The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

by David Mitchell

  A black-headed bird watches from the core of the flame-red tree.

  “So I buy mercury, but still, I think, Affinity still exist. Strange.”

  Jacob wonders how Ogawa Uzaemon suffered before he died.

  “Then I hear, ‘Mr. de Zoet propose to Aibagawa Orito.’ I think, Ohooo!”

  Jacob cannot hide his shock that Enomoto knew. The leaves on the water spin, very slowly. “How did you …” and he thinks, I am confirming it now.

  “Hanzaburo look very stupid; this is why he very good spy.”

  A heaviness presses down on Jacob’s shoulders. His back aches.

  He imagines Hanzaburo ripping a page from his sketchbook …

  … and that page, Jacob thinks, passing up a chain of prurient eyes.

  “What do you do to the sisters at your shrine? Why must you—”

  Jacob stops himself from blurting out proof that he knows what Acolyte Jiritsu knew. “Why did you kidnap her, when a man of your position could choose anyone?”

  “She and I also—affinity. You, I, her. A pleasant triangle …”

  There is a fourth corner, thinks Jacob, called Ogawa Uzaemon.

  “… but now she is content enough.” Enomoto is speaking Japanese. “Her work in Nagasaki was important, but her mission on Shiranui is deeper. She serves Kyôga Domain. She serves the Goddess. She serves my order.” He smiles pityingly at Jacob’s impotence. “So now I understand. Our affinity was not mercury. Our affinity was Orito.”

  The white butterfly passes within inches of Enomoto’s face.

  The abbot’s hand makes a circular motion over the butterfly …

  … and it drops, lifeless as a twist of paper, into the dark pool.

  Chamberlain Tomine sees the Dutchman and the abbot and stops.

  “Our affinity is ended, Chief de Zoet. Enjoy a long, long life.”

  THIN PAPER SCREENS obscure the fine view of Nagasaki, lending the Room of the Last Chrysanthemum a mournful air like, Jacob thinks, a quiet chapel on a busy city street back home. The pinks and oranges of the flowers in the vase are bleached of half their vigor. Jacob and Goto kneel on the moss-green mat before the magistrate. You have aged five years, thinks Jacob, in two days.

  “It is courteous of the Dutch chief to visit at such a … a busy time.”

  “The honorable magistrate is equally busy, no doubt.” The Dutchman instructs Goto to thank the magistrate in suitably formal language for his support during the recent crisis.

  Goto performs his job well: Jacob acquires the word for “crisis.”

  “Foreign ships,” the magistrate responds, “visited our waters before. Sooner or later, their guns would speak. The Phoebus was prophet and teacher, and next time”—he inhales sharply—“the shogun’s servants shall be better prepared. Your ‘pontoon bridge’ is written in my record for Edo. But this time fortune did not favor me.”

  Jacob’s starched collar scratches his neck.

  “I watched you,” says the magistrate, “on the watchtower yesterday.”

  “Thank you for”—Jacob is unsure how to respond—“for your concern.”

  “I thought of Phaeton, with lightning and thunderbolts flying.”

  “Luckily for me, the English do not aim as well as Zeus.”

  Shiroyama opens his fan and closes it again. “Were you frightened?”

  “I would like to say, ‘No,’ but truthfully … I was never more afraid.”

  “Yet when you could have run, you stayed at your post.”

  Not after the second round, he thinks. There was no way down. “My uncle, who raised me, always scolded my—” He asks Goto to translate the word “stubbornness.”

  Outside, the bamboo winnows the breeze: a sound ancient and sad.

  Shiroyama notices the ridge of the scroll tube in Jacob’s coat …

  … but he says, “My report to Edo must address a question.”

  “If I am able answer it, Your Honor, I shall.”

  “Why did the English sail away before Dejima was destroyed?”

  “This same mystery troubled me all night long, Your Honor.”

  “You must have seen how they loaded the cannons on the quarterdeck.”

