The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

  “Who’s wrongheaded?” Arashiyama’s feet crunch on the stones.

  “Yoshida-sama’s provocations. Those were dangerous words.”

  Arashiyama hugs himself against the cold. “Snow in the mountains, I hear.”

  My guilt about Orito shall dog me, Uzaemon fears, for the rest of my life.

  “Ôtsuki-sama sent me to find you,” says Arashiyama. “Dr. Marinus is ready, and we are to sing for our supper.”

  “THE ANCIENT ASSYRIANS used rounded glass to start fires.” Marinus sits with his lame leg at an awkward angle. “Archimedes the Greek, we read, destroyed the Roman fleet of Marcus Aurelius with giant burning glasses at Syracuse, and the emperor Nero allegedly employed a lens to correct myopia.”

  Uzaemon explains “Assyrians” and inserts “the island of” before “Syracuse.”

  “The Arab Ibn al-Haytham,” continues the doctor, “whom Latin translators named Alhazen, wrote his Book of Optics eight centuries ago. The Italian Galileo and the Dutchman Lippershey used al-Haytham’s discoveries to invent what we now call microscopes and telescopes.”

  Arashiyama confirms the Arabic name and delivers a confident rendering.

  “The lens and its cousin the polished mirror, and their mathematical principles, have evolved a long way through time and space. By virtue of successive advancements, astronomers may now gaze upon a newly discovered planet beyond Saturn, Georgium Sidium, invisible to the naked eye. Zoologists may admire the true portrait of man’s most loyal companion …

  … Pulex irritans.” One of Marinus’s seminarians exhibits the illustration from Hooke’s Micrografia in a slow arc, while Goto works on the translation. The scholars do not notice his omission of “successive advancements,” which Uzaemon can make no sense of, either.

  De Zoet is watching from the side, just a few paces away. When Uzaemon took his place on the stage, they exchanged a “good evening,” but the tactful Dutchman has detected the interpreter’s reticence and not imposed further. He may have been a worthy husband for Orito. Uzaemon’s generous thought is stained by jealousy and regret.

  Marinus peers through the lamplit smoke. Uzaemon wonders whether his discourses are prepared in advance or netted from the thick air extemporaneously. “Microscopes and telescopes are begat by science; their use, by man and, where permitted, by woman, begets further science, and Creation’s mysteries are unfolded in modes once undreamed of. In this manner, science broadens, deepens, and disseminates itself—and via its invention of printing, its spores and seeds may germinate even within this Cloistered Empire.”

  Uzaemon does his best to translate this, but it isn’t easy: surely the Dutch word “semen” cannot be related to this unknown verb “disseminate”? Goto Shinpachi anticipates his colleague’s difficulty and suggests “distribute.” Uzaemon guesses “germinate” means “is accepted” but is warned by suspicious glances from the Shirandô’s audience: If we don’t understand the speaker, we blame the interpreter.

  “Science moves”—Marinus scratches his thick neck—“year by year toward a new state of being. Where, in the past, man was the subject and science his object, I believe this relationship is reversing. Science itself, gentlemen, is in the early stages of becoming sentient.”

  Goto takes a safe gamble on “sentience” meaning “watchfulness,” like a sentry. His Japanese rendition is streaked with mysticism, but so is the original.

  “Science, like a general, is identifying its enemies: received wisdom and untested assumption; superstition and quackery; the tyrants’ fear of educated commoners; and, most pernicious of all, man’s fondness for fooling himself. Bacon the Englishman says it well: ‘The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.’ Our honorable colleague Mr. Takaki may know the passage?”

  Arashiyama deals with the word “quackery” by omitting it, censors the line about tyrants and commoners, and turns to the straight-as-a-pole Takaki, a translator of Bacon, who translates the quotation in his querulous voice.

