by Shusaku Endo
“It’s good of you to work so hard. It must be difficult to weed when the sun’s so hot,” Hondō gently consoled the girl. “Do the foreigners here treat you well?”
“Yes.”
“Are you … a Kirishitan?”
“No!” Kiku quickly shook her head.
“Ah. Well, that’s good.” He nodded and started off when an urgent voice from behind called out to him.
“Excuse me!” When he turned around, Kiku picked up a cloth to wipe her hands and asked, “Since your lordship is an official of the magistrate’s office, if you know what’s happened to the people from Nakano, then maybe you know a man named Seikichi …?” She could say no more. Hondō stood where he was, regarding Kiku as he repeated his question, “Are you … one of the Urakami Kirishitans?”
“I’m not from Nakano. I was born in Magome. There’s not a single Kirishitan in Magome.”
“Is that so? Then listen carefully to me. It’s fine for you to work here, but you must never become a Kirishitan. Their religion is illegal. That’s why the people of Nakano have been arrested by the magistrate and been subjected to severe torture.”
“Torture?” Kiku’s face went pale.
“That’s right. Some suffer so much pain they come back covered in blood. And it’s because they believe in a heretical religion. Do you understand?”
Shuntarō did not say this to Kiku to threaten or torment her. He merely wished to give a stern warning against becoming a Kirishitan to this woman who worked at the Nambanji.
He could have had no idea what a shock his news inflicted on this young woman. He set off walking toward the grove of trees where the cicadas screeched noisily….
Kiku was trembling, quivering. Seikichi is being tortured….
Fear and torment racked her body. She had no idea what forms of torture were used by the magistrate’s office. But she could almost see before her eyes the pathetic, unresisting body of Seikichi as the officers and constables cursed and kicked and stomped on him and beat him repeatedly with their fists. The man she loved was at that very moment suffering humiliation and agony.
That knowledge caused her to feel the same torment he was experiencing. That’s the way with a woman. And Kiku had become that kind of woman.
“Ahh!” She covered her face with both hands and crouched down on the ground. Overhead, a swarm of large brown cicadas nesting in a large camphor tree shrieked as if to mock her.
Why did you have to become a Christian? She lifted her head resolutely. It’s not Seikichi’s fault. He’s a good person. It’s that Kirishitan religion that has jumbled his mind and brought this cruel punishment on him.
No mother considers her own child bad. She tries desperately to believe that someone else ruined her child. Kiku, too, was overcome by the same sort of agonized feelings shared by all women.
The Kirishitan faith—for Kiku, it came down to that one woman. That woman, of course, was the Santa Maria that Seikichi so adored. He had given Kiku a medaille engraved with that woman’s image. And once, he had knelt with a look of rapture on his face before her statue in the Nambanji.
This is all her fault. She’s to blame for everything that’s happened.
Defiantly she marched straight to the door of the church. She put her weight against the door to open it.
With Mass completed, the chapel was empty, dark, and silent. Once it became known that the Urakami Kirishitans had been arrested, spectators suddenly stopped appearing on the church grounds.
To the side of the altar flickered a tiny light fueled with rapeseed oil. It was a sign that the Eucharist representing Christ’s body had been placed at the altar.
To the side of the altar was that woman: the statue of Santa Maria stared fixedly toward Kiku. The statue of the Blessed Mother that Seikichi had gazed on with such rapture….
It’s your fault! Kiku glared at the other woman. Even when frowning, her face was beautiful.
You’re a woman, too. So you must understand how I feel. I prayed to you every single day that nothing terrible would happen to Seikichi…. But … but you made terrible things happen to him. Since you’re a woman … you must understand how sad … how painful … how painful … Tears poured in a deluge from Kiku’s eyes. There was nothing else … nothing else Kiku could say. She looked up at the statue of the woman, her eyes brimming with resentment.
