it had something to do with the omen of the crows, but more to do with the incredible sleep he had enjoyed. So though he still mourned Einosuke, would never forget such a good and filial son, he could not help wishing he'd had a chance to properly thank Kyuzo, too, for he finally understood that Kyuzo was the real “Kambei” in their midst, the last of the great samurai warriors. He intended to have Kyuzo's ashes interred at the inn as well, but Tsune insisted that he send them to Kyoto.
“In the rain near Nijo Castle, under the falling wisteria”
had not, after all, been a call to self-destruction, but directions to the family burial site.

By the time Kyuzo's ashes got there the wisteria were in full bloom, and rain, at that time of year, was common.

ONE MIGHT THINK
that Commodore Perry would have worried over the fact that while two minstrels left him only one came back, but in truth he hardly noticed, for on the day of Ace's return, April 24,1854, two Japanese stowaways were discovered on board the fleet ship
Mississippi
, and he had to decide whether or not to honor their requests for political asylum. And a few days later, when a sailor by the name of G. W. Parish plunged to his death from the top of a mast, he never gave the minstrels another thought. He was simply too busy, and, like Keiki and Ichiro, it was not in his makeup to think about the past.