Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show

by Richard Wiley

  After the orchestras opening strains, when one of the musicians sang, “Three tulips grew down by the river, red, yellow, and white, lips pursed, necks craning toward the sky, “the screen seemed to depart under its own power, exposing Keiko and two other girls. Keiko was the tallest tulip. Her face was fine and bright, her red kimono the tightly pursed mouth of an unbloomed flower, and she kept a perfectly taut neckline.

  “The three tulips grew in a bed of a thousand, but one day a boat came by…”

  Masako, who had stayed with the other students even after Keiko stepped behind the screen, now went to sit by her uncle. She whispered, “Keiko’s tulip has had this idea of leaving the flower bed in her head for ever so long. She can’t get rid of it, can’t stop wondering what it might be like in the world at large. Look, she is leading the other two tulips astray.”

  It was true that as the three tulips got closer to the river their lips seemed to un-purse, their mouths part in what Manjiro thought of as a particularly erotic way, but otherwise leaving the tulip bed seemed to do them no immediate harm. People in the audience could see for themselves how wonderful the new wind must feel, how fresh the river water and how tempting it would be to step off the bank, into the calmly bobbing boat. Manjiro was watching the back of Tsune’s neck, wishing to place his fingers upon it, but the dancers’ delicate movements soon drew his attention again. They seemed to interpret nothing but a safe journey and a safe return. Everything was in favor of it, even the music, which had none of the crescendo that might indicate an approaching storm. When the girls actually took the fateful step, however, showing the audience their legs as they tried to maintain their balance in the boat, the music suddenly changed.

  “A wind came up and the three tulips realized that the boat was leaving the shore. They also knew, too late, too late, that their roots had left the soil.”

  Keiko was the best dancer by far. The other girls were not only followers as tulips, but in the intricate steps of the final root removal as well. Masako told her uncle, “Now they’re in for it. There is a danger in leaving your home, you know. There is a lot in this dance that is really perfect for Keiko.”

  The river got rough so quickly that the members of the audience understood its earlier calmness had been a ruse, a trick perpetrated on the tulips by the evil river god. For a full minute the dancers were yanked around so violently that they seemed about to dance, not only out of the boat, but right out of their kimono. Keiko was especially expert at jerking this way and that, especially practiced at making the outer layers of her gown come undone, so innocently amorous, as if, ready or not, a tulip’s breast were about to pop out. The two brothers looked at each other. The children in the audience, all the dancers from the earliest part of the morning, seemed to sit up straight and watch.

  “Oh, who will help the tulips once they have left the shore?”‘asked the singer from the orchestra.

  The answer, quite to the delight of everyone, was that one of the tulips, Keiko, of course, would find a way to save them. The other tulips were too terrified to act, but Keiko stepped over the side of the boat, even though it appeared to be too late, not knowing as she did so whether she would meet her death instantly or find the river shallow enough for her to stand upon its bottom and pull the bucking boat to shore.

  For another few minutes it was difficult to tell what the outcome would be. Keiko fought for her footing and pushed against the depth and strength of the water and against the other forces of the awful river god. But then, very slowly, she began to make some headway, to pull the other two terrified tulips home. The audience could see them leaning, yearning, pushing their roots toward the lost safety of the tulip bed.

  It was a perfectly performed dance, Keiko did better than she’d ever done in practice, but perhaps because it was expressed so well, its ending bothered Masako like it never had before.

  “Well fine for the two whose disruption was small,” she said. “What will happen to Keiko’s tulip, though? She’s been very badly roughed up. She is wet and disheveled. What are we supposed to think about her prospects, that she just got up and planted herself back into the dirt as if nothing at all had happened? I don’t think so, Uncle. You can’t just return to a normal life after a trip like that!”

  Masako’s questions were good ones, but the rest of the audience got up and went to congratulate the teacher and the dancers, and Manjiro wanted to be among the first to reach Keiko. So he somehow ignored Masako, while at the same time pulling her with him to the front. “Such a tulip!” he said. “Such perfection. My, how your practice has paid off!”

