Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show

by Richard Wiley

  The others were beginning to see the workings of Lord Abe’s mind and, as if instructed to, all bent back down to take another look through the spy holes. The minstrels had moved from their table. The one with the chopsticks in his nose was dancing around the apprentice geisha, all of whom were laughing and covering their mouths.

  Lord Tokugawa sat back up and frowned. “All right,” he said, “let me see if I understand you correctly. The Americans hold one ridiculous idea and this philosopher you’ve discovered holds another. The American idea, which you have just now outlined, is ridiculous because it’s obvious beyond measure that men are not equal—all men, oddly enough, should be able to see that equally well—and the other idea is ridiculous since, precisely because of this inequality, a ruler has an obligation to look out for the welfare of his peasants and such. And you intend for these ideas to come into contact with each other and somehow explode. Am I right so far?”

  “Yes,” said Lord Abe, “but to argue the validity of the ideas is nowhere near the point I am trying to make…”

  For a moment he seemed about to say more, but instead turned to Manjiro again. “Young man, do you understand what I am coming to? You have read some of those books at least, and you have been in the American presence nearly as much as I, so perhaps you can examine our discussion with a neutral mind.”

  Manjiro knew he had brought this on himself, that had he not spoken once he would not be obliged to do so again, but he answered calmly. “I think the Americans are sincere in their ideas,” he said, “but even so I believe Lord Abe is now conducting an experiment of his own which is in two parts. The first consisted of observing Perry’s reaction when he invited such low-born men ashore. If he saw that Commodore Perry was insulted by the invitation he would understand that all this talk of equality among men was hollow. But if he was not insulted, as indeed, he wasn’t, then Lord Abe thought he might discover some new leverage with which to negotiate.”

  “Yes,” said Lord Tokugawa, “but what leverage? And how can we use it against them at this late date? The treaty is signed!”

  To Manjiro’s relief Lord Abe held up a hand, stopping his reply. He pointed at Ueno, his stark-faced aide. “What if we have to arrest these men while they are here?” asked Ueno.

  Lord Tokugawa scoffed, “These are singers we’re talking about, street musicians of the simplest kind, like chin-don-ya. Chin chin chin, bong bong bong. All they do is make noise. Men aren’t necessarily criminals, you know, just because they are low-born.”

  “Of course not,” said Lord Abe, “but put aside the improbability for a minute. What if they did commit a crime?”

  “Then we would inform Commodore Perry and go on from there,” said Keiki, irked that someone like Ueno had spoken before him. “And once confronted with the evidence he would agree to some apt punishment. It isn’t a difficult problem. There is no conflict where there is evidence and there is law.”

  “What if we had no evidence?” Lord Abe wanted to know.

  “Please,” said Lord Tokugawa. “What if, what if… How about this? What if we enclosed them in pickle jars? What if we kill them right now and say that they grew lonely for America and thrust those broken chopsticks all the way up their noses and into their brains?”

  “Then we would have nothing to bargain with,” said Ueno, “no living commoners, no pawns.”

  Lord Tokugawa looked at his son and then, briefly, down into one of the spy holes again. When he sat back up he said, “I want to thank you for your explanation, but I think I need to go home now. It’s no doubt the inflexibility of my mind that keeps me from understanding all of this. Perhaps if I sleep on it my brain will adjust.”

  “Wait, Father,” said Keiki, “I think there’s something moving in the center of this fog.”

  The remark was unexpected, and at its heart so rude that Lord Tokugawa, who was halfway to his feet, sat back down. He had been worried about Keiki of late, about his son’s ability to stand up to the real rulers of the world, men such as Lord Abe, and he didn’t want to miss a chance to hear him argue.

  Keiki was glaring at Ueno, but the aide simply said, “What do you mean by fog?”

  “By ‘fog,’ I mean ‘fog.’” said Keiki. “As a word it’s clear, it is only as a thing that it is not.”

  He thought that was cleverly phrased but Ueno only put his hands on the table, lightly touching his fingertips together. “How would you like me to be clear?” he asked.

