‘Your grandmother and sisters were also calm, entirely calm and resolved. They were true samurai, all of them. There was no time to dress for death but they all wrote their death poems and entrusted them to Juémon. Mother cut off a lock of her hair and asked him to ensure it was put in the family grave. Then she asked him to administer the last blow and one by one they … they cut their throats.’ His voice was shaking. He swallowed hard and was silent. Then he spoke again. ‘Even little Sato didn’t hesitate, though she was only seven. She put the dagger to her throat with great courage and determination. You would both have been proud if you’d been here.
‘Your mother was the last, of course. Juémon helped them to die, as they’d requested. He cut off their heads, then set fire to the house.
‘So you see, they weren’t dishonoured. They weren’t killed by the enemy, they didn’t burn to death in the flames. They died like samurai by their own hands. They were fine women, all of them, fine brave women. I am proud of them and I miss them.’ The last words were more like a sob.
Nobu knew he should be proud they’d died with such dignity. It was what every samurai hoped for, an honourable death. But all he could feel was horror and terrible pain. He’d known they were dead, he’d lived with that knowledge and come to terms with it, but he’d never before had to think about how they’d died. The old wound had been reopened. It was too forceful a reminder of their loss. Groaning, he put his head on his knees and clapped his hands over his ears.
The hut seemed too small. Stifled by the smoke, he leapt to his feet and rushed outside. But as he dropped to his knees, gulping down the cool autumn air in great convulsive breaths, he realized that this was the very spot, this blackened expanse of scorched earth. This was where they’d died. The ground was drenched with their blood.
There was a hand on his shoulder. Yasu had followed him out. ‘This is no way to behave. Our mother and grandmother and sisters behaved with courage and we should too.’ His voice softened. ‘You’re young still. When you’ve seen war, when you’ve seen your comrades cut down like rice under the scythe, even then is not the time to weep. We have to learn to be dry-eyed, like little Sato. Many Aizu families lost their womenfolk in the same way. We have to help Father. His suffering is the greatest.’
‘I wish I’d died myself,’ Nobu said. ‘It would have been easier to bear.’
It was hard to eat the meal that Yuki had prepared but in the end, sitting with his family around the fire, Nobu began to feel a sort of peace. Father took a mouthful of tea and said, ‘Your dear mother must have thought Uncle Juémon would be killed and nothing would be left. After all, who would have guessed any of us would survive – except you, young Nobu; you were meant to survive. Juémon did his best but somewhere along the way the scrolls with our family’s death poems were lost. But he gave me this.’
He reached up to the simple altar on the wall of the hut and took down a relic bag. He opened it and tipped something into his hand. Nobu stared at it in the darkness. It was a lock of dark hair. Father held it out to Yasu, who shook his head.
‘“If I took it in my hands it would melt”,’ he murmured.
‘Of course. The ninth month,’ said Father, swallowing. ‘The very same month that Basho returned to his family in Iga.’
‘“At the beginning of the ninth month I returned to my native place.” Isn’t that how it begins, that passage?’ said Yasu.
Nobu hung his head, wondering how they could talk of Basho at a time like this. But then he began to get an inkling. Perhaps in some way it made it easier to bear. Perhaps Basho’s words helped them come to terms with their pain.
Father nodded and began to recite. ‘“At the beginning of the ninth month I returned to my native place. The miscanthus in the north chamber had withered away with the frost and there was nothing left of it. Everything was changed from old times. My brother’s hair was white, his brows wrinkled. He said only, ‘We are alive.’ Without a word he opened his relic bag. ‘Do reverence to Mother’s white hairs. This is Urashima’s magic box. You too have turned into an old man.’”’
He placed the lock of hair in Nobu’s open hands. Nobu let it rest there, light as down, feeling the silky softness. His mother’s scent lingered. He closed his eyes, feeling the warmth of her lap and her fingers smoothing his hair and her soft voice as she told him the story he’d loved to hear, of Urashima, the handsome young fisherman.
