The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, Page 24

… and her blood pumps louder, her arteries widen, and well-being soothes her joints.

  “The Goddess didn’t choose you,” says Abbess Izu. “You chose the Goddess.”

  Warm snowflakes settle over Orito’s skin, whispering as they melt.

  Every evening, the doctor’s daughter wants to ask Suzaku about the ingredients of solace. Every evening, she stops herself. The question, she knows, would initiate a conversation, and conversation is a step toward acceptance.

  “What’s good for the body,” Suzaku tells Orito’s mouth, “is good for the soul.”

  DINNER IS A FESTIVE occasion compared to breakfast. After a brief blessing, Housekeeper Satsuki and the sisters eat tofu in tempura batter, fried with garlic and rolled in sesame; pickled eggplant; pilchards and white rice. Even the haughtiest sisters remember their commoners’ origins, when such a fine daily diet could only be dreamed of, and they relish each morsel. The abbess has gone with Master Suzaku to dine with Master Genmu, so the mood in the long room is leisurely. When the table is cleared and the dishes and chopsticks washed, the sisters smoke pipes around the table, swap stories, play mah-jongg, reread—or have reread—their New Year letters, and listen to Hatsune play her koto. The effects of solace wear out a little earlier every night, Orito notices. She leaves, as usual, without saying good night. Wait till she’s been engifted, she feels the women think. Wait till her belly is as big as a boulder, and she needs us to help her scrub, fetch, and carry.

  Back in her cell, Orito finds that someone has lit her fire. Yayoi.

  Umegae’s spite or Kagerô’s hostility encourages her to reject the house.

  But Yayoi’s kindness, she fears, makes life here more tolerable …

  … and ushers closer the day when Mount Shiranui becomes her home.

  Who knows, she wonders, if Yayoi is not acting under Genmu’s orders?

  Orito, troubled and shivering in the icy air, wipes herself with a cloth.

  Under her blankets, she lies on her side, gazing into the fire’s garden.

  THE PERSIMMON’S branches sag with ripe fruit. They glow in the dusk.

  An eyelash in the sky grows into a heron; the gawky bird descends …

  Its eyes are green and its hair is red; Orito is afraid of his clumsy beak.

  The heron says, in Dutch, of course, You are beautiful.

  Orito wishes neither to encourage him nor wound his feelings.

  She is in the courtyard of the House of Sisters: she hears Yayoi groan.

  Dead leaves fly like bats; bats fly like dead leaves.

  How can I escape? Orito asks nobody. The gate is locked.

  Since when, mocks the moon-gray cat, do cats need keys?

  There is no time—she is knotted by exasperation—to speak in riddles.

  First, persuade them, says the cat, that you are happy here.

  Why, she asks, should I ever give them that false satisfaction?

  Because only then, answers the cat, shall they stop watching you.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE SHIRANDÔ ACADEMY AT THE ÔTSUKI RESIDENCE IN NAGASAKI

  Sunset on the twenty-fourth day of the tenth month

  “I CONCLUDE,” SAYS YOSHIDA HAYATO, THE STILL-YOUTHFUL AUTHOR of an erudite monograph on the true age of the earth, surveying his audience of eighty or ninety scholars, “this widely held belief that Japan is an impregnable fortress is a pernicious delusion. Honorable Academicians, we are a ramshackle farmhouse with crumbling walls, a collapsing roof, and covetous neighbors.” Yoshida is succumbing to a bone disease, and projecting his voice over the large sixty-mat hall drains him. “To our northwest, a morning’s voyage from Tsushima Island, live the vainglorious Koreans. Who shall forget those provocative banners their last embassy flaunted? ‘Inspectorate of Dominions’ and ‘We Are Purity,’ implying, naturally, ‘You Are Not’!”

  Some of the scholars grizzle in agreement.

  “Northeast lies the vast domain of Ezo, home to the savage Ainu but also to Russians, who map our coastlines and claim Karafuto. They call it Sakhalin. It is a mere twelve years since a Frenchman”—Yoshida prepares his lips—“La Pérouse, named the straits between Ezo and Karafuto after himself! Would the French tolerate the Yoshida Straits off their coast?” The point is well made and well received. “The recent incursions by Captain Benyowsky and Captain Laxman warn us of a near future when straying Europeans no longer request provisions but demand trade, quays, and warehouses, fortified ports, unequal treaties. Colonies shall take root like thistles and weeds. Then we shall understand that our ‘impregnable fortress’ was a placebo and nothing more; that our seas are no ‘impassable moat’ but, as my far-sighted colleague Hayashi Shihei wrote, ‘an ocean road without frontiers that links China, Holland, and Edo’s Nihonbashi Bridge.’”

  Some in the audience nod in agreement; others look concerned.

