Her disappointed look caught him off guard. “Well … I don’t really care which way I go, so long as there’s somebody willing to buy mozuku.”
“Ummm …” Kiku paused a moment, then swallowed hard. “Please come by here every morning. That way we can talk.” After she said it, she blushed.
Seikichi flinched at Kiku’s boldness, but soon he was grinning. Just the way an older brother smiles wryly at a willful younger sister.
“Fine, fine. I’ll come by here as often as I can.”
“Really?” Kiku beamed as she clutched her broom. “You’re telling the truth, right?”
Oyone called loudly to Kiku from the kitchen. “Kiku, don’t be dawdling out there. Hurry in here and light the stove!”
Kiku clacked her tongue. “Horrible woman!” But after cursing her boss, she said, “I’ll see you again. For sure, yes?” and ran toward the kitchen, carrying her broom.
For the rest of the day she was in a daze and was frequently scolded by Oyone and corrected by Tome. In actuality she spent the day staring blankly, wandering off from her chores, and gawking at an empty spot in space.
“Kiku!” Even docile little Mitsu couldn’t stand it anymore and asked, “Is something wrong with you? You stand there looking so clueless!”
“Mitsu, what do you think of Seikichi?”
Her question caught Mitsu off guard. “What do I—?” Stuck for a reply, she said, “I think he’s a good person.”
“I really like him.” Like: it wasn’t customary for sixteen-year-old girls to come right out with no embarrassment and announce that they liked a young man.
“Kiku!” Mitsu was awestruck and virtually shouted, “What in the world has happened to you? You’ve lost your mind!”
But with calm composure Kiku proclaimed, “Mitsu, you can’t tell anybody, but I’m going to marry Seikichi.” Her words were also intended to put Mitsu on notice that she mustn’t fall for Seikichi herself, even if by accident.
Mitsu gaped wide-eyed at her cousin. Since their childhood together she had known Kiku to be assertive and unequivocal and frank, but she had never imagined that she would blurt out something so discomfiting.
“Well, OK, but Seikichi …” Mitsu hesitated a moment. “He’s from Nakano, you know. Your family would never permit it.”
“And what’s wrong with Nakano? Everybody there’s the same as folks in Magome!” Kiku responded as though she herself were the one being vilified.
1. The Kunchi Festival in Nagasaki, held at the Suwa Shinto Shrine over a three-day period each autumn, “was first celebrated in 1634…. [It] was originally a part of the [shogunate] policy to forge a Yamato spirit for Nagasaki, which up to 1614 had been Japan’s only Christian town. In other words, the Kunchi festival started out as an anti-Christian festival” (Reinier Hesselink, “The Dutch and the Kunchi Festival of Nagasaki in the Seventeenth Century” [manuscript]).
Containing elements of both Dutch and Chinese culture, the popular festival includes snake dances, Chinese dragons, and the parading of large wooden boats.
2. Setsubun is a celebration held on the eve of the vernal equinox. Part of the traditional festivities includes tossing roasted soybeans while shouting “Out go the demons! In comes good fortune!”
THE ROAD IS LONG
HALF A YEAR had passed since Petitjean’s arrival in Nagasaki. He had grown quite comfortable with life here.
What left him most nonplussed was not the sweltering heat of the summer or even the strange flavors of the Japanese food that Okane cooked for him. As a priest who had come to Japan to preach the Gospel and who was determined to have his bones interred here, he was not bothered by such trivial things as the topography or the climate or the food.
What plagued him most was the fact that even with the Japanese language ability he had acquired in Naha and improved on with further study in Yokohama, he still could not understand much of what was being said in the Nagasaki dialect.
For instance, on one occasion Okane’s husband, Mosaku, abruptly asked him, “Bapo-san, oro-no?” And he had no idea what the man was talking about. Only later did he learn that “Bapo-san” was their way of saying “the Master,” with the master of the church here being Father Furet, and so the question meant “Is Father Furet here?”
