Kiku's Prayer: A Novel

by Shusaku Endo

  Ah, Mount Shiba, Mount Shiba!

  Today it is a vale of tears.

  But in coming days

  It will be the path to deliverance.

  The voices of the Urakami women singing the hymn were audible in the house where Kiku and Okane lived.

  “That is so sad!” Even Okane was deeply moved with sympathy. “Here it is almost New Year’s, and those women will be spending a lonely holiday. Their husbands who’ve been taken so far away won’t have a New Year’s Day or anything, will they?”

  As Kiku listened to the singing of the hymn from the chapel, she thought of Seikichi.

  Again next spring,

  The same flowers will open their buds….

  Would Seikichi be coming back next spring?

  Neither Laucaigne nor Petitjean was able to obtain any information that would have answered her question. Precisely because they were foreigners, the government office in Nagasaki remained tight-lipped and would tell them nothing.

  “Why don’t you work here for a while? Some very important men from the government office come here for entertainment.” Kiku still had fresh memories of what the madam of the Yamazaki Teahouse had said to her. “You could get to know them.”

  Despite the madam’s invitation, Kiku had returned to the Ōura Church. When all was said and done, she felt an obligation to Petitjean and Laucaigne.

  Even though the holiday was still a month away, the streets were lined with stalls selling New Year’s decorations such as ropes made of rice straw, pine branches to decorate doorways, small pine trees with roots attached, bitter oranges, and persimmons, and the calls of the hawkers echoed through every neighborhood. There were even some houses where the families got a head-start on pounding rice for mochi, their mallets hammering away.

  On the first day of the twelfth month, Father Laucaigne returned to the church, his face twisted with anger. At the doorway he shouted for Father Petitjean and the others and began screaming something in French.

  After hearing Laucaigne’s news, Father Petitjean raced into Nagasaki with an alarmed expression on his face.

  “Padre, what has happened?” Okane asked in surprise.

  Twisting up his sallow face, Laucaigne replied, “Another seven hundred Kirishitans are being arrested! They’ve been ordered to assemble at the Tateyama Bureau on the third.”

  “Seven hundred!”

  “Yes.”

  “Then, women and children too?”

  “Women and children … yes, them too.” Father Laucaigne pointed to several boats moored in Nagasaki Bay. “I suspect the government has prepared those ships to carry these seven hundred away,” he muttered in a voice that was more a moan.

  When Kiku heard these words, her mind was made up.

  I can’t help Seikichi if I stay here.

  If she wanted to help Seikichi, she’d have to go to Maruyama. There was no option other than to accept the invitation from the madam of the Yamazaki Teahouse. Kiku was convinced of it. That very evening, she left the church…. Following urgent pleas from the missionaries, the French consul Dury, the American consul Mangum, and the British consul Enslie went to the prefectural office and requested an audience with Governor Nomura Sōshichi. This time their protest was not based on religious grounds; rather, they argued on humanitarian grounds that it was unconscionable to exile so many men and women.

  Nomura responded that he was acting on orders from the Grand Council of State that could not be disobeyed.

  “These are Japanese internal affairs,” Nomura repeated the customary cliché through his translator, Hondō Shuntarō, who had returned to Nagasaki after a stint in Tokyo. Shuntarō had undertaken further study of French in Yokohama and now held a position with the Foreign Affairs Ministry. “I beg you not to interfere in internal matters.”

  The consuls took turns registering objections, but Governor Nomura sat with his eyes closed, saying nothing.

  “The Japanese government has already sent 113 Christians to Chōshū and Iwami.” Unable to maintain his composure, U.S. Consul Mangum inquired, “Do you intend to exile similar numbers again this time?”

  Finally Nomura opened his eyes and asked Shuntarō to translate: “This time we’ll be banishing six times that number. To be specific, the number is 729. But there are still three thousand Kirishitans in Urakami.”

  “And is it your ultimate intention to exile those three thousand as well?”

  “I assume that so long as they continue to believe in a religion that is banned under the laws of the country, our government will adopt stern measures against them.”

  Again Nomura closed his eyes and sat motionless. This stone statue of a man had no further interest in dealing with the complaints of these foreign diplomats.

  Governor Nomura could take such a cold, obstinate stance not merely because he detested the interference of foreign powers in domestic matters but also because the Meiji government had decided that their policy toward religion would hinge on a revitalization of Shinto and its shrines in an effort to establish a system that unified church and state under the emperor. To recognize the Kirishitans would violate that policy. This approach toward the foreign religion differed markedly from that of the Tokugawa shogunate, though the upshot in both cases was the banning of Christianity.

  On the fourth day of the twelfth month, initially only the males among the 729 were loaded onto waiting ships. On the fifth, the families of those men who had been exiled the previous year were lodged at the Nishi Bureau, and that evening they were put onto ships.

  On the seventh and the eighth, all the Kirishitans from Nakano, Satogō, Motohara, and Ieno were herded together in Togitsu, Omotaka in Nishi Sonogi District, and in Nagasaki.

