The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

by David Mitchell

  The sword hilt in Enomoto’s hand is, Orito sees, a pistol.

  “The sisters are not ‘playthings.’ They dedicate twenty years to the Goddess and are provided for after their descents. Many spiritual orders make similar pacts with their adherents but demand lifelong service.”

  “What ‘spiritual order’ harvests infants from its nuns like your private sect does?”

  Darkness uncoils and slides around the edges of Orito’s vision.

  “The fertility of the world below is fed by a river. Shiranui is its spring.”

  Orito sifts his tone and words for cynicism but finds faith. “How can an academician—a translator of Isaac Newton—speak like a superstitious peasant?”

  “Enlightenment can blind one, Orito. Apply all the empirical methodology you desire to time, gravity, life: their genesis and purposes are, at root, unknowable. It is not superstition but reason that concludes the realm of knowledge is finite and that the brain and the soul are discrete entities.”

  Click: an aspirant has placed a white counter on the board.

  “You never treated the Shirandô Academy to this insight, as I recall.”

  “We are a spiritual order of limited numbers. The way of Shiranui is no more the way of the scholar than it is the way of the common herd.”

  “What noble words for a squalid truth. You coop women up for twenty years, impregnate them, snatch the infants from their breasts—and forge letters to their mothers from all the dead ones as they grow up!”

  “Just three sadly deceased gifts have their New Year letters written: three out of thirty-six—or thirty-eight, including Sister Yayoi’s twins. All the others are genuine. Abbess Izu believes this fiction is kinder to the sisters, and experience bears her out.”

  “Do the sisters thank you for this kindness when they discover that the son or daughter they wish to join after descent died eighteen years ago?”

  “This misfortune has never occurred during my abbotship.”

  “Sister Hatsune is intending to join her dead daughter, Noriko.”

  “Her descent is two years away. If her mind is unchanged, I will explain.”

  The bell of Amanohashira rings for the Hour of the Dog.

  “It saddens me,” Enomoto says, leaning into the fire, “that you view us as jailers. Perhaps it is a consequence of your relative rank. One birth every two years is a lighter levy than most wives in the world below must endure. To most of your sisters, the masters delivered them from servitude into a pure land on earth.”

  “Mount Shiranui Shrine is far from my imagining of the pure land.”

  “The daughter of Aibagawa Seian is a rare woman. A singular case.”

  “I’d prefer not to hear Father’s name on your lips.”

  “Aibagawa Seian was my trusted friend before he was your father.”

  “A friendship you repay by stealing his orphaned daughter?”

  “I brought you home, Sister Aibagawa.”

  “I had a home, in Nagasaki.”

  “But Shiranui was your home, even before you heard its name. Learning of your vocation in midwifery, I knew. Watching you at the Shirandô Academy, I knew. Years ago, recognizing the Goddess’s mark on your face, I—”

  “My face was burned by a pan of hot oil. It was an accident!”

  Enomoto smiles like an adoring father. “The Goddess summoned you. She revealed her true self to you, did she not?”

  Orito has spoken to no one, not even Yayoi, about the spherical cave and its strange giantess.

  Click: an aspirant places a black counter on the board.

  There was a secret seal, logic assures her, entering the tunnel.

  Wings beat in the spaces overhead, but when Orito looks up, she sees nothing.

  “When you ran away,” Enomoto is saying, “the Goddess called you back …”

  Once I believe this lunacy, Orito thinks, I am truly Shiranui’s prisoner.

  “… and your soul obeyed, because your soul knows what your mind is too knowledgeable to understand.”

  “I came back because Yayoi would have died if I hadn’t.”

  “You were an instrument of the Goddess’s compassion. You shall be rewarded.”

  Her dread of engiftment opens its ugly mouth. “I … can’t have done to me what is done to the others. I can’t.” Orito is ashamed of these words, and ashamed of her shame. Spare me what the others endure, the words mean, and Orito begins to tremble. Burn! she urges herself. Be angry!

  Click: an aspirant has placed a white clamshell counter on the board.

