Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show

by Richard Wiley

  Einosuke’s house was in a convenient area of Edo, not far from the castle where the Great Council met. For a decade Lord Okubo had leased the house, and last year he had finally bought it and invested in an expansion of its garden and in shoring up its foundation and cracked front wall. The house was still too small, especially now that Junichiro was born, and there were workmen coming daily, repairing the bath and kitchen, even at this most awkward time. Not only that but as soon as the family left for Odawara an entire second wing would be built.

  O-bata, their troublesome maid, met them in the entryway. She took the baby and bowed and waited until the adults, Keiko included, had passed into the garden room, before hurriedly pulling Masako aside.

  “Well?” she demanded. “Did you see them? Did you see the American ships? The maid next door saw them yesterday and said that carved on the side of each one is the image of a foreigner’s face! That can’t be true, can it? Tell me, Masako, did you see such a thing?”

  “They are big and ugly and stupid,” said Masako. “They are dark and looming, all eight of them, and it seems to me that if you tried to make them move they would not go fast. But if they’ve got faces on their sides, they’re not as ugly as the one on the maid next door.”

  O-bata threw her hands to her mouth but laughter came out anyway, jiggling her breasts and snorting between her fingers, like the steam from one of the foreign ships. Masako was becoming rude these days! “Oh, Masako,” she said, “I pity the man who marries you! When the investigators come I hope they don’t ask the opinion of the maid next door!” She laughed again, then waited until Masako left before picking up Junichiro and slipping back outside. She was in love with the local fish seller’s son, and, even under threat of firing, would not leave the young man alone.

  The others had walked through the house, stepping over workmen’s tools, to settle into a long tatami room that overlooked the newly finished rock garden in the back. This room was warm in winter yet in summer it was shaded, and when the doors were opened the garden seemed to come up into it, making it a favorite of everyone. It had been Einosuke’s idea to add the room first, before any of the other new construction, and his idea, also, that the rock garden below it should be a smaller but otherwise precise replica of the one at Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto. Einosuke had not admitted that he wanted the garden for reasons other than aesthetic ones, but in fact it had been while viewing the original garden that he had finally found the resolve to change his life. Until that day, eighteen years ago now, he had been a carouser and a gambler and a regular visitor to pleasure quarters everywhere.

  “It is difficult to judge his speed of travel,” Einosuke said, “but I think father will be here sometime tomorrow.”

  “Father will travel slowly,” said Manjiro. “He will bear his colors high.”

  There was something in that statement that both brothers recognized as true and false at the same time. Lord Okubo would indeed travel slowly, but not so much out of a sense of regal passage as because he abhorred coming to Edo. He was following the Shogun’s decree, coming for his year of duty, but he didn’t like the expense of it, nor did he want to hurry into the political turmoil that awaited him. Einosuke, on the other hand, was fond of Edo and did not look forward to returning to Odawara, even for the few months it would take to get the Edo house remodeled. He and his family had stayed in Edo for a decade, only occasionally visiting Odawara, and he was miffed that his father insisted upon their return to the countryside. His father had often said that Einosuke should return to Odawara in order to better learn how to run the estates once he became lord, but Einosuke suspected it was merely that his father wanted to be in Edo without him, to deal with the edicts concerning behavior toward foreigners wihtout his counsel.

  The brothers looked at each other with rueful smiles. Once again their time alone together had been short. They both knew that their father’s arrival would reconfigure things, making their relationship unrecognizable compared to what it was now. Unlike Manjiro’s earlier visits, though, which might have been too short but had been harmonious, this time the brothers had shouted and argued bitterly every night. It was for that reason that Fumiko felt it important that there be no arguing on this, the last solitary evening they would have. She believed that harmony at the end of a visit was more important than harmony in its middle. She had instructed her daughters in the matter, but when Masako joined them in the garden room she was still under the influence of O-bata, and her words came out wrong.

  “Think of it,” she said. “By the time our fat little brother is grown up there will be foreigners everywhere. Even when we move back to Grandpa’s castle we will probably have foreigners living right next door.”

  Manjiro reached up and pulled his niece down next to him as she spoke. Whenever he was around these girls what he longed for most was not intercourse with the outside world but marriage and constancy, a family of his own. He hoped, in fact, that he might quite soon find both. “Your father and I discuss such things only so that we can make them clear,” he said.

  When Einosuke heard that he knew it was his responsibility, more than his brothers, to regret their long hours of discord. But when he tried to do it, to agree with Manjiro at least that far, he found he couldn’t do it well. He admired Manjiro greatly, but at the same moment was angry with him, not because Manjiro held opinions of his own, but because he could not see the need for a united family view. In earlier days, when his role had been subordinate, he would not have dared speak to senior family members the way Manjiro seemed to have no trouble speaking to him now.

  “If you are eating in tonight I must send O-bata out to buy fresh fish,” Fumiko finally said. “Are you eating in or are you eating out?”

