by Rokuro Inui
Kihachi made a small noise of irritation. Jinnai decided to change the subject.
“I hear the shogun’s put forth a remarkable contender at this year’s cricket-fighting tournament,” he said. “Hawk and Plum, was it? They say it eats its opponents alive. Everyone else is in a cold sweat, hoping they won’t have to meet it in the brackets.”
“What’s your point, Jinnai?” Kihachi asked darkly.
“Well, there’s a rumor that Hawk and Plum was discovered inside the imperial palace.”
And that wasn’t all. By tradition, each cricket’s fighting name included part of the name of its discoverer.
And Umekawa meant “Plum River.”
“Some people even say it crawled out of the imperial tomb.”
“You’ll take years off your life talking like this, Jinnai.”
That, it seemed, was Kihachi’s reply.
If the cricket had been found in the imperial tomb and presented to the shogun by Kihachi, that was proof that the shogun’s spies had gotten inside the palace.
But provoking Kihachi further probably wasn’t the best strategy.
Jinnai nodded politely and went back into the building.
When all the bouts for the day were over and Jinnai and Sashichi left the castle to head for home, it was dark outside.
Two of Utsuki’s five contenders had remained in the bracket. If they could win their bouts tomorrow and then again the next day, they would make it into the final ten and fight before the shogun himself. Sashichi only hoped that they would not have to face Hawk and Plum.
Back at the Kugimiya residence, Jinnai dragged himself into the workshop to resume his repairs on the golden macaw. But, unable to concentrate, he rose from his seat again less than an hour later.
By night, Eve rested in the basement room in this building that Kyuzo used as his private work space. Jinnai felt uneasy about entering the room uninvited, but he had done so on several occasions when Kyuzo had been out. Guilt aside, for a former spy getting inside was no challenge at all.
He lifted a certain floorboard to reveal a steep, straight staircase. At the bottom of the staircase, cool and quiet, was the basement. It was roomier here than upstairs. Kyuzo sometimes spent days down here, lost in his work.
Moving into the depths, Jinnai slid a lacquered door aside. In the room beyond lay Eve.
Once a month, Kyuzo detached her head and limbs from her torso for a detailed inspection, placing each component on its own bench or platform. But tonight she was in one piece, lying utterly still on the central bench in her thin sleepwear. Her eyes were closed.
Jinnai walked to the bench and gazed down at her face. Something about her expression gave the illusion of deep, regular breathing. Her eyelashes were long and her lips only faintly colored, like a bud waiting to blossom.
As if drawn by some invisible force, Jinnai’s hand reached slowly toward her breast.
Right on the verge of making contact, he came to his senses.
He shook his head.
Eve lay still as if nothing had happened.
I don’t understand it.
Standing beside the Sacred Vessel on its bench, Kyuzo wiped the perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand.
He had replaced every component that might have degraded over time, whether it appeared to have actually degraded or not.
The Vessel’s construction was nearly identical to Eve’s. Which meant that Kyuzo had every one of its millions of components in his head, down to the tiniest gear.
He knew that if a single gear-tooth length or the distance between two sesame-seed-sized cogs was off by the tiniest fraction, the mechanism would fail. But even after examining each one individually through the magnifying glass, Kyuzo had found no evidence of any mismatches.
If this were Eve’s body, it would be running smoothly.
The more he’d seen of the Vessel’s construction, the more firmly he had come to believe that Keian Higa had used his inspection of it as a pretext for recording its design and building a reproduction.
Namely, Eve.
Kyuzo pressed his fingertips into his eyelids and shook his head.
Having barely slept in days, he was near mental and physical exhaustion. Perhaps there was some subtle difference between Eve and the Vessel that he had failed to notice.
Several of the components in Eve’s body were made of unknown alloys or other materials whose provenance was obscure. In the Vessel, different materials had been used for the corresponding parts, although they did weigh exactly the same.
Still seated, Kyuzo surveyed the Vessel. Its limbs were still detached, and its head was on a raised platform as if to look down on its own torso.
He had been so engrossed in examining its workings through the scope, he realized, that he had not considered it as a whole in some time.
Its eyes were closed as if asleep. The swellings on its chest retained their form despite the Vessel’s prone position lying on its back, and the nipples at their peaks were pink like flower buds.
He felt a sudden urge to touch them and began to reach out before a wave of déjà vu struck him.
This had all happened before. Long before, when he was still a young man, learning his trade at Keian Higa’s Institute of Machinery.
Just after his first meeting with Eve.
He closed his eyes and thought back on that day.
IV
Kyuzo stared at the hand he had just pulled back, then looked down at the half-built automaton on the platform.
Its head and torso were complete down to about the solar plexus, and half of its right arm was present. The rest was yet to be built.
When Kyuzo had first stolen into the workshop while Keian was away, he had mistaken it at first for the remains of a girl who had been carved up alive, and he had fallen over in terror.
But even in its partially complete state, on closer examination there could be no mistake: this was an automaton made in the form of a young woman.
