Kiku's Prayer: A Novel

by Endō, Shūsaku. Translated by Van C. Gessel

  “I’m sure they are…. Say, that serving girl who just brought your tray is from Urakami. Evidently one of her relatives was arrested, and she’s all worried about what’s going on in Tsuwano.”

  “Hmmm.” Itō Seizaemon gulped down the contents of his cup disinterestedly. But when he saw Kiku come in with another tray, his drooping eyes suddenly flashed strangely. “You’re from Urakami, are you?” he asked Kiku in a soft voice.

  “Yes, from Magome.”

  “Then are you a Kirishitan?”

  “No, we aren’t Kirishitans, sir.”

  “In that case, is one of your Kirishitan relatives in Tsuwano?”

  “He’s not a relative. But Nakano and Magome are very close to each other, so I know a lot of people from there,” Kiku deftly glossed over the details.

  “Kiku,” Oyō interjected, “this gentleman is Lord Itō, and he goes frequently to Tsuwano on government business, so why don’t you ask him? Lord Itō, this girl is engaged to a young man who was banished to Tsuwano.”

  Kiku’s eyes flashed when she heard that Itō worked for the Nagasaki government, and she adjusted her posture.

  “Oyō!” Hondō Shuntarō reprimanded her with a look of disgust on his face. “Lord Itō and I are here tonight to renew old acquaintances. You can talk about those things later.”

  At the reproof from a man she loved, even Oyō, known throughout the quarter as the “Snow Queen of Maruyama,” flushed and hung her head. She had no choice but to signal to Kiku and have her leave the room.

  Although she worked in the Maruyama district, Oyō was a geisha, not a prostitute. Geisha were called geiko in Nagasaki, and in local parlance they were referred to as “wildcats,” possibly because the samisens they played were made from cat hides.

  The geiko, unlike prostitutes, were indistinguishable from women born and raised in Nagasaki, but they were reviled by litterateurs visiting from Edo for being not as quick-witted or sophisticated as their Edo counterparts. Oyō, however, was an exception, skilled at both the arts and conversation, and she had a beautiful, vividly white face. When her lover Shuntarō rebuked her, however, she became anything but a “wildcat,” responding instead with the docility of a lamb.

  “I’d like to get out of Nagasaki and go up to Yokohama or Tokyo,” Itō grumbled. “It’s boring here. They’re talking as though foreign ships will start docking in Yokohama instead of Nagasaki, so we’ll fall even further behind the times.”

  “Now, hold on a minute. Don’t be in such a rush. Even if you go to Tokyo now, every important government position is monopolized by men from Satsuma and Chōshū. It’s not that easy for someone from another province to get his foot in the door. I’ll keep my eye out for the right opportunity and try to come up with something for you.”

  To some degree Shuntarō was fed up with Itō, who sniffed up snot as he moaned and whined, so Shuntarō kept plying him with saké.

  Eventually Itō, his eyes blurry from drink, staggered to his feet and headed for the bathroom. Oyō followed him out of the room, and while he was relieving himself, she weighed the circumstances and went to fetch Kiku.

  When Itō emerged from the toilet, dragging the hems of his formal skirt behind him, Kiku was holding out a basin for him to wash his hands. He gaped at her with dissolute, drooping eyes and whispered, “Hey, how about it? Why don’t you come to bed with me? Then I’ll see what I can do for your fellow in Tsuwano.”

  Kiku turned bright red and scowled reflexively at him.

  “That angry face of yours makes you look even more beautiful. You’re a fine girl, now aren’t you?” With a chuckle he returned to the room.

  For a time, the rage lingered in her breast. This was the first time the innocent young woman had ever been insulted in such vulgar terms.

  “Silly child, to get upset over something so trivial,” the madam smilingly took her to task. “We don’t have any harlots here, but we’re a house where gentlemen come to amuse themselves with geiko. You’ve got to learn to laugh off a few harmless jokes.” She then instructed Kiku to take more saké bottles upstairs.