  Keiko was still on the floor, exhausted and kneeling where the tulips had finally reached the shore, but she was smiling. The other girls, as Masako had predicted, seemed far less affected by the adventure, and had left with their families immediately after getting out of the boat.

  “It’s a shame about teacher’s duet with what’s-his-name,” Keiko said, feeling it necessary to deflect the attention from herself, but her grandfather said, “Nonsense.” He did not mean, of course, that it was not a shame, but only that he was proud, too, and that not a word should be spoken, not even by Keiko herself, to take away from such a fine performance.

  “A dinner!” he said. “Einosuke, Fumiko, invite the dance teacher, too. We must all go out together, to some fine establishment to celebrate!”

  Again, since Fumiko had reserved a room at a nearby fish restaurant weeks before, and since there was no question but that the teacher would dine with them, Lord Okubo’s bombast was misplaced. The spirit behind it, however, greatly pleased everyone, especially Manjiro. This was the father that both he and his brother remembered from before the rotten seed of the American arrival had been planted in his mind, this was the father-in-law Fumiko had learned to admire when her marriage was new and her children were small. And her grandfather’s exuberance so pleased Masako that she forgot, for a while, the nagging questions she had had about the resolution of the dance.

  “Get up, Keiko,” she said. “Drowned or saved you should straighten your kimono now. Don’t show your body so much, we are going to eat, did you not hear? Get up and thank Grandfather before he changes his mind.”

  Keiko didn’t want to straighten her clothes, nor did she want to leave her place on the floor while there was still a chance that someone else would praise her dancing, and she was irritated with Masako for saying she should. From where she sat she could see the entrance of the geisha house, where her teacher was standing again, looking down the road. She could see the lovely maiko now, too, the youngest of those working after six o’clock, coming in from outside in twos and threes, turning left and walking down the hall.

  Peace and harmony. Calm before the fall.

  14.

  Under the Falling Wisteria

  OUT AT Lord Tokugawa’s hunting lodge the old warrior Kyuzo walked away from the Pavilion of Timelessness, where he had been sitting and thinking about Tsune, and into a small cemetery at the upper edge of the bamboo forest. He was looking at the wooden statues of dead infants with their red bibs on, and trying to return his mind to tranquility by praying at the graves of old and forgotten samurai. The darkness of the earlier evening had stood back a little, acquiescing to the rainy moonlight, but when he put his hands in front of his eyes the moonlight only seemed to heighten their liver spots, to laugh at him, to accent his age. When he touched his face he could feel the sharpness of his cheekbones and the depths of his eye sockets, his very skeleton tired of waiting to come out.

  There was a small Buddhist temple outside the cemetery gate, and on his way back to the hunting lodge, Kyuzo threw some coppers into its receptacle, pressed his hands together, and prayed. He was careful to put Tsune and Manjiro out of his mind, to think only of his father, who had died some thirty years before. He pictured his father’s face as it had been at the end of his life, haggard, thin, sallow. During his father’s last illness Kyuzo had stayed by his side, meditating and talking with him of his l
ife. His father had died in Kyoto, on a straw mat in a small mud house adjacent to Higashi-Honganji Temple. He had spent his entire career in the employ of one lord, but had died masterless, a ronin, sure that his life had failed.

  Kyuzo had the thought that, at sixty-one, he was now a year older than his father had been on his ñnal day, and when he tried to push that thought away, too, he suddenly heard his father’s voice. “In the rain near Nijo Castle, under the falling wisteria.” He opened his eyes and glanced around, but of course there was no one.

  “Under the falling wisteria…” He repeated the words, coaxing, hoping the voice would return, but there was only the temple’s open doors, the shadow of its Buddha inside. Kyuzo didn’t like this temple and rarely prayed here. He thought it too small, the incense favored by its priest too cloying. When he came here he felt more as if he had wandered into a cake shop than into a sacred place, but he stayed and prayed for some few minutes more before walking out to the farthest edge of the hill.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What more can I do? What are you telling me? How should I behave?”

