Kiku's Prayer: A Novel

by Shusaku Endo

  “I see.” Petitjean stared at the ground. “I hope I haven’t caused any problems for you.”

  Father Furet lowered his voice. “I think it would be best if you didn’t go around quizzing them so openly. If you keep this up, I fear they might call a halt to the building of our church.”

  Petitjean recognized how conflicted Father Furet felt. For the present, the chief task here in Nagasaki was to get a church constructed, in the expectation that it would form the foundation for spreading the word of God. He must refrain from doing anything that might endanger that plan in any way.

  And so Petitjean changed his tactics.

  Whenever he had a free moment, he would go out of his way to stroll around the streets of Nagasaki. That would make people aware of his presence. Everyone would know who he was. And perhaps he could begin to form friendships with some of the Japanese in this city.

  If that were to happen, someone might just volunteer the information he was seeking. Perhaps someone would cautiously share a secret that only the two of them could know. A secret that “there are still some Kirishitans among the Japanese.”

  After hitting on this strategy, he began to stroll around the streets of Nagasaki for two, sometimes even three hours. The “stroll,” of course, was merely a pretext for his real purpose.

  But how remarkable to discover that Nagasaki was a city filled with hills and temples and trees! Three hundred years ago the Portuguese had built this city on a narrow strip of land facing the inlet, and now you could barely take a step in it without bumping into a hill. Or you’d run into a temple encircled by a long wall. Giant trees grew along those stretches of wall, and in those trees a seemingly infinite number of cicadas cried out as though in their death throes.

  His usual practice was to walk down the hill from the house where he lived, passing through the Chinese quartier. The temples in this Chinese neighborhood were painted vermilion, and often a Chinese with his hair in a braid would appear from the shadows of one of their thick doors.

  As he passed through the Chinese district, he came upon a fan-shaped, man-made island called Dejima. The Japanese had allowed only Dutch merchants to live on this island, which was surrounded by a black moat, during the centuries of seclusion. It was a truly minuscule point of contact, no wider than a cat’s forehead, between Japan and foreign lands.

  The slope rising from Dejima into the hills behind was jammed with black-tiled roofs. That is the city of Nagasaki. Private homes, the steeples of temples, more private homes, more temples. With scores of hills in between them. Trees grew in thick profusion, and cicadas screeched everywhere.

  As Petitjean walked along, Japanese would move to the edge of the road and let him walk past. Young girls would flee fearfully into their homes, and young boys with fingers stuck in their mouths would stare at his every movement.

  “Hey, it’s a barbarian from the south!4 Come look at him! His nose is huge! And his face is bright red!” Those were the kinds of comments shouted as he walked by.

  From inside some of the houses, he could hear the languid, monotonous sound of a stringed instrument being strummed. It was a samisen, a musical instrument often played by Japanese women.

  Each time he heard those listless, monotonous tones, Petitjean felt an indescribable sorrow and emptiness. The never-ending repetition of the same notes. The relentless reiteration of that tedious cadence!

  “This is the ‘nothingness’ that Buddhism teaches about,” the Christian missionary thought. He had the feeling that a listlessness resembling the sound of the samisen permeated every part of Nagasaki.

  A listless, tedious cadence.

  The European Petitjean experienced that nothingness not just in the samisen but in every part of the city as he strolled about. Squat, black two-story houses stretched as far as his eye could see. As he walked down the narrow roads, he wondered what sorts of lives the Japanese eked out in these tiny, dark houses. Pondering the question, he could imagine the ineffably languid rhythm of the lives of these Japanese, and the thought gripped his heart like a vise.

  Occasionally there would be a break in the rows of tiny houses, and he would encounter a long wall. Whenever he came across such a wall, he knew the odds were high that he would soon come up to a Buddhist temple.

  Not a narrow-minded man, Petitjean did not reject outright the sacred places of the heathens. He looked with admiration at the large wooden buildings that were so different from those in his native land. He was particularly fond of the line of the heavy roofs and the shimmer of the black tiles that he saw through the gates of the compound. When he ventured inside the gates, the sutra chanting which he took to be the prayers of the heathens, coming from somewhere inside the main temple building, sounded to him like the indolent, droning rhythm of the samisen—evoking the same feelings of emptiness that pervaded Nagasaki.

