‘Ryutaro would say so too,’ Taka said firmly. She knew how to win her over.
Fujino nodded. ‘Leave him alone, Eijiro,’ she said. ‘You’re not dismissing any of the servants without very good reason.’ She sniffed quietly and dabbed her eyes with her sleeve.
Eijiro scowled. ‘I’ll find one.’ His brow darkened and he turned on his heel and left.
Taka allowed herself a smile of victory. She didn’t know why she’d championed Nobu so vigorously. Perhaps it was because Eijiro was set against him and anything Eijiro opposed she defended. Or perhaps it was because Nobu was young, like her, and she could see how hard his life was, much harder than hers. She was just a thirteen-year-old girl, she didn’t have any power at all, but she knew unfairness when she saw it. If she caught Eijiro bullying him she’d stand up for him, she told herself. Eijiro might be out to cause Nobu trouble but she could be just as stubborn. She vowed to herself that from that moment on she would do all she could to protect him.
4
IN THE DAYS and weeks that followed, everyone was so busy preparing for Haru’s wedding that even Eijiro had no time to worry about the new servant.
Once again New Year came early, when there was still snow on the ground, long before the first aubergine-coloured buds brightened the gnarled branches of the plum trees. Taka tried to forget that this was the last New Year she and her sister would ever spend together. They played the poem card game and the flower card game and Haru won every time. And so began the 7th year of Meiji, a wood dog year, 1874 by the new calendar.
One spring day, a couple of months later, when the cherry trees were coming into bud, Haru stepped into her wedding palanquin. Taka had helped with her make-up and formal black kimono with the family crest on the sleeves and collar and thought she had never looked so lovely, like a porcelain doll. Once she was settled on her knees inside and the go-between, hairdresser, attendants, porters and trunks were all lined up, the bearers lifted the litter on to their shoulders and the procession set off. Taka and her mother and the maids and servants watched from the gate as the line of people grew smaller and smaller until they disappeared under the trees. Tears ran down Taka’s cheeks and she could hear her mother sniffing. Haru wasn’t going far – her new family lived in Tokyo, close to the imperial palace – but she wouldn’t be able to come back to visit until her mother-in-law allowed her to.
A few days later a letter arrived. Taka read it over her mother’s shoulder. ‘Greetings,’ Haru had written. ‘I hope you are keeping well in this changeable weather. Just to let you know that I am in good health and fine spirits. The Fukuda family take care of me and my husband is kind.’ The letter ended, ‘I am very busy about the house and grateful to my mother-in-law for her patience in enduring my stupidity and clumsiness. Your daughter, Haru.’
Tears came to Taka’s eyes, thinking of Haru, dear Haru, in a house among strangers. She must be so lonely. Taka sighed. Soon she too would be writing just such a letter, full of empty phrases, giving away nothing, for soon she too would be sent to another house.
The cherry trees in the gardens were heavy with blossom when Fujino announced that some of her geisha friends were coming to visit the following day. A famous dance master was in town and he was going to teach them some new dances and then they would have a tea ceremony and a meal.
‘Don’t bother us,’ she told Taka. ‘Take care of yourself for a few hours when you get back from school.’
Next day Taka was up well before dawn. The sky was streaked with pink and the air was fresh when she came out of the house and saw Nobu standing beside the rickshaw, holding her books and lacquered lunch box. Washed and shaved and with his hair oiled into a topknot, wearing the striped robe and narrow sash her mother had given him, he looked really distinguished. All the girls at school had footmen to carry their books but theirs were stunted, bandy-legged Edo lads, like Gonsuké, the rickshaw boy. None was handsome like Nobu. As Taka climbed in and they set off, rattling and bouncing along, she looked back at Nobu running behind in the dust. It seemed terrible that he would never have the chance to go to school himself.
The school Taka went to was in a building that had been a Buddhist temple, with dark corridors running alongside musty rooms where girls sat on their knees at low desks, studying in the faint light that glimmered through the paper shoji screens.
