Death on an Autumn River (A Sugawara Akitada Novel)

by I. J. Parker

  Table of Contents

  CHARACTERS

  The River

  The Old Couple

  Naniwa

  A Sparrow Among Cranes

  The Ugly Man

  The Dead End

  The Amulet

  The Hostel of the Flying Cranes

  The Black Dragon

  The Ugly Man Returns

  Ducks

  A Flea between a Dog's Teeth

  The Bawdy Postmaster

  Karma

  Return to Naniwa

  Family Ties

  The Evils of Gambling

  Melons and Courtesans

  The Pirate Ship

  The Lady of the River Mansion

  The Shared Cup

  The Island

  The Goblin's Tale

  The Bodhisattva

  Treading on the Tigers's Tail

  A Sword in his Belly

  Even Monkeys Fall From Trees

  Reckoning

  Akogi

  Homecoming

  Historical Note

  Contact Information

  DEATH

  ON AN AUTUMN RIVER

  An Akitada Novel

  by

  I. J. Parker

  Copyright 2011 by I. J. Parker

  Praise for I. J. Parker and the Akitada series

  “Elegant and entertaining . . . Parker has created a wonderful protagonist in Akitada. . . . She puts us at ease in a Japan of one thousand years ago.” The Boston Globe

  “You couldn’t ask for a more gracious introduction to the exotic world of Imperial Japan than the stately historical novels of I. J. Parker.” The New York Times

  “Akitada is as rich a character as Robert Van Gulik’s intriguing detective, Judge Dee.” The Dallas Morning News

  “Readers will be enchanted by Akitada.” Publishers Weekly Starred Review

  “Terrifically imaginative” The Wall Street Journal

  “A brisk and well-plotted mystery with a cast of regulars who become more fully developed with every episode.” Kirkus

  “More than just a mystery novel, (THE CONVICT’S SWORD) is a superb piece of literature set against the backdrop of 11th-cntury Kyoto.” The Japan Times

  “Parker’s research is extensive and she makes great use of the complex manners and relationships of feudal Japan.” Globe and Mail

  “The fast-moving, surprising plot and colorful writing will enthrall even those unfamiliar with the exotic setting.” Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

  “. . .the author possesses both intimate knowledge of the time period and a fertile imagination as well. Combine that with an intriguing mystery and a fast-moving plot, and you’ve got a historical crime novel that anyone can love.” Chicago Sun-Times

  “Parker’s series deserves a wide readership.” Historical Novel Society

  Also by I. J. Parker

  The Akitada series in chronological order

  The Dragon Scroll

  Rashomon Gate

  Black Arrow

  Island of Exiles

  The Hell Screen

  The Convict’s Sword

  The Masuda Affair

  The Fires of the Gods

  Death on an Autumn River

  The collection of stories

  Akitada and the Way of Justice

  The HOLLOW REED trilogy

  Dream of a Spring Night

  Unsheathed Swords

  Dust before the Wind

  The Author

  I.J. Parker was born and educated in Europe and turned to mystery writing after an academic career in the U.S. She has published her Akitada stories in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, winning the Shamus award in 2000. Several stories have also appeared in collections, such as Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense and the recent Shaken. The award-winning “Akitada’s First Case” is available as a podcast. Many of the stories have been collected in Akitada and the Way of Justice.

  The Akitada series of crime novels features the same protagonist, an eleventh century Japanese nobleman/detective. It now consists of nine titles.Death on an Autumn River is the latest. Most of the books are available in audio format and have been translated into twelve languages.

  Acknowledgments

  I’m grateful to my readers, Jacqueline Falkenhan and John Rosenman, and to my agent, Jean Naggar. Without them the series would not exist.

  Pronunciation of Japanese Words

  Unlike English, Japanese is pronounced phonetically. Therefore vowel sounds are approximately as follows:

  “a” as in “father”

  “e” as in “let”

  “i” as in “kin”

  “o” as in “more”

  “u” as in “would.”

  Double consonants (“ai” or “ei”) are pronounced separately, and M or k are doubled or lengthened.

  As for the consonants:

  “g” as in “game”

  “j” as in “join”

  “ch” as in “chat”.

  Death on an Autumn River

  In the Yodo’s waters

  The young Ayu fish

  Cries out.

  Pierced by the Cormorant’s beak,

  It writhes.

  How pitiful!

