Toru: Wayfarer Returns (Sakura Steam Series Book 1)

by Stephanie R. Sorensen

  “How are they so powerful so fast?” demanded the daimyō.

  “My time in America was so short, only two years. I’m sure I missed many things. But one thing is clear. They love technology and machines and steam engines. Any task, like sewing, or making a weapon, or building something, the Americans love to build a machine to do the thing. It seems they are all tinkerers and engineers, with the rich men hiring the best engineers to build and invent things.”

  “What do you mean by this ‘engineer’?”

  “A man who makes things, invents new machines. Everyone is always dreaming up new ways to do things. For example, instead of horses on a road, they build huge steam engines to pull carts along a special track made of iron. They call them ‘trains’ and they ship cargo on these trains, and passengers too. Instead of women sewing by hand, they make a machine and the women turn the machine to sew faster.”

  Tōru began to explain about his beloved sewing machine, how cunning and useful it is.

  The daimyō waved him off. “No, no, I don’t care about toys for women. Tell me about the steam engines. You’ve seen these trains?”

  “Seen them? I rode on them.”

  Tōru wished he could see Masuyo’s face, hidden inside the norimono. He could sense her listening to the conversation. He wondered what she thought of him, and of sewing machines and trains. And how he had ridden on a train. He pictured her riding on a train by his side.

  “The engineers showed me how they work. They even let me operate the controls. They are amazing machines, these steam engines. So powerful. And dirty. The engineers all have black faces from the smoke pouring out of the engines. The Americans are mad for their railroads and steam engines. Every little town fights to be along the railroads they are building, connecting every major city. They blow giant mountains to pieces and tunnel through them so their trains can get through without going up so high. And canals. They dig endless long straight canals to connect their cities. They fill them with water and make rivers for their barges. They—they like straight lines. The land is invisible to them, just something to build a road or a railroad on, a way to get from here to there as quickly as possible. They do not see the beauty of their tall mountains, only obstacles to be blown up or tunneled through so they can build their roads.”

  Tōru gestured around them.

  They were traveling through particularly scenic countryside, along the top of a narrow ridge, with tidy fields of rice and vegetables terraced down the hillside below in the valley on one side, and the crashing waves of the ocean on the other side. Twisted pines and rustling trees shaded them as they rode. Everywhere was curved and sloping, hidden and intricate.

  “I do not know if the Americans can see this land as it is. Some of them would flatten this mountain and fill up the valley so they can build giant square fields and run their railroads.”

  Lord Aya grunted and shook his head. “I cannot imagine this. How ugly it must be. Straight lines everywhere? Barbaric.”

  “They are not barbarians, although they are forceful and aggressive. They have complex laws. The people decide who their daimyōs are. Their Shogun, their President, they also choose. They have powerful families, and those families are often in the government, but the people must choose them to lead. Leaders are not decided by ancient right of family as here.”

  The daimyō broke in. “If it is not by family, how do they know who is to rule, and who is noble and who is samurai and who must till the land and trade?”

  “They don’t think about it that way. Their leading families are as young as the country or younger. Anyone can do anything they want, farm or start a business or run for office.”

  Tōru stopped again, stumped by the challenge of explaining in Japanese alien concepts like “democracy” or “voter.” He tried again.

  “Other than their love for technology and machines, they are shaped by their short history. Their violent history. They are rebels who left the ancient countries. They didn’t want to bow down to ancient families. And those younger brothers born into the ancient families of the old countries, they did not want to bow down to an older brother. They escaped. They are the poor, and the younger brothers of the rich and powerful. Rich or poor, they have big dreams, no fear and nothing to lose. They want to make a new world and do things their way. So they invent everything new and fight everything old. And now they want to come here.”

  Lord Aya considered this.

  “Our families, and our ways, are very old.”

  “Yes.”

  Dusk had fallen as they rode and spoke. They found themselves at Lord Tomatsu’s gate. His servants ushered them in for the night.

