Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show

by Richard Wiley

  There was the kind of muslin cotton wrap that women used under their kimono encircling the botde, and the physician tore a piece of it and doused it with the liquid when the lord didn’t see where he’d pointed. “Hold it on there gently,” he said. “Dab it like a geisha might, when reapplying makeup at a party.”

  Lord Okubo tried to do as he was told but Ned defeated the idea of dabbing by resting his entire face against the old lord’s hands. So it looked to everyone like he had his nose back and was crying into a towel.

  OUTSIDE THE STABLE most of Lord Okubo’s guards were awake by then and milling about. Tsune was with them, she had gone out to tend to the girls and had not wanted to interrupt things by going back inside, but the girls had not only run across the grounds and reentered the castle, they had gone up the main inside stairs, as well. Einosuke and Fumiko had been sleeping on the top floor, but a minute after the girls awakened them Tsune saw lanterns burning in their window, and then she saw Einosuke and Fumiko looking out. Both of their faces were easy to read. Einosuke’s looked pained that he had not been consulted immediately upon his brother’s arrival, and Fumiko’s looked wild, almost wanton, like she’d been having some horrible dream and was having trouble waking up to reality.

  When the doors to the stable opened again some five minutes later, Lord Okubo emerged first, in magnificent slow form, the wounded American by his side. He was not much taller than Lord Okubo, but people could now see that he was leaner and more muscular, and that he walked with a litheness most often present in animals. That he was maimed was as plain as the rain that wet them. That he was foreign, however, in the light of that maiming, did not seem to occur to anyone.

  29.

  Einosuke’s Anger

  INDEED, Tsune had been right. Einosuke was deeply angered by his father’s change of heart toward Manjiro, and stunned by the fact that he had not been consulted the moment his brother and the others arrived at the castle. And so to spite them all he got up at dawn the next morning and, without greeting Manjiro or asking a single question about the foreigners, threw himself into working on his garden. That is why he was the first to get news, brought by a runner from Keiki in Edo, that the Great Council had in fact removed Lord Abe—for the moment, at least—from all dealings with the Americans. It was a situation that was aided greatly, Keiki’s note strongly hinted, by the advent and wide distribution of his now famous Kambei posters. A man by the name of Lord Hayashi had been put in charge of any remaining talks with Commodore Perry, and Manjiro could therefore continue on to Shimoda with the musicians or return them to Edo, whichever he wished. Lord Abe’s dislikable aide, Ueno, though probably still unaware of the altered political climate, would soon be ordered to disband his illegal army and go on about his private business, no more threat to anyone.

  Einosuke did his best to dismiss the importance of the news and rode on horseback to the edge of the sea, where, with an unerring eye and profound concentration, he selected the necessary boulders for his garden. But then he sat down on one of them to brood and think things over. Now it seemed his brother could return the Americans to their vessels freely—never mind that one of them had lost his nose!—even strut around as a hero of the realm, if he had that much bombast in him. It made Einosuke both glad and furious to contemplate such a thing, glad because it meant his father’s resignation from the Great Council would not be accepted, that his family could return to Edo when their house was done with few remaining clouds of disgrace, but furious because, just as he’d done innumerable times since childhood, irresponsible Manjiro had bumbled into prominence while he, Einosuke, had worked behind the scenes without the slightest accolade from anyone.

  ON THE SECOND MORNING after Manjiro’s arrival, when talk of Lord Abe’s demotion was everywhere, all over the castle and surrounding town, Einosuke was up and off at dawn yet again, before anyone could speak his name. This time he traveled to a mountain village known for the production of superior sand and gravel. He found just the grade of pebble he wanted for his garden—each one about one-eighth the size of those American chocolates—and paid the village elders the asking price on the condition that the loading and delivery of his purchase take place that day. When the elders agreed and offered him tea, he accepted, and when the tea was gone he asked for lunch and a quiet place to take a nap.

  In this way, though he could not control his anger, he stayed away from Odawara Castle two days running, until late at night.

  30.