On that first occasion, Kyuzo had wondered, horrified, if Keian Higa’s soul had been captured by some malevolent spirit.
Did he intend to create a working replica of the human soul?
He had discussed the question of the soul with Keian often, and the older man’s thoughts were clear.
In the end, a human being is nothing but a fiendishly complex machine. There is no border between the soul and what is not the soul—only differences in complexity and diversity.
This was the position of that small, agreeable man, always full of smiles and surrounded by students.
Kyuzo wanted to argue, but he had no reply. He made his living building and repairing dolls for karakuri shows and great works like the eternal clock. He had some confidence in his abilities, but he realized then that he had never thought about these matters before.
The name of the Institute of Machinery was known even in Tempu, but Kyuzo had never imagined how advanced Keian’s work truly was. In his conceited ignorance, he had agreed to the master of the Conch and Taiko’s proposal that he enter the institute as a mole, thinking that he could at least steal a design or two.
Kyuzo gazed at Keian’s half-built automaton and sighed.
It was beautiful despite the absence of life—or was it that absence that made it beautiful? An ageless beauty, unchanging, inviolable.
Worried that if he stayed too long the other students might notice, Kyuzo decided to leave.
“I’ll be back, Eve,” he said to the automaton.
He knew there would be no answer. He felt foolish even saying it, but there was something about the automaton that made him do so anyway.
He had named it “Eve” himself. It was the name of the courtesan said to live on the highest level of the Thirteen Floors in Tempu.
In truth, there was no such woman. The thirteen
th floor was unoccupied, and the highest rank was left empty to prevent arguments among the women who were at the rank below. All this was well-known to the residents of the pleasure quarters and their savvier regulars, who treated the fictional Eve as a sort of guardian bodhisattva of the Thirteen Floors.
When Kyuzo had lived in Tempu, he had been credulous enough to long to see this Eve at least once before he died, until an acquaintance and habitual customer at the Thirteen Floors told him the truth.
The name of a woman who did not exist. It seemed ideal for the woman before him, who existed but had no life.
Kyuzo stepped out of Keian’s private workshop, which stood apart from the main residence in a separate building surrounded by bamboo grass. He trod the narrow path through the grove and pushed open the gate in the hedge. Then he returned to his room in a corner of the main building and prepared to go out.
He had to meet Matsukichi.
The thought made his stomach ache.
The knowledge of his wrongdoing in betraying his master Keian and fellow students grew larger every day.
If Kyuzo had not been sent into the institute as a mole by Matsukichi, a spy with the shogun’s intelligence service, he might never have become a student of Keian’s at all.
But if it had not been his fate to meet Keian under different circumstances and become his student honestly, better to have never met him at all and lived out his life as just another karakuri artisan. Fortune could be cruel.
Matsukichi insisted that he report everything he saw at the institute, hiding nothing. He seemed particularly interested in notes or diagrams related to the Sacred Vessel from the Age of Myth, which Keian was reportedly inspecting in the imperial palace, but Kyuzo had seen nothing of that nature.
Kyuzo had not told Matsukichi about Eve and did not intend to. She had no connection to the palace’s secrets, as far as he could tell, and above all he could not bear the thought of her attracting interest from the wrong people and being exposed to danger.
“You haven’t switched sides on me, have you?”
Matsukichi sat across from Kyuzo in a roadside establishment on the Hase Highway, not far from Utsuki Castle. The din coming through the floor betrayed the gambling tables downstairs. Secret talks were better held in busy, noisy places than quiet, isolated ones.
This meeting place would also allow Kyuzo to use gambling as an excuse should anyone become suspicious of his excursions and follow him here, although no one had so far. “Admitting” to gambling would also explain why he had kept his visits here secret.
“I don’t know what you want me to tell you,” Kyuzo said. “There is no suspicious activity within the Institute of Machinery, and none of the students have heard anything about his inspections of the Sacred Vessel at the palace.” None of this was a lie, allowing Kyuzo to speak with genuine conviction.
“So you say. All right, then. I see you’re in typically good humor, in any case.” Matsukichi slurped at the sake in his cup and grimaced. “Even with the drink, these meetings of ours are no fun at all.”
I couldn’t agree more, Kyuzo thought.
“By the way, any news about the empress’s condition? Since Keian’s a regular palace visitor these days.”
Kyuzo shook his head.
The empress was currently pregnant with her second child. Her firstborn had been a boy named Hiruhiko, so the imperial household was naturally hoping for a girl this time who could inherit the throne.
Physically, the empress was frail. Giving birth to Prince Hiruhiko had weakened her severely, and rumors had spread that he might be her last child.
So the shogun was interested in palace affairs too, Kyuzo mused. He had heard that the shogunate had been the main funder of the most recent relocation of the palace itself. The warrior clans were undeniably in the superior position today, but even they could not simply ignore the authority of the imperial household, which dated back to the Age of Myth.