  The samisen, the sutra chanting, the screams of numberless cicadas coming from every corner of this city. He could even detect the odor of nothingness in the voices of these insects that shrieked the same shrieks from morning till night.

  This is what Japan is like, Petitjean thought. Japan has remained exactly this way for two hundred years. Isolated from the rest of the world….

  But now Japan, undisturbed for so many years, was in the process of change, minor though it might be. He had come to Japan right at that turning point of change. Perhaps he himself might even have some impact on the changes coming to Japan.

  He had returned from one of his walks and sat down to eat the dinner prepared by Okane when Father Furet came back from the construction site and asked with a touch of sympathy, “Well, have you found them yet?” Father Furet was mindful that even as his own project was progressing smoothly, that of his brother was meeting with no success whatsoever.

  “Nothing again today.”

  “It would seem, then, that there really are no Japanese left who are secretly practicing Christianity. Perhaps that Chinaman was simply lying.”

  “I haven’t abandoned hope yet,” Petitjean said, forcing down the still peculiar Japanese food. “If the people can just get a little more comfortable with me … they may tell me where to find the Christians. Or maybe some of them will identify themselves to me.”

  “Yes, but …” Father Furet’s face clouded over. “The Japanese here in Nagasaki … no, not just here; all the Japanese are kind on the surface, but they’ll never reveal to a foreigner what’s really in their hearts. They won’t let their guard down with us. They believe they are fundamentally different from us.”

  “I think that’s to be expected,” Petitjean replied. “It’s our fault that the Japanese are wary of us foreigners. We Europeans started invading the nations of Asia more than three centuries ago. The Japanese are well aware of that fact. That’s precisely why they can’t yet open up to foreigners. It’s why they’re mistrustful of us.”

  “You certainly have taken their side,” Father Furet teased, seeing how seriously Petitjean had responded.

  “Yes, I have taken their side. Japan will be a second home to me. I want to feel love toward this country where my bones will be interred,” Petitjean responded, his eyes glistening. “The truly sad thing is that Christianity in the past collaborated in those invasions. That makes it completely reasonable for the Japanese to reject Christianity. We have to do something to dispel their misapprehension of us. We must acknowledge our mistakes as mistakes.”

  “My friend, it’s fine for you to say such a thing to me, but you really mustn’t repeat it to our superiors back in Paris.” Father Furet prized Petitjean’s genuineness but worried that this quality might put their obdurate superiors in a foul mood.

  “I realize that.”

  After dinner they took candlesticks and went into a tiny room they had labeled their “chapel.” With the flames from their candles flickering like the wings of moths, the two joined their voices in prayer.

  When the Liturgy of the Hours concluded, Petitjean whispered his own prayer to God:
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  “Where can they be? I am resigned if they no longer exist. But if any are still alive somewhere here in Nagasaki, please show me where they are. Please help them to know that I have crossed the distant seas and come here to Japan to find them.”

  After their prayers, the priests withdrew to their separate bedrooms.

  A night in Nagasaki was the very essence of stillness. Okane had strung up mosquito nets in both of their rooms, but it was hot inside those nets even with the windows thrown open. Insects came flying in from every tree if he lit a candlestick for even a moment—including those loathsome cicadas….

  Half a month passed since his arrival in Nagasaki. During those two weeks, he had descended and ascended the hills of the city every single day, whether in blistering heat or in drenching rain. He had made his way along narrow paths, hearing the strumming of samisens, and he had quietly made his way alongside the long walled temple compounds.

  “They’re gigantic, these Southern Barbarians!”

  “I can’t believe how huge their noses are!”

  He had heard these whispered comments many times over. Each time he heard them, he turned and smiled at the speaker, whether a child or an adult. With those smiles, he hoped he might create an opportunity for conversation that would lead to friendship, until ultimately he would be able to hear one of them say “I know where the Christians are.”

