by Rokuro Inui
“The money? I could sell that habitat”—Nizaemon jerked his chin toward the eaves—“and have enough to free you and get change back.”
It was the middle of the night, but the glow from the Thirteen Floors lit up the sky. Muffled laughter and coquettish murmurs could be heard all around. This part of the city only grew quiet when the sun rose.
The prospect of freeing Hatori had been on Nizaemon’s mind for some time. There were two complications. The first was money. A samurai of his lowly rank could never save the requisite sum.
The second was the fact that Hatori had no place for him in her heart.
Perhaps he was too softhearted for his own good. He wanted to give Hatori her freedom even if she used it to go to the man she cared for. She would never be happy staying with Nizaemon anywhere. If he truly desired her happiness, he would have to let her go.
But that was his rational side talking. What he really wanted, of course, was to keep her for himself. To drive this other man out of her thoughts and make her his own, body and soul.
He had been struggling to reconcile these opposing urges for some time. But today’s events had given him an idea for how he might solve both problems at once.
“I’ve decided to find the man who made that cricket automaton.”
“What?” Hatori looked startled.
“I think I already know who it was. Everyone says that only one man could build something so intricate: Kyuzo Kugimiya.”
The name had been mentioned by several people in the aftermath of the disturbance at the tournament. Kyuzo Kugimiya, master of automata. An assistant at the shogunal refinery who maintained a compound larger than the refinery itself, people said. The shogunate’s attitude toward him was unclear.
Nizaemon had never heard of him before, but rumor had it that his work in automata was unparalleled—and that he would create anything for the right price.
“I wish you wouldn’t, Niza,” said Hatori, concern on her face.
“You know him?”
Hatori hesitated. “By reputation,” she said in a near whisper.
III
Kyuzo snorted. “That is what you want this automated doll for? Your plan is to sell a cricket and habitat received as a reward from your domain, use the proceeds to buy this Hatori her freedom, and then comfort yourself with a replica of her after she walks away?”
The idea had seemed reasonable to Nizaemon as he nurtured it alone, but it seemed unbearably foolish to him now. He reddened with embarrassment.
They returned to the main house, where the macaw was still on its perch. Nizaemon produced the habitat he had brought with him, unwrapping the many layers of cloth and spreading them out on the table.
Kyuzo’s eyes gleamed. “Well, now,” he said, picking up the habitat. He turned it this way and that, examining the dragon motifs engraved on its unglazed ceramic exterior. When he opened the lid and looked inside, the corner of his mouth curled up in a grin.
“The one with a missing leg is the female?”
Nizaemon nodded.
“She’s been eaten alive.”
Nizaemon peered in to see the female’s head separated from what remained of her body, both parts swept into a corner of the habitat like refuse. The male was drinking from the tiny water dish as if nothing was amiss, opening and closing his wings.
“This is certainly worth enough to free Hatori and build an automaton in the form of a woman, with money to spare. But do you have a buyer?”
Nizaemon shook his head. The habitat was so magnificent that word would get around immediately if it appeared on the market. If he was caught selling a gift from his daimyo without permission, things would not go well for him.
As for the cricket, it could be sold to the cricket master of a public gambling house for a considerable sum. Insects raised in domain stables were far stronger than those used by commoners. But crickets could not survive the winter. If he was going to sell it, it would have to be soon—and Nizaemon had no idea where to begin.
“I thought not,” said Kyuzo. “In that case, I will take both of them off your hands. I will even create another habitat, identical to this one, and give it to you. That should keep you out of trouble.”
“So we have a deal?”
“Unless you have second thoughts.”
“You have made automata in human form before?”
Kyuzo nodded. “I have,” he said, looking unshakably confident.
“How human were they?”
“A soul can take up residence anywhere. Use a tool long enough and it takes on a life of its own. All the more so for things made in the image of humanity.”
“Surely you aren’t saying that you can even give your automata souls?”
“What is a soul?” retorted Kyuzo. “Hair, skin, innards—I can reproduce everything in automated form. The result is incomparably more complex than that clock, but not infinitely so. What is the difference between a person and something identical to a person in every way?”
He leaned closer, staring directly into Nizaemon’s eyes.
“Not even I can see into the heart of man. Faced with an automaton made perfectly like a human—one that behaves, cries, and laughs like a human on the surface, giving every impression of a rich inner life—I am sorry to say that I would not be able to tell whether all of it was truly born of humanlike emotions or simply performed by an arrangement of springs and clockwork and gears. This is a problem of great interest.”
“Enough salesmanship. I want you to show me hard proof that you can build what you say you can.”
“Very well. If that will suffice,” Kyuzo said with a nod at the macaw, “I will show you what is inside it. Come.”
He walked to the perch, gesturing for Nizaemon to follow, then seized the bird around its neck. The bird did not like this, spreading its wings and scrabbling its feet in protest.
“Stop that,” Kyuzo admonished the macaw, struggling to get the best of it.
“You can’t be serious,” Nizaemon said.
Kyuzo jabbed a finger into the bird’s breast. It convulsed once, as if having a fit, and then became still as a corpse.
