Kiku's Prayer: A Novel

  And that is why, when her parents and grandmother hesitated to answer, muttering something like “Mitsu and Kiku are still a little young to be maidservants,” Kiku jumped right in and said, “Reverend, I’ll go!”

  “So you’ll go, will you, Kiku?” This put the priest in good spirits, but he made sure to emphasize for her: “But Kiku, working as a servant isn’t like going on picnics or a flower-viewing excursion. You can’t be unruly the way you are here at home. You have to accept the fact that there will be difficult times as well…. And what about you, Mitsu?”

  “If Kiku’s going, so am I,” she answered without hesitation, as if it were only natural. Since their childhood, she’d formed the habit of following after Kiku in everything.

  “Well now, well now …” Their parents delayed giving a final answer, and after the priest had left, they discussed with Kiku the trials of working in a stranger’s home.

  “But if I work there, it will help out our family, too.”

  They had no answer to that. It was true that having Kiku and Mitsu working at a merchant house in Nagasaki could certainly bolster the household finances a bit.

  “Mitsu.” When the two of them were alone, Kiku gave her gentle cousin some encouragement, “There’s nothing to worry about. We’ll learn so much more in a place like Nagasaki than here in this village that always stinks of manure.”

  “I’m not worried. I’ll be with you,” Mitsu said with a grin.

  It was around the end of the Spring Festival2 that the priest of Shōtokuji made the final arrangement for Kiku’s and Mitsu’s employment. During the Spring Festival the children of Magome fashioned a white rat out of daikon radishes, which they placed on a tray and brought out in the morning, racing from house to house and shouting, “The White Rat’s here!!” This was seemingly in imitation of what the children in Nagasaki did, but Kiku and Mitsu and her friends had been doing this since they were young.

  Granny sang an auspicious “bean throwing” song for the benefit of her two granddaughters, who hereafter would be living in a stranger’s home. It was a song from Sotome Village where Granny grew up.

  Ebisu, the god of plenty,

  Has come into our home

  Scattering oh so many beans!

  Just as Watanabe no Raikō,

  Governor of Settsu Province,

  Exterminated the saké-drinking demon

  Of Mount Ōe in Tamba Province

  (It’s OK to say it,

  It’s OK not to say it),

  Cast the evil spirits out,

  Bring good fortune in!

  Evil spirits out,

  Good fortune in!

  That’s the way, that’s the way!

  Bring in lots of money!!

  Kiku and Mitsu collapsed in laughter as they watched their Granny’s toothless mouth spout out these words, but the realization that they would be leaving this home tomorrow made them somber. And they worried that they might make stupid mistakes in that unknown household or become a laughingstock. It was discouraging that nobody knew anything about the master of the house or any of its occupants.

  “Ichijirō, you be sure and come visit us after you go to the farmers’ market,” they kept reminding him, and each time Ichijirō smiled and nodded, “Sure, I will.”

  The skies were clear the following morning. The two girls, escorted by Ichijirō and the priest, headed toward Nagasaki. When they left the house, their parents spoke not a word, and Granny wept. Neighborhood children gathered to watch in wonderment.

  To their right, the ocean glittered brightly all the way to the horizon, and one large sailing ship floated atop it. This was the first foreign vessel that Mitsu or Kiku had ever seen. Neither the priest nor Ichijirō had any idea what country it belonged to, but the priest remarked, “The attitude of the magistrate’s office has changed of late. Many ships of the Southern Barbarians come to Nagasaki now.” He went on to mutter with some disgruntlement that the barbarians were now proudly walking the streets of Nagasaki. To his mind, America and Great Britain and Holland were all Southern Barbarian nations, and the barbarians themselves were believers in a profane religion.

  “Of course, sir.” Ichijirō, who had no idea what any of this was about, bowed his head apologetically, as though the priest’s irritation was his own fault.

  A black kite soared across the brilliant sky. They had walked for a long while, and the road along the beach became an incline. This hill was called Nishizaka, where in the past an execution ground had been located. Dozens of the heretical Christians so hated by the chief priest of Shōtokuji had been executed here.

