The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

by David Mitchell

  RAIN HISSES LIKE swinging snakes and gutters gurgle. Orito watches a vein pulsating in Yayoi’s throat. The belly craves food, she thinks, the tongue craves water, the heart craves love, and the mind craves stories. It is stories, she believes, that make life in the House of Sisters tolerable, stories in all their forms: the gifts’ letters, tittle-tattle, recollections, and tall tales like Hatsune’s singing skull. She thinks of myths of gods, of Izanami and Izanagi, of Buddha and Jesus, and perhaps the Goddess of Mount Shiranui, and wonders whether the same principle is not at work. Orito pictures the human mind as a loom that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory, and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception.

  “I can’t stop thinking,” Yayoi murmurs, “of the girl.”

  Orito wraps Yayoi’s hair around her thumb. “Which girl, sleepyhead?”

  “The ribbon seller’s sweetheart. The one he planned to marry.”

  You must leave the house and leave Yayoi, Orito reminds herself, soon.

  “So sad.” Yayoi yawns. “She’d grow old and die, never knowing the truth.”

  The fire glows bright and dim as the draft blows strong and weak.

  There is a leak over the iron brazier: drips hiss and crackle.

  The wind rattles the cloisters’ wooden screens like a deranged prisoner.

  Yayoi’s question comes from nowhere. “Were you touched by a man, Sister?”

  Orito is used to her friend’s directness, but not on this subject. “No.”

  That “no” is my stepbrother’s victory, she thinks. “My stepmother in Nagasaki has a son. I’d rather not name him. During Father’s marriage negotiations, it was settled that he’d train to be a doctor and a scholar. It didn’t take long, however, for his lack of aptitude to betray itself. He hated books, loathed Dutch, was disgusted by blood, and was dispatched to an uncle in Saga, but he returned to Nagasaki for Father’s funeral. The tongue-tied boy was now a seventeen-year-old man of the world. It was ‘Oy, bath!’; it was ‘Hey, tea!’ He watched me, as men do, with no encouragement. None.”

  Orito pauses as footsteps in the passageway come and go.

  “My stepmother noticed her son’s new attitude but said nothing, not yet. Until Father died, she passed as a dutiful doctor’s wife, but after the funeral she changed … or changed back. She forbade me to leave our residence without her permission, permission that she rarely gave. She told me, ‘Your days of playing at scholars are over.’ Father’s old friends were turned away, until they no longer called. She dismissed Ayame, our last servant from Mother’s time. I had to take over her duties. One day my rice was white; from the next, it was brown. What a pampered creature that must make me sound.”

  Yayoi gasps slightly at a kick in her uterus. “They’re listening, and none of us thinks you were a pampered creature.”

  “Well, then my stepbrother taught me that my troubles had not yet begun. I slept in Ayame’s old room—two mats, so it was more of a cupboard—and one night, a few days after Father’s funeral, when the whole house was asleep, my stepbrother appeared. I asked him what he wanted. He told me that I knew. I told him to get out. He said, ‘The rules have changed, dear stepsister.’ He said that as head of the Aibagawas of Nagasaki”—Orito tastes metal—“the household’s assets were his. ‘This one, too,’ he said, and that was when he touched me.”

  Yayoi grimaces. “It was wrong of me to ask. You don’t have to tell me.”

  It was his crime, Orito thinks, not mine. “I tried to … but he hit me as I’d never been hit before. He clamped his hand over my mouth and told me”—to imagine, she remembers, he was Ogawa. “He swore that if I resisted, he would hold the right side of my face over the fire until it matched the left side and do what he wanted to do to me anyway.” Orito stops to steady her voice. “Acting frightened was easy. Acting submissive was harder. So I said, ‘Yes.’ He licked my face like a dog and unfastened himself and … then I sank my fingers deep between his legs and squeezed what I found there, like a lemon, with all my strength.”

  Yayoi looks at her friend in a wholly new way.

  “His scream woke the house up. His mother came running and ordered the servants away. I told her what her son had tried to do. He told her I had begged him to my bed. She slapped the head of the Aibagawas of Nagasaki once for being a liar, twice for being stupid, and ten times for almost wasting the family’s most salable property. ‘Abbot Enomoto,’ she told him, ‘will want your stepsister intact when she arrives at his nunnery of freaks.’ That was how I learned why Enomoto’s bailiff had been visiting. Four days later I found myself here.”