  Jacob has Goto explain how cannons are for punching big holes in ships and walls, whereas carronades are for punching small holes through lots of men.

  “Then why did the English not kill their enemy’s chief with the ‘carronades’?”

  “Possibly the captain wanted to limit damage to Nagasaki.” Jacob shrugs. “Possibly it was an …” He has Goto translate “act of mercy.”

  A child’s voice can be heard, muffled by two or three rooms.

  The magistrate’s celebrated son, Jacob guesses, delivered by Orito.

  “Perhaps,” Shiroyama muses, examining the joints of his thumb, “your courage made your enemy ashamed.”

  Jacob, recalling his four years of living with Londoners, doubts the suggestion but bows at the compliment. “Will Your Honor be traveling to Edo to submit your report?”

  Pain flashes across Shiroyama’s face, and Jacob wonders why. The magistrate addresses his difficult-to-understand answer to Goto. “His Honor says …” Goto hesitates. “Edo requires a—the word is a merchant’s word, ‘settle of accounts’?”

  Jacob is being instructed to leave this deliberate vagueness alone.

  He notices the go board in its corner; he recognizes the same game from his visit two days ago, just a few moves further on.

  “My opponent and I,” says Shiroyama, “can rarely meet.”

  Jacob makes a safe guess: “The lord abbot of Kyôga Domain?”

  The magistrate nods. “The lord abbot is a master of the game. He discerns his enemy’s weaknesses and uses them to confound his enemy’s strengths.” He considers the board ruefully. “I fear my position is without hope.”

  “My position on the watchtower,” says Jacob, “was also without hope.”

  Chamberlain Tomine’s nod to Interpreter Goto indicates, It is time.

  “Your Honor.” Nervously, Jacob produces the scroll from his inner jacket. “Humbly, I beg you to read this scroll when you are alone.”

  Shiroyama frowns and looks at his chamberlain. “Precedent would instruct,” Tomine tells Jacob, “all letters from Dutchmen to be translated by two members of the Interpreters’ Guild of Dejima, and then—”

  “A British warship sailed into Nagasaki and opened fire, and what did precedent do about it?” Shiroyama is irritated out of his melancholy. “But if this is a petition for more copper, or any other matter, then Chief de Zoet should know that my star in Edo is not on the rise ….”

  “A sincere personal letter, Your Honor. Please forgive its poor Japanese.”

  Jacob senses the lie deflate Tomine’s and Goto’s curiosity.

  The innocuous-looking scroll tube passes into the magistrate’s hands.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  FROM THE VERANDA OF THE ROOM OF THE LAST CHRYSANTHEMUM, AT THE MAGISTRACY

  The ninth day of the ninth month

  GULLS WHEEL THROUGH SPOKES OF SUNLIGHT OVER GRACIOUS roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike-topped walls, and triple-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas, and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by mule drivers, mules, and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunchbacked makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed from kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges. Gulls fly through clouds of steam from laundries’ vats; over kites unthreading corpses of cats; over scholars glimpsing truth in fragile patterns; over bathhouse adulterers; heartbroken slatterns; fishwives dismembering lobsters and crabs; their husbands gutting mackerel on slabs; woodcutters’ sons sharpening axes; candlemakers rolling waxes; flint-eyed officials milking taxes; etiolated lacquerers; mottled-skinned dy
ers; imprecise soothsayers; unblinking liars; weavers of mats; cutters of rushes; ink-lipped calligraphers dipping brushes; booksellers ruined by unsold books; ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers; filching page boys; runny-nosed cooks; sunless attic nooks where seamstresses prick calloused fingers; limping malingerers; swineherds; swindlers; lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and aging rakes by other men’s wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; statues of Jizo anointed with posies; syphilitics sneezing through rotted-off noses; potters; barbers; hawkers of oil; tanners; cutlers; carters of night soil; gatekeepers; beekeepers; blacksmiths and drapers; torturers; wet nurses; perjurers; cutpurses; the newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator; and around again, where their flight began, over the balcony of the Room of the Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night’s rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.

