The Incense Game: A Novel of Feudal Japan

by Laura Joh Rowland

  “It’s true!” Reiko cried. “Have you ever seen him without his clothes? Take them off and look!”

  “Some people will say anything to save their necks,” Jagged Teeth said.

  “Tie her up.” Smiling faintly, Minister Ogyu slicked sweat from his forehead with the back of his dainty hand.

  Jagged Teeth found a coil of rope. While he bound her wrists and ankles, Reiko fought desperately, but the other guard held her down. He was young, with hard eyes and a falsely winsome smile. She screamed until the men tied a kerchief around her mouth as a gag. They forced her knees up to her chest and wrapped rope around her curled body. They lifted her and dumped her into the trunk. Minister Ogyu stood over her as she keened and strained against her bonds. His face was drained of his relief that his men hadn’t believed her, and crazed with desperation. Reiko agonized because her gamble had backfired. If he’d ever considered sparing her life before, he wouldn’t again. He knew that she knew his secret.

  “Where are we taking her?” Jagged Teeth asked. “To Saru-waka-cho?”

  “Yes.” Minister Ogyu closed the lid of the trunk.

  37

  “LADY OGYU?”

  Sano listened to his voice echo across the courtyard of the Confucian academy, where he and Detective Marume stood. He heard birdsong from the trees down the hill and the beat of his head throbbing. The opium had worn off, and the pain resurged like a vanquished enemy returning to attack. Dizziness and nausea persisted. No one answered his call. He lifted the flap of the tent where he’d seen Lady Ogyu and the children. The tent, crammed with household items, was unoccupied.

  Marume touched Sano’s arm and put his finger to his own lips.

  A child’s babble was quickly silenced. It had come from across the courtyard. Sano and Marume crept around the collapsed building at the back. The building’s whole roof had slid onto the ground. About half of the roof had caved in. Sano and Marume peered between the beams of the other half, exposed where tiles had fallen off. Underneath, Lady Ogyu and her children cowered like animals in a cave. She held her hands over the boy’s and girl’s mouths to keep them quiet.

  “We’re not going to hurt you,” Sano said gently. “We just want to talk. Come out.”

  Lady Ogyu buried her face against the little girl’s head, as if by refusing to look at Sano she could make him vanish. She obviously knew that he was a danger to her family. Sano noticed that the boards that sealed the gable on the end of the roof had been pried loose. He squeezed through the narrow gap. The roof’s sides slanted, but the peak was high enough for him to walk under. The cold space smelled of damp earth and wood. As he moved toward Lady Ogyu, she and the children scuttled backward until they reached the caved-in section of the roof. Splintered rafters heaped with loose tiles kept them from retreating farther. Lady Ogyu aimed a desperate, pleading gaze past Sano, too afraid to look directly at him. “Please don’t hurt my babies,” she whispered.

  “I won’t.” Sano stopped ten paces from Lady Ogyu. He crouched so that he wouldn’t loom over her. Her eyes and nose were red and swollen, her face wet.

  “Please don’t hurt him,” Lady Ogyu whispered.

  “Who? Your husband?”

  Nodding, Lady Ogyu clutched her children so tightly they squealed.

  “Where is he?”

  “He hasn’t done anything wrong!”

  Sano hated to take advantage of this vulnerable woman, but his first duty was to protect the regime from war and serve justice. “I believe it was your husband who poisoned Madam Usugumo and Lord Hosokawa’s daughters.”

  Lady Ogyu cried, “No, he didn’t kill them, it wasn’t him, you mustn’t hurt him, it was me, I did it!”

  The headache, dizziness, and nausea interfered with the extra sense that helped Sano determine whether people were lying. Maybe she was trying to protect her husband. “Then tell me how you did it. But first send your children outside while we talk.”

  Lady Ogyu clung to them. She didn’t seem to care if they heard her confess to murder. “It was my husband’s idea to poison Madam Usugumo. He bought rat poison and mixed it with incense. But he couldn’t go through with it. He was afraid of getting caught. So I took it upon myself. I would do anything for him!” Devotion blazed in her eyes. She reminded Sano of a mother bird, flying between its young and a predatory hawk. “I used the poison on Madam Usugumo without going near her.” Her timidity gave way to pride; her downturned mouth curved in a smile. “I used those two Hosokawa girls. They were always quarreling. They hated each other.”

