Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show

by Richard Wiley

  When Keiki clapped his hands, delighted to have found them in the bath, and immediately sat down, and stuck his feet in the tub, Ace looked at him keenly, wondering if anyone connected to the family could possibly know of his feelings for Fumiko. Keiki, however, was staring directly at Ned.

  “I hope you remember that we have met before,” he said. “At that time, too, we were bathing. You gave me your wonderful mouth organ, your ‘harmonium,’ or whatever it’s called, and I want you to know that I learned to play a tune or two before I left Edo. Maybe when this trouble passes you can give me a lesson. I would like that very much indeed. Great friendships have been based on less, you know.”

  Keiki smiled. He remembered how Ned’s long nose had terrified him, giving the impression of a giant standing rat. But even so he was sorry to see that the ruined face he looked at now held little of its previous offense. It looked, in fact, like the face of a desecrated owl.

  For his part, Ned understood that Keiki was trying to be friendly, and so he smiled back and said, “Guess you noticed I had me an accident.” He’d been holding his prosthesis up in front of him and tried to lower it, to show Keiki what had happened. But O-bata stayed his hand. “No, you mustn’t do that,” she said. “Not everyone is as pleased with your wounds as I am just yet.”

  “What a half-baked idea a stick nose is,” Keiki told Ichiro. “It not only doesn’t make him look whole again, but it takes away the use of a hand!” He made sure to keep his eyes on Ned. “I heard about your misfortune and want you to know that my father and I feel a personal responsibility,” he said. “Japan has far too many rogues these days, but we will see that justice is brought to those who did that to you. This very night, I hope.”

  He spread his hands out and tried to remember just how long it had been since he and his father had looked down upon these same two men, from the spy room of that geisha house. Three weeks? Four? Back then, though they had truly been appalled by Lord Abe’s plan, they had thought of the Americans as mere curiosities, exotic to look at to be sure, but more like a couple of rare birds than men with natures and personalities. Yet when meeting Ned in his father’s courtyard, and again now, with the damage that had been done to him so hideous to behold, Ned and the other man, too, suddenly seemed like people who were knowable. Something was cracking inside Keiki, and he smiled again. Foreigners were knowable people! He looked at Ichiro, and then at Kyuzo, but it was the other American who looked back at him. He sat slightly higher in the tub, and spoke in a quiet voice.

  “A problem I’ve had all my life is that I’ve often affixed importance to something only to find out later I was wrong,” he said. “I’ve looked for too much weight in things, wanted to give too much promise to a chance meeting, or a word heard out of context…or a touch. But I’ve never been able to rid myself of the idea that a man’s life ought to mean something, and that its meaning would come clear to him if he remained steadfast in his waiting, if he was patient and could listen well enough for God’s plan…”

  Ace stopped. He didn’t want to talk about God’s plan, he wanted to talk about Fumiko. He wanted to ask what it meant in Japan for a woman to walk into the forest with a man, for a woman to look at him, and touch him, and speak to his heart. Still, they were all staring at him like they knew he wasn’t quite done, so he added, “I thought this visit to Japan might mean something in my life, but I guess I was wrong.”

  The Japanese were all gripped by a fair amount of sadness. Kyuzo was so sure he had understood the sentiment behind Ace’s words that it occurred to him that in speech, as with music, there was meaning in sound alone, and Ichiro, similarly, was thinking that melancholy was a universal trait. The innkeeper and his wife were miffed at having lost time alone with Keiki and Ichiro, and they were sad, too, but for a different reason; they knew they’d have to drain and scrub their tub once the foreigners were gone. Keiki alone would have spoken to Ace, if only to try out his theory that foreigners were knowable, but Ned croaked out another bit of gibberish, before he could think of something to say.

  “Well, shoot, Ace,” he said, “ain’t you the unlucky one, though?”

  This time his stick nose slipped down a notch or two, until everyone could clearly see the hole in his face. Even those who had seen it before turned away.