The shogunate might have adopted the custom of cricket fighting and many other trappings of nobility, but to the imperial household it was still a shedder of blood, barred absolutely from even the outer rooms of the palace. The shogun appeared to be planning to marry his daughter into the imperial line, however, and if the empress had another son, the palace’s utter dependence on the shogun would make it difficult to refuse his proposal.
Kyuzo assumed that Matsukichi was doing the bidding of some highly placed figure in the shogun’s bureaucracy, but he did not know who that was. In truth, he had no idea what Matsukichi was scheming, or to what end.
A month or so later, Kyuzo was summoned to speak with Keian. The first words out of the older man’s mouth were shocking.
“Her Majesty did not survive the delivery,” said Keian.
Kyuzo was shocked. “And the heir?” he asked.
“Claimed by the gods.”
So the child had died too.
“Naturally, this is not to be shared with anyone,” Keian said.
Kyuzo reeled. Why would Keian share this momentous secret with the likes of him?
“The palace has decided to keep the news to themselves for now.”
“It does not seem the sort of thing that can be kept hidden for long.”
Keian nodded, a serious expression on his face. “It has been decided that I will build an automaton in the shape of a human,” he said.
Kyuzo swallowed.
Notwithstanding the half-built automaton in Keian’s workshop, the idea seemed reckless beyond belief.
“I find it hard to believe that it will fool anyone,” Kyuzo said, “no matter how closely it resembles the empress.”
“Not the empress, you fool,” said Keian. “It will be in the image of the stillborn child.”
Kyuzo mopped the sweat beading on his brow.
“The death of the empress will be reported when the time is right. Succession will pass to the infant, and a regent will be installed. I imagine that eventually Prince Hiruhiko will play that role.”
To build an automaton in the form of an adult woman would be a staggering undertaking. But a baby could not speak and had little opportunity, except through cries, to convey its will to others. It seemed to Kyuzo that perhaps—just perhaps—what Keian proposed might be possible.
It must have been because he had seen Eve that it seemed this way to him. Certainly he would never have imagined such an automaton to be possible otherwise.
“The first step is to make an infant,” Keian said. “As it develops, its components can be replaced one by one, bringing it closer to humanity in its gestures and behavior.”
Much easier to start with a simple baby and gradually refine its functionality as it approached adulthood than to aim for perfection from the outset.
Of course, even Kyuzo’s plan seemed just barely within the realm of possibility. But Kyuzo felt quiet excitement stir within him, and his hands trembled slightly.
“The other students at the institute are still learning and can be of no use to me when action is required immediately. But you were a karakuri artisan in Tempu. You have skills they do not. Will you help me?”
Kyuzo was startled but proud to learn that Keian saw that potential in him.
From that day on, whenever he had the chance, he visited the execution grounds and dissected the bodies of pregnant women, newborn infants, and young children in particular, inspecting their insides closely.
Based on diagrams that Keian drew, Kyuzo carved a skeleton out of silver. Keian built a mechanism of gears and springs and clockwork to set inside it. Kyuzo set precious stones in milky-white glass to create eyeballs, and Keian created the workings that would control the expressions and movements of the face, cramming them inside the skull with no room to spare.
The two of them were possessed by a blasphemous drive to create life from the lifeless.
They threw t
hemselves into the project, heedless of the passing time. After weeks of work, their automaton began to look increasingly like a baby.
As he honed their design, a thought came to Kyuzo.
A pregnant woman’s body was home to not one soul but two.
On reflection, that was an extraordinary thing.
Where did the life in her womb come from, and when?
If souls came from elsewhere to reside in the human body, was it not possible that one might take up residence in the infant automaton they were building?
After a hundred days or more of work, the automaton’s form, at least, was nearing completion.
Keian had been forced by unavoidable business to go out that evening. Mentally and physically exhausted, Kyuzo found himself unable to resist stealing into Keian’s workshop for another look at Eve.
Entering the workshop in the bamboo grass grove, he found her lying faceup on her workbench, as usual. More parts had been added since he’d seen her last, and she was now complete to her elbows and knees.
Sitting beside her, Kyuzo gazed intently at her face. Her eyes were closed.
Her missing extremities gave her a certain ghoulish air, but unlike the corpses Kyuzo was by now thoroughly sick of seeing at the execution grounds, she had the color of radiant health, with a hint of red in her cheeks. It might have been his imagination, but she also seemed to have the faint fragrance of flowers.
“Eve,” he said quietly.
Perhaps it was because he was tired. If not, perhaps because he was overworked and his feelings for this automata were even stronger than usual.
Until that night, he had sat gazing at her at length, but he had never touched her.
Because if a man such as he touched her, wouldn’t she be polluted? Would this not destroy something pure? So it had always seemed to him.
He felt his heart pounding.
He reached toward her white chest.
The tip of his middle finger brushed against her nipple.
Hesitation. Then he softly placed his palm over her left breast.
Supple elasticity. Softness. Vulnerability.
