Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show

by Richard Wiley

  So it was that while once Lord Abe threatened the foreigners’ lives, now it was they who were doing it, this pitiable father and son. Oddly, it was that very irony that seemed to provide some measure of relief, giving both men the will to go and rest for a few hours; to agree without speaking about it that, for these next few days at least, they would put their despair aside, stay alive in the world, and concentrate on that sweetest of all man’s follies: Revenge.

  38.

  A Fetish without Many Followers

  THE FISH SELLER’S SON back in Edo had had a missing thumb. That was why O-bata had been drawn to him.

  Before his accident if O-bata had thought of him at all it was as a gross kind of fellow, overly leering and loud, but when she saw him after his accident he was quiet, sitting on a stool in front of his father’s empty stall.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she had asked him. “Are you closed?”

  He looked up and slowly pulled the hand with the missing thumb into the air between them. His thumb was gone, not just to its first or second joint, but all the way to his wrist, and it still bore the craggy redness of something sore. He was in a foul mood, lonely and depressed, and meant to send O-bata running by showing her his scars. But instead of being repulsed, she was moved to a surprising sympathy by his misfortune. She knew it was abnormal, a fetish without many followers, but a fair amount of ardor rose within her as soon as she saw it.

  And when she felt that ardor rise again, upon being assigned the job of caring for the two Americans, while the family was embroiled in its tragedy, she did not deny it. Rather, as she watched Ned’s new wooden nose sway in front of her one evening—Ace had gone for a walk in the woods, working out his own sense of how he ought to behave from then on—she let him see her in her bath yukata, her body still wet and her hair undone. Her nipples showed right through the fabric, as if she didn’t have a fabric on. She spoke to him, saying, “Everyone’s sad. My mistress and her daughters will never be the same again, and the baby will never know his father. Don’t you think there is too much misfortune in this world of ours?”

  “It don’t hurt a bit,” said Ned. “As I was tryin’ to tell Mangy before all this new bad stuff happened, I keep waitin’ for the pain, but it just won’t come.”

  He took one hand, off the stick to which his new nose was glued and pointed behind it, at the spot O-bata was drawn to, and when she came over to touch his ruined face he let his prosthesis fall.

  “What’s this?” he asked. “Some newfangled kind of Japanese hospitality?”

  O-bata took him into her room and closed the door. “I like my men wounded,” she said. “Don’t ask me why.”

  She smiled, for in truth she had hardly ever spoken to a man before, let alone uttered anything so provocative. But she seemed to know that with Ned she could say whatever she pleased because he didn’t understand. Unlike Fumiko with Ace, she had no sense of intuition, not much sense that they understood each other, at all. She only knew that Ned was someone who would let her talk. Maybe that’s what she’d been waiting for.

  “Hana,” she told him, rubbing the nose on the end of his stick. “Hana is what you don’t have anymore.”

  “Angelface,” said Ned. “I forget the word for ‘angel,’ but face is ‘cow.’ You got the ‘cow’ of an angel, just like my old wife.”

  And with that, though a thick cloud of mourning filled all the other rooms of the castle, there was a small amount of light in the maids’ quarters, a pinprick for Ned, a shaft for O-bata.

  Ace understood and stayed away from them, walking and thinking about Fumiko.

  He felt an abiding sympathy for Ned, who, he remembered, had only come ashore to please him, while he, Ace, had known in his bones that everything he’d done so far had led him here, that his life’s true purpose resided on these shores.

  He touched his face where Fumiko had touched it, and even closed his eyes, but try as he might he could not recapture the look she had had when she’d left him, and had no idea what she felt about things now that her husband was dead.

  He thought about it and thought about it, and walked so quietly through the forest that the frogs didn’t stop singing when he arrived at the marsh.

  Or even when he climbed upon Masako’s sumo wrestler to think some more.

  PART THREE

  SHIMODA

  39.

