Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show

by Richard Wiley

  In the room upstairs there was silence now, and an energized stillness as Tsune and Manjiro listened to Fumiko’s song, while in the room below, Ned’s eyes, dark and round as plums upon a plate, searched O-bata’s, his prosthesis resting on the table by their side.

  Sex and grief. Oh, it was strange! What could they possibly have in common?

  It was a question that Fumiko had been fearful of asking herself all along.

  46.

  I Am Taking You Home

  IT WAS THEIR BEST and newest wagon, used for collecting human waste, to be sure, but exclusively from geisha houses, and for less than a month, all told. Manzo’s job had been to clean it thoroughly, which he did three times, finally climbing all the way inside the wagon, to pluck away any last bits of debris with his fingers and rub the walls with lily petals. His seriousness and concentration were unrelenting. He lined its bottom with eucalyptus boughs, and decorated its exterior in a lighthearted but dignified way, with sprigs of various wildflowers from a hillside near their village, and a plethora of ancient Buddhist funeral flags, which he’d begged off an equally ancient monk at the nearby temple.

  As for the pickle jar itself, when they’d first pulled it from its brown and liquid hiding place they had been sure it would contain something deeply and objectively valuable, like jewels or money or an outlawed foreign spice, and Manzo and Momo had immediately engaged in an argument as to whether or not to return it to its owner even before they tried to open it. “We should, we shouldn’t. We must, we mustn’t.” They pushed and pulled at the question like loggers felling a giant forest pine, each emphatic in his opposition to the other’s point of view. Until, that is, their father, in his wisdom, said, “First we will open it, then we will decide what to do.”

  Manzo worried that again their father would simply side with Momo, who, though clumsy with his fighting stick, was better with the weapon of words, but he nevertheless kicked at the jar while Momo threw rocks at it, following his father’s instructions like the loyal son he was. They kept it up for fifteen minutes, then for thirty, but though the jar was cracked and leaking putrid fluid, the lid was so secure and it was otherwise so toughly made that they finally had to roll it into their shed and hit the sides of it with mallets. And only when that, too, did not readily work did Manzo judge it proper to say, “All right father, here’s what I think. It is a sign that we should leave it as it is, if it doesn’t come apart on the very next hit.”

  When he saw his father nod in acquiescence he gave the jar that hit himself, a roundhouse slam with a broken wagon axle. He hit it as hard as he could so his father wouldn’t think he was shirking, and the pickle jar exploded, with shards of it slapping against the walls of their shed and the putrid liquid covering all three of them. They spit and stomped, yelling and gagging with their hands on their knees, but what was even worse was that the shed was built on a hill, with its open door on the downward side, and when Einosuke’s head got free of the jar it rolled out that door and down the path toward their house and the forest and streams beyond it. It rolled with an energy that seemed to come from within, bounding over hillocks and dodging wagons and extra buckets, even dancing around the edges of their well, like a wagon on two wheels. It seemed to be rolling with both determination and malice, as if it was headed back to avenge itself, until it suddenly came to an abrupt and terrifying halt, not against a wall or a tree, but where nothing at all was in its way, atop their mother’s vegetable garden. It spun for a second like it was trying to dig a hole, then turned so it was facing them, gasping once like it was out of breath.

  The father and his sons saw all of this from the doorway of their shed, locked together in a fused collapse, like a statue of exhausted warriors after battle. But they pulled themselves apart and pulled themselves together, and approached the head cautiously, one at a time, their mallets at the ready, lest it begin to move again and attack them.

  Einosuke’s head was preserved fairly well, but with several thick tangles of hair hanging over his bleached-out eyes, and an expression on his face that equaled their own, save for the fact that Manzo and Momo were crying as they approached it, as they let the knowledge of what had just rolled out of their shed roll over them. But because he had seen Einosuke before, and because the story of his death had sped down the peninsula faster than those Kambei posters, the father knew immediately who was facing them and what it might mean to them in the long run. So he sent his sons away, telling them to go and practice acting like men, and sat in front of Einosuke for a very long time, looking at his face and thinking what to do about it. He had seen the way the head had a mind of its own, and he knew there was a message in it. But what that message was took him hours to decide.