  “Science is still learning how to talk and walk. But the days are coming when science shall transform what it is to be a human being. Academies like the Shirandô, gentlemen, are its nurseries, its schools. Some years ago, a wise American, Benjamin Franklin, marveled at an air balloon in flight over London. His companion dismissed the balloon as a bauble, a frivolity, and demanded of Franklin, ‘Yes, but what use is it?’ Franklin replied, ‘What use is a newborn child?’”

  Uzaemon makes what he thinks is a fair translation, until “bauble” and “frivolity”: Goto and Arashiyama indicate with apologetic faces that they cannot help. The audience watches him critically. In a low tone, Jacob de Zoet says, “Toy of a child.” Using this substitute, the Franklin anecdote makes sense, and a hundred scholars nod in approval.

  “Had a man fallen asleep two centuries ago,” Marinus speculates, “and awoken this morning, he should recognize his world unchanged, in essence. Ships are still wooden; disease is still rampant. No man may travel faster than a galloping horse, and no man may kill another out of eyeshot. But were the same fellow to fall asleep tonight and sleep for a hundred years, or eighty, or even sixty, on waking he shall not recognize the planet for the transformations wrought upon it by science.”

  Goto assumes “rampant” is “deadly” and must reconstruct the final clause.

  Marinus’s attention, meanwhile, has drifted away over the scholars’ heads.

  Yoshida Hayato clears his throat to indicate that he has a question.

  Ôtsuki Monjurô looks at Marinus, then nods his consent.

  Yoshida writes Dutch more fluently than many interpreters, but the geographer fears making a mistake in public, so he addresses Goto Shinpachi in Japanese. “Please ask Dr. Marinus this, Interpreter: if science is sentient, what are its ultimate desires? Or, to phrase this question another way, when the doctor’s imagined sleeper awakens in the year 1899, shall the world most closely resemble paradise or the inferno?”

  Goto’s fluency is slower in the Japanese-to-Dutch headwind, but Marinus is pleased by the question. He rocks gently to and fro. “I shan’t know until I see it, Mr. Yoshida.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE ALTAR ROOM AT THE HOUSE OF SISTERS, MOUNT SHIRANUI SHRINE

  The twenty-sixth day of the eleventh month

  DON’T LET IT BE ME, ORITO PRAYS, DON’T LET IT BE ME. THE Goddess is disrobed for the Annunciation of Engifting: her exposed breasts are ample with milk; and her belly, devoid of a navel, is swollen with a female fetus so fertile, according to Abbess Izu, that the fetus’s own tiny womb encloses a still smaller female fetus, which is, in turn, impregnated with a still smaller daughter … and so on, to infinity. The abbess watches the nine unengifted sisters during the Sutra of Supplication. For ten days, Orito has acted the part of the penitent sister in hopes of earning access to the precincts and a quiet escape over the wall, but her hopes have come to nothing. She has dreaded this day since she saw Yayoi’s pregnant belly and understood what it must mean, and now that day is here. Speculation about the Goddess’s choice has been rife. To Orito, it has been unbearable. “One of the two has to be the newest sister,” said Umegae, with cruel satisfaction. “The Goddess will want Sister Orito to feel at home here as soon as possible.” Blind Minori, in her eighteenth year here, says that newest sisters are engifted by the fourth month, at the latest, but not always the second. Yayoi suggested that the Goddess may give Kagerô and Minori, neither of whom conceived a gift last month despite being chosen, another chance, but Orito suspects that Yayoi said so to calm her fears, not because it is true.

  The prayer room falls silent. The sutra is over.

  Don’t let it be me. The waiting is unendurable. Don’t let it be me.

  Abbess Izu strikes her tubular gong. The chime rises and falls in waves.

  The sisters press their heads against the tatami mat in obeisance.

  Like criminals
, Orito thinks, waiting for the executioner’s sword.

  The abbess’s ceremonial clothes rustle. “Sisters of Mount Shiranui …”

  The nine women all keep their foreheads on the floor.

  “The Goddess has instructed Master Genmu that, in the eleventh month—”

  A fallen icicle shatters on the cloister walkway, and Orito jumps.

