Kiku's Prayer: A Novel

  Unless he returned at that hour, Okane and her husband would grow suspicious, no matter how well Father Laucaigne might try to cover for him….

  “Je suis japonais. Vous êtes français. Il est japonais.”

  Hondō Shuntarō leaned against the window of the Yamazaki Teahouse in Maruyama as he memorized the French verb conjugations that were written on a piece of paper spread across his lap. He was particularly determined to practice over and over again the L sound, trying to mimic the way in which Petitjean pronounced it, repeatedly screwing up his face and pointing to his tongue.

  “That’s so funny …! You look like one of those men who wears a village idiot mask at the festival!” A young geisha named Oyō, who sat beside him watching his struggles, couldn’t help but put a hand up to her mouth and laugh.

  Oyō, who would later become Shuntarō’s wife and one of the most sought-after women at the Rokumeikan,1 was at this time the most popular of the young geisha working in Maruyama. She was a fair-skinned beauty, buoyant and quick-witted, and she could hold the attention at parties hosted by even the most boorish of customers. It was the custom of the dandies who frequented Maruyama, whenever they wanted to bad-mouth a geisha, to open with “that wildcat …!” but not one man was ever heard to snipe about Oyō as “that wildcat”; instead, she was given the pet name of “Snow Queen of Maruyama” because of the exceedingly beautiful whiteness of her skin.

  “Like the village idiot, eh?” Shuntarō chuckled. He was a jolly drinker, and when he laughed he twittered like a turtledove, not the sort of laugh one would have anticipated based on his massive bulk.

  “So you won’t be able to converse with the foreigners unless you make sounds like that?” Oyō taunted him with her eyes. “I hear that the foreigner at the Nambanji who’s teaching you these baby noises takes long strolls every day, gives candy to children, flies kites, and seems like an all-around nice man.”

  “Yeah.” Shuntarō nodded and looked through the window at the street below. On this spring evening, the lights of Maruyama flickered seductively. Swaggering by were men with scarves over their heads and their hands thrust into their pockets, as well as the bosses of merchant houses eager to deflower a novice geisha.

  Watching them from the second floor, Shuntarō’s smile suddenly changed to a gloomy expression and he muttered, “He’s a good man…. But he’s definitely a conniver.”

  “A conniver?”

  “Uh-huh. He seems to be planning to spread the prohibited Kirishitan teachings among the Japanese, and he’s making serious problems for the magistrate. It’s as though he’s rousing the normally docile peasants in Urakami from their slumber…. Those things you call his little strolls around Nagasaki … they aren’t the innocent little outings you think they are.”

  “If they aren’t just walks, what is he up to?”

  “I’m … I’m not sure yet. But he’s up to something. Definitely something …”

  Oyō’s eyes beamed with curiosity. “You mean not even the great Lord Hondō knows what it is yet?”

  Shuntarō knew from Itō Seizaemon’s reports that Petitjean and Laucaigne went out walking every afternoon. Seizaemon had likely concluded that Petitjean was guiding Laucaigne around Nagasaki, but there was just one thing that didn’t make sense to Shuntarō: the fact that they set out on their walks at precisely the same hour every day.

  According to Oyō’s memoirs from late in her life—

  Two or three days after she had this conversation with Shuntarō, she had an errand to run and headed for Kaji-chō on the other side of Shianbashi. As she walked the long road from Kaji-chō toward Teramachi, she noticed two foreigners strolling along, their backs to her.

  Curiously enough, the two foreigners were the pair that Shuntarō had labeled “connivers.” They walked along in a leisurely manner, glancing up at the temple roofs in Teramachi or calling out to children who were playing beside a fence. Thinking of what the man she loved had said about these foreigners, Oyō was driven by a desire to somehow be of assistance to Shuntarō, so she followed the two men.

  At one point the foreigners turned to look behind them, but they smiled in relief when they saw that the person walking a little ways behind them was merely a young woman.

  The sky was cloudless. A few kites hovered in the sky. And just a few moments earlier, a sash-shaped kite had climbed into the sky above Mount Kompira.