Since you’re a woman … you must understand how sad …
Heaving with sobs, groaning, her shoulders shaking, Kiku continued to remonstrate with the statue. She muttered protests. Since she was not a Kirishitan, she knew nothing about prayers to the Blessed Mother, but her protests and her sobs were surely one form of human prayer.
The statue of the Blessed Mother Mary looked down at Kiku with wide eyes. With her large eyes open wide, she listened carefully to Kiku’s prayers of anger, of protests, and of curses.
Since you’re a woman … you must understand how sad …
Kiku did not know that the Blessed Mother also had had someone she loved very much taken from her. The one she loved, like Seikichi, had been arrested and beaten, had bled, and had died on a cross—but Kiku did not know that. Kiku did not know that just as she herself was doing now, this woman had also once wept in pain and torment.
It was silent in the chapel that afternoon. In the silence, all that could be heard was Kiku’s intermittent, seemingly interminable sobbing. In the light of day, the streets of Nagasaki were like a desert; the black shadows of houses dozed along the roadways; a man in front of the gate shared by the magistrate’s office and the Sakuramachi Prison sat on his haunches and gnawed on a melon; and in Nagasaki Bay the waves lapped languidly at the shore.
Nagasaki Bay was also visible from Petitjean’s room. Unaware that Kiku was in the chapel, Petitjean sat with his head resting in both hands, struggling to rid himself of the anger he had felt since his conversation with Hondō.
As he gazed at the bay of Nagasaki, which glimmered in the sun like the sparkle of countless needles, his anger gradually abated, and he reached a point that he could ponder coolly what Hondō Shuntarō had said.
If I were a Japanese … Petitjean was a fair-minded priest, and he tried to consider the matter from the standpoint of the Japanese … I might feel just the way Hondō does about this.
Potent Western nations had invaded the countries of Asia. Petitjean could not deny that. His own homeland of France had actually been more active in occupying parts of Africa. The justification used for the invasions was that they were efforts to bring modern civilization and culture to primitive lands, and the Christian church had been tacitly complicit in their actions.
But if he were an Asian from one of the plundered countries who had had his pride deeply wounded, Petitjean would surely have sensed hypocrisy in the attitude of the Christian church for granting unspoken approval to all this, turning a blind eye, and conveniently benefiting from all the coercive tactics. Without question, it had been a grave error, even a sin, on the part of the Christian church.
Why are you causing disruptions here in Japan? Why are you stirring things up in Urakami Village? And here you are, not in prison, but sitting back carefree in your room!
Petitjean could vividly recall Hondō’s words. The words stung, but he could not ignore the jabs of his conscience.
Petitjean hung his head, his hands still over his face. In a separate place, Kiku’s shoulders shook with sobs….
What tormented Petitjean the most was the fact that of the sixty-eight men and women held in prison, every one except Sen’emon had apostatized out of fear of the gruesome tortures. Hondō Shuntarō had casually and triumphantly reported to him that the Urakami Kirishitans had been broken. That the believers had abandoned God.
Petitjean had to admit his bitter defeat. The elation he had felt when he found the Kirishitans hidden in Japan had changed into this unspeakable pain of remorse and regret.
O Lord, Thy ways are … are unfathomable to me. Thou hast granted me the flowers of
delight … only to suddenly destroy them.
He heard Okane call his name. “Lord Petitjean, when will Lord Laucaigne be returning?”
“This evening.”
Laucaigne had once again gone to visit the homes in Nakano, Motohara, and Ieno, where he offered comfort to the women whose husbands or sons had been taken off to prison. But those same husbands and sons, having abandoned their faith, would eventually be set free.
He decided to kneel in prayer in the chapel, which was his heart’s refuge. He wanted to be alone in the chapel to pray and ponder to know whether the things he had done were approved or misguided.
But as he was about to step into the sanctuary through a door behind the altar, Petitjean saw Kiku standing there alone. She was looking up at the statue of the Blessed Mother and weeping.
“Kiku. What … what are you doing there?”
