The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

by David Mitchell

  “Not good,” admits the drawler. “I had Sawarabi three months ago.”

  “I had Kagerô last month,” says the third voice. “I’m at the back of the queue.”

  “The newest sister’s bound to be chosen,” says the third voice, “chances are, so we acolytes shan’t snatch a peep all week. Genmu and Suzaku are always the first to dig their hoes into virgin soil.”

  “Not if the lord abbot visits,” says the drawler. “Master Annei told Master Nogoro that Enomoto-dono befriended her father and guaranteed his loans, so that when the old man crossed the Sanzu, the widow had a stark choice: hand over her stepdaughter to Mount Shiranui or lose her house and everything in it.”

  Orito has never considered this: here and now, it is sickeningly plausible.

  The third voice clucks admiringly. “A master of strategy, our lord abbot.”

  Orito wishes she could tear the men and their words to pieces, like squares of paper ….

  “Why go to all the bother to get a samurai’s daughter,” asks the high voice, “when he can pick and choose from any brothel in the empire?”

  “Because this one’s a midwife,” answers the drawler, “who’ll stop so many of our sisters and their gifts dying during labor. Rumor has it she brought the Nagasaki magistrate’s newborn son back from the dead. Cold and blue, he was, until Sister Orito breathed life back into him …”

  That single act is why Enomoto brought me here?

  “… I’d not be surprised,” continues the drawler, “if she’s a special case.”

  “Meaning,” asks the third voice, “that not even the lord abbot honors her?”

  “Not even she could stop herself dying in childbirth, right?”

  Ignore this speculation, Orito orders herself. What if he’s wrong?

  “Pity,” says the drawler. “If you ignore her face, she’s a pretty thing.”

  “Mind you,” adds the high voice, “until Jiritsu is replaced, there’s one less—”

  “Master Genmu forbade us,” exclaims the drawler, “ever to mention that treacherous bastard’s name.”

  “He did,” agrees the third voice. “He did. Fill the charcoal bucket as penance.”

  “But we were going to throw dice for it!”

  “Ah. That was prior to your disgraceful lapse. Charcoal!”

  The door is flung open: bad-tempered footsteps crunch toward Orito, who crouches into a terrified ball. The young monk stops by the barrel and removes its lid, just inches away. Orito hears his teeth chatter. She breathes into her shoulder to hide her breath. He scoops up charcoal, filling the scuttle lump by lump …

  Any moment now—she shakes—any moment now …

  … but he turns away and walks back to the guardhouse.

  Like paper prayers, a year’s good luck was burned away in seconds.

  Orito abandons all hope of leaving through the gates. She thinks, A rope …

  HER PULSE STILL FAST and frightened, she slips from the purple shadows through the next moon gate into a courtyard formed by the meditation hall, the western wing, and the outer wall. The guest quarters are a mirror reflection of the House of Sisters: here the laymen of Enomoto’s retinue are housed when the lord abbot is in residence. Like the nuns, they cannot leave their confinement. General supplies, Orito gathers from the sisters, are kept in the western wing, but it is also the living and sleeping quarters of the order’s thirty or forty acolytes. Some will be sound asleep, but some will not. In the northwestern quarter is the lord abbot’s residence. This building has been vacant all winter, but Orito has heard the housekeeper talk about airing the sheets in its linen cupboards. And sheets, it occurs to her, can be knotted into ropes.

  She creeps down the gully between the outer wall and the guest quarters ….

  A young man’s soft laughter escapes the doors and falls silent.

  The fine materials and crest identify the house as the lord abbot’s.

  Exposed from three angles, she climbs up to the gabled doors.

  Let them open, she prays to her ancestors, let them open …

  The doors are shuttered fast against the mountain winter.

  I’d need a hammer and chisel to get inside, Orito thinks. She has nearly walked around the perimeter but is no nearer escaping. The lack of twenty feet of rope means twenty years of concubinage.

  Across the stone garden of Enomoto’s residence is the northern wing. Suzaku, Orito has learned, has his quarters here, next to the infirmary …

  … and an infirmary means patients, beds, sheets, and mosquito nets.

