Cat accepted them with both hands and bowed low over them. She was still bowing when Oishi took his place in the procession and the forty-seven men began walking through the snow toward the setting moon. When Cat looked up she watched their receding backs until they were out of sight.
Only when the last man turned a corner and the crunch of sandals and the rattle of weapons faded away did she look at the letters. The sight of her mother’s name on one of them created a longing so intense, her chest ached with it. She realized she was free to see her mother and her nurse.
The tiny house where they were living seemed as great as a mansion to her now. On the way there she would buy charcoal to fill the braziers and warm every corner of it. And she would write Kasane a message and send it to Lord Hino’s upper mansion.
She looked at the second letter. It was addressed to “One who desires flowers.” Cat had almost forgotten the nickname, taken from the opening line of an old poem. Oishi had called her that when she was a child and used to beg him every spring to take her to see the cherry blossoms at Mukojima on the banks of the Sumida.
Cat opened the letter with trembling fingers and held it so Hanshiro could read it, too. The familiar calligraphy of Oishi’s poem was like a dear friend she hadn’t seen in a long time but whom she could now keep with her for as long as she lived.
“Remember,” he wrote, “that spring dwells inside the struggling buds of snow-covered hills.”
“My lady ...” The familiar voice sounded just behind her.
Cat turned to see Viper and Cold Rice standing next to their borrowed kago. They bowed low. “We’re at your service to carry you anywhere.”
“Where do you want to go?” Hanshiro asked softly.
“Home,” Cat said.
EPILOGUE
After spending the day at Sengakuji, then being questioned by a government inspector, Oishi, his son Chikara, and fourteen of his men were put in Lord Hosokawa’s care. The rest of the AkM retainers were divided among three other lords while the government deliberated their fate. They were treated as honored guests while controversy raged through Edo. Because they had acted in the true spirit of the warrior’s Way, petitions were raised asking the government to spare them. Finally, after six weeks, an envoy delivered the verdict.
The government’s Great Council had been lenient. It had decided that the forty-seven loyal rMnin of AkM should be granted the deaths of samurai instead of criminals. Apparently they agreed with the powerful abbot of Ueno who pointed out that if the AkM rMnin lived, they might do something later that would sully the purity of their deed. The greatest lords in the country gathered in Lord Hosokawa’s garden to see the sentence carried out.
Cat and Hanshiro came early, before the others arrived. A bamboo screen hid them, but they could watch the sad proceedings through the latticework woven into the screen. The cherry tree nearby was white with blossoms, but their fragrance was too faint to be detected over the metallic scent of blood pervading the garden.
Cat wore the unadorned kimono of mourning. Hanshiro was dressed in formal robes, hakama, and winged vest bearing the crest of Matsudaira Aki-no-Kami. Lord Asano’s family had been a minor branch of Aki-no-Kami’s clan, and at Oishi’s request he had discreetly offered Cat and Hanshiro, and their loyal servants, Kasane and Shintaro, places in his Edo household. But when Cat and Hanshiro married, they held the ceremony at Lord Hosokawa’s mansion so Oishi could be there.
Beyond the screen shielding Cat and Hanshiro was a corner of bare ground. It was bordered on two sides by the raised floor of the veranda of Hosokawa’s mansion. Lining the veranda and seated in rows on tatami mats on the ground were the lords. In the center of the open space three mats had been turned upside down and laid side by side. A white cloth had been spread in the middle of them, but it didn’t completely cover the smears of fresh blood.
Behind the low dais, a curtain of white silk hung from ropes stretched between poles. The silk billowed gently in a light spring breeze. It hid the platform from the view of the fifteen men who had approached it, one by one, this morning. The executions had been carried out according to rank, and only one man was left.
Cat had bid Oishi good-bye the night before, but she wished she could have told him today that his son had died well. She saw the man who would serve as second approach the dais. He drew his sword and took his stance behind the white cloth.
Hanshiro glanced over at Cat. “Victor and vanquished,” he murmured.
Cat finished the poem silently. Victor and vanquished are but drops of dew, bolts of lightning, illusion.
The silent men in the garden seemed to give a collective sigh as Oishi strode out from the door of the mansion. He turned at the end of the curtain, stepped onto the dais, bowed, and knelt. As Cat watched him through her tears, his figure seemed to shimmer there.
Fare you well, sensei, she thought. And she knew the ancients were right. Her thoughts and her love would accompany him on his long journey.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A book could be written about the eccentricities of the fifth Tokugawa shMgun, Tsunayoshi, known as the dog shMgun. The years of his rule were called the Genroku period. Genroku officially lasted from 1688 to 1703, but its flowering of art and literature and drama extended into the next two decades of the two hundred and fifty years known as the Tokugawa or Edo period.
