‘Here’s what I think of that,’ said Eijiro, ripping the paper into pieces and tossing them out into the sweltering heat. ‘You heard, Mother. We have to get rid of him right now.’
Taka appealed to her mother, her voice rising sulkily. ‘It’s not fair. We’ve done nothing wrong. I’ve been teaching him to read, that’s all. I admit I shouldn’t have interfered with his work, but I wanted to help him. He’s very clever, he shouldn’t be a servant. Don’t blame Nobu. It was my fault, not his. You know Eijiro’s been after Nobu ever since Nobu got here. He’s been looking for a way to catch us out. He’s a trickster.’
‘Insolent girl! How dare you speak of me like that?’ Eijiro raised his large hand and gave Taka a resounding smack on the head.
‘Children, children. Enough!’ barked Fujino.
Nobu heard the blow and saw Taka rock on her knees and go pale. She put her hand to her head and tears came to her eyes. She was glaring at Eijiro, her lips trembling.
There was nothing strange about Eijiro hitting his sister. Women were property, along with servants, and their menfolk could do as they liked with them – punish them, beat them, even kill them. That was the way it had been in Aizu too. Taka was just a chattel, to be sent off to another house. But even though Nobu knew all this in theory, somehow he just couldn’t see it like that. It was all he could do to stop himself lunging at Eijiro, though he knew once he touched him he was finished.
‘And you, Okatsu,’ said Fujino. ‘You should know better. You’re a grown woman. You should have stopped Taka. That’s what we employ you for! We’ll be looking for someone else if you’re not careful. I’m disappointed in you.’
Okatsu was on her hands and knees, her face pressed to the ground. She looked up. ‘It’s not what you think, madam,’ she whispered, her voice shaking. ‘I’ve never left them alone together. I can vouch for them. They weren’t doing anything wrong.’ She wept, bowing again and again. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault, Okatsu,’ said Eijiro. He swung round. Taka still had her hand to her head. ‘But you, my girl – mixing with men, consorting with a servant and an enemy. You’ve brought shame on this house!’
He picked up the ink stone, spattering Taka’s kimono and splashing ink across the veranda, and drew back his arm as if he was going to hit her round the head with it. Nobu gasped in horror. He leapt to his feet and grabbed Eijiro’s wrist. Even as he did so he knew he’d destroyed any chance he might still have had of staying at the house.
There was a gleam in Eijiro’s eye. He’d goaded Nobu into doing exactly what he wanted – behaving so badly that he’d have no choice but to throw him out.
Nobu had nothing to lose now. Blind with rage, he could hardly see or think. His heart was pounding and his breath came in sharp pants. He was ready to kill Eijiro. The old samurai adage flashed through his mind: ‘Let the enemy cut your flesh so that you can cut his bone.’
Eijiro was bigger and stronger but Nobu pulled him towards him and swung a punch. He would have liked to grip him round the neck but even at this moment of madness he knew that would be going too far.
The next thing he knew, he was flying backwards off the veranda. As he crashed on to the gravel, Eijiro landed on top of him and started pummelling him. Nobu smelt sweat and blood. He could see nothing but a bloody haze. He swung his arms desperately, trying to get in another blow, and his fist made contact with something hard. Eijiro gave a yowl.
Fujino shouted, ‘Help, help! Come quickly, stop them. He’s killing my son.’
Her words sent a shock of misery through Nobu. So it was only her son she cared about, not him. He’d been wrong, he hadn’t found a new home, this wasn’t his home at all. All the fight went out of him. He was too overcome by despair even to try to stop Eijiro getting in a couple more punches before the servants raced over and wrenched them apart.
Eijiro stood looking down at Nobu, his hands on his hips. ‘Ungrateful bastard. You’re lucky I didn’t kill you. We take you in and look how you repay us!’ He was scowling but there was a hint of a smirk on his face. ‘Get out, now.’
‘Let him take his belongings.’ It was Taka’s voice. She was sobbing.
‘Belongings? He has nothing, just what we’ve given him.’