Kyuzo unlocked the fetter around the motionless bird’s leg, revealing a flash of something like a bundle of fine silver thread. Nizaemon saw that the links in the fetter were hollow and had been carefully arranged to create a conduit for the bundle of thread from the bird into the perch and then the black lacquered box below.
“The bird is an automaton?” Nizaemon said hoarsely.
“It is. Oh, the feathers are real, procured separately and attached later. But its innards are nothing but clockwork and gears.”
Kyuzo held out the macaw, silent and still.
Nizaemon took it in his hands. It had a certain heft, but it was softer than he had expected. The skin under its feathers was warm, and he felt something like a skeleton underneath.
Kyuzo took what looked like a pair of sewing scissors from a drawer in the black lacquered box and snipped the macaw open right down the middle of its breast.
The cruelty almost made Nizaemon look away. A dark liquid began to ooze from between the bright-yellow feathers. For a moment he thought it was blood, but the smell of oil and the stickiness as it ran down his fingers told him he was wrong.
Once he had finished slicing from throat to tail, Kyuzo pulled apart the skin on either side to open it. The rib cage had the same shape as a real one, but it was made from gleaming machined metal. The cavity it enclosed was completely filled with gears and clockwork.
Kyuzo opened the incision wider, pulling back the skin to show the bird’s innards from the scapula to the upper wings. Nizaemon saw countless bundles of fine steel fibers attached to the skeleton. Fused together like tendons, they disappeared into holes in the bones and seemed ultimately connected to the gears in the thoracic cavity. The spaces b
etween were filled with a tangle of countless thin tubes.
“The tubes are filled with mercury to move the center of gravity. The clockwork is self-winding.”
Nizaemon squinted at the mechanism inside the bird’s rib cage.
Where the heart should have been, he could see a disc-shaped component. There was an oscillating semicircular pendulum like an anchor, and as he watched, a balance wheel with a hairspring struck the pendulum, rebounded, and began to rotate again.
“It does need to be wound once, but after that the motion of the automaton itself does the work,” Kyuzo said.
Nizaemon was speechless. He felt as if he had slipped into a dream as he gazed down at the mechanical macaw he held in his hands.
“One of the very first karakuri I ever made,” Kyuzo said. “Not truly autonomous. Some of its workings are hidden inside the box and the perch it sits on. Good enough for a toy, I suppose.”
Nizaemon heard a paper screen slide open behind him. He turned to see a woman kneeling in the next room. She looked seventeen or eighteen years old and wore a tastefully dyed kosode.
“Who is this?” he asked.
“My name is Eve,” the woman said, bowing her head low.
Nizaemon turned in surprise to Kyuzo. “Your daughter?” he asked. “I had heard that you lived alone.”
“Oh, I am the only person here,” said Kyuzo.
The woman, Eve, raised her head a fraction and gazed up at Nizaemon with languorous eyes.
“It would take years to build what you ask from scratch,” said Kyuzo. “Instead, I will remake Eve into the automaton you desire.” He spoke as if this were the most natural thing in the world. “We will need to measure this … Hatori, was it?—of yours. My first visit to the Thirteen Floors in some time. You will cover all expenses, of course.”
He sounded peculiarly cheerful as he spoke.
IV
Hatori lay on the futon spread across the tatami mats, completely naked.
Each time Kyuzo’s wrinkled hands glided over her pale skin, her brow knotted as she let out a short exhalation.
Nizaemon sat to one side, watching with hands balled into fists on his thighs.
The food and drink prepared for them lay untouched. As soon as they had entered the room, Kyuzo had produced a set of implements Nizaemon had never seen before and begun his comprehensive survey of Hatori’s form.
His notes had already filled dozens of pages when he declared that what could not be recorded in writing must be remembered by feel, and began running his fingers over Hatori’s sex.
Nizaemon watched from beside the futon, far from happy about the situation but unable, under the circumstances, to do more than bite his lip and endure it.
From time to time, Hatori would shoot him an accusing look. She did not speak, but her eyes were eloquent enough as they welled with tears: Why are you doing this to me?
Nizaemon looked away. He had Hatori’s young attendant Kozakai pour him a cup of sake and drained it immediately. Kozakai looked back and forth suspiciously between the shameful treatment Hatori was receiving and Nizaemon, who permitted it to continue despite his evident displeasure.
Hatori had not been informed of the plan to build an automaton in her image.
Kyuzo stayed in the room for three full days, not leaving the Thirteen Floors once.
He had Hatori speak until her voice was hoarse, starting with the traditional i-ro-ha syllabary and proceeding through a list of hundreds—thousands—of unremarkable words. He took small samples of her hair, her nails, her pubic hair, and her saliva, folding them in oiled paper he had brought with him. He had her bite down on something like a block of clay to create a cast of her teeth.
Even so, the task could have been finished in a day. Instead, he would work for a while and then call for food and drink, even hiring women to carouse with through the night. The Thirteen Floors was best enjoyed on somebody else’s account.
Just as Nizaemon was losing the last of his patience, Kyuzo announced that his work was complete and dropped out of sight.