  Because Keiki believed that the only thing clear thus far was the stupefying fact that Lord Abe had no idea what he would do with the musicians he had invited, he was surprised at the ease with which Ueno fell into the trap he had set. But at the same time he was disappointed. It was rare that he got to argue in front of his father and he found himself wanting more of a challenge.

  “We all know why Lord Abe extended his invitation,” he said. “He did so because he wanted to discover how the American Commodore would react. But the clarity I want is both simpler and more difficult. Since they are not about to commit a crime, what do you propose to do now?”

  Ueno’s thin lips moved up but his eyes weren’t smiling. “I have the words but I fear you’re unready to hear them,” he said.

  Keiki barked out a laugh. “I know I look unready for many things,” he said, “but if I look unready for words I’ve got to do something about my appearance.”

  “Very well,” said Ueno, “what if the crime they are not about to commit were high? A crime with an element of surprising heinousness to it?”

  Keiki took a drink from his saké cup. His father peered at him avidly, with the bright eyes of a hunting falcon, while Manjiro kept his own eyes closed, his mind awash with the sense of coming trouble.

  “Whether high or low, whether heinous or trivial, without evidence Commodore Perry would discount it,” said Keiki.

  “Of course he would!” shouted Lord Tokugawa. “What are you talking about?”

  “If the crime were high,” Ueno continued, “if the crime were serious enough, then forget about the American Commodore. If the crime were high our own laws, Japanese laws, would dictate that the perpetrators be killed or put in jail for a very long time.”

  Keiki laughed again though he didn’t want to. “So that’s your plan? To simply make up some crime, imprison them, and then tell the Americans an outright lie?”

  “Why not?” asked Lord Abe, looking straight at Lord Tokugawa. “If we did that, if we were arbitrary, even capricious and clumsy in our accusations, then our very bumbling would trigger Perry’s desire to get them back. He would deal with a real crime fairly, you are right about that, but if he believed the charges were unfair, then his inborn sense of that unfairness will override everything else. The American idea oí equality, don’t you see, provides for no other outcome.”

  The room was so still that they could hear the faint sounds of singing from the room below. Lord Tokugawa’s mouth was open, while Manjiro’s mind was awash with a terrible guilt. He had brought this on himself! He was to blame for everything and must do something to make it right. But what?

  “This is so shameful!” whispered Keiki. “These men will have done nothing, but you are suggesting that we, Japan’s rulers, accuse them anyway? We will have broken the laws of behavior, violated the Bushido… We won’t have acted like lords.”

  That was the crux of the matter for Manjiro, too, for beyond all of his ambition, beyond, even, his growing love for Tsune, he had a deeply held belief in Japanese honor and could never be a party to such a plan. But Lord Abe simply said, “Come now, the Bushido isn’t sullied by such an action because the Bushido doesn’t come into play with foreigners. And this idea doesn’t come from us anyway, but from those portentous paragraphs that some barbarian thinker wrote three hundred years ago. That’s the beauty of it, don’t you see? We’ll poison them with their own ideas, drown them in water from their own murky well.”

  There were more questions that might have been asked but everyone
remained quiet, waiting for Lord Tokugawa, whose own deep silence these last few minutes had given him the floor. “Help me stand,” he told Keiki. “As I get older I find it difficult to remain sitting for so long. In that, I guess, I am like the American Commodore.”

  Keiki went around behind his father, but before he got there, Lord Tokugawa had stood alone. He was facing Lord Abe, his complexion as ashen as Manjiro’s. “For years I have advocated a buildup of our defenses,” he said, “When I was military advisor to the government I always argued for it. Because of the weakness of the Shogunate, I have even gone along with our stupid policy of trying to put the Americans off with schemes and excuses, of trying to buy more time with the ridiculous concept of ‘perpetual negotiations.’ But, my dear Lord Abe, as far as schemes go, does it not shame you to have dug so deeply only to come up with this one?”

  Lord Abe was stung but he held his tongue, rage trapped and growing within his reddening face. Yet when Lord Tokugawa stepped toward the door and Keiki opened it for him, everyone, including Lord Abe, scrambled to follow him down to the building’s first floor. There were geisha down there, waiting with food and musical instruments. They had expected that once the meeting was over the lords would join the foreigners, but Lord Tokugawa hurried past them, not speaking, not even pausing when he got to the front door.

