Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show

by Richard Wiley

  And he would also blame that bow for making him unready, for making it nearly impossible for him to believe it when, by late the next afternoon, his father resigned from the Great Council in shame, and decided to return to Odawara with what remained of his family.

  17.

  Fine Mornin’, Ain’t It?

  NED AWOKE FIRST, climbed from his blankets in the Pavilion of Timelessness, and stepped out to breathe the cold crisp air. It was true he hadn’t really wanted to come ashore, had done it only for Ace, to soothe his friend’s desire for adventure, but now that he was there he found the bamboo grove beautiful, with its trees at uniform distances, and when he noticed the side wall of Lord Tokugawa’s hunting lodge, his immediate thought was to get a closer look at it, give a warm welcome to whoever might be inside.

  As he reached back through the paper doors for his shoes and seaman’s jacket, Ned looked at Ace, asleep with his mouth open, next to the Japanese man who had brought them here, a guy that he’d decided to think of as “Mangy,” because it was as close to his real name as he could get. Mangy’s topknot was loose and creeping down the side of his head like a slug, but both men looked peaceful in their slumber. If there was one thing Ned knew about Ace, however, it was that peace was as foreign to him as a hairdo like Mangy’s, and search as he might, he wasn’t going to find it by hooking up with strangers in Japan. No sir, that they should have stayed at home was as clear to Ned as the bamboo trees in front of him as he looked out the door.

  Still, they were here now and he’d done enough standing still on shipboard, so he pulled on his shoes, stepped off the porch and made his way through the bamboo quickly, by gripping the tree trunks and swinging on them—allemande left, allemande right—as if he were at a square dance. And soon he found himself standing on a bare stretch of hard ground next to the side of the lodge. In one direction its wall jetted down to meet the forest again, but in the other it seemed to grow higher, as if yielding more standing room to a man inside. So he walked that way and when he stepped around the corner saw the mouth to a corridor that led to a sun-bright courtyard. He could hear someone caterwauling in there—singing would be a kind word for it—but he could also hear wind chimes, a high-pitched and pleasant ringing, not unlike the ship’s triangle.

  Ned felt his unshaven face and worked his mouth, briefly thinking that he should pass the courtyard by, just circle the building and go back to wake Ace. When the man stopped singing, however, and barked out a phlegmy cough, he stepped inside the corridor and reached into his jacket pocket to retrieve a small harmonica. And when the cough came again he blew softly, copying the cough perfectly, finding its pitch on the first try. The cougher heard it and stopped, while Ned pressed himself against the wall and grinned mischievously. A moment passed, and when another cough came, he gave it a quieter echo.

  “Chikusho,” said Keiki in the courtyard.

  Ned would have left then, satisfied that he had a good story to tell, but a shadow fell across the ground before him, followed so quickly by its maker that he could only press himself closer to the wall. The man was naked except for a loincloth, and had hair flying everywhere. He was so comic-looking that Ned might have laughed, except for the fact that he was carrying a large and unsheathed sword.

  The man glanced into the corridor but couldn’t see Ned, and when he went some distance farther and coughed again, a random spasm this time, like five or six dog barks, Ned put the harmonica to his lips and woofed out the same sound.

  “Baka yaroo!” hissed Keiki, nudging his sword in among a nearby chorus of wide-mouthed barrels.

  Ned was quiet the next time he coughed, and also the time after that, but when he went back to the porch to resume his washing, Ned played a series of notes up high, extending the joke.

  This time Keiki left his sword alone and moved around the courtyard in the opposite direction, carrying only a rolled-up towel. He finally understood there was a trickster in the area and hoped that maybe it was one of his father’s maids, that this might be an inventive prelude to her coming to his rooms that night.

  “Hora!” he said, looking in somewhere and snapping his towel.

