Kiku's Prayer: A Novel

by Endō, Shūsaku. Translated by Van C. Gessel

  2. Momo no sekku—literally, “Peach Blossom Festival”—is today more commonly called Hina matsuri, or Girls’ Day. Traditionally, it was held on the third day of the third month by the lunar calendar and marked the passing of winter to spring. Dolls representing the imperial court of the Heian period are put on display.

  A MAN NAMED ITŌ

  OF THE TWENTY-EIGHT men who had originally come to Tsuwano, fourteen had apostatized and two others had died in the three-foot cell. Only twelve continued to insist that they would not abandon their Kirishitan faith.

  One evening the twelve prisoners heard the sound of digging in the garden. Sen’emon peeked out and saw several men using hoes to dig a hole.

  The workers realized they were being watched, so they began talking to one another loudly enough to be heard: “Anyways, it’s a grave for men with no hope of becoming buddhas, so we can make it shallow enough so’s that wild dogs won’t have no trouble diggin’ ’em up!”

  The prisoners could then visualize the grave that was being dug.

  Maybe it won’t be long before we’re beheaded. That was the consensus among the captives, but strangely, they were no longer afraid of execution; it had begun to seem like a sweet release to them. If all they had to look forward to was one painful day after another and the fear of the three-foot cell, they would prefer to have their heads lopped off sooner rather than later so they could go to Paraíso.

  A heavy snow fell on the third day after the hole was dug. Late that night Sen’emon caught the chills, but at dawn while the prisoners were still sleeping a policeman arrived and summoned all twelve to an interrogation, “You’re all wanted!”

  “I can’t go.” Sen’emon demurred, suffering from a severe headache.

  “Why is that?”

  “I’m sick. I can’t walk.”

  “If you can’t walk, somebody’ll have to carry you. You’re coming! Is that clear?” Underscoring the order, the policeman disappeared.

  Assisted by Kanzaburō, Sen’emon walked slowly behind the others down the long hallway of the temple. The temple edifice was right next to the building where they were interrogated.

  The atmosphere in the room was different from usual. Today, an older man who looked like he might be a physician sat beside the interrogating officers, along with several other men seated stiffly, wearing swords and dressed sharply in formal kimono trousers and robes with their sleeves tied up with cords.

  Maybe we will be executed after all…. The mood in the room gave all twelve men the sense that their time had come.

  “Still no wish to change your beliefs?” It was the same question they were always asked by the officials. When no one replied, they were queried individually.

  “Sen’emon, what about you?”

  “I don’t wish to.”

  “And you, Kanzaburō?”

  “I won’t change my beliefs.”

  The men in formal attire, who seemed to be expecting those replies, scrambled to their feet.

  “Sen’emon, Kanzaburō—outside!” An officer ordered the door to be opened. Through the opening they could see the courtyard blanketed in pure white snow.

  All the men were convinced that these two men would be the first to be executed. Both men felt the same way as they got to their feet. Kanzaburō held on to Sen’emon, whose legs were shaky because of his fever.

  The doctor and the official led the way out into the drifts of snow and stopped in the courtyard.

  “Take off your clothes! Then come over here!” The official ordered brusquely.

  The men removed their clothing and stepped across the snow to where the official stood.

  They hadn’t seen it from the distance, but the official and the doctor were standing at the edge of a pond. Because the pond was covered with a thin white layer of ice, they had not been able to distinguish it from the snow-blanketed ground.

  “I told you to take off your clothes … !” the official screamed at Sen’emon and Kanzaburō, who were hugging their bodies with both arms. “Take off those loincloths, too!”

  The moment the two prisoners submitted and removed their loincloths, the men in formal attire hurled themselves without warning against the bodies of both men. Thrown off balance, Sen’emon and Kanzaburō tumbled into the icy pond with a splash.

  A spray of water shot up as the ice shattered. The two men’s bodies were sucked into the dark water, then bobbed to the surface again. Their hair was disheveled.