  The storm pelts the roofs and the fire growls.

  Orito remembers how all her fathers’ friends refused to shelter her on the night she ran away from her own house.

  She remembers hiding all night in the House of Wistaria, listening.

  She remembers her painful decision to accept De Zoet’s proposal.

  She remembers her final shaming and capture at Dejima’s land gate.

  “The monks aren’t like your stepbrother,” Yayoi is saying. “They’re gentle.”

  “So gentle that when I say, ‘No,’ they stop and leave my room?”

  “The Goddess chooses the engifters, just as she chooses us sisters.”

  To implant belief, Orito thinks, is to dominate the believers.

  “At my first engiftment,” Yayoi confesses, “I imagined a boy I once loved.”

  So the hoods, Orito realizes, are to hide the men’s faces, not ours.

  “Might you have known a man”—Yayoi hesitates—“who you could …?”

  Ogawa Uzaemon, the midwife thinks, is no longer my concern.

  Orito banishes all thought of Jacob de Zoet, and recalls Jacob de Zoet.

  “Oh,” says Yayoi, “I’m as nosy as Hashihime tonight. Pay me no mind.”

  But the newest sister slips from the warmth of their blankets, goes to the chest given her by the abbess, and takes out a bamboo-and-paper fan. Yayoi sits up, curious. Orito lights a candle and opens the fan.

  Yayoi peers at the details. “He was an artist? Or a scholar?”

  “He read books, but he was just a clerk in an ordinary warehouse.”

  “He loved you.” Yayoi touches the ribs of the fan. “He loved you.”

  “He was a stranger from another … domain. He scarcely knew me.”

  Yayoi looks at Orito pityingly and sighs. “So?”

  THE SLEEPER KNOWS she is dreaming, because the moon-gray cat pronounces, “Someone carried this fish all the way up this mountain.” The cat takes the pilchard, jumps to the ground, and vanishes beneath the walkway. The dreamer lowers herself onto the courtyard, but the cat has gone. She sees a narrow rectangular hole in the foundations of the house …

  … Its breath is warm. She hears children and summer’s insects.

  A voice up on the walkway asks, “Has the newest sister lost anything?”

  The moon-gray cat licks its paws and speaks in her father’s voice.

  “I know you’re a messenger,” says the dreamer, “but what is your message?”

  The cat looks at her pityingly and sighs. “I left through this hole, beneath us …”

  The dark universe is packed into one small box that slowly opens.

  “… and reappeared at the house gate a minute later. What does that mean?”

  The sleeper wakes up in frosted darkness. Yayoi is here, fast asleep.

  Orito gropes, fumbles, and understands. A conduit … or a tunnel.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE TWO HUNDRED STEPS LEADING TO RYÛGAJI TEMPLE IN NAGASAKI

  New Year’s Day, the twelfth year of the Era of Kansei

  THE HOLIDAY CROWDS THRONG AND JOSTLE. BOYS ARE SELLING warblers in cages dangling from a pine tree. Over her smoking griddle, a palsy-handed grandmother croaks, “Squiiiiiiiiid on a stick-oh, squiiiiiiiiid on a stick-oh, who will buy my squiiiiiiiiid on a stick-oooh!” Inside his palanquin, Uzaemon
hears Kiyoshichi shout, “Make way, make way!” less in hope of clearing a path than to insure himself against being scolded by Ogawa the Elder for laziness. “Pictures to astound! Drawings to amaze!” hollers a seller of engravings. The man’s face appears in the grille of Uzaemon’s palanquin, and he holds up a pornographic wood-block print of a naked goblin, who bears an undeniable likeness to Melchior van Cleef. The goblin possesses a monstrous phallus as big as his body. “Might I proffer for sir’s delectation a sample of ‘Dejima Nights’?” Uzaemon growls, “No!” and the man withdraws, bellowing, “See Kawahara’s Hundred and Eight Wonders of the Empire without leaving your house!” A storyteller points to his board about the Siege of Shimabara: “Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the Christian Amakusa Shirô, bent on selling our souls to the king of Rome!” The entertainer plays his audience well: there are boos and yells of abuse. “And so the great shogun expelled the foreign devils, and so the yearly rite of Fumi-e continues to the present day, to weed out these heretics feeding off our udders!” A disease-gnawed girl, breastfeeding a baby so deformed that Uzaemon mistakes it for a shaven puppy, implores, “Mercy and a coin, sir, mercy and a coin …” He slides open the grille just as the palanquin lurches forward a dozen steps, and Uzaemon is left holding a one-mon piece against all the laughing, smoking, joking passersby. Their joy is insufferable. I am like a dead spirit at O-bon, Uzaemon thinks, forced to watch the carefree and the living gorge themselves on Life. His palanquin tips, and he must grip the lacquered handle as he slides backward. Near the top of the temple steps, a handful of girls on the cusp of womanhood whip their spinning tops. To know the secrets of Mount Shiranui, he thinks, is to be banished from this world.