  It was funny, a good game, but the new direction he had chosen gave Ned nowhere to hide, and when Keiki suddenly saw him he froze, one end of his towel held firmly in his right hand while his left pulled the other end back, making it look like a thick white arrow in an invisible bow. From Keiki’s point of view it was horrifying, for the man’s long nose, his flat face and the turned-up collar of his coat all combined to give the impression of a great standing rat who might at any second fall down on all four legs and charge.

  “Abra, kowai.” he shouted. He dropped his towel and reached to the waistband of his loincloth for his absent sword.

  “Fine mornin’, ain’t it?” said Ned. “Didn’t mean to give you a start.”

  Keiki’s mouth was so wide that his next cough came out hollow.

  “Me and Ace are camped out yonder in that freezin’ cold building. Come in late with Mangy. I hope like hell you know him. Nervous fellow? Talks English pretty well?”

  He stepped out of the shadows and smiled.

  “But you are one of the barbarians!” said Keiki. “One of the men we spied upon in the geisha house last night! How is this possible? What? How…? Did my father…? Did you…? This doesn’t make any sense at all!”

  He picked up his towel and shoved the corner of it into his mouth, and that made Ned laugh.

  “Ned Clark’s my name,” he said. “What might yours be?”

  “Hold it. Please, don’t move,” said Keiki. “I’ll get my father. Who else? What kind of trouble?” He let a laugh fall from his mouth and said, “I see you standing here but everything I know tells me it’s impossible. This doesn’t make any sense at all!”

  “Don’t you want to get yourself dressed?” asked Ned. “I mean, ain’t you cold?”

  He pointed down at Keiki’s body. “I ain’t never seen a country so full of folks what like to strut around with their naked butts a-showin. I spied some others doin’ it from shipboard with the masters glass. Pa-radin’ around the seashore like nymphs on a weekend holiday.”

  “Oh, yes!” said Keiki. “What a way to greet someone. And look at the poor condition of my hair!”

  He hurried back to the porch and while he snatched up his clothing Ned took a look around the courtyard. There was more order here, among the barrels and piles of lumber, than he had ever seen anywhere before. The lumber constructed something beautiful, even in its stacking, and on top of each barrel were precisely cut lids with well-crafted handles. Ned admired orderliness, to one day lead an orderly life him-self was his desire, and he smiled again, pleased with what he saw. Even the way Keiki’s wash water came from the well at the side, trickling from a split of bamboo and into his pail, made Ned think he’d made the right decision after all, not only coming ashore with Ace, but venturing out alone this morning to explore things, also.

  He nodded at the trickling water. “Bein’ it’s handy do you mind if I wash, too?” he asked. “There’s fresh water for naught but drinking on them ships. A man gets used to his own body odor, but any fool knows it don’t afford him a good first impression when he’s meeting new folks.”

  Despite himself, despite his great surprise and the fact that he knew he had to wake his father, Keiki laughed again. He liked this man, whose narrow eyes and sharp features no longer resembled a rat. There was a charming quality about him, something open. What’s more, he believed he understood the gist of what he’d said just now.

  “Of course,” he answered, “help yourself, I’ll go get more towels.”

  So Ned stripped to his waist and started splashing himself, and Keiki put his kimono back down. It was a funny situation, and both men laughed, trying, without saying so, to imitate the sound of the falling water, the rudiments of the game that had started it all.

  That is how they were discovered some thirty minutes later, when Lord Tokugawa and Kyu
zo, the old warrior, came out the back door. Keiki was sitting on one side of the barrel, Ned on the other. Both men were naked and had commenced to naming body parts.

  Though it might not seem like it, it was an important beginning, for though Lord Tokugawa nearly fainted and Kyuzo drew his sword, Keiki believed a genuine connection had been made.

  And later, when Tsune was awakened and a disconsolate and raw-eyed Manjiro brought Ace from the Pavilion of Timelessness, Keiki began to remember that favorite old folk hero of his, that story book wonder and savior of the downtrodden, Kambei.

  And that gave him a great idea concerning how they would play havoc with Lord Abe.

  18.