  Suddenly the two foreigners stopped in their tracks and said something to each other, then quickly turned on their heels and raced back along the road that had brought them to this point.

  As their paths crossed that of Oyō, she hastily bowed to them, and they lowered their heads in polite response….

  This all comes from Oyō’s memoirs, but however clever she may have been, she had no idea at the time that the kite over Mount Kompira served as the mode of communication between Petitjean and the Kirishitans in Urakami.

  The sash-shaped kite that had swept through the skies that day was, by prior agreement between Petitjean and Seikichi, a signal of urgency. It meant that there was a gravely ill person close to death in Nakano, and they were waiting frantically for the priest to come and administer the last rites and prayers.

  But when he scurried back to the Nambanji in Ōura, Petitjean found Hondō Shuntarō waiting at the entrance for his French lesson.

  Mon Dieu! If he didn’t reach Nakano quickly, the sick person might die. He had to find some way to slip away from Shuntarō.

  “You’ve been out?” The magistrate’s interpreter smiled, feigning ignorance.

  “Yes. Father Laucaigne and I have been on one of our long walks.”

  “You’ve been particularly diligent about taking those walks lately,” Shuntarō said trenchantly. “And they’re always at the same hour….”

  Petitjean tried to appear unperturbed by this comment, but he sensed that his own complexion had changed. He had been thrust on the defensive, and when Shuntarō said, “Well, shall we get on with the French lesson?” Petitjean could not refuse him. He fidgeted anxiously throughout the lesson, and when Shuntarō made ready to leave, he asked the priest, “What’s happened to you? You look as though your mind just isn’t here today.”

  After Shuntarō left, Petitjean rushed to Nakano, but the sick man had already died.

  1. A Western-style building completed in Tokyo in 1883, the Rokumeikan (Deer-Cry Hall) was the scene of many parties and dances for Japan’s social elite and became a symbol, for better or for worse, of the rapid Westernization of Meiji Japan.

  THE CONTEST

  THE BLOSSOMS HAVE fallen….

  Almost immediately Nagasaki was greeted by a flood of new sprouts. The young leaves sparkled in the early summer sun as though they had been soaked in oil, and homes were filled with the smell of new straw mats.

  Kiku was on high alert every morning. She was standing watch in hopes that she would hear Seikichi calling out his wares far in the distance.

  “Takkekuwai!”—That was what he shouted on days when he was selling bamboo shoots.

  Each time she heard that strong voice, Kiku ran to the front of the store, carrying her broom. Sweeping the street in front of the store was one of her assignments, but it was no longer as cold as it had been on wintry mornings, so she would have at least a little time to talk with the man she loved.

  But there was more to her anticipation. Each morning when she heard Seikichi’s voice, she breathed a sigh of relief. “The magistrate still hasn’t arrested him. Whew!”

  Seikichi merely laughed at her. “The magistrate can’t get his hands on me. Ever since you gave me the warning, me and everybody in the village is being careful so we don’t get caught!”

  At first she worried, but with each morning that she saw Seikichi striding energetically toward her, Kiku began to feel more and more at ease. Maybe Ichijirō had just been taunting her.

  “Kiku, I got this from the padre at the Nambanji.” One morning, Seikichi set down his load of goods, wiped the sweat
from his brow, and suddenly looked very solemn. He reached into his basket and carefully took out something that looked like a silver coin from some foreign land.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s called a medaille, and it’s engraved with the image of Santa Maria. It’s a very, very important treasure to us Kirishitans. I want you to have it for what you did for me.”

  “Me?” This was so unexpected that Kiku clutched her broom handle, her eyes sparkling.

  “Yeah. But you can’t show it to anybody else. If you show somebody, they might accuse you of being a Kirishitan.”

  The medaille he placed in the palm of her hand was engraved with an image of the woman she had seen in the Nambanji. Just like that statue, the woman here wore a crown and cradled an infant.

  “I won’t show it to anybody. I’ll take really really good care of it, since it’s from you.”

