The Samurai's Daughter

by John J. Healey

  Back in command of his vessel, far from his family and the ties of country, Kurt relaxed and spent much time with me. Had it not been for the presence of Father and the crew, who knows what might have transpired between us? He had kind, sad eyes, broad shoulders, and that broken nose. We traded stories about our youth. His had taken place in Amsterdam, and then on the high seas in the Pacific. He had sailed with a mad captain named Jan Pieterszoon Coen. It was Coen who unleashed a massacre upon the inhabitants of the Banda Islands where, with the aid of Japanese mercenaries, thousands of people lost their lives, tortured and beheaded. Kurt’s involvement, what he witnessed and what he did, changed him. Afterward he managed to get his own commission and decided to dedicate his professional life to the improvement of relations between his own countrymen and the inhabitants of the islands they traded with. His attitude caused him to be ostracized and made fun of by numerous officials of the Dutch East India organization, but his gift for trade and the loyalty he inspired in his crews had prevented his being relieved from duty. I told him about Mizuki and Yokiko and Nobuko. I told him about Date Masamune and Date Tadamune. I spoke to him in vague terms about my training. I did my best to describe North America, while omitting certain events.

  After the evening meal we would stroll on deck. Father accompanied us. The tension in the air was palpable, frustrating, pleasurable. Kurt would point out different constellations and relate them to Greek mythology, and Father and I would describe how the heavens were considered in Japan. Sometimes Kurt would try to speak in Japanese and I would laugh, and Father would chide me. In bed, alone, listening to the creaking rigging and feeling the gentle swell of the sea, I would imagine him coming to me in the middle of the night. I would roll the pearls of the necklace he gave me with my fingers, wondering what, if anything, might happen between us; wondering about where I was heading, to the land of a mother I never knew.

  On our last night, somewhere between Lisbon and the coast of Spain, as our stroll concluded, Father did something unusual. He bid us goodnight and left us alone on deck, save for the helmsman and a sailor or two. We found a corner where no one could see us. I embraced him fiercely, surprising him. I buried my face against his breast. I breathed in the scent of him, a scent tinged with wine and tobacco, and the salt of the sea held within the weave of his damp coat. I felt his powerful arms around me, so different from my father’s. I felt his hands clasping me through the thin material of my kimono.

  “How slight you are,” he whispered.

  I looked up at him, barely able to see his eyes in the darkness.

  And then he kissed me.

  My first kiss.

  Lonan had never kissed me.

  It was such an intimate thing.

  “Do you care for me, Masako?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’m embarrassed.” he said,

  “Why are you embarrassed?” I asked.

  “Because I am in love with you. I am embarrassed and I am miserable,” he said. “I am so much older than you. I am married, with children. I sail the seas for a living. Tomorrow I shall put you ashore and perhaps never see you again.”

  We stood there by the railing clinging to each other in silence. We contemplated the truth of what he said, a truth I had thought of night after night.

  “I care for you without embarrassment,” I finally said to him. “I owe my life to you from long ago. You must find a way to return to me.”

  – XXVII –

  Sanlúcar de Barrameda came into view the following morning. Gentle, early autumn light enveloped the ship. Father, Kurt, and I stood by the prow, observing the low dunes along the coast, the calm of the estuary, the blue winged magpies crossing overhead.

  “When I first came here, I was a year older than you are now,” Father said to me in Japanese. “After our ship docked, the samurais followed Hasekura Tsunenaga off the ship. There was much ceremony, trumpets and priests, and a line of brightly painted coaches waiting to take our delegation to a reception.”

  Hearing Father speaking to me in our language, Kurt backed away, respectfully, so as not to intrude. I looked at him with gratitude. He smiled, bowed, and turned. Father continued.