  Lady Tōmatsu was known for the feasts offered at the castle on festival days. Even tonight’s impromptu meal for the weary unexpected travelers would put many a fine restaurant to shame. Her cooks prepared plate after plate of delicate morsels, from seaweed salads to pickled vegetables, sushi and tempura, savory soups and noodles, pork buns and dumplings. The two lords enjoyed the lavish meal with their retainers, as Masuyo hovered with Lady Tōmatsu supervising the kitchen activities.

  “Your father brings you on such a journey?”

  Masuyo stayed silent, bowing a nod of assent. She watched as one of Lady Tomatsu’s servers readied a tray with the next round of saké for the men, who were growing loud and boisterous in the next room. She knew better than to try to explain to such a grand lady what she was doing, muddied and exhilarated from the trip. No valid reason existed, even to avoid death, for a woman of her rank to risk the dangers and dirt of a journey like this.

  Lady Tōmatsu was more conservative on such matters than most, as she boasted blood from one of the most ancient and aristocratic of families, a lineage flowing from a lesser branch of a kuge family. She was cousin to the Tokugawa clan itself. Her pride was thrice brittle, for she had been married off to a wealthy and vigorous but much lower ranked daimyō in Lord Tōmatsu, far from the capital, a nod to the wealth of his clan and the poverty of her own, in spite of its glorious heritage. Masuyo knew her own beloved father was of even more humble rank, though a daimyō in name and in truth, than mighty Lord Tōmatsu and his grand wife. Rarely cowed by anyone, Masuyo for once was tongue-tied and quick to behave more like a modest young woman than her usual boyish self.

  Lady Tomatsu sniffed ever so slightly. She bowed to Masuyo with exaggerated courtesy.

  “Perhaps our honored guest would like to bathe after dinner? The men will be late; you may use the private bath my ladies and I enjoy. Please allow me to lend you something fresh to wear. Your travel clothes are…”

  Masuyo cringed. She knew she smelled ever so slightly of the droppings she had slipped on as they searched for Lord Tomatsu’s gate in the dark. The hem of her kimono was muddied and ruined. It was one thing to taunt and tease her poor father into letting her run wild. Standing tall in the face of the great lady’s chilly judgment was another matter altogether. She bowed her thanks, not daring to speak in her shame at her wild appearance.

  Lady Tōmatsu smiled in victory, sending a wave of servants scurrying to prepare a bath and a room for Masuyo. Humiliation of her guest complete, she turned to matters of greater interest.

  “The prisoner…your father seems to take a great deal of interest in him. Just a young fisherman…what can he matter? Where is your father taking him?”

  The directness of her question took Masuyo by surprise.

  Masuyo considered her reply carefully. Instinctively she knew the more people knew about Tōru, the more dangerous for him, and the more certain her father would have to carry out his threat to send him to Edo for execution by the Shogun’s government.

  “I do not know, my lady. My father does not confide in me.”

  Lady Tōmatsu eyed her steadily.

  “Of course, my dear. The men, they do not wish to trouble us with tedious concerns. Still, I am surprised to see Lord Aya personally escorting a fisherman on such a journey.”

  “Yes, indeed.�
� With this non-committal reply, Masuyo resolved to flee before Lady Tōmatsu could probe further.

  “Forgive me, my lady, but the day has been long…”

  “Yes, yes, let us get you off to rest.” Lady Tōmatsu motioned for her servants to escort Masuyo to her bath.

  Masuyo looked longingly at a plate of pork buns she had hoped to swipe to take out and give to Tōru, but she knew it was impossible. Resigned, she shuffled off to her bath.

  She need not have worried.

  Even Tōru, tied up again in Lord Tōmatsu’s stable with the horses, enjoyed more fine food than he could eat. At last he lay back on the clean straw and rested, satisfied at last, his painful feet forgotten for the moment in the happiness of a full belly. He sat up again when he heard a faint rustle in the straw.

  “Masuyo-sama! What are you doing here?”