  It was snowing that day in Nagasaki. The women, with loads on their backs and children at their sides, were brought to the homes of the village heads in the outlying regions and then forced to walk from there to Nagasaki through the snow, the yellow and white scarves on their heads standing out like signal flags. The houses they left behind were strewn with dishes and other possessions, as though in the aftermath of utter destruction. A cow abandoned by its master lowed mournfully in the snow.

  They thought perhaps they would never see their village again. In later years they referred to this banishment as “The Journey.” A journey. A journey to eternity. A journey to Paradise. That’s what their hymn described:

  Let us go, let us go,

  Let us go to the Temple of Paraíso!

  And this was that Journey, they thought.

  Father Villion, one of the missionaries laboring at the Ōura Church at the time, records this dreadful scene in his journal of the twelfth month. He writes in part:

  7th. Following yesterday’s official orders, it appears that the women and children were put into ships in the middle of the night. We saw several barges, their lamps aflicker, plying the harbor. We’re told the rest of them will be summoned today and put onto the ships.

  At four in the afternoon, the barges slowly traversed the harbor and sidled up to the steamship that was moored in the distance. Nearly fifty women sat in the center of each barge, with baggage stacked around them, and children crouched between. There were one or two officers in each barge.

  Every one of the Kirishitans was gazing up toward our church here in Ōura. Some made the sign of the cross. Each of the women, in a public declaration of her faith, wore the white veil that had covered her head when she was baptized.

  What a scene!

  Three of the barges pulled alongside a large ship flying the flag of the Satsuma domain while the remaining barges moved up to other ships. We watched all this dumbfounded. We had been left behind, unable to share the joy of confinement with them.

  8th. Officers wearing two swords broke into the church. They made as if to draw their swords, but after talking together, perhaps anxious that there would be trouble for them if they wounded any foreigners, they exchanged glances with one another and departed.

  At seven
o’clock, the first steamship weighed anchor and left the harbor.

  We understand that more than two thousand Kirishitans are aboard those ships. At eight, the large Satsuma ship set off, and at two in the afternoon, the steamship from the Chikuzen domain also departed.

  This was Father Villion’s detailed description of the scene as every Kirishitan from Urakami was transported far from Nagasaki Bay.

  These believers were in fact divided into groups and taken to the Tōhoku region in the north, to Kyushu, to Shikoku, and to the Hokuriku region. The exiled were sent to Kōchi, Takamatsu Matsue, Okayama, Nagoya, Tsu, Himeji, Hiroshima, Kagoshima, Kanazawa, Matsuyama, Wakayama, Kōriyama, Daishōji, Fukuoka, Tottori, Tokushima, Tsuwano, and Fukuyama.

  On the seventeenth, Father Villion was finally able to visit Nakano and Ieno, which were now utterly deserted.

  From the far side of the harbor I climbed the hill, then following along the edge of the basin I went down the slope and arrived in Ippongi. All around me was devastation, followed by even more devastation.

  The houses were empty, their doors beaten down, with shards of bowls and plates scattered about. Not a single soul remained. I have no words to describe the appearance of this village tucked away in the mountains, its houses arranged in a ring like a circular theater stage. Every house has its doors thrown open, and not a single tatami mat is left on the floors. All that reaches my eyes is wreckage and cold death and absolute silence.

  All that reaches my eyes is wreckage and cold death and silence.

  The people who had lived here until the previous day now suffered aboard wave-tossed ships. Some muttered prayers; some threw up; children wept; and their mothers scolded them. This was the beginning of their “Journey.”

  Maruyama was lively and frenzied before New Year’s Eve. In every house, preparations were made for the pounding of the ceremonial rice and the arrival of the male patrons.

  As the mallets began to pound energetically in the mortars that had been placed in the spacious earthen entryways, the middle-aged madams, the geisha, and their male assistants commenced a spirited plucking of samisens in time to the mallets and chanted:

  Let’s celebrate! How festive!

  We pine for the strong young men

  Who come as the young pines bud.

  It was the custom in Nagasaki to take the last rice pounded in the mortar, form it into a ball, and affix it to the central pillar of the house. They called this “pillar mochi,” and on the fifteenth of the first month it was heated and eaten. Just as they finished up the rice pounding, they would also amuse themselves by scrambling to smear their faces with soot from the iron kettle. When the laughter died down, débutante geisha, accompanied by men who carried their samisens and displayed large placards with the women’s names, would make the rounds of each house to convey their New Year greetings.

  The morning of New Year’s Day arrived after these various events had been held. The streets of Maruyama, which normally were bustling with activity, fell eerily silent during the morning hours, but the silence was broken on many streets in the afternoon by the whirring of shuttlecock rackets, and before long, Daikoku performers, whose dances portended good fortune, as well as dancing monkeys and pipers playing the double-reed charamela, began circulating from door to door.

  “Kiku.” The madam of the Yamazaki Teahouse said consolingly to Kiku, who had started feverishly wiping down the kitchen on the second day of the New Year, “You don’t need to work that hard from first thing in the morning. It won’t be long before we’ll be so busy our eyes will swim. You’ve got to rest up during this three-day holiday.” Then suddenly she lowered her voice and said, “I want to tell you something I happened to hear. Those Kirishitans who were exiled were divided up and sent all the way from Ōshū in the north to as far south as Shikoku and Hokuriku.”

