A wind blew across from the opposite hill, rustling the trees and prickling her nose with the hot tang of gunpowder. The noise of firing was louder than ever. Nobu couldn’t save her father, he couldn’t ease the pain of that loss, but to have him there, alive and real, was a comfort. He bent his head to hers and she felt safe and home.
The watchman cleared his throat. ‘I was trying to tell you, Madame,’ he said timidly. ‘It wasn’t the army coming up the hill, it was the young lady’s servant. I thought he was deaf and dumb but he isn’t, not at all.’
Fujino was gazing across at Castle Hill with a look of horrified fascination, as if she couldn’t pull herself away. Her face was haggard.
She turned to Nobu. ‘Well I never,’ she said, trying to smile. ‘Young Nobu. You’ve turned into a man.’ The sun had coloured her skin but beneath the tan her face was ashen, not an opalescent white as it had once been but pale like a ghost. She looked worn and faded and exhausted.
Taka stroked her arm. She was afraid she might die too along with her father, not by her own hand but simply slip away. ‘Have something to eat, Mother,’ she said.
The children had returned with flasks of water and cooked sweet potatoes they’d managed to find. Madame Kitaoka and the samurai aunts, the two geishas, Okatsu, Uncle Seppo, the young men in their ragged uniforms, even the watchman, sat down on the ground in a circle with the boom of rifle fire echoing in their ears. Taka felt as if she was at a wake, as if the world really was coming to an end and they were the only survivors.
She tried to eat but it was hard to swallow. She couldn’t think about anything except her father. She couldn’t bear to imagine what was happening on the opposite hill.
But even as Taka thought about death, she couldn’t help feeling perversely, exhilaratingly, joyously alive, more alive than she had ever felt before. With every breath she was aware of Nobu next to her. His closeness made her tingle. She reached out shyly and touched his foot gently with hers. It was all she dared do with Madame Kitaoka and the others around.
She looked at his face with concern. When she’d hugged him she’d been shocked to feel his ribs poking out under his uniform. He was holding his hand to his side as if he was in pain and there were dark bruises around his eyes.
He gave a wry smile. ‘It’s nothing,’ he muttered.
‘Yoshida braved our camp,’ said Kuninosuké. ‘Some of our boys were a little enthusiastic.’
‘So you met my father,’ Taka whispered.
‘I had that honour.’
Taka’s mother leaned forward, clasping her dirt-stained hands. ‘Did he look healthy?’ she asked softly, looking up at him with big eyes. ‘Was he in good spirits?’ She was no longer gloriously plump but her voice still had the husky notes that had bewitched Taka’s father in Kyoto all those years ago.
‘The last thing he spoke of was you.’ Nobu hesitated. Fujino bowed her head and wiped her cheeks with her sleeve. Flies buzzed around the remnants of food and a wind sent the ashes whirling. ‘He said how beautiful you were and how he missed you. And then he said he was afraid you … you might take your own lives. He wanted to be sure you lived. When he said that, I couldn’t stop myself, I just ran as fast as I could. Kuninosuké came with me, on the general’s orders, to make sure none of his men took a shot at me. We carried a white flag. He protected me on Castle Hill and I protected him when we reached army territory. He disappeared into the woods before we reached the checkpoint, otherwise he would have been shot himself. But when I got back to base, I had to report. I only managed to slip away as the army was advancing up the hill. I thought Kuninosuké had gone back up the hill but he’d delivered the general’s message himself. He knew I wouldn’t make it in time.’
He turned to Kuninosuké, put his hands on the ashy soil and gave a formal bow. ‘Toyoda-sama. I’m in your debt. We all are. You carried out your master’s orders and saved everyone’s lives here. I know our people – yours and mine – are enemies, and have been for generations. You have every reason to hate me, especially now.’ He gestured at Castle Hill where gunfire continued to roar. ‘I know you’re close to General Kitaoka. He’s a great man. I revere him too. It’s terrible that things have to end this way. It’s too soon to speak of such things but once this is all over I hope the old enmity can come to an end and we can be friends. You’re a fine and honourable man and a true samurai. I have nothing but respect for you.’
