Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show

by Richard Wiley

  Kyuzo, who for some reason counted barbering among the merchant endeavors he did not quite approve of, nodded but said he would wait outside. The wind wasn’t pushing him anymore, yet across the street he noticed others struggling along one way or another, either leaning into it or trying to keep it from making them run. He saw that he was standing in the lee of two low walls, in a lull like a ship sometimes finds in the trough of a wave. When he put his hand up he could feel his fingers reenter the wind and begin to wiggle of their own accord, like his father’s had during the last few days of his life. He pulled his hand down to make his fingers stop and up again to make them wiggle, down and up twice more. He nodded, as if some previously muddled thought had finally come clear, something he had intended to tell Ichiro during their talk at Odawara Castle, and opened the door to the barbershop.

  “Listen, Ichiro,” he said, “there is little we can do about anything. I may be able to defeat you because I am a better swordsman, just as you may be able to cut down another, but that means nothing because the scale we are using, the scope of our thinking, is too small. Let me try to cut this wind out here and it will simply blow against the sharpness of my sword and go around. These fools walking across the street are helpless because they don’t have a wall.”

  Ichiro wasn’t alone in the barbershop. Two mid-level bureaucrats were there too, and he was just then sitting down to get his hair combed. Kyuzo’s face in the doorway, the poor condition of his clothing, plus the outright oddness of his comment, all served to make the others wary. No one spoke, however, until the barber asked him to close the door.

  “Come in if you like,” he said, “but that wind you mentioned is capricious and might decide to blow dirt into my store.”

  The bureaucrats laughed nervously for they knew from experience that masterless samurai could be as capricious as any wind, and they saw no crests on Kyuzo’s clothing that would indicate his attachment to anyone.

  “I’m making a serious point,” Kyuzo said, but he did come in and close the door. The barber had Ichiro’s hair out of its ties and hanging down to his shoulders. The barber was about to tell him that combing it without first giving it a much-needed wash was a waste of time, but Kyuzo’s entrance made him forget to say it.

  The bureaucrats, both of whom had finished, were simply hanging around. They had come into the barbershop because they were expected to perform official duties first thing in the morning, and they were a little drunk, having just departed a party. One of the bureaucrats lived in Shimoda and was in charge of rice taxation on local peasants, while the other, who was his cousin, had the duty of vetting that taxation on behalf of the Shogunate. The happy coincidence of their employment meant that they were able to meet whenever the vetting cousin came from Edo. A second happy coincidence was that this time they would have the pleasure of observing the official arrival of the Americans.

  What they should have done was simply excuse themselves and go home, but something he heard in the barber’s tone when telling Kyuzo to close his door emboldened the bureaucrat from Edo, who, as too often happened, had been looking for a way to show off his superior sophistication to his cousin. He was wearing a sword, this Edo man, but in his case it was strictly ornamental. He put a hand on his cousin’s arm, to properly get his attention, before walking straight up to Kyuzo.

  “A man should speak sensibly,” he said, “and what you said just now made no sense at all.”

  He used a rude form of speech, but Kyuzo was trying to hold onto his point about the wind and didn’t hear it.

  “Wait a minute,” he answered, gesturing vaguely toward the bureaucrat, “I want to remember what I was going to say to this young man.”

  The bureaucrat looked over his shoulder, made a face at everyone, and said, “Maybe you were going to offer to cut his hair with your sword.”

  It was a boorish kind of comment, embarrassing to his cousin and not very clever as an insult, and he had used rude speech a second time, no doubt because he had gotten away with it in the first place. He looked at his cousin as if to say, “See how times have changed? We often act with such impunity in Edo.”

  Ichiro sat up and the barber stepped back out of his way, but the bureaucrat’s voice was no more than an irritating fly buzz to Kyuzo, who, though he had lost a little speed over the years, still had excellent powers of concentration.

  “Ichiro,” he said. “Can you imagine cutting the wind with your sword? You cannot imagine, can you, that such a thing could possibly have any value?”

  He looked up to hear Ichiro’s answer, but the bureaucrat stood between them.

