The Concubine's Tattoo

by Laura Joh Rowland

  Mura led the way through a gate that consisted of a gap in the rough plank fence, then down narrow, crooked lanes awash in mud. Beside these ran open gutters full of reeking sewage. The houses were tiny shacks assembled from scrap wood and paper. In the doorways, women cooked over open fires, scrubbed laundry, or nursed babies. Children ran barefoot. Everyone gaped, then dropped to their knees as Sano passed: Probably they’d never seen a bakufu official enter their community. Clouds of smoke and steam billowed over the settlement, creating a foul miasma that stank of decaying flesh. Sano tried not to breathe. He’d eaten a hasty meal before leaving Asakusa, but now, as nausea gripped his stomach, he wished he hadn’t.

  “It’s the tanneries, master,” Mura said apologetically.

  Sano hoped he could hide his distaste for the settlement when he questioned its chief. Such different worlds Lady Harume and her lover had inhabited!

  Following Mura down a dim passage, Sano looked into a courtyard. A lye pond full of carcasses bubbled. Men stirred it with sticks, while women sprinkled salt on freshly flayed hides. Cauldrons steamed on open hearths; a partially butchered horse oozed blood and viscera. When a gust of wind wafted rancid fumes toward Sano, he nearly vomited. Feeling immersed in spiritual pollution, he resisted the urge to flee. How could Lady Harume have ignored society’s taboos to love a man contaminated by this place? What had brought her and Danzaemon together “in the shadow between two existences”?

  Mura halted. “There he is, master.”

  Toward Sano came three adult male eta, walking with brisk, purposeful strides. The middle, youngest one immediately drew his attention.

  Thin as a sapling, his body carried no excess flesh to soften the hardness of bone and muscle. Strong tendons stood out like cords in his neck. Sharp-edged planes carved his face into a pattern of angles. His thin mouth was compressed in a resolute line. Thick, cropped hair grew back from a deep peak above his brow like a hawk’s crest. Head high and shoulders squared, he projected an aura of fierce nobility at odds with his patched, faded clothes and eta status. The two swords he wore proclaimed his identity.

  Danzaemon, chief of the outcasts, knelt and bowed. His two companions did the same, but while the gesture humbled them, Danzaemon’s dignity elevated it to a ritual that honored himself as well as Sano. Arms outstretched, forehead to the ground, he said, “I beg to be of service, master.” His quiet tone, while respectful, bore no obsequiousness.

  “Please rise.” Impressed by the chief’s poise, which would have done a samurai proud, Sano dismounted and addressed Danzaemon politely. “I need your help in an important matter.”

  With athletic grace, Danzaemon stood. At his command, his men also rose, keeping their heads inclined. The eta chief turned a measuring gaze on Sano, who saw with surprise that he wasn’t more than twenty-five years old. But Danzaemon’s eyes belonged to someone who’d seen a lifetime of toil, poverty, violence, and suffering. A long, puckered scar down his left cheek bespoke his fight for survival in the harsh world of the outcasts. He was handsome in a tough, savage way, and Sano could see the appeal he’d held for Lady Harume.

  Mura performed the introductions. Sano said, “I’m investigating the murder of the shogun’s concubine Lady Harume, and I—”

  At the mention of her name, instant awareness flashed in the eta chief’s eyes: He knew why Sano had come. His men sprang to attention, unhooking clubs from their sashes. They evidently thought Sano had come to kill Danzaemon for violating the shogun’s lady. Although the penalty for attacking a samurai was death, they were prepared to defend their leader.

  Raising his hands in a gesture of entreaty, Sano said, “I’m not here to hurt anyone. I just need to ask Chief Danzaemon some questions.”

  “Stand back,” Danzaemon ordered with the authority of a commanding general.

  The men retreated, though Sano could still feel their hostility toward him, a member of the dreaded samurai class. He faced Danzaemon. “Can we talk in private?”

  “Yes, master. I’ll do my best to assist you.”