  When the inebriated Itō saw Kiku, he called to her as though he had forgotten that Hondō and Oyō were in the room. “Com’ere! Over here! Whyn’t you pour me a drink?”

  “Here, I’ll pour for you,” Oyō responded in place of Kiku. “Please tell this girl whether her friend is doing all right in Tsuwano.”

  “Her friend? Wha’s ’is name?”

  “Seikichi,” Kiku answered, her knees tightly pressed together as though in self-defense.

  “Seikichi. Hmmm, seems like there was a fellow with that name. Yeah. I remember now. One of the pushy bastards. I imagine right about now he’s prob’ly ready to give in ’cause of the cold.”

  “Is it that cold a place?” Oyō asked.

  “It’s a little village surrounded by the San’in Mountains, so it’s a lot colder than you can imagine here in Nagasaki. In the morning there’s icicles hanging from every roof. At night the snow freezes over, and it’s hard to even walk. The ones who cave in get fed all the rice they want, and they give ’em bedding. But the stubborn bastards like this girl’s friend get nothing but a little straw rug. They don’t feed ’em more than two cups of rice a day.”

  “Two cups of rice? That’s horrible!” Oyō cried instinctively. “That’s the same as letting them starve to death.”

  “Can’t be helped,” Hondō, who had remained silent until now, interjected. “Those who don’t follow orders from their leaders must be sternly punished. The ban on Christianity is one of the core policies of the new government.”

  Oyō easily acquiesced to words spoken by the man she loved. On the one hand, she felt sorry for the Urakami Kirishitans, but on the other, she felt there were no alternatives, since they had gone against the will of the government. Feeling thus conflicted, she said nothing.

  Suddenly Kiku leaped up and stumbled from the room.

  Outside the room, she leaned against the wall of the staircase and wept aloud.

  Two cups of rice a day. Seikichi has nothing to sleep on, so he has to wrap himself in a thin little rug. And in such bitter cold …

  But there was nothing she could do to help him. She had no money to travel to Tsuwano. She had no way to help him.

  Before long Itō had fallen asleep, snoring vulgarly.

  “Bring something to cover him. Can’t let him catch a cold,” Hondō said to Oyō, smiling sardonically as he looked into the face of this man, drooling into the unkempt whiskers that had sprouted around his mouth. “No matter how you look at him, he’s a pathetic soul.”

  “Why pathetic?”

  “He’s good-natured enough. But it’s because of his good nature that he’ll never amount to anything his whole life.”

  Sitting with his arms folded while Oyō massaged his shoulders, Hondō pondered the difference between himself and Seizaemon.

  Hondō had been born into an underprivileged, low-ranking samurai family, so the points of departure for him and Itō were essentially the same. They had previously worked together at the Nagasaki magistrate’s office. But Hondō was the type who looked to the future, and while he was assiduously studying foreign languages, Itō remained oblivious to the shifts and flows in the times and carried on, being far too much devoted to his official duties. Those differences had now created a wide gap between the two of them.

  “About the Urakami Kirishitans. A short time ago, there was a heated debate in Tokyo, at a place called Takanawa, between several foreign envoys on one side and Chancellor Sanjō3 and Minister of the Right Iwakura representing Japan. I acted as interpreter,” he added with some self-importance.

  Hondō remembered that day clearly. The British envoy, Parkes; the French ambassador, Outrey; the American chargé d’affaires, DeLong; and the Dutch envoy, Von Brandt, complained vehemently to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the wholesale banishment of the Urakami Christians. The gist of the protest from these foreign legacies was “If foreigners
hear that these people have been punished because of their religious faith, it could damage the friendship that has been fostered between us,” and “If you don’t modify your handling of this situation, your country will be despised by the entire world.”

  In the meeting room at Takanawa where Hondō participated as interpreter alongside Prince Iwakura, Prince Sanjō, Councillor Soejima, and Minister of Foreign Affairs Sawa, Hondō was able to renew an old acquaintance with Dr. Siebold, who was also present as interpreter for the opposing side.