  KAWASEMI HOLDS UP a white under-robe for Shiroyama. She is wearing her kimono decorated with blue Korean morning glories. The wheel of seasons is broken, says the spring pattern this autumn day, and so am I.

  Shiroyama inserts his fifty-year-old arms into the sleeves.

  She ducks in front of him, tugging and smoothing the material.

  Kawasemi now wraps the obi sash above his waist.

  She chose a green-and-white design: Green for life, white for death?

  The expensively trained courtesan ties it in a figure-of-ten cross.

  “It always takes me ten times,” he used to say, “to get the knot to stay.”

  Kawasemi lifts the thigh-length haori jacket; he takes it and puts it on. The fine black silk is crisp as snow and heavy as air. Its sleeves are embroidered with his family’s crest.

  Two rooms away he hears Naozumi’s twenty-month-old footsteps.

  Kawasemi passes him his inyo box: it contains nothing, but without it he would feel unprepared. Shiroyama threads its cord through the netsuke toggle; she has chosen him a Buddha carved in hornbill.

  Kawasemi’s steady hands pass his tantô dagger in its scabbard.

  Would that I could die in your house, he thinks, where I was happiest …

  He slides its scabbard through his obi sash in the prescribed manner.

  … but decorum must be seen to be observed.

  “Shush!” says the maid in the next room. “Suss!” laughs Naozumi.

  A chubby hand slides the door open and the boy, who looks like Kawasemi when he smiles and like Shiroyama when he frowns, darts into the room, ahead of the mortified maid.

  “I beg Your Lordship’s pardon,” she says, kneeling at the threshold.

  “Found you!” singsongs the toothy grinning toddler, and tips over.

  “Finish packing,” Kawasemi tells her maid. “I’ll summon you when it’s time.”

  The maid bows and withdraws. Her eyes are red from crying.

  The small human whirlwind stands, rubs his knee, and totters to his father.

  “Today is an important day,” says the magistrate of Nagasaki.

  Naozumi half-sings, half-asks, “‘Ducky in the duck pond, ichi-nisan?’”

  With a look, Shiroyama tells his concubine not to fret.

  Better for him now, he thinks, to be too young to understand.

  “Come here,” says Kawasemi, kneeling, “come here, Nao-kun …”

  The boy sits on his mother’s lap and loses his hand in her hair.

  Shiroyama sits a pace away and circles his hands in a conjuror’s flourish …

  … and in his palm is an ivory castle sitting on an ivory mountain.

  The man turns it around, inches from the boy’s captured eyes.

  Tiny steps; cloud motifs; pine trees; masonry grown from rock …

  “Your great-grandfather carved this,” says Shiroyama, “from a unicorn horn.”

  … an arched gate; windows; arrow slits; and, at the top, a pagoda.

  “You can’t see him,” says the magistrate, “but a prince lives in this castle.”

  You will forget this story, he knows, but your mother will remember.

  “The prince’s name is the same as ours: shiro for the castle, yama for the mountain. Prince Shiroyama is very special. You and I must one day go to our ancestors, but the prince in this tower never dies: not for so long as a Shiroyama outside—me, you, your son—is alive, and holds his castle, and looks inside.”

  Naozumi takes the ivory carving and holds it against his eye.

  Shiroyama does not gather his son into his arms and breathe in his sweet smell.

  “Thank you, Father.” Kawasemi angles the boy’s head to imitate a bow.

  Naozumi leaps away with his prize, from mat to mat to door.

  He turns to look at his father, and Shiroyama thinks, Now.

  Then the boy’s footfalls carry him away forever.

  Lust tricks babies from their parents, thinks Shiroyama, mishap, duty …

  Marigolds in the vase are the precise shade of summer, remembered.

  … but perhaps the luckiest are those born from an unthought thought: that the intolerable gulf between lovers can be bridged only by the bones and cartilage of a new being.

  The bell of Ryûgaji Temple intones the Hour of the Horse.