  “I know it ain’t exactly pretty,” Ned said. “But you all listen to me. I’ve had mirrors at my disposal these past few days, so I know what I’m up against better’n anyone. Ace here always says that a man will know what his life’s supposed to accomplish if he sits around listening for God to announce it to him, but I gotta tell you, that ain’t true. A man’s got to bear what burdens he gets. He can cry if he wants to yet in the end he better just keep on gettin’ up every morning, since he ain’t got no other choice. And if God’s involved in what happened to me at all then I figure I owe him a great big thank you, for though he took away my good looks he gave me somethin’ better at the same time. He got my nose, I got O-bata, and so far as I’m concerned it’s a fair exchange.”

  He hugged O-bata, to demonstrate what he was saying, and once again they all thought they had understood him. Ichiro and Kyuzo, who’d been there when he lost his nose, believed he was beseeching them to avenge him against their enemies that night, while Keiki believed with equal firmness that he was saying his nose was a small price to pay if the intricacies of the treaty between Japan and America could be worked out smoothly from then on.

  And even Ace was more taken with watching Ned’s lips and the various abstract expressions that the stick nose gave his face than with actually listening to Ned. In one way Ned looked to him like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, nose and mouth and eyes floating in various proximities to each other, while in another it seemed like Ned was removing, layer by intricate layer, a series of complicated masks, much like taking off his minstrel paint. It was strange, but the more Ace watched the weird configurations before him, the more he began to think of them as representations of himself instead of Ned. Whenever they had removed their stage makeup it had always been Ned who had quickly returned to himself, while Ace, no matter how hard he scrubbed his face, was always, always, still in disguise. He was the jigsaw puzzle, not the man who sat before him with a stick nose in front of his face. He was the man of a thousand faces—his father’s, his music teacher’s, Colonel Morgan’s, Buford Holden’s, as well as those of the myriad other characters he had created. And during those short periods of time when he hadn’t had a stage to stand upon he had simply waited, taking other men’s ideas as his own and gazing out to sea, whether on shipboard or at home with no water visible for miles. Until last week, that is, until Fumiko took him into the forest and touched his face.

  So Ace brought as much contrivance to hearing Ned speak as the others did, and as with the others, he thought his own contrivance was profound.

  48.

  Not Selling Chestnuts

  “I am Momo of Shimoda, come with salvaged plunder, to honor the Okubo family and the dead. I do it in the name of my father and brother and without the hope or desire of a reward.”

  Now that he had said his speech out loud it didn’t sound so good to him anymore, and he looked at Manzo, to see what his brother thought. A fog had descended over the mountains and those pregnant clouds had opened up, yesterday’s storm come back again, but there was noise in the air, too; the sounds of fireworks and the general clamor of celebration floating up the river from the harbor. The American fleet had come ashore. Oh it was a terrible thing to have to miss if Lord Okubo didn’t offer him a job!

  “If you want to know the truth I don’t like ‘salvaged plunder’ very much,” said Manzo. “A human head is what it is, right? So I think you should just say ‘head’ and be done with it. And I don’t think you should go turning down a reward that’s not been offered, Momo. If it was me I would say, ‘Hello, sir, I’m bringing back your son’s head.’ That’s all. Or if I was talkin’ to the widow I’d say, ‘Madam, I am bringing back your husband’s
head,’ or to the brother I would say… But you get the picture, right? Keep it simple. And if you happen to meet his daughters first don’t say anything at all.”

  It had taken them two long hours to creep along the darkened pathways, and they were stopped again, sitting and waiting for the appropriate moment to approach the inn, nervous and peering through the fog. The river was on their right, lined with a series of fish stalls and bars. Momo had insisted that they turn off the main road, where their father now waited for them, well before they reached the inn, go about halfway toward the river and far enough forward to be opposite the inn’s main door. If he ruined this, if he wasn’t timely or correct in his approach, if he failed to get Lord Okubo to see his valor… Well, a chance like this would simply never come again.