  (From the Ryojin hisho, a collection of the songs of courtesans by Emperor Go-Shirakawa)

  CHARACTERS

  Sugawara Akitada - midlevel official in the Ministry of Justice

  Sadenari - his clerk

  Tamako - his wife

  Yasuko - his little daughter

  Seimei - his elderly secretary

  Tora and Genba - faithful retainers

  Kobe - chief of the capital police

  Characters in Eguchi:

  Fujiwara Takeko - the lady of the River Mansion

  Fukuda and Harima - two poor, elderly people

  Mrs. Wada - owner of the Hananoya brothel

  Warden Wada - her husband

  Nakagimi - the reigning queen of courtesans

  Akogi - a young trainee in the Hananoya

  Characters in Naniwa and Kawajiri:

  Oga Sadazane - governor of Settsu

  Oga Yoshiyo - his son

  Munata - the local prefect; a wealthy landowner

  Nakahara - chief of the trade office

  Nariyuki and Tameaki - his clerks

  Otomo - a retired professor of Chinese

  Watamaro - a local ship owner and merchant

  Saburo - a severely disfigured former spy

  Kunimitsu - owner of a sailors’ hostel

  Chapter One

  The River

  Akitada watched the passing scenery through half-closed eyes. The river was as deep green as the wooded shoreline and flowed heavily toward the sea. Fish swam dimly in the glaucous depths of the water, shadows of silver in the shifting shades of green. On shore, the green curtain of the forest was broken here and there by a shimmer of gold or a touch of red. It was autumn, the “leaf-turning month.”

  Something he had read somewhere came to his mind: “Ceaselessly flows the river to the sea, never pausing, always changing, losing itself in eddies and rice paddies, gaining new life from streams and tributaries. Even so is man.”

  He had reached the middle of his life after almost losing himself on several occasions. His life’s waters moved more calmly now, both in his official life and at home.

  The boat rode low in the water, poled along by three half-naked men and guided by their master at the rudder. Under its reed covered midsection, the passengers drowsed in the late afternoon warmth. They huddled close together at a respectful distance. The motion of the boat had made them sleepy
and their chatter desultory. Only the youngsters in front still chattered, bursting into laughter or song from time to time.

  Akitada’s clerk, Sadenari, was with them. The boy was nineteen and made him nervous with his awkward efforts to impress his superior. The young man was the son of a low-ranking official and had proved neither very capable nor useful. Being the newest member of the ministry, he was assigned to Akitada because he could be spared most easily.

  As senior secretary in the Ministry of Justice, Akitada traveled on official business to the city of Naniwa on the Inland Sea. More elegant travel arrangements could have been made — he was entitled to them by rank and position — but he wanted to arrive with as little fanfare as possible. His true assignment, the delicate matter of finding out the truth about recent pirate attacks, must remain a secret. Ostensibly, he carried legal documents and instructions to the Naniwa office that handled matters of shipping goods from foreign countries and the western provinces to the capital.

  Like most of the passengers, he was in a pleasant and soporific mood. Now and then a fish jumped in the distance, egrets made brilliant splashes of white against the dark green shoreline, and for a while seagulls had been circling overhead. Their boat would soon reach the coast. Soon enough he would have to deal with matters he knew little about. Anyone on this boat probably knew more about shipping and piracy than he did. The problem was that he could not ask questions and must learn from observation.

  Pushing up a sleeve, he dipped his hand into the river. The water was cool on his wrist, and he instantly felt refreshed. They were turning into a bend of the river and the shore was coming closer. The curved roof of an elegant pavilion appeared among the trees.

  There was a good deal of river traffic, coming and going between Naniwa and the inland towns and temples, but Akitada had not seen any villages or farms for a while. The pavilion had slender red-lacquered columns and a blue-tiled roof, and its veranda was suspended above the water. It was beautiful, almost other-worldly in its perfection. He watched it slowly gliding past, a dwelling fit for the heavenly beings in the western paradise.

  Perhaps someday, he would build himself a small house on a river: a simple building of plain wood with a roof of pine bark so that squirrels and monkeys could play on it without sliding off. He would take his family there during the hottest weeks of summer. His little daughter Yasuko would like watching the animals. He would teach her how to fish, and they would sit side-by-side in their watery pavilion, letting their lines drift with the current until one of the bamboo rods would suddenly bend sharply, and Yasuko would cry, “I’ve caught one, father! I’ve caught one!”

  And much later, when he was an old man and Yasuko had long since gone to be with her own family, he and his wife Tamako would live there and be at peace.

  A shout from the front of the boat shattered the dream. The boatmen jumped about trying to stop the boat and turn it against the current. Some of the passengers asked questions but got no answers. Most got to their feet and craned their necks to see what was happening.

  Akitada was as curious but restrained himself. Not so the young men in front. All five peered into the water over the shoulders of the boatmen. When the passengers went to join them, the boat began to list dangerously. The boat’s master cursed them back to their places. Order restored, he and his men leaned over the side and dragged something sodden and heavy into the boat. A gasp went around, and excited babble broke out.

  A drowned woman.

  One of the passengers near him, a fat shopkeeper returning from a pilgrimage to Iwashimizu’s Hachiman shrine, tsked and shook his head. “Happens all the time here,” he announced. “The girls from the brothels are always killing themselves in the river.”

