The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

by David Mitchell

  “Thank you. I—I hoped you say these words.” Uzaemon addresses De Zoet’s unasked questions with a foreigner’s directness. “First, to answer, ‘What is the words in this scroll?’ You remember Enomoto, I think”—the name causes De Zoet’s face to cloud over—“is lord abbot of shrine in Kyôga Domain, where … where Miss Aibagawa must live.” The Dutchman nods. “This scroll is—how to say?—rules, believings laws of order, of shrine. These laws are—” This would be hard in Japanese, the interpreter thinks, sighing, but in Dutch it is like breaking rocks. “These rules are … are bad, worse, worst than worst wrong, for woman. It is great suffering … It is not endurable.”

  “What rules? What must she endure, Ogawa, for God’s sake?”

  Uzaemon shuts his eyes. He keeps them shut and shakes his head.

  “At least,” De Zoet’s voice cracks, “tell me if the scroll could be a weapon to attack Enomoto or shame him into releasing her. Or, via the magistracy, could the scroll win Miss Aibagawa justice?”

  “I am interpreter of third rank. Enomoto is lord abbot. He has more power than Magistrate Shiroyama. Justice in Japan is justice of power.”

  “So Miss Aibagawa must suffer—suffer the ‘unendurable’ for the rest of her life?”

  Uzaemon hesitates. “A friend, in Nagasaki, wish to help … with directness.”

  De Zoet is no fool. “You plan a rescue? Can you hope to succeed?”

  Uzaemon hesitates again. “Not he and I alone. I … purchase assistance.”

  “Mercenaries are risky allies, as we Dutch know well.” De Zoet’s mind works an abacus of implications. “But how could you return to Dejima afterward? And she would just be recaptured. You’d have to go into hiding—permanently—and … so why … why sacrifice so much … everything? Unless … oh.”

  Momentarily, the two men are unable to look each other in the eye.

  So now you know, the interpreter thinks, I love her, too.

  “I am a fool.” The Dutchman rubs his green eyes. “A boorish fool …”

  Two of the Malay slaves hurry down Long Street, speaking their language.

  “… but why did you help my—my advances toward her, if you, too …”

  “Better she lives here with you than become locked forever in bad marriage or be sent away from Nagasaki.”

  “Yet still you entrust me with this”—he touches the tube—“unusable evidence?”

  “You wish her freedom, too. You will not sell me to Enomoto.”

  “Never. But what am I to do with the scroll? I am a prisoner here.”

  “Do nothing. If rescue succeed, I not need it. If rescue …” The conspirator drinks his honey and lime. “If rescue does not succeed, if Enomoto learns of scroll’s existence, he will hunt in my father’s house, in friends’ houses. Rules of order is very, very secret. Enomoto kill to possess it. But on Dejima, Enomoto has no power. Here he will not search, I believe.”

  “How will I know whether your mission succeeds or not?”

  “If succeeds, I send message when I can, when is safe.”

  De Zoet is shaken by this interview, but his voice is steady. “You shall be in my prayers, always. When you meet Miss Aibagawa, tell her … tell her … just tell her that. You shall both be in my prayers.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  YAYOI’S ROOM AT THE HOUSE OF SISTERS, MOUNT SHIRANUI SHRINE

  Minutes before sunrise on the eighteenth day of the first month

  HOUSEKEEPER SATSUKI RECEIVES YAYOI’S MILKY-LIPPED BABY daughter. By firelight and dawnlight, Satsuki’s tears are visible. No fresh snow fell during the night, so the track down Mekura Gorge is passable, and Yayoi’s twins are to be taken to the world below this morning. “Now then, Housekeeper.” Abbess Izu issues a gentle rebuke. “You’ve helped with dozens of bestowals. If Sister Yayoi accepts that she isn’t losing little Shinobu and Binyô but sending them on ahead into the world below, surely you can control your feebler feelings. Today is a parting, not a bereavement.”

  What you call “feebler feelings,” thinks Orito, I call “compassion.”

  “Yes, Abbess.” Housekeeper Satsuki swallows. “It’s just … they’re so …”

  “Without the bestowal of our gifts,” Yayoi half-recites, “Kyôga Domain’s rivers would dry, its seedlings would wither, and all its mothers would be barren.”

  Before the night of her escape and voluntary return, Orito would have considered such words to be despicably passive; now she understands that only this belief, that life requires their sacrifice, makes the separation tolerable. The midwife rocks Yayoi’s hungry son, Binyô. “Your sister’s finished now. Give your mother a little rest.”