  “I am Momo of Shimoda, come with salvaged plunder…”

  Now that Manzo had criticized “salvaged plunder” Momo wanted to rethink his entire speech. He would not say “head” no matter what, he wasn’t a hopeless bumpkin like his brother, but “salvaged plunder” truly did seem a little unclear, a little crude, even, he had to admit it now. But it was hard to think of anything to put in its place.

  It was also hard to see much of anything from where they stood, but when he glanced at their gussied-up wagon now, it bothered him even more than the clumsiness of his speech, for it looked like nothing so much as one of those winter contraptions commonly used by roving tradesmen for roasting and selling chestnuts. The hat on Einosuke’s head even resembled the ventilating hood at the top of a stovepipe, not dignified like they’d intended it to be, but garish and foolish at the same time. Oh, why hadn’t he seen it before? He knew that his father had intended this contraption to honor Einosuke, but the more he thought about it the more it seemed likely that Lord Okubo might be offended by their mode of transporting this most essential part of his son back to him—before he had a chance to make any speech at all. What if they chased him away? What if they took out their swords and cut him up?

  “I am Momo of Shimoda, come with——, to honor the Okubo family and the dead.”

  Come with what? What could he say instead of “salvaged plunder”? And how could he avoid the awful possibility that they might think he was roasting and selling chestnuts himself? Oh, nothing sounded good anymore!

  “I am Momo of Shimoda, a simple shit man, not selling chestnuts but returning something you have lost…”

  He walked away from his brother until he could see neither the inn nor the fish stalls by the river, but external darkness did not give way to internal light, and his words still tripped over each other. It was strange because words had always before been Momo’s ally, and for the first time since escaping the murderers that morning he got a sense of foreboding, as if an impure heart were clogging the words in his throat.

  Oh, silence was the best! Speeches were no good to anyone at a time like this, his father had been right! He should simply push the wagon up to the inn and leave it there for them to find.

  But how, then, would they ever get their wagon back?

  All these questions! All this trouble! And no one save his brother, on whose opinion he could rely.

  49.

  Outraged Periods and Exclamation Points

  JUST INSIDE THE INN’S ENTRANCE stood a complex of three banquet rooms, the inn’s best innovation, next to the bath. The first two rooms could be opened, as they were tonight, to form a large enough space for tables to be placed together for large dining parties, and the third room, smaller and more elegant than the others, was primarily meant for clandestine liaisons. It could be reached from the main hallway, but there was also a special panel leading to it from the back, perfect, the innkeeper liked to joke, for narrow escapes.

  Lord Okubo had ordered places set in the smaller room for the women, so they could hide and listen to whatever might take place, and in the larger rooms a huge flower arrangement sat within the tokunoma, a simple three-branch combination, but with the middle branch springing halfway to the ceiling, making everyone in the inn feel that it, like the day they were all experiencing, was entirely too long.

  But even with the longest of days, evening finally comes, and as this one fell to its dinner hour Tsune came down from upstairs, to join the others. She wore a black kimono with the slightest pattern of dark brown lines upon it, her face unpowdered and her eyes set solemnly for the night. Fumiko and Masako and Keiko awaited her in the hall. “Has Manjiro not returned yet from his prayers?” she asked. “Someone still needs to wake his father.”

  When no one replied she took Keiko’s arm and looked with her niece toward the darkest end of the hall, where Keiki and Kyuzo, O-bata and Ichiro and the two Americans, were just then coming from the bath. When Kyuzo bowed toward Tsune, neck and shoulders loose within his kimono, Ace tried to follow his lead, smiling at Fumiko. Beneath the stairway Tsune had just descended was the passage that led to the smaller banquet room that Lord Okubo had ordered prepared for the women, and when they finally did see Manjiro, walking back from his meditation at the inn’s shrine, Fumiko hurried all the women that way, not even looking toward Ace.

  “Quickly now,” she said. “O-bata, that means you, too. Let’s go in and leave the men alone.”