  Sano remembered Reiko mentioning the sisters’ rivalry. He’d decided it had no bearing upon the murders. Now he was surprised that it apparently had.

  “I could hardly stand to listen to them hissing and snapping like cats,” Lady Ogyu said. “But later I was glad I knew them. They were taking lessons from Madam Usugumo. I went to see Kumoi. I told her that I could help her get back at her sister Myobu. At first she didn’t believe me. She told me to mind my own business. I said, ‘Do you want your sister’s husband? Do you want your son? Then you should listen to me.’ And she listened while I told her that if she killed her sister, she could marry the man she loved and be a mother to her own son. She was so excited, she didn’t even ask me why I would help her. She just begged me to tell her what to do.”

  Sano felt as dazed as if he’d swallowed all his opium pills. He was that shocked to understand how the crime had happened.

  “I gave Kumoi the poisoned incense,” Lady Ogyu said. “I told her to take it with her when she and Myobu went for their next lesson and sneak it in with the samples for the game.”

  The crime had resulted from a conspiracy between two women with different goals. Lady Ogyu had wanted a blackmailer dead; Kumoi, her hated sister. Their hidden collaboration was finally revealed. Sano shook his head in astonishment. Never had he imagined that the crime was so complicated.

  “Didn’t you warn Kumoi that she would be poisoning herself and Madam Usugumo as well as her sister?” he asked.

  “She was worried about that,” Lady Ogyu said. “But I reminded her that Myobu always took the first turn during the incense games. I said that as soon as Myobu breathed the poisonous smoke, she would drop dead. I told Kumoi to pour water on the incense burner and then accuse Madam Usugumo of poisoning Myobu. Everybody would blame Madam Usugumo because the incense was hers and she was a commoner. Nobody would believe it was Kumoi.”

  Kumoi’s ignorance, selfishness, and gullibility had been her downfall. “But you must have known that the smoke could be lethal enough to kill all three women.”

  “I knew,” Lady Ogyu said. “I didn’t care.”

  Never would Sano have guessed that this timid woman was one of the most ruthless criminals he’d ever met. “What did Madam Usugumo learn about your husband that’s so dangerous that you would sacrifice two innocent people in order to silence her?”

  Lady Ogyu responded with bewilderment. “Isn’t it enough that I confessed? Can’t you just punish me and let my husband keep his business private?”

  “No.” Sano wanted the whole story. “If you don’t tell me the secret, I’ll tell Lord Hosokawa that you and your husband were accomplices and he should take revenge on you both.”

  Worry darkened Lady Ogyu’s brow. “I promised not to tell. He promised to take care of us.” Her glance wandered as if she’d lost control of it. Sano glimpsed shame in her eyes. “He promised not to tell on me. He said no one would ever know.”

  Sano was surprised by this first hint that Minister Ogyu wasn’t the only person in this couple who had a secret. “Did Madam Usugumo know something about you?”

  Lady Ogyu rocked her children from side to side. She smiled tenderly at them. “It doesn’t matter that he isn’t their father. He loves them as much as if he were.”

  “You were unfaithful to your husband? You had your children by another man?” Sano didn’t understand why Minister Ogyu would have paid blackmail to hide his wife’s affair. “Why didn’
t he just divorce you?”

  “That’s not how it happened,” Lady Ogyu said vehemently. “It was before we met.” Her gaze clouded, as if with polluted memories. When she spoke, her voice was high and tiny. “He would come into my bed at night. He would lie on top of me and push himself between my legs. He would put his hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t cry out. My sisters knew what was going on. They were there in the room. They must have heard.” Lady Ogyu’s face took on a childishly frightened cast. She was describing a rape inflicted on her when she was a girl, Sano realized. “But they pretended to be asleep. Because they were scared of him. If it wasn’t me, it would be one of them. He was our brother. Our father let him do whatever he wanted.”

  “You don’t have to tell me this.” Sano looked at her children. They watched her, their faces blank. He didn’t want them listening even if they were too young to understand. He also doubted that the story had any bearing on the blackmail. Incest was common; so was sex between adults and children. Sano considered both detestable, but neither was against the law; society usually looked the other way. Had Madam Usugumo revealed this secret, the rapist wouldn’t have been punished, and neither Lady Ogyu’s reputation nor her husband’s would have suffered. Minister Ogyu would have realized that.