  But it was all futile.

  1. Louis-Théodore Furet (1816–1900), a French priest of the Société des Missions-Étrangères de Paris (M.E.P.), arrived in Nagasaki in May 1856 after spending nearly a year in Naha awaiting the chance to travel to the Japanese mainland. Furet was instrumental in the planning and early construction stages of the original Ōura Church in Nagasaki, erected in a spot overlooking the execution ground where twenty-six Christians had been martyred in 1597. Furet was replaced by Bernard Petitjean and Joseph Laucaigne in 1864.

  2. This is Bernard-Thadée Petitjean (1828–1884), one of the key figures in the reintroduction of Catholicism to Japan in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Petitjean, like Furet a member of M.E.P., arrived in Nagasaki in August 1863. The following year, he began teaching French at a Japanese government school. He was consecrated as bishop of Japan in 1866 and labored in Nagasaki as well as Yokohama and Osaka. He died in Nagasaki.

  3. Endō here uses the common term applied to Japanese Christians of this era; it is distinct from Kirisutokyō, which is elsewhere translated as “Christianity.”

  4. Nambanjin, the term applied to the first group of Europeans who went to Japan in the mid-sixteenth century, literally means “Southern Barbarian,” a reference to the fact that Saint Francis Xavier and other missionaries and traders traveled to Japan by way of India, Southeast Asia, and Macao en route to southern Kyushu.

  NAGASAKI

  TEN YEARS HAD passed since the tree-climbing incident. Mitsu was now fifteen, and Kiku was sixteen.

  The two girls had naturally forgotten all about that young man. Or it might be better to say that the shyness of young girls in those days compelled them even more than it would today to remain unaware of young men.

  Compared with the tranquil Mitsu, Kiku was as spunky as ever. Her almond-shaped eyes flashed even more brightly when her grandmother would say something such as, “You know, Kiku, when you grow up you’re going to be a real beauty.” Kiku herself became aware of her own beauty around the age of ten, and more than once she quietly asked, “Mitsu, do you think I’m pretty?”

  To which Mitsu would always nod unaffectedly and compliment her cousin, “Yes. You’re prettier than any of the girls in Nagasaki.” Nagasaki was the city of dreams for the young girls of Magome District, and the combs or wooden clogs that their fathers or Ichijirō would bring them once or twice a year from Nagasaki became jewel-like treasures to them. They envied and resented the girls of Nagasaki, who freely wore such treasures around town.

  While girlishly hoping to become as beautiful as those city girls, Kiku turned her nose up at the young men of her village. She blissfully ignored them.

  “She’s a stuck-up girl, that Kiku.” Snotnose and Crybaby, now fifteen and sixteen years old and no longer either snotty or weepy, roomed together at a youth dormitory in the village, where from time to time they would plan out naughty nocturnal raids. Whenever Kiku became the topic of their conversations, they reviled her, calling her a snob because she darted looks of scorn at them whenever they crossed paths.

  “We oughta raid her place and leave her bawling!” They bravely discussed various insolent plans, but neither of them had the courage to actually carry them out. They were constantly aware of the disquieting face of Ichijirō lurking behind both Mitsu and Kiku.

  The only opportunities for the young men and women of Magome to meet in public came on the night of the Obon Festival and in the first month of the year, when all the villagers were compelled to trample on the fumie, images of Christ or Santa Maria. On the eve of the Obon Festival, the young men and women who had felt a spark of attraction for each other would arrange quiet rendezvous, the same as the youth in every Japanese village did. But the fumie ritual at the beginning of each year was performed with particular severity in and around Nagasaki, where in the distant past the Kirishitan population had grown to vast numbers.

  When Kiku was a young girl, on every fourth day of the first month in Nagasaki, neighborhood councilmen and those responsible for the conduct of each local citizens’ association dressed up in their finest clothes and made the rounds of every home, where they required each family member to trample on a brass image of Christ or the Virgin.