  Now, he thinks, I have a murder to commit.

  “It is best that you leave,” Shiroyama tells his concubine.

  Kawasemi looks at the ground, determined not to cry.

  “If the boy shows promise at go, engage a master of the Honinbo School.”

  THE VESTIBULE OUTSIDE the Hall of Sixty Mats and the long gallery leading to the front courtyard is crammed with kneeling advisers, councillors, inspectors, headmen, guards, servants, exchequer officials, and the staff of his household. Shiroyama stops.

  Crows smear rumors across the matted, sticky sky.

  “All of you: raise your faces. I want to see your faces.”

  Two or three hundred heads look up: eyes, eyes, eyes …

  … dining on a ghost, Shiroyama thinks, not yet dead.

  “Magistrate-sama!” Elder Wada has appointed himself spokesman.

  Shiroyama looks at the irritating, loyal man. “Wada-sama.”

  “Serving the magistrate has been the deepest honor of my life …”

  Wada’s face is taut with emotion; his eyes are shining.

  “We learn from the magistrate’s wisdom and example …”

  All you learned from me, thinks Shiroyama, is to ensure that one thousand men man the coastal defenses at all times.

  “Our memories of you shall dwell in our hearts and minds forever.”

  As my body and my head, thinks Shiroyama, molder in the ground.

  “Nagasaki shall never”—his tears stream—“ever recover!”

  Oh, supposes Shiroyama, by next week things will be back to normal.

  “On behalf of all who were—are—privileged to serve under you …”

  Even the untouchable, thinks the magistrate, who empties the shit pot?

  “… I, Wada, offer our undying gratitude for your patronage!”

  Under the eaves, pigeons coo like grandmothers greeting babies.

  “Thank you,” he says. “Serve my successor as you served me.”

  So the stupidest speech I ever heard, he thinks, was the very last.

  Chamberlain Tomine opens the door for his final appointment.

  THE DOOR RUMBLES shut on the Hall of S
ixty Mats. Nobody may enter now until Chamberlain Tomine emerges to announce Magistrate Shiroyama’s honorable death. The near-silent crowd in the gallery is returning to the bright realm of life. Out of respect for the magistrate, the entire wing shall remain vacant until nightfall but for the occasional guard.

  One high screen is half open, but the hall is dim and cavernous.

  Lord Abbot Enomoto is studying the state of play on the go board.

  The abbot turns and bows. His acolyte bows low.

  The magistrate begins the journey to the center of the room. His body pushes aside drapes of hushed air. His feet swish on the floor. Chamberlain Tomine follows in his master’s wake.

  The Hall of Sixty Mats might be six hundred wide or six thousand long.

  Shiroyama sits across the go table from his enemy. “It is unpardonably selfish to lay these last two impositions on such a busy man.”

  “Your Honor’s requests,” replies Enomoto, “pay me a singular compliment.”

  “I had heard of Enomoto-sama’s accomplishments as a swordsman, mentioned in low, awed tones, long before I met you in person.”

  “People exaggerate such stories, but it is true that, down the years, five men have asked me to be a kaishaku second at their deaths. I discharged those duties competently.”

  “Your name came to mind, Lord Abbot. Yours and no other.” Shiroyama glances down at Enomoto’s sash for his scabbard.

  “My acolyte”—the abbot nods at the youth—“has brought it.”

  The sword, wrapped in black, lies on a square of red velvet.

  On a side table are a white tray, four black cups, and a red gourd.

  A white linen sheet, large enough to enfold a corpse, lies at a tactful distance.

  “Your wish is still”—Enomoto indicates the game—“to finish what we began?”

  “One must do something before one dies.” The magistrate drapes his haori jacket over his knees and turns his attention to the game. “Have you decided your next move?”

  Enomoto places a white stone to threaten black’s eastern outpost.

  The cautious movement of the stone sounds like the click of a blind man’s cane.

  Shiroyama makes a safe play that is both a bridge to and a bridgehead against white’s north.