  Masuyo, freshly bathed and dressed in one of Lady Tōmatsu’s old kimonos, slipped into the stable and motioned for Tōru to speak softly. She slipped him a steaming bowl of red bean soup with o-mochi floating in it. She had found the kitchen abandoned except for a young girl tending the fire. Covering her surprise with an imperious tone to match Lady Tōmatsu’s, she cowed the girl into giving her the red bean soup and swept out to deliver it to Tōru.

  “Why do you pretend to be a fisherman?”

  Tōru nearly choked on a mochi sticky rice ball at her question. He made a show of choking and sputtering and grabbing for a cup of tea to wash down the offending mochi. He bought time, but not enough to come up with a good answer.

  Masuyo gazed at him calmly, letting the silence weight her question.

  “I-I am a fisherman.”

  “When my father occasionally takes a boat out onto the sea with the fisherman from his village for sport and to celebrate the bounty of the sea on a clear and lovely day, it is true he fishes. But fishing does not make him a fisherman. You are no fisherman’s son, boy.”

  Tōru bit into another floating mochi, stalling. Masuyo’s gaze drilled into him, demanding truth. He held his tongue. Longing to tell her the truth, he ventured another lie.

  “My father is dead.”

  “That may be so, but he was no fisherman.” Exasperated, she waved his journal at him. “Who taught you to read and write? To write a skilled hand? And don’t tell me someone else wrote this journal. We found it in your personal things. It is full of stories about America, stories no one here could make up. Stories like those you have been telling my father all day.”

  “Your father is an intelligent man.” Tōru dropped his attempts to speak like a poor village fisherman. His next sentence was spoken like a minister of the shogun’s court, in clear and elegant Japanese with a refined accent and precise vocabulary. “He understands the challenges Japan faces against the foreigners. He knows they will come. He’s read the reports by the Dutch learning scholars, the Rangakusha. He believes me when I tell him about trains and steamships and factories because he’s seen the diagrams and drawings copied by the Rangakusha. He knows I tell the truth.”

  “About some things, ‘fisherman.’”

  “Who taught you to read? Girls don’t…”

  “Girls don’t generally get to study like a man, no. But Father has no sons, so I got all the dreams he had for sons. What dream did your ‘fisherman’ father have for you?”

  Tōru answered truthfully this time.

  “He wanted me to see America. And return to tell him how to defend Japan against her might.”

  “So you spy after all, boy?” asked Lord Aya. Masuyo and Tōru had not heard her father and Lord Tōmatsu enter the stable. Masuyo flushed at being caught in the stable with the boy, but her father ignored her and focused on Tōru. She could see he was in no mood to jest.

  “Sir, you know about America.” Tōru spoke forcefully, the fisherman’s accent gone. He used respectful language, but in the manner of one lord to another, without the cringing manner of a lesser man. If he was to die, he might as well speak out first. “You know her ambassadors will come again, like Biddle came to Edo six years ago, and Glynn to Nagasaki, three years ago.”

  “How do you know about Biddle and Glynn? We are forbidden to discuss them except in council! You are a spy!”

  “I spied on no council, sir. I’ve never even been to Edo. I learned of their missions from the Americans. Their visits are facts, not secrets, published in every great newspaper. In America, even the common people have heard of China, and the educated and the military officers know of Japan.”

  Lord Aya interrupted. “I don’t care what their common people think. What do their daimyōs plan for Japan?”

  “They assume their mighty warships will convince us to open our borders to trade, like the British forced the Chinese to open. Refusing to discuss the Americans will not make them vanish like the dew and go away! You know the Americans will return. With guns. And steamships. The government speaks of sending an expedition next year.”

  Lord Aya and Lord Tōmatsu exchanged a look.

  Lord Tōmatsu spoke first. He nodded to one of his men to release Tōru.

  “You’d best come in. We have much to discuss.”

  Tōru rubbed his wrists and ankles where the ropes had scraped his skin raw. He slipped his blistered and bandaged feet into a pair of worn zori sandals and followed the lords into the house. Masuyo slipped in behind them, not daring to enter the main hall with the men. Instead she knelt silently on the other side of the thin sliding doors, where she could hear every word through the narrow space between them. She hoped Lady Tōmatsu would not find her there.