Nobu sat up slowly. He put a hand to his face. It was red with blood.
‘Aizu cur. Never set foot on this property again,’ Eijiro barked. ‘Gonsuké, Chubei. Get him out of here.’
The servants hauled him to his feet. He heard Eijiro’s voice. ‘No need to be so gentle. He’s a criminal, mind, and an Aizu.’ They marched him round to the front of the house. He stumbled across the gravel, through the moss-covered gardens, under the pine trees. The great gate with its carved lintel and heavy overhanging roof loomed in front of him.
Then Okatsu appeared from nowhere, running across the gravel. She thrust a purse and a bamboo travelling case into Nobu’s hand. The servants didn’t seem to care. They didn’t try to stop her.
They pushed Nobu towards the small side gate and slid it open and Nobu stumbled into the road. He sank down on his knees. People walking by in their festival clothes stepped back in alarm and gave him a wide berth.
The gate slammed behind him. He sat dazed in the road. It had been a brutal awakening. A phase in his life was over. He was back on the street again, broke, with nothing – almost nothing; he had the purse and the bamboo case. Pain, despair, poverty, misery were all familiar companions. The only thing that was new was an aching feeling of emptiness. The certainty was like a blade, cutting him to the bone: he would never see Taka again.
Slowly he got to his feet and limped away. He didn’t look back.
PART II
The Weaver Princess and the Cowherd
6
Seventh month, year of the rat, the ninth year of the Meiji era (August 1876)
IT WAS GOING to be another sweltering day. Taka put down her brush, took her handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed at the sweat that prickled her face and arms. From the garden came the tinkle of wind-bells and the dry clack of a bamboo pipe, pivoting down to strike the edge of the stone basin with a monotonous ‘tock, tock’. Cicadas erupted in an ear-splitting whine. How odd, she thought, that such tiny insects could make such an enormous noise. The sound throbbed in her ears. It seemed the embodiment of summer.
Servants bustled around, scuttling up and down the tatami pushing damp rags or dusting and polishing the delicate wooden frames of the shoji screens. Muted light glimmered, falling across her paper.
She tipped a little more water on to the ink stone, took the ink stick and began to rub. Then the sweet scent of freshly rubbed ink brought a surge of memory so intense that tears sprang to her eyes. She took a sharp breath, put down the ink stick and buried her face in her hands. It was nearly two years ago now, that dreadful day when she’d seen Nobu for the last time.
It had been on a day just like this, hot and close, that Nobu had left, walked out of her life and never come back. She’d cried for days and even now, when she went to her secret place in the woods to sit and think, she’d remember being there with him and the sting of the memory would make her cry again. He’d just been her servant and her pupil, she told herself, there was nothing more to it than that. She’d been lonely and he’d come to seem like a friend. It was the way Eijiro had treated him, the brutality of it, that had made her so upset. Since he had gone, her life had felt terribly empty.
She’d never heard from him, of course, not a whisper. She didn’t expect to. He’d simply disappeared, been swallowed up in the great city of Tokyo. Or perhaps he’d gone back to Aizu. She’d never know.
These days she didn’t think about him much any more – only when she smelt ink or the rickshaw wheels creaked in a certain way or she saw a clump of horsetail shoots sprouting beside the river.
She was going to a new school now – Kijibashi, the first-ever high school for girls in Japan. Before her father had left she had begged him to put her do
wn for it. It was quite different from the old one. There were girls like her there, girls she could get on with – Kyoto girls, including some who’d started their lives as geishas, as she had. She no longer had to be ashamed of her dancing skills.
Taka loved her new school. She knew how privileged she was to be there. Like the others, she dressed in outrageously daring hakama skirt-trousers, such as a boy would wear, over a maroon kimono with a mannish square-shouldered haori jacket on top, and stepped out with her western books feeling like a true member of the modern age. She worked hard at her studies – singing, maths, sewing, calligraphy, art and English, her favourite.