It was long long ago, she always began. Urashima was setting out with his nets one day when he saw some children beating a turtle. He rescued it and put it gently back in the ocean.
The very next day he was out again when he heard a voice calling, ‘Urashima! Urashima!’ A gigantic turtle was swimming towards the shore, its huge flippers parting the waves. In gravelly tones it told him it was the chief retainer of the dragon king. The turtle Urashima had saved was the dragon king’s daughter and she wanted to see him and thank him in person. So Urashima clambered on to the turtle’s broad back and held tight to its scaly neck as it dived under the water.
He found himself in the dragon king’s palace, where shoals of brilliantly coloured fish swam through labyrinths of rocky caverns, and delicate towers and turrets spiralled towards the surface of the water far above. The turtle he’d rescued turned out to be a princess more beautiful than anyone could ever imagine, with coral cheeks, eyes that tapered like a fish’s tail and lustrous rippling tresses.
Three days passed in a dream as he lay in her arms, enjoying singing, dancing and feasting. But then he thought of his aged parents and remembered that he had to go back, to reassure them that he was alive and well. The princess begged him to stay but he had no choice, so she gave him a farewell gift of a jewelled treasure box. He must keep it carefully, she told him, but never open it, no matter what.
The giant turtle took him back to the seashore. But when he got there nothing looked the same. There were new houses in his village and a new bridge across the river and the temple on the hill and the shrine at its base had been rebuilt. He couldn’t find his parents’ home or anyone he knew. Finally he came across a bent old woman. She thought for a long while. ‘Urashima,’ she said slowly. ‘When I was a little girl people spoke of a boy of that name who disappeared into the sea and never came back. But that was many generations ago, long before I was born.’ The dreadful realization dawned on Urashima. He had spent not three days but three hundred years under the waves.
Horrified, he decided he must go back straight away to the dragon king’s daughter. Running to the seashore he stood at the edge of the grey roiling sea and called out to the giant turtle, but there was only the crash of the waves. He sat down on the sand and wept. Then he thought of the box the princess had given him. It was the only thing he had left. Perhaps it contained some clue. In desperation, forgetting the princess’s warning, he opened it.
A wisp of smoke curled out. His hair turned white and his body grew old and bent, then began to dissolve. In a moment there was nothing left but a heap of dust which swirled around then blew away into the wind. The box had contained the three hundred years.
Nobu raised his head. Perhaps that was who he was – Urashima. Perhaps they all were. Perhaps they would all have done better to have turned into dust rather than discover what had become of the life they had known. But no. His family was still here, enough of them. They would go together and pray at the family grave. It would be a start towards finding peace.
‘Our dear mother was still young,’ said Yasu. ‘But Basho’s mother’s hair had turned white as snow.’
His voice quivering, Father murmured the haiku:
‘te ni toraba kien If I took it in my hands it would melt
namida zo atsuki from the heat of my tears.
aki no shimo Autumn frost.’
19
TAKA PEEKED FROM behind the froth of lace around her mother’s ample décolletage as they rumbled along the Ginza in their carriage. The maples and cherries that had made the street beautiful had lost
most of their leaves and all her hopes had withered along with them.
Everything had got into such a muddle. She couldn’t remember a time when she’d felt so confused. She sighed and leaned back against the upholstery, pulling her shawl closer, as the driver shook the reins and the groom sprinted ahead, clearing a way through the rickshaws, carriages and horse-drawn omnibuses that crammed the broad brick-paved mall. Ladies with plaid shawls wrapped around their kimonos, others in gowns with huge bustles and men in Inverness capes and mufflers or bowler hats atop their long huge-sleeved haori jackets and flowing hakama trousers promenaded along the pavements.
‘Look at them all, just milling about as if they didn’t have a care in the world.’ Fujino gripped Taka’s wrist, shouting above the hubbub of voices and the clatter of wheels and hooves. The tiered skirts of her elaborate day dress rustled with every bounce of the carriage. ‘Life goes on as if nothing at all had happened.’