  Once they climbed the hill and began their descent, the city of Nagasaki lay before them.

  Unlike Magome, where every home was a thatched-roof farmhouse, here the streets were jammed with black-tiled residences. They could also see the steeples of churches. They noticed a red Chinese-style building.

  “Well now, this is Nagasaki!” Ichijirō poked his sister’s shoulder.

  It was so unlike their village of Magome, which was dotted with farmhouses built between rice paddies and fields and groves of trees. The two girls were utterly overwhelmed, and all they could do was walk forlornly beside the priest and Ichijirō, making sure not to get separated from them.

  “Oh, look!” Mitsu came to a dead stop, her eyes wide in astonishment as she spotted some Chinese walking along, their braided hair sweeping down over the shoulders of their mandarin garb. They climbed the stone stairs directly beside where the Japanese stood and disappeared through the vermilion gates of a Chinese temple.

  As the group from Magome continued on, the priest stopped and pointed to a stone bridge crossing a river. “This is Meganebashi—Spectacle Bridge. See, it looks just like eyeglasses, doesn’t it?” The supports of the bridge reflected on the surface of the water in such a way that the shape really did look like a pair of glasses.

  Houses, then more houses. A long wall surrounding a temple, followed by a gigantic roof. They climbed one hill, turned to the right, then ascended yet another hill.

  “We’re almost there.”

  Soon they were standing in front of a large dry-goods store. Apprentices and customers of the shop scurried in and out through the dyed curtain at the door-way. The name “Gotōya” was written boldly across the curtain.

  “Wait here.” Leaving the other three standing next to the shop, the Shōtokuji priest nimbly disappeared through the curtain.

  They waited a long while.

  “What do you think’s going on?” Mitsu tugged nervously at Kiku’s sleeve. Ichijirō, who had been carrying the girls’ two wicker trunks, finally lowered them to the ground and sat on one. Then suddenly he got to his feet and whispered to his sister, “Mitsu! There’s a Southern Barbarian heading this way!”

  A tall man who appeared to be totally encased in white robes was coming toward them.

  His nose truly was enormous. His hair was as golden as corn silk. And his skin was pinkish.

  “Oh, my!” Even more astonished than when she saw the Chinese men, Mitsu swallowed hard and gripped Kiku’s hand. Their hands tightly joined, the two girls watched apprehensively as the foreigner passed by them.

  “G’morning!” As he walked by, the barbarian suddenly smiled and greeted them in an oddly accented voice, but the two stood frozen and said nothing.

  Finally Mitsu exhaled something that was either a sigh or a moan and said, “That was scary!”

  “What was scary about it? The Southern Barbarians aren’t devils, you know,” Kiku chided her.

  Eventually the priest reemerged from the shop. “The Mistress says she will meet you. But you three can’t come in this way. Employees have to enter through the service door.” He pointed to a narrow doorway at the side of the shop.

  What transpired thereafter neither Mitsu nor Kiku remembered very well, having been so stressed as it was happening. The Mistress of the Gotōya came out holding a toothache plaster against her jaw and examined the two girls from head to
toe.

  “You girls simply must work in good harmony with all the others,” she announced, summoning the oldest servant, Oyone, who apparently held a position something like head servant, and after instructing Ichijirō to take the girls’ trunks to a room on the second floor, Oyone introduced the girls to Tome, who worked in the kitchen.

  “Tome came to us from the Gotō Islands. Many of the men serving here at our shop come from Gotō, just as the shop name says. I myself was born in Ōmura,” Oyone smiled, showing her gums.

  Tome was the same age as Kiku. Tome gave a brief nod and went back to work, watching from a distance as the two new girls were taught many things about the shop.

  “So there’s five shopboys. Making breakfast for them will be enough to make your head spin. There’ll be no sleeping in for you.” Then Oyone lowered her voice and said, “The Mistress here is pretty rough on her employees.” Again she smiled a gummy smile.

