‘Can’t you tell Mother … Please, tell her I’m ill,’ Taka said, beginning to panic.
Okatsu laughed till her shoulders shook and remained firmly on her knees. Taka gave her a last beseeching look and rose reluctantly to her feet. She hadn’t felt so nervous since her entrance examination for Kijibashi. This was far worse. This was how condemned men must feel when they were on their way to have their heads cut off, she thought.
The doors at the great front entrance had been pushed right back and a large screen painted with a tiger filled the space. Gold eyes glinted in the gloom. Taka knelt behind her mother, pushing herself as far back into the darkness as she could and keeping her eyes fixed firmly on the ground as the young man stepped out of his shiny leather shoes and up into the cool shadows of the entrance hall. An unfamiliar foreign scent mingled with the distinct whiff of sweat as a pair of feet, clad in fine silk socks, stopped before her. She flushed till her ears were on fire.
‘Apologies for the short notice,’ he said. His voice was rather high-pitched, with a hint of a drawl, reminding Taka that he was just back from abroad and probably not used to speaking Japanese. ‘You’ll have to forgive me, I know this is all rather sudden. I haven’t been back for long and I guess I’ve acquired foreign habits. Your mother’s told me all about you.’
Taka’s mother answered for her. ‘Welcome. Our house is small and dirty but please come in.’ It was the most conventional of phrases and she would have said it whether they lived in a hovel or a palace. The fact was that their house was not that small but not overly large either, rather modest in fact for the house of the second family of General Kitaoka.
In the kitchens, the maids had laid out tea utensils. Taka had learned tea ceremony as a child in the geisha district in Kyoto. Now that everyone was modern and progressive, it was considered laughably old-fashioned but she still loved it. Fujino had insisted that Taka perform just a simple summer tea ceremony, enough to show that she had all the traditional accomplishments but was not at all old-fashioned. It was a difficult balance to maintain.
‘Hurry,’ said her mother. ‘I don’t know why you’re wearing such a dowdy kimono. I can’t imagine what Madame Masuda will think.’ She was even more nervous than Taka was.
As Taka knelt and put the tray on the floor beside her and slid open the door, the conversation stopped. There was silence as she rose to her feet, her mother behind her. The room glowed with a muted light, glimmering through the shoji screens.
She glanced at her brother Eijiro, kneeling in what should have been her father’s place. His square face, the very image of her father’s, was flushed and puffy and his large dog-like eyes half shut. Hungover again, Taka thought, but at least he had made it back from the pleasure quarters. He fanned himself morosely, head drooping. His robe was hanging open and there was a huge gold timepiece protruding from the breast pocket. He looked positively slovenly compared to the dapper Masuda-sama, wriggling one expensively trousered leg, then the other, as if he wasn’t used to sitting on the floor.
Taka warmed the tea bowl, measured out powdered green tea, whisked it and slid the bowl across the tatami to Masuda-sama’s father, sitting cross-legged in the place of honour, in front of the tokonoma alcove with its elegantly carved shelves, hanging scroll and tall bamboo vase containing a single camellia blossom, perfectly placed. He took the bowl and cradled it in both hands as he drank, taking the requisite three sips followed by a slurp.
‘It’s been a long time since I tasted green tea. Delicious,’ he said with a grunt, licking his lips.
‘It’s good to see these old arts preserved,’ said Madame Masuda. Perhaps she was not as supercilious as she looked. ‘I learned tea ceremony myself when I was a girl. We struggle so hard to make ourselves western that we’re in danger of throwing away our own culture.’ She turned to Fujino. Taka could see she was hesitating as to the proper way to behave towards her, with precisely what degree of respect or familiarity. Her mother was the number two wife of the ex-chief counsellor of the realm, once the most powerful man in the country, though he had now retired; but she was also a geisha, by definition – according to the traditional class system, at least – beneath contempt, the lowest of the low.
