The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

by David Mitchell

  “As I said, Mother,” says Uzaemon, “this pilgrimage is not a pleasure trip.”

  “People may wonder whether the Ogawas can no longer afford servants.”

  “I rely on you to tell people why your stubborn son went on his pilgrimage alone.”

  “Who, exactly, is going to be scrubbing your loincloths and socks?”

  A raid on Enomoto’s mountain stronghold, Uzaemon thinks, and it is “loincloths and socks” …

  “You shan’t think the matter so amusing after eight or nine days.”

  “I’ll be sleeping at inns and guest dormitories in temples, not in ditches.”

  “An Ogawa mustn’t joke, not even joke, about living like a vagabond.”

  “Why don’t you go inside, Mother? You’ll catch a dreadful cold.”

  “Because it’s a well-bred woman’s duty to see her sons or husband off from the gate, however cozy it may be indoors.” She glares at the main house. “One can only wonder what my green-pepper-head of a daughter-in-law was whimpering about.”

  Utako the maid stares at the droplets on the camellia buds.

  “Okinu was wishing me a safe journey, as you are.”

  “Well, plainly they do things differently in Karatsu.”

  “She is a long way from home, and it has been a difficult year.”

  “I married a long way from home, and if you’re implying I’m one of those ‘difficulties,’ I can assure you the girl has had it easy! My mother-in-law was a witch from hell—from hell, was she not, Utako?”

  Utako half-nods, half-bows, and half-whispers, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “No one was calling you a ‘difficulty.’” Uzaemon puts his hand on the latch.

  “Okinu”—his mother puts her hand on the latch—“is a disappointment …”

  “Mother, for my sake, would you please be kind to her, as—”

  “… a disappointment to all of us. I never approved of the girl, did I, Utako?”

  Utako half-nods, half-bows, and half-whispers, “No, ma’am.”

  “But you and your father were so set on her, so how could I voice my doubts?”

  This rewriting of history, thinks Uzaemon, is breathtaking, even by your high standards.

  “But a pilgrimage,” she says, “is a fine chance to reconsider one’s missteps.”

  A moon-gray cat, padding along the wall, catches Uzaemon’s eye.

  “Marriage, you see, is a transaction … Is something wrong?”

  The moon-gray cat vanishes into the mist as if it never existed.

  “Marriage, you were saying, Mother, is a transaction.”

  “A transaction, yes; and if one buys an item from a merchant and one finds that item to be broken, then the merchant must apologize, refund the money, and pray that the matter ends there. Now: I produced three boys and two girls for the Ogawa family, and although all but dear Hisanobu died in childhood, nobody could accuse me of being a broken item. I don’t blame Okinu for her weak womb—some might, but I am fair-minded—yet the fact remains, we were sold bad merchandise. Who would blame us for returning it? Many would blame us—the ancestors of the Ogawa clan—were we not to send her home.”

  Uzaemon sways away from his mother’s magnified face.

  A kite swoops low through the drizzle. Uzaemon hears its feathers.

  “Many women have more than two miscarriages.”

  “‘It’s a reckless farmer who wastes good seed on barren soil.’”

  Uzaemon raises the latch, with her hand still on it, and swings open the door.

  “I say all this,” she says, smiling, “not from malice, but from duty …”

  Here it comes, Uzaemon thinks, the story of my adoption.

  “… as it was I who advised your father to adopt you, instead of a richer or a nobler disciple, as his heir. This is why I feel a special responsibility in this matter, to ensure the Ogawa line.”

  Raindrops find the nape of Uzaemon’s neck and trickle between his shoulder blades. “Goodbye.”

