Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show

by Richard Wiley

  “I have enough trouble going on living even as it is,” he said. He regretted the answer immediately and began again. “It’s true that I am strong, I guess, if you define the word narrowly, but my kind of strength is so old-fashioned that during these times of rampant change it begins to seem a great deal more like weakness.”

  He was thinking of his talk on intransigence the previous evening, but decided not to mention it to Lord Okubo.

  Two large crows flew into the garden, landing in a tree about half way between the men and the reemerged kittens. Lord Okubo nodded and said, “Change is the real issue, isn’t it? If a man lives long enough he is sure to lose everyone, so maybe it’s a kind of false grief, to overly mourn the passing of a son.”

  Kyuzo loved a philosophical discussion as much as anyone. He knew Confucian doctrine and Zen parables, and had memorized dozens of poems, but when he looked at this wounded old man he understood that this was not a time for philosophy.

  “Those crows,” he said, “do you know why they have come?”

  When he spoke the crows seemed to turn on their perches, looking at him out of crooked heads, just like Lord Okubo.

  “To pluck at the carrion like all thieving scavengers!” shouted the lord. “To reap those benefits which should rightly go to others!”

  His answer made him furious again, and he hissed at the unperturbed crows.

  “Often so,” Kyuzo calmly admitted, “but that is not why they are here just now. They have come, as creatures will, because of the easy pickings. Soon they will fall out of that tree and snatch up one of those kittens.”

  He pointed up the path and gave a dark chuckle. “It is nature turned on its head, for most of the time cats eat birds, that’s why I think it’s interesting.”

  Kyuzo truly did feel sympathy for Lord Okubo. He believed that having a son and losing him was a far worse fate to suffer than his own sad circumstance of never having been a father. So he decided to stop talking about the crows and wait for Manjiro to join them, before turning to what their posture ought to be against Ueno that night. He looked when he heard the doors opening behind them, as if his thoughts might have brought out Manjiro, but it was only a couple of maids, carrying futon.

  Lord Okubo spoke quietly, repeating his refrain about needing to rest and bathe. “What you see before you will subside, I think, if I can only sleep for a few hours. During this last week I’ve done nothing at night save wander the halls of my castle. And I’ve spent my days like the man who suddenly discovers that his country is an island, and stands at the edge of the promontory, blaming the ocean.”

  He did not take his eyes off the crows as he spoke, but his words sounded somewhat sane again and relieved Kyuzo, who turned to dig into the bottom of his satchel.

  “I don’t often mention this,” he whispered, “but fighting insomnia has been the longest-running battle of my life. I always carry a number of excellent potions. Take one.”

  He turned back toward the lord and opened a folded paper, revealing two large mounds of white powder, neatly separated by a thin bamboo divider.

  “Either will work,” he said, “and they have never failed to make me sleep when I take a small amount of both.”

  The smaller of the crows was eyeing them, while the larger had fallen to the ground about ten feet away from the kittens. Kyuzo kept a steady hand while Lord Okubo reached down to get his teacup. He surprised Kyuzo greatly, however, by pouring all of his powder into the remaining half-inch of tea, swirling it twice, and drinking it down. Had there been time, Kyuzo would have told him that on each side of his bamboo divider there was a three-night supply, but as it was he kept quiet.

  Lord Okubo wiped his mouth and stood, silently advancing on the crows, the teacup tucked into the palm of his hand like a stone. The crow that remained in the tree watched him curiously, but the other one began advancing on the unwary kittens, every bit as single-minded as Lord Okubo. Kyuzo got up and slipped his short sword from its scabbard. They could both hear the maids behind them, beating the futon.

  “You take the high one,” said the lord, “I’ll get the impudent little bastard on the ground.”

  Absurd as it was, both men felt that this was an ominous moment, a rehearsal for the evening to come, and full of portent. The odds were against them now, just as they probably would be tonight, and trickery played a role.

