The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

by David Mitchell

Uzaemon thinks about the foreigner De Zoet’s Psalms of David and the narrowness of his own escape when Kobayashi had the Dutchman’s apartment burgled. He wishes he had asked De Zoet about his mysterious religion last summer.

  Noise washes in from the commoners’ ritual in a neighboring hall.

  The first official is now addressing him: “Please state your name and profession …”

  Once the formalities are completed, Uzaemon steps up to the fumi-e. He glances down and meets the pained eyes of the foreign god. Uzaemon presses his foot down on the bronze and thinks of the long line of Ogawas of Nagasaki who have stood on this same fumi-e. On previous New Year’s Days, Uzaemon felt proud to be the latest in this line: some ancestors would, like him, have been adoptive sons. But today he feels like an impostor, and he knows why.

  My loyalty to Orito, he phrases it, is stronger than my loyalty to the Ogawas.

  He feels the face of Jesus Christ against the sole of his foot.

  Whatever the cost, Uzaemon vows, I shall free her. But I need help.

  THE WALLS OF SHUZAI’S dojo hall echo with the two swordsmen’s shrieks and the crack of bamboo poles. They attack, parry, counter, rout; attack, parry, counter, rout. The sprung wooden floor creaks under their bare feet. Drips of rainwater are caught by buckets, which, when full, are changed by Shuzai’s last remaining apprentice. The practice bout comes to an abrupt end when the shorter of the two combatants deals his partner a blow on his right elbow, causing Uzaemon to drop his pole. The concerned victor slides up his mask, revealing a flat-nosed, well-weathered, and watchful man well into his forties. “Is it broken?”

  “The fault was mine.” Uzaemon is clutching his elbow.

  Yohei hurries over to help his master unfasten his mask.

  Unlike his teacher’s face, Uzaemon’s drips with sweat. “There’s no breakage … look.” He bends and straightens his elbow. “Just a well-deserved bruise.”

  “The light was too poor. I should have lit lamps.”

  “Shuzai-san mustn’t waste oil on my account. Let us end here.”

  “I hope you won’t oblige me to drink your generous gift alone?”

  “On such an auspicious day, your engagements must be pressing …”

  Shuzai looks around his empty dojo hall and shrugs at Uzaemon.

  “Then,” the interpreter bows, “I accept your courteous invitation.”

  Shuzai orders his pupil to light the fire in his private apartment. The men change out of their practice clothes, discussing the New Year promotions and demotions announced earlier by Magistrate Ômatsu. Stepping up into the teacher’s quarters, Uzaemon recalls the ten or more young disciples who ate, slept, and studied here when he first took lessons from Shuzai, and the pair of matronly neighborhood women who cajoled and cared for them. The rooms are colder and quieter nowadays, but as the fire comes to life, the two men slip into informal manners and their native Tosa dialect, and Uzaemon is warmed by his and Shuzai’s ten-year-old friendship.

  Shuzai’s boy pours the heated sake into a chipped flask, bows, and leaves.

  Now is the time, Uzaemon prompts himself, to say what I have to say.

  The thoughtful host and his hesitant guest fill each other’s cups.

  “To the fortunes of the Ogawas of Nagasaki,” proposes Shuzai, “and to the speedy recovery of your honorable father.”

  “To a prosperous Year of the Sheep for the dojo hall of Master Shuzai.”

  The men empty the first cup of sake, and Shuzai sighs contentedly. “But prosperity is gone for good, I fear. I pray I’m wrong, but I doubt I am. The old values are decaying, that’s the problem. The smell of decadence hangs everywhere, like smoke. Oh, samurai enjoy the notion of wading into battle like their valiant ancestors, but when the storehouse is hungry, it’s swordsmanship they say goodbye to, not their concubines and silk linings. Those who do care about the old ways are the very ones who fall foul of the new. Another of my students quit last week, with tears in his eyes: his father’s stipend at the armory has been paid at half rate for two years running—and now the gentleman learns that his rank won’t be eligible for a New Year payment. This at the end of the twelfth month, when the moneylenders and bailiffs do their rounds, badgering decent people! Have you heard Edo’s newest advice to its unpaid officials? ‘Cover your indulgences by breeding goldfish.’ Goldfish! Who has money to waste on goldfish, other than merchants? Now, if merchants’ sons were permitted to carry swords”—Shuzai lowers his voice—“I would have a line of pupils stretching from here to the fish market, but better to plant silver coins in horse shit than wait for Edo to pass that edict.” He refills his cup and Uzaemon’s. “Ah, so much for my woes: your mind was on other things during sword practice.”

