SI2 Bundori (1996)

by Laura Joh Rowland

  Sano realized that word of his conflict with Yanagisawa had spread. The guards and servants present at his meeting with the shogun must have fed choice excerpts into the castle’s rumor mill. Yanagisawa himself, seeking for whatever reason to blacken his reputation, had no doubt dropped disparaging remarks about him in all the right places. Sano knew his downfall had begun.

  His face must have reflected his dismay, because Noguchi wailed, “Oh, no, the rumors are true, then! Sano-san, what have you done?”

  “Nothing to offend Chamberlain Yanagisawa, at least that I can see.” In his agitation, Sano began pacing the room. He succumbed to his impulse to confide in the only friend he had at Edo Castle. “But the chamberlain seems determined that I not catch the Bundori Killer.”

  Noguchi’s head swiveled back and forth, following Sano’s movements. “Then you must not,” he said, as though this were the most reasonable course of action in the world.

  Sano stopped in his tracks and stared in disbelief. When he began to protest, Noguchi cried, “No, wait! Allow me to explain!”

  He harried over and clutched Sano’s arm. “You’ve not been in the shogun’s service long enough to understand the way of things.” Although they were alone, he glanced around furtively and lowered his voice to a whisper. “His Excellency’s condition is on the decline. He grows weaker and more self-indulgent with each passing year. Someday soon he will abandon the practice of government and devote himself entirely to the theater, Confucianism, religion, and boys, leaving Yanagisawa to rule the land.”

  Sano pulled free of Noguchi’s grasp and went to stand by the window. Arms folded, he stared at the opaque paper panes. “Tokugawa Tsunayoshi is still our lord, no matter what his character,” he said, although having his own suspicions about the shogun confirmed dealt him a severe blow. For what future had he if abandoned to Yanagisawa’s mercy? “The shogun wants the killer caught. I can’t disobey his orders. And besides, this might be my only chance to distinguish myself and to make a name for my family.”

  Back and forth he paced, on a path that led nowhere, as did any course that involved opposing Chamberlain Yanagisawa.

  Noguchi followed him like a small, persistent shadow. “My friend, what you don’t understand is that if you defy Yanagisawa, you will not even keep your position, let alone distinguish yourself in it.” He paused for breath, then said, “Saigo Kazuo, Miyagi Kojirō, and Fusei Matsugae. You have heard of these men?”

  “Yes. They were all His Excellency’s advisers when he became shogun ten years ago.”

  “They were. Each had considerable influence with His Excellency, but lost it when Yanagisawa rose to power. Saigo ended his days as a highway inspector in the far north.”

  Noguchi stopped trying to keep up with Sano, but his loud whisper followed, irritating as a mosquito’s buzz. “Miyagi supposedly died of a fever. But many say Yanagisawa ordered his murder.

  “And Fusei. Officially he committed seppuku because he was caught embezzling funds from the treasury. What really happened is that after much harassment by Yanagisawa, he went mad and drew his sword on Yanagisawa in the council chamber. He claimed that his dead mother’s spirit told him to do it.”

  Noguchi didn’t need to add that compulsory suicide was the penalty for drawing a weapon inside Edo Castle. “The chamberlain ruthlessly eliminated all these men whom he perceived as obstacles in his path to supremacy, without the shogun’s lifting a hand to save them.”

  Sano’s steps faltered. He’d heard rumors of Yanagisawa’s machinations, but none as bad as these. “I accept the possibility that what happened to those men could happen to me, too,” he said, trying to sound braver than he felt. “And it’s my duty to catch the Bundori Killer.”

  Heaving a mournful sigh, Noguchi knelt, easing his body to the floor. “Sano-san. Please listen to reason. Do not ruin yourself over this murder investigation. When you see the shogun, convey to him that he should turn the job over to the police. You are intelligent; you can find a way to do this without a loss of face on your part or his. And Chamberlain Yanagisawa will help you-perhaps even reward you for yielding to him. Then leave the job to the police. They have the men. The expertise. Yanagisawa’s sanction.”

  He gestured for Sano to sit opposite him. “Come. Save yourself before it is too late.”

  Sano remained standing.

  Then Noguchi said timidly, “Have you considered the full consequences of your rash behavior, Sano-san? While you toil alone at the murder investigation, the Bundori Killer remains free to kill again. How many lives might be saved if you conceded?”

