The Last Concubine

by Lesley Downer

  Taki slipped out of the room with a swish of her kimono skirts and returned with the small iron kettle of tooth-dyeing liquid. The bitter smell of iron, vinegar and sumac-leaf gall suffused the room. She knelt in front of Sachi.

  Sachi looked at her thin pale face, her big, rather startled eyes and pointed chin. Taki was still as sharp-boned and prickly as ever, a samurai through and through. Sometimes when she thought Sachi wasn’t around the placid expression she worked so hard to maintain would fade. Sachi suspected she thought of Toranosuké.

  Neither he nor Tatsuemon had ever reappeared. Just that year there had been an amnesty and all the stubborn northern warriors had been pardoned. Even Admiral Enomoto, who had fled north with the Tokugawa fleet, now had an important job in the government. If Toranosuké and Tatsuemon were going to return it would surely be now. But no one knew what had happened to them. They might have stayed in Ezo; they might have gone back to Kano; or they might have died. Sachi knew that many people had never come back from the war and no one ever discovered what had become of them.

  She also knew that Shinzaemon was determined to find out. He was not going to stay in Tokyo for ever, being a bureaucrat. He would be off again soon enough in search of adventure. She would never try to quench that fiery spirit of his.

  For, despite everything, they were still together. Sometimes Sachi looked back over the years and thought how fortunate they had been.

  After Haru’s death, they had come straight back to Tokyo. The mansions of the defeated lords were all being turned into government ministries or accommodation for leading political figures and shortly after they got back Daisuké was granted the Mizuno lands. They buried Haru next to Sachi’s mother, under the great plum tree in the grounds.

  They left the old man who had guided them up the mountain to bury Lord Mizuno and to carry on digging the pit in the moorland; he seemed to be sure he would find gold there. Edwards too seemed fascinated by the Tokugawa gold and stayed a few days longer on the mountain after Sachi, Daisuké and the others left. But it wasn’t the gold he was interested in; it was obvious he had finally realized that Shinzaemon was far more to Sachi than a friend or a brother and that he had no chance of a liaison with her, let alone marriage. Sachi was glad. She knew very well where her heart belonged, where it had always belonged since the day she’d first seen Shinzaemon when she was fleeing from the palace.

  But she also knew that as a woman she had no say over what happened in her life, no matter what her personal feelings might be. A new government had been installed and new laws were being worked out, but it made no change to something as fundamental as that. It was obvious that Daisuké needed an heir, needed to adopt a son. Sachi was afraid that once they had settled down he would call on the services of a go-between to arrange meetings for her with prospective candidates. Many ambitious young men who had fought on the southern side would be eager to be taken on as her husband and her father’s successor.

  One day not long after Haru’s funeral Sachi was sitting with her father in the great hall. Daisuké was smoking quietly. He looked at her from under his bushy eyebrows and said suddenly, ‘My dear daughter, I didn’t seek you out in order to make you unhappy.’ It was as if he had read her mind.

  ‘Your mother chose me and I chose her,’ he continued. ‘I have no intention of forcing you to marry anyone you don’t care about. It’s obvious to me that you care for Shinzaemon and he for you. The war is over, he is a brilliant young man and I owe my life to him. If I am right, I am happy to take him as my adopted son.’

  They were married shortly afterwards. Sachi smiled as she remembered their wedding day. She had been dressed in beautiful robes and carried through the streets in a wedding palanquin, surrounded by bridesmaids and preceded by retainers carrying lanterns, boxes and a spear, before the week-long ceremonies began. Daisuké had insisted on arranging palanquins to bring Jiroemon, Otama, Yuki and the children from the village in the Kiso valley and Shinzaemon’s relatives had come up from Kano for the occasion. His stern father and sweet-faced mother seemed delighted to be in an alliance with Daisuké, a powerful member of the new government, and relieved that their rebellious second son had become respectable at last. Shinzaemon had taken Daisuké’s family name and he and Sachi settled down to their new life together. They adopted Yuki and kept her with them when the rest of the family went back to the village.