  THAT AFTERNOON the father built an entire outhouse floor, complete with a hole in its center and wood planks aligned to perfection, and nailed it to the top of their best wagon, which he had ordered Manzo to prepare. The wildflowers and Buddhist funeral flags had been Manzo’s idea, the suggestion that Manzo should clean the inside of the wagon, too, had come from Momo.

  Though the pickle jar had broken badly, most of its bottom third still formed a solid bowl, which the father filled with clean garden dirt and pushed down into the outhouse-floor hole. It fit there remarkably well, and after placing Einosuke’s head on top of it, facing the wagon’s front, he spent another hour straightening and combing Einosuke’s hair, much as the older of the two outlaws had done. He thought it was a dignified and reasonable idea to take Einosuke back to Lord Okubo like this, for it now seemed as if he were hiding in the wagon and peeking out through its hole. That his eyes were missing was a problem that the father tried to solve by placing radishes in their sockets, and then removing them in favor of mushrooms, and then removing them in favor of nothing at all. The hard reality of a horrible death could not be softened with vegetables. That, at least, he was finally sure of.

  During all these difficult preparations it had not been Momo’s job to do anything save stop his crying, calm his shaking limbs, and clean himself at least as well as Manzo had cleaned their wagon, in a nearby creek. And once he was clean he was to dress in a set of armor, complete with an ancient bow and a single well-made arrow, that had been taken from a dead samurai’s body two generation earlier by his great-grandfather. It would be his responsibility to actually return this piece of his son to Lord Okubo, and he had to look the part of a dignified pallbearer. In choosing Momo for this job, the father had recognized his younger son’s desire to get out of the business they were in, and thought it might give him a nudge.

  When everything was finally ready the father found an old sloping hat and used it to cover Einosuke’s head, so as they made their way toward the inn in which the Okubo family was staying they would not draw a crowd. The idea of such a dignified passing was somewhat hindered, however, by Momo’s incessant questions.

  “Should I knock first and explain what I’ve brought,” he asked, “or should I pull the wagon up to the inn and leave it there to be discovered after I’m gone?”

  The latter had been his father’s idea, the former his own, so he was addressing his brother, who was sweating as he pulled the wagon, alone in the halter at its front. Momo kept wrenching his samurai suit around so it fit him better, and moving his old bow and arrow from one hand to the other. He didn’t have a sheaf for the arrow, and once or twice poked Manzo in the buttocks with it, causing the wagon to lurch. Their father walked pensively nearby, for the first time wondering if the entire venture might not be a mistake.

  “Do you simply want to give it back or do you want credit for it?” asked Manzo.

  He tried to speak without malice, though having been twice poked by that arrow certainly made him malicious. Momo, however, only sighed. “I don’t want credit for anything, Manzo,” he answered, “but if I leave it at the inn’s door without comment, how are we to know if his lordship received it safely? And how will we ensure the return of our wagon?”

  Since he was doing all th
e pulling, his own clothes already stained with unsightly sweat, Manzo finally did let a little of the spite he was feeling escape his mouth.

  “Maybe Lord Okubo will hire you,” he said. “Maybe he’ll understand that you want to work your way out of one shitty business and into another. The future is bright for smart young men like you, Momo. Just smile and keep bowing, smile and keep bowing. That’s as sure a path to the upper reaches of society as this one is to the inn’s door.”

  He glared at Momo as he spoke but Momo was lost in the glory that his own imagination provided, and didn’t hear a word his brother said, let alone his sarcasm. Oh, it was true, he would be heralded! Embraced by Lord Okubo, appreciated by the other family members, finally recognized for all of his fine qualities!

