But he soon found that getting into school was just the beginning. He was at the bottom of the lowest class. He was busy morning to night studying, exercising and learning martial arts. All the teachers and military instructors were French, for, as they boasted to the students, the French army was the best in the world and their aim was to make the new Japanese army just as good. The first task was to learn French and all about France – its history, geography, mountains, rivers and cities. Only then could the students start on the manuals of military theory and tactics, all written in French.
Nobu lived like a Frenchman. He slept in a dormitory on a hard bed, not a futon, sat on a chair at a table and ate French meals – soup, bread and meat, with rice and curried meat on Saturdays. It took a bit of time to get used to eating meat but all the same, while the other students complained about the food, Nobu felt as if he’d been reborn in Amida Buddha’s western paradise.
But then the holidays had come. All his schoolfriends had somewhere to go but he had nowhere and once again had to find a job as a servant to tide him over.
‘A coeur vaillant rien d’impossible,’ he muttered.
There was a giggle and a small hand with grubby fingers and bitten nails slapped down on his page. He started. The sweet-voiced girl leaned her soft body, moist with sweat, against his, enveloping him in the heady scent of sandalwood and aloe. He laughed, acknowledging defeat. The lanterns in the corners cast long shadows and a thick fug of tobacco hung in the air. It wasn’t worth trying to read any longer.
‘My, but he’s the studious one,’ the girl trilled. Under the white make-up, thick enough to plaster a storehouse wall, she had an impish face with a pointed chin and questioning eyes. She was young, no more than thirteen. ‘But I like them studious,’ she said in wheedling tones, looking up at him with big eyes. ‘And such a nice-looking boy. Reading, are you? Your master’ll be a long time gone, you know. Mori-sama, isn’t it? It’s a big party he’s having, he has twenty guests. He won’t be asking for you, not for a long while.’
‘You know who he’s booked tonight?’ said the second voice, snickering. ‘Our Segawa. Only the best will do for Mori-sama, only our Segawa, the most famous courtesan in the whole Yoshiwara – no, the whole country. She’s like the cherry blossom, there’s none to equal her. She’ll keep your Mori-sama busy till dawn, I can tell you now! She’s a toppler of castles, a ruiner of men, she can bring a nation to its knees with a swish of her skirts, have men tearing at each other’s throats.’ The old woman gave a chortle. ‘Of course, we know you can’t afford a castle-toppler yourself. I can’t see you bankrupting yourself for anyone, my son, you’ve nothing to bankrupt yourself with. But you could run to a maidservant or a waitress or a bathhouse girl. We have ladies for all budgets and we can make a special price for a handsome lad like you. We wouldn’t want you to end up down some stinking alley with a night hawk or a river duck or a hundred-mon woman now, would we? That would be a waste, nice young fellow like you.’ The woman cackled and the girl purred with laughter.
There were snorts from the other side of the room, where Bunkichi and Zenkichi, Nobu’s fellow attendants, were sharing a flask of sake, long pipes drooping from their lips.
‘What sort of talk is that, Auntie?’ demanded Bunkichi. His sash was loosely tied and his cotton jacket flapping open, revealing a hollow chest, scrawny arms and stringy thighs. The maids pawed at him admiringly. ‘“Courtesan”, “castle-toppler”? We use more down-to-earth words these days. “Ladies for hire”, isn’t that what we say? And this establishment of yours – it’s a “rental parlour”, I believe. And you’re “Madam” now, not “Auntie”.’ He took a hairy green pod from the dish in front of him and squeezed a boiled soy bean into his mouth, then belched.
‘Always the sharp one, Bunkichi,’ said the woman. She had a withered face and narrow black eyes that took in everything. ‘What do they call it – the Cattle Release Act?’ She gave a snort of laughter.
‘The Prostitute Emancipation Act,’ said Zenkichi, thrusting out his chest and enunciating the syllables in comically pompous tones. He was a smooth-faced fellow with the air of a dandy.
‘It certainly hasn’t done much for business,’ said the old woman dryly. ‘Some of the girls in the other houses even took the opportunity to slip away. The gods only know where they went. But the best houses, like ours, haven’t had any problems. We’ve always been kind to our girls.’ Her face crinkled into a thin smile. ‘But you’re quite right, my boy. Nowadays nobody’s bought and sold any more and our girls have had their debts forgiven. Though, foolish creatures that they are, they just go on running up new ones. So you see, we still need customers – like our dear Mori-sama; and everyone understands the old words better than the new.’