  A lumbering ox obscures Uzaemon’s view of the girls.

  The creeds of Enomoto’s order shine darkness on all things.

  When the ox has passed, the girls are gone.

  THE PALANQUINS ARE set down in the Courtyard of the Jade Peony, an area reserved for samurai families. Uzaemon climbs out of his box and slides his swords into his sash. His wife stands behind his mother, while his father attacks Kiyoshichi like the snapping turtle he has come, in recent weeks, to resemble: “Why did you allow us to be buried alive in that”—he jabs his stick toward the thronged steps—“in that human mud?”

  Kiyoshichi bows low. “My lapse was unforgivable, Master.”

  “Yet this old fool,” growls Ogawa the Elder, “is to forgive you anyhow?”

  Uzaemon tries to intervene. “With respect, Father, I’m sure—”

  “‘With respect’ is what scoundrels say when they mean the opposite!”

  “With sincere respect, Father, Kiyoshichi could not make the crowd vanish.”

  “So sons now side with menservants against their fathers?”

  Kannon, Uzaemon implores, grant me patience. “Father, I’m not siding with—”

  “Well, doubtless you find this silly old fool very behind the times.”

  I am not your son. The unexpected thought strikes Uzaemon.

  “People will start wondering,” Uzaemon’s mother declares to the backs of her powdered hands, “whether the Ogawas are having doubts about the fumi-e.”

  Uzaemon turns to Ogawa Mimasaku. “Then let us enter … yes?”

  “Shouldn’t you consult the servants first?” Ogawa Mimasaku walks toward the inner gates. He rose from his sickbed a few days ago only partially recovered, but to be absent from the fumi-e ritual is tantamount to announcing one’s own death. He slaps away Saiji’s offers of help. “My stick is more loyal.”

  The Ogawas pass a queue of newly wed couples waiting to inhale incense smoke curling from the bronze Ryûgaji dragon’s mouth. Local legend promises them a healthy baby son. Uzaemon senses that his wife would like to join them but is too ashamed of her two miscarriages. The temple’s cavernous entrance is strung with twists of white paper to celebrate the forthcoming Year of the Sheep. Their servants help them out of their shoes, which they store on shelves marked with their names. An initiate greets them with a nervous bow, ready to guide them to the Gallery of Paulownia to perform the fumi-e ritual away from the prying eyes of the lower orders. “The head priest guides the Ogawas,” Uzaemon’s father remarks.

  “The head priest,” the initiate apologizes, “is busy with te-te-te—”

  Ogawa Mimasaku sighs and stares off to one side.

  “—temple duties,” the stutterer says, mortified into fluency, “at present.”

  “Whatever a man is busy with, that is what, or whom, he values.”

  The initiate leads them to a line of thirty or forty strong. “The wait should”—he takes a deep breath—“n-n-n-nnn-n-n-not be long.”

  “How, in Buddha’s name,” asks Uzaemon’s father, “do you say your sutras?”

  The blushing initiate grimaces, bows, and returns the way he came.

  Ogawa Mimasaku is half smiling for the first time in many days.

  Uzaemon’s mother, meanwhile, greets the family ahead. “Nabeshima-san!”

  A portly matriarch turns around. “Ogawa-san!”

  “Another year gone,” croons Uzaemon’s mother, “in the blink of an eye!”

  Ogawa the Elder and the opposing patriarch, a rice-tax collector for the magistracy, exchange manly bows; Uzaemon greets the three Nabeshima sons, all close to him in age and employed in their father’s office.

  “The blink of an eye,” sighs the matriarch, “and two new grandsons …”

  Uzaemon glances at his wife, who is withering away with shame.