  “I will knock and introduce myself, that’s what I’ll do,” he said. “But I’ll only stay a minute. I will present his son’s head to him in the name of our father and bring back the wagon once the head is taken inside. I have even prepared a small speech I will make, but I will not take a reward. No reward is best, don’t you think? Or maybe a small cup of saké, a little refreshing tea. I might even write my name down for them, so they’ll know how to find me later on.”

  They had successfully escaped from the environs of their own village by then and were working the wagon along a rarely used valley path, struggling over hillocks and around rabbit holes, so they wouldn’t have to pass through other hamlets on their way. It had already grown slightly dark, and though it wasn’t raining yet, the bellies of the clouds above them were sagging.

  The father had been listening to his sons and, with each exchange between them, accelerated his worry, quickly coming to the realization that, indeed, they were doing the wrong thing. They should have called the authorities immediately, before even opening the pickle jar, and he should have been the one to see how obvious a decision that was! Oh, what had made him act so boldly? What had made him think that a young lord’s head, balanced precariously upon a shit wagon, bore a sense of regal passage? He had forgotten by then the way Einosuke’s head had seemed to run from their shed as if it had legs…the way it turned and looked back at them.

  “You may return what we are bringing and listen to the grieving lord,” he finally told his younger son. “But Manzo will go with you and you will both come back as soon as politeness allows. Be humble, Son, don’t be brazen. Represent us well. And do not speak at all unless you are asked a direct and unavoidable question.”

  He spoke as he always did, quietly and with measured tones, but his heart was full of dread. When Momo heard his words, however, he could not contain himself.

  “Oh don’t you worry, Father, I will!” he pledged. “I will represent us in the best possible manner. You’ll see! And I swear it won’t take long! Lord Okubo will be happy, I bet. Happy and appreciative! Oh yes he will, Father. To see his son again like this will surely bring his wounded heart joy!”

  He didn’t mind Manzo going with him because he believed he could make his brother stay back when the time came, far enough away to give him independence, yet close enough to hear the speech he had been practicing, and thus be able to tell their father how grand it was. He touched the hat that covered Einosuke’s head and whispered, “Do not worry, sir, I am taking you home!”

  Not long after that they entered a low grove of marshy pines where the ground was so soft that keeping the wagon level took all of their attention and they grew quiet for a while. Manzo pulled with all his strength, and their father pushed from the back, while Momo stayed with Einosuke’s head, making sure it didn’t roll off.

  When they finally got the wagon on solid ground again it was easier than they expected it would be to get where they were going. So Momo began insisting that they slow way down, that they set a more funereal pace.

  He didn’t want to run into his new life quickly like this, but go into it with the proper decorum.

  47.

  Knowable People

  THE INNKEEPER AND HIS WIFE had been up since dawn for several days running, as they always were when preparing for a visit from the Okubo family, and had grown so exhausted that when Keiki explained to them that Lord Okubo had mistaken him for the innkeeper and asked that a runner be sent to Ueno, putting off the meeting for a couple of hours, they not only thanked Keiki, laughing demurely, but began a long conversation with him about the difficulties of running an inn, about what could go wrong, and how pleasurable it was when things went right.

  Keiki had brought young Ichiro with him when approaching the innkeeper—he had done so at Kyuzo’s urging, to keep Ichiro away from Keiko while she was grieving—and both men were surprised to discover that it was an enjoyable thing, hearing about the inside workings of such a lovely inn as this one. Keiki liked it because he knew he had a great deal to learn about commerce if he was ever going to be an effective leader, and Ichiro remembered his father’s parting words to him, that he should ensure his future by finding some sort of trade.

  So since they had time on their hands before the beginning of the evening’s troubles, and since neither of them were formally grieving, they decided to use that time not only to learn about inns, but also to help with the preparations. Keiki joined the innkeeper’s wife while she lectured the maids, adding comments that made the maids blush, while Ichiro walked the halls behind the innkeeper as he checked to see that everything, everywhere, was in order. Keiki was good at talking to maids, his touch lightly humorous, while Ichiro truly did find the industry of the thing, the busyness of it, to be the perfect antidote to his last few months of self-doubt, worry, and unemployment. He found himself thinking that this was work with honor in it, work that would allow a man to sleep soundly at the end of the day, rather than stare at his empty palm before his face.