  “—in the eleventh month of the eleventh year of the Kansei Era—”

  This is not where I belong, Orito thinks. This is not where I belong.

  “—the two sisters to be engifted in her name are Kagerô and Hashihime.”

  Orito smothers a groan of relief but cannot calm her wildly pounding heart.

  Won’t you thank me, the Goddess asks, for sparing you this month?

  I can’t hear you. Orito clamps her jaw shut. Lump of wood.

  Next month, the Goddess laughs like Orito’s stepmother, I promise.

  ENGIFTMENT DAYS usher a holiday mood into the House of Sisters. Within minutes, Kagerô and Hashihime are being congratulated in the long room. Orito is dumbfounded at the sincerity of the other women’s envy. Talk turns to the clothes, scents, and oils the Goddess’s choices shall wear to welcome their engifters. Rice dumplings and azuki beans sweetened with honey arrive for breakfast; sake and tobacco are sent from Abbot Enomoto’s storehouse. Kagerô’s and Hashihime’s cells are decorated with paper ornaments. Orito feels nauseous at this celebration of obligatory impregnation and is grateful when the sun shows its face and Abbess Izu has her and Sawarabi collect, air, and beat the house’s bedding. The straw-filled mattresses are folded over a pole in the courtyard and, in rapid turns, struck with a bamboo beater; a faint fog of dust and mites hangs in the cold bright air. Sawarabi is a sturdy daughter of peasants from the Kirishima plateau, but the doctor’s daughter soon lags behind. Sawarabi notices and is kind enough to suggest that they have a short rest, and sits on a pile of futons. “I hope you aren’t too disappointed that the Goddess overlooked you this month, Newest Sister.”

  Orito, still catching her breath, shakes her head.

  Across the cloisters, Asagao and Hotaru are feeding crumbs to a squirrel.

  Sawarabi reads others well. “Don’t be afraid of engiftment. You can see for yourself the privileges Yayoi and Yûguri are enjoying: more food, better bedding, charcoal … and now the services of a learned midwife! What princess would be so pampered? The monks are kinder than husbands, much cleaner than brothel customers, and there are no mothers-in-law cursing your stupidity for giving birth to daughters but turning into jealousy incarnate when you produce a male heir.”

  Orito pretends to agree. “Yes, Sister. I see that.”

  Thawed snow falls from the old pine with a flat thud.

  Stop lying. Fat Rat watches from under the cloisters. Stop fighting.

  Sawarabi hesitates. “Really, Sister, compared to what blemished girls suffer …”

  The Goddess, Fat Rat says, standing on its hind legs, is your gentle, loving mother.

  “… down there,” Sawarabi says, “in the world below, this place is a palace.”

  Asagao and Hotaru’s squirrel darts up a cloister pillar.

  Bare Peak is so sharp it might be etched onto glass with a needle.

  My burn, Orito cannot add, doesn’t justify the crime of my abduction. “Let’s finish the futons,” she says, “before the others think we’re idling.”

  THE CHORES ARE DONE by mid-afternoon. A triangle of sunshine still lies over the pool in the courtyard. In the long room, Orito helps Housekeeper Satsuki repair nightgowns: needlework, she finds, numbs her longing for solace. From the training ground across the precincts ebbs the sound of the monks practicing with bamboo swords. Charcoal and pine needles rumble and snap in the brazier. Abbess Izu is seated at the head of the table, stitching a short mantra into one of the hoods worn by the sisters at their engiftment. Hashihime and Kagerô, wearing blood-red sashes as a mark of the Goddess’s favor, are applying each other’s face powder; one of the few objects denied even to the highest-ranked sisters is a mirror. With ill-concealed malevolence, it is Umegae’s turn to ask Orito whether she has recovered from her disappointment.

  “I am learning,” Orito manages to say, “to submit to the Goddess’s will.”