  Lord Okubo walked away, careful to rotate his teacup in a manner that would make the crow in the tree continue to watch it, while Kyuzo judged the branch on which it sat to be about eight feet off the ground. The other crow had chosen an angle that mirrored Lord Okubo’s, and, with an equal amount of nonchalance, advanced upon the kittens, all the time looking somewhere else.

  Kyuzo knew the key was in the treed crow. His plan was to appear to be passing beneath the tree and then to fling his sword upward, aiming at its feet. In his youth he had performed similar tricks, in games with other samurai, but now he not only worried about his diminished speed, but also about the available arc in his progressively arthritic shoulder. Had young Ichiro stayed outside, he grimly realized, he would have served Lord Okubo’s purposes far better. Kyuzo kept his eyes on the lord, hoping for a signal, but when the inn’s doors opened again and Keiki came back out, he acted on his own, leaping toward the tree and flinging his sword upward with such vigor that he nearly released it into the sky. He jumped higher than he had in two decades, turned his sword in midair, and sped it along the barren tree branch toward the crow. The crow’s beak fell open, but it sprang into flight an instant too late, and paid a price for its slowness, by leaving its legs and feet behind. They clung to the branch for a second, then swung around in opposite directions to dangle and fall like a fortune-teller’s sticks, landing with implicit softness on the ground.

  The second crow, still watching everything, easily dodged the teacup, which Lord Okubo had thrown at the instant of Kyuzo’s attack, but Keiki’s gasp, and subsequent dash into the yard, so confused the second crow that it lost its sense of the best escape route. It couldn’t fly straight up because there were branches above its head, so it hopped and then flew toward the kittens in the grass. Lord Okubo chased it, fearful beyond reason that it might still grab a kitten as it passed, when the mother cat, whom no one had noticed, leapt from nowhere, extended her long front claws, and pulled the ascending crow back down. She tore into it quickly, breaking its neck with her jaws and tearing its nearest wing in half.

  Lord Okubo stopped and looked about him, first at Keiki, then at Kyuzo, who had come down badly and reinjured his toe, but when Keiki took his arm and walked him over to the dead crow he felt little exultation, little save those triple doses of two sleeping powders, which were pulsing through his bloodstream by then, like six tired men in a boat.

  “It will be fine,” he told Lord Tokugawa’s son. “After all it will be Ueno, not us, who will succumb.” He yawned and asked, “Is our appointment not set for six o’clock?”

  “It is, sir,” said Keiki, who had heard as much inside.

  This was the beginning of a speech he had prepared about his willingness to do anything in his power to help, but Lord Okubo, who still thought he was the innkeeper, stopped him.

  “Six is too early,” he said. “Wake me at six, but send a runner to reschedule. Make our appointment for eight and, come to think of it, do not awaken me until seven.”

  Keiki might have set the record straight, saying that he was not the innkeeper, but a cautionary glance from Kyuzo made him hold his tongue. Lord Okubo still looked horrible, red-eyed and unbathed, but otherwise it was as if he had been exorcised, saved from his continued downward spiral for another moment, at least, by their surprising victory over the crows.

  “What do you think is the proper order,” he asked Keiki, “to bathe before sleeping or to sleep before taking one’s bath? I had a running argument about that question, years ago, with my wife.”

  “Bathe before sleeping,” Keiki said, taking the old lord’s arm. “It is
the only way you can truly enjoy both.”

  As they walked past Kyuzo, however, who was on the bench again rewrapping his toe, Lord Okubo said, “I think I will sleep first, and rid myself of this stench when I wake up.”

  When they were gone Kyuzo stood and slapped the dust from his clothing and tried to find the crow’s legs on the ground. He believed in omens and, though he was as happy with the victory over the crows as Lord Okubo, felt sure that he would be able to read a further hidden message in the way the legs had configured themselves.

  The legs were easy to find, but when he bent to examine them he saw that they looked like nothing so much as the scattered twigs that surrounded them, the feet at their ends already atrophied, toes curled up like withered leaves, with no message in them at all.