‘I’m a townswoman myself,’ Madame Masuda ventured. ‘I hear you’ve taught your daughter the geisha arts. Tell me, to what school of dancing do you belong?’ She gave a bland smile. So she’d decided familiarity was in order. Taka heard the undertone of contempt and bristled. How dare this dry old snob sneer at her mother for being a geisha? She would never have dared mention it if General Kitaoka had been here.
Fujino could take care of herself. She gave a tinkle of laughter. ‘We wanted to give our daughter as broad an education as possible,’ she said serenely. ‘She’s studying at Kijibashi High School. Perhaps you haven’t heard of it. It’s the first high school for girls in this country. We enrolled her as soon as it opened. She was in the very first intake.’
‘I know it well,’ said Madame Masuda silkily. Drops of sweat stood out on her forehead. Her skin clung to her face like a mask. ‘You must find the weather pleasant here after the heat of Kyoto. You’re from Gion, I imagine.’
Taka smiled to herself. A mere townswoman could never outdo her mother. Fujino was impervious to barbs.
‘I hear you studied in America, Masuda-sama,’ Fujino trilled. ‘Our Taka has learned mathematics and English and history and French. Say something in English, Taka.’
Taka’s heart began to pound and she stumbled as she murmured the English phrase, ‘You are welcome. Our house very small.’ Her face was burning as she stared at the tatami.
Masuda-sama drawled, ‘Our house is very small. Thanks. You speak English well.’
Taka raised her head. She was aware of a pair of brown eyes appraising her. She’d have expected Masuda-sama to be nervous too, but he seemed disconcertingly relaxed and confident. He was actually quite handsome and she had to concede that his eyes were kind. But it didn’t make any difference. She hated the idea of being forced to marry anyone.
‘What did they say?’ cooed Fujino. ‘It sounded delightful.’
As Taka tidied away the tea things and beat a hasty retreat to the kitchens, she could hear her mother’s voice. ‘We’ll have many years to get to know each other. Taka’s an excellent girl and a good housekeeper. As you can see, I’ve brought her up in the traditional way. Above all, she’s obedient, I can promise you that.’ That was far from true, Taka thought, smiling to herself. ‘If you’re happy to go ahead,’ Fujino concluded, ‘we’ll make plans for the wedding straight away. It’ll be a splendid affair.’
Suddenly Taka saw her life stretching in front of her – an eternity of enduring this man’s patronizing ways and his mother’s sarcasm, always smiling, standing in line with the servants to bow when her strutting, immaculately dressed husband came home and when he left the house. She’d be number one among the household staff. She couldn’t imagine anything more lonely. So that was what her expensive education had been for. She bit her lips, blinking back tears.
‘You’ll get used to it,’ Okatsu said gently, taking the tray of tea utensils. ‘Everyone does. People always cry when the time comes to marry and leave home. “To catch a tiger cub you have to step inside the tiger’s den.” Wasn’t that what Nobu used to say?’ She said his name as though they talked about him every day, glancing questioningly at Taka as she spoke.
Taka smiled, nodding. Nobu, who had appeared so suddenly at the Black Peony, like a breeze blowing in from another world. That was when she had realized that the world was far bigger than she could ever have imagined. An image of a boyish face with sunburnt cheeks and slanted eyes and funny sticking-out ears rose before her eyes.
‘He had a better one,’ persisted Okatsu. ‘“Once fallen, the blossom doesn’t return to the branch …”’
‘“Once broken, the mirror never reflects again.”’ Taka finished the proverb. ‘Yes, he liked those quaint sayings, didn’t he? But t
hat’s not it either. It means once something’s done it can’t be undone. But nothing’s decided yet, the knot hasn’t been tied. There must be another saying that’s more hopeful.’
‘What about “Don’t put a price on your badger skin before you’ve caught your badger”? No. “When winter comes, spring can’t be far behind.” That’s the one. Keep thinking of that.’
Taka laughed. ‘That Nobu. What a ragamuffin he was, even after Mother gave him clothes. I used to smile whenever I saw him, the way his arms and legs stuck out of his stripy footman’s jacket.’
Okatsu’s face had softened. ‘Do you remember how you helped him study?’