  Entering one of the wings is a reckless risk, but what choice is left?

  THE DOOR SLIDES six inches before emitting a high, singing groan. Orito holds her breath to hear the noise of running footsteps …

  … but nothing happens, and the fathomless night smooths itself.

  She squeezes through the gap; a door curtain strokes her face.

  Reflected moonlight delineates, dimly, a small entrance hall.

  An odor of camphor locates the infirmary through a right-hand door.

  There is a sunken doorway to her left, but the fugitive’s instinct says, No …

  She slides open the right-hand door.

  The darkness resolves itself into planes, lines, and surfaces …

  She hears the rustling of a straw futon and a sleeper’s breathing.

  She hears voices and footsteps: two men, or three.

  The patient yawns and asks, “’S anyone there?”

  Orito withdraws to the entrance hall, slides the infirmary door shut, and peers around the shrieking door. A lantern bearer is less than ten paces away.

  He is looking this way, but the glow of his light impairs his vision.

  Now Master Suzaku’s voice can be heard in the infirmary.

  The fugitive has nowhere to run but the sunken doorway.

  This may be the end, Orito thinks, shivering, this may be the end …

  THE SCRIPTORIUM IS walled from floor to ceiling with shelves of scrolls and manuscripts. On the other side of the sunken door, someone trips and mutters a curse. Fear of capture pushes Orito into the large chamber before she can be certain that it is unoccupied. A pair of writing tables are illuminated by a double-headed lantern, and a small fire licks a kettle hanging over the brazier. The side aisles provide hiding places, but hiding places, she thinks, are also traps. Orito walks along the aisle toward the other door, which, she guesses, leads into Master Genmu’s quarters, and enters the globe of lamplight. She is afraid to leave the empty room but afraid to stay and afraid to go back. In her indecision, she glances down at a half-finished manuscript on one of the tables: with the exceptions of the wall hangings in the House of Sisters, these are the first written characters the scholar’s daughter has seen since her abduction, and despite the danger, her hungry eye is drawn. Instead of a sutra or sermon, she finds a half-composed letter, written not in the ornate calligraphy of an educated monk but in a more feminine hand. The first column she reads obliges her to read the second, and the third …

  Dear Mother, The maples are aflame with autumn colors and the harvest moon floats like a lantern, just as the words of The Moonlit Castle describe. How long ago seems the rainy season, when the lord abbot’s servant delivered your letter. It lies in front of me on my husband’s table. Yes, Koyama Shingo accepted me as his wife on the auspicious thirtieth day of the seventh month at Shimogamo Shrine, and we are living in the two back rooms of the White Crane obi-sash workshop on Imadegawa Street. After the wedding ceremony, a banquet was held at a famous teahouse, paid for jointly by the Uedas and Koyamas. Some of my friends’ husbands turn into spiteful goblins after capturing their bride, but Shingo continues to treat me with kindness. Married life is not a boating party, of course—just as you wrote in your letter three years ago, a dutiful wife must never sleep before her husband or rise after him, and I never have enough hours in the day! Until the White Crane is well established, we economize by making do with just one maid, as my h
usband brought only two apprentices from his father’s workshop. I am happy to write, however, that we have secured the patronage of two families connected with the imperial court. One is a lesser branch of the Konoe—

  The words stop, but Orito’s head is spinning. Are the New Year letters, she wonders, all written by the monks? But this makes no sense. Tens of fictional children would have to be maintained until their mothers’ descents, and then the subterfuge would be discovered. Why go to so much trouble? Because—twin lamps dot Fat Rat’s knowing eyes—the children cannot write New Year letters from the world below for the reason that they never reach the world below. The scriptorium’s shadows are watching her react to the implications. Steam rises from the kettle’s spout. Fat Rat is waiting. “No,” she tells it. “No.” There is no need for infanticide. If the gifts were unwanted by the order, Master Suzaku would issue herbs to trigger early miscarriages. Mockingly, Fat Rat asks her to explain the letter on the table in front of them. Orito seizes on the first plausible answer: Sister Hatsune’s daughter died from disease or an accident. To save the sister the pain of bereavement, the order must have a policy of continuing the New Year letters.