  The ice broke, and we tried to swim around, Kanzaburō later recalled his painful memories of that day. Our feet didn’t reach the bottom of the pond, but it was shallower in the middle, so I was able to keep my chin above the surface. I lifted my eyes to heaven and clasped my hands and pleaded to Santa Maria to intercede. I begged for Jezusu to be with me, while Sen’emon prayed the “Our Father.” I offered up a devotional prayer. Then an officer mocked us, saying, “Sen’emon, Kanzaburō, can you see your heavenly Lord? Eh? How about it?!”

  The officers mercilessly scooped up water in a long-handled ladle and poured it over the two men’s faces. As a result, they could barely catch their breath.

  My body was freezing, I was shuddering, and my teeth were chattering. Sen’emon said to me, “Kanzaburō, how are you holding up? I can’t see anymore. The world is spinning. Please don’t forsake me!” He was about to draw his last breath when the official ordered, “Come out now!” and one of the guards yelled, ‘Hurry out!’ I was at the point of saying “I can make the climb to heaven but I can’t climb out of this lake” when they brought a six-foot-long bamboo pole with a hook on the end and wrapped our hair around the hook and pulled as hard as they could. They dragged us up out of the ice, brushed the snow off us, and built fires with two bundles of brushwood and some logs. Then six of them surrounded our two bodies, warmed us by the fire, and gave us some warm liquid to revive us.

  They were not the only two prisoners tortured in the frozen pond. On that day alone, Kanzaburō’s father, Kunitarō, and Tomohachi were subjected to the same punishment. As soon as Kanzaburō was pulled from the pond, he was jammed into the three-foot cell. The officials had concluded that unlike the aging Sen’emon, they could shove young Kanzaburō in the tiny enclosure without fear of his dying.

  Despite these torments that were heaped on them one after another, not one of the twelve men apostatized.

  But even though their spirits could not be broken, these tortures, when added to the cold and starvation, led to the deaths of two of the men. A man named Seishirō muttered words of encouragement to his friends as he died.

  At around that same time—

  A procession of men and women, led along by officers, was making its way along the cold, snowy road toward Tsuwano.

  The procession included not just women and children but even elderly people and infants. It was obvious from their baggy clothes that they brought only what they wore. Some mothers carried their infants on their backs. Behind them climbed the elderly, scarcely able to breathe.

  Young children walked beside their grandparents.

  These were 125 of the Urakami Kirishitans who had been driven from their homes a month earlier and were relatives of the men and who were already suffering in agony in Tsuwano. They had initially been taken to Mikuriya Village in the Hirado domain rather than to Nagasaki; from there they had been loaded onto boats and taken to Onomichi. They had then been separated out from those being exiled to Hiroshima and were now heading toward Tsuwano under armed guard.

  We’ll be able to see our husbands and fathers again.

  Although they feared what might lie ahead, still their hearts thrilled at the prospect of being reunited with their husbands, fathers, and other relatives, about whom they had heard no news.

  I wonder how they’ve been treated.

  They were less worried about what would be happening to themselves than they were about the well-being of their husbands and fathers. Had they been ill? Had they been subjected to terrible tortures?

&nb
sp; Even the women and children felt that they could endure whatever suffering lay ahead if only they could be with their husbands and fathers from whom they had been so long separated. They had no way of knowing that some of those husbands and fathers had already apostatized.

  News of this procession quickly reached the cell in Tsuwano. As one day after another passed, the emotions of the prisoners were a mixture of joy and pity.

  How inhuman! They didn’t have to drive our wives and children from the village!

  I didn’t want them to have to endure the hunger and cold and the three-foot cell here!

  Anger and anxiety clutched at their hearts.

  The sounds of trees being cut down and stakes being driven into the ground echoed every day from the garden of the temple.

  “You men will be moving over there,” one guard secretively alerted them. “Your wives and children will live here.”