  Danzaemon spoke in the same soft, respectful voice with which he’d greeted Sano. His speech was more cultured than Sano had expected, probably because of his contact with samurai officials. Now Sano found himself subjected to the eta chief’s scrutiny. A kind of mutual scenting occurred, as if between two animals from different packs. A crowd of eta gathered to watch. Sano sensed in them a reverence for their leader that matched any his own people felt toward their lords. Looking at Danzaemon across the vast barrier created by class and experience, Sano knew in a flash of intuition that under different circumstances, the two of them could have been comrades. Danzaemon’s slight nod acknowledged that he realized it, too.

  “You’re the friend of Dr. Ito,” he said. The statement sealed their understanding. “We can go to my house. It’s nicer there.” His manner conveyed a stoic acceptance of his squalid domain and Sano’s authority over him.

  “Yes. Please.” Sano gave his relieved assent.

  The house to which Danzaemon led Sano and Mura was larger and in better condition than the others. It had solid wooden walls, an intact roof, and untorn paper panes behind the window bars. Danzaemon’s lieutenants stood sentry outside, while Mura tended Sano’s horse. Inside the house, people of all ages, far too many for them all to be family members, filled the main room. A blind man and two cripples sat against the wall. Mothers cradled babies who looked too frail to live. Men awaited Danzaemon’s counsel. A young pregnant woman passed out bowls of soup. Upon Sano’s arrival, all activity and conversation ceased. The adults prostrated themselves, and the mothers pressed the infants’ small heads to the floor.

  Danzaemon ushered Sano into a smaller, vacant room. Cheaply furnished but spotlessly clean, it held a desk, a chest, and open cupboards. One cupboard held folded bedding and clothes; the two others, full of ledgers and papers, suggested that the only literate member of his caste devoted more time to work than rest. The window overlooked a yard where men were butchering an ox. Evidently Danzaemon’s clan supported itself by practicing a trade; he didn’t abuse his position by extorting money from his people. Sano felt awed by the young chief’s responsibilities. Did many samurai lords have more, or attend to them with any greater apparent dedication?

  Perhaps Lady Harume had admired this trait as well as Danzaemon’s looks and manner. Never before had Sano seen such strong proof that character transcended class.

  Danzaemon knelt on the mat. Sano took the spot opposite him. “You’re here because you’ve found out about my relationship with Lady Harume,” Danzaemon said without straining their relations by inviting a samurai to eat and drink with an eta. “Thank you for sparing my life. I’ve committed an inexcusable crime. I deserve to die, and it’s your right to kill me.” The eta chief’s mouth thinned in a bitter smile. “But if you did, you wouldn’t get the answers you want, would you?”

  In spite of the young man’s controlled tone and expression, Sano observed signs of grief: the bleakness in his eyes; lines of strain around his mouth. Danzaemon mourned Lady Harume as no one else did.

  “Love may not be a good excuse for breaking the law,” Sano said, “but it’s a reason I can understand.” He would do anything for Reiko, risk any danger, betray any other loyalty. “I won’t punish you for loving unwisely. If you tell me about you and Lady Harume, I’ll try to be fair.”

  The current of mutual empathy again flashed between them. Danzaemon inhaled a tremulous breath and released it in a shuddering sigh. Sano watched his need to speak of his lover warring with the reluctance to compromise himself and his people by saying something that might tax Sano’s tolerance. Need triumphed over prudence.

  “We met by chance. At a temple in Asakusa.” Danzaemon spoke haltingly, looking down at his hands, clasped in his lap. “Even though a long time had passed, I recognized her at once. And she recognized me.”

  “You knew each other before?”

  “Yes. When we were children. My uncle used to ta
ke me to Fukagawa to gather shellfish on the beach every month. He met Harume’s mother and became her client. We would go to her houseboat. While I waited for them to finish, Harume and I played together.”

  So he’d been correct in guessing that part of the solution to the mystery of Lady Harume’s life lay in her past, Sano thought. Blue Apple, the nighthawk prostitute desperate enough to accept eta clients, had unwittingly set the course of her daughter’s future.

  A slight, tender smile curved Danzaemon’s lips. “Harume was so small and pretty, but tough, too. She was six years younger than I, but not afraid of anything. I taught her to throw stones, fight with sticks, and swim. It never mattered to her that I was eta. We were like sister and brother. While I was with her, I could forget…everything else.”