  Taki was frowning in concentration. Both women loved this daily ritual when they could forget everything else and concentrate on this small but important task. First she tweezed out Sachi’s eyebrows. Next she blacked her teeth, applied her make-up, painting her face white, and smudged in moths’ wings high on her forehead. Then she combed her long black hair over and over again till it gleamed. It cascaded down her back in a luxuriant mane. Taki swept it back, not into the usual matronly marumage style but into a long tail, loosely bound with ribbons here and there, such as she used to wear at the palace. Finally she painted in her lips in red.

  There was a scrabbling at the door and little Daisuké scampered in. Clambering on to Sachi’s lap, he put his arms around her neck.

  ‘Me too! I’m coming too!’ he yelled.

  ‘Not today, Daisuké,’ said Sachi, laughing and giving him a cuddle. He started rummaging among the brushes and combs and jars of make-up. He was going to be as handsome as his grandfather, she could see that already. The same broad open face, the same big black eyes. He had the same curiosity too, the same energy and determination.

  Taki had brought out some of the formal robes Sachi had had as part of the princess’s retinue. It was years since she had worn them. Taki helped her into the heavy robes one after another and arranged the different-coloured layers so that they were perfectly aligned at the collar and cuffs. Then she handed her her ceremonial fan.

  Sachi stared at herself in the mirror. A shiver ran down her spine. She saw a woman dressed in the archaic robes of the shogun’s concubine – a woman with a pale oval face, eyes set wide apart, slanting at the corners, a small mouth with full lips and an aristocratically arched nose. It was a long time since she had looked in the mirror and seen not herself but her mother. She was twenty-two, she realized, the very age Okoto had been when she met Sachi’s father.

  Her reflection glimmered back at her. She was not sure who she saw hovering before her, whether it was the Retired Lady Shokoin, widowed concubine of His late Majesty the fourteenth shogun, or the Lady Okoto, concubine to the twelfth shogun, Lord Ieyoshi. She had thought she had laid the past to rest, but it came to life again so easily. She had only to put on these robes.

  ‘Shinzaemon won’t recognize me,’ she murmured uneasily. She had never told him about her life in the women’s palace. All the women had promised on pain of death never to reveal anything about their life there. It was part of that old world of shadows and darkness, where everyone was suspicious of everyone else and everyone had secrets. Shinzaemon knew that world too and respected it and had never asked anything about her past. But today he was to meet the princess. Today the door would open a crack. Sachi wondered how he would feel, whether it would change his feelings towards her.

  Shinzaemon was waiting with Daisuké at the entrance. His broad face with the shapely cheekbones and slanting cat’s eyes was as dramatic as ever, but the look of untamed warrior ferocity had been replaced by a fierce intelligent determination. It reassured Sachi to see him. He didn’t live in a world of ghosts and spirits, didn’t live in the past. He had wholeheartedly embraced the present.

  He was formally dressed in starched hakama trousers and haori jacket, nattily combined with European boots, a bowler hat and an umbrella in the modern style. With his short haircut, cropped jangiri-style, he was the very picture of the modern young man. There was a ditty people hummed: ‘Tap a head with a topknot and you hear the sound of the past; thump a jangiri head and it sings out “civilization and enlightenment”.’ These days ‘civilization and enlightenment’ was what everyone talked about. Sachi wasn’t
at all sure what the phrase meant. But she was certain that Shinzaemon was the very embodiment of it.

  Daisuké too was dressed in the modern style. He had stepped into the background a little, allowing Shinzaemon to take over some of his governmental duties. He had grown a little greyer around the temples, but he was still the fine handsome man whom Lady Okoto had risked everything to be with.

  Sachi could see the two men looking at her and Taki as they came towards them in their formal court dress, moving very slowly, swishing along in their full trousers with the quilted hems of their kimonos fanning out behind them. She knew that Shinzaemon had never seen them in court dress before; they had never worn it outside the palace. He said nothing, simply nodded.