  As this last remark hit home, Sano hid his discomposure by turning his back to Noguchi. He might accept the danger to himself, but could he sacrifice innocent people to his goals and principles? When he’d begun this assignment, he’d thought only of the good he could do. But now he found himself in the exact situation that he’d hoped his new status would allow him to avoid: Because of him, others might die. The nightmare of his first murder investigation was beginning again. Slowly he turned to face Noguchi.

  “Oh, you see now.” Noguchi’s smile anticipated his capitulation.

  “No,” Sano had started to say yes, but the negative slipped out, spoken by that inquiring, truth-seeking part of his nature that he’d never been able to control. “I have to find out who the Bundori Killer is and why he kills, then bring him to justice.”

  With a sense of incredulity, he felt the familiar pull between practical wisdom and personal desire within him. For what conflict could he have expected to encounter while obeying his lord’s orders? And how could he have foreseen that anyone would want to prevent his catching a multiple murderer who was terrorizing the city?

  Even as he saw the futility of perseverance, he made one last appeal to Noguchi. “Will you help me?”

  Noguchi looked away, and Sano understood that the meek, kindly archivist wanted to help a comrade, but feared punishment from Yanagisawa. Sano said nothing, hoping Noguchi’s love of scholarly research would sway him.

  Patience won out. Sighing, Noguchi rose clumsily. “Oh, well. Come along. But please, for my sake, do not tell anyone that I came to your assistance.”

  Noguchi picked up a lamp and led Sano out the back door, along a sheltered walkway through a garden scented with night-blooming jasmine, to a huge, windowless storehouse. Its thick, whitewashed earthen walls and heavy tile roof protected precious original documents from fire. Sano helped Noguchi swing back the massive, ironclad door.

  The storehouse’s dark interior exuded a musty, metallic odor. As they entered, the wavering flame of Noguchi’s lamp revealed hundreds of iron chests, labeled with painted characters, stacked against the walls. As far as Sano could tell, they weren’t in any particular order. “Shimabara Rebellion,” about a peasant uprising that had taken place fifty years ago, sat wedged between “The Ashikaga Regime,” of some two hundred years past, and “Nobuo,” the name of a poet who had died last month. Never having understood the archival filing system, Sano was glad of Noguchi’s assistance.

  “This one, I think,” Noguchi said. He tapped a chest labeled “Oda Nobunaga.”

  “And these.”

  The last two both bore the unpromising notation “To Be Sorted.” Sano helped shift the heavy chests, free the relevant ones, and carry them into the study.

  With the reverent air of a priest conducting a sacred ritual, Noguchi knelt beside the chest labeled “Oda Nobunaga” and lifted the lid. His little eyes glowed. Sano, kneeling beside him, saw scrolls stacked to the brim, some clean and intact, others stained and crumbling. He smelled old paper and mildew: the odors of the past, which never failed to stir his intellectual curiosity. Feeling privileged to touch the old documents and read the words of witnesses to historic events, he’d disliked his assignment to the archives only because it offered no chance to distinguish himself. Now Sano’s love of history reclaimed him. As he and Noguchi scanned the records of Oda Nobunaga’s life, seeking any mention of his t
wo allies, Araki Yojiemon and Endō Munetsugu, neither could resist reading irrelevant but fascinating passages.

  “Oh, my, here are the writings of the Buddhist priest Miwa,” Noguchi exclaimed. Untying a faded silk cord, he opened the scroll and intoned:

  “Lord Oda Nobunaga was a beast such as the world had never before seen. In his quest for power, he destroyed his own family to gain the territories of Matsuda and Fukada Provinces. He forced one uncle to commit suicide and had another murdered. He killed his younger brother, whom their mother plotted to install as head of the family in his place. Later he slaughtered another brother to become the ruler of Owari Province. In savage battles, he destroyed the Imagawa, Takeda, and Saitō clans and hundreds of thousands of their troops. By the time of his death at age forty-nine, he had strewn countless severed heads and rotting corpses across the countryside and conquered half the nation’s provinces.”

  “Described that way, Oda Nobunaga sounds more like evil incarnate than like a great lord,” Sano said.