‘I gave him books, that’s all. He was so proud. He never said a thing about wanting to study until that time I offered to teach him characters. It was really just a way to help myself remember them. Then I caught him peeking at my textbooks. It wouldn’t do any harm to give him the ones I’d finished with, I thought. After that, every spare moment he was poring over mathematics or history. He wanted so badly to better himself.’
Okatsu sighed. Taka looked at her. They both had tears in their eyes.
‘He was a good lad.’
‘He should have been a samurai,’ Taka said. ‘It was terrible that all he could be was a servant.’
But in the new Japan lots of people were not what they appeared. Even Gonsuké, the rickshaw boy, had once let slip that his life had been quite different before the war. It was as if everyone had been tossed in the air and come down all mixed up. People who had been on top were at the bottom now and people like her family who were of lowly origin had ended up on top. No doubt Nobu would have had a saying for that too.
Once a samurai girl passed ten she was not supposed to mix with boys. But Nobu hadn’t been a proud young samurai or a wealthy boy of her own class. He was only a servant, he hadn’t really counted as a boy at all. She remembered how he’d cleaned the house and tidied the garden every day and run behind her rickshaw, carrying her books and lacquer lunch box to school and back again. One way or another, she’d often ended up in his company. How she wished he were here now so that she could talk everything through with him, as she used to. But there was no point wishing. He’d long since disappeared.
8
‘HERE, COME OVER here,’ twittered a girlish voice in the sultry lilt of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, soft and insistent as if coaxing a cat. ‘Yes, you, big brother. What’ya doing hiding in the corner like that?’
Another voice, fruity and ripe with innuendo, rasped, ‘There’s fun for servants as well as masters here, y’know, son!’
Nobu groaned. ‘Trois petites truites cuites, trois petites truites crues,’ he muttered, his jaw aching as he tried to shape his lips around the difficult French syllables. ‘Three little cooked trout, three little raw trout.’ He still couldn’t distinguish ‘i’ and ‘e’ or ‘ri’ and ‘ru’ or make anything that sounded remotely like a French ‘r’ but, in these long days of summer, he’d managed to find a corner where the last shaft of light filtered through a hole in the paper screens, though the rest of the room was in near darkness. He knelt, long legs folded under him, his book in the patch of brightness, poring over his French grammar. ‘A coeur vaillant rien d’impossible,’ he murmured, repeating one of the endless list of proverbs he was supposed to have learned. ‘To the valiant heart nothing is impossible.’ The other students were so far ahead, he had no chance of ever catching up, but he had to keep trying.
‘If you want to capture a tiger cub, you have to step inside the tiger’s den.’ He could almost hear his mother’s cool voice, admonishing him. She had had a proverb for every occasion. The well-worn syllables reminded him of how she had drilled them into him when he was a little boy in a distant northern town. Trying to learn French was more daunting by far than stepping inside a tiger’s den; but it was the only way if he wanted to get anywhere in life. And that was what he had to do. He owed it to his family, if not himself.
It hurt to think of his mother and sisters, his father and brothers, all dead or in poverty. Time had eased the pain but he still felt a wrench of sadness. He could hardly even picture his mother’s face any more.
And Taka …
After he’d stumbled away from the gate of the Kitaoka house, it had taken a long time to get back on his feet. Eijiro had done him more damage than he’d realized. He’d ended up at the house of his father’s kindly old friend, Nagakura. He’d handed over the contents of the purse Okatsu had given him – he’d found ten yen in it and some clean clothes in the bamboo travelling case – and holed up there like a dog, licking his wounds.
As soon as he could he moved out. Nagakura’s house was overflowing with family, students and refugees from up north. He couldn’t impose for ever. He found a job as a live-in servant, then as a delivery boy for an eel restaurant, then worked as a bathhouse attendant, carrying shovels of hot coals and scrubbing backs. But even after his wounds had healed and his bruises had faded and he no longer looked like a soldier back from the wars, sometimes when he was on his own he’d come back to the present with a jerk and realize he’d been staring into space, sunk in misery.
