‘And Haru?’ the princess asked suddenly, looking around. When Sachi told her that Haru had passed away, she stood in silence for a long while, her head bent and her hand to her eyes.
Suddenly Sachi was aware of Shinzaemon watching with his piercing eyes and felt a tremor of fear. What would the princess think when she discovered Sachi had made an alliance with another man instead of spending the rest of her life devoting herself to the memory of the shogun, as she herself had done? Would she not think that Sachi was bound – by honour, if nothing else – to the Tokugawa clan? This was certainly the choice the princess had made.
Trembling, Sachi introduced Shinzaemon. ‘My husband,’ she said. ‘He fought loyally for the Tokugawas to the very last.’
The princess didn’t seem to hesitate.
‘Welcome,’ she said. ‘I am very happy to meet you. Lady Shoko-in has been a devoted friend and sister to me for many years. It is a bond that can never be broken – I as the wife, she as the concubine of the shogun. Had things gone differently, she would have been one of the highest ladies in the land. We are bound for ever to the Tokugawas.
‘We may be relics of a past age, but we are also survivors. We have all found a place for ourselves in this new world. I’m happy to give my blessing to your union.’ The princess inclined her head formally to Shinzaemon.
It was the last secret, the last mystery. Now Shinzaemon knew that Sachi had been not just a court lady but the last concubine of the shoguns. The last veil between them had been lifted. In the old days he, a ronin from Kano, and she, the shogun’s concubine, could never have been together. They had succeeded where her parents had failed and had managed to grasp the life they wanted.
To Sachi’s relief Shinzaemon did no more than nod quietly. He looked at her and smiled. In his eyes she read pride, admiration and affection. No, more than that. There had been a word that Edwards had taught her all those years ago when he had taken her hand in the garden. It was not affection, like a man feels for his parents, he had said, or respect, like a man feels for his wife, or even lust, like a man feels for a courtesan, but more than all those put together. She remembered the strange foreign syllables: rabu – ‘love’. That was the only word to express it. In his eyes she saw love.
A man had arrived in an open carriage, surrounded by a huge escort. Sachi knew that it was the same person who had been inside the phoenix car which they had watched enter the castle in grand procession. At that time they had thought they would die if they so much as looked at him. Timidly Sachi glanced up just for a moment. He was in scarlet court trousers, white robes and European boots and was very young – the very age His Majesty the shogun had been when she had known him. She quickly lowered her eyes.
The princess stepped forward. They exchanged a few words, then she beckoned to Sachi. An extraordinary fragrance such as Sachi had never smelt before floated around the young man – the legendary imperial fragrance.
‘The Retired Lady Shoko-in, only concubine of his Late Majesty Lord Iemochi,’ said the princess, introducing her. ‘She has been my devoted friend and sister, a comfort to me for many years.’
Sachi bowed low.
‘Ah, Lord Iemochi,’ said the emperor. He had a youthful piping voice and spoke the special language that only the emperor spoke. ‘I remember him well,’ he said. ‘A very gentle man. So tragic that he died so young. My late father was very fond of him. We’ve had so much loss, so much tragedy. It’s good that we now go forward together. I’m very happy to meet you, my lady.’
Then the emperor moved on. He made a speech as smoke poured from the engine, then he and a few other dignitaries got on board. Sachi, Shinzaemon, Daisuké and Taki watched as the princess disappeared inside.
The whistle shrieked, the huge wheels started to move, at first very slowly then faster and faster. The train rumbled off and disappeared into the distance.
Afterword
During my research for The Last Concubine, I came across a reference to the lost Tokugawa gold, in a footnote in a history of the Mitsui company. Apparently Lord Oguri had smuggled the shogun’s hoard of gold coins out of Edo when Lord Yoshinobu was still in power and buried it somewhere in the foothills of Mount Akagi. He was beheaded shortly afterwards and all trace of it disappeared. The author added that treasure hunters had been digging for it for three generations, riddling the lower slopes of Mount Akagi with tunnels and trenches.