  There was a kind of code in this, a reminder delivered from wife to husband, not concerning Manjiro this time, but concerning O-bata, the maid, and the fish seller’s son. Fumiko nearly dismissed her earlier but had lately relented, just the night before allowing O-bata to deliver her farewells to the boy in person, before going to Odawara with the family.

  “Oh, we must eat in,” Einosuke told his wife, “but Manjiro and I will buy the fish ourselves. That way we may speak together without the family spies.”

  Once outside, however, Einosuke and Manjiro argued about the Americans again, standing next to each other in the frigid night.

  They were an hour late for dinner, everyone was upset, and when their father arrived the next day he, too, immediately started arguing, even before he had unpacked his bags.

  2.

  Oh, What I’ll Find There I Don’t Know

  THE FIRST SURPRISE was that the deck felt smooth under Manjiro’s feet; familiar, like standing on planks of Japanese cypress, in a temple or in a bath or in someone’s finely made entryway.

  The American sailors stood silent but bug-eyed, oddly dressed and chopstick straight, backs against the far railing, while the Japanese contingent of eleven walked by. For each of the eight great lords a high-ranking American naval officer acted as escort, but for Manjiro and the Dutch-speaking interpreter there was no one, and there was only a mid-level officer for Ueno, Lord Abe’s surly and ubiquitous aide, who earlier that afternoon had referred to Manjiro as a “toad.” The interpreters were last to go in, so Manjiro took the opportunity to look into the nearby sailors’ faces. It was a violation of protocol but impossible not to do so, and it was instructive as well. The American faces were strange—had not his brother always said so?—but they were also well kempt and contained, not like the ruinous and combative face of Ueno.

  Below deck, in a hallway brightly lit with lanterns, Manjiro took his place at the front, directly behind Lord Abe and his aide. He bent over, nearly touching the great lord’s shoulder with his nose as he tried to make himself small. Lord Abe, however, felt him there and said without turning, “Ah yes, I know your father, don’t I? He is in Edo now, is he not? Come up to help cast these barbarians from our land?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Manjiro, b
owing farther down. Lord Abe’s short stature often made him do so, so that his physical proximity to the lord might equal his social one.

  “You really do speak English, I hope. It’s not just hearsay, is it, not just a rumor that got out of hand, but something I can actually count on?

  If asked that question under normal circumstances, say, in a Great Council antechamber or in a riverside geisha house, custom would require Manjiro to answer that his English was poor. But he knew the great lord would have no patience with such self-deprecation now. “I have had the honor of learning it well,” he answered, “but I fear there will be words I don’t know, idioms, expressions whose meaning cannot be deduced by taking them apart.”

  “Oh well, there are words I don’t know in Japanese,” said Lord Abe, moving a hand up as if to push Manjiro’s mouth a few inches farther away, “but let me hear you speak this English of yours before we go inside. It will calm my nerves. Say something to this gangling oddity standing here next to me. Don’t just greet him, but compliment him. Tell him he’s handsome.… Let’s see, tell him he is handsome and ask him if all Americans are so tall.”

  Manjiro had prepared for the difficulty of political speech, working hard on vocabulary these past few weeks. He would have been readier to make such trivial comments up on deck, to one of the sailors whose rank was low, but the “gangling oddity” now in question was a dignified-looking man with medals on his uniform and graying hair. And because he had been given the honor of escorting Lord Abe himself into the banquet room, his rank, perforce, could only be high. These cautions came to Manjiro in a split second. Of course he could neither question Lord Abe’s choice of phrases, nor allow his own opinions any further rein. Already he had waited too long.

  “You are handsome and tall,” he told the man. “Lord Abe asks if all Americans are like you.”

  The officer was startled, but said, “Oh no, nothing like me, most of the time. By that I mean that at six foot three I am particularly tall, so much so that my wife can always spot me in a crowd. As to handsome; handsome is as handsome does, my wife always says.”

  Manjiro’s face fell but he caught it quickly and put it back up. He knew American measurements and had otherwise understood the words well enough, but just as he’d feared, he had little idea what was meant by them when put together that way.

  “I think he’s speaking in dialect,” he told Lord Abe, “but he says that he is unusually tall and that he’s got a wife and that his wife is the only one in America who thinks him handsome.”

  “That’s pretty well spoken,” said the lord, not to Manjiro but to Ueno, his aide. “I wouldn’t mind engaging these tyrants, you know, getting to know them better, if we were on their land instead of ours. But look, we’re going in now.” He turned back to Manjiro. “Stay beside me and keep your ears open. The official language of these proceedings is Dutch, of course, so I want you to focus on what is spoken casually. If you hear deceit, note it and tell me later. Can you do it, young man?”

  Manjiro said he would do his best, and when the banquet-room doors opened, sliding on rollers into the ship’s wall, the Japanese lords got the elegant greeting most of them had expected a few minutes earlier on the deck. Though the light in the hallway had been bright, now they were faced with such brilliance that Manjiro thought it was like going outside in the morning and looking directly into the sun. The very plates on the banquet table were gold-rimmed—surely not brass or bronze—the utensils beside them were gold, and shining silver medals so decorated the chests of the waiting officers that they seemed like nothing less than the shimmering bellies of fish in a bowl. Manjiro didn’t know whether to think it garish or fine. And he had just glanced at Lord Abe, to see how the great man was taking it, when English came from the mouth of the one man whose uniform was unadorned.