  Four questions, the last one identical to that which he had posed to his father on the night of his death, and the same question he asked himself in prayers always. He felt some shame that this time his heart was less pure, that this time Tsune resided in a corner of it, but he listened through the rain, and, to his surprise, the voice did come again, giving him the same message. “In the rain near Nijo Castle, under the falling wisteria.”

  Kyuzo looked at the sky and could see that in the west now the spring storm was beginning to clear. He said aloud, “A man’s first loyalty should lie with his master’s wishes.” He said it because he knew it was close to his father’s heart, but at the same time he knew that his father’s time had passed, or was passing quickly, at least. He turned and sighed. “In the rain near Nijo Casde, under the falling wisteria…” The phrase had the pleasing resonance of a mantra, something not so much to be dissected as chanted. He knew Lord Tokugawa’s hunting lodge was modelled after Nijo Castle. Was that the connection then, the thread between his life now and the one his father seemed to be asking him to rejoin?

  As Kyuzo walked back through the bamboo forest he let his mind return to Tsune and Manjiro, whom she had brought today for his approval. He had only stared at the young man, hardly speaking, and then had walked for hours, and come here, to this cemetery.

  “In the rain near Nijo Castle, under the falling wisteria.”

  Kyuzo decided that it was, after all, a message, not a mantra. And that its meaning would come clear to him over time.

  15

  The Experiment of America

  THOUGH THEY had never been in it together, the room they now shared was one Lord Abe and Lord Tokugawa had each used before. It was higher than the room it looked down upon and better appointed, with a comfortable dais and actual spy holes in the floor, through which they could see everything. They were in that same entertainment district where Keiko’s dance recital had taken place only twenty-four hours earlier, in another geisha house not far from the Thousand Cranes. It was an odd meeting, not because the two men rarely met socially, but because they were not in the presence of other lords; only the two of them, accompanied by Lord Abe’s aide, that mean-looking samurai Ueno, by his English interpreter, Manjiro, and, on Lord Tokugawa’s side, by Keiki, his befuddled son and the heir to his political aspirations.

  The room below them was interesting because it contained the two recently arrived Americans, content, it seemed, but as yet ungreeted by anyone but apprentice geisha. They weren’t doing much, the Americans, only taking sips of saké and waiting, but the irregular shapes of their bodies, their weird faces, and the way their fingers moved across the table like hairy spiders’ legs, provided an eerie fascination for Lord Tokugawa, who could not refrain from leaning down to peek through one of the spy holes.

  “I confess I am still at a loss,” he told Lord Abe. “I have read what you copied from the foreign book and I know you see within it some good idea, but after watching these men I can’t imagine what that good idea could be. They are curious to look at, that’s for sure, but they are also as innocent and as powerless as the palanquin bearers who brought me here tonight. The American Commodore won’t give a damn for the loss of them, I know that as well as I know my own name.”

  “Listen,” said Lord Abe, “according to both the American constitution and that loud-mouthed Commodore the rights of low born men are equal to the rights of lords. It may sound absurd to you, but rather than repeatedly looking at them, why not take a moment to try to grasp the idea? Low born men with the rights of lords. Now put that together with what those paragraphs I copied advocate. Doesn’t it exercise your mind?”

  It did not, and Lord Tokugawa said so. “Perry won’t care what happens to them,” he reiterated. “He brought them along as an entertainment. I’ll venture he might even make us a gift of them if we asked him nicely.”

  Despite himself he bent to take another look through the nearest spy hole, and thought what a fine gift they would be. One of the Americans had broken a chopstick in half, and was dancing around with it protruding from his nose.

  “Tell me clearly then, what can be done with these men that would confound a treaty which is already signed?” he asked. “In wanting to rid our country of these foreigners we are all allies.”