  Lady Ogyu said, as if she were too immersed in the past to hear Sano, “It went on for years. Until my mother noticed I was sick in the mornings. She took me to my father and told him I was with child. He was very angry. He hit me and called me a disgrace to the family. He didn’t ask who the child’s father was. I think he guessed. I didn’t tell him. He never let anyone say anything bad about my brother. He decided that I should be married off right away.”

  That was the usual solution. But why would Minister Ogyu have wanted to cover up the fact that his wife had been pregnant when he married her? The children were legally his. Madam Usugumo couldn’t have proved he wasn’t their real father. And why would Lady Ogyu have killed Madam Usugumo? She was safely, respectably married to the man who’d accepted her and her children. An incense teacher spreading gossip about her might have embarrassed her, at the very worst.

  “I went to one miai after another.” Lady Ogyu’s face twisted with revulsion. “I couldn’t bear the men looking at me. I didn’t want to be with any man. I prayed that they wouldn’t want me. And they didn’t. Time went by. My parents were worried that they wouldn’t find me a husband soon enough. And then they introduced me to Ogyu-san. He agreed to marry me.”

  Lady Ogyu spoke in her regular, adult voice, but her face still belonged to the terrified girl she’d been. “When the wedding was over, and my husband and I were alone, I was so afraid that I hid my face and cried. My husband asked what was wrong. I didn’t have the words to tell him, so I—I opened my robe.”

  Sano imagined the scene, the darkened bedchamber, the tearful bride revealing her swollen belly. He could see the shock on Minister Ogyu’s face.

  “I thought he would be angry at me for tricking him. But he wasn’t,” Lady Ogyu said. “He looked as if he were glad. He sat down beside me, and said, ‘I’m sorry. Who did this to you?’ He was so kind that I told him everything. And he said, ‘It’s all right.’” Gratitude filled Lady Ogyu’s voice. “He promised to take care of me. He said no one would ever know that I was pregnant before we married.

  “Then he frowned, but not because he was angry; he seemed to be thinking hard. He said, ‘You never have to be afraid of me.’ And he started to undress.” Lady Ogyu sucked her breath in. “I thought he was going to, to—” She cringed. “I shut my eyes. I waited for him to climb on top of me and push himself between my legs. But he just said, ‘Look at me.’ He sounded as afraid as I was. I opened my eyes. And…”

  Lady Ogyu blinked with remembered shock. “On top, he had…” Her hands cupped the air in front of her bosom. “And between his legs … nothing.”

  As her meaning sunk in, Sano’s jaw dropped. Minister Ogyu had breasts where he shouldn’t. He had no penis where he should have. That was why a woman who feared men need not fear him. That was his secret.

  “Your husband is female?” If Sano hadn’t already been kneeling, his astonishment would have knocked him to his knees. He was all the more shocked to remember that when he’d seen Minister Ogyu wheeling a barrow at the academy, he’d thought Ogyu was a woman. His senses had noticed what his mind hadn’t.

  Lady Ogyu nodded as if she thought her marriage with another woman were the most natural thing in the world. “He told me that when he was born, his parents were disappointed because he was a girl, so they decided to turn him into a boy.”

  Sano thought Madam Usugumo must have been thrilled when her incense ritual uncovered such rich ground for blackmail. Had she spread the story that Minister Ogyu was a woman, it would have aroused so much curiosity that the government would have eventually forced Minister Ogyu to reveal his sex. Then would come his humiliation and the loss of all his rights and privileges that depended on his being male.

  “He said we were lucky that fate had brought us together,” Lady Ogyu said. “I thought so, too.” Sano saw how relieved she’d been that she need never again endure sexual relations with a man. “Because he’s kept his promise. He’s taken care of me. And the children. When they were born, he called them blessings.” Sano could imagine how thankful Minister Ogyu had been, conveniently provided with an heir, assured that no one would ever question his virility. “He’s been so good to us.”

  At the Confucian academy Sano had witnessed Minister Ogyu’s love for his wife. Now he saw Lady Ogyu’s eyes brim with love for her husband. Had their love, based at first on mutual need, later become physical? Maybe it had. Sex between women was as natural as sex between men.