  HALF UZAEMON’S LIFETIME AGO, in his thirteenth year, he made the two-week journey from Shikoku to Nagasaki with his first master, Kanamaru Motoji, the chief Dutch scholar to the Court of the lord of Tosa. After his adoption by Ogawa Mimasaku in his fifteenth year, he visited scholars as far away as Kumamoto with his new father, but since his appointment as interpreter of the third rank four years ago, Uzaemon has rarely left Nagasaki. His boyhood journeys were bright with promise, but this morning the interpreter—if “interpreter,” Uzaemon concedes, is what I still am—is hounded by darker emotions. Hissing geese flee their cursing gooseherd; a shivering beggar shits at the loud river’s edge; and mist and smoke obscure an assassin or spy beneath every domed hat and behind every palanquin’s grille. The road is busy enough to hide informers, Uzaemon thinks with regret, but not busy enough to hide me. He passes the bridges of the Nakashima River, whose names he recites when he cannot sleep: the proud Tokiwabashi Bridge; the Fukurobashi, by the cloth merchants’ warehouses; the Meganebashi, whose reflected double arches form round spectacles on bright days; the slim-hipped Uoichibashi; the matter-of-fact Higashishinbashi; upstream, past the execution grounds, Imoharabashi Bridge; the Furumachibashi, as old and frail-looking as its name; the lurching Amigasabashi; and, last and highest, the Ôidebashi. Uzaemon stops by a row of steps disappearing into the mist and remembers the spring day when he first arrived in Nagasaki.

  A voice as small as a mouse’s says, “’Scuse, o-junrei-sama …”

  Uzaemon needs a moment to realize that the “pilgrim” is him. He turns …

  … and a wren of a boy with a gash for an eye is opening his cupped palms.

  A voice warns Uzaemon, He’s begging for coins, and the pilgrim walks away.

  And you, a voice admonishes him, are begging for good luck.

  So he turns and returns, but the gash-eyed boy is nowhere to be seen.

  I am Adam Smith’s translator, he tells himself. I don’t believe in omens.

  After a few minutes he reaches the Magome ward gate, where he lowers his hood, but a guard recognizes him as a samurai and waves him through with a bow.

  Lean and rancid artisans’ dwellings cluster along the road.

  Rented looms tack-ratta-clack-ah, tack-ratta-clack-ah …

  Rangy dogs and hungry children watch him pass, incuriously.

  Mud splashes from the wheels of a fodder wagon sliding downhill; a farmer and his son pull it from behind, to help the ox in front. Uzaemon stands aside under a ginkgo tree and looks down to the harbor, but Dejima is lost in the thickening fog. I am between two worlds. He is leaving behind the politics of the Interpreters’ Guild, the contempt of the inspectors and most of the Dutch, the deceits and falsifications. Ahead is an uncertain life with a woman who may not accept me, in a place not yet known. In the ginkgo’s knotted heart, a brood of oily crows fling insults. The wagon passes by, and the farmer bows as deeply as he can without losing his balance. The false pilgrim adjusts his shin bindings, secures his shoes, and resumes his journey. He mustn’t miss his rendezvous with Shuzai.

  THE JOYFUL PHOENIX INN stands by a bend in the road, shy of the eight-mile stone from Nagasaki, between a shallow ford and a stone pit. Uzaemon enters, looking for Shuzai but seeing only the usual citizens of the road sheltering from the cold drizzle: palanquin carriers and porters, mule drivers, mendicants, a trio of prostitutes, a man with a fortune-telling monkey, and a bundled-up bearded merchant sitting near, but not with, his gang of servants. The place smells of damp people, steaming rice, and pig lard, but it is warmer and drier than outdoors. Uzaemon orders a bowl of walnut dumplings and enters the raised room, worrying about Shuzai and his five hired swords. He is not anxious about the large sum he has given to his friend to pay for the mercenaries: were Shuzai less honest than Uzaemon knows he is, the interpreter would have been arrested days ago. Rather, it is the possibility that Shuzai’s sharp-eyed creditors sniffed out his plans to flee Nagasaki and threw a net around their debtor.

&nbs
p; Someone knocks on the post: it is one of the landlord’s girls, with his meal.

  Uzaemon asks, “Is it already the Hour of the Horse?”

  “Well past noon now, Samurai-sama, I do believe it is, yes …”

  Five shogunal soldiers enter and the chatter dies away.

  The soldiers look around the roomful of evasive faces.

  The captain’s eye meets Uzaemon’s: Uzaemon looks down. Don’t look guilty, he thinks. I am a pilgrim bound for Kashima.

  “Landlord?” calls out one guard. “Where’s the landlord of this shit hole?”

  “Gentlemen!” The landlord emerges from the kitchen and kneels on the floor. “What an indescribable honor for the Joyful Phoenix.”

  “Hay and oats for our horses; your stable boy’s flown off.”

  “Straightaway, Captain.” The landlord knows he will have to accept a credit note that won’t be honored without a bribe of five times its value. He gives orders to his wife, sons, and daughters, and the soldiers are shown into the best room in the rear. Cautiously, the chatter resumes.