  Commodore Perry’s Anxiety

  OUT IN HIS STATEROOM on the Pohatan, Commodore Perry wrote letters to the President of the United States and to his friends in the upper echelons of the American navy, and to his wife. When he met with various Japanese contingents it was in order to prepare for his departure to Shimoda, one of the two port cities that were officially opened to Americans by the Kanagawa Treaty of 1854. He was anxious to visit Shimoda and anxious, after that, to sail for home.

  He heard nothing of the minstrels, thought of them rarely, and asked after them only once. He was told that they were busy traveling and assumed, by that, that they were doing no harm after all, and having a good time.

  PART TWO

  ODAWARA

  19.

  Everything Wrong Everywhere

  BECAUSE OF THE VAST FORESTS of pines, much of the open land around Odawara Castle wasn’t visible from its narrow windows, not even from those on its top floor. There were indeed large expanses of meadow, and rice and soybean fields, and even a few small villages where Lord Okubo’s peasants lived, but the continuous canopy of trees revealed almost nothing, only, here and there, a slight dip in its prominence, a line of lime-green color distinguishing new growth from old.

  From the windows on the castle’s north and west sides one could see the parade grounds directly below, and a dried-out ditch which once had been a moat, and beyond the gate one could also see a road leading down the hill to Odawara township. But from the east and the south windows, over the forest top, there was only the Pacific Ocean, whitecaps flashing in the afternoon sun, as if they too had heard the awful story of the family’s ruin, coming faster than runners could carry it, down the maritime shipping routes from Edo. Majiro had taken the Americans, acted on his own, defied the leaders of the Great Council! “Oh, oh, oh!” said the waves.

  The family had been in Odawara for three days and still things weren’t calm. That was the refrain that stuck in Masako’s head, worrying her as she walked across the grounds, hoping, though she usually thrived on it, to free herself from the constant sound of bickering for a while. Masako looked back at the castle before ducking into the forest, sneaking onto a favorite old path of hers from past visits. As recently as last year she had been forbidden to take this path because down one of its forks there was a dangerous marsh, so she glanced back again, to make sure she hadn’t been followed. A big boulder sat at the edge of the marsh, and she intended to sit upon it until the sun went down, to watch the marsh’s frothy stillness, and figure things out.

  Even though Masako had taken this path many times, however, she could not remember how far the marsh was from the forest entrance except by the way the trees, no matter what the time of day, at first made everything dark and then made everything lighter again. She always hurried through the darkest part, keeping her mind off the subject of animals, and when she could finally smell the stagnant water, she slowed and tried to walk silendy. Her goal was to arrive at the marsh without interrupting the chorus of croaking frogs that sang their hearts out when no people were around. But no matter how quiet she was, she never achieved her goal.

  This day, however, probably because she’d been away for so long, the frogs were less guarded. She got past the place where they usually stopped croaking, even though she was bigger and more awkward now. She even reached the spot where she could first glimpse that boulder, the place where its massive grayness looked like nothing so much as the shoulders and buttocks of a huge sumo wrestler, crouched down and relieving himself, defecating directly into the marsh. Masako loved the look of him so much that once or twice she had nearly brought Keiko here just to show him off. He was perfect. There was even an elongated piece of darker rock that seemed to jut from the center of his enormous buttocks, a thick and healthy-looking bit of stony waste forever falling into the water.

  When Masako laughed at the image the frogs stopped singing and the marsh grew quiet, as if all eyes were on the sumo wrestler to see if he would ever complete the movement of his bowels. But even when she climbed upon his back, putting her foot on the falling excrement to help her up, he remained oblivious to everything. And Masako believed that that, even more than his looks, was the central reason that she loved him so much. Unlike the real people in her life, he wasn’t so quick to judge.

  Masako had two main worries, but once she was settled on her boulder she tried to breathe easily and notice the beauty of the place, before turning her thoughts to them. Someone had been here while she’d been gone, she saw that immediately, to cut away the moss that always before had grown everywhere, thick as whale blubber.