  His hands turned palms up, as if accepting a burden—an eloquent gesture that conveyed the young boy’s unhappy knowledge of his destiny. “Then Harume’s mother died. She went to live with her father. I thought I would never see her again.”

  This was because Danzaemon was one of the low-class companions from whom Jimba had separated Harume, Sano realized. Yet the horse dealer had not reckoned with the power of fate.

  “When we met in the cemetery, at first it seemed as if no time had passed at all,” the eta chief continued. “We talked the way we did in Fukagawa. We were so glad to see each other.” Then he uttered a humorless chuckle. “But of course everything was different. She was no longer a little girl, but a beautiful woman—and the shogun’s concubine. I’m a grown man who should have known better than to go near her. But what we felt for each other was so sudden, and strong, and wonderful…When she said she had a room at an inn and asked me to go there with her, I couldn’t refuse.”

  Sano marveled at the attraction so powerful that Harume and Danzaemon had courted death to consummate their desire. A centuries-old taboo, defeated by the even more ancient force of sex.

  “It wasn’t only lust,” Danzaemon said, reading Sano’s thoughts. He leaned forward, his sharp face alight with the wish to make Sano understand. “What I found with Harume was the same thing she gave me all those years ago: the chance to forget that I’m dirty and inferior, less than human; an object of disgust. When I held her, I felt like a different person. Clean. Whole.” Looking away, he added sadly, “It was the only time I ever felt loved.”

  “Your people love you,” Sano pointed out, wondering if Danzaemon’s passion had led to Harume’s death.

  With a pained grimace, the eta chief said, “That’s not the same. My people are all contaminated with the same stigma as I: Underneath, we all despise one another the same way everyone else despises us.”

  Raw pain hoarsened Danzaemon’s voice, as if he were tearing all the unspoken thoughts of a lifetime from his soul. Probably he’d never met anyone else willing to hear, or capable of appreciating his insight. “Even my wife, whom I betrayed for Harume, can never give me what she did—the kind of love that eased my own self-hatred.”

  Sano hadn’t known that the outcasts themselves embraced society’s prejudice. This case had opened his eyes to the realities of worlds besides his own, and his own unwitting participation in human misery.

  “What did Lady Harume get from the affair?” he asked.

  Anger flared in the eta chief’s eyes, quickly extinguished by his formidable self-control. “I know it’s hard for you to imagine that I could give her anything besides trouble. But she was so alone. Her father sold her to the shogun and considered himself well rid of her. The women in the castle snubbed her because she was the daughter of a prostitute. She had no one to listen to her problems, to care how she felt, to love her. Except me. We were everything to each other.”

  Here Sano spied a possible motive for murder. “Did you know that Harume was meeting another man at the inn?”

  “Lord Miyagi. Yes, I knew.” Embarrassment painted red slashes across Danzaemon’s cheekbones. “He wanted to watch Harume pleasuring herself. She let him, then threatened to tell the shogun he’d violated her unless he paid her to keep quiet. She did it for me—she gave me all the money. I didn’t want her doing something so risky and demeaning. I didn’t want blackmail money. But she was hurt when I tried to refuse. She wanted so much to give me something and couldn’t believe that her love was enough.”

  The eta chief shot Sano a defensive look. “I won’t deny that I took the money to buy food and medicine for the settlement. If accepting a woman’s ill-gotten gold makes me a criminal, then so be it.”

  He laughed, a single sharp note that spoke worlds of the humiliation he must battle daily in trying to better the lot of his people. Then he bowed his head in obvious shame at betraying his emotions. Even as Sano’s heart went out to the young eta chief, he saw that Lady Harume had given Lord Miyagi a strong reason for wanting her dead. Sano thought of Reiko with the daimyo, and a chill crept through him. Resisting the impulse to hurry to his wife, he weighed Danzaemon’s statement. Everything the eta had said resonated with honesty. He had truly loved Harume, sincerely regretted her death. But was there a darker side to the story?

  Sano said, “Lady Harume was pregnant.”

  Danzaemon’s head snapped up. Shock paled the surface of his gaze like a sheet of ice over deep water.

  “You didn’t know, then,” Sano said.