Startled that Petitjean had called to her, Kiku began to flee.
“Kiku, I have something to tell you.”
She paused.
“Seikichi is … I’ve heard that Seikichi will soon be released from prison.”
Kiku stood with her mouth open, almost as though she couldn’t understand what the words meant. Then color returned to her tear-stained face and with a look exuding joy, she responded, “Seikichi is going to be released …?”
“Yes.”
“The magistrate has pardoned Seikichi?”
“That’s right …” Petitjean nodded, tasting an emotion as bitter as his own gastric juices.
“Then he’ll be going back to Urakami?”
“Yes …”
“Oh, Santa Maria!” Without warning, Kiku turned her face toward the statue of the Blessed Mother and, to Petitjean’s astonishment, cried out, “You’re wonderful! I’m sorry for hating you. Forgive me? Thanks to you, Seikichi has cut his ties with the evil Kirishitan faith!”
It looked as though it would rain that day.
Beneath the leaden sky, a procession of vagrants trudged its way up Nishizaka Hill toward the Togitsu Highway. Every man and woman in the column looked haggard, but from their expressions it appeared not that they were physically exhausted but had lost all will to live.
They were the Urakami Kirishitans, who had been released by the magistrate after many months in prison. But it was no longer correct to call them Kirishitans. They had abandoned their faith. They had apostatized.
When they passed by the Shōtokuji, the chief priest was waiting for them. His apprentices had set out earthenware teapots and teacups for them, intending to treat them to a drink of tea, but not one of them accepted the offering.
“Well done, well done! After thinking it over, you’ve had a change of heart!” The chief priest tried to encourage and cheer each one individually, almost to the point of patting them on their backs, but the apostates kept their faces averted and walked past the priest without uttering a word.
They came to Magome. Mitsu’s brother Ichijirō was in the field with his father and other relatives, just beginning to harvest the rice. Noticing the ghostly looking band, he shouted, “Hey, it’s the Kuros of Nakano and Motohara!” Then he muttered, “Just look at them. Looks like they were treated pretty badly!” Inwardly he was ashamed of buckling under to the officials at the magistrate’s office and the priest of the Shōtokuji and spying on Nakano village. He didn’t like the Kuros, but he also disliked having to act like a spy.
Beneath the dark gray sky, the column passed through Magome and finally set foot in their beloved village of Nakano. The groves of trees, the terraced rice paddies, the colors of the earth, and the smell of the soil—all these they had thought about and dreamed about while in prison. When one person at the front of the column came to a stop, they all stopped walking. Some of the women began to weep.
They were looking at their own houses, each as tiny as an animal shed. The doors were tightly shut, and all was still. There was not a sign of a single person on the road. Not a single child was at play.
Where is everybody? Seikichi thought, and without even a parting word to the others, he set off for his own house. The rest followed suit and dispersed in various directions. It was painful to look into each other’s faces. In those faces they could see their own likeness: a traitor.
The door of Seikichi’s house was also tightly shut.
“Mother, it’s me!” he called softly, knocking on the door. The house was stubbornly unresponsive.
“Mother, it’s Seikichi!” he called in a louder voice. Finally he could hear the door being unlocked from within, and an elderly woman poked her face out.
“Mother!”
“Come in quickly!” his mother said rapidly. “Once they heard that you’d apostatized, the villagers decided not to have anything to do with you.”
“Nothing to do with me? They told you that?”
“That’s … that’s what they all decided. The padres were opposed to it, but …”
Seikichi’s father was stretched out on a woven mat they used in place of a tatami. His legs had been bothering him ever since he took a fall while working in the fields. Sitting in the dark, dank room blackened by smoke from the hearth, Seikichi and his parents conversed in whispers, as though fearing they might be heard outside.
“They said you had all betrayed Deus. That you’d turned your backs on the village. Turned your backs on what our village and our families have believed in for generations…. That’s what everybody said. They decided that even if you returned to the village, they wouldn’t associate with you for fear of angering God.”