Most girls, as Taka’s mother regularly reminded her, were just taught the basic alphabet and a few kanji characters and had to learn by heart books such as The Greater Learning for Women, The Classic of Filial Piety and One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets before being sent off to needlework school at the age of thirteen to learn to make clothes. The theory was that girls were simple-minded creatures, weak of body and weak of mind, who didn’t need to be able to read or write much more than the slip to tell the dyer how to colour the yarn. But Taka’s was a school for the daughters of the elite. They had to learn seven to eight thousand kanji characters so that they would be fully literate. They studied poetry-writing, arithmetic and the use of the abacus, memorized the Confucian and other classics and even learned English, all subjects usually restricted to boys.
Taka knew how privileged she was to be going to such a special school. But as the rickshaw boy lowered the shafts she felt a rising sense of panic, as she did every day. She went in, turned her wooden nameplate face up, helped unstack the desks and took her place with her writing box in front of her, but she still had a gnawing sense of foreboding.
Most of the girls were of samurai stock, the daughters of her father’s colleagues. While Taka had spent her early years learning to be a geisha, they had been studying reading and writing and samurai arts like horse-riding and sparring with the halberd, the women’s weapon. Taka had soon discovered that singing and dancing were skills practised by vulgar townswomen or, worse still, geishas, who were so low class they didn’t even feature in the class system. Such skills were certainly not practised by well-brought-up samurai girls, who wouldn’t have dreamed of behaving like performing monkeys, which was what they considered entertainers to be. Taka had done all she could to lose her Kyoto accent and geisha ways, but it didn’t matter. Everyone knew perfectly well that her mother was a geisha.
While her father, the famous General Kitaoka, had been in town, no one had said a word, added to which Haru was so cool and dignified that no one would have dared question her samurai credentials. But now everything had changed. Taka had thought that, with Haru gone, she might make friends at school, but she was too different from the others.
The day began with morning recitation, in which the girls all read aloud at the tops of their voices. They all read different passages, whatever they were working on, so there was quite a noise. Then came writing practice. The teacher brushed a character for Taka and she wrote it again and again till she’d mastered it, then moved on to the next. Her hands were soon covered in ink.
That day they started on a classic text. The others all read confidently but when it came to Taka’s turn she was stumbling.
Later, as they collected their books to go home and ran up and down, sweeping the classroom, the girls were talking about the cherry blossoms that hung low over the streets and temple grounds.
‘We’re taking a picnic and going cherry-blossom viewing tomorrow,’ said tall, slender Ohisa. She carried herself with an aristocratic air and was so fashionable she wore western clothes even to school.
‘Yes, today’s the day,’ said short, bespectacled Yuki. ‘My mother says the cherry blossoms are at their height.’
‘Wasn’t there a song about cherry blossom?’ asked Ohisa, glancing round at Taka. Taka smiled and nodded, pleased to be included in the conversation, and hummed ‘Sakura, Sakura’, the famous song that the geishas sang at this season, letting her hands rise and fall to the rhythm of the tune. She half thought the others would join in but instead they stared at her and burst out laughing. Too late she realized she’d fallen into a trap.
‘You would know it,
wouldn’t you?’ said Ohisa, drawling out each word in slow deliberate tones. ‘What did they say your mother was? A geisha, wasn’t it?’
Taka fell silent and dropped her head. She’d been shown up for the fake she was. Cheeks burning, still smarting from the sting of the words, she ran out to the rickshaw, her eyes brimming with tears. Even the sight of Nobu waiting there with Gonsuké couldn’t lighten her mood.
Back home, her mother’s party was in full swing. The tinkle of shamisens and the geishas’ shrill laughter made Taka feel a hundred times worse. She swung on her heel and headed out into the grounds. She would walk under the cherry trees. That might make her feel better.
She heard her maid Okatsu’s high-pitched voice behind her. ‘Madam, madam, where are you going? It’ll be dark soon. There might be snakes or foxes. You can’t walk alone.’
‘Walk with me then.’
Taka’s mother’s voice floated out from the house. ‘Okatsu, where are you? I need you, right now.’