  Japan’s Conundrum

  MEANWHILE, from the rooms they had been given in the row of buildings that stretched out beside the castle’s gate, Kyuzo and Ichiro, the recent defector, could watch Einosuke at work on his new garden, with Keiko walking around its perimeter, relief over her uncle’s amazing good fortune everywhere on her face and in her pace. Ichiro tried not to stare at Keiko, to whom he was drawn, and instead hefted a pot full of tea. Kyuzo had had enough to drink but nodded anyway when offered more, holding out his cup.

  “It is good to rest,” he said. “The other night’s fighting was harder on me than I like to admit. I still enjoy the idea of fighting, but my body doesn’t seem to want to cooperate.”

  Kyuzo counted Ichiro’s defection as his doing, but even though the entire situation now seemed disarmed, he was having trouble finding a way to talk about it. He wanted to make the young man feel welcome, but he also needed to gain a better understanding of why Ichiro had so readily changed sides. It was an unusual act and very modern. Kyuzo himself would not have done it, even if some other great man had been able to show him that the path he had chosen was wrong.

  “Resting and waiting,” mused Ichiro, who wanted the same discussion. “We enjoy the first but dislike the second, yet often have a great deal of trouble telling them apart.”

  Kyuzo appreciated that observation and laughed. “Now we are doing the first,” he said, “but if we continue for much longer it will be the second.”

  Ichiro drank his tea boldly, as if it were saké, and poured himself more. Kyuzo had noticed a similar tendency in him when they’d been fighting, and he let his own expression turn serious.

  “How old are you, Ichiro,” he asked, “and what’s your story? Where did you come from, where did you gain you skill with a sword, and what will you do now that this current interesting conflict is over?”

  Ichiro said he was twenty-one, born in the year of the snake, and that he’d learned how to fight in the far northern part of the country, on the coast of Ezo, from his father.

  “Ezo,” said Kyuzo. “Then you have come a very long way, indeed. But why did you leave a beautiful place like Ezo, may I ask?”

  “My father urged me to go lest I turn the skills I had learned to some less honorable occupation,” the younger man said. “As to what I will do in the future, he hoped that I might find some sort of trade.”

  Kyuzo nodded. “No work and your father’s blessings. A nation of warriors really does have a difficult time of it when there is peace for too long. That’s why we should have gone to war with America in the first place, not so much to defeat them as to keep up our skills. What does a unified country want with a warrior class and what does a warrior class do in a country that is unified? That is Japan’s conundrum, the paradox in the way things are now. A trade, you say?”

  “I know I’m young,” said Ichiro, “but I have noticed that we often do things simply because we are able. And we continue to do them even when they become outdated or unnecessary. That’s why it’s so easy for a warrior to turn criminal, because the skills, on the surface at least, are the same.”

  When Kyuzo looked at this young man he wanted to give him his own views, in some poetic metaphor, on the matter of intransigence, which was really what they were talking about. He saw himself some forty years earlier and was both glad of his advancing age and despairing of what the next forty years would bring to others. What Ichiro said was true, of course, there was an aspect of the ridiculous in studying kendo and the other martial
arts, in keeping oneself constantly ready for the kind of warfare that had died out centuries ago. He satisfied himself with sighing in recognition of that truth, however, before finally asking what he most wanted to know.

  “Why did you come with us, Ichiro? Why did you abandon Ueno? Don’t get me wrong, I wanted you to do it, I hoped that you would, but if it had been me I think my sense of duty would have made me stick it out where I was. Give me your reasons in words I can understand, so I can stop playing with it in my mind.”

  To ask such a question made Kyuzo feel contemptible, for to welcome a young man and then immediately suspect his motivations seemed small-minded. But the idea that a samurai could do such a thing, never mind the reasons, and never mind, also, that the conflict seemed over now, went against all of his instincts. He was glad to see that Ichiro did not wait long before answering.

  “As you know, because of the Great Council’s initial censure of Lord Abe, Ueno’s force could not be made up of government samurai. But he easily found great numbers of soldiers anyway. He found some of us at Nihonbashi and others, like me, at the Sumida River ferry landing in Asakusa. He wanted only twenty men but he could have had two hundred, so numerous were those who were willing to work for anyone with cash to pay them for their swords.”