  The men were moved into the new cell as soon as it was completed. On the evening of the following day, they were startled by sounds of crying children and conversing women. They heard an elderly person coughing.

  “They must have arrived.” As one, the men pressed their ears against the newly completed mud wall. One man picked up a brick from the ground and gouged a hole in the wall. “Ah—they are here!” Unbidden tears flowed from his sunken eyes. As the father of one of the young children who had been led here from Urakami by her mother, the man could not help but weep.

  “What are you doing?! Peeking through that hole?!” An officer caught them observing the new arrivals and had one of the guards fill up the hole with mud. The clamor continued for some time, but finally night approached.

  “I’ve just had a horrible thought!” Sen’emon suddenly voiced a concern to his cellmates. “The officers are going to lie to our wives and children. They’ll tell them that we apostatized a long time ago, so they might as well go ahead and apostatize, too!”

  Sen’emon’s fears were right on the mark. They knew that the officers would use any possible means to persuade them to abandon their faith.

  “There’s nothing to worry about!” Kanzaburō said with a laugh. “I left a note on the floor of the privy telling them that the twelve of us haven’t left the faith!”

  “You did?”

  “I did!”

  Coincidentally enough, it was Kanzaburō’s younger sister, Matsu, who found the note he had left in the privy. When she discovered the note in the familiar scrawl of her brother, she hurried to tell the others that the twelve men had not apostatized.

  “But what about all the others?” Through the heart of every woman passed both the fear that her own husband or father had apostatized and a feeling akin to a prayer that her own relatives were still holding firm.

  Among the 125 new prisoners, sixteen were children age five or younger, and there were ten adults who were at least sixty-one. The officers moved all the men over the age of fifteen to a room separated from the women and younger children.

  Once they had been assigned to their cells, a voice called out, “Mealtime!”

  Their meals consisted solely of a small quantity of food served on a tray. The side dish was a clump of miso the size of one’s thumb and a pinch of salt.

  Dauntless by nature, Matsu asked a guard named Takahashi, “Is this all there is?”

  Takahashi, who had a face like a ferret, taunted her, “That’s all. But if you apostatize, you can stuff yourself full.”

  Everyone was silent as they chewed their food. But the mothers in the group gave their meager portions to their young children.

  “This must be how they’ve treated my husband the whole time.” One woman set down her chopsticks and was choked with tears. It was as though something that had been held within suddenly burst out.

  “Why are you crying?” the staunch Matsu, who was twenty-seven, tried to cheer up the woman. “If that’s true, all the more reason that we’ve got to endure this….”

  When they finished eating, Matsu led the women in prayer. They could tell that the men were also praying in the adjoining room.

  Their first night in Tsuwano was bitterly cold. Since there were elderly people and children in the group, the officers gave them old, threadbare bedding instead of tiny rugs, but even when they snuggled under them, the chill pierced their skin as the night deepened.

  “I’m cold! I’m so cold!!” Children clung to their mothers; old men coughed incessantly. That was how the first night passed for these 125. But the women took courage from their joy at being in the same location as their husbands and fathers.

  Three months later—

  Everyone was on the verge of starvation. With the scant daily ration of three-quarters of a cup of rice and the remonstrations to apostatize that were heaped on each member of the family day after day, the bodies of the elderly were the first to weaken.

  According to the historical records, thirty-one of the 125 new prisoners, equivalent to one-quarter of the total, had died within a mere sixteen months of their arrival. One in four died of starvation. Their single greatest tormentor was hunger.

  As an aside, an examination of the death records reveals that nearly twice as many men as women died there—twelve women and twenty-two men. A significant percentage of those who died were elderly, with twelve of them being over the age of fifty, along with seven deaths among those in their twenties and thirties. This may indicate that many of the prisoners were in these age brackets and that the tortures were concentrated on them.