Tantalizing though it was, that was the only reference to the gold I could find in any of the many books I researched, so in the end I concluded it was just a rumour. Nevertheless the idea of the gold and the hopeless quest for it had stirred my imagination.
When I was nearing the end of writing this book I decided to go to Mount Akagi. I didn’t expect to hear anything about the gold; I just wanted to get an idea of the place and the landscape. Mount Akagi is way off the beaten track, not in any Englishlanguage guidebook, but I finally found the address of a hotspring inn. I took the bullet train to Takasaki, then drove up a long winding mountain road.
Once there I decided I might as well ask the owner of the inn about the Tokugawa gold, absurd though it seemed. To my amazement he was not remotely surprised. ‘It’s not here,’ he said in very matter-of-fact tones. ‘It’s on the other side of the mountain.’ He showed me a map. The next day, I set off through the rain in search of it. Thoroughly lost, I asked in a lonely store and was directed through the woods and across some allotments to a dilapidated house. Next to it was a hummocky expanse of overgrown woodland with a mechanical digger in the middle. I ended up having tea with a man whose family has indeed been digging for the gold for three generations. His account of how the gold got to Mount Akagi is different from my fictional version but nevertheless I was thrilled to discover that the Tokugawa gold might actually exist – though no one has found it yet – and so it became part of my tale.
Sachi and her story are fiction but the world in which she lived is not. I’ve done my best to make the historical framework as accurate as possible (though I have taken the odd liberty in the interests of telling a good story). The battles, political events and even the weather (miserably cold and wet in summer 1868) were pretty much as described. The individual shoguns (who in books on Japanese history are usually referred to only as ‘the shogun’) really existed and the details of their stories are largely true. Princess Kazu really was sent to marry Shogun Iemochi when she was only fifteen and took the Inner Mountain Road through the Kiso region to Edo, to live in Edo Castle.
Very little is known about life inside the women’s palace. It was kept strictly secret and those who lived there were prohibited from speaking about it. After it was dismantled a few maids recorded their recollections. I have used these in imagining life there. The stories of intrigue and murder are all true, the names of the concubines – old Lady Honju-in and the others – all as they were. Princess Kazu really did insist on dressing in the imperial style, feuded with her mother-in-law, Lady Tensho-in (the Retired One), and after the women were evicted from the palace moved to the Shimizu mansion. Before the shogun set off on his last journey to Kyoto, she gave him a farewell gift: a concubine. After his death she remained a nun and died of beriberi in 1877, at the age of thirty-one.
Lady Okoto too, Sachi’s mother, really existed and the story of her liaison with the handsome carpenter is largely true. She was a member of the Mizuno family and the last and favourite concubine of the twelfth shogun, Lord Ieyoshi. We don’t know the name of her lover (he was not a carpenter, in fact, but a carpenter’s agent, a sort of building contractor); but we do know that he looked just like the ravishingly handsome kabuki actor Sojiro Sawamura. Her brother’s machinations to get her into the shogun’s palace and her sad end too are true. I made a couple of changes. The events actually happened in 1855, after Lord Ieyoshi was dead, not 1850; and there’s no record that she had a child.
Japan in the 1860s was an extraordinary place. No one knew their world was about to change, not gradually, as ours
did in the Victorian West, but overnight. Everyone assumed that life as they knew it would go on for ever. It was a world in which scent played a large part and wheeled vehicles were used only to transport goods; people walked or travelled by palanquin. Gunpowder was little used, samurai fought with swords and samurai women were trained in the halberd. I researched the clothes, the hair-styles, the incense, how people lived and, as far as possible, how they thought and felt. I’ve also kept to the Japanese calendar of the time and used the Japanese clock and Japanese distances.
Women’s lives were very different from our own. High-class women seldom left the home and were expected to maintain an impassive demeanour at all times, no matter what dreadful calamity befell them. This was a society in which the concept of love and the word for it had yet to be introduced from the West. When people fell in love, the experience took them by surprise. To be so overwhelmed by brute passion that one failed to do one’s duty was a disaster. Kabuki plays and Japanese novels on the subject end not with marriage but with love suicide. There was also no word for ‘kiss’. The kiss was one of the geishas’ esoteric sexual techniques and decent women like Sachi didn’t know anything about it. It was a challenge to write a love story set in a society in which there was no concept of romantic love – and without ever using the word ‘love’!
