The Devil Amongst the Lawyers (31 page)

Henry had been so struck by the resemblance that he took out his pen, sketched one on the back of a receipt, and pushed it toward her. “What is this?” he asked in halting Japanese.

Ishi peered at it for a moment, and then nodded, recognizing his crude depiction.
“Harinezumi.”

Literally it meant “needle mouse,” a good description of her: shy and sharp. He had tried to tell her that, but she only nodded again, and he could not tell if he had conveyed his meaning or not.

Henry could not imagine Ishi at any age other than the one she was. Impossible to picture her as an elegant and lovely young woman. He thought that she would go stumping through life staring myopically at the world as a detached observer until she was an old lady, looking much the same as she had at age nine.

Her father taught biology at the university, and he spoke good British-accented English. The family owned a narrow old three-story brick building in a respectable but modest section of Tokyo, and they made their home in a ground-floor apartment, renting out the other rooms in
the building to lodgers, mainly unmarried professors from the university, but occasionally a foreign scholar or businessman. Henry had been accepted on the recommendation of his student guide, who explained that the best way to improve his proficiency in the language was to lodge with a Japanese family, so that he would be forced to speak it.

Sometimes he felt that with Ishi he was the object of study, rather than the student. She watched him with the clinical interest of a researcher who has discovered a new species of bear. He would be sitting at the little table in the garden reading Tokyo’s English-language newspaper, and Ishi would come and sit opposite him, sometimes bringing her homework, but even if she pretended to be studying, she would be covertly observing him.

As far as Henry could tell from the expressionless gaze, there was nothing sentimental or even particularly affectionate in Ishi’s opinion of him. He was simply an intriguing specimen that fate had set within her purview, and so she watched him, as if he were simply another assignment.

He did not flatter himself that her interest in him was any species of a schoolgirl crush. She seldom smiled at him, and she did not act in the way he had seen flirtatious females act with men. No one bothered to flirt with portly, pasty Henry. But he felt that little hedgehog Ishi had also been born middle-aged, and so they were kindred spirits.

She asked very few questions at first, so perhaps she had been shy with a stranger, and she was unfailingly polite, but sometimes he had the impression that she might as well be taking him around the city on a leash, as if he were indeed a trained bear. When she was not otherwise occupied at school or in doing her studies or her home chores, her parents permitted Ishi to accompany Henry on various excursions around the city, serving as his guide and interpreter at museums, shrines, and other points of interest, usually those recommended by her father. She was tolerant of Henry’s fascination with folklore and dashing tales of yore, but she did not share his interest.

It was as if their roles were reversed. Henry was the child filled with wonder for tales of magic and high adventure, and she was the serious little scientist who humored her fanciful charge with patience and courtesy instead of enthusiasm.

In order to help him understand the plot of the most famous of Japan’s dramas, Ishi had accompanied him to the Takanawa neighborhood to visit the small temple of Sengakuji, set on a low bluff overlooking the bay. The grounds of the temple are a cemetery, containing the graves of the forty-seven ronin.

“It’s their Alamo,” another American had told him once.

When Henry tracked down the story, he realized that the man had meant the remark symbolically, rather than suggesting a real parallel between the two national icons.

Ishi stood stiffly in front of the grave of Oishi Kuranosuke, the leader of the ronin, with her head bowed, as if he were being buried today, instead of two centuries earlier. “You know who he is?”

“Hai,”
said Henry cautiously, knowing what was coming next.

Ishi inclined her head, acknowledging that his answer was acceptable. “Then tell me, please, this story in Japanese.”

His skill in language was not equal to the task of making a stirring tale of it, but in a halting narrative, punctuated by Ishi’s soft-spoken corrections to his pronunciation or his grammar, he managed to stammer out the story to her satisfaction. He didn’t know why he put his hand on the plinth of the statue—for inspiration, perhaps.

He began, “Before Meiji . . .” Because he didn’t know who the emperors had been before 1868, he could not express the date 1701 in proper Japanese form, which counted the years in the reign of the emperor of the time.

Ishi understood. “Genroku fourteen,” she said, nodding for him to continue.