  He didn’t like that and stood again, ready to join the others. But to satisfy himself that the storm, at least, would not return for a while, he glanced up at the late afternoon sky. And there he saw that first crow again, wings spread wide, staring down at him and circling, now and forever trapped in flight. Never mind the feet and legs, here was his message, his omen: that soon those circling about him, winding more deeply into anger and grief and revenge, were going to have to find a way to land.

  Who knew whether there was more truth in this omen of the crows, or in Ueno’s experience with the river trout?

  43.

  I Have Not, Particularly, Saved Myself

  “DO YOU KNOW the Bunraku puppet story Shinju, ten no Amijima?” Tsune asked Manjiro. “The one where the lovers die at the end, lying head to toe on the floor of the forest? You must remember it. The woman’s hair is spread out like a fan.”

  They were in an upstairs room of the inn, where they had been since their arrival, unavailable even to someone like Keiki, and two doors away from the now soundly sleeping Lord Okubo. There was a low table between them, empty but for two upside down teacups. Tsune was in earnest and had mentioned the famous double suicide drama because implicit in her question was an offer. Manjiro, however, was put off by it. He knew Keiki was in the inn, knew they must both go speak with him sooner or later, but more than that, did she think she could cajole him by this tactic, make him reconsider the manner in which he would fulfill his obligations, by threatening to join him in his death? His love for her had blinded him before, but no longer.

  “That was a play,” he said, “and the players only puppets. There wasn’t any real blood, and no danger, I think, to the lives of the puppeteers.”

  Tsune, herself a puppeteer of inordinate capabilities, had insisted after a week of silent suffering that she be allowed to hear directly from him whatever he had to say concerning her own culpability in the death of his brother. That was why she had come to his room and now, as she tried to delve into the deepest intentions of his heart, he was cold toward her.

  She placed her fingers upon the nearest teacup and said, “Of course you know that responsibility for Einosuke’s death rests first with those who killed him.”

  “Yes,” he answered, “and they will pay first. Soon, if we are lucky.”

  “But who will pay second, Manjiro?” she asked. “And who will pay third and fourth? Who will go on paying? Don’t you understand that that, ultimately, is the more important question?”

  That Tsune grieved for Einosuke, that she had poured that grief into daily letters to Keiki and entreaties for an earlier audience with Manjiro, was clear to all who wished to see it, but Manjiro could no longer count himself among that number. Yet neither, in the innermost chambers of his heart, did he blame her very much—if that’s what she thought she was wrong. He blamed himself; for his caprice, for his multitude of mistakes, his terminal and interminable weakness.

  “No,” he finally said, “I think who pays second is of little importance…”

  He gave her a regretful smile but found it impossible to say more. That he had always loved her he would make clear, he decided, in his suicide note.

  “Please, Manjiro, think about how it will sit with others when this revenge of yours is done. Have you thought about what your father might do? Or your nieces and nephew, or my poor sister, your bereft and noble sister-in-law? Have you thought how things might be with her a year or two from now?”

  Indeed he had, and concerning his father, though he wouldn’t say it, he felt there was no longer any danger of him ending his life prematurely, before his inevitable descent into senility and old age. At the moment of his father’s discovery that he, Manjiro, had defied Lord Abe and taken the Americans out of Edo, there had been such a danger, but now he believed it had passed. So far as his nieces were concerned he thought that time would heal them, and he had particularly considered the ironic fact that Junichiro, the toddling next Lord Okubo, would not remember his father or his ineffectual uncle at all.

  “I do worry about Fumiko,” he admitted, “for she is the best person I know. But in the end I think she will find solace in her children, in her coming grandchildren, and in remembering the good husband she once had.”

  Tsune shook her head, finally moving her hand from the overturned teacup to his arm. “She will not find solace in them, Manjiro, that is not the word you want, but will understand her responsibility to all of those you have mentioned, and see that responsibility to its end. She will find new strength. She will surprise you by how well she regains herself.”

