The Fire Kimono

by Laura Joh Rowland

  They would have numbered among hordes of other new masterless samurai. The fire had ravaged military-class residences inside the Tokiwabashi and Kajibashi gates. Many Tokugawa vassals who’d had their own retainers had died or lost everything, leaving the retainers homeless and impoverished.

  “All those new ronin caused trouble,” Sano remembered. “They banded together in gangs that marauded through the areas that hadn’t burned. They looted shops and squatted in abandoned houses.”

  Many other survivors had done the same. The fire had virtually wiped out Edo’s food supply as well as its housing and created a mass famine. Thousands of people who hadn’t been killed by the fire had died of starvation.

  “Doi made the best of a bad deal,” said Toda. “He volunteered his services to the shogun’s army, which was struggling to mount a relief effort. He led a brigade that took food to the people. He ferried rice bales across the river, cooked stew with his own hands, and fought off gangs that tried to steal the food. He became a sort of hero.”

  The fire had created many heroes who’d risen to the challenge of helping their fellow man. That was the bright side of a disaster. But although Sano could admire Doi, he wondered if the man’s efforts had been motivated by something besides valor, and there was a gap in the story.

  “Do you have any information about what Doi did during the fire?” Sano asked. “Or about his relationship with Tadatoshi?”

  “No.” Toda watched the door while people came and went. “During the fire and for quite a while afterward, the metsuke wasn’t functioning as usual. Neither was the rest of the government. There was utter chaos. And before the fire, we didn’t bother watching Doi.”

  “He was pretty much a nobody,” Sano supposed.

  Toda nodded. “But after the fire, his accomplishments caught the eye of Lord Matsudaira’s father, who took him in. Doi went to work at the Matsudaira provincial estate, as a guard captain. Before he was thirty, he was manager of the estate. Later he came back to Edo and joined the current Lord Matsudaira’s inner circle of command.”

  “Did he ever marry?” Sano asked, thinking of his mother’s broken engagement with Doi.

  “Yes. His wife is a cousin of Lord Matsudaira’s.”

  She’d been a much better match than Sano’s mother. Her connection with Lord Matsudaira had helped Doi further his ambitions. It looked as though Doi had broken the engagement because he’d wanted a more socially advantageous marriage.

  “Any children?” Sano asked.

  “Two sons and a daughter. The sons are both high-ranking officers in Lord Matsudaira’s army. The daughter married into the rich and powerful Niu daimyo clan. Doi has twelve grandchildren, all slated for great things.”

  Doi couldn’t complain about how his life had turned out. Sano’s theory that Doi had accused his mother because he had a grudge against her was losing ground fast.

  “Doi had his latest triumph in the war against the former chamberlain, Yanagisawa,” Toda said. “His regiment led the Matsudaira army in number of enemy troops killed.”

  His career seemed one of the most laudable that Sano had ever heard of, his reputation spotless. “Hasn’t Doi ever been in trouble?”

  “Not to our knowledge. He doesn’t gamble, whore, or drink too much. We’ve never smelled a whiff of corruption.” Toda smiled, rueful yet amused by Sano’s disappointment. “I’m sorry. It seems I’ve put you right back where you started.”

  With only one visible reason for Doi’s accusation—the man’s allegiance to Lord Matsudaira. “Well, I don’t intend to stay there,” Sano said. “I’m going to do my own checking into Doi.”

  The metsuke didn’t know everything, and Toda had admitted that the Great Fire had temporarily put them out of business. Their lapse had created a chance for people to do as they pleased, unobserved. Sano meant to shine a light into that dark havoc in which Tadatoshi had met his death. Sano was certain he would see Doi there with a hand in the murder.

  “Good luck,” Toda said.

  Suddenly he tensed. Sano looked at four men who’d just walked in the door. They were ronin, their faces and clothes worn rough by hardship. Toda put his fingers to his lips and whistled. The loud, shrill noise vibrated the steamy air, echoed off the walls. The ronin froze. Nine bathers erupted from the tub. In a tumult of dripping, naked bodies, they assaulted the ronin, who didn’t even have time to draw their swords. Sano, his comrades, and the other bathers watched in amazement as fists flew, limbs thrashed, and bodies thudded. In a mere instant the four rebels were wrestled into submission.