  “Our needs were seen to by the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, represented that day by a man I killed two years later in front of the king of Spain. But on that first night, I stayed behind. I did not leave the ship. My relations with Hasekura Tsunenaga were not good then, and I was eager for peace. One more night aboard, after so many at sea crammed with other men, seemed a fair price to pay for the quiet and privacy it afforded me. I had the ship to myself. I climbed to the crow’s nest in the darkness and listened to the gaiety going on in town. In the morning, I dove into these waters and swam, content, and feeling strangely at home. Later, I was chosen to ride to the duke’s estate, deep in the countryside, to deliver a gift of thanks from Hasekura Tsunenaga. If I had not been chosen to go and meet the duke, I would never have met your mother, who was staying with him. You would not have been born. We would not be here now.”

  He was trembling. I took his hand.

  “Fifteen years ago,” Father continued, “you and I left Spain from here. I held you in my arms, wrapped in a scarf belonging to your mother. And now I am bringing you back. I am bringing you back as I promised.”

  As I held Father’s hand, I realized for the first time, physically, in my body, that we were at our journey’s end. We had been traveling for so long that I had taken this last trip in stride, adapting myself to another of what felt like an unending series of voyages. But after Father spoke, I confronted the fact that the estuary we were sailing through, the dunes on either side, the gentle land spreading out and gradually rising up into green hills and gray mountains, was Andalucia, my mother’s land, a part of me I was seeing for the first time.

  Father had come here as a young samurai all the way from Japan. Then he had striven against great adversity to bring me to Sendai so that I might have a Japanese childhood. Now he had taken me all the way back, back to where I came from. Tears fell from my eyes. How he must have loved her, I thought, to have cared for me as well as he did.

  – XXVIII –

  Spain and the Low Countries were technically at war during those years, and thus Kurt only stayed long enough to see us off. Father hugged him goodbye, something I had never seen him do before. I lingered behind to have a moment alone. I raised my left arm.

  “On this wrist are the bracelets given me by my teachers and a dear friend, bracelets I shall never relinquish because they remind me of who I am.”

  Then I touched the pearls about my neck.

  “These, no matter what happens, shall only be removed from my neck by you.”

  He took my hand, bowed, and kissed it. Once again, the sensation of his fingers upon my skin sent a shiver through me.

  We waved goodbye from the wharf until the ship came about and went on its way, leaving Father and me alone. We stood with our swords, dressed in traditional Japanese clothing. The sun shone. The air was fresh and limpid. We loitered by my travel trunk that was packed with the clothing given to me in Amsterdam. We waited for someone, anyone, to appear. Thinking—erroneously, of course, but not knowing any better—that this small seaside town was to be my final destination, I was dismayed. Father, who knew better and who might have reassured me had I said something, appeared to be calm and relieved.

  The smell of baking bread wafted down from a street close to the wharf. There, it mixed with a heavier but pleasant scent that surrounded a cavernous warehouse across from us. We peered into it and saw oaken barrels filled with Manzanilla wine, stored there for export. Father knocked on a door or two until an old woman, who remembered the arrival of the samurai delegation eighteen years earlier, began to speak with him in a most animated fashion. She wore a black shawl that she used to cover her mouth, as if embarrassed, a pose in direct contradiction with her loquacious manner. She asked us in after sending a young nephew up into the town to fetch us tr
ansport. Her house was humble, whitewashed, and damp. But bright light came in through a rear patio, where flowers grew, and a pair of hens pecked about.

  The woman’s good humor—I believe her name was Dolores—was matched only by the trove of misinformation she showered upon us. She served cool water from a clay jug, a botijo. And she offered us biscuits that were dense with anise seeds, and then a sticky, sweet wine that was difficult to swallow, but impossible to refuse, so as not to appear ungrateful. Father quickly deduced that the best tactic with such a personage consisted of keeping information about our travels and identities to a minimum, allowing her to compensate the vacuum thus created—and compensate she did. I was struck by her assumption that we spoke her language, and considering the fact that not a single woman had accompanied the original Japanese delegation in 1614, her lack of interest in me, and in my wardrobe, was curious as well. I write this after many years of living in Europe, but at the time I both looked and behaved like a seventeen-year-old Japanese woman from Sendai, albeit one who had known adventures unthinkable for most people, man or woman. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, I was the first adult Japanese woman to set foot in Europe.