  Manjiro pursed his lips but would not be drawn into further discussions of Fumiko, the thought of whom still moved him to a greater despair than he could handle. He profoundly understood his own responsibility and was resolved to see it through, yet he also remembered Tsune’s great facility with reason and argument. If she was telling him that Fumiko would soon be focused upon her children once again, that was right and proper. But he didn’t want her telling him anything about himself.

  He remained silent, at first thinking only how he might greet Keiki, apologize to both of the Americans for appearing to have turned on them, then go off, alone, to prepare himself, when her hand upon his arm began to move and stroke, an unfair strategy to use against one who had adored her since he was a boy. That a man at the end of his life should be buoyed by something beyond physical desire was as clear to him as the indisputable fact that Einosuke’s death had been his fault, yet despite that clarity, and despite his sense of shame, he could feel his ardor rising.

  Tsune felt it too, and deftly made it the subject of their talk.

  “How I had hoped there might be something permanent between us,” she said. “Lord Tokugawa hoped so, too, you know, that was the real reason I took you to his hunting lodge that day, so that he could see for himself how fine you are. Those paragraphs were my excuse, that’s certainly true, but their bearer was the target. When all this trouble began he was about to write a letter to your father, and Keiki, I have reason to believe, has brought a similar letter now. Oh, Manjiro! if we can only look upon Einosuke’s death as the act of unruly criminals and go on.”

  Manjiro had one hand free that he let fall upon hers, which had not ceased stroking his arm. She turned her hand over and, grasping his wrist, pulled him slightly toward her. She only meant to speak again, to save his life through unending stealthy argument, but this time the words she spoke were not the ones she had chosen. “I am not a virgin,” she said. “Lord Tokugawa’s letter will admit as much, I’m sure, but I have not, particularly, saved myself.”

  There was a pause, a fleeting sense of things reordered, before, pay third and fourth? Who will go on paying? Don’t you understand that that, ultimately, is the more important question?”

  That Tsune grieved for Einosuke, that she had poured that grief into daily letters to Keiki and entreaties for an earlier audience with Manjiro, was clear to all who wished to see it, but Manjiro could no longer count himself among that number. Yet neither, in the innermost chambers of his heart, did he blame her very much—if that’s what she thought she was wrong. He blamed himself; for his caprice, for his multitude of mistakes, his terminal
and interminable weakness.

  “No,” he finally said, “I think who pays second is of little importance…”

  He gave her a regretful smile but found it impossible to say more. That he had always loved her he would make clear, he decided, in his suicide note.

  “Please, Manjiro, think about how it will sit with others when this revenge of yours is done. Have you thought about what your father might do? Or your nieces and nephew, or my poor sister, your bereft and noble sister-in-law? Have you thought how things might be with her a year or two from now?”

  Indeed he had, and concerning his father, though he wouldn’t say it, he felt there was no longer any danger of him ending his life prematurely, before his inevitable descent into senility and old age. At the moment of his father’s discovery that he, Manjiro, had defied Lord Abe and taken the Americans out of Edo, there had been such a danger, but now he believed it had passed. So far as his nieces were concerned he thought that time would heal them, and he had particularly considered the ironic fact that Junichiro, the toddling next Lord Okubo, would not remember his father or his ineffectual uncle at all.

  “I do worry about Fumiko,” he admitted, “for she is the best person I know. But in the end I think she will find solace in her children, in her coming grandchildren, and in remembering the good husband she once had.”

  Tsune shook her head, finally moving her hand from the overturned teacup to his arm. “She will not find solace in them, Manjiro, that is not the word you want, but will understand her responsibility to all of those you have mentioned, and see that responsibility to its end. She will find new strength. She will surprise you by how well she regains herself.”

  Manjiro pursed his lips but would not be drawn into further discussions of Fumiko, the thought of whom still moved him to a greater despair than he could handle. He profoundly understood his own responsibility and was resolved to see it through, yet he also remembered Tsune’s great facility with reason and argument. If she was telling him that Fumiko would soon be focused upon her children once again, that was right and proper. But he didn’t want her telling him anything about himself.