  Abbess Izu reminds her, “We say ‘bearer,’ Sister Aibagawa.”

  “You do, Abbess,” Orito responds, as expected, “but I am not ‘we.’”

  Sadaie empties crumbs of charcoal onto the fire; they snap and spit.

  We made—Orito holds the abbess’s gaze—firm understandings: remember?

  Our lord abbot—Abbess Izu holds Orito’s gaze—shall have the final word.

  Until that day—Orito holds the abbess’s gaze and repeats, “I am not ‘we.’”

  Binyô’s face is damp, pink, velvet; it folds into a prolonged squawk.

  “Sister?” Yayoi receives her son for his last feed from her breast.

  The midwife scrutinizes Yayoi’s inflamed nipple.

  “It’s much better,” Yayoi tells her friend. “The motherwort works.”

  Orito thinks of Otane of Kurozane, who no doubt supplied the herb, and wonders if she can insist on a yearly meeting among her terms. The newest sister remains the shrine’s lowest-ranking captive, but her decision on the Todoroki Bridge to forfeit her escape and her successful delivery of Yayoi’s twins have elevated her status in many subtle ways. Her right to refuse Suzaku’s drugs is recognized; she is trusted to walk around the shrine’s ramparts three times each day; and Master Genmu agreed that the Goddess wouldn’t choose Orito for engiftment, in return for Orito’s silence about the counterfeit letters. The moral price of the agreement is high: mild friction with the abbess occurs daily, and Lord Abbot Enomoto may undo these advances … but that is a fight, Orito thinks, for a future day.

  Asagao appears at Yayoi’s door. “Naster Suzaku is arriving, Avhess.”

  Orito looks at Yayoi, who is determined not to cry.

  “Thank you, Asagao.” Abbess Izu rises with the suppleness of a girl.

  Sadaie reties her headscarf around her misshapen skull.

  With the abbess’s departure, air and talk flow a little more freely.

  “Calm down,” Yayoi tells the yowling Binyô. “I have two. Here, greedy one …”

  Binyô finds his mother’s nipple at last and feeds.

  Housekeeper Satsuki gazes into Shinobu’s face. “A full, happy tummy.”

  “A full, smelly swaddling band,” says Orito. “May I, before she’s too sleepy?”

  “Oh, let me.” The housekeeper lays Shinobu on her back. “It’s no trouble.”

  Orito allows the older woman the sad honor. “I’ll fetch some warm water.”

  “To think,” says Sadaie, “how spidery the gifts were just a week ago!”

  “We must thank Sister Aibagawa,” says Yayoi, reattaching the guzzling Binyô, “that they’re sturdy enough for bestowal so soon.”

  “We must thank her,” adds Housekeeper Satsuki, “that they were born at all.”

  The ten-day-old boy’s petal-soft hand clenches and unclenches.

  “It is thanks to your endurance,” Orito tells Yayoi, mixing hot water from the kettle with a pan of cold water, “your milk, and your mother’s love.” Don’t talk about love, she warns herself, not today. “Children want to be born; all the midwife does is help.”

  “Do you think,” asks Sadaie, “the twins’ engifter might be Master Chimei?”

  “This one,” Yayoi says, stroking Binyô’s head, “is a chubby goblin: Chimei’s sallow.”

  “Master Se
iryû, then,” whispers Housekeeper Satsuki. “He turns into a goblin king when he loses his temper.”

  On an ordinary day, the women would smile at this.

  “Shinobu-chan’s eyes,” says Sadaie, “remind me of poor Acolyte Jiritsu’s.”

  “I believe they are his,” responds Yayoi. “I dreamed of him again.”

  “Strange to think of Acolyte Jiritsu buried,” Satsuki comments, removing the soiled cloth from the baby girl’s loins, “but his gifts’ lives just beginning.” The housekeeper wipes away the pungent paste with a murky cotton rag. “Strange and sad.” She washes the infant’s buttocks in the warm water. “Could Shinobu have one engifter and Binyô another?”

  “No.” Orito recalls her Dutch texts. “Twins have just one father.”

  Master Suzaku is ushered into the room. “A mild morning, Sisters.”

  The sisters chorus “Good morning” to Suzaku; Orito gives a slight bow.

  “Good weather for our first bestowal of the year! How are our gifts?”

  “Two feeds during the night, Master,” replies Yayoi, “and one more now.”