Taka shook her hand free. She wasn’t aware anything had happened. Her mother was behaving strangely today. Her eyes glittered as if she had something on her mind. Taka sighed. She’d find out soon enough.
She sank deeper into her corner as they careered between honey-coloured brick shopfronts adorned with porticoes, arches, balconies and colonnades. The street was changing at an astonishing rate. Everyone agreed there was nothing like it in the whole of Japan, probably not in the world. Even in the short time since they’d last been there, whole new buildings had appeared, springing up like bamboo shoots. Usually, no matter how often Taka visited the Ginza, no matter how bleak life seemed, she couldn’t help gasping at such a thrilling sight. But today she felt as if she was seeing it clearly for the first time. The splendour seemed tawdry. The street was rutted, the leafless trees scraggy, the people overdressed and garish and the horses looked like worn-out nags.
They cantered past Komura Bakery and the Tokyo Daily News Building with its portico arch and huge gaslight. A crowd just in from the country stood gawking as if at some famous temple or shrine. To the left, sightseers jammed the balconies of Matsuda restaurant – ‘Beef for the masses,’ sniffed Fujino, tossing the ribbons on her bonnet. To the right were the new postal offices where modern people took their letters, instead of rolling them into scrolls and sending for the courier with his lacquered box, as those in benighted parts of the country still did.
Fujino had said they were going to the Black Peony. But instead of turning off, they crossed Japan Bridge and rattled straight past the huge Echigoya dry-goods store. Smiling in that infuriating way of hers, she swung round and clamped her plump white hands over Taka’s eyes.
‘Just wait till you see this!’
When she pulled them away even Taka had to smile.
They’d drawn up in front of a building like a miniature castle. With its gleaming yellow bricks, tiers of red-tiled roofs and balconies with ornate fretted railings, it was a sight to make anyone forget their gloom. It stood five storeys high, like a child’s building blocks piled one on top of the other, each of the higher floors a little smaller than the one below. At the very top a golden dolphin, like the ones that adorned the roof ends of warlords’ castles, flipped its tail. People strode in and out – Chinese businessmen with long gowns and longer pigtails, ladies in kimonos or gowns with bustles and men in haori and hakama or bowler hats.
‘Don’t you know where we are?’ Fujino asked, beaming and rubbing her hands as if about to let her into a fabulous secret. ‘It’s the head office of your company, run by your husband – your husband-to-be, that is – Shimada Bank! It’s the newest building in the whole of Tokyo. Such a man as you’ve found! He’s a banking genius. He’s created a whole banking system for this country of ours – well, the Shimada family has, but everyone knows he’s the brains behind it – and this is the Shimadas’ private bank. He planned it, he runs it, the clerks who work here work for him – and he’s totally bewitched by you!’ Her capacious bosom visibly swelled. ‘I know it’s trying, having to wait so long before you get married and only having seen your betrothed that one time. But don’t forget, most girls never meet their husbands even once, not until their wedding day. So you see, there’s no need to worry. We’ll soon have you happily settled and the mistress of the Shimada empire. You’ll be putting on your red silk kimono soon enough, and that lovely white lace western gown too. It’ll be the most splendid wedding anyone’s ever seen. It’ll be the talk of Tokyo.’
Taka nodded, trying her hardest to look excited and cheerful. She was amazed her mother couldn’t see straight through her. It never seemed to dawn on her that the last thing Taka wanted was to be reminded of that dreadful day and the three wedding dresses she would don, one after the other.
She stared at her high button boots poking from under her day dress, side by side on the floor of the carriage. She was getting horribly tangled in this web. She was desperately afraid she’d never find a way to escape from it – and the worst of it was, it was all her own doing.
It was an impossible game to play, trying to fool Fujino into thinking she was eager to marry Masuda-sama and that the reason for her gloom was simply that she hadn’t seen him for so long. She’d been afraid that if she complained too much her mother would say, ‘Then let’s just go to Kagoshima to join your father.’ It was fortunate Fujino was so exuberant. She talked and talked without ever stopping to wonder what Taka herself might want or whether this man, genius or not, really was the right husband for her. The main thing was, Taka thought, she had to be sure Fujino never suspected for a moment that the person who filled her thoughts night and day was actually their ex-servant boy, a gangly young soldier with no money and precious little hope of advancement and, worst of all, an Aizu.