They’d just started a romance, like The Plum Calendar or The Rustic Genji or Tales of the Macabre, but written entirely in English. Gu-rei-tsu Ekku-supeku-tei-shi-onzu was the title. If she read the syllables quickly enough she could make them sound as they did when her teacher, a sweaty red-faced barbarian called John-sama, said them: Great Expectations. It was the story of a boy called Pippu, he had told them, and the title meant ‘huge dreams’. It seemed a good book for her to study. She too had huge dreams – though she was a girl, not a boy, so whether they’d ever be more than dreams was something she didn’t dare even to think about.
The disastrous events of two summers ago had led to one good conclusion. After Nobu left Fujino had stopped mentioning marriage, though Taka could never let herself relax completely. She knew that her reprieve couldn’t last for ever. Her mother never spoke of Nobu and Taka sometimes wondered if she too felt sorry about the way they’d treated him.
She focused her mind. Her painting master was due to visit that morning and of all her teachers she was fondest of him; and in the afternoon she and her mother would be whirling through the streets to a dance performance given by one of Fujino’s geisha friends.
Humming quietly, she dipped her brush on the ink stone, wiped off the excess ink on the edge, then brought it down firmly. She pressed it then lifted it so it danced across the paper, making the stroke first heavy, then light, then sat back on her heels, checking the way the ink faded and dissolved at the edges of the stroke. It was the hundredth bamboo she had painted that day, and the first that had satisfied her.
Footsteps came whispering across the tatami towards her. She looked up, startled, as Fujino swept in and settled herself on a cushion, tucking her kimono skirts under her knees like a mother hen smoothing her feathers. At home, especially in this hot weather, even she wore Japanese robes rather than the cumbersome western skirts she usually favoured.
Taka pursed her lips. Her mother didn’t usually drop in to see her so early. Her eyes were sparkling and she’d compressed her full mouth into a tight little knot, as if she had some news fairly bursting out of her but was nervous about how it would be received.
Taka rinsed her brush and dried it on a cloth. ‘I’m just finishing, Mother.’
Fujino took out her fan and flapped it, her plump cheeks glistening with sweat. ‘It’s so unkind of your father to go away and make me do this all by myself,’ she sighed. ‘It’s a heavy responsibility.’
Her teeth were shockingly white. A few months ago she’d stopped blackening them and now, instead of being discreetly hidden inside her mouth, as everyone else’s mothers’ were, they gleamed like pearls, like a virgin girl’s or a man’s. It was hard to get used to this new face of hers. Taka tried to stop herself staring.
She knew her mother had an important role in Tokyo society. Admittedly she didn’t get invited to many formal parties any more now that Taka’s father was no longer here, but everyone still remembered and revered him. People bowed low when she bowled past in her rickshaw or carriage and she liked to keep up appearances.
The empress had announced some time ago that henceforth she would stop blackening her teeth. Hard though it was to believe, foreign women, it seemed, did not use black tooth polish. Taka remembered giggling helplessly at the very idea of unblackened teeth. Nevertheless it was imperative that members of Japanese high society should follow their lead if the country was to become truly civilized and enlightened. The ladies of the court had quickly followed suit. As a geisha and a member of Tokyo society, Fujino simply had to keep up with the fashions.
All the same Taka sometimes wished her mother didn’t have to be quite so progressive. She had even stopped shaving her eyebrows, which now sprouted bushy and black like two caterpillars above her eyes.
‘I’ve been watching out for a position for you for several months,’ Fujino said, leaning forward and looking at Taka in that disconcertingly direct way of hers. ‘I’m sure you’ve noticed all the neighbourhood women coming by. It’s not to visit me, it’s you they want to look at. I’ve interviewed a lot of candidates and I’m proud to say I’ve been exceptionally fussy. I’ve received ten or twenty proposals and thought them all through and rejected them. It’s not something I ever expected to have to do on my own.’
A mosquito droned around the room and Taka batted it away.
‘I’ve done my best, and I’m sure I have the right candidate. I thought about it all night. This is the man your father would want you to marry.’