  Daisuké had turned pale. He was looking at her with a haunted look she had not seen since the time they had come down from the mountain. She realized that she was dressed exactly as her mother must have been when she had met Daisuké for their assignations at the temple. It was as if Lady Okoto had come back from the grave.

  Before they left they walked through the grounds to her mother’s and Haru’s graves. Sachi put fresh flowers in the vases and murmured a sutra. She thought of them with tears in her eyes. It was good to be living on the Mizuno estate, where her mother had lived when she was in Edo. Daisuké had made a good decision when he had asked for the house; it felt right to be there.

  Shinzaemon and Daisuké set off in a carriage with Sachi and Taki following behind in another. The old man was at the gate and bowed as they drove through. The sight of his kindly weather-beaten old face, broad grin and bandy legs always made Sachi smile. He was a link with the past. He had taken care of them at the palace and at the Shimizu mansion. When the Shimizus had been forced to leave, Sachi had brought him with her to her new house. Now he took care of them here, although he was so old and frail that it was really they who took care of him.

  There were rickshaws everywhere: jin-riki-sha, ‘humanpowered wheel’. They seemed to have sprung up overnight like mushrooms. Now they rattled and clattered around the streets, pulled by scrawny tattooed fellows who raced along, yelling at the tops of their voices, warning people to get out of the way. Sachi remembered how thrilled she had been the first time she had ridden in Edwards’s carriage. These days she was always bowling around at breakneck speed. The streets were packed with wheeled vehicles – carriages, horse-drawn omnibuses, two-wheeled rickshaws, four-wheeled rickshaws. They could hardly move for the traffic whizzing in every direction, which, Sachi thought, was surely a sign of civilization and enlightenment. Another was the foreigners who had appeared en masse and were busily changing the face of the city. They had already built a tall building with a flashing light in the harbour, called a ‘lighthouse’, and installed a telegraph, just as Edwards had predicted when he told them about the ‘magic messages’.

  Daisuké was looking around, beaming. He had seen it all coming. He loved being at the forefront of change, helping to plan and build the new Japan. Sachi felt a burst of pride in this father of hers.

  *

  Crowds of people were heading in the same direction as Sachi, Daisuké and their party. Everyone was splendidly dressed, as they had been when they had gone to see the emperor’s grand entry into Tokyo. Then, everyone had looked nervous and resentful, as if they had no idea what the future held and didn’t like having this new government thrust upon them. All they had been able to see was doors closing, the end of something. It had never occurred to them those doors might be about to open on to a brand-new world, more different than they could ever have imagined.

  Now the crowds were cheerful and festive-looking. The women dressed as they always had but the men sported European boots or hats or overcoats as well as their usual robes and there were plenty of jangiri haircuts dotted among the old-fashioned shaved pates. Sachi wondered if Fuyu was out there somewhere. She hadn’t seen her since the day they’d stood together watching the emperor enter the castle. Those palace women – all three thousand – seemed to have vanished entirely.

  Everyone was moving towards one of the wonderful gleaming new western-style buildings that Daisuké loved so much. It was actually two buildings of white stone, like the twin guard towers of a castle, decked inside and out with flags and coloured lanterns as if for a festival. Officials escorted Daisuké, Shinzaemon, Sachi and Taki inside. Sachi gazed around at the spacious, airy building, feeling rather cowed. On the far side was an open, roofed corridor, rather like the covered arcades that had led from one building to another in the palace or a huge version of the hanamichi, the ‘flower road’ on which actors walked through the audience in a kabuki theatre. It led through the middle of a perfectly smooth, perfectly flat expanse of ground.

  And there, standing out in the open on the smooth iron road it would travel on, was a massive iron monster. As she looked at it, Sachi had to blink back tears as she thought of how proud and thrilled Haru would have been to see it. It was huge and black, exactly as Haru had described it all those years before. It towered above them, casting a vast shadow, like nothing they’d ever seen before, and puffed out smoke, making a lot of noise.