  “I can imagine cutting wind with my ass,” he said. “Can you imagine that?”

  “What?” Kyuzo asked. “I beg your pardon?”

  Even then, however, he was not so much offended as surprised. He had tried to look nondescript in order to do the work Lord Okubo had assigned him, but he glanced down at himself to see if maybe his bad dress and generally humble appearance were even worse than he thought. His kimono was brown and without markings, his leggings dirty and wet, yet otherwise he did not think he looked so disgraceful as to spawn words of outright insult.

  “Say it again, sir,” he told the bureaucrat, “I’m not sure I heard you right.”

  He spoke politely and with his forehead furrowed, as if he really did believe the fault could only reside with himself.

  The Shimoda cousin took a step forward and bowed. “It was just a poor joke, sir,” he said, “a play on words that didn’t quite work out.”

  Had Kyuzo known the men were cousins, one local and the other an Edo-ite, he might have deduced everything and stepped aside. And even as it was he remembered that he was supposed to be circumspect, that his and Ichiro’s mission to gather information would not be furthered by a public fight. But the more he looked into the Edo bureaucrat’s eyes, the less inclined he was to pretend it had all been a misunderstanding.

  “Please…” the barber started to say, but everyone knew the next move was Kyuzo’s.

  “I was thinking about man’s true weakness in the face of the larger elements,” he told his opponent. “The wind was my example but it could as easily have been earth or fire or water. Or it might have been something more intrinsically human like love for a beautiful woman or intransigence. Anyway, however obvious my observation might be to an established man like yourself, I wanted to point out to Ichiro here, while he is still young enough to care for such things, just how insubstantial we are in the face of real power.”

  His voice was soft and his words had the odd quality of acceding to and enjoining the Edo bureaucrat at the same time. That is, the man could take it as an explanation or a lesson, the first if he was dead-hearted enough to believe his bluster had cowed Kyuzo, the second if beneath his outer layers of laziness and fat there was still something uncontaminated. Either way Kyuzo seemed to have avoided what he could not allow: an escalation of the argument.

  Everyone saw it except the Edo bureaucrat. Ichiro watched with earnest eyes and the barber nodded, and the Shimoda cousin tried to prompt their leaving by rattling the barbershop door. He even said, “I used to think that everyone wanted success. That each man, whatever his station, wanted to be looked up to by some, while at the same time having a larger pool of others to look down upon. But I don’t believe I think so anymore.”

  Kyuzo bowed at this, and gave the man a smile. The Edo man, however, seemed not only not to have heard his cousin, but to be on the edge of another insult. He opened his mouth with a quickness, at least, that usually meant unthoughtful words would fall out. But then he closed it again and his features seemed to alter.

  “Did you say intransigence?” he asked Kyuzo. “Surely you don’t believe that such things as intransigence are part of nature?”

  Kyuzo nodded. “Societies have natures, and if men make them up then men do, also. A man’s nature is as difficult to change, sometimes, as the flow of any river.”

  Now the Shimoda cousin grasped
the bureaucrat’s arm, and when he felt it he finally understood that in the eyes of this cousin intransigence was one of his great faults. And suddenly, quite as if he’d been caught by a shopkeeper sucking an unpurchased sweet, he felt sorry for it. It wasn’t the first time he had felt this way, too much drink often made him maudlin, but he could not remember when such feelings had struck him simply by listening to the words of some badly dressed stranger, some nameless old man. And, oh yes, the words of his cousin, as well.

  “Let’s go, Kiku,” he told his cousin. “Let’s go back to your house.”

  His voice was defeated, but his cousin was delighted by it and bowed his thanks to Kyuzo. Kiku! Chrysanthemum! It was the first time the Edo cousin had called him by his childhood nickname in a decade and a half.

  When they were gone the barber turned back to Ichiro’s hair, which was in tangles and had to be wetted and combed out again before it could be put into its topknot. So Kyuzo followed the men out into the street to stand between those two walls again and watch them go. Kiku’s arm was across his cousin’s shoulder and both men bent forward, though the wind had lessened and another drizzly rain had begun.

