The Incense Game: A Novel of Feudal Japan

by Laura Joh Rowland

  “Who is she?” one man asked. “What are you going to do with her?”

  Reiko held her breath, anxious yet dreading to hear her fate.

  Minister Ogyu said, “Come with me. I’ll explain.” The men’s legs moved away. “You two, stay with her.” As he left, he said, “Unwrap her, but leave her hands and feet tied.”

  The two men knelt in front of Reiko. They were the guards from Kasane’s house. One drew his short sword. She gasped. He grinned. It was Jagged Teeth. He cut the ropes. The younger man, with the winsome smile and hard eyes, pulled them off Reiko. She straightened her body. Relief was immediately followed by painful spasms that shot through her stiff muscles as the blood rushed back into them. The men watched her struggle into a sitting position. Faintness and nausea washed through her; she’d been lying down for so long, and she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. She looked around the room.

  It was elegantly furnished with silk cushions, lacquered tables, and a mural of a river scene, but it was as cold as outdoors and, strangely, set on a wide wooden platform. A gangway extended across the space below, which was divided into compartments by a grid of wooden beams. Reiko realized that she was on stage in a theater. The compartments had once provided seating for the audience; the actors had once entered the stage via the gangway. The center of the theater was a pile of timbers and tiles open to the sky because a large section of the roof had collapsed. The light from the stage dimly illuminated railed galleries hanging off walls that leaned inward. Minister Ogyu had chosen the ruined theater as a place where he could do his evil business in complete, uninterrupted privacy.

  Reiko seized her last chance to enlist allies. “If Minister Ogyu murders me, you’ll be as guilty as he,” she told the two men with her. “My husband will kill you.”

  They laughed.

  “If you want to live, you should stop him,” Reiko persisted even though she knew samurai didn’t defy their masters to protect strangers. “And then take me back to the castle and tell my husband that Minister Ogyu killed Kasane and kidnapped me. My husband will be grateful. You won’t be punished.”

  Winsome Smile said, “You saw what we did to your guards,” and pinched her cheek so hard that her eyes watered. He was paying her back for calling his master a woman, Reiko supposed. “Keep quiet, or no more pretty little face.”

  Minister Ogyu returned without his other men. His plump face was closed like a fist, as if it were gripping his emotions. His eyes wouldn’t meet Reiko’s. “Go outside and watch for anyone coming,” he told Jagged Teeth and Winsome Smile.

  They left. Fear closed an icy hand around Reiko’s heart. Minister Ogyu was going to kill her; he didn’t want his men to see. All she could do was hope for a quick, painless death.

  * * *

  SUNSET FLAMED BRIEFLY as Sano and his troops galloped on horseback along the highway. Night brought a darkness so pervasive that it was as if a cosmic hand had painted fields, woods, and hills black. Stars glinted like ice chips in a sky like frozen lava. The troops wore lanterns on poles attached to their backs, but hazards loomed too abruptly into the small halo of light in which Sano’s party traveled. A rider in the lead tumbled with his horse into a wide chasm. Branches on an uprooted tree knocked another man off his horse. Sano left behind troops to rescue their injured comrades. As he sped onward, his head pounded in rhythm with his horse’s hooves, but he couldn’t take more opium; he needed to stay alert. He peered into the blackness, hoping to see Reiko’s palanquin coming toward him. His vision smeared the lights from the lanterns, whose erratic motions worsened his dizziness. He could barely remain upright.

  “You don’t look good,” Detective Marume, beside him, said. “We should slow down.”

  “No.” Sano gripped the reins. “We have to get to Kasane and Reiko.”

  Cliffs hunched like giants’ shoulders over the road. The procession came to a stop at a mountainous pile of earth, a landslide. Four men stood at its base. They called to Sano’s troops, who greeted them by name. Sano felt his spirits lift as he recognized the men. They were Reiko’s bearers. Then he saw her palanquin resting on the ground, empty.

  “Where’s my wife?”

  “She and her guards climbed over the landslide,” said a bearer. “She told us to wait for her.”

  “When was this?” Sano asked.

  “Three, four hours ago.”

  Dismay stabbed Sano. “Has anyone come by?”