  Enomoto’s voice is a caress. “All of us—the Goddess most of all—know what you sacrificed to be here. Look at me with your wise eyes, Orito. We wish to offer you a proposal. No doubt a doctor’s daughter like yourself has noticed Housekeeper Satsuki’s poor health. It is, sadly, a cancer of the womb. She has asked to die on her home island. My men shall take her there in a few days. Her post as housekeeper is yours, if you want it. The Goddess blesses the house with a gift every five or six weeks: your twenty years at the shrine would be spent as a practicing midwife, helping your sisters and deepening your knowledge. Such a valuable asset to my shrine would never be engifted. In addition, I shall procure books—any books—you wish, so you can follow in your father’s scholarly footsteps. After your descent, I shall purchase you a house in Nagasaki, or anywhere else, and pay you a stipend for the rest of your life.”

  For four months, Orito realizes, the house has bludgeoned me with fear …

  “You’d be less a sister of Shiranui Shrine than a sister of life.”

  … so that this proposal seems not a tether, or a noose, but a rope lowered to a drowning woman.

  Four knocks at the door send ripples across the room.

  Enomoto glances past Orito and nods once. “Ah, a long-expected friend has arrived to return a stolen item. I must go and present him with a token of gratitude.” Midnight-blue silk flows upward as Enomoto stands. “Meanwhile, Sister, consider our offer.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  BEHIND THE HARUBAYASHI INN, EAST OF KUROZANE VILLAGE IN KYÔGA DOMAIN

  The twenty-second morning of the first month

  EMERGING FROM THE REAR PRIVY, UZAEMON LOOKS ACROSS THE vegetable patch and sees a figure watching him from the bamboo grove. He squints through the half-light. Otane the herbalist? She has the same black hood and mountain clothes. She could be. She has the same bent back. Yes. Uzaemon raises a cautious hand, but the figure turns away, with a slow, sad shake of her gray head.

  No, he mustn’t acknowledge her? Or No, the rescue is doomed?

  The interpreter puts on a pair of straw sandals left on the veranda and crosses the ruckled vegetable patch to the bamboo. A path of black mud and white frost winds through the grove.

  Back at the inn, the rooster crows in the forecourt.

  Shuzai and the others, he thinks, will be wondering where I am.

  Straw shoes offer little protection for a clerical samurai’s soft feet.

  On a snapped cane at eye level is a waxwing: its mouth opens …

  … its throat vibrates and spatters out a tuneless tune …

  In short arcs it hops, from perch to perch, through the thick grove.

  Uzaemon follows through slanted bars of light dark and dark dark …

  … through the pressing confinement; thin panes of ice shatter underfoot.

  Up ahead, the waxwing beckons him onward, or over to one side?

  Are two waxwings, Uzaemon wonders, toying with one human?

  “Is anyone there?” He dares not raise his voice. “Otane-sama?”

  The leaves shuffle like paper. The path ends at a noisy river, brown and thick like Dutchmen’s tea.

  The far bank is a wall of gouged rock …

  … rising up beneath splayed boughs and knuckled roots.

  A toe of Mount Shiranui, Uzaemon thinks. At its head, Orito is waking.

  Upriver, or downriver, a man is shouting in a hunchbacked dialect.

  B
UT THE PATH back to the rear garden of the Harubayashi Inn delivers Uzaemon into a hidden clearing. Here, on a bed of dark pebbles, several dozen head-sized sea-smoothed rocks are enclosed within a knee-high stone wall. There is no shrine, no torî gate, no straw ropes hung with paper twists, so it takes the interpreter a little time to recognize that he is in a cemetery. Hugging himself against the cold, he steps over the wall to examine the headstones. The pebbles grind and give beneath his feet.

  Numbers, not names, are engraved on the rocks: up to eighty-one.

  Invasive bamboo is kept back, and lichen is cleaned from the stones.

  Uzaemon wonders if the woman he mistook for Otane is a caretaker.

  Perhaps she took fright, he thinks, at a samurai charging her way …

  But what Buddhist sect spurns even desultory death names on its headstones? Without a death name for Lord Enma’s Register of the Dead, as every child knows, a soul is turned away at the next world’s gates. Their ghosts drift for all eternity. Uzaemon speculates that the buried are miscarried children, criminals, or suicides, but is not quite convinced. Even members of the untouchable caste are buried with some sort of name.

  There is no birdsong, he notices, in winter’s cage.

  “MORE THAN LIKELY, SIR,” the landlord tells Uzaemon back at the inn, “it was a certain charcoal burner’s girl you saw. She lives with her father ’n’ brother in a tumbledown cottage an’ a million starlings in the thatch, up past Twelve Fields. She drifts this-a-way ’n’ that-a-way up ’n’ down the river, sir. Weak-headed an’ stumble-footed, she is, an’ she’s been with child twice or three times, but they never take root ’cause the daddy was her daddy, or else her brother, an’ she’ll die in that tumbledown cottage alone, sir, for what family’d want such impureness dilutin’ its blood?”