Saikaku Diara, the son of a seventeenth-century merchant, wrote many entertaining novels detailing life and love among the common people of that time. His works, such as Five Women Who Loved Love, Some Final Words of Advice, The Life of an Amorous Man, This Scheming World, and Comrade Loves of the Samurai are available in paperback editions.
Howard Hibbert’s work, The Floating World in Japanese Fiction, and Stephen and Ethel Longstreet’s Yoshiwara give a good account of the demimonde of Tokugawa Japan’s pleasure districts and kabuki theaters. Charles Dunn’s Everyday Life in Traditional Japan is also a wealth of detail about the period.
Jippensha Ikku’s comic novel Shank’s Mare, translated by Thomas Satchell, follows two picaresque vagabonds down the TMkaidM. Hiroshige Ando’s famous series of woodblock prints depicting the fifty-three post stations of the TMkaidM Road are also available in book form. Because of the Tokugawas’ resistance to change and their refusal to allow foreign commerce, both Jippensha’s and Hiroshige’s works, although done over a hundred years after this story, impart the ambience of the time.
Various nonfiction accounts, with embellishments, have been written in English about the AkM-Asano affair. The two most widely read are found in A. B. Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan and John Allyn’s The Forty-Seven RMnin Story.
One study mentions that Lord Asano Takumi-no-Kami had a daughter and that Oishi Kuranosuke tried to arrange an adoption for her. Other research indicates that Lord Asano had no offspring. I chose the middle ground, postulating that he had a child by a secondary wife. This was a common occurrence and the children of such unions were often adopted.
The AkM rMnin’s loyalty raised the issue of civil law versus a higher moral imperative. The common folk were loud in their support of the forty-seven and scholars argued the case at great length. As a consequence, almost more has been written about the aftermath of the vendetta than about the raid itself.
Oishi Kuranosuke and his men walked five miles through the center of Edo and no one interfered with them. After washing Kira’s head in the well at Sengakuji and visiting Lord Asano’s tomb, they surrendered to the abbot there. Sentence was passed on the fourth day of the second lunar month, about the third week in March by the Gregorian calendar. In the mansions of the lords who had hosted them, forty-six of the rMnin, including Oishi’s sixteen-year-old son, committed seppuku on the same day. They were buried with their lord at Sengakuji.
After the raid on Lord Kira’s mansion, the lowest ranking member of the league was dispatched to Hiroshima to take the news to Lord Asano’s brother. Two years later the messenger surrendered and begged to be allowed to commit sepp
uku, and join his comrades. The shMgun, perhaps unwilling to reawaken the whole tumultuous affair, denied his request and he lived to be eighty-three years old.
Within two weeks of the incident, the first play about the heroic forty-seven appeared. The events in it were only thinly disguised as having happened in an earlier century. Since then hundreds of plays, books, essays, and movies about the story have been produced. The version written in 1748, by the famous playwright Chikamatsu, is still performed every year on the anniversary of the raid. The two movies, called Chushingum, about the forty-seven loyal retainers, are broadcast nationwide on that same day.
At the quiet temple of Sengakuji, near the subway stop by that name on the outskirts of Tokyo, their graves are still visited by those who honor them. Clouds of incense burned in their memory always hang over them. Their names have become immortalized in Japan, and each of them is a national hero.
Be sure to read the complete collection of
Lucia St. Clair Robson
Native American historicals from Ballantine Books
LIGHT A DISTANT FIRE
Osceola had no illusions that the struggle would be an easy one. But after years of humbly acquiescing to the white man’s demands, he was ready to fight, no matter what the cost. The young men would have the chance to earn war honors. Their women would have reason to be proud of them again. But when “Old Mad” Jackson declared war on the Seminole, he never envisioned battling a people who would become symbols of courage, loyalty, and patriotism.
RIDE THE WIND
In 1836, when she was nine years old, Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped by Comanche Indians from her family’s settlement. She grew up with them, mastered their ways, and married one of their leaders. Except for her brilliant blue eyes and golden mane, she was in every way a Comanche woman. This is the story of Cynthia Ann Parker and the last days of the Comanche.
WALK IN MY SOUL
Tiana of the Cherokee grew up learning the magic, spells, and the nature religion of the Cherokee. Sam Houston was known to all as the father of Texas, but the young Sam ran away from his family’s general store to live among the Cherokee. He came to love Tiana. And as the Cherokee would say, she walked in his soul.
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[i] Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, 5th Tokugawa shMgun, 1646 – 1709, shMgun 1680 - 1709
Lucia St. Clair Robson, The Tokaido Road
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