Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show

by Richard Wiley

  “I remembered that,” said Einosuke, “and so I thought the fish official was either incompetent or Lord Abe had somehow given him the forms without me noticing. But I could see no evidence of the first in the man’s behavior or of the second among the papers that were stacked around him on his dais. It was a mystery, so in order to stay longer without appearing to spy I assumed a level of friendliness I don’t usually have, much as Lord Abe had done. But I’m not a good actor, I guess, for the fish man immediately saw through my ruse. What he thought I was after, however, was not a moment of spying on Lord Abe, but information on the sexual properties of the ginseng root.”

  Manjiro didn’t want to draw the attention of those inside the house, but he laughed, his heart growing progressively light. “Ginseng cures impotency, Einosuke,” he said. “Did you tell the fish man that your own root had lost its form?”

  Einosuke let his thoughts shift back to the night before with Fumiko, but all he said was, “I let him assume what he would. I wasn’t aware of it before that visit, but this Chinese Herbs Institute is not purely informational. They also have a selection of ointments and medicines for sale.”

  “So you bought ginseng in order to cover your ruse? That’s expensive. Let me see it. Let’s try some now, do you have it in the house?”

  “The fish man got down off his dais and, since he didn’t know the Chinese herb section well, took a long time looking around. And when he came back he not only carried a dripping wet ginseng root, but a box of ginseng powder, too. We were both shocked by the prices, but he left the powder on the table when he went to put the root away. And while he was gone this second time, Lord Abe came back out of the Barbarian Book Room. I was no longer comfortable with the subterfuge and had decided to greet him properly, but he hardly looked at me and he didn’t slow down until he turned to slip into his geta at the door.”

  “What had he been reading?” Manjiro asked. “Did you discover the book’s name after he’d gone?”

  “I thought I would,” said Einosuke, “I thought I might be able to get the fish man to tell me, but when Lord Abe finally looked up I saw that he still had the book in his hand. I was surprised that the book was so small.”

  “Those books are to be read in the library!” said Manjiro. “And then only when you’ve got the necessary stamps.” His voice grew louder. “Even a member of the Great Council… Even the Shogun…!”

  “At the time I assumed that a member of the Great Council might be able to go there without the proper stamps, but since then I have found that you are right, no one, not even the Shogun, can take a Barbarian Library book home.” That the Shogun had no interest in the daily machinations of government, let alone the intellectual curiosity necessary to want to venture into the Barbarian Book Room, the brothers acknowledged with a glance.

  The charcoal had burned down but Manjiro no longer noticed the cold. The single time he had visited the Barbarian Book Room he had been sent by his tutor to catalogue the books so his tutor would know which of them came from German, which from English, which from Dutch. Manjiro remembered the experience well. Because it had taken the better part of his stay in Edo to get the approval stamps, he had made a day of it, going to the book room early and not leaving until it closed. It had taken him no time to list the books, such a list, in fact, was given to him by the attendant, so he spent his time reading. He read the first chapter of every book in the library, all forty of them, and then went back to three that had caught his interest and read them in their entirety; two books of scientific inquiry and one of poems. The visit had been a defining moment in his life, reinvigorating his interest in studying English, and making him doubly curious about the outside world as a whole.

  “What happened next?” Manjiro asked. “Did you find out where he went or which book he took home?”

  “No, the fish man didn’t know anything, and it would have taken a long time in the book room just to discover the book’s name. I was suspicious and curious by then, and decided to be even more careful than I had before. So when the fish man came back to his desk I bought the ginseng powder and followed Lord Abe out into the night. But, unfortunately, I could no longer find him.”

  The brothers had grown cold again, what with the rain and the brazier’s fire burning down, so when he finished speaking Einosuke opened the shoji and they went back inside.

  “But what does it mean?” Manjiro asked. “Do you believe Lord Abe is secretly learning about the West, that he isn’t an isolationist anymore?

  Manjiro himself could never believe such a thing, even after hearing Einosuke’s story and observing Lord Abe’s strange behavior the night before, but Einosuke was stopped from answering by the sound of a woman’s voice.

  “One might just as well ask, ‘Do you believe that Japan is not an island anymore?’ or ‘Do you believe Lord Abe is a woman under his robes?’”

  It was Tsune. She had just returned from Lord Tokugawa’s hunting lodge and was sitting there staring at a calligraphy that hung at the room’s far end.

  “I’m sorry,” said Einosuke. “This room is for contemplation. We should not have interrupted you with our gossip.”

  He was angry. He had told Manjiro his story on a whim, without really deciding to do so, and now it seemed possible that everyone in the house might know. Of course he had already told his wife, but what if Tsune told his father, or worse, decided to tell Lord Tokugawa? If that happened Einosuke might be called into the Great Council chambers to explain himself!

  “These stamps, Manjiro-san, these permissions one needs to enter the Barbarian Bock Room, once you have them how many times are you allowed to go?”

  Tsune had turned away from the calligraphy. She now faced the brothers directly but remained on her cushion, knees together beneath her gown.

  “Ah,” said Manjiro, as much in answer to her continued ease as to her question.