‘To marry …?’ Taka shivered despite the heat of the day. ‘But, Mother …’
Taka had suspected this was what Fujino had been leading up to but she’d pushed the thought away. She bowed her head. She’d seen her friends one by one say goodbye and leave school, their faces frozen into rigid smiles as they contemplated a future they couldn’t imagine, with a man they had yet to meet. But she’d always told herself that she’d be the one who’d escape.
Fujino laughed her tinkly geisha laugh. Taka hated it when she put on her geisha face. It meant she was about to wheedle her into doing something she didn’t want to do.
‘Come, come, young woman,’ she said. ‘No need to look as if you’ve seen some dreadful wailing ghost tearing out its hair in clumps. You know how modern I am. It’s not like in the old days. When I was a girl – younger than you, a lot younger – your grandmother just packed me off. She didn’t even tell me what she had planned.’
Taka knew exactly what she was talking about. Packed her off to be deflowered, she meant.
Taka remembered her last days at the geisha house in Kyoto. When she complained about having to move to Tokyo, Haruyu, the withered old geisha who worked there, had told her how lucky she was. It meant she would never end up as Haruyu had. When the old lady was thirteen, as soon as she was an adult, she’d had to line up to be chosen by a customer. Haruyu had hidden a comb, she told her, turned backwards, in the back of her hair. It was supposed to be a charm against being chosen but there was no guarantee it would work. In any case, even if the ancient jowly silk merchant or the sweaty-palmed purveyor of lacquerware chose another girl for the night, her virginity would still have to be sold to someone. After all, she had a debt to repay. Haruyu didn’t bewail her lot. She was perfectly down to earth about it. It was what happened to women like them.
‘Marriage is not such a terrible fate as what I had to put up with, I can promise you that,’ Fujino said, smiling her superior smile as if she’d settled the argument. Taka was not at all sure about that. She suspected that marriage would not be all that different from what had happened to her mother and to Haruyu. She too would have to lie with someone she didn’t know.
Her mother glanced at the servants, who moved discreetly away. She moved closer to Taka and lowered her voice. ‘The offer came through a Hiroyuki Hashimoto, a gentleman of excellent standing and very suitable to broker your marriage. He met your father when Father was still in government. He’s the head clerk of the Shimada company.’ She paused and looked at Taka with a knowing smile. Taka knew her mother was expecting her to be delighted. The Shimadas were of the lowly merchant class but they were enormously rich and successful and, from all Taka had heard, practically ran the government.
Fujino took a breath and fluttered her fan as if the very thought of these people filled her with excitement. ‘The Shimada house would l
ike to make an alliance with us, even though your father is in retirement.’
‘In retirement …’ It made it sound as if her father had taken holy orders, not stormed off in disgust at his government colleagues and gone home to his base on the island of Kyushu. But her mother preferred not to mention such thorny matters or, if she had to, referred to them only obliquely.
‘The Shimadas have already carried out a thorough investigation and of course everything is in order,’ her mother continued. ‘They’re very impressed with everything they’ve heard about you – your character, your accomplishments.’
Taka stared at the spreading sweat stains under Fujino’s plump arms. She was dizzy from the heat. The whirr of the cicadas drummed into her brain. I’m not as naive as all that, Mother, she thought to herself. They want to make an alliance with the second family of General Kitaoka. It has nothing to do with me.
‘Please, Mother,’ she said plaintively, trying her best to keep her voice from shaking. ‘Can’t we wait a while? My … My studies. I haven’t even completed them yet.’
Fujino snapped her fan shut and glared at her.
‘You’re already sixteen. Do you want to end up an old maid, like one of those shrivelled old women who live with their parents for ever, without ever knowing a man or having children of their own? It’s a woman’s job to bear children, that’s what women are for. You’re lucky anyone’s prepared to take you. Your father was so eager for you to attend this fancy high school of yours. I knew they’d put silly ideas in your head. I warned him no respectable household would want a girl with education. They’d think you were disobedient and headstrong and not well trained in wifely skills. And they’d be right.’