Out of necessity he began studying the Nagasaki dialect each morning, with Mosaku as his study partner.
“Donku. What does that mean?”
“That there’s a frog.”
“I don’t get yosowashika.”
“It means ‘filthy.’”
As he took his customary afternoon strolls through the streets of Nagasaki, whenever he heard a word he didn’t understand, he quickly noted it down and asked Mosaku about it.
Just yesterday some women saw him and whispered among themselves, “Yō chōmawari ba sareru to ne.” He knew that yō meant “a lot,” but no matter how hard he thought about it, he couldn’t figure out what chomawari meant.
“Chomawari?” Okane’s husband cocked his head, stumped by Petitjean’s peculiar pronunciation, so he repeated it to himself several times until he said, “Oh, I think you mean chōmawari. If that’s what it was, it means to walk around the city a lot.”
Every day he was out chōmawari-ing. He set out every afternoon, come rain or wind. It was almost to the point that there was hardly anyone left in Nagasaki who had not seen him out walking in his cassock.
The people of Nagasaki were very kind. They always smiled and were gracious to him. If he asked for directions, they would explain politely until he understood, and sometimes when he took refuge from the heat in the shade of a tree, they brought him some cold well water to drink.
“Please come to my place and have a look around,” he would invite them. “We have many unusual things for you to see.”
Sometimes he took candy from the pocket of his cassock and offered it to children who were playing nearby, or he showed people his watch and his glasses, and he would point to his own nose and say “I am Petitjean,” making every effort to help people feel comfortable around him. His objective, of course, was more complicated.
His strategy began to bear fruit. Before long everyone in Nagasaki had heard the name of Petitjean, who was living at the Nambanji, the Temple of the Southern Barbarians,1 which was under construction. Once his name had spread abroad, some of the people he passed on the street began to acknowledge him with a smile.
The first to grow close to him were the children. Petitjean’s stumbling attempts to use the Nagasaki dialect had melted away any trepidation the children might have felt toward him. Before long, children would bring him fruit when he paused in his incessant walking and rested beside the long wall surrounding a Buddhist temple.
“Mom said to give you this.” Apparently this was an expression of gratitude for the candy he had previously given the children. But the parents of these children would not approach Petitjean themselves, instead having their children give him the fruit. He wasn’t sure whether the parents were too embarrassed or still too guarded toward him.
One day, however, he quietly asked a group of children, “Do any of you know where I could find any Kirishitans?” At a loss, the children just shook their heads.
And for some reason, starting the next day they stopped flocking around Petitjean.
He tried gesturing to them to approach, saying, “Come here, don’t you want any candy?”
But the response was, “No. My mom’ll get mad.”
“Why would she get mad at you?”
“She said I couldn’t talk to you.”
Petitjean was made aware that simply by asking, “Do you know where I could find any Kirishitans?” he had made the parents of these children exceedingly wary of him. He lamented his own rashness.
“It looks like it’s going to take quite some time to win over these Japanese,” he confided to Father Furet, who nodded in agreement.
“Even among themselves the Japanese regard someone as a foreigner if he lives ju
st over the mountain or the other side of the river. How can we expect them to open their hearts to us foreigners in a mere six months or a year?”
“Is that because their country has been closed to foreign interaction for such a long time?”
“It’s not just that. After all, the Japanese are surrounded on all four sides by oceans, so they’ve hardly ever met any foreigners before.”
Petitjean, who had started out so optimistic about his mission, gradually grew perplexed as he sensed a thick wall separating himself from the Japanese people. Having experienced only courtesy and smiling faces—on the surface at least—among the people of Nagasaki, he never would have imagined that such a stubborn wall existed.
He began to lose hope. Perhaps the ramblings of that drunken Chinaman in the Ryūkyūs were all lies after all. If there really were any Christians hiding out here in Nagasaki, they should have come to him by now.
They probably just don’t exist. In an effort to avoid total despair, Petitjean tried to persuade himself gradually.