Not long after it became the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Edo Castle was razed to the ground. Where the women’s palace used to be is now the Imperial Palace East Gardens; the expanse of the gardens gives some idea of how vast the palace must have been. The Gate of the Shoguns’ Ladies with its massive guardhouse – officially known as the Hirakawa Gate – is still there, as is the outer gate of the Shimizu mansion. At Himeji Castle, west of Osaka, the women’s quarters still exist, though much smaller than in Edo Castle. The Tokyo National Museum on Ueno Hill is on the site of what was once Kanei-ji Temple. In Tokyo I paid my respects at Zojoji Temple where Lord Iemochi is buried alongside Princess Kazu. There is a life-size statue of Princess Kazu there. I also reacquainted myself with the Inner Mountain Road (the Nakasendo) and the villages of Tsumago and Magome, on which Sachi’s village is modelled. As for Kano, that is the old name of Gifu, where I lived for the first two years I was in Japan; though the treacherous behaviour of the daimyo of Kano is pure fiction.
History is always written by the winners and never more so than in the case of the civil war that culminated in 1868 with the so-called Meiji Restoration. It is often described as a ‘bloodless’ revolution; as readers of this book know, it certainly wasn’t bloodless. I tried to imagine how it must have been to be one of the hundreds of thousands of people on the losing side, and most especially what happened to the women of Edo Castle after the women’s palace was disbanded.
The history of the time – the plots and counterplots and secret alliances – is labyrinthine. People living through it would have had little idea of what was going on outside their own small world. I’ve simplified it and tried to show it as it must have seemed to Sachi. I’ve lumped the Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa and their burgeoning band of allies together and called them ‘the southerners’, which makes geographical sense and, funnily enough, is exactly as The Japan Times’ Overland Mail and other contemporary western observers referred to them.
In the period in which this book takes place Japan had just begun to open up to the West. The Victorians who visited were well aware that they were seeing an extraordinary world – and one that was on the brink of disappearing. Many of them wrote diaries and books which I read with great envy. Some are listed below. For me, writing The Last Concubine has been the latest chapter in a very long love affair with Japan. Everyone who goes there wishes they could have experienced the old Japan – that magical, fragile world which has gone for ever. Writing this book has given me the chance to imagine myself there and to take my readers with me.
Acknowledgements
This book would not exist were it not for my agent, Bill Hamilton. Bill insisted I embark on the project and has been a part of it all the way through, offering wise advice and support. Huge thanks also to Sara Fisher, Corinne Chabert and everyone at A. M. Heath.
I’ve been very fortunate in being able to work with Selina Walker at Transworld. Selina did a great deal to shape this book and keep me pointed in the right direction. I’m much indebted to her and to all her team, including Deborah Adams and Claire Ward, who have been full of support, enthusiasm and patience when required.
Thanks to Kimiko Shiga, who deciphered the archaic Japanese of Takayanagi Kaneyoshi’s Life in the Women’s Palace at Edo Castle. Gaye Rowley and Thomas Harper were in on this project from the beginning and shared their extensive knowledge of Japan and of the Edo period, Tom’s speciality. Colin Young – one of only three teachers of the Shodai Ryu school of swordsmanship outside Japan – provided much esoteric information and gave me the chance to wield a real Japanese sword, a thrilling experience. Thanks to all of these for casting a critical eye over the manuscript and making many invaluable suggestions, and also to Louise Longdin and Ian Eagles. Thanks too to the teachers and students of the London Naginata Association, where I learned how to handle a practice stick and watched competition-level naginata(halberd) duels. Yoko Chiba and John Maisonneuve (another swordsman) also provided information about the halberd.