  Hondō’s precise manner of translating on that occasion enabled him to make a favorable impression not only on the Japanese representatives but also on the foreign delegation. Perhaps for that reason, two or three days later Hondō was singled out for commendation by Chief Councillor of State Iwakura.

  “Even Siebold applauded your linguistic abilities,” Prince Iwakura said as he handed Hondō a glass of imported wine. “In the near future—that is to say, probably in another two or three years—would you be interested in going to America?”

  “To … America?”

  “Yes. Our country signed a pact with America in the 1850s, but resentment over its terms is tremendous. We are planning to travel to America to sound them out on possible revisions. I’m considering taking you along as interpreter.”

  Shuntarō’s face flushed as he bowed his head. The joy of that moment still cascaded through his heart.

  But right now, here before his eyes Itō Seizaemon was fast asleep, drooling. Framed in scruffy whiskers, his face, exhausted and muddied from his visits to Tsuwano …

  1. Although the Japanese began using the Western calendar during the Meiji period, the Asian lunar calendar remained in common use until after World War II.

  2. It has long been the custom in Japan to eat nanakusa kayu, a rice porridge with seven herbs intermixed, on the seventh day of the first month of the year in the belief that it will help digestion and protect from illness throughout the coming year.

  3. Sanjō Sanetomi (1837–1891) also served the Meiji government as Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal and briefly in 1889 as interim prime minister.

  THE VALLEY OF PAIN

  SEVERAL BOYS HAD finished their midwinter training exercises at the Tsuwano clan school and were walking home, the bags that held their fencing sticks propped on their shoulders, their breath white in the frigid air, and frost crystals crunching under their feet. The clan school was named the Yōrōkan and had been built by the earlier rulers of the domain, who placed a high premium on education.

  One of the boys whispered furtively to a classmate, a short fellow they called “Rin-saa,” as though he were passing along some great secret, “Say, Rin-saa, did you hear? The Kirishitans at the Kōrinji were thrown in the frozen lake.”

  Rin-saa looked up in surprise and said, “In the lake?”

  “That’s right. That’s what happens to people who don’t do what they’re told.”

  The Kirishitans were confined at the Kōrinji Temple on the outskirts of town. Even young children in this tiny village of Tsuwano knew about them. The children sensed something frightening about this situation, but at the same time they were in their own way curious and interested in it.

  When Rin-saa got home, he set down his fencing stick and told his mother what he had just heard.

  “You children don’t need to know anything about this,” his mother chided him, her brows knit.

  But they tell us at school that people who don’t know the right path should be taught it with kindness and reason, so why would they be so cruel as to throw them into a frozen lake? With glum eyes, he pondered this to himself.

  The young man’s real name was Mori Rintarō, who later became known as Mori Ōgai. In his biography of the literary giant, Yamasaki Kuninori demonstrates persuasively that the brutal treatment of the Kirishitans at the Kōrinji, which Ōgai knew about while he attended the Yōrōkan School, left traumatic wounds in the writer’s heart.

  After eight men at the Kōrinji apostatized when they could no longer bear the hunger and cold, the authorities inflicted even more ruthless punishments on the twenty who still stood firm.

  First, those who had renounced their faith were moved to a nunnery known as the Hōshin-an. They were taken to a stream in front of the Hachiman Shrine and there subjected to a ritual purification to memorialize the vow they had made to abandon their Kirishitan beliefs. Afterward, they were given warm clothing and warm food, and every day they received an allowance of seventy-one mon,1 were allowed to move about outside the nunnery, and were granted the opportunity to do piecework.

  In contrast, the twenty men who refused to apostatize had their allotment of food reduced even further. Occasionally they were called out three at a time and taken to observe the traitors at the Hōshin-an savoring copious amounts of food and living in comfortable rooms.

  The apostates naturally averted their eyes when their former brethren were herded in to see how they were living. They were ashamed of their own weakness. Somewhere in their hearts they despised those who resolutely maintained their convictions. They could not have coped with their own emotions had they not scorned those who were strong.