But then one day something happened. It occurred while Petitjean was taking his customary stroll through the streets of Nagasaki.
He had passed through the residential district of the Chinese, whom the Japanese called Acha, and, as always, had emerged near Shianbashi. Just to the side of the bridge was the sort of pleasure quarter that would cause a missionary like him to knit his brows in disapproval, and the name of the bridge, Shian, meant “to ponder,” because men who were about to yield to the temptation to visit the quarter would stand here and ponder whether they should enter.
He happened upon a crowd of people at the base of the bridge. There appeared to be some sort of fight going on.
Because he was so tall in stature, Petitjean merely had to stand behind the short Japanese in the crowd to have a clear view of what they were looking at.
Two tough-looking men were beating and kicking another man, who wasn’t so innocent looking himself. The man being attacked appeared to have been drinking a great deal since morning, and he was unable either to stand and fight or to run away. He was left to the devices of the other two.
“This good-for-nothing—” Cursing as they indiscriminately kicked the man’s head and face, the two men paused when they saw a Southern Barbarian in a white cassock suddenly standing before them.
“You mustn’t do this! Stop it!” Petitjean shouted.
“What the—?” The two toughs, realizing it was a foreigner interrupting them, had the wind taken from their sails and grunted, “What do you want?”
“Stop it!” Petitjean shook his head. “Let him go.”
“Let him go?” One of the toughs sneered and mocked Petitjean’s words. “Well, since you put it that way, I totally surrender.” He lowered his fist that was raised in the air. “This is the first time I’ve ever had a fight broken up by a Southern Barbarian. Wait till the guys hear about this!”
The two thugs laughed and walked away, but the onlookers continued to stare at Petitjean and the cudgeled man.
“Are you wounded?” Petitjean took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped away the blood that was streaming down the man’s cheek. “This must be painful.”
“Yeah.” The man’s bobbed his head up and down in grateful humiliation.
“Where do you live? Would you like me to take you home?”
“No, I don’t need you to do that.” The man staggered to his feet and again gave a bow. The crowd began to disperse.
Seeing that the fellow could manage to walk, Petitjean gave a shallow bow and turned to leave. But the man called out to him, “Sir?”
Petitjean turned back. “What is it?”
The man flashed him an obsequious smile. “Mr. Foreigner, tell me something I can do for you.” He bowed again.
“Something you can do?”
“To thank you for saving me. I’ll run errands or do anything. I can take you to see a nice young lady.”
The fellow had no idea that Petitjean was a priest. He likely wouldn’t know what a priest was even if he heard the title.
“No thank you.” Petitjean looked a bit angry. He had often watched with disgust as sailors from foreign warships that had docked in Nagasaki harbor came ashore looking for Japanese whores.
He took five or six steps away but then abruptly changed his mind. When he turned back around, the man peered at him with a somewhat surprised look. He didn’t seem able to grasp why his offer to provide a “nice young lady” had been refused.
“Will you really do anything I ask of you?” Petitjean peered unwaveringly at the man, then reached into his pocket and took out a one-franc silver coin that he had brought with him from France. “Take a look at this. I assume you know what silver is.”
Petitjean saw greed flash across the man’s eyes as he gazed at the foreign silver coin and continued, “If you do what I ask, I’ll give you this.”
“You’ll give to me?”
“That’s right.”
The man displayed his yellowed teeth in a smile.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Do you know any Kirishitans?”
“Kirishitans?”
“Yes.”
The man cocked his head and mumbled, “Kirishitans,” but his face evinced none of the fear or hesitation that other Japanese had shown in response to this question.
Just maybe …
Petitjean felt a faint hope stir in his heart for the first time. Perhaps this man would give him the information he sought. If that were to happen, he would not begrudge a single franc coin: he would gladly give away all his means.
“Do you know any?”
“You have some business with Kirishitans, do you?”
“Yes.”
“It’ll be difficult,” the man sighed deeply. “The Kirishitan faith is banned, you know. B-a-n-n-e-d.”