  Uzaemon is no longer surprised by Shuzai’s perspicacity. “I don’t know if I have the right to involve you.”

  “To a believer in Fate,” replies Shuzai, “it’s not you who is involving me.”

  Damp twigs on the weak fire crackle as if trodden upon.

  “Some disturbing news came into my possession, some days ago …”

  A cockroach, shiny as lacquer, crawls along the base of the wall.

  “… in the form of a scroll. It concerns the Order of the Shrine of Shiranui.”

  Shuzai, privy to Uzaemon’s intimacy with Orito, studies his friend.

  “The scroll lists the order’s secret precepts. It’s … disturbing.”

  “It’s a secretive place, Mount Shiranui. You are certain this scroll is genuine?”

  Uzaemon produces the dogwood scroll tube from his sleeve. “Yes. I wish it was a forgery, but it was written by an acolyte of the order who was no longer able to bury his conscience. He ran away, and to read the scroll is to understand why …”

  The rain’s innumerable hooves clatter on the streets and roofs.

  Shuzai holds out his open palm for the scroll tube.

  “To read it may implicate you, Shuzai. It could be dangerous.”

  Shuzai holds out his open palm for the scroll tube.

  “BUT THIS IS”—Shuzai speaks in an appalled whisper—“this is insanity: that this”—he gestures at the scroll on his low table—“murderous garble could purchase immortality. The phrases are misshapen but … these third and fourth creeds—if the ‘engifters’ are the initiates of the order and the ‘bearers’ are the women and their newborn the ‘gifts,’ then the shrine of Shiranui is a—a—not a harem but …”

  “A farm.” Uzaemon’s throat tightens. “The sisters are livestock.”

  “This sixth creed, about ‘extinguishing the gifts in the Bowl of Hands’ …”

  “They must drown the newborn children, like unwanted puppies.”

  “But the men doing the drowning … they must be the fathers.”

  “The seventh creed orders five ‘engifters’ to lie with the same ‘bearer’ over as many nights so no one can know that he is killing his own offspring.”

  “It—it violates Nature: the women, how could …” Shuzai aborts his sentence.

  Uzaemon forces himself to voice his worst fears. “The women are violated when they are most fertile, and when the children are born, they are stolen. The women’s consent, I presume, is not a matter of concern. Hell is hell because, there, evil passes unremarked upon.”

  “But might some not prefer to take their own lives to this?”

  “Perhaps some do. But look at the eighth creed: ‘letters from the extinguished.’ A mother who believes that her children are living good lives with foster families may, perhaps, endure what she must—especially if she can nurture hopes of meeting her children again, after her ‘descent.’ That these reunions can never occur is a truth that, evidently, never reaches the House of Sisters.”

  Shuzai passes no comment, but squints at the scroll. “There are sentences I cannot decipher … See this last line of all: ‘The final word of Shiranui is silence.’ Your runaway apostate must translate his testimony into plain Japanese.”

  “He was poisone
d. To read the creeds, as I said, is dangerous.”

  Uzaemon’s servant and Shuzai’s apprentice talk as they sweep the hall.

  “Yet Lord Abbot Enomoto,” Shuzai speaks with incredulity, “is known as a …”

  “A respected judge, yes; a humane lord, yes; an academician of the Shirandô, a confidant of the great, and a dealer in rare medicines, yes. Yet it appears he is also a believer in an arcane Shintô ritual that buys blood-drenched immortality.”

  “How could these abominations be kept a secret for so many decades?”

  “Isolation, ingenuity, power … fear. These achieve most ends.”

  A clutch of New Year revelers hurries along the street outside.

  Uzaemon looks at the alcove where Shuzai’s master is honored; a mildewed hanging proclaims, The hawk may be starving, yet he won’t touch corn.

  “The author of this scroll,” Shuzai says cautiously, “did you meet him face-to-face?”