  The nearby businesses were shutting down, their outside lanterns dimmed, but the bars and noodle shops were thriving. Kyuzo could hear doors opening and closing, laughter modulated by it like the waves on the beach below. It was the beginning of an evening of storytelling and gaiety. “The American ships are here,” he heard someone say, “like giant black boulders, right out there in the harbor!”

  He thought of the lines given him in Edo recently by his dead father’s ghost, “In the rain near Nijo Castle, under the falling wisteria,” and suddenly he wanted to take part in the festivities, to have one last joyous evening among strangers, before the trouble started again and those lines came home to roost.

  And so, with that in mind, and with a sense of magnanimity as well, he took the barber’s lantern from its place by the door, killed its flame with his fingers, and went back inside to hurry Ichiro along.

  “The bars are filling fast,” he said, “let’s go. The three of us. Now is not a time to think about class. Men of various backgrounds must learn to get along!”

  The barber smiled at that, said he knew the best bars in Shimoda, not only those with the prettiest geisha, but also with the best singers, and Ichiro was happy for he believed what Kyuzo, in his deepest heart, even though he had just paid lip service to it, did not; that something had to change in this ridiculous and unnecessary warrior class to which they both belonged. Maybe by turning samurai into merchants and businessmen, by making them innkeepers and traders, scholars and shipping executives, builders and scientists and yes, even barbers, maybe by giving up something that had been begging to be given up for more than two hundred years, they could still somehow save their country from these invaders!

  Maybe so. For the moment, however, all such a mood accomplished was a night of happy revelry, the result of which was that they fell into drunken slumber at the barber’s house, and didn’t arrive at the temple where Keiki awaited them, himself hung over from the cheap planting wine, until the middle of the following afternoon.

  41.

  Hide This in Your Wagon

  CLEANERS CAME OUT at sunrise the next morning, brooms pulling debris from its hiding places, fingers digging bits of sodden-colored papers from between the cobblestones, peasants taking advantage of the lull in the rain to silently move up the town’s narrow and empty roads.

  Oh, it had been a party! Drunks and geisha had warbled until just a couple of hours prior to that sunrise, plunging wildly into stories of better times and staggering outside to hurl insults at Perry’s ships with their sleeping cargo of foreign invaders. A cadre of ronin had burst from one geisha bar and tried to commandeer a fishing boat, ready to sail out and board the nearest American vessel, while in another a member of Lord Hayashi’s new official negotiating team had torn a geisha’s clothing from her, in an attempt to dramatize what the Americans would likely do, once they came ashore. He’d exposed himself, the story went, saying, “Look at this, will you look at this? Unlike an American penis it properly fits that purse of yours. Let me show you. Let me show you right now!”

  On the port road itself, in front of a shrine built years earlier to honor sailors lost in a memorable storm, the last of Ueno’s lottery-chosen ronin slept in rumpled clothing—it was they who had tried to commandeer the fishing boat—and on a bar street near them a honey-bucket man walked the narrow pathways, trying not to slop the buckets of human waste that were draped across his shoulders. This man had two sons who waited for him at his wagon, having already finished with the bars and geisha houses assigned to them. His elder son, Manzo, was tending to business, carefully weaving together freshly cut boughs of sappy pine, while his younger son, Momo, swaggered around pretending to be the “Kambei” on the posters they kept seeing, swatting the air with a bamboo stick, as if it were a real sword. The elder son was happy with his lot in life and looked for a peasant girl to marry, while the younger sorely wished that he, too, could be a real samurai, sick with sleep and drink from the previous night’s debauchery.

  “Who knows what I might do if I had the chance?” he kept asking his brother. “And why must heredity always determine things? Are the sons of fishermen truly born to be fishermen, the sons of farmers to be farmers, and are we born to slog this shit around all of our lives? I don’t think so, Manzo. I don’t think so at all!”

  He would have been happy to know that such luminary gentlemen as Kyuzo and Ichiro had been having those same liberal (and drunken) thoughts only a few hours earlier.

