“I wanted her. I wanted her so very badly!” Itō crouched down in the clump of grass and began to weep.
“Forgive me! Kiku, please forgive me! It was because I witnessed your life, that’s how I came to understand the meaning of the kind of love that Father Houissan often talks about. I understood how precious a woman is to a man. After he listened to my confession, Father Houissan said that you were like a saint…. Kiku, no matter how hard I try, I will never forget … I will never forget the tears you shed … the tears you shed when I took your body….”
His shoulders trembling, Itō continued speaking, but not to Seikichi—to Kiku, who was no longer in this world. Looking at Itō’s pathetic figure, Seikichi lost all desire to hurl insults at him.
“It’s all right, Itō. Kiku suffered at your hands, but she was able to lead you toward a different life. That by itself proves that her life was not without meaning … it was not without meaning.”
Seikichi, too, sniffled, and spoke the words as though to himself. A single red dragonfly lighted on his shoulder, and another landed on Itō’s shoulder as he squatted on the ground. The two men remained there for a long while, like statues, not saying a word, not moving a muscle.
1. Construction on the cathedral began in 1895, but it was not completed until 1914. On August 9, 1945, the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki destroyed the structure, its epicenter being only 546 yards away. The clergymen who were inside the cathedral and the many Christians who had come to make confession in preparation for the Feast of the Assumption on the fifteenth were killed. A new cathedral was built in 1959. Blackened statuary from the original cathedral is displayed on the grounds, and portions of the original walls can be seen in the Nagasaki Peace Park.
BETWEEN THE LINES
Author’s Afterword
I WROTE Kiku’s Prayer to try to repay some of my debt to Nagasaki, the city that is my heart’s homeland.
I wasn’t born in Nagasaki or raised there. But since the first time I visited the city more than a dozen years ago, my attachment to the place has only deepened and never faded.
The more I learn and study about the history of Nagasaki, the more I am filled with admiration for the depth and significance of the city’s many layers. And I have come to sense that there are many more questions that must be asked in my life. I think it’s fair to say that I have been writing novels, beginning with Silence, in an attempt to answer each one of those questions. For these several years, Nagasaki has played a central role in the maturation of my heart. It has become like a womb that has provided me with delectable nourishment.
One of the great joys of life for me as a novelist has been my encounter with a city like Nagasaki. And I have been able to savor that joy over these many years. The writing of Kiku’s Prayer was my attempt to repay some of my debt to Nagasaki.
This first of two novels1 is based on the persecution of the Kirishitans at the end of the Tokugawa and the beginning of the Meiji periods, known in history as the “Fourth Persecution of Urakami.” As a result, there are models for many of the characters that appear in the story. There are also some characters, such as Fathers Petitjean and Laucaigne, Takagi Sen’emon and Moriyama Kanzaburō, who appear under their real names.
There is also a model for Itō Seizaemon, but in my initial plan for the novel, he was not going to play such a significant role.
But as I wrote, I began to sympathize with this despicable man—and I felt not just sympathy but even a love for him. Up to the very end of the novel I couldn’t bear to forsake him.
I visited Nagasaki a couple of times while I was serializing this novel.2 As I went up and down the streets where Kiku and Mitsu walked, climbed the slopes that Itō rambled up, and stood atop the hills overlooking Urakami, I felt as though the Kirishitans of Urakami Village were shouting to me “Write! Please write about us!” Kiku’s hometown of Magome no longer exhibits any traces of its earlier self, and a new, modern building has been erected on the site of the magistrate’s office where Itō worked. The only place that retains its former appearance is the Ōura Catholic Church—what was then called the Ōura Nambanji—but I wonder how much the tourists who flock there realize the degree of influence that the Fourth Persecution of Urakami had on Japan’s modernization.
The statue of the Blessed Mother Mary is still in the same spot in this church—the spot where Petitjean discovered the Japanese Kirishitans, and the spot where Kiku died …
1. The second novel, The Life of Sachiko, is also set in Nagasaki, during the years leading up to the atomic bombing of the city. It was published in Japan in 1983 but has not yet been translated into English.
2. The novel appeared as a newspaper serial in the Asahi shimbun from November 1, 1980, to July 1, 1981.
Kiku's Prayer: A Novel Page 40