  “I am asking because it occurred to me that you, Manjiro-san, might be able to return to the room and by simply asking the attendant for another list, deduce which book is gone.”

  “It’s true, I’m an authorized visitor now,” Manjiro said. He gave Einosuke a glance that he hoped apologized for him thinking that Tsune’s idea was a good one, but Einosuke now spoke directly to her.

  “A word overheard is a word forgotten,” he said. “I think that’s a useful proverb.”

  He did not like to be blunt but if Tsune would involve herself so blithely in the affairs of state and if Manjiro could find nothing better to do than agree with her, what else could he do?

  “Of course,” said Tsune, “you have my promise, Einosuke-san.”

  When he heard that Einosuke saw, yet again, that Tsune was more beautiful and disarming than his wife and, just at that moment, as if catching him in the thought, his wife came into the room.

  “Breakfast is ready,” she said. “Did O-bata not call?”

  All three of them turned to face her and Manjiro said, “It should be easy. I will go today.”

  “Go where?” asked Fumiko, but Tsune touched her sister’s hand.

  “Do we have any ginseng in the house?” she asked. “When the subject came up just now I realized that though I have heard of its powers often, I have never tried it. It might be interesting to see if its effects are as readily available to women as men.”

  It was a harmless joke, meant to tell Einosuke that she was a reliable sister-in-law, but it titillated Manjiro and entirely perplexed Fumiko.

  “Have you done your raking this morning, dear?” she asked her husband. “Did you smooth the gravel below the porch?”

  Einosuke assured her that he had, and when the others left the garden room ahead of them he slid his hand along the contours of his wife’s back, hoping to let her know that he would like to meet her here later, and mess up the rocks again.

  At breakfast Lord Okubo was contrite about the shouting he had done the night before. He apologized to Einosuke and Fumiko, but could manage only a nod to Manjiro.
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  10.

  The Pavilion of Timelessness

  TSUNE WAS KNOWN in Edo society not only because her name had once surfaced on a list of candidates when a previous Shogun needed a wife, or because in recent years she had had two marriage proposals from sons of members of the Great Council and had cut off negotiations with both, but also because of a certain recent and serious indiscretion, word of which had somehow reached Edo. And now that she was back in the capital, now that she had been seen at the treaty-signing ceremonies, people were talking again. What was she up to, this woman with the spotted reputation, this no-longer-quite-so-eligible daughter of the realm? And who was this strange younger brother of her brother-in-law, this usurping young scoundrel, Manjiro?

  Such were the public conditions under which the two young people left Einosuke’s house the next morning, to search out the Barbarian Book Library. Manjiro had departed first, so was inside the library’s main room, in the presence of the official from the Institute of Fish and the previously missing Barbarian Book Room man, when Tsune arrived shortly after him.

  “Ah, my husband, I have found you,” she said. “I worried I might not.

  Manjiro’s face darkened. Wasn’t that too bold a comment, too risky a joke? There had been no formal talk yet, nor had there been the slightest private word between them concerning marriage. Was she trying to tell him something, or was she merely choosing the most obvious ruse to fool the book room man?

  “Here I am,” he said.

  Her entrance drew the man from the Institute for the Investigation of Chinese Herbs, making him hurry over to join the others. He had not heard the exchange and assumed that whenever a woman came into the building she wanted what he had to offer. Exotic Chinese herbs! The constantly whispered-about promise of female sexual pleasure!

  “Good morning, madam,” he said, in a slightly lascivious voice. “Allow me to help you find what you want.”

  The herb official’s greatest joy came when he placed his medicines in front of these young wives or geisha, for years earlier he had discovered that if he leaned into the table while explaining their properties, and if he watched the expressions on the women’s faces as he did so, the herbs worked far more quickly for him than if he ingested them.

  “Please,” he said, “there have been so many advances recently, let me give my litde talk. There is nothing for you to spend on it except time.”

  He bowed, in respect for Tsune’s station, but he also waved his hands in the air in the way certain merchants had recendy found to somehow garner authority. Tsune knew that Manjiro’s papers would not allow him to take her, wife or not, into the Barbarian Book Room with him. Her idea had simply been to engage the room’s attendant in small talk so that Manjiro could search in peace. She was therefore hesitant to go with the herb man until she saw that the book attendant followed right along behind them, a little like a dog in heat. He, too, had also taken up the habit of pressing against the edges of his table while the herb man gave his talk, it seemed, and he left Manjiro fast, saying only, “Read at your leisure, sir, I know you have the verifications. I remember you from before.”

  So that is how Manjiro was able to mirror Lord Abe’s time in the Barbarian Book Room alone. He remembered the room exactly. During the first thirty years of its existence books had been translated and added to the collection regularly, but it had stopped growing a decade ago. Now there were forty strange and wonderful foreign titles, each arranged on its own low table.