He hesitated and gave a wry, embarrassed laugh. He suddenly looked very young. ‘I know you have another reason too to hate me.’
Taka stiffened and her eyes went to the amulet on Kuninosuké’s belt. So Nobu knew. He hadn’t said anything but he couldn’t have avoided seeing it and he must have guessed Taka had given it to him. But there was nothing to say, no need to explain. It was already in the past.
Kuninosuké was on his knees, pale and stern, his back very straight. The Satsuma clan had lost everything but he’d lost more. He’d given up the chance of a glorious death, shoulder to shoulder with his beloved general, Taka’s father, to save her and now he’d lost her too.
He returned Nobu’s bow. ‘If we’d had it out on the battlefield I would have killed you,’ he said quietly. ‘But this is a different sort of battle. I let myself be distracted from my duty. I disobeyed my master. My orders were to escort you back to your lines, not to carry out your mission for you. I behaved like a woman. I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life.’
But he’d also saved them, Taka thought. A flicker crossed his face and she remembered the hug and the warm words they’d exchanged. Now his eyes were hooded, all feelings concealed beneath the stern exterior.
‘We’ve been living like nuns here,’ said Fujino. ‘The watchman brought us news, but – forgive me, my good man – he hasn’t told us the worst. Nobu, Kuninosuké, you must tell us everything, everything.’
Taka looked at the two young men, crouched side by side on their haunches, one committed to one side, one to the other. There was a look in the dark recesses of their eyes as if they had done and seen things too terrible ever to tell.
Suddenly there was an unearthly silence. Taka held her breath, waiting for the next explosion, but there was nothing. The gunfire had stopped.
One by one they stood up and went to the edge of the clearing and looked out across the valley. A pall of smoke hung over Castle Hill. Crickets began to chirrup and birds to circle again. The first rays of sunlight were peeking from behind the volcano.
‘It’s over,’ Fujino said hoarsely.
She fell to her knees and buried her face in her hands and her shoulders heaved. ‘Masa, Masa,’ she cried, her voice choking. ‘Eijiro, my boy!’ Taka put her arms around her and wept too. There was an emptiness in her life that could never be filled. Even when her father had been far away for years at a time she’d always known he was there and that one day she’d see him again. But now, now … Aunt Kiharu and Okatsu knelt together, sobbing.
Kuninosuké was striding towards the edge of the clearing.
Nobu raced after him and took his arm. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To my master.’ His face was grim. ‘I betrayed him by coming here. I betrayed them all.’
‘They’ll arrest you. They’ll kill you,’ said Aunt Fuchi. Taka suspected that that was exactly what he had in mind.
‘My place is with my master,’ he said. ‘Whatever has befallen him I will share his fate. If he’s dead already I must deal with the consequences.’ The amulet swung on his belt. It had given him a cruel kind of protection, kept him alive when all his comrades were dead.
Madame Kitaoka rose to her feet. She’d pinned her hair back up and only a few greying strands hung loose to remind everyone of the warrior beneath the prim exterior. She flourished the general’s fan imperiously. ‘For better or for worse you brought us back to life. We’re bound together by karma now, all of us. We’ll go down together and identify the bodies and make sure our men are properly and respectfully buried.’
‘You’ll be arrested too. Everyone in Kagoshima knows Madame Kitaoka,’ said Aunt Kiyo.
‘Let’s not assume the worst,’ Fujino said breathlessly. She was panting in distress. ‘We don’t know what’s happened. There’s always hope till we know for sure.’
‘You mustn’t have false hopes,’ said Nobu. ‘The army would only stop firing once General Kitaoka was dead. You must prepare yourselves.’
‘It’s over for us all. We’ll give ourselves up and they can kill us.’
Nobu turned and faced the women. ‘There’ll be no more killing.’ His voice was quiet and firm. He took a breath. ‘If Kuninosuké had been seen coming down from Castle Hill they’d have shot him, but he’s with us. We’re in the same uniforms, we look the same. No one will even realize he’s a rebel. I mourn General Kitaoka and his men, we all do. General Yamagata was his friend, he’ll mourn him more than anyone. But the killing’s over now. I’m an officer of the Imperial Army. I will protect you all. You can be sure of it.’