  “Ah.” Seikichi lowered his eyes in embarrassment. “You know who that woman is, don’t you? It’s the mother of Lord Jezusu. She’s called Maria…. If you pray with all your heart to her, she’ll listen to you, no matter what it’s about. That’s what we believe.”

  A voice called for Kiku from the kitchen, so Seikichi scrambled to hoist his basket full of bamboo shoots onto his shoulder and headed off, calling “Takkekuwai—!”

  The silver medaille shimmered in Kiku’s palm. It was the first present she’d ever received from a man, and her only possession that smelled of a foreign land.

  She heard footsteps. She swiftly hid her medaille.

  The fifth month. The month of early planting.

  In Nagasaki and the surrounding villages, the most important celebration in the fifth month was the day of the Pe-ron competition.

  On the fifth and sixth days of the fifth month, during the Boys’ Day festival, the young men from villages along the coast—including Magome, Takenokubo, Inasa, Mizunoura, Akunoura, Nishiura, Hiradokoya, and Senowaki—tied cylindrical towels around their heads, fastened their waistbands tightly, and participated in a rowing competition. The residents of each village and township assembled at the beach on those days and cheered on their team until their voices were hoarse. Their support for their teams was so impassioned that bloody fights would often break out.

  The Japanese were apparently imitating a competition run by the Chinese residents of Nagasaki, who set up competitions between their barges. There is also speculation that the word Pe-ron was the Nagasaki way of pronouncing the name of the Bailong—White Dragon Boats—from Guangdong Province. In any case, it appears that the competition got its start in China.

  Every year Magome sent a team of young men to compete in the White Dragon Boat Festival, so when the fifth day of the fifth month approached, virtually no young men could be spotted in the village. They all had gone to the seashore to practice their rowing.

  Ichijirō was one of the rowers, and he got so busy with practices that he scarcely did any work in the fields.

  And it wasn’t just the residents of Magome. Everyone in Nagasaki—male and female, elderly and young—grew buoyant in the bright spring weather and looked forward with excitement to the fifth and sixth. Spectators pressed toward the shores in such great numbers that the streets of Nagasaki were basically uninhabited while the boat festival was going on.

  “Padre.” Seikichi and his comrades described the White Dragon Boat Festival to Petitjean and said, “So, you see, there won’t be any spies from the magistrate out that day. Nagasaki will be deserted. You can come openly to Nakano and perform the Mass and hear confissão. Please!” Their plan was to take advantage of the boat racing day and assemble all the Kirishitans together.

  “Still,” Tokusaburō, one of Seikichi’s friends, cocked his head curiously, “I don’t understand why the magistrate hasn’t come to arrest us. Do you think they’re just afraid to?”

  Thanks to Seikichi’s report, they all knew they were being watched, but it seemed strange to them that the officials hadn’t raided their gatherings.

  “It’s probably because they haven’t caught us worshipping,” a young man named Kisuke responded. “Padre, what do you think?”

  Petitjean was puzzled as well. Piecing together some of what Hondō Shuntarō had said, he had concluded that the magistrate, suspicious of the entire region encompassing Nakano, Ieno, and Motohara, had been keeping an eye on them, but it baffled Petitjean that they did nothing more than observe.

  Petitjean concluded that perhaps the magistrate’s office was holding back out of fear that if they rounded up the Kirishitans, it would provoke the foreign nations who were even then pressing Japan to open its doors unconditionally.

  When he expressed this view to Seikichi, Tokusaburō, and Kisuke, they gleefully responded, “So that’s why they’re so spineless!” To these impoverished farmers, the thought that they had been able to render the magistrate impotent merely served to magnify the delight they felt, since they had never thought such a thing possible.

  The fifth day of the fifth month.

  The roads from Nagasaki to the Magome inlet were packed with spectators. The White Dragon boats were lined up in the ocean, the stern of each brandishing a flag or banner decorated with the emblem of its village or seaside hamlet. The boats were extremely narrow relative to their length, which ranged from 88 to 118 feet. In the center of each boat was a wooden post festooned with streamers made of white or colored paper braids, as an offering to the Shinto gods. A gong was affixed to the base of the post. Drums had also been provided, and young men who beat the gongs and drums rode in the boats along with the rowers.