  He swung his stick again, perilously close to his brother’s head.

  “Father won’t like it if you wake up these geisha,” Manzo told him. “And you won’t like it if some hung-over samurai comes out and slaps you around. I remember how you whimpered and mewed the last time that happened, Momo. And if you hit me with your stick I’ll make you whimper myself.”

  “Ah Manzo, you have no imagination, and no ambition, either, that’s your problem. If I were a warrior I could wake up any geisha I chose, simply by sliding in beside her, warming her futon!”

  “Be quiet, Momo,” said Manzo, “I mean it now. Look what your nonsense has brought us! Look there, at the bottom of the road!”

  Momo followed his brother’s hand when it held a pine bough up, and sure enough, two actual samurai had come into the street at its lower end, as if summoned by his bravado. They were badly dressed men and rode on the backs of two awful-looking horses, a large pickle jar tied to the first horse’s flank with strands of thick hemp rope.

  “Here comes real trouble, Momo,” Manzo said. “Just act busy. What are they doing here so early? Oh, what bad luck!”

  Momo hid his stick in their wagon and bent as if inspecting the wagon’s wheel, trying to control his fear. Manzo, on the other hand, continued with the weaving of his boughs, looked up at the approaching riders, and smiled.

  “Hey dung men, what’s your secret? How do you keep the flies away?” called one of the filthy samurai. He had ridden up close to the two brothers, pointed at their wagon, and then at his pickle jar, where swarms of iridescent flies carved geometric figures in the wet morning air. The men had the stench of evil upon them. Manzo recognized it by the ease with which it cut through the shit smell.

  “We do it with these,” he politely said, holding up one of his nicely woven pine boughs.

  The samurai who’d spoken was younger and a good deal more frightening than the other one. He stared at the brothers hard, as if trying to discern some insult, a small bit of drool at the corners of his mouth. But his next words were directed at his companion.

  “You should have kept things clean,” he hissed. “You should have washed it like I told you! Washed it and sealed its lid every night!”

  A small bit of urine wet Momo’s thigh, but the older man merely waved his companion’s words away, like he’d no doubt waved away the fl
ies, and climbed down off his horse. “I should have stayed away from the likes of you, from the outset,” he said.

  He looked at Manzo, his voice full of resignation. “Bring me a few of those good-smelling boughs, then. Come on lad, be quick about it.”

  Manzo hurried to oblige but when Momo saw their father emerging from the pathway between the two geisha houses he swallowed his fear, stood up and spoke deliberately, as if he were just then finishing a long explanation.

  “Sappy pine will keep flies away,” he brightly said, “but only after you scrub your jar with citrus oil. Flies don’t like citrus, even fruit flies don’t.”

  As he spoke he looked to gauge his father’s reaction to his fine instructive tone, but when he saw a thin white hand opening the upstairs window of the nearest geisha house his heart turned a somersault, never mind that danger stalked them all. A geisha was looking out at them—looking out at him!—and though she no doubt wished they would be quiet, Momo loved her instantly, and doubled his hatred for the fact that these stinking men could go and drink with her, while he, in this lifetime at least, could not. All he could ever really do, he understood bitterly, was piss his pants and swat the fetid air with his stick!

  “I can do it for you if you like,” said his brother, bowing down before the men. “I have just now woven these new boughs.”

  The older samurai held up a hand and the younger one began to tell him to stay where he was, but Manzo, dulled to the danger as usual, had already stepped beside the pickle jar. Flies lined the jar’s lip and the tails and rumps of both the horses and were in the hair of the two men. Momo thought the flies looked like humble and begging petitioners outside a castle, while Manzo saw them as elegant, like an emergency meeting of metallic-blue lords.

  Their father had stopped when he saw the two samurai, but came forward quickly now, worried that Momo’s unruly mouth had once more got him in trouble.

  “I’m sure he didn’t mean it like it sounded,” he told the two men. Last week’s pine boughs were stretched over his shoulders, where they worked to soften the strain of the overflowing buckets.