  When the four of them paused under an archway on whose cross-beam hung the innkeeper’s father’s old samurai sword, Keiki told the man that he had been right to opt for commerce, giving up the warrior life some decade earlier, and though Ichiro agreed wholeheartedly, he also told the innkeeper that it was a fine-looking sword. Both Keiki and Ichiro knew that others might think it insensitive of them to enjoy these simple pleasures when the Okubo family was filled with wretchedness and rage, but in fact each man’s character was such that he was not well equipped for moroseness. Both had faces that turned more easily into smiles than frowns, and personalities that wanted to get on with things.

  “Having Lord Okubo and his family visit us is an honor that will be considerably diminished if there is a fight tonight,” the innkeeper’s wife chanced saying. She had wanted to say it to Lord Okubo himself but, of course, could not. And so as she grew more comfortable with him, she said it to young Ichiro. Neither she nor her husband were quite sure who Ichiro was, but assumed, correctly, that his rank was low.

  The inn was composed of two right-angled sections, with elegant rooms upstairs, with balconies overlooking either the meandering Inozawa River or the garden where Lord Okubo and Kyuzo had defeated the crows. The inn’s ground floor rooms were smaller, some, like those given to the Americans and O-bata, even cramped, but their great advantage was a closeness to the inn’s best attraction: its sen-nin furo, its one-thousand-person bath.

  “People laughed when we first built our bath,” the innkeeper told both young men, “but they aren’t laughing now.”

  They were standing in the bath’s antechamber, and while he spoke his wife straightened the rows of straw clothing baskets, enlisting Keiki’s assistance as she rearranged the stones and counterbalances of their modern new body-weight scale. And, indeed, the bath itself was larger and more elegant than any even Keiki had encountered before, almost as wide as the inn, with two long rectangular pools separated by a line of thick cedar logs. There was an outside section as well, surrounded by bamboo trees, stone Buddhas, lilies and chrysanthemums, all of it located above the largest confluence of hot springs on the entire peninsula. It was their masterpiece, this outside section, but the innkeeper and his wife wer
e stopped from showing it to Keiki and Ichiro by the fact that the inside section was not empty, as they had expected it would be. Both of the foreigners sat in the tub near the anteroom door, bobbing like Ezo monkeys, with O-bata next to Ned and Kyuzo floating on his back, occasionally spouting water into the air like a whale.

  For O-bata and Ned this was not the first time they had been in the bath together—due to the nearness of their room and the rigor of their recent activity they had bathed twice already—but it was the first time for Ace, who, embarrassed by such communal nudity, had submerged himself on the tub’s far side without first washing. Ace’s head rode above the water like Einosuke’s did on that honey-bucket wagon, and in a certain way he was as out of things as Einosuke, too, as disconnected. He touched his face and looked at the others. His hand had been so constantly drawn to the spot where Fumiko’s fingers had branded him that his cheek had become a little sore. At first he’d been perplexed by what she’d done, thinking he had run across some truly alien custom, but he had also been moved by an upsurge of feeling, a groundswell of emotion such as he’d never known before, and it unbalanced him as surely as if she’d struck him with a sword. He had looked for her that evening back in Odawara, to see if she might let it happen again, but had found her prone on the castle’s floor, her body bent around such abject suffering that at first he’d thought she regretted what had happened between them. He hadn’t shown himself, he’d only hidden and watched her, his desire welling up, until the others returned from procuring Ned’s nose and he learned of her husband’s murder.

  Since then Ace had come to believe he was tied to Fumiko, anchored to her as surely as the American fleet was now anchored in Shimoda by something that had resided in both of them before he had come to Japan. Yet all he could do now was sit in his room or float in this tub, hindered as clearly as if she’d come to him and told him in English, by the knowledge that if he tried to go to her and declare himself, she would no longer welcome him at all.