  Keiki and the Planting, Ueno and the River Trout

  MORE THAN A WEEK went by—eight days—before Lord Okubo opened the gate of Odawara Castle again, passing through it with his hurt and angry family, and during that time most of the one thousand or so houses in Shimoda, at the end of the Izu Peninsula, were conscripted by Edo government officials. Regular residents had to use either single rooms at the backs of their homes, or go out of town altogether, into the surrounding villages.

  Shimoda’s official buildings and Buddhist temples were also taken over as various headquarters. Its two main streets, which curved around the bay, had been made up festively, as if the arrival of the American fleet were something to be celebrated, but because the Americans would soon be free to roam those streets, something they had not been allowed to do in Edo, there was a good deal of consternation behind the façade. Would they act wildly, slurping saké and staggering when they walked, like unruly ronin, or would they be even more frightening than that, trudging slowly and chanting behind the forbidden sign of Christianity? Shimoda, along with Hakodate farther south, was to be an open port, but what would it mean, in terms of daily life, when such a thing became a reality?

  This was the atmosphere into which Keiki came, down from Edo and into the fray. Tsune had written him faithfully, describing each of the incidents that befell the Okubo family, and he had come to Shimoda not only to help stop further fighting—it was he who had invented the clever Kambei posters, after all, plunging Manjiro into heroic national prominence—but also to deliver the letter from his father, at long last proposing marriage between Tsune and Manjiro. His father and he both believed that rage was most easily battled with love, and wanted, at any cost, to prevent more strife between the Okubo clan and Ueno. Things in Edo were healing now, and should heal down here, among these outcast family members, as well.

  It was true that the treaty had been signed, but there were still details to be hammered out, and Ryosenji Temple, the official meeting place of the new contingent of Japanese negotiators and Commodore Perry’s soon-to-arrive party of rain-soaked naval officers. It was there that Keiki had reserved rooms, and there, also, where he was to meet the family’s emissary—Kyuzo of all people—who would receive his father’s letter in the name of the grieving Lord Okubo.

  Keiki arrived at the temple without fanfare and was shown to his rooms in the back. He hung up his spare kimono and arranged his father’s letter on a writing table, but he didn’t like the darkness of the room and soon stepped out to its surrounding walkway again, to sit in a little patch of sunlight and think about everything once more.

  As he did so he absently watched one of the temple’s old monks, oblivious to the machinations of the outside world, preparing his springtime vegetable garden. The monk bent and spiked his hoe into the dirt, dragging it along its furrow, the sleeve of his yukata tied back with strands of hemp rope. The temple’s soil, Keiki knew, was like Japan itself, far too old for delicate vegetables, far too ready to surrender to the encroaching loam. But this year’s early rain seemed to have made the monk determined to succeed with tomatoes, for resting in the shade near where Keiki sat were two dozen crack-bottomed teacups, each holding a sprouted tomato plant, ten inches tall. It was a pleasant thing for Keiki to see and he smiled. Here was the optimism that he wished he could instill in everyone, from his father back in Edo, to the members of the Great Council, even to the grief-stricken Okubos. And if he ever gained a position of power this was what he would insist upon. What a good idea it was—planting with the fullness of one’s heart, even in the face of poor soil!

  When his garden w
as ready and the monk retrieved his tomato sprouts he did not acknowledge Keiki, but Keiki, brimming by then with positive thoughts, acknowledged and startled him, by jumping down off the walkway and offering to help with the planting. He followed the monk back to the garden and knelt beside him and picked up a trowel. Work was more important than thought, he thought, action a better tonic than moroseness! That was another lesson he would impart, if he ever gained power in Japan.

  The monk had a cheap bottle of saké on the ground next to him, and each time he dug a hole for a tomato plant he poured a little in, as a kind of blessing. Keiki soon usurped the job of taking a plant from its crack-bottomed teacup and sliding it into the hole on top of the saké, and he did so with such exuberance that the monk finally relented a little, accepting him. It did surprise Keiki when the monk took a sip of the saké, and handed him the bottle, but the planting went quickly anyway; a trowel full of dirt out, a drop of saké in, a sprouted tomato placed into the ground, and two men drinking from the bottle.