  “Six samurai on horseback. About an hour after Lady Reiko went. Going that way.” The bearer gestured over the landslide.

  “It must have been Minister Ogyu and his men.” Certain that Reiko had met them and come to harm, Sano climbed off his horse and urged it up the landslide. His men followed suit. Clinging to the reins, he let the horse drag him. The lanterns flashed on boulders, chunks of clay, and tangled tree roots. Sano stumbled; his knees struck rocks. When he reached the top, he lay there for a moment, panting, while the earth pitched under him like the deck of a ship during a storm. On the way down the other side of the landslide, he lost his grip on the reins. He rolled side over side, bumping painfully, until the ground leveled.

  “Are you all right?” Marume barreled down the landslide and knelt beside him.

  Wincing, Sano held his head. “Put me back on my horse.”

  His men hoisted him up. As the procession galloped, he rested against his horse’s neck. Fatigued, he drifted toward sleep. Dimly aware of movement, the cold wind, and the cadence of hoofbeats, he lost track of time. A shout from Marume jolted him alert. He raised his head to see the lights in the distance. As soon as he and his men rode into Mitake, he knew something was wrong.

  Villages usually shut down at sunset, but lamps burned in the windows of the thatched huts, and peasants clustered outside the bamboo fences. They gazed toward the village’s opposite end. As his procession thundered into their midst, Sano saw horror written on their faces. He urged his horse faster in the direction they’d been looking. He was first to arrive at a house with a stone wall. He jumped off his horse by the gate, which was open to reveal men loitering in a courtyard. Another man sat on an overturned bucket, his head between his knees.

  Barging into the courtyard, Sano said, “What’s happened?”

  The men stared in surprise, then noticed that Sano and his troops, who’d followed him, were samurai. They hastily bowed. One said, “Murder.” He gestured to the man seated on the bucket. “His aunt was killed.”

  The midwife, Sano thought. He was too late. Fighting dizziness and dread, he hurried to the house. Voices and light emanated from the open door through which he staggered. “Reiko!” he shouted.

  The room beyond the entryway was full of people. The raw, meaty odor of blood nauseated Sano. The scene tilted. Regaining his sense of what was up and what was down, he saw only three people standing. Eight others lay in puddles of blood that gleamed wetly red on the tatami. Blood had also splashed the walls. In the kitchen section of the room, dishes had shattered. Smeared, bloody footprints on the floor charted a vicious battle fought. All the corpses were male except one, a tiny old woman so emaciated that her body was like crooked sticks inside her robes. Papery lids drooped over her blank eyes. Her toothless mouth overflowed with blood. Her throat was cut.

  Hope welled up through Sano’s horror like the sun rising on the morning after the earthquake. Reiko wasn’t among the dead. Calling her, he ran, slipping in the blood, toward a doorway that led to the house’s other rooms. One of the men stepped in front of Sano and said, “Excuse me, who are you?”

  Sano was so distraught he could barely stammer his name and rank. “My wife. I have to find her. Get out of my way!”

  “There’s nobody else here.” The man had a permanently suntanned face like a farmer’s, but his crown was shaved, his hair in a topknot. He wore a jitte—an iron rod with a prong at the hilt for catching the blade of an attacker’s sword, standard equipment for police He was a local doshin. The two men with him looked to be his civilian assistants.


  “Then where is she?” Sano demanded.

  “She must have been the lady that was seen riding through the village today,” the doshin said in the satisfied tone of a police officer who’d fitted together facts of a crime. “Those dead samurai must be her guards. She came to see old Kasane, according to her nephew. He came in and found this.” The doshin shook his head at the bloody scene. “There are reports of another group of mounted samurai in the area. They were probably rōnin bandits. They must have broken in here and killed Kasane and your wife’s guards.”

  Sano didn’t have time to correct the doshin’s impression. He had to look for Reiko. Maybe she’d managed to run away from Minister Ogyu and his troops.

  Maybe they’d caught her, and her dead body was lying in a field.

  Banishing the thought, Sano started toward the door. A gurgling noise stopped him. It sounded as if someone were calling his name under water. One of the doshin’s assistants said, “Hey, that one’s alive!”