Exactly a hundred days had passed since that night Nobu had suddenly appeared at their house and they had sneaked off together to the woods at the far end of the grounds. Taka could still remember every breath, every word of that meeting, as vividly as if she were there – the bats flitting, the earthy smells, the stars twinkling through the leaves, the heat of his body next to hers in the moist darkness and the feel of his palm on hers as he took her hand.
‘There’s never been anyone but you,’ he’d said. ‘There never will be.’
But ever since then she’d heard nothing, only silence.
At first she’d been so sure he’d come again himself or send a message but days had gone by without a word. She tried to imagine what had happened. Maybe he couldn’t get a message out from the Military Academy. He was not as free there as he had been at Mori’s; it was like being in prison. Or maybe he’d decided there was too much between them, that she was wealthy and he not much more than a servant; maybe that was the truth of it. But poor though he was, he was also proud. She knew that he didn’t consider himself one whit inferior to her. She could tell that he came from a distinguished family, even though it might have been cast low by the civil war.
She’d wondered if she could somehow get a note to him, but it was unthinkable to have her maid, pretty round-faced Okatsu, knocking at the gates of the barracks, asking for him. It would make him a laughing stock, he’d never forgive her. She’d just have to wait.
But at least they were still in Tokyo, they hadn’t moved to Kagoshima. And while they were here, there was always a chance she’d hear from him.
Her mother prodded her with a plump elbow. ‘You’re a hundred ri away, dreaming about your wedding day. I know you’d like to have a look around the bank. I would myself. But we can’t have you bumping into Masuda-sama before the great day, can we? Anyway, Aunt Kiharu’s waiting.’
20
AUNT KIHARU WAS perched on a chair in one of the private rooms at the Black Peony, her skirts elegantly draped, her small head rising proudly above the frilled collar of her fitted jacket. Voices and laughter boomed from the main restaurant, shaking the sand-dusted walls and sliding paper doors with their painted chrysanthemums.
Looking around, Taka realized that they were in the very same room wh
ere the Satsuma samurai had charged in, waving his sword, three years earlier. Unbidden, an image rose of Nobu’s sunburnt young face, scowling with determination as he tackled the assailant, and she blinked hard as tears sprang to her eyes.
While Fujino settled herself with much rustling and creaking over a couple of tiny chairs, waitresses began to file in with plates of dark red meat, cut paper thin and set out in rounds like the finest sashimi, and laid a few slices on the hot iron plate. After all this time Taka still didn’t find it any easier to eat meat. She wrinkled her nose and dabbed at her eyes, grateful for the excuse, as smoke began to rise. It smelt like a funeral pyre.
Her mother drew herself up. ‘Beef-eating is the mark of the civilized classes,’ she said sternly. ‘People like us have to set an example. The emperor himself eats beef. If you’re going to be Masuda-sama’s bride, you’ll have to develop sophisticated tastes. In America, where he lived, they eat beef every day. That’s why they’re so big and strong. Isn’t that right, Kiharu?’
Reluctantly Taka dipped her chopsticks into the raw egg in the bowl in front of her, whisked it up and took a slice of the grey cooked meat, trying not to look at Fujino’s unblackened teeth. Every time she spoke Taka could see them gleaming in a most embarrassing way. She wondered what the waitresses made of them, whether they admired her mother for being so up to date or just thought she was odd. Probably the latter, Taka thought. At least Aunt Kiharu kept hers a respectable black.
‘Come on, Kiharu, out with it.’ Fujino and Aunt Kiharu pressed their heads together and were talking in undertones. Whenever they met they turned back into geishas and gossiped and giggled all evening about kabuki actors they both knew, referring to them by their nicknames. Geishas, of course, were entertainers, and the same low caste as actors, and they were all old friends.