The Fire Kimono

by Laura Joh Rowland

  “In the meantime, I’m going to visit Tadatoshi’s mother and sister,” Sano said. “Maybe they can shed some light on the crime.”

  As much as he hoped that whatever they said would exonerate his mother, he feared it would dig her grave deeper.

  Reiko spoke with Lieutenant Asukai in the garden, where she was watching Akiko play with the children’s old nurse. “My husband has enough to do without having to search for the spy,” she said, and explained how Sano’s mother had been charged with murder. “I think we should handle the problem ourselves.” She longed to help Sano, and there wasn’t much else she could contribute.

  “I’m ready and willing,” Asukai said. “But how should we go about it? Have you ever unmasked a spy before?”

  “No,” Reiko admitted, “but let’s try a little common sense. We can’t watch all the people in the estate. There are too many.” Sano’s retainers, officials, clerks, and servants numbered in the hundreds. “And this spy will be careful not to attract attention.”

  “We might never catch him doing anything to betray himself,” Asukai agreed.

  “So we must draw him out,” Reiko said.

  “Good idea.” Asukai regarded her with admiration, then puzzlement. “How?”

  “We’ll set a trap, using something that Lord Matsudaira would want as bait.” Inspiration lit Reiko’s brain. “I know! How about the secret diary in which my husband has listed the names and locations of all his spies?”

  Asukai looked surprised. “Is there such a diary?”

  “There will be.”

  Reiko hurried into the house to her chamber. Asukai followed. She knelt at her writing desk, lifted the lid, and pulled out a book covered in black silk. The pages were blank. She prepared ink, dipped her brush, and wrote a long list of male names as fast as she could invent them. She wrote, after each, “spy,” the place where he was stationed, choosing random locales within Edo Castle, around town, inside daimyo estates, and among Lord Matsudaira’s numerous properties; she threw in cities all over Japan.

  “There,” she said, closing the book.

  Asukai laughed. “It would have fooled me. I’ll spread the word that it exists. Where are we going to hide it?”

  “We have plenty of choices,” Reiko said. “This estate is riddled with secret compartments.” They’d been installed by the former tenant—the onetime chamberlain Yanagisawa. So had other unusual architectural features. Masahiro had found most of them. “I know just the place.” Reiko described the location, adding, “Make sure you spread that around, too.”

  “And then we watch to see who goes for the bait?”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Reiko said.

  Asukai nodded as he caught her meaning, then said, “Here I go, to lay down the scent for our spy.”

  Masahiro came in through the door as Asukai exited. “I heard that Grandma is here,” he said. “Where is she?”

  “In the guest room,” Reiko said.

  “Can I go see her?”

  Both children were fond of their grandmother, Reiko knew. When Sano took them to visit her, she gave them little treats, told them stories, and never scolded them. “You can see her later,” Reiko said. “She’s resting now.”

  “Why did she come?” Masahiro said. “She hardly ever does.”

  Reiko didn’t want to frighten him with the details, so she said, “Grandma and your father have some business to take care of together.”

  “Did she do it?” Masahiro asked.

  “Do what?”

  “The murder.”

  “How did you know about that?” Reiko said in dismay.

  “I heard the servants talking.”

  Reiko sighed. There was no hiding anything from Masahiro. Even if she ordered the servants not to gossip in front of him—which she often did—he would absorb information from the air.

  “Did she kill the shogun’s cousin?” Masahiro persisted.

  He spoke of killing in such a nonchalant manner. Reiko worried that he’d become hardened to death and violence far too young. She regretted that he’d already killed, albeit in defense of her and their family, while they’d been in Ezogashima. But she couldn’t reprimand him for circumstances that weren’t his fault.

  “Grandma hasn’t killed anyone,” Reiko said. “It’s all a mistake.”

  But for the first time she wondered if it really was.

  Of course she’d always believed her mother-in-law to be a good, harmless person. Of course she was obligated to share Sano’s faith that his mother was innocent. And Reiko knew too little about the crime to judge it based on facts. There was no denying, however, that the woman had lied, at least about her past. Why?