“So you don’t know any Kirishitans.” Petitjean deliberately twirled the silver coin between his fingers. “Then you won’t be getting this.” He thrust the coin back into his pocket.
The man swallowed audibly. The foul sound was like a bald display of the man’s lust for the silver foreign coin.
“All right,” he muttered with a sigh. “I’ll take you to them. But who knows what kind of punishment I’ll get from the magistrate if I get found out. This is a dangerous bridge to cross, Mr. Foreigner.”
Then the man thrust three fingers into Petitjean’s face. He was giving clear notice that he would not take on this task for a single coin but that he required three.
The man had obviously read Petitjean’s heart. He seemed quite aware of how keenly this Southern Barbarian wanted to find out where the Kirishitans were hiding.
Petitjean stared at the man’s three extended fingers, then looked at the cunning face, and for a time he said nothing.
He had a powerful impression that he could not trust this Japanese fellow. But he would be left without any way to locate the people he was seeking if he didn’t make a decisive wager on this man.
“Fine.” Petitjean nodded, keeping his eyes riveted on the man’s face. “But you’re being truthful with me, aren’t you?” He searched his pocket, pulled out one silver coin, and handed it to the man. “Once you actually take me to the Kirishitans, I’ll give you the other two.”
A filthy hand with grime under its fingernails shot out and grabbed the coin and jammed it into the man’s pocket. For some reason Petitjean pictured Judas betraying Lord Jesus.
“Are we going right now?”
“Now?” Surprised, the man shook his head. “We can’t go till after dark. We’d best meet up here again at Shianbashi after it gets dark.”
Petitjean had the feeling the man would not show up. But he could not argue with the man and was left with no choice but to agree with his plan.
When he returned to Ōura, Father Furet was standing in his customary spot at the work site, observing the progress of the construction. When Petitjean told him what had just occurred, Father Furet laughe
d heartily.
“You’re so gullible. You’ve just tossed your money into a swamp.”
“So you think he was lying?”
“Of course he was! You’ve been taken in, my friend.”
Petitjean went to his room, opened the window, and gazed out at the bay of Nagasaki as the sun set, all the while keeping in check his mounting anger.
Even so, he finished his dinner quickly, slipped out without Father Furet noticing, and hurried down the hill. Someone was flying a kite above the slope that was surrounded by farmland.
The area was bustling with people as he approached Shianbashi. They all were on their way to the pleasure quarter, known as Maruyama. Petitjean stopped at the foot of the bridge and searched for the man. He was there …!
Reflecting back later on how he had felt when he spotted the man, Petitjean remembered that an overpowering joy had suffused his heart. An elation that the man had kept his promise. But his joy was overshadowed for a brief moment by the humiliation he felt for having doubted the man.
Petitjean tapped the man’s bony shoulder. “I’m sorry, friend. Have I kept you waiting?”
“Ah, Mr. Foreigner.” The man flashed the few remaining yellowed teeth he had. And the smell of liquor issued from his mouth. Evidently he had traded away the silver coin he got from Petitjean and had spent every subsequent minute drinking in some bar.
“You’ve had quite a bit of liquor, haven’t you?”
“I haven’t been drinking. No, sir, I haven’t been drinking, Mr. Foreigner.” The man waved his hand in denial, but he couldn’t conceal the unsteady gait that was the result of his drunkenness.
“Well, Mr. Foreigner,” the man scanned their surroundings. “So you’re looking for Kuros?”
“Kuros?”
“Don’t say Kuro so loud, Mr. Foreigner! If the police hear it, you won’t be the only one they’ll take off in ropes.” With one hand the man wiped the saliva from his mouth and then mumbled a number of words Petitjean couldn’t understand.
Exasperated, Petitjean said curtly, “Please take me to them right now.”
“I will, I will!” The man set off falteringly, clinging to the bridge railing to steady himself.
Kiku's Prayer: A Novel Page 6