  “That’s true,” said Lord Abe, “but what does it mean to say such a thing? Since Perry’s first visit last autumn, when America made its initial thuggish demands for trade, have we prepared ourselves in even the simplest ways? No, we have not. We’ve done nothing but sit on our thumbs, lost in rhetoric and worry, everyone wanting to hear the sound of his own voice lamenting things.”

  Lord Abe bent to look at the two men again, too, trying to forget that it was he who had led the Great Council to its indecision, but Lord Tokugawa only sighed.

  “Yes, yes, I know that is true,” he said, “and I understand how frustrating it has been for you. But I still don’t see what you are going to do with them now, after the fact of the treaty signing. I’ve grown slow in my old age, I admit it, sir, but answer me that, as clearly as you can. Is there something I have missed?”

  Manjiro listened with his head bowed. To hear the two leaders speak like this, directly, equally, without the crippling corset of form, was something he had never in his life encountered, and he wished with all his heart that his beloved brother, Einosuke, could be there to witness it beside him. But this did not sound like the same Lord Abe he had heard earlier, the Lord Abe who had said “gangling oddity” about the American officer on shipboard. Then he had seemed strong while now he seemed to be grasping at straws.

  “Listen,” said Lord Abe, “have you ever been to the Barbarian Book Library? Have you ever read a single foreign volume anywhere, a single translation from a language other than from Chinese?”

  Lord Tokugawa answered peevishly. “You know very well I’ve read Dutch shipbuilding manuals! The Great Council might have sat on its thumbs, but whose idea was it to build a fleet of warships last summer? Who suggested maybe even buying an entire fleet from the Dutch?”

  “All right, so you’ve read a few manuals,” Lord Abe allowed, “but what I’m asking now is something entirely new. You have read manuals but have you read thought? Other than the copy which you somehow managed to get your hands on yesterday, have you ever read a word about what these people say they believe?”

  Instead of answering quickly, Lord Tokugawa poured himself more saké and drank it down. He didn’t like intellectuals and he didn’t like Lord Abe, he remembered that now. If there were shipbuilding manuals to read then fine, but he would not be drawn into Western philosophy.

  “I don’t mean to be insulting,” said Lord Abe, bowing into the silence that had transpired, “but please, if not to investigate this thing I have started, what are you doing here this evening, why have you bothered to call me out?”

  He spoke calmly
, but lest Lord Tokugawa answer him again with silence, he turned and posed a question to Manjiro. “You, young interpreter, you’ve been to this foreign library, have you not? Isn’t that where you learned the barbarian tongue?”

  “It is not, sir, but I have been there,” said Manjiro.

  “And have you read all the books? There are only forty or so.”

  Manjiro said he had read a few, but otherwise had only browsed.

  “Well if that’s the case then I have read more than you,” Lord Abe told him. “For I have not only read the book everyone’s so bothered about tonight, but every other book, as well. Have you read the American constitution? It’s there, you know.”

  Manjiro said he hadn’t.

  Shifting his glance back to Lord Tokugawa, Lord Abe said, “Then I wish I had copied that, too. I can’t quote from it, but it says in part the same thing that Perry is always lecturing us about, that however insignificant his station, no matter whether he is landed or even whether he has a surname, each man has the same basic rights as any other. It says so in their constitution, sir, how can I emphasize that point strongly enough? Can’t you grasp how such a belief might cripple a country?”

  “My tutor sometimes called it ‘the experiment of America,’” said Manjiro.

  He froze after he spoke, surprised and ashamed of himself. What had propelled him to add his voice, and what had propelled him to mention his tutor? It was true that he and his tutor used to spend time discussing such things, but to draw attention to it during these capricious days. This was as big a mistake as showing Lord Tokugawa the paragraphs in the first place.

  But Lord Abe only said, “Hmm. ‘The experiment of America,’ what an interesting phrase. The Americans love this idea and push it everywhere they go. I think they are zealots who want to preach, to convince others of the worth of their beliefs, even more than they want trade. It is like the time of the missionaries all over again, but instead of Jesus Christ, the devil in the middle of everything is ‘American Democracy’!”