  “Ichijirō, it’s OK for you to go now,” Kiku called out to her cousin who waited quietly and anxiously in a corner of the entryway. “If you don’t go now, you won’t make it back to Magome before the sun goes down.”

  “Yeah.” Ichijirō nodded, but he cast a worried look at the two girls and said, “You two give it your all now.” He nodded to Oyone and went out onto the road, where the sun still shone brightly.

  When Ichijirō had passed from view, Mitsu felt as though she had been abandoned. Now her cousin Kiku was the only person she had to rely on.

  Oyone, after ordering the two girls to help Tome clean the kitchen and the earthen floor of the entryway, disappeared inside.

  As Kiku wrung out her cleaning rag, she asked Tome, “Is the Mistress really so strict?”

  Tome nodded. “Yeah, she is. It’s like the missus in ‘Three Years at Hard Labor.’”

  “Three years at—?”

  “You don’t know that? On Gotō in the old days, if a family couldn’t pay their land taxes, their daughters were forced into three years of hard labor for the ruler.” In a soft voice, Tome sang a folk song from the Gotō Islands:

  When you’re shipped out for three years at hard labor,

  Your mistress will be strict….

  In the morning, she sends you to the fields;

  At noon, she sends you to the mountains;

  At night, you work till eight.

  No doubt the mistress will have no worries in the future,

  While we’ll end up cripples.

  That was the start of Mitsu’s and Kiku’s lives in Nagasaki.

  “You can’t be pampered children anymore,” the priest of the Shōtokuji had repeatedly cautioned them as they were leaving the village. And he was right: Starting the day after their arrival, their lives became incredibly demanding, even for girls who were accustomed to the challenging daily routine at a farmhouse.

  For starters, they had to wake up at the first cock’s crow. The maidservants had the responsibility of preparing breakfast and cleaning up after the servants and the family who operated the Gotōya. Their first task was to light the fire, boil the water, and draw drinking water.

  When the sky began to grow light, the girls raised in the backwater of Magome had the unusual experience of hearing the voices of door-to-door tradesmen making their rounds.

  “What are those voices?” they asked Tome, who explained to them what the men were shouting.

  Shibayashi bai!

  Hana ya hanai, hanainai!

  Ko-ko! Kyu!

  They gathered that the fellow calling out “Hana ya hanai, hanainai!” was strolling around selling flowers, but it was news to them that the man shouting “Shibayashi bai!” was talking about the evergreen branches that people placed on the tiny Shinto altars in their homes, and that “Ko-ko! Kyu!” came from a man hawking the radishes and other pickled vegetables that they served with breakfast.

  They had no problem lighting fires or boiling water, since these were things they had done back in Magome, but they were left breathless when it came to racing back and forth over and over between the well and the kitchen in order to scoop water with little pails and pour it into a huge kettle. When the Mistress of the house finally got up and saw Kiku and Mitsu working at that together, she scolded them:

  “Mitsu should be able to do that by herself. Kiku, you go sweep in front of the shop.”

  The Mistress was just as tough on her staff as Tome had warned, and she found no shortage of faults to pick at.

  “Mitsu, why are you so out of breath?”

  “Tome, this rice is as hard as rocks. It’s inedible!”

  About the time they completed their chores, the apprentices had gotten out of bed, and the girls began to wipe down the floors inside the shop. They crawled around on their hands and knees, polishing the floors until they glistened.

  When the shop master awakened, he gathered all the clerks and apprentices and his wife to offer up prayers before both the Shinto and Buddhist altars. Then breakfast would begin. The maidservants were allowed to eat at seats on a lower level, but they had little time to savor the taste of their food, since they had to be constantly scurrying around refilling the men’s soup and rice bowls.

  Both Kiku and Mitsu lost themselves in their work for the first five or six days. They didn’t even have time to think “I hate this,” or “I’m so sad,” or “I want to go back to Magome!”

  “Mitsu, those cracks must hurt!”

  Blood was seeping out of cracks in Mitsu’s hands from having to scoop out water almost ceaselessly. Kiku winced as she looked at Mitsu’s hands and mumbled encouragingly, “My hands really itch where they got chilblains.”