  Reiko considered the strain that had always existed between her and her mother-in-law, which she’d previously attributed to their different social backgrounds. But now Reiko knew that wasn’t the whole story. Perhaps she reminded the old woman of the young lady she herself had once been and the privileged life she’d lost. But it seemed just as likely that she’d been afraid Reiko would notice the discrepancies between her real and her supposed background and mention them to Sano.

  Why conceal her background unless there was something in it that she wanted to hide?

  “What’s going to happen to Grandma?” Masahiro asked.

  “Nothing,” Reiko said. She was ashamed of her speculations about her mother-in-law. “Your father will prove she’s innocent. She’ll be all right.”

  Reiko resolved to withhold judgment at least until she’d talked to the woman herself.

  The search for the tutor took Hirata to the Ueno temple district. The buildings of the minor temple to which Egen had belonged forty-three years ago had burned down during the Great Fire. The government had relocated it, and scores of other religious orders, to Ueno, on the city’s outskirts. There, the fires in the temples’ crematoriums couldn’t threaten the town, and the smoke wouldn’t offend the citizens.

  Hirata rode with a few detectives up Ueno’s Broad Little Road, one of many firebreaks created after the disaster. He recalled that their original purpose had been to provide bare space that would relieve overcrowding, prevent fires from spreading, and limit casualties. But land within such a big attraction as a temple district was valuable, and little empty space remained today.

  Pilgrims and tourists flocked to the stalls of the marketplace that lined the road. Vendors did a thriving business in Buddhist rosaries and prayer scrolls, vegetables and fish grilled on skewers, china dolls and straw hats, sake and plum wine. Itinerant priests marched, beat drums, and juggled. Acrobats capered on a tightrope. Customers flowed to and from teahouses and brothels in the back streets.

  Hirata found Egen’s temple inside a small compound enclosed by a bamboo fence. A few worshippers lit incense sticks and knelt before the altar decorated with gold lotus flowers and burning candles in the main hall where Hirata approached an old priest.

  “I’m looking for a monk named Egen who belonged to your order before the Great Fire,” Hirata said. “He worked as a tutor to Tokugawa Tadatoshi, cousin of the shogun.”

  “I haven’t been here that long,” the priest said, “and unfortunately, the fire destroyed all our records.”

  “Is there anyone here who might remember Egen?”

  The priest took Hirata to an elderly monk who was meditating in the sunny garden outside the dormitory. The monk was as lean and tough as a rope. He had no teeth, and his ears and nostrils were filled with tufts of gray hair, but he wore a serene, content expression. When Hirata asked him if he’d known Egen, he smiled and said, “Ah, yes. We were friends. We entered the monastery and took our vows at the same time.”

  Hirata thought it too good to be true that the old man had remembered so promptly. “Are you sure?”

  The monk smiled. “At my age it’s easier to remember what happened fifty years ago than what I had for breakfast this morning. When you get old, you’ll see.”

  “My apologies for doubting you,” Hira
ta said. “Can you tell me where Egen is now?”

  “I’m afraid not. He left the order.”

  “Oh. When was that?”

  “The same year as the Great Fire.”

  Hirata felt his hopes deflate, but he said, “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “It was some twenty days after the fire.” The monk’s eyes chased recollections through the past. “The temple had burned down. My brothers and I had run for our lives. We tried to stay together, but we got separated. When the fire finally went out, I walked through the ruins, looking for the others. That was the only way to find anyone.”

  Hirata remembered his parents talking about the fire’s aftermath and the thousands of people roaming the city in search of lost loved ones. Many of his family’s relatives had died.

  “I managed to find eight of my comrades. We were all that was left of the fifty monks and priests from our temple,” the monk said sadly. “By that time, the bakufu had begun putting up tents for everyone who’d lost their homes.”

  A city of tents had grown up in the ashes of the great capital. They’d been hurriedly stitched together from any fabric available—quilts, kimonos, canopies. Hirata saw it in his imagination, a sea of patchwork.