  The night was mild, the rain of the last few days gone west. But when Lord Tokugawa and Keiki got into their palanquins and departed, without so much as a farewell bow, there was so much brooding in the geisha house doorway that Lord Abe had to speak twice before Manjiro finally understood that the words were directed at him.

  “Do you know the Shoguns guesthouses,” he asked, “those older ones further down the Sumida River, the ones not in use anymore?”

  “Yessir,” whispered Manjiro.

  “Then take these Americans there. Make them comfortable, feed them and give them saké if they want it, but otherwise say nothing.”

  Manjiro could not bring himself to answer, so outraged was he by Lord Abe’s plan, his behavior—by how severely his greatness was diminished. But Lord Abe was stung by far more lofty slights than Manjiro’s and didn’t notice. He only turned, barked a fiery order at the tight-lipped Ueno, and frightened the waiting geisha down the hall.

  Thus it was that everyone involved, whether traveling across Edo or standing numbly at that open doorway, was cold-eyed or determined or lost or emphatic, burning with one kind of rage or another.

  Everyone, that is, but the two American minstrels, who continued to play like bear cubs, singing and dancing in their cell.

  16.

  Rumors

  DURING THOSE TRYING DAYS even ordinary rumors could spread across Edo more swiftly than fire among its wooden buildings, but the rumor of the rift between Lord Abe and Lord Tokugawa, and the subsequent disappearance of the American musicians, was a seven-headed monster with each head talking in fine full voice. On his way to the palace with his father the next morning Einosuke heard it several times. He was told that the Americans had run from a geisha house and were hiding in the entertainment district; that they were escapees from a harsh America and seeking political asylum; and that they were already dead, their heads spiked on lantern tops, planted at the front of that circular American train. Merchants all over Edo heard they were loose and killing merchants; palanquin bearers, that they were small of frame and short, dressed in women’s clothing and murdering palanquin bearers; and samurai, that they were well-trained warriors.

  Closer to the seat of government, inside the chambers of the Great Council, in the Edo offices of the Imperial Chamberlain, and in the living quarters of the Shogun himself, the location of the missing Americans was less on people’s minds than the situation that had developed between the two great lords. In those places one story had it that Lord Tokugawa had laughed in Lord Abe’s face, another that he had refused to hear Lord Abe out at all, and a third that Lord Abe’s mean-spirited aide would soon fight a duel with Keiki, Lord Tokugawa’s unready son and heir. Oh gossip, how it spreads across the world, irrespective of customs or cultures!

  Lord Okubo and Einosuke searched for Manjiro in the hallways and antechambers of the Great Council, for they knew he had been present at the geisha house meeting everyone was talking about and would be able to tell them what had truly taken place. But though they looked everywhere for him, they could not find Manjiro. He wasn’t with the Dutch-speaking interpreters in the corner, and he wasn’t with those junior aides who stood outside of Lord Abe’s inner chamber door. Lord Okubo thought he might find Manjiro in the commissary, though it seemed too early for lunch, and Einosuke searched the castle grounds, through its gardens and around its ponds. Both men still felt the renewed family bonding that Keiko’s dance recital had brought them, and very much needed Manjiro.

  It was unusual for Lord Okubo to grow anxious at rumors, but when he met Einosuke again, later, he put a hand on his eldest son’s shoulder. They sat down on a couple of cushions in a side hallway, from which they could see that the door to Lord Abe’s private chambers remained closed, that no one left or entered except the dislikable Ueno.

  “I’m going to stop him, ask after Manjiro when next he comes out,” Einosuke announced, but when Ueno did come out again, more than half an hour later, he was moving so fast that stopping him became an impossibility. Aides and servants and even some lords had to leap out of his way. Lord Okubo urged Einosuke on, telling him to catch up in a hurry, and soon Einosuke was chasing Ueno down the hall.