  “But it was an old woman I saw, not a girl.”

  “Kyôga mares are fatter-hipped than the princesses o’ Nagasaki, sir: a local girl o’ thirteen, fourteen’d pass for an old mare, specially in half-light.”

  Uzaemon is dubious. “Then what about this secret graveyard?”

  “Oh, there’s no secret, sir: in the hostelers’ trade it’s what we call our ‘long stayers’ quarters.’ There’s many a traveler who falls sick on the road, sir, ’specially on a pilgrims’ route, an’ sleep their last in inns, an’ it costs us landlords a handsome ransom. An’ ‘ransom’ is the word: we can’t very well dump the body by the roadside. What if a relative comes along? What if the ghost scares off business? But a proper funeral needs money, same as everythin’ else in this world, sir, what with priests for chantin’ an’ a stonecutter for a nice tomb an’ a plot of earth in the temple …” The landlord shakes his head. “So, an ancestor of mine cleared the cemetery in the copse for the benefit, sir, of guests who pass away at the Harubayashi. We keep a proper register of the guests lyin’ there, an’ number the stones proper, too, an’ write down the guests’ names if they said one, an’ if it’s a man or woman, an’ guess their age, an’ whatnot. So if any relatives do come lookin’, we can maybe help.”

  Shuzai asks, “Are your dead guests often claimed by their relatives?”

  “Not once in my time, sir, but we do it, anyway. My wife washes the stones every O-bon.”

  Uzaemon asks, “When was the last body interred there?”

  The innkeeper purses his lips. “Fewer single travelers pass through Kyôga, sir, now the Omura Road’s so much improved … Last one was three years ago: a printer gentleman, who went to bed fit as a goat but come mornin’ he was cold as stone. Makes you think, sir, doesn’t it?”

  Uzaemon is unsettled by the innkeeper’s tone. “What does it make you think?”

  “It’s not just the aged an’ frail Death bundles into his palanquin.”

  THE KYÔGA ROAD follows the Ariake Sea’s muddy shore and then inland through a wood, where one of the hired men, Hane, falls behind and another, Ishi, runs on ahead. “A precaution,” explains Shuzai, from inside his palanquin, “to make sure we aren’t being followed from Kurozane or expected up ahead.” Several upward shrugs of the road later, they cross the narrow Mekura River and take a leaf-strewn track turning up toward the gorge’s mouth. By a moss-blotched torî gate, a notice board turns away casual visitors. Here the palanquin is lowered, the weapons removed from its false floor, and, before Uzaemon’s eyes, Deguchi of Osaka and his long-suffering servants turn into mercenaries. Shuzai emits a sharp whistle. Uzaemon hears nothing—unless a twig cracking is something—but the men hear a signal that all is well. They run with the empty palanquin, climbing shallow curves. The interpreter is soon out of breath. A waterfall’s clatter and boom grows louder and nearer, and around a recent rock fall the men arrive at the lower mouth of Mekura Gorge: a stepped cutting in a low escarpment as high as eight or nine men, cloaked and choked by long-tongued ferns and throttling creepers. Down this drop the cold river plunges. The pool below churns and boils.

  Uzaemon becomes a prisoner of the ever-plunging waterfall …

  She drinks from this river, he thinks, where it is a mountain stream.

  … until a thrush whistles in a flank of wild camellia. Shuzai whistles back. The leaves part and five men emerge. They are dressed in commoners’ clothes, but their faces have the same military hardness as the other masterless samurai. “Let’s get this crate on poles”—Shuzai indicates his battered palanquin—“out of sight.”

  Hidden by the wall of camellia in a hollow where the palanquin is covered with branches and leaves. Shuzai introduces the new men by false names: Tsuru, the moon-faced leader, Yagi, Kenka, Muguchi, and Bara; Uzaemon, still dressed as a pilgrim, is named “Junrei.” The new men show him a distant respect, but they look to Shuzai as the leader of the expedition. Whether the mercenaries view Uzaemon as a besotted fool or an honorable man—and maybe, Uzaemon considers, one may be both—they give no sign. The samurai named Tsuru gives a brief account of their journey from Saga down to Kurozane, and the interpreter thinks of the small steps that gathered this raiding party: Otane the herbalist’s accurate guess at the contents of his heart; Jiritsu the acolyte’s revulsion at the order’s creeds; Enomoto’s nefariousness; and more steps; and more twists—some known, and others not—and Uzaemon marvels at the weaverless loom of fortune.