  Sano crouched beside the fallen man who’d spoken. The man’s armor tunic was drenched with blood. Sano was aghast to see what he’d not noticed before: The man’s face had been mutilated. So had the faces of the dead men. Their noses had been cut off, their eyes, cheeks, and mouths crisscrossed with slashes. Minister Ogyu must have disfigured them in an attempt to obscure their identities.

  “Who are you?” Sano grasped the man’s hand.

  Blood frothed around the hole that had been his nose as the man breathed. His hand squeezed Sano’s. His cut lips moved in a whisper. “Tanuma.”

  He was Reiko’s chief bodyguard. Sano said urgently, “Where is Reiko?”

  “Ogyu.” Tanuma’s eyes were swollen shut, their lids covered with blood, leaking muddy fluid. “Took her.” His pierced lungs gurgled as they sucked air. “Couldn’t. Stop. Him.”

  “She’s alive, then?” Caught between eagerness to believe it and fear of disappointment, Sano said, “Where did Ogyu take her?” He felt Tanuma’s grip on his hand, and on life, weakening.

  “Saru-waka-cho.” Tanuma exhaled for the last time.

  39

  INSIDE THE THEATER, Minister Ogyu knelt at the end of the stage where Reiko sat. His soft features were set in lines of unhappy resignation. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.” His gaze fixed on a point above her head, as if he were unable to look directly at her. “Things just spun out of control.”

  He sounded as if eight people had died without any involvement from him! Angry words leaped into Reiko’s mind, but she held her tongue, afraid to antagonize Minister Ogyu.

  “Life is a path that one must walk, sometimes regardless of one’s wishes. My path was determined the day I was born. I was the only child. They wanted an heir to carry on our family name and bring honor to our clan.” Pride and tears glistened in Minister Ogyu’s eyes. “They didn’t let nature stand in their way.”

  This was the only admission of his true sex that he would ever make, Reiko thought. She listened while frantically trying to think of how to turn him away from this destructive path along which he was taking her.

  “They never let down their discipline. ‘Eat more! Get bigger! Talk deeper in your throat. Never cry! Don’t be a sissy!’” His voice imitated an angry woman’s. “I did everything they wanted. All the acting and pretending. Even when I thought it would kill me.” A spasm disfigured the right side of Minister Ogyu’s face. He groaned. “What choice did I have? According to Confucius, whose teachings I began studying as soon as I learned to read, duty to my parents was my highest duty.”

  Reiko remembered Sano telling her that Minister Ogyu’s parents were dead. She risked a comment that might lead him to realize the error of his ways. “When your parents died, there was no need to pretend anymore. You could have stopped.”

  “When I was young, I used to think that when they were gone, I would go someplace far away, and live all by myself, and be however I wanted, and nobody would care.” He spoke as if he hadn’t heard Reiko, but his thoughts had followed the same course as hers. “But my duty to them didn’t end with their deaths. One also has a duty to one’s ancestors. And by the time my parents died, it was too late for me to change. I had my position at the academy. I was a married man. I had my wife and children to consider.”

  Anguish added to the suffering on his face. “I didn’t do it only to protect myself. I did it to protect them, too.”

  “I understand. Madam Usugumo found you out—she was a threat to your wife and children,” Reiko said. “She had to be silenced.”

  “She discovered my secret. I had to silence her.” Again he echoed Reiko’s words without seeming to hear them. “But I hadn’t the courage. I gave my wife the poisoned incense. She did what I should have.”

  Reiko was astonished. Lady Ogyu, not her husband, had actually murdered the women at the incense game.

  “But Madam Usugumo wasn’t the only danger. There was Kasane.” Pain screwed Minister Ogyu’s right eye shut. “I couldn’t risk her telling. And after what my wife had done, I had to be the one to take the next step, didn’t I?” He seemed to be arguing with himself, not Reiko. “I had to do what a man, a samurai, would.”

  He was using Bushido to justify cutting the throat of a helpless old woman who’d loved him. Reiko despised him, but her life depended on currying his favor while guiding him to a different conclusion than he had planned.

  “You did right,” she said. “Everybody who knew about you is dead.” Also people who’d only been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Tears stung Reiko’s eyes as she thought of Lieutenant Tanuma and her other guards. “It’s time to stop the killing.”