  Noguchi laid the scroll aside. “You must remember that the clergy had no love for Oda Nobunaga. When the Ikko sect rebelled against him, he burned their temples and killed over forty thousand men, women, and children. But he was the quintessential warlord of his time-a master of gekokujō.”

  The low overcoming the high: the process by which a warrior rose to power by overthrowing his superiors. Few had practiced it as effectively as Oda Nobunaga.

  “But one might imagine that the clergy found much satisfaction in the manner of Oda Nobunaga’s death,” Noguchi continued. “For as he lived by treachery and violence, so did he die by it. Here is the account of what happened one hundred seven years ago.” Opening another scroll, he read:

  “While Lord Oda was enjoying a holiday at the Honno Temple in Kyōto with but a small force to guard him, he was besieged by the army of an ally turned traitor, General Akechi Mitsuhide. Lord Oda’s troops died in the attempt to defend their master. Lord Oda fought the attackers alone. An arquebus ball shattered his arm. With no hope of survival, he retired within the temple hall and committed seppuku to avoid capture. His body was destroyed in the flames of the burning temple.”

  “An unspeakable act, the murder of one’s lord,” Sano said, feeling the horror that this transgression of Bushido always inspired in him.

  “And one for which Akechi received just punishment,” Noguchi reminded him. “Lord Oda’s loyal allies, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, fared much better.”

  Sano quoted an old and apt saying: “ ‘Nobunaga quarried the stones to build the country’s foundations, Hideyoshi shaped the stones, and Ieyasu laid them in place. ’ ”

  “Or: ‘Nobunaga ground the flour, Hideyoshi baked the cake, and Ieyasu ate it. ’ Heh, heh, heh.”

  “Yes.” Sano smiled, appreciating Noguchi’s joke. No one could deny that Tokugawa Ieyasu and Toyotomi Hideyoshi had benefited from Oda’s ruthlessness-and his murder. Hideyoshi, Oda’s direct successor, had consolidated the domains he’d inherited. Ieyasu had eventually become the first shogun to rule over the unified nation whose construction his predecessors had begun. If not for Akechi Mitsuhide’s treason, neither might have achieved military supremacy.

  Noguchi read aloud the account of the aftermath of Oda Nobunaga’s death.

  “Yamazaki. General Toyotomi Hideyoshi, having received the news of Lord Oda’s death, immediately embarked on a seven-day march through wind and rain to seek vengeance upon the traitorous Akechi Mitsuhide.”

  “Oh, my,” Noguchi interrupted himself. “Here is one of the names you seek.”

  “Let me see!” Impatient with the archivist’s slow, ritualistic reading, Sano took the scroll from Noguchi.

  “Among the force accompanying Hideyoshi were his commander, Endō Munetsugu, and General Fujiwara, one of Lord Oda’s most loyal retainers. The retribution they dealt Akechi was swift. After destroying Akechi’s small army, they killed Akechi as he fled, pleading in vain for mercy, through the fields.

  “Then, on the crest of their glorious victory, General Fujiwara suddenly turned his troops upon Endō Munetsugu. Wielding his two swords, which had guards wrought in the image of death’s-heads, the great General Fujiwara cut down Endō’s soldiers, leaving carnage in his wake, and suffered grievous losses in turn. These two allies had become bitter enemies because-”

  Here, to Sano’s distress, the scroll had deteriorated. Bits of moldy paper, covered with faded, fragmented characters, flaked away in his hands. He unrolled the scroll’s intact lower portion, only to find that subsequent passages contained no mention of General Fujiwara, Endō Munetsugu, or Araki Yojiemon. He and Noguchi checked the other scrolls in the chest and found references to the three men-all mere short entries that listed them as participants in various battles.

  “I believe I remember seeing something in here… ” Noguchi opened a “To Be Sorted” chest, handling each scroll as if it were a fragile living thing. Sano opened the other. A thorough search yielded a single but intriguing find, dated a year and a half after the last.

  Kyōto. The twentieth day of the twelfth month was one of heavy snow and bitter wind. As midnight approached, General Fujiwara and thirty of his men advanced on Araki Yojiemon’s mansion. They smashed the gate’s heavy timbers with a huge. mallet. Then, as half his men scaled the estate’s back and side walls, General Fujiwara led the rest on a frontal assault, storming through the gate like a legion of avenging gods.