  Tsune wanted a word with Keiki, one last chance to plead with him, to ask him to intervene concerning Manjiro’s postbattle intention to kill himself, and she would have taken a final moment of communion with Kyuzo, too, to assure him of her love. When she saw her nieces hesitate, however, she first helped her sister guide them toward the hallway, and when she tried to retreat again, Fumiko would not let her pass.

  “There is no more time for anything,” she told her younger sister. “Do not invest yourself further, Tsune, let the men be men.”

  Whether or not it was a scolding, Tsune knew that to disobey her sister now would reorder everything between them. And so she turned and allowed herself to be herded behind O-bata, into that clandestine room.

  When the women were gone from the hallway Manjiro, who had waited in the garden, came inside. He looked at Keiki for a moment, and at the other ready warriors by his side, and then he turned and spoke to the Americans.

  “My life has been dedicated to knowing you,” he said in English. “I took all my recent actions, full of mistakes as they were, only in order to return you safely to the ships from which you came. I thought I acted honorably, but I lost my way…”

  He had more to say, words he had practiced at the shrine. He wanted to tell them that neither he nor his father had ever really intended to use them as pawns, that that had only been a ruse, something written in his father’s letter to Ueno, to make him want to bring Einosuke’s murderers to the inn this very night. He wanted to tell them that he knew without question that the subdeties of spirit which resided in all good men, resided in both of them, that he had seen it in Ace when first receiving the chocolates, and in Ned in his recent and most stunning bravery, the dignified way in which he confronted his injury. He had even planned on slipping into metaphor for a moment, saying he had “brought them onto a path he thought he knew well, but led them into a great unknown forest”—but in fact he thought better of it, for the good quality of the English he had used thus far gave him an extra reason to grieve, in the sudden understanding that when he finally put a blade to his belly, all those unending hours of study would spill out.

  So though he would have plunged ahead heedlessly in earlier days, to make himself clear through constant explanation, now he only bowed, turning his mind to the other question he had prayed about at the shrine: not whether to kill himself, but whether or not to go back upstairs and wake his father.

  He would not. He would let his father sleep and awaken to an accomplished fate.

  The innkeeper’s wife had been playing her koto in the larger banquet rooms this last little while, sitting beneath that mammoth flower arrangement, but when everyone heard what could only be Ueno’s arrival at the inn’s front door she stopped. And a few seconds later the
innkeeper came to tell them that their guests had arrived.

  “I will end it quickly and alone,” Manjiro told the others, “so be ready to move out of the way.”

  His plan, he thought, was simple. He would kill Einosuke’s murderers as soon as they were made known to him, kill Ueno, too, if he got the chance, then run back to the shrine and kill himself. He believed that by acting alone he would absolve his father, and when his father finally awoke to find everything done, coerce him into carrying on. Kyuzo and Ichiro were to fend off any soldiers that might intervene, but otherwise were under orders not to act at all.

  The door was shaking when they walked toward it, the impatience of their visitor evident in its rattle.

  “Hello?” Ueno called. “It’s raining out here. Someone open up!”

  They were simple words, really, however plaintively spoken, but a strong sense of Einosuke came to Manjiro when he heard them, a renewed knowledge of how his brother, though always bemoaning Manjiro’s free and scholarly life, had in truth protected him, taking the mundane family duties upon himself. He felt sorry that he could offer only this, the death of his killers, when he should have thanked Einosuke, shown him greater deference when he was alive!

  “You do it,” he told the innkeeper. “Open the door quickly and get out of the way.” He let his breath settle deep in his abdomen, and stood there waiting.

  For the innkeeper, however, though Manjiro’s orders were certainly clear enough, there was a problem in complying, for he didn’t feel he could be duplicitous and welcome someone to his inn at the same time. He didn’t like it, he would never have sided with Ueno under normal circumstances, but an innkeeper’s responsibilities to his guests were as unambiguous as a samurai’s to his lord, so neither could he bring himself to commit a direct betrayal. It simply went against the innkeeper’s code.