Madame Kitaoka was holding the fan in both hands. She bowed her head. The samurai aunts followed suit. Okatsu was silent. She couldn’t say a word in front of Fujino, but she gazed at Nobu and smiled.
Taka looked at Nobu. With him here she could face anything, she thought, even this most terrible moment in their lives. If anyone could make things better, he could. He could take care of everything, take care of all of them. They had nothing to fear.
It was the end of their lives but also the beginning of a new life.
Like a party of wraiths, thin and ragged and brown, they set off down the hill. Madame Kitaoka strode in front and the others straggled after her. Fujino stumbled along at the back, dragging her feet as if the fire that had kept her going all that time had finally gone out.
As they passed the farmhouse, Taka took a last look at the smoke-blackened walls and thatched roof of this place that had been home for five long months. She was going back to a world which she knew had been totally changed, which she could not even imagine any more. The city had been destroyed and even the Bamboo House had burnt down.
Walking behind the others where no one could see them, she took Nobu’s hand and held it tight. As she felt the touch of his palm on hers, she knew that so long as he and she were together, everything would be all right. Perhaps this was where the new Japan really started, with them – north and south, Aizu and Satsuma – together. She thought of her father, big and bluff, and suddenly was totally sure that wherever he was, in whatever world, he would approve.
Afterword
Taka and Nobu are products of my imagination but the world they lived in and the historical events they lived through – the war known in Japanese as the War of the Southwest and in English as the Satsuma Rebellion – are all true and as accurate as I could make them.
General Kitaoka is modelled on the real ‘last samurai’, Takamori Saigo (Saigo Takamori, to put his name in the Japanese order, surname first), who is as famous and beloved in Japan as Winston Churchill or the Duke of Wellington in Britain, and whose name and exploits and tragic end are known to every Japanese schoolchild.
On 24 September 1877 – the year that Edison invented the phonograph, Anna Karenina was published and Swan Lake had its debut in Moscow – Saigo and some three hundred of his most devoted and loyal followers were holed up on Castle Hill. The Imperial Army, some 35,000 strong, was encamped at the foot. The army began shooting at 3.55 a.m. By 5.30 they had destroyed the rebels’ fortifications and closed in on them. At 7 a.m. Saigo and a ragtag band of forty men, who had all made the decision to die with their master, charged down the hill, swords drawn. They had no ammunition left.
Saigo made it 650 metres. Just above the school where the rebels had trained, he was hit in the groin by a bullet. He turned to his trusted lieutenant and appointed second Shinsuké Beppu (Beppu Shinsuké in the Japanese order) and said, ‘Shin-don, mo koko de yokaro.’ ‘Shin, my good friend, here is as good as anywhere.’ According to legend, he then cut open his stomach (though in reality he was probably in too much pain to do so and there was no abdominal wound on his corpse) and Beppu cut off his head. Then Beppu shouted that the master was dead and that the time had come for those who wished to die with him. They rushed towards enemy lines and were mown down by rifle fire.
The sound of guns stopped the moment Saigo’s body was found.
When the bodies were laid out and identified, one, of a strikingly large, powerful-looking man, was headless. An American ship’s captain, John Hubbard, was present. He wrote to his wife that while he was looking, ‘Saigo’s head was brought in and placed by his body. It was a remarkable looking head and anyone would have said at once that he must have been the leader.’
According to legend his head was washed in spring water and carefully dried and taken to General Yamagata (Aritomo Yamagata, commander of the government forces and Saigo’s old friend and colleague), who stood in silent tribute, then bowed respectfully and said, ‘Ah, what a gentle look you have on your face.’ He is also quoted as saying, ‘Takamori Saigo was a great man. It is a matter of regret that history has forced him to die like this.’ The surviving rebels were killed or overpowered and disarmed.
Saigo was fifty years old.
Saigo and his men were buried in the grounds of a nearby temple, overlooking the city, the bay and the volcano. Three years later memorial stones were erected and the bones of some of the other rebels – 2,023 men in all, including two aged only thirteen – brought there too and marked with 755 memorial stones. Right in the centre of the graveyard is a huge stone which reads simply ‘Saigo Takamori’. There are always fresh flowers in the stone vases in front.