There was silence. Taka was already well away from the house. Okatsu’s voice rang out. ‘Nobu, you lazy fellow. What are you doing? Go with the young mistress.’
Feet came running after her. She paid no attention.
In the five or six years they’d lived there Taka had explored every corner of the estate. It was huge, like a chunk of countryside on the edge of the city, large enough to get completely lost in. It took an army of gardeners to keep it all in perfect shape. Parts were landscaped, modelled after scenic places in Japan, complete with hills and lakes, arbours, bridges and winding paths, with stone lanterns and teahouses cunningly tucked away so that the stroller came upon them unexpectedly, with a pleasing sense of surprise. Other parts were deliberately left wild. At the back of the grounds paths led past bamboo groves into woodland. Pale pink cherry blossom drifted like snow, forming piles along the paths and heaping up against rocks and tree trunks.
Taka kicked through the blossom sulkily, barely aware of Nobu following behind her. Now that she was supposed to be a samurai girl, she wasn’t allowed to mix with boys any more. But servants were different, they didn’t count as boys or men, they were another species.
‘I hate school,’ she said fiercely. She was well away from the house, tramping up the slope that led to the woods. She could see the trees ahead of her, an enticing tangle of foliage. A breeze rustled the leaves. ‘I’m never going back.’
‘You must.’ She turned in surprise. She hadn’t been expecting a reply. ‘It’s the only way you’ll learn. You’re so lucky to be going to school.’ Nobu stopped when she stopped, keeping a proper distance between them.
A wind had blown up and bats flittered under the trees. A bird sang out forlornly.
Taka looked at him appraisingly. He had dark intelligent eyes and a rather prominent, strangely aristocratic nose. He was a servant but not a servant. She couldn’t be sure where he belonged. The other servants would never understand what her life was like, but there was just a chance that he might.
She sighed. ‘All the others are good at history and arithmetic and know the classics. They’ve all been studying ever since they were little but all I did was learn to sing and dance and play the shamisen. When my father was here they kept their mouths shut but now he’s gone they don’t care. Today we started The Tale of the Heike. Everyone knew it except me. They were whispering behind their hands, laughing every time I made a mistake. And then … And then …’ She couldn’t bear to recount the humiliation of how she’d forgotten herself and begun to sing and dance. Her eyes filled with tears.
There was a silence, then Nobu murmured something. At first Taka didn’t catch his words. His voice was so soft she hardly heard him. Then she realized what he was saying. ‘ “The Gion Temple bells toll the impermanence of all things; the sala flowers beside the Buddha’s deathbed bear testimony to the fact that all who flourish must decline. The proud do not endure, they vanish like a spring night’s dream. The mighty fall at last like dust before the wind.”’ He was reciting the first lines of The Tale of the Heike, the ancient epic that she’d been struggling with that morning. She stopped, hardly daring to breathe, waiting for him to continue.
He didn’t repeat mechanically, by rote, as they had at school. They were not just characters to be learned. He spoke with feeling, as if the words were wrenched from his soul. Suddenly, for the first time, Taka understood the meaning. ‘The mighty fall at last …’ Now she and her people were the mighty ones, but once, maybe, Nobu’s had been. In any case, all were destined to fall at last ‘like dust before the wind’.
The faint notes of shamisens and the sound of singing drifted across from the house on the other side of the grounds.
‘How do you know that?’ she asked, astonished.
He scowled and hung his head. ‘I learned it when I was little.’
‘You mean … you can read?’
His scowl deepened. ‘I haven’t studied for years. I just remembered it.’
Taka stared at him, her heart touched. He was probably a couple of years older than her, tall and gangly with dark hair sprouting on his cheeks. He shifted from foot to foot. There was so much she wanted to know about him – about his life, his childhood. But now that Eijiro had told her he was an Aizu she hardly dared ask. She felt he had a dark secret she ought not to probe.
She remembered when he first came to their rescue. He had seemed part of another world. Now he was just one of the servants, yet she could see that, like her, he was different. She was different from the other girls, he was different from the other servants. She chewed her lower lip thoughtfully.