  “The boy is right.”

  Lord Aya considered Lord Tōmatsu’s statement. He waited for him to continue. Any possible comment could be dangerous; he needed to know where Lord Tōmatsu meant to take the conversation. He knew Lord Tōmatsu somewhat and as neighboring domains long at peace, their houses were traditionally friendly, but Lord Tōmatsu’s ultimate loyalties were a mystery.

  “He only confirms what the southern lords have been saying for a decade. The Americans are coming, and soon.”

  Tōru understood what the Lord Tōmatsu left unsaid. The southern lords had long given the Shogun trouble, and all of the Shoguns before him, ever since Tokugawa Iemitsu ordered the realm closed two hundred and fifty years ago under the sakoku isolation policy. Never quite rebelling openly, they honored a proud tradition of thwarting the Shogun’s orders and obeying them slowly if at all. They bowed to the Shogun’s officers in public, grudgingly paid required tributes and hostages and did as they pleased once the bakufu officers were gone.

  Close by the ancient kingdoms of Korea across the sea, and in the trading paths of the Chinese, British, Dutch and American ships as they patrolled the seas that lay between Japan and the mainland, the southern lords had never quite closed completely to the rest of the world. The Tsushima clan traded with Korea across the straits from Nagasaki.

  The Shimazu clan of the Satsuma domain traded with the Ryukyu kingdom, which traded promiscuously with the Chinese and every foreign nation, sending Japanese goods out into the world in a thin but steady trickle. Dutch traders lived penned up on the tiny island of Deshima in the bay off Nagasaki, the only Europeans allowed to trade with Japan at all. A handful of Chinese traders also lurked in the markets of Nagasaki. Much-needed goods were quietly imported, along with news, and a few small fortunes made through hidden exports of Japanese goods and resources.

  The bakufu government of the Shogun tolerated these exceptions to the isolation policy, but barely. Southern lords made wealthy by trade and armed with foreign weapons were a threat to the Shogun’s rule. The bakufu’s spies did not care about silks, lacquerware and even silver flowing across the seas, but they were acutely interested in inbound warships and weapons, ideas and movements that might challenge their rule and shatter a peace that had endured for two hundred and fifty years.

  Lord Tōmatsu regarded Lord Aya steadily before making his position clear. They both knew the risks.

  “W
e will need to meet them prepared. Our rusty swords will not defeat their guns. We need guns. Big guns. We need ships, these steamships that can speed in any wind.”

  Lord Aya nodded in agreement, matching Lord Tōmatsu’s disclosure with his own statement. “I fear we are too late.”

  “True enough,” agreed Lord Tōmatsu. “We should have been building defenses for a decade.”

  Tōru looked from one lord to the other, hesitant to interrupt but yearning to speak. He was glad they were listening at last. He ventured a question, knowing the answer but longing to join the conversation. “The Shogun still forbids arming the coastal lords?”

  Lord Tōmatsu barked a short, harsh laugh. “The Shogun forbids our cats to grow claws. He knows only how to defend his own council room, filled with councilors who say yes to him and ignore reality. He can no more defend Japan from the foreigners than he can speak Chinese or build one of your trains.”

  Lord Aya looked troubled. Defying the Shogun rarely ended well. “Tōru, you think the Americans will attack?”

  “The Americans? No, not right away, but the British, perhaps, yes, like they did in China with their gunships in her ports. The Americans—they prefer trade to war. They want us to open our ports to their goods and their people. They do not understand our isolation. Their officers speak of Japan as though it is already open, so firmly do they believe we must open to them.”

  “So they are traders, not warriors?” Lord Aya asked.

  “Oh no, sir, they are warriors, and quick to fight.”

  Tōru had witnessed more than one saloon fight and and many a duel in his two years in America. America’s young men were as quick to draw their guns as any young samurai to draw his sword over a perceived slight to honor. He had also learned the American saying, to “never bring a knife to a gun fight.” He knew which weapon Japan was holding.