  Hayashi Shihei, Ogawa Uzaemon remembers, died under house arrest for his writings.

  “My lecture is finished.” Yoshida bows. “I thank the Shirandô for its gracious attention.”

  Ôtsuki Monjurô, the academy’s bearded director, hesitates to ask for questions, but Dr. Maeno clears his well-respected throat and raises his fan. “First, I wish to thank Yoshida-san for his stimulating thoughts. Second, I wish to ask how best the threats he enumerates can be countered.”

  Yoshida takes a sip of warm water and a deep breath.

  A vague and evasive answer, thinks Uzaemon, would be safest.

  “By the creation of a Japanese navy, by the foundation of two large shipyards, and by the establishment of an academy where foreign instructors would train Japanese shipwrights, armorers, gunsmiths, officers, and sailors.”

  The audience was unprepared for the audacity of Yoshida’s vision.

  Awatsu, an algebraist, is the first to recover. “Is that all?”

  Yoshida smiles at Awatsu’s irony. “Emphatically not. We need a national army based on the French model; an armory to produce the newest Prussian rifles; and an overseas empire. To avoid becoming a European colony, we need colonies of our own.”

  “But what Yoshida-san proposes,” objects Dr. Maeno, “would require …”

  A radical new government, thinks Uzaemon, and a radical new Japan.

  A chemist unknown to Uzaemon suggests, “A trade mission to Batavia?”

  Yoshida shakes his head. “Batavia is a ditch, and whatever the Dutch tell us, Holland is a pawn. France, England, Prussia, or the energetic United States must be our teachers. Two hundred bright, able-bodied scholars—a criterion that,” he says, smiling sadly, “excludes me—must be sent to these countries to study the arts of industry. Upon their return, let them spread their knowledge freely, to the ablest minds of all classes, so we may set about constructing a true ‘impregnable fortress.’”

  “But,” Haga the ape-nosed druggist raises the obvious objection, “the Separate Nation decree forbids any subject to leave Japan, on pain of death.”

  Not even Yoshida Hayato dares suggest, thinks Uzaemon, the decree be annulled.

  “Hence the decree”—Yoshida Hayato is outwardly calm—“must be annulled.”

  The statement provokes fearful objections and some nervous assent.

  Interpreter Arashiyama glances at Uzaemon: Should someone not save him from himself?

  He’s dying, the young interpreter thinks. The choice is his.

  “Yoshida-san,” calls out Haga the druggist, “is naysaying the third shogun …”

  “… who is not a debating partner,” the chemist agrees, “but a deity!”

  “Yoshida-sama,” counters Ômori the Dutch-style painter, “is a visionary patriot and he should be heard!”

  Haga stands up. “Our society debates natural philosophy—”

  “—and not matters of state,” agrees an Edo metallurgist, “so—”

  “Nothing is outside philosophy,” claims Ômori, “unless fear says it is.”

  “So whoever disagrees with you,” asks Haga, “is, therefore, a co
ward?”

  “The third shogun closed the country to prevent Christian rebellions,” argues Aodo the historian, “but its result was to pickle Japan in a specimen jar!”

  Clamor breaks out, and Director Ôtsuki strikes two sticks together for order.

  When relative quietness is reestablished, Yoshida wins permission to address his detractors. “The Separate Nation decree was a necessary measure in the day of the third shogun. But new machines of power are shaping the world. What we learn from Dutch reports and Chinese sources is a grave warning. Peoples who do not acquire these machines of power are, at best, subjugated, like the Indians. At worst, like the natives of Van Diemen’s Land, they are exterminated.”

  “Yoshida-san’s loyalty,” concedes Haga, “is beyond question. What I doubt is the likelihood of an armada of European warships sailing into Edo or Nagasaki. You argue for revolutionary changes to our state, but why? To counter a phantom. To address a hypothetical what-if?”

  “The present is a battleground”—Yoshida straightens his spine as best he can—“where rival what-ifs compete to become the future ‘what is.’ How does one what-if prevail over its adversaries? The answer”—the sick man coughs—“the answer, ‘Military and political power, of course!’ is a postponement, for what is it that directs the minds of the powerful? The answer is ‘belief.’ Beliefs that are ignoble or idealistic; democratic or Confucian; Occidental or Oriental; timid or bold; clearsighted or delusional. Power is informed by belief that this path, and not another, must be followed. What, then, or where, is the womb of belief? What, or where, is the crucible of ideology? Academicians of the Shirandô, I put it to you that we are one such crucible. We are one such womb.”

  DURING THE FIRST interval, the lanterns are lit, braziers are stoked against the cold, and conversations stew and bubble. Interpreters Uzaemon, Arashiyama, and Goto Shinpachi sit with five or six others. The algebraist Awatsu apologizes for disturbing Uzaemon, “but I hoped to hear news of an improvement in your father’s health …”

  “He is still bed-bound,” replies Uzaemon, “but finds ways to wield his will.”