  Dolores’ pronouncements concerning local gossip, internecine rivalries, land disputes, jealousies, recent crop failures, and vineyard swindles were possibly reliable. But in order perhaps to honor our status as visitors, as foreigners, she felt obliged to expatiate on matters wider afield. She confused north with south, east with west, kings with dukes and counts. She spoke of the Berbers, long driven from Spain, as if the caliphates of Córdoba and Granada had never been conquered, and were still hell-bent on cutting every Christian’s head off. Her answer to the only important question Father put to her almost caused us to change our plans.

  “I believe the late Duke of Medina-Sidonia keeps some fine houses nearby,” he said to her, after taking the smallest possible sip of the wine.

  “They’ve been closed and boarded up for years,” she replied with an odd sparkle in her eyes. “The ghost of the duke haunts their halls and salons, you see, a ghost that howls with rage. No one could bear to live in them any longer.”

  “Rage at what?” I asked, unable to restrain myself.

  “At how his oldest son took everything, cutting out all the other siblings and relatives, reducing them to paupers like the rest of us. Some have become shepherds, others have gone off to convents and seminaries.”

  Father considered the option of setting off directly for Sevilla—yet another journey. But when a cart appeared, drawn by a handsome mule and driven by a thin little old man in rope-soled sandals, permitting us to extricate ourselves from Dolores’ domain, Father insisted on showing me the Medina-Sidonia house anyway. It was where he had recovered from wounds many years earlier, after being mauled in Sevilla and left for dead by my mother’s husband and his guards. The grand house had been his sanctuary.

  As the cart made its way up along the narrow streets of the village, there were hardly any people about, for it was the hour of the siesta. It enabled us to make our way through the town without drawing attention. Father trusted that after viewing the house, if only from the outside, we would be able to leave Sanlúcar before the ebullient Dolores had time to tell everyone about the latest visitors from the Orient.

  The residence we approached was not the main Medina-Sidonia palace, but a more modest property just outside the town, regal and deceptively unadorned. It faced the dunes and the water and was protected by high, whitewashed walls that hid a large and beautiful Moorish garden. Recalling what Dolores had said, I asked Father if he believed in ghosts.

  “No,” he replied.

  “But in Japan everyone believes in the yürei,” I said, “the souls of the dead that seek revenge.”

  “I am not one of them,” he said, and asked the driver to stop.

  “Both Yokiko and Nobuko believed in them,” I said, “even Mizuki.”

  “And half of my fellow samurai,” he said, looking at me, taking my hand and helping me down from the cart. “Do you think that mice have spirits, or dogs, or monkeys, or spiders?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Think about it,” he said. “How likely is it?”

  “Perhaps not very,” I conceded.

  “Precisely,” he said. “When you step on a spider, when mice drown in a river, when monkeys slip from trees, they die, they rot like fallen fruit, they return into the earth, and that is the end of it. It is the same with us, I’m afraid.”

  “But maybe you are wrong,” I said, somewhat irritated by his air of certainty.

  “Maybe,” he said, “but I doubt it.”

  Changing to Spanish, I queried the driver. “Tell me sir, do you believe in ghosts?”

  He made the sign of the cross and answered, “I do indeed, Señorita.”

  “We were told,” I continued, pleased by his reply, “that there is a ghost in this house.”

  “I know nothing of that, Señorita,” he said, “but if such a thing were true, it would be a ghost of very high ranking.”

  I found his reply amusing. Father ignored the exchange and knocked on the front door. Just before he was about to knock again, a corpulent and most unghostlike woman, dressed as a maid, opened it.

  “Good afternoon,” Father said. “Might there be any member of the family in residence?”

  “Who may I say is calling, sir?” the woman asked, drying her hands on her apron as she inspected Father, me, the cart, and its cargo with great suspicion.