Henry paused for a moment, searching his memory for the Japanese word for a feudal lord. “There was a
daimyo
named Asano, who was a
sanka
. . .” He had heard this last word on his travels, and he thought it meant something akin to “hillbilly.” Anyhow, he recalled that Asano was a
daimyo
from a rural area, which is probably what started the trouble when he arrived at the court of the shogun.

Ishi wrinkled her nose when he said that word.
“Inakamono,”
she said. Country boy. But she seemed pleased that he had grasped the general idea, and with a series of quick nods, she urged him on.

“Asano is insulted many times by Kira, a court official. When he finally fought back, the court took the side of Kira, and forced Asano to . . .
seppuku
.” Henry pantomimed the motion of disemboweling oneself with a sword.

Behind her spectacles, Ishi’s dark eyes did not waver. “Continue.”

“So the warrior followers of Asano are now samurai without master . . .”

“Ronin.”

“Thank you, Ishi-san. Ronin. The forty-seven ronin wish to avenge the death of their master, but it would be difficult to get into the shogun’s palace and kill Kira. So they make long plan.” Henry’s words came hesitantly now, as he put small words together to make up for the more complex terms that he did not know. This language was much more difficult than French, where, between schoolboy Latin and a sufficiently large vocabulary in English, you could usually improvise an intelligible word. “These ronin . . . They pretend to be samurai no more. They take jobs as laborers or become monks. Oishi, the leader, becomes a drunk. He does no work. Everybody laughs at these men. People think they are without honor.” He broke off then and looked at her stern little face, still staring at the statue of the samurai. “That would have been most difficult,” he said.

She looked up, surprised. “What?”

“To pretend dishonor and to allow all the world to laugh at you for more than a year. I have read that a man once spat on Oishi and said he was a disgrace to his old master. It must have been very difficult for the ronin.”

“Hai,” said Ishi, nodding. Her expression did not change, but he thought that beneath the folds of her silk child’s kimono, her chubby sparrow body stiffened to imagine such an ordeal. Henry thought that you could bounce pebbles off Ishi’s pride.

“It must have been hard for them, but their plan worked. At first Kira had expected Asano’s men to attack him out of revenge, but after a year of having spies watch them, he decided that they were no danger to him. He stopped being careful. And then the forty-seven ronin got into the house of Kira to kill him. He did not act with honor. He hid with the women and the servants. He allowed his followers to die trying to protect him.”

Another curt nod from Ishi. “It is taking you longer to tell this than it took the ronin to find Kira.”

“Yes. Japanese is very difficult for me. Not only the words but the way of thinking.”

“How so?”

“Well, I see why the ronin would kill Kira to—” here Ishi supplied the word for avenge “—their master, but I do not understand what came after.”

“To place the severed head of Kira on the grave of Asano?”

“No. That was—” He gestured that it was satisfactory, because he had no idea how to say “poetic justice” in Japanese. He didn’t even know if the concept would translate from English. “After that, Ishi, the ronin gave themselves up to the police, and after a trial, they were ordered to kill themselves, and they did.” Something in his voice must have told her that he was uneasy with the way the story ended.

The little girl peered up at him with her solemn stare. “What would you have them do?”

Henry had not thought that far ahead, and he wasn’t sure that he was up to expressing an alternative in Japanese. With a few words accompanied by many gestures he conveyed his thoughts. Run . . . Go to the mountains . . . to a village by the sea . . . Become farmers . . . or monks . . . or fishermen . . . Live.

Ishi blinked. “But this is not honorable. Better to die a samurai.”

“But Kira won. Yes, he was killed, but all his enemies died, too.”

Ishi gave him one of her rare smiles, and swept her arm outward to indicate the temple and the cemetery. “But all this is for them. They are remembered with honor.”

She led him inside the temple then, and he stood by respectfully while she pointed out to him the clothes and the homemade armor worn by the forty-seven ronin on the night of their attack on the great house of Kira. He put a few coins in the offering box, wondering if prayers were still said for the repose of their souls, as they would have been in a Christian cathedral.