“I’m almost ready to buy out your contract.”
Nizaemon murmured the words into Hatori’s neck, which smelled of sweat and white face powder after he had spent himself inside her.
He had not done so in some time. He had felt too guilty after watching her rigidly endure Kyuzo’s baffling and often humiliating demands. Instead, he would simply hold her, and they would sleep like that until dawn.
Before long, rumors began to spread that the habitat Nizaemon had received from his daimyo was on the market, but Kyuzo delivered the fake as promised.
It was so well-made that it might be better to say that there were now two real habitats. For a man who made automata that moved and spoke, reproducing a lifeless stoneware pot must have been no difficulty at all.
In any case, Nizaemon now had a way to defend himself from accusations of selling the habitat as he waited for his automaton to be finished.
His negotiations with Hatori’s madam in the Thirteen Floors had already concluded. Her freedom would cost a fortune, but not as much as the habitat would bring. A ceramic pot worth more than a human life—a bitter irony indeed.
“You don’t look very happy about it,” Nizaemon said to Hatori. “I might be buying out your contract, but I’m not going to lock you up as a mistress. Once you leave this place, you’re free to go to the man you love.”
Hatori stared at him wide-eyed. “But it will cost you so much money …”
“The money doesn’t matter. I want you to be happy.”
There were stories of women who, dreading the prospect of being bought out by a man they had no feelings for, had planned a double suicide or daring escape with their true lover and been slain for it. But even Nizaemon had never heard of a man of such heartwarming generosity that he had invested vast sums in a courtesan’s freedom only to let her go to someone else’s side. Perhaps Hatori still found it hard to believe too.
Of course, if Nizaemon had not hit on the wild notion of making an automated replica of her, he doubted he could have gone through with it either.
“I doubt I will ever be happy,” Hatori murmured. She laid her head on his chest and closed her eyes as if listening to his heartbeat.
“Don’t say that,” Nizaemon. A pause. “What kind of man is he? If you don’t mind telling me.”
“Are you sure?”
“I want to know.”
“A samurai from the provinces. We met when I was still just an attendant.”
“I see.”
“My mistress was summoned to a teahouse by a domain liaison, and I accompanied her there. The liaison was a regular client of hers, so I entertained his deputy. Perhaps it was because he was newly arrived in the city and did not know the ways of the Thirteen Floors, but we did not sleep together that night. His innocence charmed me.”
Closing his eyes, Nizaemon imagined the scene.
“He talked incessantly about his hometown and asked about mine too,” Hatori continued. “I was sold to the Floors as a girl of seven, so I do not remember it very well. But it was near the ocean. There was a beach. Black pines. When I told him how I longed to leave this place and see those pines again, his pity for me moved him to tears.”
“I see.”
Nizaemon felt more frustrated than jealous. He wished that he had been the first to get to know her.
“Niza,” Hatori said. He realized that his chest was damp with her tears. “If you really care for me, please, just leave me here.”
“Are you afraid?”
Women who had been sold to the pleasure quarters as young girls might live out their whole lives there, never setting foot in the outside world again. The lady of pleasure whose desire for freedom began to waver as the prospect grew more concrete was an old trope. However unfree life in the Thirteen Floors might
be, the threat of an abrupt change in lifestyle apparently made it difficult to leave.
But Nizaemon had set too many wheels in motion already. There was no turning back.
Still, he felt some concern over Hatori’s unexpected reaction. He had thought she would be delighted.
Every domain maintained its own compound in Tempu, and most of those compounds stood shoulder to shoulder with the merchant mansions along Tengen Street. The Ushiyama domain’s compound was in a small side street west of the street proper, not far from Renkon Inari Shrine.
Nizaemon had come to Tempu with the current domain liaison and deputy more than three years before. He had always lived in the compound with the other Ushiyama samurai, as was customary. But Hatori was not entirely unknown to regulars at the Thirteen Floors, and when rumors began to spread of his plans to buy out her contract, he became a figure of some notoriety.
Nizaemon had a wife and children in Ushiyama and could not live openly with another woman, so he rented a private residence outside the compound. It was far from spacious, and he did not much care for the smell of pickled ginger from the wholesaler behind it, but it would do.
On the day Hatori left the Thirteen Floors, he shared a last wistful night with her, then gave her some coins and bade her farewell. When he said he wished he could have walked with her along the beach of the black pines, she replied only with an anxious smile. That place was reserved not for him but for her lover, the man he did not know.
He had not heard from Kyuzo for some time and was beginning to fear that re-creating Hatori as an automaton had proved too difficult after all. But finally, more than ten days after her departure, the old man sent for him.
Nizaemon left the Ushiyama compound and set off for Kyuzo’s residence across the river for the first time in months. As he strode down the street through the sticky rain, umbrella in hand, his pace quickened of its own accord. The rain was not heavy, but the drops were large, pockmarking the hard dirt road with tiny craters.
The gate at Kyuzo’s mansion was open. Accepting the implicit invitation, Nizaemon ducked under the crossbar and into the yard.