  “Good work,” Sano said.

  Toda smiled, watching his colleagues march the rebels out the door. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  A thought nudged Sano. “Have you heard any news about Yanagisawa?”

  “He’s still wasting away on Hachijo Island, according to reports from the officials.” Interest animated the smooth, opaque surface of Toda’s eyes. “Why do you ask?”

  Sano felt his suspicions dwindle. If there was any cause for them, Toda of all people should know. “Just curious.”

  When Sano returned to his estate, he sought out Hana, his mother’s maid. He tracked her to the building that housed the kitchen, where the meals for his family, retainers, and servants were prepared. Inside, the cooks labored amid a din of chopping, sizzling, voices, and banging. Hana was alone in the courtyard where storehouses held coal, rice, and other supplies. She stood by a frame with a horizontal crossbar. From the bar hung a dead duck, suspended from a rope tied around its legs. Blood trickled from the duck’s cut neck into a pot on the ground.

  “What are you doing?” Sano asked.

  “Making duck stew,” Hana said, “for your mother. To restore her strength.”

  The Buddhist religion outlawed killing animals and eating meat, but made an exception for medical reasons. Hana must have sent for the duck from Edo’s wild-game market.

  “How is my mother?” Sano asked.

  “She’s asleep,” Hana said. “I hope you aren’t going to bother her with more questions. She needs rest.”

  “I won’t bother her,” Sano said. At least not yet. “It’s you I want to talk to.”

  “All right.” Hana spoke in the same irritated but indulgent manner as when Sano had pestered her during his childhood. The last drips of blood fell from the duck. She untied it. Holding it by the legs, she plunged it into a pot of water that boiled on a hearth.

  “How long have you been my mother’s maid?” Sano asked.

  “I was with her when you were little.” Hana swirled the duck in the boiling water. “Don’t you remember?”

  “Of course.” Sano waved away the steam, which smelled of wet feathers. But he knew as little about Hana’s past as his mother’s. Hana had always been there, taken for granted; he’d never imagined her as a person with a life apart from his. “Were you with her before she married my father?”

  “Yes.” Hana’s resigned, glum air said she’d expected an interrogation along these lines. She pulled the duck out of the pot. It was naked, the feathers scalded off, bits of down clinging to its dimpled pink skin. “Since she was a child.”

  Sano asked the questions that had been foremost in his mind all day: “Why did she marry my father? Why didn’t she marry Colonel Doi?”

  Hana rinsed the duck in cold water. She shook her head.

  “Do you mean you don’t know? Or you just won’t tell me?”

  “It’s not my place,” Hana said, thumping the duck onto a chopping board.

  Sano was hurt and frustrated by her and his mother’s insistence on keeping him in the dark. “Not even to save her life? Any information about that time could help me prove that she didn’t kill Tadatoshi and find out who did.”

  “Her broken engagement had nothing to do with the murder,” Hana said stubbornly as she took up a sharp knife. “Neither did her marriage to your father.”

  “Let me be the judge of that.”

  Hana clamped
her mouth so tightly shut that it looked like a walnut, wrinkled around the slit, tough to crack.

  “Maybe you don’t understand how much trouble my mother is in,” Sano said. “If I can’t prove she’s innocent, she’ll be executed.”

  “I do understand.” The fear in Hana’s eyes said she did.

  “She needs your help.”

  Hana expertly slit the duck’s belly. “Has she ever told you how we met?” Sano shook his head. “My parents were servants to a family in town. They died when I was ten. I became a beggar. One day I was outside a food-stall in town, eating scraps that people had dropped on the dirt. Along came some rich samurai girls in palanquins. They laughed at me.” Hana plunged her hands into the duck and tore out glistening, pungent red entrails.

  “One of the girls got out of her palanquin. It was your mother. She ordered her attendants to buy me a bowl of noodles. She kept me company while I ate, and she asked me about myself. When she found out I was an orphan, she took me home with her. Her parents said I was dirty and disgusting, but she insisted on keeping me. They finally gave in. She saved my life.”