  Araki’s retainers awoke from their slumbers and engaged General Fujiwara’s force in a violent battle. Walls splintered, windows tore, and beams toppled. Blood flowed and cries pierced the night as fighters on both sides fell dead.

  But although the Fujiwara contingent fought bravely, alas, they were sadly outnumbered. They never penetrated Araki’s private chamber. Forced to retreat, General Fujiwara fled the house into the snowy night to his waiting horse, barely escaping with his life. General Fujiwara vowed to slay Araki, but; never did. He took ill the following month, and died.

  “General Fujiwara evidently bore a grudge against both Endō and Araki,” Sano said thoughtfully. “Could the Bundori Killer be one of his descendants, who has resumed the feud by killing Araki and Endō?”

  “But why now, after so many years?” Noguchi’s forehead wrinkles climbed his scalp.

  Sano pondered the question. “Maybe none of Fujiwara’s sons cared enough about the feud to jeopardize their own positions or risk their own lives by committing murder. Maybe the present-day Fujiwara is braver than his forebears, or has a stronger sense of filial duty. Or perhaps he’s mad.”

  “Perhaps. But if he’s not mad, then what grievance could be so important? What could Araki and Endō have done to earn the Fujiwara clan’s permanent animosity?”

  Sano ran a hand over the scroll, as if by doing so he could divine the answers. Without them, his theory lacked substance. It linked Araki Yojiemon and Endō Munetsugu to a man who had wanted them both dead. It offered an explanation for why someone might have wanted to kill Kaibara and Tōzawa. But the records. gave no motive sufficient to justify the gruesome murders-or the assassination attempt on himself-committed more than a hundred years after General Fujiwara’s death. Still, the theory was the best Sano had.

  “I must locate General Fujiwara’s descendants who now live in or near Edo,” he said. “Until proven otherwise, they’re all murder suspects. Will you help me find them?”

  Noguchi cringed, obviously wanting no further involvement with the murder investigation. Sano waited. Then, as he’d hoped, the archivist’s eyes began to shine.

  “That would be a formidable task,” Noguchi said with cautious relish. “Examining the old family lineages, then searching the census records at the Ministry of Temples and Shrines… Oh, my.” Eagerly he rubbed his hands together.

  Sano smiled in relief and affection. The thrill of the hunt had overcome Noguchi’s fear of Chamberlain Yanagisawa. “I know it’s asking a lot, but can you get the names for me by tomorrow?�
�� Sano asked, rising to go. “Lives are at stake.” His own included, he thought.

  Face alight with zeal, Noguchi rose and drew his pudgy body up to its full, insignificant height. “Tomorrow, if it is humanly possible, I will have them for you.” For once he exhibited a hint of samurai steel as he girded himself for battle in his chosen arena.

  As Noguchi saw him out the door, Sano felt, for the first time since he’d begun the investigation, the fire of certainty. He was finally making progress that he could report to the shogun, the elders, and Chamberlain Yanagisawa at the council meeting tomorrow. He only regretted that the evening’s unexpected, time-consuming events had prevented his meeting with Aoi.

  Then, before he’d reached the gate, Noguchi called his name. Sano turned.

  “Gambatte kudasai,” Noguchi said solemnly. Do your best, and good luck. “But know this: Yanagisawa will almost certainly make sure that you do not succeed. And the shogun, who does not tolerate failure, will distance himself from you. If you persist, you may find yourself a rōnin again-or worse-in no time at all.”

  When Sano didn’t answer, Noguchi continued, “Sometimes the truth is dangerous to seek, and even more dangerous to know. Unfortunately that is a lesson some men must learn over and over again. But I fear that this time you will suffer enough to fix it in your mind permanently. Good night, Sano-san.”

  Chapter 13

  At Sano’s mansion, the guards bowed and opened the gate for him. A yawning stableboy led his horse away. Inside, a lantern burned in the entryway, but the rest of the house was dark, silent. As Sano walked toward his bedchamber, carrying Tōzawa’s swords to put away for safekeeping, the creak of the floor under his feet echoed in the chill, deserted corridor. Where were the servants? Not that he required their attentions; he wasn’t hungry, and he could prepare his own bath and bed. But he always dreaded this solitary homecoming. And tonight his melancholy went deeper because of his disappointment over not seeing Aoi, which he tried to dismiss as purely professional. He didn’t want to admit he’d been looking forward to her company all day.