  “People rigged up poles beside their tents and flew banners with their family names or crests,” the monk continued. “We put up the name of our temple, hoping our brothers would come. The only one who did was Egen. We were overjoyed to see him. We wanted him to stay with us and help us rebuild the temple. But he wouldn’t. He said he was leaving the order, leaving Edo.”

  “Did he give a reason?” Hirata asked.

  “He would only say that something had happened,” the monk said. “We asked him what, but he wouldn’t tell us.”

  Hirata wondered if his reason had anything to do with Tadatoshi’s disappearance and murder. “Where did he go?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think he had a definite place in mind.”

  Hirata envisioned the highways, the cities along them, and the villages off branch roads winding through mountains and forests. Even in this rigidly governed land, a man could get lost.

  “Did you ever see Egen again?” Hirata said.

  “No.”

  “Have you heard from him since?”

  “Not a word.”

  Discouragement filled Hirata, but he couldn’t give up. “Do you know of anyone who might have information about Egen?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t.”

  “How old would he be now?”

  “About the same age as me. I am sixty-four.”

  Hirata thanked the monk, who wished him good luck on his search. When he joined his men outside the temple, he said, “We’ve got a big manhunt on our hands. Arai-san, organize troops to ride along the highways and post notices asking for information about Egen.”

  Arai looked doubtful. “There’s a lot of area to cover.”

  “We’ll cover it as best we can,” Hirata said. “If we’re lucky, Egen is still alive and he’ll turn up.”

  If not, Sano and his mother might be doomed.

  “And we can always hope that Egen has returned to Edo,” Hirata said. The city was a magnet for all sorts of people, even those with reason to stay away. Maybe Egen had decided that after all this time, it was safe to come back even if he was responsible for Tadatoshi’s murder. “Inoue-san, you’ll help me mount a search in the city. We’ll start by checking the temples in case Egen has joined another order.”

  As Hirata rode back toward town, he recalled his conversation with Midori. Working day and night for the foreseeable future wasn’t the best way to fix their marriage. And the odds were his search for Egen would fail. The tutor was one grain of rice among millions.

  As Sano rode through the city with his entourage, he felt as if he were traveling into the past. He was about to meet people his mother had known before his birth, who knew things about her that he didn’t. He had an uncomfortable sense that he was digging up his own history as well as investigating a crime. He wasn’t the same man he’d been yesterday, oblivious to the trouble sleeping under the earth with Tadatoshi’s skeleton. And the city around him wasn’t the same city as before the Great Fire.

  Gray and brown ceramic tiles covered the roofs of the buildings in the Nihonbashi merchant district. Thatch had been outlawed since the fire; it was too combustible. Sano passed through a gate and the square, open space around it, created to prevent people from being trapped while escaping fires. But these changes were superficial compared to the city’s wide-scale, profound transformation.

  After the Great Fire, a legion of surveyors, engineers, and builders had swarmed over the ruins. They’d resurrected a new, improved Edo. Rearrangement had eased overcrowding and prevented fires from spreading. Tokugawa branch families had moved their estates outside Edo Castle; daimyo clans relocated farther from it. The lesser warrior class had moved into the western and southern suburbs. Peasants had gone farther west and colonized new villages; merchants and artisans had been dispersed to Shiba and Asakusa districts. The metropolis grew to more than double its previous size. Many of the new quarters were marshy, at inconvenient distances from the city center, and unpopular, but relocation was mandatory. The alternative for people who resisted was being convicted of arson and burned to death—punishment for fires that would result if they didn’t go.

  Sano and his men traversed the Ryogoku Bridge, built to encourage settlement on the east bank of the Sumida River. Tadatoshi’s mother and sister lived in Fukagawa, in one of many villas built after the Great Fire. Noble families now usually had three different residences—an “Upper House” near Edo Castle, for the lord, his family, and his retainers; a “Middle House,” farther away from the castle, for an heir or retired lord; and a “Lower House,” a villa in the suburbs, for evacuation during emergencies or for clan members not needed in town. The villa at which Sano and his men stopped was located in a quiet enclave of samurai residences amid the townspeople’s houses and markets. Guards greeted Sano and his men, took charge of their horses. Ushered inside, Sano found himself in a reception room quaintly decorated with a mural of dragonflies and frogs on a lily pond. Servants bustled off to fetch the women.