‘I’m so behind,’ she said. ‘Will you help me? I need to practise my writing. Why don’t we find somewhere to sit and I’ll show you the characters I learned today.’
She didn’t want him to feel patronized. He seemed so touchy, she knew it would be all too easy to offend him. She had the feeling he’d just disappear one day. He’d flit away and be gone and no one would know where he was, they’d simply never see him again.
He looked at her and his face lit up. She could see his black eyes shining in the gloom. He was completely transformed. Then he frowned. ‘But it’s wrong for you to be alone with me. I’m a man.’
‘I’m allowed to be with servants.’ They both knew that wasn’t quite true. Again she was afraid she’d offended him but he didn’t seem to notice. ‘Come. I’ll show you my secret place.’
Taka led the way, pushing aside branches and brambles and stepping over fallen tree trunks. Deep in the woods there was a hidden grove where she and Haru used to play. They’d dragged out logs to sit on and made a little roof to creep under when it rained.
They sat side by side on a tree trunk. Taka cleared away pebbles and gravel and smoothed out a patch of ground while Nobu sharpened a stick.
‘Write “man”,’ Taka said. It was best to start at the beginning.
Now he really was offended. ‘Every child knows that,’ he snorted. He drew two strokes on the ground to make a stick body above a pair of forked legs.
‘Now “big”.’
He smoothed out the ground, then drew another stick man with an extra horizontal stroke like arms stretched out.
‘“Mother”.’ He frowned. A shadow crossed his face as he bent and wrote the character. They went on till they came to one he didn’t know.
‘ “Purity”.’ She wrote it for him then he copied it, writing it again and again, stroke by stroke. They did ten new characters then she tested him on the first one. By now it was so dark they could barely see the characters scratched on the ground.
Taka jumped up, suddenly aware that they would both be in dreadful trouble if they were found out. Nobu would be in more trouble than her. He might be beaten or dismissed or worse.
‘We must go.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘For helping me.’ She flushed, aware of his eyes on her. As they scrambled through the bushes and ran back to the house she realized she hadn’t felt so happy since Haru had
left.
That evening she sorted through her books. There were simplified versions of the classics – the poems of Ariwara no Narihira, The Tale of Genji, Yamato Library: Teaching One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets and Crimson Brocade: A Great Treasury of One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets. There were books listing the eight celebrated landscapes with the poems associated with each, including Narihira’s famous poem on Mount Fuji. Then there was A Japanese Fabric of Selected Practices for Women, Old Courtly Practices for Women: A Thin Pocketbook and A Treasury of Precepts for Women. She picked out the ones she’d finished with, that she thought would be the most useful. Then she dug out a spare writing set – an ink block, stick of ink, water dropper and brushes – and a new workbook. She was already planning a whole learning programme for him.
The problem would be to get him away from the other servants and out of her mother and Eijiro’s sight so she could teach him. She knew her mother would never approve and Eijiro would be outraged if he found out. Taking a servant away from his work, spending time alone with a young man – it was utterly scandalous. It would be Nobu who would suffer. Eijiro would beat him or dismiss him, maybe even kill him. He was a mere servant, their property, Eijiro could do as he pleased with him.
She gazed thoughtfully at the screens painted with landscapes and birds and animals that formed the walls of the room, at the oil lamps glimmering inside their shades, at her small writing desk piled with books she’d chosen, at the alcove with a few flowers casually arranged in a vase and a scroll hanging behind on the wall, at the delicate shelves and great wooden chests, at the tobacco box and the brazier with the kettle on its iron hook hanging above it and the teapot and cups on the edge, at her own shadow moving fitfully with every breeze that shivered the lantern flames.
Then she started to smile. Okatsu. That was it. She would take her maid, Okatsu, into her confidence. Okatsu would be their chaperone. She could always say she needed Nobu to help her with such and such a task. She was a resourceful girl, she’d think of something. Best of all, Taka knew her brother had a soft spot for Okatsu. If anyone could twist him round her little finger, she could. She could keep an eye out and distract him if he started asking questions or nosing around.
The Samurai's Daughter Page 5