  Kyuzo’s question wasn’t satisfactorily answered but he kept disappointment at bay by shaking the now empty teapot and looked off toward the castle, as if he expected to see a maid coming toward them with more. There was, in fact, someone emerging from the castle, but it wasn’t a maid.

  “So he hired us by lottery as a way, I guess, of entertaining himself,” Ichiro continued. “He gave us each a number and we drew lots. He took us irrespective of our abilities or the good or bad qualities of our characters, not even asking our names or, as you have just done, sir, caring where we came from. I was Number 24 in the beginning and continued to be Number 24 until the other unfortunate night. Had he hired Ichiro then Ichiro would have given him his life, never mind whether the cause for which he gave it was right or wrong, but Number 24 felt no such compunction. Even now I don’t think he knows that Number 24 has defected, unless he was informed of it by those two nefarious others, Numbers in and 75.”

  Ichiro laughed, relieved to have spoken, and then grimly smiled, for now Kyuzo was more than satisfied. While it appalled him to hear such a story—samurai hired by number!—at the same time it gave him a sharper sense of Ueno and made him doubly glad that the conflict was over, for a man who hired samurai by lots would not care how many he buried that way.

  “Well, here we will call you Ichiro,” he told the young man. He might have said more, he might have stood with Ichiro, pacing him through the movements of his too-quick sword thrust from the other night, but Tsune herself had come out of the castle, and she walked across the grounds calling his name.

  “We are summoned to Lord Okubo’s chambers,” she said, “to hear him speak on the matter of the foreigner’s injuries and on what he has decided that Manjiro should do now.”

  She kept any hint of irony out of her voice, and for his part Kyuzo tried to look at her as if she were someone else coming to get him, one of Lord Okubo’s granddaughters, perhaps, betrothed and unavailable, or even truly a maid. When he stood Ichiro stood also, not because he thought he was included in Lord Okubo’s summons, but because his name had been returned to him, and with it a renewed sense of protocol.

  Tsune turned back toward the castle before Kyuzo got to her, and Ichiro watched them until they reached the stone stairs. He then strolled off toward that half-made garden.

  He was young and pretended that he had been called too, not by Tsune but by Keiko.

  31.

  An Earlier Walker than His Uncle

  THOUGH THE OTHERS were pleased, even somewhat giddy, with how things had turned out, Einosuke was not so quick to forgive his brother. He skipped his fathers meeting on the subject entirely—an unprecedented act of protest in itself—and the following morning, the third after Ned Clark’s wounding, went out to his garden early again, with Masako this time, who ran from the castle to help him when she saw him getting his rakes. She stepped on top of Keiko’s cordon, rubbing it into the ground with both her feet. She had faith that she could end her father’s grouchiness better than anyone else.

  “I think we will need a wall,” she told her father, “to give our new garden the necessary privacy. Then we can come inside of it and be as gloomy as we want and no one will even notice. We can pout and rage in here, then rake everything nicely again before we come out. How would that be, Father?”

  It was raining again and a group of laborers from the pebble village were slumped nearby, using their empty A-frames for umbrellas. Einosuke gave his younger daughter a grim-faced smile, but went on with his work, would not be drawn in by her teasing, so Masako gave up, and did what she liked best to do anyway. She sat down next to the laborers to ask if they had seen any three-legged frogs. She loved talking to anyone about nature’s aberrations, and workers were more observant than lords.