“That’s a damned fine thing for them to say! People who know absolutely nothing about the horrible pain we suffered, strutting around like they’re the only ones with real faith …!” Seikichi spat the words out angrily, but his heart was bursting with the feeling that he was in fact a cowardly traitor, an apostate.
“Won’t you go to the village head and tell him you want to return to the faith?” From his sickbed, Seikichi’s father asked between coughing fits. “Returning to the faith” meant, of course, for one who has separated himself from the Kirishitan faith to come back to the church.
“If you don’t,” his mother sighed, “I doubt the people of the village will ever forgive you.”
“Are you telling me to return to the faith so that I can be tortured again? Mother, look at these scars.” Seikichi stripped his kimono down to his waist and showed them the deep red scars on his back that witnessed the torture he had undergone. “People only say what suits their own convenience.”
A misty rain began to fall outside. Both his father and mother hung their heads and said nothing further. Gazing at their sorry postures, Seikichi’s chest tightened with agonizing emotion. He got to his feet and brusquely left the house. He had decided to show his wounded body to someone in the village and, together with some of the others who had just been released from jail, to protest this ostracism.
When he got outside, he saw through the misty rain that two men had emerged from their houses and were walking toward him. Both men, Seishirō and Mataichi, had been tortured along with him.
“Seikichi, I guess you’ve heard what they’re saying?” Mataichi asked, almost in tears.
“They told me that if I didn’t come back to the church, I’d be an outcast. I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous.”
“But Seikichi, we’ve rejected Lord Jezusu and Santa Maria. I can put up with being shunned. But I can’t bear having promised to turn my back on Lord Jezusu and Santa Maria.”
Seikichi could not dispute what Mataichi said. He felt the same way himself. His heart was seared as though with molten lead for abandoning what he had been taught from childhood was the most beautiful, most pure, and most true of all things.
“Are you suggesting we should go to the village head and tell him we want to return to our Kirishitan faith?” he muttered weakly, with a sigh.
The light rain drizzled over the three men. But they stood motionless, like cows that have been left standing in
the field.
As the trio headed through the rain toward the village head’s house, they saw the hazy gray figures of several other people moving through the fog. When they drew near, they recognized another three who had apostatized: Mojū, his wife Kisa, and their son Shigeichi.
At this point, they knew without asking why this family was going to the village head’s house. The six now trudged wordlessly along the wet road.
Catching sight of them, a dog tethered in the village head’s garden began to bark. At the sound, the village head, Kanjūrō, stuck his head out the door and said, “Ah, you’re back home!” Unaware of their intentions, he seemed to think they had come to offer their apologies, and with a forced smile on his face he said, “Well, come in, come in! How terrible that you’ve had such a rough time.” Once Seikichi, with a weak shake of his head, explained their desires to return to the Kirishitan faith, his look changed to one of shock and despondency.
“What?!” He was at a loss for words.
One after another, men and women assembled through the mist at the village head’s house. Each of them had heard about the ostracism and had come to ask permission to return to the church.
“I see …” Breaking his long silence, he stammered, “Well, I … Because of my position, I’ll have to report this to the magistrate. I assume you have no objection?”
“There’s no other choice.”
“You’ll have to go back to prison.”
No one responded. Their wretched life in jail came vividly back to mind. But their minds were thrown into confusion by the threat of ostracism, the agonizing prospect of being separated once again from their families, and their guilt at having betrayed Lord Jezusu and Santa Maria.
Someone cried out, “Sen’emon is still in prison by himself. If Sen’emon can endure it, we can, too!”
“Is that so?” The village head nodded. “You know, it’s possible that the magistrate won’t have any more time to deal with you…. The domains of Satsuma and Chōshū have joined forces with a pledge to attack Edo. Things will change if the shogun loses that battle. And who knows what will happen to the magistrate?”