  “How long we have waited for this day!” said Commodore Perry, smiling and extending his arms. “You are welcome, gendemen. Come in, we don’t stand on ceremony here! Be casual, stand at ease! This is not a time for protocol!”

  The Commodore’s exuberance was dulled by the lengthy process of translating his words from English into Dutch and then into Japanese, but Lord Abe waited until the job was done before simply thanking the Commodore on behalf of everyone. There had been posters depicting the threat of foreign attack all over Edo lately, some serious, some comic, and now that Manjiro had his first close-up look at them he marveled at the accuracy with which the artists had caught the angular lines of the American face, the high noses and deep-set eyes; especially those of Commodore Perry.

  “Well sit down, ease yourselves, my friends!” said the Commodore. “This, after everything else, is a time to relax, to let our hair down! How hard we’ve all worked to get even this far!”

  As per earlier Japanese instructions there were eight guest chairs, with stools for the interpreters and Lord Abe’s aide. Commodore Perry’s banquet table seemed inordinately high, as if designed to embarrass the shorter visitors, and roughly formed a horseshoe with Americans sitting along both sides and the Japanese in the middle, closest to the door. Manjiro waited for Lord Abe to balance himself on his chair, then sat down himself, adjusted his hakama, whose long skirt was too stiff to tuck around his stool. He stretched, trying to make himself tall. The great lord’s aide, the mean-spirited Ueno, sat on Lord Abe’s other side and glared at Manjiro, for he was too low to give his usual, biting advice.

  Commodore Perry spoke for a long time and seemed to leap after topics of conversation quite as a collector might leap after butterflies. “The weather!” he said. “Is it always so mild here during the early spring? My, my, and the wind is such that it warms an old sailor’s heart! I must admit, I expected the north Pacific to blow us around much more than it has. But maybe it’s just luck, maybe it won’t hold. Is it unusual to have such fine weather this time of year, or do I detect a hint of approaching rain?”

  Manjiro hated Dutch. His tutor had disliked it also, comparing it to vocalized lumps of coal, but what he hated most was the way the Great Council used it as a thick and cumbersome tool, an ugly tunnel through which good-sounding English was brought into normal Japanese. Part of what he felt was jealousy, maybe, since his skill was in English, but he also felt that if he were the primary translator there would have been a lively exchange from the beginning—something of the kind that poor Commodore Perry was trying to put forth—not this constipated, thick-tongued, dull concoction of ugliness that the lords were forced to hear now.

  “Ah, yes,” came Lord Abe’s slow reply. “It is no longer winter but nearly cherry blossom time. Is it unseasonable? I think you are right about the coming rain. But we will make you a gift of a few cherry trees before you go home. I mean, of course, if they are fine this year, if we have good trees to offer by the time you leave our shore.”

  “That would be most kind,” the Commodore said, after Lord Abe’s words had gone through Dutch and come out constrained. “And let me say something personal. I love the material I see on everyone, the cloth that makes up your extraordinary kimonos. I have written in my diary that we in America can learn a thing or two from you about formal dress, and perhaps about textiles in general.”

  “I will make you a gift, a gift,” Lord Abe repeated, this time about either cloth or kimonos, but even when someone said something simple, as the two leaders tried to do several more times, the translations were slow and, to Manjiro’s mind, often slightly wrong as well. Even Manjiro knew that Dutch, because of its neutrality, and because there were some few dozen Japanese who could speak it, had been useful when negotiating the treaty, but here tonight, once the wine was poured and the toasts were given, both sides grew quiet, defeated by the Dutch just as surely as much of the world had once been, finally letting the room’s only chatter come from the gold forks and spoons as they came down softly to speak in murmurs to the golden plates.

  Though in truth, as much as anything, it was a monument to the Japanese inability to be informal, it seemed to Manj
iro that the central part of the meal was over in no time, not only because he had no food himself and had therefore been daydreaming, drifting back to earlier arguments with his brother, but also because when the eight lords saw how quickly the Americans ate they tried to match them, plunging heedlessly forward, stabbing at the great chunks of meat with their forks. They hunted them down, threw them into their mouths, closed their eyes and swallowed and reached their hands out for wine. It was like a comic scene from Kabuki, and though Lord Abe was their leader in everything else, in this speedy eating ritual his physical coordination did not nearly equal his rank. Meat fell into his lap and bright orange lengths of carrot bounced onto the floor beside Manjiro, long and thick as severed American thumbs.

  “Everyone’s drunk and this thing is impossible to handle,” Lord Abe whispered, showing Manjiro his fork. “Hide those damned carrots and sit up high enough to get the waiter’s attention. Tell him to pour me more wine. Have you noticed that the Americans serve only themselves after the first cup or two? They serve themselves and not their neighbors! That is the first line of barbarism, don’t you think, not tending properly to another man’s cup of wine?”