  Sano was surprised as well as moved by this tale, more astonished by his mother’s backbone than by her compassion. He’d never known her to stand up for anything. He began to realize where he’d gotten his own tendency to champion the underdog. But what had changed her? Was it only her marriage to his father, who’d been a strict, traditional, authoritative husband?

  “Now I’ll do anything to save her life,” Hana said with passionate conviction.

  “Anything but tell the whole truth,” Sano observed.

  “Anything that will help her. Not telling old tales that won’t do her any good.”

  “Let’s try another question,” Sano said. “Were you with my mother when she was a lady-in-waiting at Tadatoshi’s house?”

  “Yes.” Hana flung intestines into a bucket, saved the deep red liver and heart.

  “Then you knew the people there.”

  “I was just a maid.”

  Servants knew their superiors better than most other folks did, and Hana was a shrewd observer. As a child Sano had been amazed at how she’d always known everything that went on in their neighborhood. “Who could have kidnapped Tadatoshi and killed him?”

  “Not your mother. I swear.”

  “I agree, but our opinion isn’t good enough. Can you remember what happened in that estate the day Tadatoshi disappeared?”

  “The last time I saw him was the day the Great Fire started. We’d all heard about the fire, and his father decided we should go across the river. Everyone was rushing to get ready. But not Tadatoshi. He just hung around.

  “Your mother and I packed some things to take with us. We didn’t know how long we would be gone. It was hard to decide what to bring and squeeze it into small bundles that we could carry.” As she washed the gutted duck, Hana seemed to get lost in the past. “That was when we heard that Tadatoshi was missing. His sister told us.” Hana’s memory drifted forward. “Oigimi was burned very badly in the fire. She almost died.”

  “I gathered that when I met her today,” Sano said. “She still has scars.”

  “I heard she never married,” Hana said. “She’s had a hard, lonely life. But when she was young, she was a very pretty girl. Still, she’s lucky to be alive at all. Anyway, her father said everyone had to look for Tadatoshi. Your mother and I helped search the estate. When nobody found him there, his father sent us all outside to look. If we had to scour the whole city, then so be it—we weren’t leaving without his son.” Hana’s expression turned grim. “We never left. Everyone from his estate was trapped by the fire, inside the city. Almost everyone died, all for the sake of one boy.”

  His household might have escaped the fire had Tadatoshi not disappeared. If he’d been kidnapped, not gone off voluntarily, those deaths weren’t his fault. But Sano wondered if they were the motive for Tadatoshi’s murder.

  “There were crowds in the streets, running from the fire,” Hana said. “Your mother and I got separated from the other people from the estate, but we managed to stay together. After the fire, we went back to the estate. It had burned down. But we found your mother’s parents and moved in with them. Their house was all right. They lived in Asakusa, which was countryside far away from town back then.”

  Here was another fact about the grandparents Sano had never known. “When I was young, were they still alive?”

  “Your grandfather died when you were nine. Your grandmother a few years later.”

  Sano suddenly remembered two occasions somewhere around those times, when he’d found his mother weeping. She’d refused to say why. Now he realized that she must have heard about her parents’ deaths. “Why didn’t I ever meet them? Why did she pretend they’d died before I was born?”

  “That’s not for me to say. It has nothing to do with the murder. Forget it.” Impatient, Hana flung the duck on the chopping board. “What I’m trying to tell you is that your mother didn’t have the chance to kidnap or kill that boy.” She grasped Sano’s hand. He had another sudden memory from his childhood, of teasing a horse and Hana snatching his hand away before he could be bitten. “I was with her the whole time.”

  Her gaze held Sano’s, bright and fierce and unblinking. Sano didn’t have to wonder if Hana had told the whole truth; he knew she hadn’t. He knew she was doing it for the noblest motive, to protect his mother … or was she?

  Sano looked down at her hand, locked around his. There was blood from the duck under her fingernails. Maybe she knew, for the best reason of all, that his mother hadn’t killed Tadatoshi. The idea seemed ludicrous, yet not beyond possibility.

  For now Sano said, “How well did you know Colonel Doi?”

  Hana paused before replying. Her eyes gleamed and she smiled, as if at a sudden recollection, or inspiration. “Well enough to know he didn’t get along with his master.”