  Still, Kiku’s determined self-respect would not allow her to utter a word of complaint, since this work was something she had volunteered to do.

  And then something unexpected happened.

  Some six months since they’d come to work at the shop, they awoke to a cold morning, even though the spring equinox had passed.

  The servants had to get up extra early that day, since the master was taking his head clerks on the “Seven High Mountains” pilgrimage. This was an event in which the participants visited seven of the hills around Nagasaki and made votive offerings at each mountaintop temple. Many of the shop owners participated in this ritual.

  Puffing on her hands that were numb with cold, Kiku swept the road in front of the shop with a broom. Mitsu endured the pain in her chapped hands as she scooped up water.

  “Mozukuhyai, O-sahyai!” The cries of the morning tradesmen echoed from down the road. Both mozuku and o-sa were kinds of seaweed sold in early spring in Nagasaki.

  One young tradesman, only slightly older than Kiku, drew closer to her as she swept and asked, “Need any mozuku?”

  “Nope,” she answered curtly. But then she took a quick glance at the man’s face and gulped hard. Even though ten years had passed, she still remembered the young man’s face.

  She couldn’t forget it.

  It was the young man who had saved her when she had tried to climb the huge camphor tree on a dare from Snotnose and Crybaby.

  “Ummm—” Kiku hurriedly called to him as he started to move on. “Ummm—” Nothing else would come out of her mouth.

  “Yes?” The youth smiled, showing healthy teeth. “The miss would like to buy some mozuku?”

  “Aren’t you from Nakano in Urakami, sir?” Her manner of speech became a bit more polite.

  The young man gazed curiously at this girl who knew what village he was from. “How do you know that? Are you from Urakami, miss?”

  “Yes,” Kiku nodded. “I know you.”

  “You know me?” He eyed her suspiciously.

  “I do. When I was little, you saved me when I climbed up a tree and couldn’t get down.”

  “Saved you?” He crunched his eyes into an even narrower stare, trying to summon up an old memory as he looked into Kiku’s face. “Ah! I remember when that happened…. Well, you’ve certainly become a fine young lady.”

  Kiku b
lushed and averted her eyes. “Another girl from back home works here, too. She’s over there.” She pointed toward Mitsu, who was dipping up water.

  Mitsu was pouring water from the well bucket into several smaller pails she had arranged in a row. The well water was still as cold as ice.

  “Mitsu!” She turned around at Kiku’s voice. “Hey, take a good look. You remember this fellow, don’t you?”

  A young peddler wearing a familiar smile stood next to Kiku.

  “You’ve forgotten, haven’t you? Remember when I climbed that tree and got stuck, and there was a young man who saved me? That was this gentleman!”

  Mitsu’s jaw dropped open vacantly as she stood with empty buckets in each hand.

  Kiku said proudly, “He was passing by here on his morning sales route. He sure took me by surprise!”

  The young man looked piteously at Mitsu’s bare wet feet and chapped hands and said to Kiku, “I guess being a maid is rough, eh?”

  “But I’m not by myself. Mitsu and I work here together. It’s not at all lonely.”

  The young man nodded but said nothing and began pouring water into a bucket that Mitsu had set down. “I’ll dip out the water for you. You just carry in the pails.”

  Mitsu nodded and set out for the kitchen with a full pail.

  “My name’s Kiku.” Kiku announced her name loudly, as though she were disgruntled that the young man had focused his kindness on Mitsu.

  “I’m Seikichi,” he answered as he worked.

  “So you come to Nagasaki every morning to do your sales?”

  Seikichi smiled and nodded in response.

  “Then I guess you go by here every morning …”

  “Not every morning. Depending on the day, I sometimes go by way of Teramachi.”

  Knowing none of the directions in Nagasaki, Kiku had no idea where Teramachi might be.

  “Why don’t you come this way?”

  Her disappointed look caught him off guard. “Well … I don’t really care which way I go, so long as there’s somebody willing to buy mozuku.”