  “You may say that Shiro of Sendai is calling, and the grandniece of Doña Soledad Medina.”

  The woman, as round as she was tall, did not react to our names in any way. She only said, “Wait here please,” before closing the door. I noticed she closed it gently.

  I then realized how frivolous my humor and concerns were in that moment compared with Father’s. For me, being on dry land in a new place, where the sun shone not too oppressively, was sufficient adventure. It was very different for him, and I suppose I knew it, and it made me nervous, so I preferred to talk about ghosts rather than pay attention to anything real from his past that might be connected to me.

  Just as I was sobering to this thought, as the driver, zen as any monk in Kyoto, lit a pipe, as Father waited patiently at the door, and as I stood petting the mule’s broad forehead, a young man slightly older than me appeared on horseback. He was handsome and dressed like a gentleman, and the horse, pure Arabian, was white and magnificent with its mane and tail braided to perfection. He dismounted in one motion and looked at us with an expression of benevolent curiosity.

  But before he could utter a single sound of greeting, the door to the house was opened again, this time by a different woman, a beautiful and elegant lady in her mid-thirties, wearing a long white dress offset by long, raven-black hair. It was Rosario. She and Father just stood there, staring at each other. The young man stared at them in turn—as did the driver and I. Then Rosario looked at me and began to weep.

  – PART FIVE –

  – XXIX –

  I had little recollection of where I was taken to live in Venice as a child. The castle where I grew up in Japan was exquisite but austere. My brief impressions of Kurt’s home in Amsterdam are confused with the romantic notions that began to flower there. I was not at all prepared for Rosario’s home in Sanlúcar. Its combination of simplicity and sophistication, its whiteness with dark furnishings, the deeply waxed terracotta floor tiles, the Islamic arches, the placement of flowers and paintings, the sensation that no matter how much one was occupying an interior space, the exterior accompanied you as well.

  Delicate vines of white jasmine crept through windows. Pots of thick green ferns lined upstairs hallways. A blue and yellow bird flew into the house from one of the gardens and fluttered about unperturbed. In the grand entrance hall, I saw my first portrait of the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, Father’s patron, Rosario’s late husband, and the young rider’s sire. The solemnity and dignity of the painting and
the richness of its gilded frame coexisted in unexpected harmony with the high, whitewashed walls surrounding it. The whitewash was chipped here and there, and spots of mold were visible near ceiling beams that were decorated with Moorish inlay. And all the while I felt the presence of the sea, the shore, the dunes, the estuary, and the Gulf of Cadiz. Clean light speckled on the palm trees, on the coverlets in the bedrooms, sluicing through the slats of dark green shutters.

  The shock and emotion that gripped Rosario were such that her son Francisco and I soon left her alone with Father. Proud, shy, and well-mannered, the young man showed me about the house and grounds. Though surprised like his mother, he seemed much less affected by our sudden appearance and continuing existence in the world. We were, after all, just two characters from a story he had been told as a child, two ghosts suddenly become flesh. After inquiring politely about our journey—displaying, I should add, a remarkable lack of interest in what was an epic tale—he spent most of our time together that afternoon complaining about his provincial life, a constricted routine that was only relieved occasionally by visits to Sevilla, which, according to him, was not that much different.

  Judging from his mother’s reaction, I wondered how close she and Father had been during his convalescence in that house so many years before. She was recently widowed back then, and was carrying the self-involved young man walking beside me in her womb. She was alluring. From the first moment I felt drawn to her, yet I also felt somewhat jealous of her, a sensation that was new to me.

  After the tour concluded, Francisco and I sat in the shade looking out at the garden near a quince tree that was heavy with fruit. He had run out of things to say, and though this made him anxious, I was content to sit in silence in continuing gratitude for being on terra firma. Then he noticed the satchel Father had placed by the travel trunk, where he had put our swords before mounting the cart in front of Dolores’ house. The hilts were sticking out from it.