  They walked round it, looking at the massive wheels and the great rods that connected them, then stepped back and gazed up at the mighty funnel. Timidly they went up the steps of one of the huge boxes that people were to travel in and peeped inside. Sachi had never imagined anything could be so big. It was like a small town in there, as big as a whole street of houses. Every now and then there was a loud shriek and smoke puffed from the funnel.

  The dignitaries gathered there were almost entirely men. Only women of rank, with a special relationship to the emperor, had been invited. Many of the dignitaries were foreigners.

  Edwards strode over to greet them. He had grown more serious since their ill-fated journey up the mountain and was no longer as carefree and boyish as he used to be. His hair no longer shone like gold, there were lines on his face and his eyes were a little faded although they were still the colour of the sky on a fine day. They smiled and bowed. Edwards enquired after Sachi’s son, little Daisuké, and Sachi enquired after Dr Willis. They reminisced for a while.

  ‘So did anyone ever find the Tokugawa gold?’ Edwards asked in his direct way. In all these years it was the first time anyone had brought up that harrowing memory.

  ‘I think we’d have heard if someone did. I expect the old man from Lord Oguri’s village is still up there, digging,’ said Daisuké. He smiled rather sadly.

  ‘I could never understand why Lord Mizuno didn’t know where it was,’ said Shinzaemon. ‘Didn’t the old man tell you anything when you stayed up there with him, after we’d left?’

  ‘Apparently Lord Oguri and Lord Mizuno had an argument,’ said Edwards. ‘Someone in the village heard raised voices. That was how the rumours started about the gold. The old man thinks Lord Oguri tricked Lord Mizuno. He found a pretext to send him away somewhere and got rid of the gold before he returned. The old man’s convinced that Lord Mizuno must have had some idea where it was buried. It must be somewhere on that moor. The trouble is, the gold was buried in spring and by summer the whole place had grown over. There’s nothing to distinguish one spot from another. The grass goes on for ever.’

  Sachi shivered, remembering the pit. She thought wistfully of Haru. She had been the custodian of their story, entwined with their destinies even before Sachi was born, ever since she was a child, growing up with Sachi’s mother. She had guarded her secret until she could guard it no longer. And finally it had brought her face to face with Lord Mizuno. Tears came to Sachi’s eyes at the thought that she was no longer there to share these wonderful new experiences with them.

  Yet she also understood that her uncle, Lord Mizuno, had had to do what he did. That was how it had always been in the old days. Everyone had known what they had to do and had done it, no matter what, without stopping to think about whether they wanted to do it or whether it was even the right thing to do. They had done their duty.
/>   That was what made Shinzaemon and Daisuké different, and Sachi too. They thought for themselves.

  Sachi looked around. On the far side of the crowd, standing apart from everyone else, was a group of women. They were dressed as Sachi and Taki were, as ladies of the court. As Sachi looked, she no longer heard the metallic shrieking of the whistle or the mechanical huffing and puffing of the great engine. In the middle of the group was a small thin woman, her glossy black hair cut short like a widow or a nun. She stood so quietly no one would ever have noticed her. Her eyes were lowered and she was looking at the ground as if she had retreated so deep inside herself it was painful to have to come out. In the whole crowd Sachi could see nothing but her small pale face with its big ethereal eyes. She forgot everything but that special love she always felt for the princess.

  A gentle smile crossed Kazu’s face when she saw Sachi.

  ‘Child,’ she said. ‘The Retired Lady Shoko-in. It’s been so long. You have bloomed like a flower!’

  She greeted Taki too with joy.

  ‘I spend most of my time in prayer and contemplation,’ she said when they asked her how she was. ‘But my nephew the emperor begged me to come out this one time. His Majesty has been very kind to me. He begged me many times to go back to Kyoto and I did go back once for a visit. But now His Majesty has established his court in Tokyo I have moved back here. My life is very quiet. The Shimizu family take care of me still and I write poetry and think. It is a good life.’

  Sachi was aware of nothing but the luminous presence of the princess. Standing there in their court robes it was as if time had stood still, as if they were still in the palace.