So here he was, back in the Yoshiwara, the city of endless pleasure, where darkness never fell, the lights never went out and the streets heaved with merrymakers. It was years since Nobu had first come here as a child, waiting patiently in the antechamber while his master frittered away the hours upstairs.
As he’d followed Mori-sama through the Great Gate and down the Central Boulevard, marching alongside Bunkichi and Zenkichi, the place had seemed grimier, more tawdry than he remembered. Sake vendors and fortune tellers squatted in the dust, teahouse maids dozed in cool corners behind lowered blinds, and a single food stall offered bowls of tepid noodles to servants from the pleasure houses. The sparkle of excitement, the promise of endless possibility had entirely disappeared. The place had lost its glamour. Or maybe it was him that had changed, not the Yoshiwara.
Even the famous Pine Cone House looked distinctly run down. The tatami was worn and shabby, the railings broken, the paper panes roughly patched. The anteroom, where the attendants waited, was dank and airless and reeked of stale food and dirty bedding. From the floor above came girlish shrieks and yells of laughter, the strumming of shamisens and sounds of singing and dancing, growing louder and wilder as the night wore on. Later, he knew, there would be grunts and groans and ecstatic yelps.
‘Hey.’ The imp-faced girl tried to snatch Nobu’s book and as he grabbed it back, the page tore. Cursing, he thrust it into his bag. ‘A coeur vaillant rien d’impossible,’ he repeated to himself. The words were like a mantra. They helped him forget where he was.
‘Don’t you like having fun?’ the girl whined, tugging at his sash.
‘You’re wasting your time. We’ve no money,’ said Bunkichi. ‘Especially our Nobu, all he ever does is read. He might as well be a monk.’
‘Maybe he has someone special,’ said the girl, tilting her chin and glancing slyly up at Nobu.
‘Hey, Nobu. Someone you’re soft on, is there?’ said Bunkichi with a leer. ‘Nothing to be ashamed of. I’m soft on Oshin here, aren’t I?’ He grabbed at a bony serving girl with a pinched face and protruding lower lip who was running by heading for the kitchens. Giggling, she beat him off with her fists. ‘Tell us, who is it?’
Nobu kept his mouth clamped firmly shut. Bunkichi was trying to goad him into speaking so he could make fun of his accent; but he wouldn’t succeed.
Zenkichi piped up. ‘I don’t pay any money, I gets what I wants without paying a sen. I have to fight them off, I tell you. I was waiting for the master the other day at a restaurant downtown. Took a stroll round the block and the girls are all calling after me, “Hey, handsome!” One just throws herself at me – not much of a looker, but a good figure. We go to the back of her teahouse and I take her right there.’
‘So how was she?’ asked Bunkichi, sniggering.
‘“A suck like an octopus …”’
‘“… a grip like a trapdoor, tight like a purse”,’ said Bunkichi, running his tongue around his fleshy lips. He paused and narrowed his eyes to a lascivious squint. ‘Reminds me of this teahouse girl I met a few days ago. I’d won at cards and I comes swaggering into the Yoshiwara with a purse full of yen and there she is behind the lattices. Pretty little thing. She sets eyes on me and she’s smitten, I could
tell straight away. Now that was a suck like an octopus! You fellows stay here and keep an eye on things and I’ll slip off and say hello. Just hello, mind.’
‘Just hello, Bunkichi?’ said Zenkichi. ‘Like last time, just hello, is it?’
Nobu laughed. He was used to his fellow attendants’ bragging, he’d heard it all before. If he’d had the money he might have spent it that way himself, but he needed to hang on to every sen and mon he could. In any case he’d rather save it for something better. Even the imp-faced girl was not to his taste. He picked up the bag containing his precious book and turned towards the vestibule.
‘Hey, you can’t leave. Where you going?’
‘Outside,’ he grunted. ‘Gonna take a look around.’
‘What was that?’ bawled the attendants, grinning in delight. ‘Can’t understand a word he says! Whoa, listen to that. You gotta lose that accent. You can talk how you like at home but here in the Yoshiwara you gotta talk sophisticated. You sound like a bumpkin!’