  “I don’t forget a face, Samurai-san.” The bearded merchant has sidled over.

  Avoid encounters, Shuzai warned him, avoid witnesses. “We never met.”

  “But to be sure we did—at Ryûgaji Temple on New Year’s Day.”

  “You are mistaken. I never laid eyes on you. Now, please—”

  “We talked about ray skins, Samurai-san, an’ scabbards …”

  Uzaemon recognizes Shuzai under the bedraggled beard and patched cloak.

  “Aye, now you remember! Deguchi, Samurai-san—Deguchi of Osaka. Now, I wonder, might I hope for the honor of joining you?”

  The maid arrives with a bowl of rice and pickles.

  “I don’t forget a face.” Shuzai’s grin is brown-toothed and his accent different.

  The maid’s expression tells Uzaemon, What a tedious old fart.

  “No, Miss,” Shuzai drawls. “Names slip away, but a face, never …”

  “IT’S LONE TRAVELERS who stick out.” Shuzai’s voice comes through the grille of his palanquin. “But a group of six, on the Isahaya Road? We’re as good as invisible. To any part-time informers at the Joyful Phoenix, a taciturn pilgrim wearing a sword is worth watching. But when you left, you were just a pitiful bastard having his ear drilled by a human mosquito. By making you bored, I made you boring.”

  Mist blurs the farmhouses, erases the road ahead, hides the valley walls …

  Deguchi’s porters and servants turned out to be Shuzai’s hired men: their weapons are hidden in the modified floor of the palanquin. Tanuki—Uzaemon memorizes their false names—Kuma, Ishi, Hane, Shakke … They avoid speaking to Uzaemon, as befits their disguise as porters. The remaining six men will be at Mekura Gorge tomorrow.

  “By the way,” asks Shuzai, “did you bring a certain dogwood scroll tube?”

  Say no now, fears Uzaemon, and he’ll think you don’t trust him.

  “Everything of value,” he slaps his midriff, visible to Shuzai, “is here.”

  “Good. If the scroll had fallen into the wrong hands, Enomoto might be expecting us.”

  Succeed, and Jiritsu’s testimony shan’t be needed. Uzaemon is uneasy. Fail, and it mustn’t be captured. How De Zoet could ever use this weapon is a question the interpreter cannot answer.

  The river below is a drunk, charging boulders and barging banks.

  “It’s like the Shimantogawa Valley,” says Shuzai, “in our home domain.”

  “The Shimantogawa,” replies Uzaemon, “is a friendlier river, I think.” He has been wondering about applying for a court post back in his native Tosa. Upon adoption by the Ogawas of Nagasaki, all ties with his birth family were severed—and they’d not be happy to see a third son, a “cold-rice eater,” come back with no fortune and a half-burned wife—but he wonders whether his former Dutch teacher might be willing and able to help. Tosa is the first place, Uzaemon worries, Enomoto would look for us.

  It would be a matter of not just a fugitive nun but the lord of Kyôga’s reputation.

  His friend the Elder Councillor Matsudaira Sadanobu would issue a warrant …

  Uzaemon glimpses the enormity of the risk he is taking.

  Would they bother with a warrant? Or just dispatch an assassin?

  Uzaemon looks away. To stop and think would be to abort the rescue.

  Feet splash in puddles. The brown river surges. Pines drip.

  Uzaemon asks Shuzai, “Are we to lodge at Isahaya tonight?”

  “No. Deguchi of Osaka chooses the best: the Harubayashi Inn at Kurozane.”

  “Not the same inn where Enomoto and his entourage stay?”

  “The very same. Come now, what group of bandits planning to steal a nun from Mount Shiranui Shrine would dream of staying there?”

  ISAHAYA’S PRINCIPAL temple is celebrating the festival of a local god, and the streets are busy enough with hawkers and floats and spectators for six strangers and a palanquin to slip through without notice. Street musicians vie for customers, petty thieves trawl the holiday crowds, and serving girls flirt in front of their inns to reel in customers. Shuzai stays inside his palanquin and orders his men to proceed directly to the gate into Kyôga Domain on the east side of the town. The guardhouse is overrun by a herd of pigs. One of the soldiers, dressed in the domain’s austere livery, gives Deguchi of Osaka’s pass a cursory glance and asks why the merchant has no merchandise. “I sent it all by ship, sir,” answers Shuzai, his Osaka accent grown almost impenetrable, “every last piece, sir. By the time every customs man in western Honshu’s had his nibble, I’d not be left with the wrinkles on my hands, sir.” He is waved through, but another, more observant guard notices that Uzaemon’s pass is issued via the headman’s office on Dejima. “You’re an interpreter for the foreigners, Ogawa-san?”