  He could see in an instant that no book was missing. To speak precisely there were eighty books, for in every case the Japanese translation and the original text lay together, the Japanese version inevitably larger, as if the information contained in each volume had been augmented by its translator, exploded by Japanese grammar and syntax. While Manjiro gazed at the books he thought again of his tutor, an ex-priest and wayward intellectual named Wilhelm Mundt, whom he had rescued from Nagasaki some five years ago, and who had finally been forced to leave Japan only six months earlier, at the beginning of this current antiforeign furor. His tutor’s dream had been to add another book to the collection in this marvelous room. He had completed his work before he left, and it sat in their study in Shimoda, silent in both its languages, waiting for Manjiro to collect it and bring it to this room. Its title was Faust, and Manjiro loved a particular line from it that read, “If ever I lay down in sloth and base inaction, then let that moment be my end.” It was how he hoped to live his life—with that thought as his admonition.

  Manjiro glanced back out at the men before going over to the book attendant’s table and turning the ledger around. The ledger recorded the names and interests of all visitors to the room, but though it went back more than forty years, it was still only one-third full. He found his own name, with notations next to it telling how long he had stayed and what he had done, and he saw that after him no more than a half dozen people had visited the room. Lord Abe’s name was not among them. Now what would he do? He could tell from the quickening pace of the herb official’s monologue that his time alone might be short.

  Starting on the left side of the room, Manjiro opened each book in the wild hope that he would be able to guess Lord Abe’s interest from the title or the first few lines, when suddenly he remembered Einosuke saying that the book Lord Abe took with him had been small, that Lord Abe had held the volume in one hand. He picked up the nearest book and found that he could only carry it comfortably under his arm, so he put it down again and stood in the middle of the room, surveying all of the books, this time forgetting content and paying attention only to size. The largest book, rising off the floor to mid-calf level, was the Christian Bible, and the smallest, which he knew immediately could not be the one, was a volume of sonnets by the English poet William Shakespeare.

  Manjiro crossed the room to the only other book that could be taken out of the room in one hand, but before opening it he parted the shoji a little, so that he could see the backs of the caretakers again, a dozen feet away. He could also see Tsune, who had drawn her kimono sleeve back and was just then pulling a ginseng root out of a large-mouthed jar. It was a gesture that made his mouth water.

  “Show me,” she was saying. “Can you cut it a little? I have never seen it before.”

  Manjiro closed the shoji and picked the book up off the floor. The original volume was in Spanish, or perhaps Italian. The Japanese title was Ooji, Prince, and it had been written by someone named Niccolò. Manjiro still had the intention of reading a little bit from the book’s beginning, to see what he could learn, but the book opened at its middle where a thin sheet of paper fell out. The paper was covered with Japanese words, with lines of expert calligraphy. He was at first indignant, nearly ready to call that lax attendant back into the room and complain. What if the ink on this paper had not been sufficiently dried and had marked the pages of the book with little half circles or parts of a phrase? There were only forty books and each was a treasure, fashioned with grace and care; each a work of art. What was this attendant’s job, then, if not to keep the books safe, if not to walk among them looking for such problems as this, to open and close them occasionally so that their unread pages got air?

  His anger would have gotten the best of him on another occasion, but in fact the book had not been dirtied and for an instant his new fear was that an actual page had come loose in his hands. Manjiro opened the shoji again, an inch or two. How could this be? There was no question that the loose page and the one it marked contained precisely the same words, and there was also no question that they had been written by different hands. Had Lord Abe, then, or someone else, copied the words out and then inexplicably forgot them when he returned the book, or, for some even more unfathomable reason, purposefully left them behind? Manjiro stood against the flow of such thoughts until his eye was caught by the flourish of Tsune’s sleeve and he saw that the Chinese ganglion was sliding back through the mouth of its jar. The prurient party was breaking up. He had just put the book back do
wn, in fact, and tucked the loose page up his sleeve, when the barbarian book man came back.

  “Tell me,” asked Manjiro, “who cares for these volumes? How often does someone dust them, how often does someone clean?”

  He had intended to sound merely curious, but had not been able to hide his irritation. The book room man’s face was red. “I do, sir,” was his reply.

  When Manjiro turned back into the room and pointed, both men saw that everything before them was in order. “I meant to ask how of ten their pages are aired,” said Manjiro. “I thought I saw a bit of yellow in the Sonnets of Shakespeare just now.”

  He was still pointing, though he couldn’t even remember where the sonnets of Shakespeare resided.

  “I assure you, sir, not only do I air the pages of these books, but I actually read them, one after another, over and over again, year after year. I believe it is the act of reading, not the air, that keeps the yellow out.”

  The man was small, but his voice and bearing were not. He looked directly at Manjiro and began to recite:

  Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

  Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;

  But you shall shine more brightly in these contents

  Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.

  “That’s Shakespeare,” he said. “Isn’t it beautiful? It’s meaning comes clearer if you read it more than once or twice.”

  Manjiro was so taken by the words that he might have stayed, turning back to Shakespeare to read for a while, had he not seen Tsune again, this time at the book room door. “My husband we must go now,” she said. Her eyes flashed at him, dimming the book attendant’s quote.

  It only took another minute for the attendant to stamp Manjiro’s papers, and when he reentered the larger room the herb man was in its most distant corner and Tsune was gone. Seeing him standing there so filled Manjiro with fury at how he had used the woman he loved, that his right hand actually touched the shaft of his sword. He would teach the man a lesson he would not soon forget! Never in his life had he known civil servants to be so bold!