‘I understood exactly what he said,’ said the maid who’d been lolling against him. ‘Anyway, who cares how he talks? He’s a lot better-looking than either of you two.’
Nobu squatted morosely outside the door, his thin-stemmed pipe in his mouth, and struck a flint.
Red lanterns glowed along the Central Boulevard, making the street as bright as day. Men dressed for a night on the town jostled elbows, old women with shrivelled walnut faces plucked at passing sleeves.
‘The Yamato House, gentlemen, try our wares! Prime young women at knock-down prices!’ a voice quavered from one side of the street.
‘The Kano House, this way!’ came a croak from the other. ‘Beautiful young women, moist and tender, waiting to devote themselves to your pleasure. Their skills know no bounds!’
‘Prices reduced across the board,’ squawked another. ‘All fresh new prostitutes. Jug of sake and bowl of soup thrown in for free!’
Fortune tellers and hawkers of food shouted at the tops of their voices while pedlars of woodblock prints designed to enflame desire, depicting clients and prostitutes with unfeasibly large sexual organs entwined in all manner of unlikely positions, held up their wares to the indifferent gaze of the passers-by. When the crowds parted Nobu caught a glimpse of the latticed cage of the brothel across the boulevard and the painted girls in gaudy kimonos crowded inside, staring into the night or plucking listlessly on shamisens.
There were barbarians too, more than ever before – the polite word now, he reminded himself, was ‘outsider’ – sauntering up and down with their ungainly gait, peering into cages with their big round eyes popping out of their heads. They came in all shapes and sizes, mostly giants but some smaller ones, some fat, some thin, with pinkish, brownish or even black skin, but all uniformly ugly and hairy, with exaggerated features and grotesquely beaky noses.
Aromas of roasting eel, fish-paste cakes and grilling sparrows on skewers swirled enticingly, mingling with dust, sweat and alluring perfumes, with pungent gusts of sewage underlying all.
Nobu inhaled the fragrant tobacco and blew out a long plume of smoke, watching it dissolve into the air. The rough cotton at the back of his neck prickled in the heat. He took a plug of tobacco and rolled it between his fingers, then packed his pipe and took another puff, chewing thoughtfully on the stem. There were so many responsibilities. His brother Kenjiro ill again, for a start. His brothers had come south and managed to find a small house in Tokyo but now he had to pay the rent on it and buy Kenjiro’s medicine; and his father and Gosaburo up north needed money too. They all worked as hard as they could but for the time being he was in the best position to earn. Now it was the summer holidays, he had to use this time to make as much money as he could. He’d soon be back in the barracks and then there’d be exams. If he failed he’d be out on his ear and then what? What would become of his family, who depended on him?
Study and earn money. He had to concentrate on that. A coeur vaillant rien d’impossible.
Suddenly he caught the sound of a voice, jaunty and teasing, rising above the clatter of clogs and the din of shouts and laughter. ‘Hey, Yamakawa, how you doing? Quite a night we had of it, what? That last drinking session about finished me off.’ Somewhere in the back of his mind a memory stirred. He knew that self-satisfied drawl but for the life of him he couldn’t place it.
He listened intently, but the voice had disappeared. Then he heard it again, floating across the sea of bobbing black heads towards him. It was speaking Edo dialect, but with a hint of a Kyoto twang. ‘I’d never have got out of here this morning if it hadn’t been for our rickshaw boy waiting at the gate. Suzuki, you’re not looking so fresh yourself today, what?’ The din of the crowd drowned the answer.
Nobu stared at the crush of bodies, trying to pick out a face he knew. The voice was coming closer.
‘And isn’t this little Ayame?’ It was the tones of a man talking to a child or a woman or a dog. ‘Just look how she’s grown! She’ll be celebrating her first night any time now, won’t she? Who’s going to share her first night’s bedclothes with her?’
Nobu caught the answer.
‘You wouldn’t believe who the lucky fellow is, Eijiro-sama!’
Of course. Eijiro. Taka’s brother, Eijiro. Nobu had always known Eijiro was a great patron of the pleasure quarters. It was amazing he hadn’t bumped into him before.
As the realization hit home, Nobu started back and shrank into the shadows. He remembered that voice all too well. He could still hear his rough bark: ‘Oi, you. Call these boots clean? You should be able to see your ugly face in them. Mother says she caught you reading again. We don’t pay you to read.’ There had been not the remotest hint of charm when he yelled at Nobu.