  Fat Rat twitches, turns, and disappears.

  The door by which she entered is opening. A man says, “After you, Master …”

  Orito rushes for the other door; as in a dream, it is both near and far.

  “Strange”—Master Chimei’s voice follows—“how one composes best at night …”

  Orito slides the door open three or four hand widths.

  “… but I’m glad of your company at this inhospitable hour, dear youth.”

  She is through and slides shut the door just as Master Chimei strides into the lamplight. Behind Orito, the passageway to Master Genmu’s quarters is short, cold, and unlit. “A story must move,” Master Chimei opines, “and misfortune is motion. Contentment is inertia. Hence, into the story of Sister Hatsune’s Miss Noriko, we shall sow the seeds of a modest calamity. The lovebirds must suffer. Either from without, from theft, fire, sickness—or, better yet, from within, from a weakness of character. Young Shingo may grow weary of his wife’s devotion, or Noriko may grow so jealous of the new maid that Shingo does start tupping the girl. Tricks of the trade, you see? Storytellers are not priests who commune with an ethereal realm but artisans, like dumpling makers, if somewhat slower. To work, then, dear youth, until the lamp drinks itself dry …”

  ORITO SLIDES HER feet along the corridor to Master Genmu’s quarters, staying close to the wall, where, she hopes, the wood is less likely to squeak. She reaches a paneled door. She holds her breath, listens, and hears nothing. She opens it a tiny crack …

  The space is empty and unlit; blocks of darkness in each wall indicate doors.

  In the middle of the floor lies what might be discarded sacking.

  She enters and approaches the sacks, hoping they can be roped together.

  She thrusts a hand into the mound and finds a man’s warm foot.

  Her heart stops. The foot recoils. A limb turns. The blankets shift.

  Master Genmu mumbles, “Stay here, Maboroshi, or I’ll …” The threat disintegrates.

  Orito crouches, not daring to breathe, much less run away …

  The quilted hills that are Acolyte Maboroshi shift; a snore snags in his throat.

  Minutes pass before Orito is even half sure the two men are asleep.

  She counts ten slow breaths before carrying on to the door ahead.

  Its sliding rumble sounds, to her ears, loud as an earthquake.

  THE GODDESS, lit by a large votive candle and carved in a fine-flecked silver wood, watches the intruder from her plinth in the center of the small, luxurious altar room. The Goddess smiles. Do not meet her eyes, an instinct warns Orito, or she shall know you. Black robes with blood-maroon silken cords hang along one wall; the other walls are lined with paper, as in the richer Dutchmen’s houses, and the mats smell resinous and new. To the right and left of the door on the far wall, large ideograms are written in thick ink on the papered walls. The calligraphic style is clear enough, but when Orito peers at them by the light of the candle, the meanings elude her. Familiar components are arranged in unknown combinations.

  After replacing the candle, she opens the door onto the northern courtyard.

  THE GODDESS, WHOSE paint is peeling, watches the surprised intruder from the center of the mean altar room. Orito is unsure how the shrine’s outer walls can accommodate it. Perhaps there is no northern courtyard. She looks behind her, at the Goddess’s spine and neck. The Goddess ahead is lit by a vigilant candle. She has aged since the first room, and there is no smile on her lips. But don’t meet her eyes, insists the same instinct as before. There is a lingering odor of straw, of animals and people. The boarded walls and floors evoke a farmhouse of middling prosperity. Another one hundred and eight ideograms are written on the far wall, this time on twelve mildewed scrolls hanging at either side of the door. Once again, when Orito pauses for a moment to read the characters, they retreat into troubling unintelligibility. Who cares? she berates herself. Go!