  They returned carrying Lady Ateki, a minute woman more than eighty years old, her bones as fragile as a bird’s under her gray kimono. Her nose was shaped like a beak, her sparse gray hair tied in a feathery knot. When the servants gently settled her on cushions, she resembled a dove on a nest. Her daughter sat protectively beside her. Oigimi wore a dark brown kimono, and a black scarf shrouded her head. She kept her face turned to her left, toward her mother, away from Sano.

  Tea was offered, politely refused then accepted, and served. Lady Ateki addressed Sano: “Did His Excellency the shogun Tokugawa Ietsuna send you?” Her quiet voice sounded like paper crumpling. The wrinkles in her face drooped downward, giving her a permanently mournful expression.

  “No,” Sano said. “Unfortunately, he’s been dead twenty years. Tokugawa Tsunayoshi is shogun now.”

  “Dear me, how time rushes by.” Lady Ateki sighed. “Who did they say you were, young man? Chamberlain Yanagisawa?”

  “No, Mother.” Impatience tinged Oigimi’s voice. She was in her fifties. Thick white rice powder covered gaunt, plain features on the side of her face that Sano could see. “His name is Sano. You’re thinking of his predecessor.”

  At least Yanagisawa had held office more recently than the past shogun, Sano thought. But if Lady Ateki was this confused, the interview was off to a bad start.

  “Oh. Very well,” Lady Ateki said. “What brings you here, Chamberlain Sano?”

  Sano now faced a task more difficult than coping with an old woman’s foggy memory. He had to break disturbing news. “It’s about your son Tadatoshi.”

  Alert and trembling, she leaned toward Sano, one hand on her heart, the other outstretched to him. “Has he been found?”

  She had clearly never given up hope that Tadatoshi w
as alive. Sano hated to disappoint her. He glanced at her daughter, to see how she’d reacted to the mention of Tadatoshi, and did a double take.

  Oigimi had turned slightly in his direction. The left side of her face was twisted, seamed, and paralyzed with scar tissue under her makeup. Her lips formed a half grimace. Her left eye was a dead gray orb. Sano realized that she was a living casualty of the Great Fire.

  Consternation showed on the intact right side of her face. Whether it was in response to news about her brother or because she’d seen Sano’s instinctive revulsion to the ravages of the fire, Sano couldn’t tell. She quickly turned away, pulling the scarf over the wreckage.

  “I’m sorry to say it was Tadatoshi’s remains that were found,” Sano said. “He died not long after he disappeared.”

  “Oh.” Lady Ateki’s animation faded. “I suppose it was foolish to believe Tadatoshi could still be alive. I suppose I’ve known all along that he was dead.”

  “Of course he’s dead, Mother.” Oigimi’s voice sounded unnecessarily harsh. “If he weren’t, he’d have come back by now.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” Lady Ateki said, and Sano didn’t miss the frostiness of her tone. Oigimi might be her loyal protector, but their relationship wasn’t all peace and harmony. She turned to Sano. “How was Tadatoshi found?”

  Sano explained about the storm near the shrine, the fallen tree, the grave exposed.

  “How on earth did he get there?” she said, bewildered.

  “Not by himself, obviously,” Oigimi said. “What Chamberlain Sano is trying to say is that Tadatoshi was murdered.”

  “Murdered?” Lady Ateki gaped at Sano. Her hands flew to her face. Her fingers trailed down her cheeks, pulling them farther downward. “But who would kill my son?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me. I’m investigating his murder, on behalf of the shogun.”

  Oigimi said, “Forgive my presumption, but I’d have thought the shogun had more important things to do than bother about Tadatoshi.” She had the traditional outspokenness of older women, despite her disfigurement. “Whatever happened to him happened long ago.” She eyed Sano suspiciously. “Have you a personal interest in this, may I ask?”