  Masako looked back along the path she had just traversed, and off toward each of the other paths that opened onto the marsh, before she let her right hand drift up to touch her lower lip and pull it out. This was her first worry, that her lower lip was getting fatter, and even though she knew it was a trivial thing to worry about with all this current family trouble, she fretted over it constantly. And she pulled on it so often that she feared she was causing the trouble herself. There were other things too, changes in other parts of her body, that her mother and Aunt Tsune, and even Keiko, had warned her about.

  Masako sighed and leaned back against her sumo wrestler’s neck. She could fit her entire upper body along that neck, which now sloped more than any real neck would, and from her reclined position she could see the bamboo supports and partially submerged gates that lined the marsh at its edges. Once she had seen her grandfather’s workmen putting those supports in, and another time she had seen them repairing one of the gates, but when she asked her grandfather what purpose the fence served he had said only that he thought he’d told her not to go there anymore. She was afraid, after that, to bring it up with her mother or father, but when she finally asked Keiko she was surprised by Keiko’s good answer. Keiko had told her that the marsh was meant to contribute to the natural beauty of the castle grounds, and that as often as once or twice a year their grandfather had workmen go in there to maintain it. She said that a marsh was most beautiful when it reached a state between the freshness and vigor of an ordinary pond, and the rotting stagnancy of a swamp. In a pond there was beauty yet there was no sense of life passing, and in a swamp there was ugliness and all kinds of death and dangers, but in a marsh everything was in balance and their grandfather’s workmen did things that maintained that balance because nature would not.

  Keiko, of all people, had told her that. It was one of the few times, in recent years, that the two of them had spoken without fighting, and as she pulled at her lower lip Masako somehow reflected back upon Keiko’s answer and began to think that it not only fit the marsh, but herself as well. She had been like a pond and now was changing, all too quickly passing by her marshness and turning into a stinking swamp.

  Masako took a breath and looked at the sky and tried to find animal shapes in the clouds. Once she had seen a sumo wrestler up there that seemed an exact copy of the one she lay upon. That had been marvelous and she tried to see something like it again, but in a minute she understood that today she would not find anything so lovely. And though she still worried, she was tired, also, of pulling on her lip and making it sore. Everything was wrong everywhere, Masako decided, and so the bravest thing she could do would be to sit here for another long time and face it. But unfortuna
tely she didn’t know the facts of what was going on. At first she thought it was only that her mother and father were angry about having Grandfather return to Odawara with them, but then she noticed that they all got furious whenever she mentioned Manjiro. And, except for the fact that no one wanted to talk about the marriage arrangement anymore, she did not know why her mother always had to be so wretched. Unless it was something else, something she had no idea of. Oh, she hated being so ignorant, and being so little respected by the others that no matter what was happening she was always the last to be told.

  She sighed and then thought of Keiko, who, she had to admit, seemed a bit more lively than the others, probably because she was still proud of herself for doing so well at the dance recital. But even Keiko, though she didn’t cry and carry on like their mother, would only walk around the castle or along the edge of the forest. She wouldn’t talk to Masako frankly and she wouldn’t play their usual games, and when Masako taunted her by carrying Junichiro precariously she refused to rage and storm. It was unlike Keiko not to rise to such bait, even if Keiko now thought of herself as grown.

  It was a circle, this kind of difficult thinking, and she grew tired of making no progress, of coming to no conclusions no matter how hard she thought. She put her hands up and pointed her eight fingers and two thumbs at a cloud that did not seem to be passing by as quickly as the others. It seemed heavier around its abdomen, this cloud, and looked like a rabbit or perhaps like O-bata would have looked like if she hadn’t been forced to stay away from that fish seller’s son! Masako smiled at the idea and closed her eyes and opened her own mouth. It was nice lying on her sumo wrestler, and pretty soon she was asleep with her arms down by her sides, and quite as if they knew from her breathing that her presence was no longer a threat, the frogs opened their mouths again and croaked.