  Those who know Ogawa the Elder of the first rank smile downward.

  “What ails the gentleman?” Yanaoka is a sake-blushed doctor from Kumamoto.

  “Dr. Maeno believes Father suffers from a cancer of the—”

  “A difficult diagnosis! Let us hold a consultation tomorrow.”

  “Dr. Yanaoka is kind, but Father is particular about who—”

  “Come, now, I have known your honorable father for twenty years.”

  Yes, thinks Uzaemon, and he has despised you for forty.

  “‘Too many captains,’” Awatsu quotes, “‘sail the ship up the mountain.’ Dr. Maeno is no doubt doing an excellent job. I shall offer prayers for his swift recovery.”

  The others promise to do the same, and Uzaemon expresses due gratitude.

  “Another missing face,” Yanaoka mentions, “is Dr. Aibagawa’s burned daughter.”

  “You didn’t hear, then,” says Interpreter Arashiyama, “about her happy ending? The late doctor’s finances were found to be in so parlous a state, there was talk of the widow losing the house. When Lord Abbot Enomoto was apprised of the family’s hardships, he not only paid every last sen of the debts—he found space for the daughter in his convent on Mount Shiranui.”

  “Why is that a ‘happy ending’?” Uzaemon regrets opening his mouth already.

  “A full rice bowl every day,” says Ozono, the squat chemist, “for reciting a few sutras? For a woman with such an unmarriageable blemish, this is a jubilant ending! Oh, I know her father encouraged her to play the scholar, but one must sympathize with the widow. What business has a samurai’s daughter to be dabbling with midwifery and mingling with sweaty Dutchmen?”

  Uzaemon orders himself to say nothing.

  Banda is an earthy engineer from marshy Sendai. “During my stay in Isahaya, I overheard some strange rumors about Abbot Enomoto’s shrine.”

  “Without you want,” Awatsu warns Banda cheerfully, “to accuse a close friend of Matsudaira Sadanobu and senior academician of the Shirandô of impropriety, then you should ignore any rumors whatsoever about Lord Enomoto’s shrine. The monks live their lives as monks and the nuns live their lives as nuns.”

  Uzaemon wants to hear Banda’s rumors, but he doesn’t want to hear.

  “Where is Abbot Enomoto tonight, anyway?” asks Yanaoka.

  “In Miyako,” says Yanaoka, “settling some abstruse clerical point.”

  “At his court in Kashima,” says Arashiyama. “Exercising justice, I heard.”

  “I heard he went to the Isle of Tsu,” says Ozono, “to meet Korean traders.”

  The door slides opens: a welcoming hubbub sweeps the hall.

  Dr. Marinus and Sugita Genpaku, one of the most celebrated living Dutch scholars, stand at the threshold. Half-lame Marinus leans on his stick; elderly Sugita leans on a houseboy. The pair enjoys a verbal tussle over who should enter first. They settle the matter by a game of scissors, paper, stone. Marinus wins but uses his victory to insist that Sugita takes precedence.

  “But look,” asks Yanaoka, his neck craning, “at that foreigner’s hair!”

  Ogawa Uzaemon sees Jacob de Zoet hit the crown of his head on the door frame.

  “JUST THIRTY YEARS AGO,” Sugita Genpaku says, sitting on the lecturer’s low plinth, “there were only three of us Dutch scholars in all Japan and a single book: this old man you see before you, Dr. Nakagawa Jun’an, and my dear friend Dr. Maeno, whose more recent discoveries surely include the elixir of immortality, for he has aged not a day.” Sugita’s fingers loop his stringy white beard.

  Dr. Maeno shakes his head with embarrassment and delight.

  “The book,” Sugita continues, tilting his head, “was Kulmus’s Tafel Anatomia, printed in Holland. This I had encountered on my very first visit to Nagasaki. I desired it with my whole being, but I could no more pay the asking price than swim to the moon. My clan purchased it on my behalf and, in so doing, determined my fate.” Sugita pauses and listens with professional interest to Interpreter Shizuki translate his words for Marinus and De Zoet.

  Uzaemon has avoided Dejima since the Shenandoah departed and avoids De Zoet’s eye now. His guilt about Orito is knotted up with the Dutchman in ways Uzaemon cannot disentangle.