  “Of the third rank, yes, in the Interpreters’ Guild on Dejima.”

  “I just ask, sir, because of your pilgrim’s clothes.”

  “My father is gravely ill. I wish to pray for him at Kashima.”

  “Please”—the guard kicks a squealing piglet—“step into the inspection room.”

  Uzaemon stops himself from looking at Shuzai. “Very well.”

  “I’ll be with you once we’ve cleared these porkers away.”

  The interpreter steps into the small room where a scribe is at work.

  Uzaemon curses his luck. So much for slipping into Kyôga anonymously.

  “Please forgive this inconvenience.” The guard appears and orders the scribe to wait outside. “I sense, Ogawa-san, you are a man of your word.”

  “I aspire,” Uzaemon answers, worried where this may lead, “to be one, yes.”

  “Then I”—the guard kneels and bows low—“I aspire to your good offices, sir. My son’s skull is growing … wrong, lumpen. We—we daren’t take him outside, because people call him an oni demon. He’s clever and a fine reader, so it’s not affected his wits, but … he has these headaches, these terrible headaches.”

  Uzaemon is disarmed. “What do the doctors say?”

  “The first diagnosed ‘burning brain’ and prescribed three gallons of water a day to quench the fires. ‘Water poisoning,’ said the second, and bid us parch our son until his tongue turned black. The third doctor sold us golden acupuncture needles to press into his skull to expel the demon, and the fourth sold us a magic frog, to be licked thirty-three times a day. Nothing worked. Soon he won’t be able to lift his head …”

  Uzaemon recalls Dr. Maeno’s recent lecture on elephantiasis.

  “… so I’m asking all the pilgrims who pass through to pray at Kashima.”

  “Gladly, I’ll recite a healing sutra. What is your son’s name?”

  “Thank you. Lots of pilgrims say they will, but it’s only men of honor I can believe in. I’m Imada, and my son’s name is Uokatsu, written on this.” He passes a folded slip of paper and a lock of his hair. “There’ll be a fee, so—”

  “Keep your money. I
will pray for Imada Uokatsu when I pray for my father.”

  The shogun’s policy of isolation preserves his power unchallenged …

  “May I suppose,” the soldier is bowing again, “Ogawa-san also has a son?”

  … but sentences Uokatsu and countless others to futile, ignorant deaths.

  “My wife and I”—more details, Uzaemon thinks with regret—“are not yet blessed.”

  “Lady Kannon will reward your kindness, sir. Now, I am delaying you …”

  Uzaemon stores the name paper in his inrô pouch. “I wish I could do more.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE LORD ABBOT’S QUARTERS AT MOUNT SHIRANUI SHRINE

  The twenty-second night of the first month

  THE SWAYING FLAMES ARE MOONFLOWER BLUE AND SILENT. ENOMOTO is seated behind a sunken hearth at the far end of a thin room. The roof is vaulted and ill-defined. He knows Orito is there but does not yet look up. Nearby, the two motionless boy aspirants stare at a go board; but for the twitching pulses in their necks, they could be cast from bronze. “You look like an assassin, hovering there …” Enomoto’s sinewy voice reaches her. “Approach, Sister Aibagawa.”

  Her feet obey. Orito sits across the watery fire from the lord of Kyôga. He is examining the craftsmanship of what may be a bladeless sword hilt. In the strange firelight, Enomoto looks a full decade younger than she remembers.

  If I were an assassin, she thinks, you would already be dead.

  “What would happen to your sisters without my protection and the house?”

  It is faces he reads, thinks Orito, not minds. “The House of Sisters is a jail.”

  “Your sisters would die, miserably and early, in brothels and freak shows.”

  “How is that to justify their captivity here as monks’ playthings?”

  Click: an aspirant has placed a black counter on the board.

  “Dr. Aibagawa, your honorable father, respected facts, not opinions twisted out of shape.”