  After twenty-four such sips, Keiki gained a new appreciation for the darkness of his rooms and went back inside to nap. He knew nothing, of course, of Manjiro’s earlier drunk-monk imitation on the road outside of Odawara, or that Ned Clark’s nose has also resided in a teacup.

  And even if he had known it would not have made an impression on him, for Keiki wasn’t a believer in omens.

  MEANWHILE, HOWEVER, at an inn not very far away and afflicted with a deep belief in omens, Ueno reread the letter he had received from Lord Okubo, and severely berated himself for having entrusted Einosuke’s head to those two nameless ronin, the idiots who had procured Ned’s nose. Now where was it? Now how would he get it back?

  Choosing his samurai by lot had been a stupid idea in the first place, for a third of them had gotten lost in mountains, while others, like Ichiro, had defected, and still more had succumbed to laziness and drink. He had sent that last group remaining loyal to him after the two, but had little hope that they would be successful. He was confident that Lord Okubo had no idea that he, Ueno, was personally responsible for Einosuke’s death—in his experience peasants could rarely tell one samurai from another—but that, too, had been an unfortunate mistake, a bad omen.

  The inn where Ueno stayed was next to the tiny Hiraname River, and as he walked in its summer mikan orchard he not only carried Lord Okubo’s letter, but also a few of Keiki’s “Kambei” posters, brought to him the night before by an aide. At the edge of the orchard was a Shinto shrine, and when Ueno came under the cover of its arch, to escape the beginnings of another storm, he unrolled the posters. They were disquieting things and had infuriated Lord Abe, but he couldn’t help thinking they were masterfully done. The first depicted Manjiro putting the Americans into palanquins with small U.S. flags on their sides, Lord Abe in the background wringing his hands. “Just when we need him, here comes Kambei, again,” the script beside it read.

  The next three posters were equally irritating, with Manjiro the hero of their actions, but the last one showed Ueno himself, cowering like a peasant before an angry Lord Abe, while Manjiro and the two Americans danced away from them in monk’s robes. The caption had Ueno looking pitifully up at Lord Abe and saying, “I guess the experiment of America has failed.”

  And now Lord Abe had been censured and he, Ueno, had been left to clear up the mess on his own. In that way he felt a sort of affinity with Manjiro—the players continuing to act after the play was over and the directors had gone home. That is what he had wanted to tell Einosuke at the beach that day. That is what he would have told him had he not been so rude. And now what he needed most of all was a change of luck, a good omen.

  Ueno rolled the posters up again, threw them into a nearby puddle, then turned to walk along the evenly spaced rows of the mikan orchard. Rain had soaked his back and shoulders as he’d been standing there, so he paced the entire length of the orchard as fast as he could, in an effort to rid himself of the frustration he felt.

  On the orchard’s far side was the bank of the Hiraname River, particularly narrow where it ran past the inn, and on a whim Ueno decided to wade across it, to do it immediately, to defeat this little river as he soon would those other remaining actors in this drama they were continuing to effect. If he could do that successfully, maybe his luck would change

  He slipped off his geta, set them on a rock, and stepped into the water’s flow. He knew the river would be icy cold, the shock of it, in fact, was what he wanted most, but he had not expected it to be so powerful, and he nearly fell over. He put his hands onto a protruding rock but when he righted himself his feet were far apart and he no longer looked elegant. Rather, he looked like a crab on the shore, and that is how he moved to the river’s middle, determined but ungainly, where he found a place to stand again, on the top of a forked tree branch, lodged amongst the stones.

  Ueno was soaked and freezing and furious, but did not look to ward the inn, did not succumb to his desire to see if his clumsy efforts had been observed by anyone. Instead, he stared into the water as it back-eddied below him, looking deep into the gray-blue darkness for a sign. He could see his toes, curled around the blond forks of wood, and there, below them, something else. Yes, yes, he could also suddenly see the back of a brown river trout, its gill-quiver hardly visible above the slow and stabilizing movement of its tail.