  “Maeno and I took the Tafel Anatomia to Edo’s execution ground,” continues Sugita, “where a prisoner named Old Mother Tea had been sentenced to an hour-long strangulation for poisoning her husband.” Shizuki stumbles on “strangulation”; he mimes the action. “We struck a bargain. In return for a painless beheading, she gave us permission to conduct the first medical dissection in the history of Japan on her body and signed an oath not to haunt us in revenge. Upon comparing the subject’s inner organs with the illustrations in the book, we saw, to our astonishment, the Chinese sources that dominated our learning were grossly inaccurate. There were no ‘ears of the lungs’; no ‘seven lobes of the kidneys’; and the intestines differed markedly from the descriptions by the ancient sages …”

  Sugita waits for Shizuki’s translation to catch up.

  De Zoet looks gaunter, Uzaemon thinks, than he did in the autumn.

  “My Tafel Anatomia, however, corresponded with our dissected body so precisely that Drs. Maeno, Nakagawa, and myself were of one mind: European medicine surpasses the Chinese. To say so nowadays, with Dutch medical schools in every city, is a self-evident truth. Thirty years ago, such an opinion was patricidal. Yet, with just a few hundred Dutch words between us, we resolved to translate Tafel Anatomia into Japanese. A few of you may have heard of our Kaitai Shinsho?”

  His audience savors the understatement.

  Shizuki renders “patricidal” into Dutch as “great crime.”

  “Our task was formidable.” Sugita Genpaku straightens his tufted white eyebrows. “Hours were spent in pursuit of single words, often to discover that no Japanese equivalent existed. We crea
ted words that our race shall use”—the old man is not immune to vanity—“for all eternity. By dint of example, I devised ‘shinkei’ for the Dutch ‘nerve,’ over a dinner of oysters. We were, to quote the proverb, ‘The one dog who barks at nothing answered by a thousand dogs barking at something …’”

  DURING THE FINAL INTERVAL, Uzaemon hides in the not-quite-winter garden courtyard from a possible encounter with De Zoet. An unearthly wail from the hall is accompanied by appalled laughter: Director Ôtsuki is demonstrating his bagpipes, acquired earlier this year from Arie Grote. Uzaemon sits under a giant magnolia. The sky is starless, and the young man’s mind recalls the afternoon a year and a half ago when he asked his father for his views on Aibagawa Orito as a possible bride. “Dr. Aibagawa’s a notable scholar, but not so notable as his debts, I am informed. Worse yet, what if that singed face of his daughter is passed on to my grandsons? The answer must be no. If you and the daughter have exchanged any sentiments”—his father’s expression suggested a bad smell—“disown them, without delay.” Uzaemon begged his father at least to consider an engagement a little longer, but Ogawa the Elder wrote an affronted letter to Orito’s father. The servant returned with a short note from the doctor, apologizing for the inconvenience his overindulged daughter had caused and assuring him that the matter was closed. That grimmest of days ended with Uzaemon receiving one last secret letter from Orito, and the shortest of their clandestine correspondence. I could never cause your father, it ended, to regret adopting you.

  Uzaemon’s parents were prompted by the “Aibagawa incident” into finding their son a wife. A go-between knew of a low-ranking but wealthy family in Karatsu who had thriving business interests in dyes and were eager for a son-in-law with access to sappanwood entering Dejima. Omiai interviews were held, and Uzaemon was informed by his father that the girl would be an acceptable Ogawa wife. They were married on New Year’s Day, at an hour judged to be fortunate by the family’s astrologer. The good fortune, Uzaemon thinks, is yet to reveal itself. His wife endured a second miscarriage a few days ago, a misfortune attributed by his mother and father to “wanton carelessness” and “a laxness of spirit,” respectively. Uzaemon’s mother considers it her duty to make her daughter-in-law suffer in the same way she suffered as a young bride in the Ogawa residence. I pity my wife, Uzaemon concedes, but the meaner part of me cannot forgive her for not being Orito. What Orito must endure on Mount Shiranui, however, Uzaemon can only speculate: isolation, drudgery, cold, grief for her father and the life stolen from her, and, surely, resentment at how the scholars of the Shirandô Academy view her captor as a great benefactor. For Uzaemon to interrogate Enomoto, the Shirandô’s most eminent sponsor, about his shrine’s newest sister would be a near-scandalous breach of etiquette. It would imply an accusation of wrongdoing. Yet Mount Shiranui is as shut to inquiries from outside the domain as Japan is closed to the outside world. In the absence of facts about her well-being, Uzaemon’s imagination torments him as much as his conscience. When Dr. Aibagawa had seemed close to death, Uzaemon had hoped that by encouraging, or, at least, by not discouraging, Jacob de Zoet’s proposal of temporary marriage to Orito, he might ensure that she would stay on Dejima. He anticipated, in the longer term, a time when De Zoet would leave Japan, or grow tired of his prize, as foreigners usually do, and she would be willing to accept Uzaemon’s patronage as a second wife. “Feeble-headed,” Uzaemon tells the magnolia tree, “cock-headed, wrongheaded …”