  Nearly every day, entire families were summoned for questioning. They were most likely interrogated in groups because the officers were fully aware of the Japanese tendency to act as a family unit, with either the entire family apostatizing or all of them maintaining their faith.

  In the early stages, no matter how much they were persuaded, everyone staunchly refused to change. At that point, the officers merely responded, “I see. Well, think it over carefully.”

  The officers knew from previous experience that some time would have to pass before they would hear screams come from the Kirishitans. Over time, the daily ration of three-quarters of a cup of food would sap the Kirishitans’ physical strength and their wills, so the best plan was to wait patiently until their energy had drained away.

  Winter came to an end and spring arrived.

  Because it’s surrounded by mountains, spring in Tsuwano is heralded by cotton-hued clouds that drift lightly over Mount Aono and Shiroyama. Unlike winter clouds, these are neither cold nor ashen in color.

  Then a spring mist rises over the mountains, and the locals make preparations to gather bracken and wild plants. They begin commenting that the cherry blossoms at the horse-riding track of the Washihara Hachiman Shrine have changed color. These are the first intimations of spring in Tsuwano.

  Toward the end of spring, with a call of “Greetings!” Itō Seizaemon, back after a long absence, showed his face at the cell holding Sen’emon, Kanzaburō, Seikichi, and the others. Behind him stood the two policemen, Takahashi and Deguchi, now assuming roles as his henchmen, their faces still looking respectively like a raccoon dog and a badger.

  “You’re a stubborn bunch! What’s the point of making so much trouble for me and the Tsuwano domain? Don’t you think it’s about time you put an end to this nonsense and went back home to Urakami?” Itō grinned cynically as he looked around at the men. “I have to thank you for all the trouble you’ve caused me.”

  He flung down the oil paper-wrapped package he held in his hand. “Seikichi,” he called. “This is a letter from your girl in Maruyama. Want to read it? If you do, all you have to say is that you’ll give up your Kirishitan beliefs.” He spoke half in jest and kicked the package toward Seikichi. Wrapped in paper that Kiku had made herself were a letter, a summer robe, and some bleached cloth. But Itō did not give Seikichi the money that Kiku had earned.

  That evening, Itō used the money that Kiku had sent for Seikichi to treat Takahashi and Deguchi at a grimy little restaurant from whic
h they could hear the flow of the Nishiki River.

  “Drink up! No need to be timid!”

  “This is very unusual, having Mr. Itō buy for us!”

  The three men, their faces vivid red, repeatedly went outside to urinate along the bank of the Nishiki River, then came back into the restaurant.

  “Take a look at this! This coin here, this coin is no bogus battle coin!” He pulled a gold one-ryo coin from his pocket and held it out for the others to see. During the fighting preceding the Meiji Restoration, the armies of the Satsuma and Chōshū domains were in need of war funds and had issued emergency coins that, though now worthless, remained in circulation; the public called them “bogus battle coins.”

  “It’s an honest-to-goodness gold coin! This coin … this coin was earned through the hard labors of … the hard labors of Seikichi’s woman … to give to Seikichi.” He stared unblinking at the coin. “You and I are having these drinks right now … thanks to this money!” he muttered mostly to himself.

  Takahashi laughed, “Mr. Itō, you’re quite the man! After all, it’s against the law to give money to a Kirishitan.”

  “Yeah … but don’t forget that we’re knocking drinks back … on money that a woman made selling her body.” Then Itō glared angrily at Takahashi and Deguchi. “That’s the kind of black-hearted bastards we are! We’re men who drink our liquor by stomping on women’s hearts.”

  “Mr. Itō, what’re you saying? That we’re no better than villains?”

  “And are you suggesting I’m some kind of saint?!” Inflamed by drink, Itō continued, “I’ve stolen the money that Seikichi’s woman earned for him. That’s the kind of wretch I am.”

  “You’re drunk. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Lemme alone! I loathe the kind of man I am. But it’s too late to change. I was born this way. You can’t change a man’s nature….”