  “Excellent. I’ll give them a drop of sleep each; they won’t wake until Kurozane, where two wet nurses are waiting at the inn. One is the same woman who took Sister Hatsune’s gift to Niigata two years ago. The little ones will be in the best hands.”

  “The master,” says Abbess Izu, “has wonderful news, Sister Yayoi.”

  Suzaku shows his pointed teeth. “Your gifts are to be raised together in a Buddhist temple near Hôfu by a childless priest and his wife.”

  “Think of it!” exclaims Sadaie. “Little Binyô, a priest’s son!”

  “They’ll have a fine education,” says the abbess, “as children of a temple.”

  “They’ll have each other,” adds Satsuki. “A sibling is the best gift.”

  “My sincerest thanks”—Yayoi’s voice is bloodless—“to the lord abbot.”

  “You may thank him yourself, Sister,” says Abbess Izu, and Orito, washing Shinobu’s soiled swaddling, looks up. “The lord abbot is due to arrive tomorrow or the day after.”

  Fear touches Orito. “I, too,” she lies, “look forward to the honor of speaking with him.”

  Abbess Izu glances at her with triumphant eyes.

  Binyô, sated, is slowing down; Yayoi strokes his lips to remind him to slurp.

  Satsuki and Sadaie finish wrapping the baby girl for her journey.

  Master Suzaku opens his medicine box and unstops a conical bottle.

  The first boom of the bell of Amanohashira ebbs into Yayoi’s cell.

  Nobody speaks; outside the house gate, a palanquin will be waiting.

  Sadaie asks, “Where is Hôfu, Sister Aibagawa? As far as Edo?”

  The second boom of the bell of Amanohashira ebbs into Yayoi’s cell.

  “Much nearer.” Abbess Izu receives the clean, sleepy Shinobu and holds her close to Suzaku. “Hôfu is the castle town of Suô Domain, one domain along from Nagato, and just five or six days away, if the straits are calm …”

  Yayoi stares at Binyô, and far away. Orito guesses at her thoughts: of her first daughter, Kaho, perhaps, sent last year to candlemakers in Harima Domain; or of the future gifts she must give away before her descent in eighteen or nineteen years’ time; or perhaps she is simply hoping that the wet nurses in Kurozane have good, pure milk.

  Bestowals are akin to bereavements, Orito thinks, but the mothers cannot even mourn.

  The third boom of the bell of Amanohashira brings the scene nearly to a close.

  Suzaku empties a few drops from the conical bottle between Shinobu’s lips. “Sweet dreams,” he whispers, “little gift.”

  Her brother, Binyô, still in Yayoi’s arms, groans, burps, and farts. His recital does not delight, as it should. The picture is flat and melancholy.

  “It is time, Sister Yayoi,” states the abbess. “I know you’ll be brave.”

  Yayoi smells his milky neck one last time. “May I feed Binyô his sleep?”

  Suzaku nods and passes her the conical bottle.

  Yayoi presses the pointed mouth against Binyô’s; his tiny tongue slurps.

  “What ingredients,” Orito asks, “does Master Suzaku’s sleep contain?”

  “One midwife.” Suzaku smiles at Orito’s mouth. “One druggist.”

  Shinobu is already asleep: Binyô’s eyelids are sinking …

  Orito cannot help guessing: Opiates? Arisaema? Aconite?

  “Here is something for brave Sister Yayoi.” Suzaku decants a muddy liquid into a thimble-sized stone cup. “I call it ‘fortitude’: it helped at your last bestowal.” He holds it to Yayoi’s lips, and Orito resists the urge to slap the glass away. As the liquid drains down Yayoi’s throat, Suzaku lifts her son off.

  The dispossessed mother mutters, “But …” and stares cloudily at the druggist.

  Orito catches her friend’s drooping head. She lays the numbed mother down.

  Abbess Izu and Master Suzaku each carry out a stolen child.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  OGAWA MIMASAKU’S ROOM AT THE OGAWA RESIDENCE IN NAGASAKI

  Dawn on the twenty-first day of the first month

  UZAEMON KNEELS BY HIS FATHER’S BED. “YOU LOOK A LITTLE … brighter today, Father.”

  “Leave those flowery fibs to the women: to lie is their nature.”

  “Truly, Father, when I came in, the color in your face—”

  “My face has less color than the skeleton in the Dutch hospital.”

  Saiji, his father’s stick-limbed servant, tries to coax the fire back to life.