  “Surely the Goddess,” Kagerô assures Orito, “shall choose you next time.”

  “The newest sister,” observes blind Minori, “sounds happier in her new life.”

  “Took her long enough,” mutters Umegae, “to come to her senses.”

  “Getting used to the house,” counters Kiritsubo, “can take time: remember that poor girl from the Goto Islands? She sobbed every night for two years.”

  Pigeons scuffle and trill in the eaves of the cloisters.

  “The sister from Goto found joy in her three healthy gifts,” states Abbess Izu.

  “But no joy,” sighs Umegae, “from the fourth one, which killed her.”

  “Let us not disturb the dead”—the abbess’s voice is sharp—“by digging up misfortunes without reason, Sister.”

  Umegae’s maroon skin hides blushes, but she bows an apology.

  Other sisters, Orito suspects, remember her predecessor hanging in her cell.

  “Well,” says Minori, “I, for one, would prefer to ask the newest sister what it was that helped her accept the house as her home.”

  Orito threads a needle. “Time, and the patience of my sisters.”

  You’re lying, wheezes the kettle, even I hear you’re lying …

  The sharper her need for solace, Orito notices, the worse the house’s tricks.

  “I thank the Goddess every single day,” Sister Minori says, restringing her koto, “for bringing me to the house.”

  “I thank the Goddess”—Kagerô is working on Hashihime’s eyebrows—“one hundred and eight times before breakfast.”

  Abbess Izu says, “Sister Orito, the kettle sounds thirsty to me …”

  WHEN ORITO KNEELS on the stone slab by the pool to dip the ladle into the ice-cold water, the slanted light creates, just for a moment, a mirror as perfect as a Dutch glass. Orito has not seen her face since she fled her old house in Nagasaki; what she sees shocks her. The face on the pool’s silvered skin is hers, but three or four years older. What about my eyes? They are dull and in retreat. Another trick of the house. She is not so sure. I saw eyes like those in the world below.

  The song of a thrush in the old pine sounds scattered and half forgotten.

  What was it—Orito is sinking—I was trying to remember?

  Sisters Hotaru and Asagao greet her from the cloisters.

  Orito waves back, notices the ladle still in her hand, and remembers her errand. She looks into the water and recognizes the eyes of a prostitute she treated in Nagasaki at a bordello owned by a pair of half-Chinese brothers. The girl had syphilis, scrofula, lung fever, and the Nine Sages alone knew what else, but what had destroyed her spirit was enslavement to opium.

  “But, Aibagawa-san,” the girl had implored, “I don’t need any other medicine.”

  Pretending to accept the contract of the house, Orito thinks …

  The prostitute’s once-beautiful eyes stared out of dark pits.

  … is halfway to accepting the contract of the house.

  Orito hears Master Suzaku’s carefree laughter at the gate.

  Wanting and needing the drugs takes you the rest of the way …

  The gatekeeping acolyte calls out, “Inner gate opening, Sisters!”

  … and when it’s been done to you once, why resist anymore?

  Unless you win your will back, says the girl in the pool, you’ll turn into the others.

  I shall stop taking Suzaku’s drugs, Orito resolves, from tomorrow.

  The stream leaves the pool through mossy grates.

  My “tomorrow,” she realizes, is proof that I must stop today.

  “HOW DO WE FIND our newest sister this evening?” asks Master Suzaku.

  Abbess Izu watches from one
corner; Acolyte Chûai sits in another.

  “Master Suzaku finds me in excellent health, thank you.”

  “The sky this evening was a sky from the pure land, was it not, newest sister?”

  “In the world below, sunsets were never this beautiful.”

  Pleased, the man assesses the statement. “You were not aggrieved by the Goddess’s judgment this morning?”

  I must hide my relief, thinks Orito, and hide that I am hiding it. “One learns to accept the Goddess’s judgment, does one not?”

  “You have come on a long journey in a short time, Newest Sister.”

  “Enlightenment can occur, I understand, in a single moment.”