The translations are my own. The symbol at the beginning of each chapter is the Mizuno crest. The endpapers (in the hardback edition only) show a section of the actual kimono on which I based the brocade – Sachi’s mothers overkimono. Greatful thanks to the Tokyo National Museum for permission to use this image of an early-nineteenth-century katabira with landscape with pavilion, gate, rope curtain and nobleman’s cart, (TNM Image Archives Source: http//TNMAArchives.jp).
I owe a debt to all the Japan historians whose work I’ve drawn on to write this book (though all mistakes, misinterpretations and liberties with the facts are my own). Some are listed below; there are many more. Professors Donald Keene and Timon Screech kindly shared their expertise. Professor Conrad Totman’s wonderful books on the last years of the Tokugawa Bakufu, together with Professor M. William Steele’s analyses of 1868 Edo, provided the factual underpinning of my story. I enjoyed a lengthy and entertaining email exchange with Dr Takayuki Yokota-Murakami of the University of Osaka on love and sex in old Japan. The information on dried lizard powder is from him. His book listed below, despite the daunting subtitle, is fascinating reading.
Last but most important of all is my husband, Arthur, without whose love and support I couldn’t possibly have written this book. He gave me the leisure to indulge in fiction, read and commented on each draft and, as an expert on military history, made sure I got the rifles and cannons right. He has shared Sachi’s world with me. We walked the Inner Mountain Road together, strolled around Edo Castle, and went to Himeji Castle and to Zojoji Temple to see Princess Kazu’s tomb. At this point he is something of an expert on Edo-period Japan and can even recognize the Tokugawa crest – an ability few can claim!
This book is dedicated to him.
Select Bibliography
There are an enormous number of wonderful books on the Edo period. Below are just a few that I have found particularly inspiring.
Biographies of Edo-period samurai, novels and other books that make the period come alive:
Bolitho, Harold, Bereavement and Consolation: Testimonies from Tokugawa Japan, Yale University Press, 2003
Katsu Kokichi, Musui’s Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai, translated with an introduction and notes by Teruko Craig, University of Arizona Press, 1988
McClellan, Edwin, Woman in the Crested Kimono: The Life of Shibue Io and Her Family Drawn from Mori Ogai’s ‘Shibue Chusai’, Yale University Press, 1985
Meech-Pekarik, Julia, The World of the Meiji Print: Impressions of a New Civilization, Weatherhill, 1987
Miyoshi Masao, As We Saw Them: The First Japanese Embassy to the United States, Kodansha International, 1994
Shiba Ryotaro, The
Last Shogun: The Life of Tokugawa Yoshinobu, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, Kodansha International, 1998
Shimazaki Toson, Before the Dawn, translated by William E. Naff, University of Hawaii Press, 1987
Walthall, Anne, The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration, University of Chicago Press, 1998
Yamakawa Kikue, Women of the Mito Domain: Recollections of Samurai Family Life, translated with an introduction by Kate Wildman Nakai, Stanford University Press, 2001
Diaries of Victorian travellers:
Alcock, Rutherford, The Capital of the Tycoon, volumes I and II, Elibron Classics, 2005 (first published 1863)
Cortazzi, Hugh, Mitford’s Japan: Memories and Recollections 1866–1906, Japan Library, 2002
Heusken, Henry, Japan Journal: 1855–1861, translated and edited by Jeannette C. van der Corput and Robert A. Wilson, Rutgers University Press, 1964
Notehelfer, F. G., Japan through American Eyes: The Journal of Francis Hall, Westview Press, 2001
Satow, Ernest, A Diplomat in Japan: The Inner History of the Critical Years in the Evolution of Japan When the Ports were Opened and the Monarchy Restored, Stone Bridge Press, 2006 (first published 1921)
Indispensable and well-loved works on literature and poetry:
Keene, Donald (ed.), Anthology of Japanese Literature: to the nineteenth century, Grove Press; Penguin Books, 1968
Miner, Earl, An Introduction to Japanese Court Poetry, Stanford University Press, 1968
Waley, Arthur, The No Plays of Japan, George Allen and Unwin, 1921; Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1976
Key academic works about the period:
Keene, Donald, Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, Columbia University Press, 2002
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