  The trampling ritual was carried out every year on the twelfth day of the first month in Magome, at the home of the village headsman, Mr. Takaya. On that day, all the young men and women of Magome queued up in front of the headsman’s house.

  Stepping on the fumie, of course, served as a witness to the officials that an individual was not secretly practicing the illicit religion of Christianity. Each person ground his bare foot into the plaque etched with the face of either Christ or Mary, thereby affirming beyond question that he did not believe in the “heretical faith of the Southern Barbarians.”

  Both old and young gathered at the headsman’s home on the twelfth day. They lined up outside and then filed in one by one, where they stood in the dirt floor entrance of the house. A fumie on loan from the magistrate’s office greeted them as they stepped up onto the blackly glistening wood floor. Seated in front of them were the sullen-faced headsman, Mr. Takaya, and a priest from the Shōtokuji, the local Buddhist temple where each family had its name registered.

  Under the watchful gaze of these two men, the villagers stepped up one at a time onto the wooden floor, paused before the fumie, and then trampled on it.

  Ichijirō inevitably grumbled each time this day arrived. “They should know by now that none of us are Kirishitans without making us do that.” The hardworking young man maintained that he could have produced several pairs of straw sandals in the time it took him to go the headsman’s house and come back.

  Once when Mitsu was young, she stood before the fumie and turned back to ask her brother, “Who are these people?”

  “The ones on the plaque?” Ichijirō replied loudly enough for the headsman and the priest to hear. “It’s an evil man and his mom. He did terrible things. That’s why he got punished in that way.”

  Innocent Mitsu believed without question what her older brother told her. And following her brother’s instructions, she placed her tiny foot on the fumie.

  The fumie on which her tiny foot rested was engraved with an image of the mournful Santa Maria, both her arms cradling the body of Jesus that had been taken down from the cross. Jesus’s face was filled with grief, and Mary’s was wet with tears.

  Unlike Mitsu, each time Kiku stepped on the image, she felt vague misgivings. She had once asked Ichijirō, “What kind of awful things did this man do?”

  “He told a lot of lies to deceive people. Anyway, it�
�s a story that belongs to the Southern Barbarians.” Since he knew no details, Ichijirō was not confident in the response he gave to his young cousin’s question.

  “What are you grumbling about there?” The Shōtokuji priest scolded Kiku. “When someone older tells you to step on it, you’d better hurry and step on it. Your problem is that unlike Mitsu, you’re always pressing your luck.”

  Kiku was frightened of the priest. At this rebuke, even the feisty Kiku dejectedly stomped on the fumie with all her might.

  One day, the priest of the Shōtokuji brought news to Mitsu and Kiku of an opportunity to work as domestic help. The employer was a mercantile house by the name of Gotōya in Nagasaki.

  “No matter how you look at it, Kiku is an insufferable tomboy. And Mitsu is a pampered child. That’s why I think that going to Nagasaki and working for about a year would prepare them to be good brides,” was the assessment of the chief priest.

  Shōtokuji was the temple among the many in the region where the citizens of Magome were required to register their religious affiliation and where all their weddings and funerals were conducted. Every birth and death had to be reported to this temple. That made the chief priest of the temple a counselor to all the adults of Magome and a teacher to all the children. Parents of the village gave diffident ear to everything he said.

  His current proposition was not out of the ordinary. Many young women of Magome had gone to work as servants at merchant houses in Nagasaki at the urging of this chief priest. When they were given leave to return home for Obon and the New Year festivities, the girls who still lived in the village were eager to hear their stories. Their curiosity sprang from the fact that unlike the boys of the village, the girls were virtually never allowed to visit Nagasaki, even though it was not far away. Relatives who had gone to the farmers’ market told them that there were Chinese (called Acha by the locals) and Dutch people in Nagasaki, but the girls’ curiosity to see them was tempered by a fear that they might be roughed up by those foreigners, who thus far existed only in their imaginations. Still, each time they heard about the Nagasaki Kunchi Festival1 or the bustling activity around Shian Bridge, their hearts began to pound.