  It must have been obvious to her that Sano was fishing for that answer, and he couldn’t complain because she’d taken the bait suspiciously fast. “What gave you that idea?”

  “I overheard Doi and Tadatoshi arguing,” Hana said.

  “When was this?”

  “A few days before the fire.” Hana picked up a cleaver.

  “About what?” Sano asked.

  “I don’t know,” Hana said. “I came in at the end. But I heard Doi say, ‘If you ever do that again, I’ll kill you.’”

  Here at last was evidence against Doi. Not that Sano wasn’t pleased, but he said, “Are you sure that’s what you heard?”

  Hana began to chop. Whack followed expert whack. Apart came the duck’s carcass. “I’m sure.”

  Sano eyed Hana quizzically. “You remember a snatch of conversation from forty-three years ago.”

  “A samurai threatening to kill his master isn’t something you see every day,” Hana said. “It stuck in my mind.”

  “How convenient that it should pop up now.”

  “Well, it did,” Hana insisted. “That’s what Doi said. And I’ll swear to it in front of the shogun.” She laid down her cleaver beside the neatly dismembered duck.

  Hirata entered the kitchen compound and called, “Sano-san, the shogun is here to see you.”

  “The shogun?” Sano was surprised, not just because Hana’s mention of the shogun had coincided with his arrival. “Here?” The shogun rarely came to visit. Sano couldn’t remember the last time. “What for?”

  “He didn’t say, but we’d better not keep him waiting.”

  The shogun sat on the dais in the reception room, with Yoritomo. Servants fanned up fires in charcoal braziers and positioned lacquer screens to shield him from cold drafts. Sano knelt on the floor and bowed, relegated to the subordinate position in his own house. Hirata followed suit. “Welcome, Your Excellency,” Sano said.

  “Greetings,” the shogun said, as casually as if he visited every day.

  Yoritomo, a frequent visitor, looked uncomfortable, his handsome face te
nse. He murmured a greeting.

  “May I offer you some refreshments?” Sano said.

  Refreshments were politely refused, offered again, and accepted. Servants laid out enough food for a banquet. As everyone sipped tea and the shogun and Yoritomo picked at sashimi, cakes, and dumplings, Sano said, “May I ask what brings you here, Your Excellency?”

  “I wanted to talk to you. Away from my cousin.” The shogun glanced around nervously, as if Lord Matsudaira might be lurking nearby.

  Sano was glad not to have Lord Matsudaira present, but also curious. “May I ask why?”

  The shogun knitted his brow. “I know my cousin wants what’s best for me. But whenever he’s around, things become difficult and troublesome. Have you noticed?”

  “I may have,” Sano said, trying not to look at Hirata.

  “He has the greatest, ahh, respect and affection for me, but sometimes I feel as if he’s—” The shogun’s tongue worked inside his mouth, as if tasting unpleasant words. “As if he’s mocking me. Do you think so, too?”

  Here was Sano’s chance to repay Lord Matsudaira for all the times Lord Matsudaira had maligned Sano to the shogun. Sano felt sorely tempted, but prudence forestalled him. If the shogun found out that Lord Matsudaira wanted to take over the regime, Sano’s own role in the power struggle might become exposed. And the shogun might forgive Lord Matsudaira, his blood kin, but never Sano the outsider, the upstart.

  “Perhaps Lord Matsudaira has so much on his mind that he’s not aware of what impression he’s creating,” Sano said.

  This evasion quelled the shogun’s fears. “Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I’m, ahh, too sensitive.”

  Sano heard Yoritomo let out his breath. Hirata sat silent, stoic and watchful.

  “But at any rate, I came to ask you what, ahh, progress you’ve made in your investigation,” the shogun said. “And I’d just as soon my cousin didn’t join us.”

  So would Sano. “I’ve interviewed Tadatoshi’s mother and sister. They don’t believe my mother killed him. In fact, they gave her a good character reference.” The shogun wouldn’t notice that the word of two women was weak compared to Colonel Doi’s without Lord Matsudaira to point it out. “They also identified someone who wanted Tadatoshi dead.” As he related their story about their relative wanting to advance his son up the line in the succession, Sano was glad that Lord Matsudaira wasn’t there to harp on the fact that the man was conveniently dead for Sano to frame.