  “No. He gave the scroll to an old herbalist living near Kurozane. Miss Aibagawa visited her, two or three times, which is how the herbalist knew my name. She sought me out in the hope that I have the will and the means to help the shrine’s newest sister.”

  The two men listen to the percussion of dripping water.

  “The will I have; the means are another matter. If a Dutch interpreter of the third rank mounted a campaign against the lord of Kyôga armed with nothing but this scroll of illegitimate provenance …”

  “Enomoto would have you beheaded for slurring his reputation.”

  This minute, Uzaemon thinks, is a crossroads. “Shuzai, if I had persuaded my father to let me marry Miss Aibagawa, as I once promised, she wouldn’t be enslaved in this”—he jabs at the parchment—“farm. Do you understand why I have to free her?”

  “What I understand is that if you act alone you’ll get sliced like a tuna fish. Give me a few days. I may take a short journey.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ORITO’S ROOM AT THE HOUSE OF SISTERS

  The eighth night of the first month in the twelfth year of the Era of Kansei

  ORITO CONSIDERS THE LUCK REQUIRED IN THE HOURS AHEAD: the cat’s tunnel must be wide enough to admit a slim woman and not barred at its exit; Yayoi must sleep until morning without checking on her; she must descend an icebound gorge without injury and pass the halfway gate without alerting the guards; and by dawn, she must find Otane’s house and trust her friend to give her sanctuary. All of which, Orito thinks, is just the beginning. Returning to Nagasaki would mean recapture, but escape to the relative safety of Chikugo Domain, or Kumamoto or Kagoshima, would mean arriving in a strange town as a homeless, friendless woman without a sen to her name.

  Engiftment is next week, Orito thinks. Next week is your turn.

  Inch by cautious inch, Orito slides open her door.

  My first footstep, she thinks, as a fugitive, and passes Yayoi’s room.

  Her heavily pregnant friend is snoring. Orito whispers, “I am sorry.”

  For Yayoi, Orito’s escape will be a brutal abandonment.

  It’s the Goddess, the midwife reminds herself, who forces you to do this.

  Orito slides her feet around the passageway to the kitchen, where a screen serves as the curfew exit out onto the cloisters. Here she binds a pair of straw-and-canvas shoes onto her feet.

  Outside, icy air soaks into her padded jacket and mountain trousers.

  A gibbous moon is grubby. Stars are bubbles, trapped in ice. The old pine is gnarled and malign. Orito navigates the cloisters back to the place the cat showed her a few weeks ago. Watching the shadows, she lowers herself onto the frost-fused stones. She ducks underneath the walkway, bracing herself for a shout of alarm …

  … BUT THERE IS NO shout. Orito crawls under the inner passageway until her groping hand finds the rectangle between the foundation stones. She found it once again after the moon-gray cat showed it to her but in doing so earned the attention of Sisters Asagao and Sawarabi and had to concoct a dubious story about a dropped pin. In the nine days since, she has not risked reconnoitering the tunnel. If, she thinks, it is a tunnel, and not just a few missing blocks in the foundations. Headfirst, she inserts herself through the black rectangle and crawls forward.

  Inside, the “roof” is knee height, the walls a forearm apart. To move, Orito must wriggle laterally, like an eel, less elegantly but as quietly. Soon her kneecaps are scraped, her shins are bruised, and her fingertips hurt as they grapple for traction on the frozen stones. The floor feels smoothed, as if by running water. The darkness is one degree short of absolute. When her probing knuckles slap a stone block, she despairs, thinking she has come to a dead end … but then the conduit bends to the left. Twisting her body around the sharp corner, she pushes onward. She shivers uncontrollably and her lungs hurt. She tries not to think of giant rats or entombment. I must be under Umegae’s room, she supposes, imagining the sister pressed against Hashihime, just two layers of floorboard, a tatami mat, and an under-futon above her.

  Is the darkness ahead, she wonders, growing less dark?

  Hope pushes her onward. She makes out another corner.

  Rounding it, Orito sees a small triangle of moonlit stone.

  A hole in the house’s outer wall, she realizes. Please, please let it be big enough.