  The apostates tried to sway those who were brought to observe them: “Even if you try to stand up to them, what’s the point of wasting away and dying here? Jezusu and Santa Maria aren’t coming to help you. Don’t you think it’s better to pretend to apostatize and go on living so we can go back to Urakami? You’ve been duped by Sen’emon and Kanzaburō.”

  Those who had apostatized singled out Sen’emon and Kanzaburō from among the stalwarts as the targets of their loathing, while the officers waited for them to begin squabbling among themselves….

  Why do we have to endure all this suffering?

  At times, when the captives would lie awake in the middle of the night, unable to sleep because of the severe cold, such questions would assail their minds. These questions were accompanied by terrifying doubts about the love of God and the validity of their faith. Doubts stabbed like a sharp knife at their chests, inflicting excruciating pain.

  When these thoughts arose, their teeth began to chatter—and not merely because of the cold. It was also because of the dark, chilling feelings of loneliness that come when one’s faith wavers.

  “Lord Jezusu suffered even more than we are. Think of that and don’t give up!” Sen’emon tried to encourage them all. But even his steadfast encouragement had no impact on their vacillating minds. Jesus’s sufferings ended after a single day. But there was no way to tell when their own torment and hunger would cease….

  Seikichi was among those struggling against uncertainty. In his darker moments he would recall happy scenes from the past in an effort to dispel his feelings of loneliness: those mornings when he would stroll through the streets of Nagasaki, selling whatever might be in season. Seikichi was proud of the resonance in his vendor’s call.

  “Such a lovely voice!” He was often complimented by the women who stood outside their doors waiting for him. Among those women … yes, Kiku was one of them.

  I wonder what that plucky girl is up to right now. Was she still working at the padres’ house in Ōura? Or had she ended up working somewhere else?

  But the details of Kiku’s face and figure had grown hazy in his weary mind. He could not imagine that she was still in love with him. This emaciated, grimy body with hair and whiskers growing in wild disarray. In his condition he no longer had the leisure to even think about a woman.

  “Come here!” One day, Seikichi was unexpectedly beckoned by an officer. It seemed strange that he would be summoned by himself, but he did as he was told.

  “You’re still so young. Don’t you think it would be a waste for someone as young as you to spend your whole life here like these other men? If you’ll just apostatize, I’ll pretty much let you do what you please.” The officer’s face was perfectly serious. Even though they had pushed eight of the others to renounce their faith, they were losing patience with the
ones who were still unshakable.

  Seikichi did not respond. Even the words this officer spoke lacked a sense of reality for him, and he felt as though he were hearing them from the distance.

  “I see. So you won’t comply no matter what we do, eh?” The officer sounded resigned, but then he gave orders to several policemen, who forced Seikichi into a tiny box. It was a mere three feet in width and height, with thick planks of pine wood for walls. A single hole had been cut in the roof to pass items through. Seikichi was unable either to stand or to stretch out his legs.

  “If you just say, ‘I give it up,’” he heard the officer’s voice through the hole in the roof, “I’ll let you out of here. Give it some thought.”

  Inside the box, his sense of the passage of time went amok. One second came to seem like an hour, and an hour felt longer than an entire day.

  White, threadlike slivers of sunlight seeped between the cracks in the planks of wood that served as walls. They were his only connection with the outside world. Since he could neither lie down nor stand up, he had to remain in the same position all day long.

  Before long his hips and back began to ache, and he could no longer contain the urge to urinate. A dull pain flared through his neck. He massaged his neck with his right hand and let the urine spray out. The warm liquid drenched his immobilized knees and legs.

  The square door in the roof opened, and by turns two policemen poked their leering faces inside. Their names were Takahashi and Deguchi—and for the rest of his life Seikichi would remember those two names along with the pain he suffered in that three-foot box. Takahashi had a round face that made him look like a raccoon dog, while Deguchi resembled a fox or a badger.

  “What do you think? Nice little house, isn’t it?” The two took turns amusing themselves. “Have you taken a liking to it? If you’ve taken a fancy to it, you can stay there as long as you like. Nobody will complain.”

  Along with their taunts, they passed two tiny rice balls and a single dried plum through the hole each day.