  Before the boat race began, the beach and the road along the shore filled with people, who raised a tremendous clamor. The tumult swirled into the sky like a waterspout and could be heard all the way to Nakano and Motohara, which were quite a long way from the inlet.

  Petitjean and Laucaigne stood in a squalid hut at Motohara. Before them stretched a tight row of faces, each of them exposed over many long years to sweat and mud, poverty and labor, sickness and pain.

  Beginning the previous evening, these faces came pressing in one after another to plead with Petitjean. “Padre, please come quickly. I don’t think my mother’s going to last much longer. She keeps saying that before she dies she’d like the padre to offer oração for her.” They begged fervently on behalf of infants who needed baptism, sins that needed confessing, and prayers and the Extreme Unction that needed to be performed before death.

  Petitjean and Laucaigne hardly slept. Like doctors in a field hospital, they listened to petitions from one location after another, and in response to those requests they spent the entire night making the rounds of Nakano, Motohara, and Ieno.

  “Is your mother’s illness critical? If not, could you ask her to wait just a little while? The two of us can’t get to everybody at once.”

  “Padre.” A man they had never seen before pushed his way to the front of the throng and pleaded with trepidation, “I’m from Shitsu. There are Kirishitans in Shitsu, and there are many hiding out in Sotome as well. Padre, we wait day after day for a padre to come to us.”

  The shouts from the beach grew more vehement. The boat race had begun. The sounds of the drums and gongs echoed amid the shouting. People were intoxicated by the festivities.

  But this room was filled with something other than festivity; it brimmed with human suffering and sorrow. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Petitjean recalled passages from the Bible.

  Blessed are they that mourn

  For they shall be comforted

  He raised one arm and pronounced a blessing on each of these people who had been buffeted by pain and grief.

  In this makeshift chapel a baby wailed as though it had been set on fire. Its mother slapped and scolded it. The smells of cow dung and urine blew in on a breeze. In a few moments he would be baptizing this child.

  After he performed the infant’s baptism, he and Father Laucaigne left their chapel hut an
d began calling on one house after another. Every house was pitiful and squalid and looked like a squashed animal shed. The smell of dung from pigs, cows, and goats hovered over them, and a flock of children pursued the two priests.

  Peering into a dark, grimy house, Petitjean called out to an elderly bedridden woman.

  “Forgive us. We couldn’t come sooner because we’ve been occupied since last night.”

  He sat beside the old woman’s bed, surrounded by people of the village. The woman’s mucus-caked eyes were tightly shut, and she spoke not a word.

  “Padre, for the past three days she hasn’t eaten a thing or said a single word. She’s beyond help. Please say a final oração for her.” This came from a woman who sat by the afflicted woman, batting her eyelids.

  Petitjean nodded, took the old woman’s bony hand, and muttered the Latin prayer. The others in the room seemed to have closed their eyes in prayer as well.

  “Padre, how blessed this old lady is. She has a padre to offer this oração for her,” whispered one man with a sigh. “My mother died without ever being able to hear a padre’s oração.”

  Petitjean remembered that day when he had been signaled by the kite to notify him that this man’s mother was about to breathe her last, but he hadn’t been able to come quickly enough because of Hondō Shuntarō’s meddling.

  “Padre, my mother ended up being buried with sutras chanted by the Buddhist priest at Shōtokuji. I guess because of that she won’t be able to go to Paraíso.” The man stared reproachfully at Petitjean.

  Petitjean came to realize after his arrival in this country just how vital the Japanese regarded the services for their deceased parents and relatives. The Kirishitans of these villages were no different. Many of the questions they posed to Petitjean involved whether their dead parents and relatives could still be saved in heaven when, under orders from the magistrate, the services had been performed in the Buddhist tradition at their local temple, the Shōtokuji.