  “For a long time I thought we were safe. After his parents died, I was the only person who knew about him. Except for…” Terror reclaimed Lady Ogyu’s expression. For the first time she looked directly at Sano. “Please, you must stop my husband!”

  “Why?” Sano said, confused by her sudden change of mood. “Where is he?”

  “He’s gone to Mitake.”

  Sano recognized the name of the village where Reiko had gone to visit Minister Ogyu’s old nursemaid. “For what?”

  Lady Ogyu began to cry. “At first he thought that since she hasn’t told yet, she never will. But this morning he changed his mind. He said that as long as there’s someone who knows about him, we’ll always be in danger. So he went to find Kasane. I begged him not to go, but he said it was for the best.” Lady Ogyu whispered, “Kasane was his mother’s midwife.”

  A chill crept through Sano as realization penetrated his throbbing head. The midwife knew Minister Ogyu’s true sex. Minister Ogyu meant to eliminate her. Kasane was like a pebble in his shoe, whose existence he could no longer tolerate. Sano’s investigation had driven him to murder.

  “He hasn’t hurt anyone yet! But if he’s not stopped…” Lady Ogyu’s speech disintegrated into babble.

  If Minister Ogyu wasn’t stopped, Kasane’s blood would be on his hands even if Madam Usugumo’s and Lord Hosokawa’s daughters’ blood wasn’t.

  “Marume-san!” Sano called. “Get one of my troops up here to guard Lady Ogyu. Hurry! We have to go to Mitake at once.”

  As he ran out from under the roof, Sano prayed that Reiko wouldn’t be there when Minister Ogyu arrived.

  38

  SPECKS OF LIGHT pierced the darkness of the wicker trunk in which Reiko lay. Her muscles ached from being bent in the same position for so long. The ropes bit into her wrists and ankles. Her mouth hurt around the gag, which was soaked with saliva. She smelled the musty odor of the trunk, the salty-sweet metallic rawness of Kasane’s blood, and the sour pungency of her own urine. Her robes were wet and cold; she shivered. Afraid that her body, in the throes of its panic, would expel the child from her womb, Reiko tried to calm herself with meditation techniques learned during her martial arts lessons. But her heart refused to slow its frantic pounding. Her harsh, rapid breaths w
ere loud in the enclosed space. She forced herself not to strain against her bonds or try to scream. She must save her voice and strength for the time when—if—a chance to escape arose.

  She listened to the rapid gait of the horses ridden by Minister Ogyu and his men. The trunk rocked atop the horse on which they’d tied it. The motion thumped her cheek against the trunk’s coarsely woven bottom. Dogs barked. Rubble clattered under the horses’ hooves. A gong clanged. Oxcart wheels rattled in the distance. She was entering the city, but she heard no voices or footsteps. The population in the area must be so reduced that three men with a woman in a trunk could travel openly, unnoticed. The earthquake had granted free rein to evil.

  The procession stopped. Reiko heard thuds as the men dismounted and their feet hit the ground. This was the end of the journey. She tried to call for help, but she couldn’t force her voice past the gag. Faint squeals were all she produced. The trunk jerked as the men untied the ropes that secured it on the horse. Reiko felt herself lifted down. She writhed while the men carried the trunk. It rocked, then slanted as they tramped up stairs. Reiko could tell from the quality of the sound that they had brought her inside a building. No one would see her and come to her aid. Hopelessness brought tears to her eyes.

  A thud jarred her as the men set her down. Their footsteps were quiet on a padded surface. The light that pierced the wicker brightened. Hands fumbled with the trunk’s latch. The lid came up. Wedged inside the trunk, Reiko couldn’t move. She blinked in the sudden yellow glare of lanterns. Minister Ogyu loomed over her. He tore the gag out of her mouth.

  Reiko screamed. She screamed until her voice rasped, her throat was sore, and she was gasping for breath.

  “Scream all you want,” Minister Ogyu said. “There’s nobody to hear you except us.” He moved out of her view and said, “Take her out of there.”

  Men lifted her and dumped her on a tatami floor. Curled within the tight coils of ropes, lying on her side, Reiko counted five pairs of armor-clad legs standing around her. Minister Ogyu must have had the other men waiting here. Reiko’s heart sank lower. Even if she could untie herself, even if she had her dagger, she could never fight her way past all these men.