  A suicide?

  “What brothels?” Akitada asked. “How did she get here?”

  The boat’s master explained, “We’re almost in Eguchi.”

  Eguchi, along with Kamusaki and Kaya, adjoined the ancient capital Naniwa and the port city Kawajiri. The three smaller towns specialized in providing sailors and merchants with prostitutes.

  Akitada protested, “But that’s downriver.”

  “The currents and the river traffic can move bodies about quite a lot, sir,” said the boat’s master.

  Perhaps. But still.

  Akitada rose and went forward. He saw now that the river up ahead widened and another joined it. At their confluence, on the very tip of what appeared like a large island in a wide stream, lay a town.

  He looked down at the body in the bottom of the boat. Curled on her side, she looked slight. Long black hair covered her face and much of her back. Her body was almost obscenely exposed under the wet silk of an undergown.

  It was a beautiful body, not yet bloated from being in the river but shapely and flawless. Perhaps the river had washed away the trappings of her trade.

  Someone was breathing heavily beside him. Sadenari was goggling at the dead woman, his face flushed and his mouth agape. When he caught Akitada’s eyes, he swallowed hard.

  Akitada snapped, “Sit down!” and then bent to examine the body more closely. The silk was very good quality, and the long hair, now tangled and full of small bits of vegetation and algae, had been cared for. He glanced at her small hands and feet and found them soft and the nails carefully trimmed.

  “Let’s turn her over to see if she has any wounds,” he said to the boat’s master.

  They handled her with great gentleness for such rough men.

  The body showed no wounds, but it astonished Akitada nevertheless. When he saw more of her face, she seemed far younger than he had assumed from her well-developed figure. Her face was slightly puffy on one side, perhaps from being in the water, and the eyes stared sightlessly, but even so she still had an extraordinary and childlike beauty. Some traces of make-up remained on the lips and around her eyes, but she had not needed it to improve her looks.

  Given the innocence that her youth suggested, the other revelation shocked him more. The thin silk clinging to her pale skin left nothing to the imagination, and her body was perfectly hairless except for her head. She had shaved her pubic hair, a practice common among some prostitutes.

  Akitada rose. “Cover her with something,” he said to the boat’s master, feeling some shame on behalf of the dead girl, though the boatmen were old enough to be fathers. “What is your normal procedure when you find drowning victims?”

  “We take them to the warden in Eguchi.”

  Akitada nodded and returned to his seat. He was joined there by Sadenari, who was eager to make his apologies.

  “It’s just,” he explained, blushing (the very young could still blush at such things), “that I’d never seen a dead woman. I know you must think it very unseemly of me, but we’ve been given eyes to look at the world, haven’t we?”

  He was an earnest youth, and Akitada relented. “True, but even the dead have some right to privacy.”

  Sadenari flushed more deeply. “Surely they don’t care. And if the girl was a prostitute, many men must have seen her like that when she was alive.” Akitada looked at him, and Sadenari positively flamed. He gulped. “At least . . . I think that must be what happens.”

  “Have you never visited a pleasure house?” Akitada asked, surprised.

  Sadenari shook his head. “The others were talking about Eguchi. They’ve been there many times and say those places are full of beautiful women. A man may have several in one night.” He blurted, “Oh, how I wish I might do so just once!”

  Akitada snorted. “Nonsense. Your father wouldn’t like it. Wait till you have a wife.” Sadenari came from a very proper family. That probably accounted for the fact that at nineteen he was still a virgin.

  “Yes, sir,” Sadenari murmured, looking dejected.

  Akitada felt a twinge of pity. The very young had their own worries, but having along a youth in the throes of lust could become a nuisance, perhaps even a danger, when one is tracking corrupt officials. The fact that their work wo
uld be so near the brothel towns was likely to keep Sadenari in a state of painful mental arousal and might lead him into mischief. Akitada toyed with the idea of letting him loose in Eguchi, but the youth probably did not have the money to purchase a woman. His father kept him very short. And advancing him the funds for a night of debauchery went against Akitada’s grain.

  He turned away to watch the approach to the Eguchi wharf, where other boats like theirs were moored. Already several small pleasure boats were coming toward them, their occupants holding large, brightly colored parasols. Prostitutes eager to snatch the first customers. He sighed and glanced at Sadenari. The boy watched the women hungrily. When the women in the first boat struck up a song, his face broke into a smile of delight.

  “Oh,” he breathed. “I had no idea they could be such artists.”

  Akitada snorted. Sadenari had a nice face, and he was young and a gentleman. Even the most mercenary female in the water trade might relent in such a case. Perhaps it was best to leave him to his own resources.

  A lively exchange between passengers and boats sprang up as they maneuvered to the landing stage. One of the young men climbed into the boat with the rose-colored parasol and embraced its occupant.