  She opens the door onto what must be the northern courtyard …

  THE GODDESS IN the center of the third altar room is half rotted away: she is unrecognizable from her incarnation in the altar room in the House of Sisters. Her face might be a tertiary syphilitic’s, far beyond the salvation of mercury medicine. One of her arms lies on the floor where it fell, and by the glow of the tallow candle Orito sees a cockroach twitching on the rim of a hole in the statue’s skull. The walls are bamboo and clay, the floor is straw, and the air is sweet with dung: the room would pass for a peasant’s hovel. Orito speculates that the rooms have been hollowed from a spar of Bare Peak, or even hewn out of a series of caves from which the shrine grew as the ages passed. Better yet, it occurs to Orito, it may be an escape tunnel dating from the shrine’s military past. The far wall is caked with something dark—animal blood mixed with mud, perhaps—on which the unreadable characters are daubed in whitewash. Orito raises the poorly made latch, praying that her guess proves accurate …

  THE COLD AND darkness are from a time before people and fire.

  The tunnel is as high as a man and as wide as outstretched arms.

  Orito returns for the candle from the last room: it has about an hour’s life.

  She enters the tunnel, proceeding step by cautious step.

  Bare Peak is above you, taunts Fear, pressing down, pressing down …

  Her shoes click-clack on rock; her breath is hissed shivers; all else is silence.

  The candle’s grimy glow is better than nothing, but not by much.

  She stands still for a moment: the flame is motionless. No draft yet.

  The roof stays at the height of a man and the width of outstretched arms.

  After thirty or forty steps, the tunnel begins to bend upward.

  Orito imagines emerging into starlight through a secret crack …

  … and worries that her escape may cost Yayoi her life.

  The crime is Enomoto’s, her conscience objects, Abbess Izu’s, and the Goddess’s.

  The truth isn’t so simple, her confined echo tells her conscience.

  Is the air becoming warmer, Orito wonders, or do I have a fever?

  THE TUNNEL WIDENS into a domed chamber around a kneeling effigy of the Goddess three or four times larger than life. To Orito’s dismay, the tunnel ends here. The Goddess is sculpted from a black stone flecked with bright grains, as if the sculptor chiseled her from a block of night sky. Orito wonders how the effigy was carried in: it is easier to believe that the rock has been here since the earth was made and that the tunnel was widened to reach it. The Goddess’s back is erect and cloaked in red cloth, but she cups her giantess’s hands to form a hollow the size of a cradle. Her covetous eyes gaze at the space. Her predatory mouth opens wide. If the shrine of Shiranui is a question, the thought thinks Orito as much as Orito thinks the thought, then this place is its answer. Inscri
bed on the smoothed circular wall at shoulder height are more unreadable ideograms: one hundred and eight, she is quite sure, one for each of the Buddhist sins. Something draws Orito’s fingers toward the Goddess’s thigh, and when they touch, she nearly drops the candle: the stone is warm as life. The scholar gropes for an answer. Ducts from hot springs, she reasons, in nearby rocks … Where the Goddess’s tongue should be, something glints in the candlelight. Ignoring an irrational fear of the stone teeth severing her arm, she reaches in and finds a squat bottle nestling snug in a hollow. It is blown from cloudy glass, or it is full of a cloudy liquid. She removes the cork and sniffs: it has no smell. Both as doctor’s daughter and Suzaku’s patient, Orito knows better than to taste it. But why store it in such a place? She slots the bottle back inside the Goddess’s mouth and asks, “What are you? What is done here? To what end?”

  The Goddess’s stone nostrils cannot flare. Her baleful eyes cannot be widening ….

  The candle is extinguished. Blackness swallows the cavern.

  BACK IN THE FIRST of the altar rooms, Orito readies herself to pass through Master Genmu’s quarters, when she notices the silken cords on the black robes and curses her previous stupidity. Ten of the cords, knotted together, form a light, strong rope as long as the outer wall is high; she attaches another five to make certain. Coiling this up, she slides open the door and skirts the edge of Master Genmu’s room to a side door. A screened passageway leads to an outer door and the masters’ garden, where a bamboo ladder leans against the ramparts. She climbs up, ties one end of her rope around a sturdy, unobtrusive joist, and throws the other from the parapet. Without a backward glance, she takes her last deep breath in captivity and lowers herself to the dry ditch …

  Not safe yet. Orito scrambles into a lattice of winter boughs.

  She keeps the shrine wall on her right and refuses to think about Yayoi.

  Big twins, she thinks, a fortnight late; a pelvis slimmer than Kawasemi’s …

  Rounding the western corner, Orito cuts through a swath of firs.