  “Please accept,” says his mother, “our heartfelt congratulations.”

  “I tell my daughters-in-law,” huffs Mrs. Nabeshima, “‘Slow down: it isn’t a race!’ But young people nowadays won’t listen, don’t you find? Now the middle one thinks she has another on the way. Between ourselves,” she leans close to Uzaemon’s mother, “I was too lenient when they arrived. Now they run amok. You three! Where are your manners? For shame!” Her forefinger plucks her daughters-in-law one step forward, each dressed in a seasonal kimono and tasteful sash. “Had I worn my mother-in-law down like these three tormentors, I would have been sent back to my parents’ house in disgrace.” The three young wives stare at the ground, while Uzaemon’s attention is drawn to their babies, in the arms of wet nurses over to one side. He is assailed, as he has been countless times since the day of the herbalist of Kurozane’s visit, by nightmarish images of Orito being “engifted” and, nine months later, of the masters “consuming” the Goddess’s gifts. The questions begin circling. How do they actually kill the newborn? How is it kept secret from the mothers, from the world? How can men believe that this depravity lets them cheat death? How can their consciences be amputated?

  “I see your wife—Okinu-san, isn’t it?”—Mrs. Nabeshima regards Uzaemon with a saint’s smile and a lizard’s eyes—“is a better-bred girl altogether than my three. ‘We’ are as yet”—she pats her stomach—“unblessed, are we?”

  Okinu’s face paint hides her blush, but her cheeks quiver slightly.

  “My son does his part,” Uzaemon’s mother declares, “but she is so careless.”

  “And how,” Mrs. Nabeshima tuts, “have ‘we’ settled into Nagasaki?”

  “She still pines for Karatsu,” says Uzaemon’s mother. “Such a crybaby!”

  “Homesickness may be”—the matriarch pats her belly again—“the cause …”

  Uzaemon wants to defend his wife, but how to combat a painted mud slide?

  “Could your husband,” Mrs. Nabeshima is asking Uzaemon’s mother, “spare you and Okinu-san this afternoon, I wonder? We’re having a little party at home, and your daughter-in-law may benefit from the advice of mothers her own age. But—oh!” She regards Ogawa the Elder with a dismayed frown. “What must you think of such an imposition at so short a notice, given your husband’s health—”

  “Her husband’s health,” the old man interrupts, “is excellent. You two,” he sneers at his wife and daughter-in-law, “do whatever you wi
sh. I’m going to have sutras recited for Hisanobu.”

  “Such a devout father,” Mrs. Nabeshima says, shaking her head, “is a model for the youth of today. All’s settled, then, yes, Mrs. Ogawa? After the fumi-e, come back to our—” She breaks off her sentence to address a wet nurse. “Silence that mewling piglet! Have you forgotten where we are? For shame!”

  The wet nurse turns away, bares her breast, and feeds the baby.

  Uzaemon peers at the queue into the gallery, trying to gauge its speed.

  THE BUDDHIST DEITY Fudô Myôô glares from his candlelit shrine. His fury, Uzaemon was taught, frightens the impious; his sword slices their ignorance; his rope binds demons; his third eye scrutinizes human hearts; and the rock on which he stands signifies immovability. Seated before him are six officials from the Inspectorate of Spiritual Purity, dressed in ceremonial attire.

  The first official asks Uzaemon’s father, “Please state your name and position.”

  “Ogawa Mimasaku, Interpreter of the First Rank of Dejima Interpreters, head of the Ogawa household of the Higashizaka Ward.”

  The first inspector tells a second, “Ogawa Mimasaku is present.”

  The second finds the name on a register. “Ogawa Mimasaku’s name is listed.”

  The third writes the name. “Ogawa Mimasaku hereby registered as present.”

  A fourth declaims, “Ogawa Mimasaku will now perform the act of fumi-e.”

  Ogawa Mimasaku steps onto the well-worn bronze plaque of Jesus Christ and grinds his heel on the image for good measure.

  A fifth official calls out, “Ogawa Mimasaku has performed fumi-e.”

  The interpreter of the first rank steps off the idolatrous plaque and is helped by Kiyoshichi to a low bench. Uzaemon suspects he is suffering more pain than he is willing to show.

  A sixth official marks his register. “Ogawa Mimasaku is registered as having performed the act of fumi-e.”