  “THE FIRST PART of our ascent,” Shuzai is saying, “we’ll make in six groups of two, leaving at five-minute intervals. First, Tsuru and Yagi; second, Kenka and Muguchi; third, Bara and Tanuki; next, Kuma and Ishi; then, Hane and Shakke; and last, Junrei,” he looks at Uzaemon, “and me. We’ll regroup below the gatehouse”—the men cluster around an inked map of the mountainside, their breaths mingling—“guarding this natural revile. I’ll lead Bara and Tanuki, Tsuru and Hane over this bluff, and we’ll storm the gate from uphill—the unexpected direction—shortly after the change of guard. We’ll bind, gag, and bag them with the ropes and sacks. They’re just farm boys, so don’t kill them, unless they insist. Bare Peak is another two hours’ stiff march, so the monks will be settling down for the night by the time we arrive. Kuma, Hane, Shakke, Ishi: scale the wall here”—Shuzai now unfolds his picture of the shrine—“on the southwest side, where the trees are closest and thickest. First, go to the gatehouse here and let the rest of us in. Then we send for the highest-ranking master. Him we inform that Sister Aibagawa is leaving with us. This will happen peacefully or over a courtyard of slain acolytes. The choice is his.” Shuzai looks at Uzaemon. “A threat you aren’t willing to carry through is no threat at all.”

  Uzaemon nods, but, Please, he prays, don’t let any life be lost.

  “Junrei’s face,” Shuzai tells the others, “is known to Enomoto from the Shirandô Academy. Although our obliging landlord informed us that the lord abbot is in Miyako at present, Junrei mustn’t risk being identified, even secondhand. That is why you shall take no part in the raid.”

  It is unacceptable, thinks Uzaemon, to cower outside like a woman.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” says Shuzai, “but
you are not a killer.”

  Uzaemon nods, intending to change Shuzai’s mind during the day.

  “When we leave, I’ll warn the monks that I’ll cut down any pursuers without mercy. We then withdraw, with the freed prisoner. We’ll cut the vines of Todoroki Bridge to win us more time tomorrow. We pass through the halfway gatehouse during the Hour of the Ox, descend the gorge, and arrive back here by the Hour of the Rabbit. We carry the woman in the palanquin as far as Kashima. There we disperse and leave the domain before horsemen can be dispatched. Any questions?”

  WINTER WOODS ARE creaking, knitted and knotted. Dead leaves lie in deep drifts. Needle tips of birdsong stitch and thread the thicket’s many layers. Shuzai and Uzaemon climb in silence. Here the Mekura River is a bellowing, roiling, echoing thing. The granite sky entombs the valley.

  By mid-morning, the arches of Uzaemon’s blistered feet are aching.

  Here the Mekura River is as smooth and green as foreign glass.

  Shuzai gives Uzaemon oil to rub into his aching calves and ankles, saying, “The swordsman’s first weapon is his feet.”

  On a round rock, an immobile heron waits for fish.

  “The men you hired,” ventures Uzaemon, “seem to trust you entirely.”

  “Some of us studied under the same master in Imabari; most of us served under a minor lordling of Iyo Domain who provoked some fierce skirmishes with his neighbor. To have relied on a man to stay alive is a bond closer than blood.”

  A splash punctures the jade pool: the heron is gone.

  Uzaemon recalls an uncle teaching him long ago to skim stones. He recalls the old woman he saw at sunrise. “There are times when I suspect that the mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past, and the might-one-day-be. This mind’s mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice.” He looks at his friend, who is watching a bird of prey high above them. “I am sounding like a drunken priest.”

  “Not at all,” mumbles Shuzai. “Not at all.”

  HIGHER UP THE MOUNTAINSIDE, limestone cliffs wall in the gorge. Uzaemon begins to see parts of faces in the weatherworn escarpments. A bulge looks like a forehead, a protruding ridge a nose, and excoriations and rock slides, wrinkles and sags. Even mountains, thinks Uzaemon, were once young, and age, and one day die. One black rift under a shrub-hairy overhang could be a narrowed eye. He imagines ten thousand bats hanging from its ruckled roof …