Saigo was officially rehabilitated in December 1898 when a bronze statue of him striding along with one of his dogs, kimono flapping, was erected outside Ueno Park in Tokyo. Yamagata was one of the dignitaries who attended the unveiling. Saigo’s widow did not like the statue. She said he always dressed with great care. She had never seen him so poorly dressed.
In Kagoshima I climbed Castle Hill, a tangled impenetrable mass of green, dense with trees and bamboo, and visited the cave where he holed up, barely a cave, more a hollow in the rock, and the site where he was killed. The black lava-stone walls of the school are still there, pocked with bullet holes. There are memorial stones in each of these places. I went to the site of the castle in the shadow of Castle Hill, to Iso where the ammunition works were, to Daimonguchi where the geisha district had been, to West Beppu, and to the cemetery. Towering above the city like a gigantic backdrop is the spectacular cone of Mount Sakurajima, spouting ash. Black dust swirls in the wind, gathering in every corner, and cats lounge and stretch.
Madame Kitaoka is entirely my fictional creation. In photographs the real Madame Ito Saigo looks beautiful, dignified and refined. She lived on quietly for many years after Saigo’s death and (apart from her comment on the statue) kept her opinions to herself. As was usual at that time the marriage (Saigo’s third) was a union of families, not love.
There really was a Kyoto geisha called Princess Pig – Buta-hime – who was famously fat and whom Saigo acknowledged was his real love. He said she was the only person with whom he could ease his heart. Nothing more is known of her (geishas are famously discreet) and her story and family by Saigo are my invention.
History is written by the winners, and never more so than in the case of the civil war that came to be known as the Meiji Restoration. The Aizu were very definitely on the losing side and, as a result, their stories are far less widely known than the exploits of their southern contemporaries.
The hatred of the northern and southern clans is true, as are the atrocities meted out to the northerners by the southerners and the hardships suffered by the northerners in the years after the civil war.
Early on in the Satsuma Rebellion the government realized that conscripts were not effective against the battle-hardened Satsuma warriors and that they would have to oppose samurai with samurai. They put out
a call to unemployed samurai. Many Aizu joined up, seeking to avenge their earlier defeat at the Satsumas’ hands, and fought with extraordinary courage, wielding their swords with abandon at close quarters. Almost 25 per cent of police casualties were Aizu, though Aizu men comprised fewer than 10 per cent of all mobilized police.
Nobu and his story are much inspired by the wonderful memoir of Shiba Goro, Remembering Aizu: The Testament of Shiba Goro, the true and terrible tale of what happened to him and his family during and after the battle of Aizu Wakamatsu. I’d like to acknowledge my considerable debt to this beautifully translated and very moving book, listed below, and urge everyone touched by Nobu’s story to read it.
Bibliography
The story as I tell it is largely based on research and historical fact, though I’ve tweaked dates and other details here and there in the interests of telling a good story. The main books I used are listed below; there are many more. Besides books, my primary resource for the story of the Satsuma Rebellion was the accounts in the Japan Weekly Mail of 1873, 1876 and 1877, all stored in the Diet Library in Tokyo. There are also accounts in the Illustrated London News with illustrations by the artist Charles Wirgman.
Except for the poem here, all translations are by me.
Aizu
Ishimitsu Mahito (ed.), Remembering Aizu: The Testament of Shiba Goro, translated by Teruko Craig, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1999
Saotome Mitsugu, Okei: A Girl from the Provinces, translated by Kenneth J. Bryson, Alma Books Ltd, London, 2008. Novel set at the time of the fall of Aizu.
Wright, Diana E., ‘Female Combatants and Japan’s Meiji Restoration: the case of Aizu’, War in History, 2001: 8: 396.
Satsuma
Black, John R., Young Japan: Yokohama and Yedo, A Narrative of the Settlement and the City from the Signing of the Treaties in 1858, to the close of the year 1879. With a glance at the Progress of Japan during a period of twenty-one years, Vol. II, Trubner & Co., London, and Kelly & Co., Yokohama, 1881; reprinted by Elibron Classics, 2005