  But after a minute’s slow struggle, she finds the hole little bigger than a fist: just the right size for a cat. Years of ice and sun, she guesses, loosened a single lump of stone. Were the hole any larger, she thinks, it would have been noticed from the outside. Anchoring herself, she places her hand against the stone adjacent to the hole and pushes with all her strength until a painful crick in her bent neck obliges her to stop.

  Some objects are potentially movable, she thinks, but this one, never.

  “That’s it, then.” Her murmured breath is white. “There’s no escape.”

  Orito considers the next twenty years, the men, and the children removed.

  She retreats to the second bend, turns around with difficulty, and propels herself forward, feetfirst, back to the outer wall and wedges herself tight: she plants her heels on the adjacent stone and pushes …

  I may as well—Orito gasps for breath—try to shift Bare Peak.

  Then she imagines Abbess Izu announcing her engiftment.

  Jackknifing herself, she kicks at the stone with the flat of her feet.

  She imagines the sisters’ congratulations: gleeful, spiteful, sincere.

  Barking her shins, she kicks at the stone again, again, and again …

  She thinks of Master Genmu pawing and gnawing her.

  What was that sound? Orito stops. Was that a grating sound?

  She imagines Suzaku pulling out her first baby; her third; her ninth …

  Her feet kick the stone until her calves hurt and her neck throbs.

  Grit trickles onto her ankles—and suddenly not one but two blocks tumble away and her feet are sticking out into empty space.

  She hears stones thump down a low slope and settle with a thud.

  THE SNOW IS SCABBY and ruckled underfoot. Orient yourself—Orito is dazed to be outside the house—and quickly. The long gully between the ramped foundations of the House of Sisters and the shrine’s outer wall is five paces wide, but the wall is as high as three men. To reach its ramparts, she must find the stairs or a ladder. Left, toward the northern corner, is a moon gate in the Chinese style: this, Orito has learned from Yayoi, leads into a triangular courtyard and Master Genmu’s fine quarters. Orito hurries in the other direction, toward the eastern corner. Passing the end of the House of Sisters, she enters a small enclosure accommodating the hen coop, dovecote, and stalls for the goats. The birds stir slightly as she passes, but the goats stay asleep.

  The eastern corner is connected by a roofed walkway to the Masters’ Hall; by a small storehouse, a bamboo ladder is propped against the outer wall. Daring to hope that escape is just a few moments away, Orito climbs up to the rampart. Level with the shrine’s eaves, sh
e sees the ancient column of Amanohashira rising from the sacred courtyard. Its spike impales the moon. Such arresting beauty, Orito thinks. Such silent violence.

  She pulls up the bamboo ladder and lowers it over the wall’s outer face …

  The dense pine forest comes to within twenty paces of the shrine.

  … but the ladder’s feet don’t reach the ground. Perhaps there is a dry moat.

  The thick shadow below the wall obscures the height of the drop.

  If I jump and break my leg, she thinks, I’ll freeze to death by sunrise.

  Her numb fingers lose their grip and the ladder falls and shatters.

  I need a rope, she concludes, or the means to fashion one.

  Feeling as exposed as a rat on a shelf, Orito hurries along the rampart toward the great gate in the southern corner, hoping that freedom can be won over the body of a soundly sleeping sentry. She climbs down the next ladder to a gully between the outer wall and the barn-sized kitchen and dining hall. There is the smell of latrines and soot. Amber light leaks from the kitchen door. Knives are being sharpened by an insomniac cook. To disguise her footfalls, Orito steps in time to the metallic scrape. The next moon gate leads her into the southern courtyard, overlooked by the meditation hall and populated by two giant cryptomeria: Fûjin, the wind god, bent under his sack of the world’s winds; and Raijin, the thunder god, who steals navels during thunderstorms, holding up his chain of hand drums. The great gate, like Dejima’s land gate, consists of tall double doors for palanquins and a smaller door through the gatehouse. This door, Orito sees, stands slightly ajar …

  … SO SHE CREEPS closer along the wall, until she smells tobacco and hears voices. She crouches in the shadow of a large barrel. “Any more charcoal?” a voice drawls. “My nuts are nuggets of ice.”

  A scuttle is rattled empty. “That’s the last,” says a high voice.

  “We’ll throw dice,” says the drawler, “for the privilege of getting more.”

  “So what are your chances,” says a third voice, “of having those nuggets melted in the House of Sisters during engiftment?”