But the logic of the story escaped Henry. He couldn’t help feeling that, despite all the trappings of honor and courage, the
daimyo
Asano had ultimately gotten a lot of people killed by being touchy about the fact that he was a hillbilly. Henry thought that if Asano had killed Kira himself in the first place, it would have saved everyone a lot of time and trouble. But then there would not have been so many songs and poems and Kabuki plays to tell the story down through the centuries. Common sense does not make for enduring legends.

Henry came to himself then, staring at the bare trees on the mountains encircling the town of Wise. He had not thought of that visit to Sengakuji for many years, but it occurred to him that the people here might have understood the forty-seven ronin better than he did.

SHADE BAKER HAD FINALLY GIVEN
up finding a suitably rustic dwelling in Norton, and he had spent the better part of an hour riding up and down country roads in the Tudor in search of a shack that would meet the reporters’ approval. He had finally decided that he would have to venture down a dirt road, and hope that he did not get stuck in the mud and have to walk back to civilization. The wind was still sharp and it looked like rain again, and a five-mile hike
under such conditions would either kill him or make him wish that it had. Finally, though, his persistence paid off. A rattling mile back on a rutted clay road, and a hundred yards back into a rock-studded pasture, he spotted the perfect place: a ramshackle wooden cabin with a sagging porch. In the gray half-light of a winter afternoon, the forlorn little shack looked bleak and cold, but there were two laughing children playing in the dry grass of the yard, next to the grubby remains of a headless snowman, the only trace of a snowfall earlier in the week.

Shade eased the car to the side of the road, hoping to watch the scene for a few moments before he approached the cabin, but as soon as he cut the motor, the children stopped what they were doing and turned to stare at the stranger. With a sigh of resignation, Shade grabbed his camera and clambered out of the car to make friends with the natives.

As he approached them, the children did not move or acknowledge his half-hearted wave. They stood as still as deer in a twilight pasture, watching him with stony eyes in expressionless faces. They were blond and thin, with sharp cheekbones and deep-set blue eyes. The girl was a head taller than the boy, who, judging from the resemblance, was her brother. The camera would work wonders with their angular features, but, while they were handsome enough, they didn’t look particularly exotic. They wore shabby cloth coats and knitted caps, just like the ones you’d see on working-class children in New Jersey or Brooklyn or Maine, which was a pity, because he was hoping for something more outlandish to highlight their rural origins. Still, they were photogenic and their cabin was squalid in a picturesque way. Given all this serendipity, the children’s ordinary modern clothes might be the easiest detail to fix.

By the time he reached the children, he had come to a decision. They were standing as still as snowmen themselves, but they were tense, as if one word from him might sending them running for
cover. “Howdy, folks. Feels mighty cold to me out here, but it’s not cold enough for your friend there, I see.” He nodded toward the remains of the dirt-streaked snowman.

This sally was met with the same unblinking stares. Finally the small boy stuck out his chin and said, “This here’s our land.”

“I know. I came to talk to you. They call me Shade. And what are your names?”

“I’m James, after my daddy, but I go by Jim. She’s Helena.”

Shade whistled. “That’s a mouthful! Is it your mama’s name?”

Almost imperceptibly she shook her head. “After the English princess.”

Shade digested this information. A family that named children after members of the royal family was perhaps to be reckoned with. He’d better get the picture quickly, before any adults turned up to see what was going on. Solemnly he shook hands with young Jim. “See, I’m a photographer, and I’m driving around taking pictures. And I thought I’d see if you’d be interested.”

The children glanced at each other, and then Helena said, “What are you selling? Pictures?”

Shade felt a twinge of admiration, a distant echo of his own rural upbringing. Nobody was going to swindle these two cautious youngsters without a fight. He hoped their native caution would serve them well when they grew up. In general, they were right, of course. Well-dressed strangers in rural areas usually did mean trouble. They’d try to buy the mineral rights to your land for pennies an acre, and then come back some day and make it a wasteland. Or they’d offer you a dollar for your grandmother’s spinning wheel and sell it in the city for fifty times that much. Maybe things weren’t as perilous for them in this place as they had been for their Scottish ancestors, when strangers burned homes and murdered the family. But the habit of caution was bred in the bone, and he knew too much about the world to think they should do away with it.