  Closing his eyes briefly, the eta chief said, “No. She never told me. But I should have known it could happen. Merciful gods.” Horror muted his voice to a whisper. “Our child died with her.”

  “You’re sure it was yours?”

  “She told me that the shogun couldn’t…and Lord Miyagi never touched her. There was no one else but me.” Danzaemon added, “I have two sons, and my wife…” Sano remembered the pregnant woman he’d seen in the outer room—proof of Danzaemon’s potency. “I suppose it’s just as well that the child didn’t live to be born.”

  For the sake of the investigation, Sano couldn’t accept at face value the apparently genuine sorrow of the eta chief, whose survival skills must surely include the ability to deceive. “If the child had been born, and been male, the shogun would have claimed it as his heir and made Lady Harume his consort She would have been in a position to give you much more than just blackmail money from Lord Miyagi. And your son could have become the next ruler of Japan.”

  “You can’t be serious.” Scorn tinged Danzaemon’s gaze. “That could never have happened. You found out about Harume and me; eventually someone else would have. There would have been a scandal. The shogun would never accept the child of an eta as his own. It would have been killed along with us.”

  “Is that why you poisoned Lady Harume? To end her pregnancy, avert the scandal, and save yourself?”

  Danzaemon blinked, as if stunned by the conversation’s unexpected turn. Then he leapt to his feet, protesting, “I didn’t poison Harume! I told you how I felt about her. I didn’t know about the child. And even if I had, I would sooner have killed myself than them!”

  “Kneel!” Sano ordered.

  The pupils of his eyes pinpointed with fury, the eta chief obeyed. Sano had no doubt about which man to whom Harume had pledged her love. That Danzaemon also knew this, Sano could tell from the expression of defeat that came over his face. He had motive for Harume’s murder, and she’d died tattooing herself for him.

  “Think what you will,” Danzaemon said. “Arrest me if you want. Torture a confession out of me. But I didn’t kill Harume.” Defiant conviction lifted his chin and burned in his eyes. “You’ll never be able to prove I did.”

  And there lay the fatal weakness in Sano’s case against Danzaemon. According to the results of his detectives’ inquiries, the ink jar had not been tampered with along the way from the Miyagi estate to Edo Castle. Therefore, the ink had to have been poisoned at one end of the journey or the other, where no eta could ever go. Danzaemon had had no opportunity to commit the murder.

  “I know you didn’t poison Harume,” Sano said. “Now I want your help.” Danzaemon regarde
d him warily. “You said Harume talked to you. Can you remember anything she said that might tell us who killed her?”

  “Since I heard the news of her death, I’ve gone over every conversation we had, looking for answers. There was another concubine who was cruel to Harume, and a palace guard who annoyed her.”

  “Lady Ichiteru and Lieutenant Kushida are already suspects,” Sano said. “Was there anyone else?”

  “The assassin who threw a dagger at Harume.”

  “She told you about that?”

  Memory darkened Danzaemon’s eyes. “I was there when it happened. We’d just left the inn. She always went first; I would follow at a distance to make sure she was safe. Usually I saw her as far as the Asakusa Kannon precinct, then went on my way. But that day I couldn’t bear to let her go. I followed her into the marketplace. I stood outside a cracker stall across the street and watched her step into the alley next to a teahouse. She turned her back and raised her sleeve to her face.” A barely audible tremor inflected Danzaemon’s voice. “I knew she was crying because she missed me.

  “Then Harume screamed and fell. I saw the dagger sticking out of the teahouse wall. People started yelling. I forgot about pretending I didn’t know Harume and started toward her. Then someone ran straight into me. She was wearing a dark cloak with a hood. She was in such a hurry to get away, I knew she’d thrown the dagger.”

  After the thrill of learning that the assassin resembled the person who’d murdered the drug peddler, Sano belatedly registered Danzaemon’s choice of pronoun. “‘She’? You mean it was a woman?” Choyei had described his attacker as a man…or had he? Now Sano recalled the peddler’s agitation when asked what the man looked like. Sano had attributed it to Choyei’s fear of death. Had he really been trying to say that a woman had stabbed him? “Are you sure?”