  Minister Ogyu glanced directly at her and whispered through gritted teeth. “There’s still one more person. You.”

  “I don’t know anything that I can prove,” Reiko hurried to say. “It would be my word against yours. Nobody would believe me. Your guards didn’t.”

  “You know I killed Kasane. You know I kidnapped you.” Facial spasms punctuated Minister Ogyu’s sentences. “You’ll tell your husband.”

  “I’ll say you didn’t hurt me and I forgive you.” Reiko couldn’t keep her voice from stuttering with panic.

  “Lord Hosokawa won’t forgive me or my wife for his daughters’ death.”

  “Lord Hosokawa doesn’t matter,” Reiko said, even though he could start or prevent a civil war. “It’s my husband whose opinion counts. I’ll convince him to pardon you.”

  Minister Ogyu raised his hand to dismiss her words, then massaged his temple. “Maybe he’ll excuse me for what I did to you. But not for what I did to him and his little girl.”

  He was responsible for the bomb, Reiko realized. And he was right: Sano would never forgive someone who’d almost killed Akiko. Neither could she. Her anger toward Minister Ogyu grew into a wild, raging animal inside her, that wanted to claw out his throat.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt her,” Minister Ogyu said. “It was an accident. I was waiting for Chamberlain Sano to come home. When I saw him, I was so intent on lighting the bomb and throwing it that I didn’t notice her until it left my hand.”

  Reiko fought the urge to shriek, Coward! You couldn’t challenge my husband face-to-face. You hid in wait for him, and you tried to kill him and our daughter, and you call it an accident!

  “My husband will pardon you if I ask him to.” Her voice shook with her effort to control her temper. “You can go on as if nothing had happened. Your wife and children will be safe.”

  His hopeless glance said he wished to believe her but knew her claims were absurd. “I’ve made up my mind. One last person. Then it can stop.”

  A mournful relief filled his voice. The spasms in his face ceased; the muscles unknotted. His decision had snapped the tension between good and evil inside him and brought him peace. Reiko thought she felt the child move in her, like a baby bird instinctively trying to escape from a cracking egg. Minister Ogyu rolled his shoulders as if a weight had fallen off them. His confessing
to Reiko was akin to dumping his secret into her grave.

  “Please have mercy!” Reiko fell forward, her bound hands clasped, and sobbed. “I’m pregnant. Please spare my child. Please let me go!”

  Deaf to her cries, Minister Ogyu sat with his hands folded, his face calm; his eyes watched the door. He seemed to be waiting for something.

  * * *

  “IS THERE ANOTHER road to town?” Sano asked the village men who’d followed him out of Kasane’s house into the cold night. There had to be, or Minister Ogyu and his men would have had to transport Reiko along the highway and been seen by her bearers waiting at the landslide.

  “Yes. I’ll show you,” the doshin said.

  The road was a narrow lane that skirted fields and climbed up and down forested hills. Sano and his men rode single file, slowly over rough terrain. Under normal conditions the highway would have been faster, but the back road was freer of obstacles created by the earthquake. Sano and his men reached Edo in half the time it had taken them to travel to Mitake. A temple bell tolled midnight as they came onto the main street through town.

  Sano floated in a fog of pain and dizziness, fear and exhaustion. He dozed, then woke to see a rubble-strewn landscape lit by his men’s lanterns and the stars and moon in the black sky. The procession had stopped.

  “Is this the Saru-waka-cho theater district?” he asked.

  “My sense of direction says so,” Marume said, “but I don’t see anything I recognize.”

  Neither did Sano. Where once great theaters had stood amid teahouses, restaurants, shops, and houses, now broken walls rose from deserted ruins. The homeless actors, musicians, directors, and stagehands had moved to the tent camps. Dogs howled. Windblown debris skittered. Riding through the district, Sano and his men came across signs of bygone gaiety. Atop rubble piles lay strings of crumpled red paper lanterns from the eaves of teahouses. Sano’s horse trod on a broken samisen. A square wooden tower, from which drummers had once summoned theatergoers, lay in pieces. None of the buildings appeared whole or inhabited. Sano’s party located the main street, which was blocked in both directions by collapsed theaters. Sano felt a growing desperation.