  ABOUT AN HOUR LATER, when his garden site was leveled, the problems of drainage corrected, and Einosuke was instructing the laborers concerning the last remaining unpebbled corner, Lord Okubo, Manjiro, Kyuzo, Ichiro, and the wounded American minstrel all came riding around the side of the castle, heading for a village of artisans, to the shop of someone named Denzaimon, a well-known prosthetics maker. It was Lord Okubo’s idea, announced at the meeting Einosuke hadn’t attended, that when Ned was finally returned to his ship, there should be some small evidence, at least, that they had done what they could to repair the irreparable damage. The village was only a thirty-minute trip up the lowest mountain road, but the American was ensconced in a palanquin, while the others surrounded it on horseback. Tsune and Keiko were going, too, in open sedan chairs, so the whole event might double as a family outing, a reunion of sorts. They were dressed demurely with their heads covered and holding fans below their eyes, the two beautiful women, and looked across the courtyard at their solitary brother-in-law and father. The other American would stay at the castle, so that if there was trouble on the road, one of them, at least, would not be put in the way of Ueno’s sword.

  Einosuke, tired and sweating among the laborers, leaned on his rake in order to watch them pass. The evening before he had had a short conversation with his father, in which Lord Okubo had repeated what he’d told the others at the meeting, that he was moved to pity by the thought of a man, even an unknowable foreigner, having to live his life without a nose. He thanked Einosuke for his long years of service in Edo, told him he understood the nature of his work in the garden, and also that he was satisfied with Einosuke’s preparation, the much harder work he had done, to get ready to succeed him as the fiefdom’s lord. They would both, he let it be known, find a way of properly admonishing Manjiro once the Americans were actually back on their ships and the trouble was truly over. Manjiro’s engagement to Tsune, it now appeared, would be announced soon, also, in a letter from Lord Tokugawa.

  At just about the time that Fumiko, herself struggling under all these family upheavals but also under the secret weight she bore, came from the castle with tea for Einosuke and Masako, the gate opened and the party moved out. Manjiro, however, sorely sorry for Einosuke’s continued distance from him, waited until everyone else was gone and then dismounted and walked toward his brother. Einosuke knew that he could not stay angry forever, that some kind of mending was in order—that, of course, had been the point his father was trying to make last night—but he couldn’t keep the pain he felt from showing in his eyes. Manjiro had survived this incredible folly of his, as always, through the good auspices of others and through pure dumb luck. And so when Manjiro said good morning he barely nodded.

  “We wont be gone long,” Manjiro said. “Father thinks if we try to fix the unfixable, the mendable things will take care of themselves.”

  He looked at his brother keenly, hoping for some sign.

  “I am
told more rain will come by midday,” Einosuke said.

  Fumiko had brought only two teacups, and as she filled one for each of the brothers she was reminded of the political arguments they had had before their father came to Edo, how easy that all seemed now, and how long ago. She touched her husbands sleeve so that he might try, at least, not to start another argument now.

  “I’ve made such grave mistakes,” Manjiro said. “I know I have been thoughtless, Einosuke, that I am an unworthy brother and son. I hope you can believe that I will be more serious as a married man.”

  He disliked having to say such words with Tsune, quite miraculously, at the center of them. Einosuke, however, seemed to accept the words for what they were, and replied with this small offering. “You have been wrong, but unworthiness is not in your character. And I wish upon you a marriage that will do for you what mine has done for me.”

  “A more cautious approach from here on out,” said Manjiro. “I know that is the lesson you have been trying to teach me since I was a boy.”

  But Einosuke waved further conversation away. That Manjiro would never learn what he had been trying to teach him was the lesson Einosuke, himself, had learned too well. “Others can see the honor in what you did,” he said. “To others you have become like Kambei. I am not unhappy to see that our father is among them.”

  “I hold your good opinion above those of others,” Manjiro answered, “even Father’s.”

  But then he strode off toward the open gate, and got back on his horse, fearing he had said too much.

  BECAUSE THE OTHERS were gone and the great weight of the family’s shame had been so suddenly and unexpectedly lifted, Fumiko meant to work beside her husband for the rest of the day, as she had often done in Edo. By doing so she expected to reinvest herself as a dutiful and single-minded wife. What was a dream, after all, but the random wanderings of an undisciplined mind? And what dreamer, when she awoke, did anything but get on with her ordinary life? A child might be forgiven her desire for romantic love, but not a mother of three, some eighteen years after her miai, her arranged and successful marriage.