‘You don’t pay me at all,’ Nobu had muttered. He flinched, remembering the cuff round the head those words had earned him.
‘We feed you, we house you, what more do you want? I know you helped Mother out once, but we can’t run a house on charity. Stupid northerners, lazy degenerate sods the lot of you. Don’t worry, I’ll find a way to get rid of you. You think we’ll have trouble finding another servant? You can’t take a step without treading on one these days.’
The crowd parted in a flurry of sycophantic bows and Nobu saw a head poking above the rest. He knew the drooping eyes and full mouth. It was a square face, jowly around the cheeks, almost as if some foreign blood had crept in, a little broader, a little fleshier than he remembered, but Eijiro sure enough. He sauntered along in an elegant kimono, nodding to left and right like a daimyo among his subjects. Then, with a lift of his eyebrows, he reached ostentatiously inside his collar and pulled out something that sparkled like gold in the lantern light.
‘Eiji-kun, is that for me?’ a silky voice sang out. ‘It’s not often you see one of those in here. What do you call it – a timepiece? Won’t you give it to me?’
There was a swirl of colour between the black heads and drab robes. Slinking gracefully beside Eijiro was a dainty figure in shimmering silks with a preposterously huge coiffure studded with glittering hairpins. Nobu glimpsed a porcelain face, camellia lips and slanted fox eyes and heard groans of lust and shouts of ‘Tsukasa-sama, Tsukasa-sama, I’m saving up my yen.’ ‘Tsukasa-sama, wait for me, I’ll buy your freedom one day.’ So this was the famous Tsukasa – more renowned by far than Segawa of the Pine Cone House, who, people whispered, was beginning to dry up.
‘Had a win on the cards, then, Eijiro?’ shouted a voice from the crowd.
Eijiro strolled on, lips curled in a supercilious smile. He passed by without looking in Nobu’s direction.
Nobu grimaced. That self-satisfied face brought back too many memories. He remembered the gate slamming behind him and found himself thinking of Taka, her wide eyes and innocent girlish face. She’d been kind to him. She’d seen worth in him when no one else had.
It was nearly Tanabata again, the one day of the year when the tragic lovers, the weaver princess and the cowherd, could be together. It w
ould be observed with the greatest fervour here in the Yoshiwara, where love and romance and everything that went with them were celebrated. The thought of Taka made his heart ache and he squared his shoulders. He had a new life; that was all in the past now.
The street was still jostling with people but the mood had changed. The din of voices had turned hostile. A knot of shaggy heads closed in around one burly figure.
‘What’ya doing?’ It was Eijiro. ‘Stop shoving us around.’
Voices growled menacingly in the impenetrable mumble of the Edo underclass. Nobu had lived for years on the rough side of town and could understand well enough what they were saying. ‘Hey, you, big man. Daddy send you, did he? Gives you money, does he? Lots of it, too, by the looks of it.’
‘Keep my father out of this, you ignorant dog,’ Eijiro snarled. It seemed he could understand too.
‘Who’re you calling a dog? Get your paws off Tsukasa. You bumpkins come here, take our city and our women, strut around like you own the place. Get back to your yam fields where you belong!’
There were yells and thumps and sounds of pushing and scuffling, followed by the screech of ripping fabric and a woman’s indignant shout. Nobu hesitated. Eijiro was his sworn enemy, he had every reason to hate him. He’d beaten him, thrown him out on the street, and he was the son of General Kitaoka, the scourge of the north. But he was Taka’s brother. He was on his own. Nobu couldn’t stand by and see him killed.
He scrambled to his feet and plunged into the crowd of gawping spectators, pushing aside damp silk and sweaty bodies. People staggered back protesting, shouting curses at him.
Eijiro was surrounded by a gang of youths, brandishing sticks and knives. Some were in cotton jackets, others stripped to their loincloths with tattoos rippling across their chests and backs and sinewy thighs gleaming with sweat. Eijiro had squared up to the youths. As far as Nobu could see, he was unarmed. Tsukasa stood beside him, her dainty fingers curled around the hilt of a dagger half drawn from her obi, her scarlet lips pursed in disdain. Eijiro’s friends had melted away at the first hint of trouble.