Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show (41 page)

For a time after the American departure Ned and O-bata stayed in Shimoda. They were married in a Buddhist ceremony at Rendaiji Temple, near that monk's tomato garden, and she bore him two children in eighteen months. A few years later, when peasants were finally allowed surnames, they took the name “Maki,” and had five more children who gained musical reputations, first locally, then throughout the land. One of Ned's great-grandchildren, in fact, immigrated to California in the 1920s, where he had a son who came back to Japan before World War II, with an American jazz band. That, however, is another story.

And for the rest, as well, life was indelibly altered. Ichiro went to work for the innkeeper's widow, quitting the samurai life and, some years later, allowing himself to be adopted by her. He hung his sword on that crossbeam, next to the innkeeper's. He still loved Keiko, and sometimes went to Edo to court her, but Keiko declined to take him as a lover. She stayed single for a decade after her father's death—eschewing even dancing—until continuing to do so began to hinder Masako's chances to find a good match. And then she married without complaint, to someone chosen for her, after careful investigation, by her mother and her Uncle Manjiro.

Momo and Manzo, in the meantime, formed the Shimoda Marine Waste Company, and thrived.

ALL OF THIS OCCURRED
, or began to occur, within days of Commodore Perry's departure, but what happened to Manjiro and Tsune and Fumiko, and to Ace Bledsoe, as well, took longer.

Immediately after he left Japan Ace grew reclusive again, for when he'd agreed so readily to come ashore he'd been sure that this would be his story, and it wasn't. He gave up music much like Keiko gave up dance, and returned to his father's Pennsylvania farm. Ace had never met John Brown, but he'd read about him, and by early 1857 began frequenting abolitionist meetings where Brown's name came up. He didn't speak at those meetings, or otherwise involve himself, until one morning when he found two runaway slave girls sleeping in his barn. He knelt to watch them—the nearest one lovely, the farther one not—and by the time they awoke and clung to each other he had decided to offer his help. A month later he did it again, this time for an entire family, and by the beginning of 1858 he had finally found his passion, the authentic society of his contemporaries. He didn't worry, this time, about whether or not it was the truly portentous story of his life, perhaps because it was.

In Edo, during those same years, Manjiro was busy learning Einosuke's old job, as his father's representative to the Great Council. At first he had difficulty outliving his reputation—to some he would always be a troublemaker, to others a hero named Kambei—but Lord Abe, whose censure had been temporary, needed his language skills and praised him publicly once or twice, and soon talk of what had happened began to die down. He lived in the remodeled Edo house with Fumiko and Keiko and Junichiro, though Masako had found her own life's path by then, and spent most of her time at her master's studio, carving Noh masks. She had first gotten the idea from seeing Ned's nose.

Lord Okubo went to Edo frequently, and when it became clear to him that a match between Manjiro and Tsune was no longer favored by Lord Tokugawa, or even by the principals themselves, he began, ever so slyly, to encourage a union between Manjiro and Fumiko. Such an idea distressed them both at first, but by about the time Ace joined John Brown's army, crossing the Mason-Dixon line to occupy the United States Armory at Harper's Ferry, they came to terms with it.

Manjiro and Fumiko were married on October 17,1859, five and a half years after Einosuke's death and the very day that Ace emptied his rifle into the American militia, and died. Fumiko thought of him that day, briefly wondering what had happened to him. She thought of Einosuke, too, of course, but the match she had hoped to find as a girl, the man she had hoped to marry, that kindred spirit,
that jibun no ki no atta hito
, slept beside her on her futon that night, and for every night thereafter for the rest of her life.

Tsune never married but stayed near Keiki, advising him as his star began to rise. She took lovers often, never Keiki himself, and never again Manjiro, but always older men, like Kyuzo. She seemed able to visit the Edo house with the same ease of spirit she had always had, an impunity at which the others marveled. She was a good sister to Fumiko, a welcome sister-in-law to Manjiro, and an excellent aunt, not only to Einosuke's three children, but to the two new babies that arrived.

And when Keiki finally did fulfill his father's greatest wish, by being adopted into a hereditary family and becoming the last Japanese Shogun, Tsune, for a time, was the most powerful woman in all of Japan.

That was not for another decade, though, and in the intervening years she visited the inn in Shimoda each April, to walk in the garden and mourn Kyuzo. It was easier and more appropriate than going to Kyoto.

Both the inn and the bath are still there today, by the way, in the heart of Rendaiji Village, a forty-five-minute walk up the Inozawa River from the bay.

Acknowledgments

I AM INDEBTED TO
the Japan-United States Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as to the Japan Foundation, for generous support during more than a decade of work on this novel. Support from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Sabbatical Committee and the Center for Advanced Research provided much-needed time for research and writing.

I want to thank my wife, Virginia Wiley, for her belief in me and her willingness to give me honest appraisals of my work at every turn, for more than three decades now. I also want to thank my agent, Gail Hochman, for her unending support of this novel, her willingness to read and reread too many drafts to count, and her tenacity on my behalf. Thanks, also, to my friends, Charles and Keiko DeWolf, Tatsuji and Mineko Suzuki, Fumi Yoshimura, and Ayako Hara, for their help and kindness during my many sojourns to Japan.

Readers of this book will find references and small quotes from two films by Akira Kurosawa:
Shichinen no Samurai (The Seven Samurai
) and
Ikiru (To Live);
as well as from the eleventh-century novel,
Genji Monogatari (Tale of Genji
) and from the poetry of Bashó. Shakespeare and Ralph Waldo Emerson also peek through the curtains once in a while. In addition, the book is intended as a prequel to my 1986 novel,
Soldiers in Hiding
, which is referenced, in sly ways, here and there throughout the work.

A few historical figures appear in the book, and speak words that I put in their mouths—Commodore Perry, Lord Abe, Lord Okubo, Lord Tokugawa, Keiki—but their acts and those of the characters I made up are entirely fictional, so if they're turning in their graves over what I made them say, I apologize.

Excerpts from the novel appeared, in altered form, in the
Kyoto Review
, and the “Whitman Sampler” chapter was published in a beautiful fine arts edition by the Perishable Press.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2007 Richard Wiley

ISBN: 978-1-4976-5928-5

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