  For his part Lord Okubo got up and walked along the short hallway, approaching Lord Abe’s door, where Lord Abe’s secretary, an even older man than Lord Okubo, sat on a high dais and admitted no one, whether lord or petitioner, without an appointment. But when he saw Lord Okubo he straightened up and bowed. “A most unhappy morning, sir,” he said. “Please, go right inside.”

  Lord Okubo looked around the anteroom, but there was no one present to witness the man’s unusually accommodating behavior.

  The first room of Lord Abe’s inner chamber was small. There were two rooms past it, neither of which Lord Okubo had ever been in before, but every time he saw this first room he got the feeling that it was too plain, not befitting the leader of the Great Council. The tatami hadn’t been changed since before Lord Okubo’s last visit to Edo, and the shoji on the windows, which overlooked the castle’s prettiest garden, was stained in places and had numerous holes.

  Lord Abe was not present in this outer room so Lord Okubo opened the shoji and looked down at the garden. Now that the rain had stopped it was possible to see spring’s delicate approach, if not in the buds on the cherry trees just yet, at least in the light step people used when walking, and the beginning color of the crocuses. All seemed peaceful and quiet. He could even see the orange flash of a carp’s back on the surface of the nearest pond.

  “I am glad you were able to come so quickly,” Lord Abe said behind him. “That, at least, is a good sign. Maybe we can stop it all right now and say that it never truly began.”

  Mystified, Lord Okubo turned around. He had not been summoned, he had only stopped in on his own, but when he saw how pale the great lord was, how his hands shook and his lips trembled, he said, “Sir? Is something the matter? Is there someone I should call?”

  He meant that ancient secretary, or perhaps the castle physician, but when Lord Abe heard him he let out a bitter laugh, regaining some of his control. He stepped around Lord Okubo so that he was closest to the open window. “Is that your eldest son down there with Ueno?” he asked, pointing out. “Did he come with you today? I had suspected he might not, that he might be in league with the despicable Man-jiro.”

  No one had been down there a moment earlier, but indeed, Einosuke was now standing at the edge of the pond, head bowed toward Ueno, who was throwing his hands about and berating him so loudly that the two lords, though they could not deduce their meaning, could hear the sense of insult in the words.

  “In league, s
ir?” asked Lord Okubo, “Einosuke ‘in league’ with Manjiro?” He could not bring himself to believe that he had actually heard the word “despicable.”

  Lord Abe turned away from the window and then back toward it and then toward Lord Okubo. He was perplexed, unsure whether to believe or disbelieve what seemed to be Lord Okubo’s ignorance of what Manjiro had done, when suddenly a cloud came over Lord Okubo’s face, forcing his eyes closed. It stopped him for such a long moment that when he once again opened his eyes he felt dizzy, and touched Lord Abe’s arm with such clumsy disorder that it was the great lord, not Lord Okubo, who rushed to the door of his office for help.

  When Lord Abe came back Lord Okubo said, “These rumors…” but he had to stop again, leaning against the windowsill. He drank some of the tea Lord Abe had brought him and put the cup down. “Where is Manjiro?” he asked. “And what do you think he has done?”

  He turned to look into the garden again, but there was no longer anyone there, and the instant Lord Abe said, “Your son…” the doors flew open and in rushed Ueno and Einosuke, agitated and shouting at each other.

  “In this man’s family treachery runs deep,” Ueno began, but Lord Abe told him to shut up and Lord Okubo shoved Ueno aside to look at Einosuke. “We have a problem,” he said. “It seems your brother has kidnapped the American musicians in a misguided attempt to keep them from harm.”

  His tone was instructive, as was his touch down low on Einosuke’s hand, and when Einosuke said, “Yes Father, I know,” his voice, whatever it might have been earlier, was once again normal.

  When Ueno tried to speak Lord Abe once more silenced him, and when Einosuke and his father left his chambers Lord Abe not only kept Ueno from sending for the palace soldiers, but followed them into the long outer hallway, to stand in silence, bowing and watching them go.

  Later Einosuke would remember Lord Abe’s bow and blame it for the sense he had during much of the rest of the day that things might not be so bad.