The most unexpected things set him back – the way the light fell, the smell of cooking, the sound of a voice. The thought of Taka was a pain just as real as physical pain, as real as Eijiro’s beating had been. Sometimes it was a dull ache, sometimes a spasm like a punch in the stomach that stopped him in his tracks and brought tears to his eyes.
Once he was delivering a letter when he glimpsed a slight young girl in a modest kimono, her hair tied back, walking with someone who looked like a chaperone. He’d sped after her and nearly caught up with her when he realized it was not Taka at all. How could he possibly have thought it was her, he asked himself angrily, in the low city dives where he spent most of his time these days?
And once he was sent on an errand that took him through the Ginza. There were rickshaws lined up outside the Black Peony and he found himself looking for Gonsuké and the Kitaoka crest, a feather in a circle. Then some women came out in lavish western gowns and he gawped at them till he was told to move on, but of course Taka was not among them. What a fool he’d been to let his guard down, he told himself, to let himself be seduced into believing that it was possible to be happy, that there was more to life than struggling to survive. And now he had to pay the price.
And then one day something happened that changed everything. He’d dropped in on Nagakura, to see how he was and pick up letters from his brothers. To his surprise the rather grand, slow-moving ex-vice governor of Aomori came racing out to the entryway to meet him. He was usually morose, permanently bemused at the disasters that had befallen them, but that day he was beaming.
‘They’re having examinations for the Army Cadet School soon,’ he said, before Nobu even had his sandals off. ‘You’re from a samurai family, fighting’s in your blood. Why don’t you apply? If you pass, you’ll be trained to be an army officer. I’ll be your guarantor. I don’t have much to hold my head up about these days but it’s the least I can do for an old friend’s son.’
Nobu had dropped the package he was carrying in shock. He was thunderstruck and then, as he thought about it, by turns thrilled, nervous and afraid. He knew that the troops of samurai that had made up the clan armies had been disbanded. There was a national army now, formed only a few years earlier, and even someone like him, from one of the defeated clans, could apply. It was virtually the only job that an Aizu could get. Government positions were monopolized by men from the ruling clans – the Choshu, the Tosa, the Hizen and the hated potato samurai, the Satsuma. He would have somewhere to live in termtime at least and, coming from a poor home, he’d have his costs paid; he’d even get a little pocket money. He’d be able to hold his head up again. He’d have a future – if he managed to get in, that was.
The light was fading. He could hardly see his book any more. He took a pull on his pipe, remembering the wintry day when he had set off for the Bure
au of Military Education to sit the entrance examinations. He had taken his place on his knees on the freezing tatami in a large bare room, along with the other applicants, all lads his own age, shivering as the cold cut through his thin clothes. His fingers had been so stiff it had been hard to manipulate his brush.
When his turn came, he had been asked to read aloud from Rai Sanyo’s Unofficial History of Japan and had silently offered up thanks to Taka for helping him with his studies. There’d also been arithmetic tests and he’d had to compose and write a letter to a friend in his home town, explaining why he wanted to pursue a military career, and then there’d been an interview and a physical examination.
Then silence. He’d taken one menial job after another, trying to keep a roof over his head and put aside a bit of money, trying not to despair as time passed and no news came. Five months after he had sat the examinations, a letter had arrived. He’d taken it, his hands trembling, not daring to look, then held his breath as he slowly unrolled it. At first he could barely take in what it said. He’d been accepted.
He could hardly believe it. Surely his luck couldn’t have changed so radically. He’d read the words again and again until he was sure it really was true, he wasn’t mistaken, then shouted and leapt in the air and clapped his heels together for joy and rushed off to send notes to his brothers and father and everyone he knew. He’d scraped together all the money he could to buy a French-style uniform of grey trousers, navy blue jacket with yellow braid and tassels, undergarments, military cap and shiny leather shoes.
When the first day of school came he’d marched up to the Ichigaya section of town, through the great gates, across the grounds, to the intimidating three-storey building on the hilltop – the Military Academy, a vast stone structure with white walls like a storehouse but glass windows and hinged doors like a western building. The echoing rooms and corridors filled him with excitement and dread. He was sure that from this moment on his life would change for ever.