  Ueno pulled his short sword from its soaked and ruined scabbard and sent it into the river, not stopping until most of its shiny blade had yielded to the dullness of the water. This gave him true pleasure and now he did look up, not to see who might be watching him, but to glance along the rows of orderly mikan trees, along the tight-lipped scrutiny of that orchard. This was his sign. It was not oneness with nature that made man what he was, but dominance and power over it, that was the unlearned lesson, the central failure exhibited by so many of his contemporaries, by these weak and hapless lords: Lord Abe! Lord Tokugawa! Every last one. If only he could spear this trout he would be sure of his place, his victory in the coming negotiations!

  He lowered his blade a few more centimeters, until it came directly over the dorsal fin of the trout. He knew, of course, that he would have just one chance, but that knowledge made his breathing easier, wiped the perennial grimace from his face, and maximized his control. He moved his blade closer, then stabbed without warning, plunging it down to a point far beyond the trout’s head, ten centimeters into the riverbed, his hands and arms frothing the water, his voice cracking like a gunshot through the air.

  “Dekita! Dekita! I got it! I got it!”

  The trout’s body was pinned so well that when Ueno stood up and pointed his blade at the brooding and unimpressed sky, it slid all the way down to his hand guard, with thin red lines of blood making other little rivers across the back of his arms. Yes! Yes! One at a time, this is how he would get them, this was how he would seek his own revenge, not on the Americans, particularly, but on all these Japanese weaklings who had not stayed the course! Oh what a game it was, the samurai’s purest motivation alive again, victory for the sake of victory alone!

  If only he had troops he knew by name, and could rely on.

  40.

  The Wind and Intransigence

  UNLIKE KEIKI, who had come down from Edo in a large and excellent navel vessel, Kyuzo, accompanied by his new apprentice, Ichiro, had traveled to Shimoda in a terrible open boat and ridden ashore in a barge with a dozen bedraggled and penniless samurai. There were other boats by the hundreds on the bay around them, small ones and large ones crowded with curious onlookers. The American fleet stood three hundred feet off shore, anchored with a majesty more likely to be attached to a visiting city—Ned’s image had been right!—than to any of the ships the Japanese were used to seeing.

  Before leaving Odawara Kyuzo had had a short meeting with Lord Okubo, and an even shorter one with his beloved Tsune. Lord Okubo had told him that at all costs he must appear business-like, even cordial, to Ueno should he find him. He should do nothing to e
xact revenge in the Okubo family name, but only look about smartly and collect information that might be helpful to them in the coming fight. And Tsune had told him that he should go immediately to Rendaiji Temple, find Keiki and retrieve that marriage proposal, which might, she believed, still solve everything.

  It was late afternoon when they arrived, and men with government crests on their robes chatted and laughed, going in and out of bars and greeting each other far more cordially than they ever would have done in Edo.

  “It’s a throwback to the old days,” Kyuzo said. “Would you look at these guys? They act like everyone in Japan is fully employed, like nothing’s changed since the days of Tokugawa Ieyasu.”

  They had left the waterfront and were standing at the intersection of two streets, under brightly colored banners. The same wind that had battered their boat on its way down from Odawara was snapping the banners, making sounds like small-calibre pistol shots. Both men were hungry and would not have refused a few cups of saké to settle their stomachs, but Ichiro’s hair had come undone during the voyage and he wanted to step in somewhere first and have it combed, so he wouldn’t have to greet Keiki looking bad. His hair was thick and full, with no part of his head shaved, as was the fashion. Kyuzo’s hair, by contrast, had thinned over the years, yet somehow rode the wind as if it were sculpted out of stone. He cuffed Ichiro’s cheek and said, “I don’t know why we have such difficult styles. When you first saw the Americans did you not notice the efficient shortness of their hair? That’s what I will do if I survive this current trouble. Wear an American hair style!”

  Ichiro laughed but kept his eye out for a barber’s sign and, luckily enough, found one before Kyuzo could locate a noodle shop. “It will only take a minute,” he said.