  “So, you’re making a pilgrimage to Kashima, to pray for your ailing father, in the depths of winter, alone, without a servant—if ‘serve’ is what the oafs sponging off the Ogawa storehouse do. How impressed Nagasaki shall be with your piety.”

  How scandalized Nagasaki shall be, thinks Uzaemon, if the truth is ever known.

  A hard brush is scrubbing the stones of the entrance hall.

  “I don’t make this pilgrimage to earn acclaim, Father.”

  “Scholars, you once informed me, disdain ‘magic and superstition.’”

  “These days, Father, I prefer to keep an open mind.”

  “Oh? So I am now—” He is interrupted by a scraping cough, and Uzaemon thinks of a fish drowning on a plank and wonders if he should sit his father upright. That would require touching him, which a father and son of their rank cannot do. The servant Saiji steps over to help, but the coughing fit passes and Ogawa the Elder bats him away. “So I am now one of your ‘empirical tests’? Do you intend to lecture the academy on the efficacy of the Kashima cure?”

  “When Interpreter Nishi the Elder was ill, his son made a pilgrimage to Kashima and fasted for three days. By his return, his father had not only made a miraculous recovery but walked all the way to Magome to meet him.”

  “Then choked on a fish bone at his celebration banquet.”

  “I shall ask you to exercise caution with fish in the year ahead.”

  The reeds of flames in the brazier fatten and spit.

  “Don’t offer the gods years off your own life just to preserve mine.”

  Uzaemon wonders, A thorny tenderness? “It shan’t come to that, Father.”

  “Unless, unless, the priest swears I’ll have my vigor restored. One’s ribs shouldn’t be prison bars. Better to be with my ancestors and Hisanobu in the pure land than be trapped here with fawners, females, and fools.” Ogawa Mimasaku looks at the butsudan alcove, where his birth son is commemorated with a funeral tablet and a sprig of pine. “To those with a head for commerce, Dejima is a private mint, even with the Dutch trade as bad as it is. But to those dazzled by”—Mimasaku uses the Dutch word “enlightenment”—“the opportunities are wasted. No, it shall be the Iwase clan who dominates the guild. They already have five grandsons.”

  Thank you, Uzaemon thinks, for helping me turn my back on you. “If I disappoint you, Father, I’m sorry.”

 
“How gleefully”—the old man’s eyes close—“life shreds our well-crafted plans.”

  “IT’S THE VERY WORST time of year, husband.” Okinu kneels at the edge of the raised hallway. “What with mud slides and snow and thunder and ice …”

  “Spring,” Uzaemon counters, sitting down to bind his feet, “will be too late for Father, wife.”

  “Bandits are hungrier in winter, and hunger makes them bolder.”

  “I’ll be on the main Saga highway. I have my sword, and Kashima is only two days away. It’s not Hokurikurô, or Kii, or anywhere wild and lawless.”

  Okinu looks around like a nervous doe. Uzaemon cannot recall when his wife last smiled. You deserve a better man, he thinks, and wishes he could say so. His hand presses his oilcloth pack; it contains two purses of money, some bills of exchange, and the love letters Aibagawa Orito sent him during their courtship. Okinu is whispering, “Your mother bullies me terribly when you’re away.”

  I am her son, Uzaemon thinks with a groan, your husband, and not a mediator.

  Utako, his mother’s maid and spy, approaches, an umbrella in hand.

  “Promise me,” Okinu attempts to conceal her true concerns, “not to risk crossing Omura Bay in bad weather, husband.”

  Utako bows to them both; she passes into the front courtyard.

  “So you’ll be back,” Okinu asks, “within five days?”

  Poor, poor creature, Uzaemon thinks, whose only ally is me.

  “Six days?” Okinu presses him for a reply. “No more than seven?”

  If I could end your misery, he thinks, by divorcing you now, I would …

  “Please, husband, no longer than eight days. She’s so … so …”

  … but it would bring unwanted attention on the Ogawas. “I don’t know how long the sutras for Father are going to take.”

  “Would you bring back an amulet from Kashima for brides who want—”

  “Hnn.” Uzaemon finishes binding his feet. “Goodbye, then, Okinu.”

  If guilt were copper coins, he thinks, I could buy Dejima.

  CROSSING THE SMALL courtyard denuded by winter, Uzaemon inspects the sky: it is a day of rain that never quite reaches the ground. Ahead, waiting by the front gate, Uzaemon’s mother is standing under an umbrella held by Utako. “Yohei can still be ready to join you in a matter of minutes.”