  “Who did you hear that from?”

  “Our geisha Oyō heard it and told me about it. She has a customer from a long time back, named Lord Hondō. He’s an official with the Foreign Ministry now and has ended up back here in Nagasaki. He’s the one who told her.”

  “Ma’am?” Kiku abruptly lifted her face. “Could you ask that Lord Hondō if he would bring Seikichi back from Tsuwano?”

  The unexpected request put the madam in an awkward position. “Kiku, you can’t be in such a hurry. There’s such a thing as a right time for everything. Once they’ve had the Nanakusa celebration2 and eaten their herb porridge, Lord Hondō and many other influential officials will start flocking in here. I’ll make your request when they’re in a grand mood,” she said with mild reproof.

  If you’re off to have fun,

  Tap on the doors of the Kagetsu,

  The Naka-no Teahouse

  Or the Plum Garden

  As you stroll around Maruyama

  Hondō Shuntarō smiled and hummed the melody to this “Yatachū song” while Oyō played the samisen.

  Although physically he was as enormous as a stone mortar, Hondō didn’t hold his liquor particularly well. Once he became tipsy, it wasn’t unusual for him to begin humming the Yatachū melody or the Kankan Dance song with its lyrics in Chinese. Now that he had been elevated to a position of responsibility in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, those songs probably brought back fond memories of the time he spent in Nagasaki.

  Suddenly Shuntarō grew somber and said, “Oyō, this is likely to be something off in the future, but … I may end up going to some distant lands like America or England as an attendant to Lord Iwakura.”

  “America or England?” Oyō gripped her samisen tightly and responded in surprise.

  “Now, I’m not saying it will be right away. But this expedition will have enormous significance for the future of Japan, and for my future, too. Imagine how valuable my foreign language skills will be to Lord Iwakura and the others…. And besides, I really want to see what things are like in the advanced nations.”

  “But if you’re going to travel to those distant places, you’ll be gone for five or six years, won’t you?”

  “Silly!” Shuntarō chuckled. “These days you can travel to America in two months if you take a large steamship. I can go around the world and be back in a year or a year and a half.”

  Oyō seemed relieved to hear that. “Then I can wait. If it’s something that will help you advance in your career, then it makes me happy, too!” Then, as though she had suddenly remembered, “What’s happened to Lord Itō? He hasn’t come by yet.”

  “I don’t want to talk about him.”

  “He said he was going to Tsuwano again, and that he traveled back and forth all the time between Nagasaki and Tsuwano.”

  “It’s his job,” Shuntarō said, looking a little miffed. Even though they had worked at the same magistrate’s office in Nagasaki, a large gulf had opened up between them: Hondō had gone to Nagasaki and taken the first steps up the ladder of success in the new government, while Itō remained a low-ranking official who made visits to keep an eye on the exiled Kirishitans.

  “Oh. And one more thing …” As she was putting her samisen away, Oyō clapped her hands, having remembered something else she wanted to ask. “When do you think the Urakami Kirishitans will be pardoned?”

  “When? Why are you asking such a thing?”

  “There’s a girl from Urakami working here as a maid, and she keeps insisting that I ask you.”

  “Not even I know the answer to that. I can’t imagine it will happen in the next two or three years,” Hondō muttered disinterestedly.

  The fate of someone as inconsequential as the Urakami Kirishitans held no interest for Hondō, who was ascending the ladder of success step by step. They were nothing more than a gang of malcontents who had risen in opposition to the new government. Leaders of an insurrection against the new order. In Shuntarō’s view, at a time when it was essential for Japan to mature into a modern nation so that it could stand up to foreign powers, anyone—even a mere peasant—who disrupted the system had to be punished.
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  Soon there was the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

  “Ma’am?” A woman’s voice called to Oyō. “I’ve brought the saké.”

  When Oyō heard the voice, she looked at Shuntarō and said, “This is the girl I was just telling you about.” Then she said, “Come in!”

  Sliding the door open, Kiku came into the room, bowed, and brought in a tray from the hallway. She did everything as she had been instructed by the madam.

  Shuntarō stared at Kiku and thought, A remarkable face for such a young thing.

  Kiku set down the tray with its saké bottles and tiny bowls, again bowed her head deferentially, and started to leave the room.

  Just then a voice called out “I’m here!” and Itō Seizaemon poked his droopy-eyed face through the open doorway. Perhaps because of all the traveling he had to do, Seizaemon looked far more worn out than he had the last time they met.

  “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” he said sarcastically, glancing toward Oyō.

  “What are you talking about? No trouble at all! Haven’t seen you for a while. Let’s have some drinks together tonight,” Hondō said with a deliberately controlled face. “Bring another tray,” he ordered Kiku as she headed out of the room.

  “Are you off to Tsuwano again?”

  “I am. It’s so cold there in the winter! A Nagasaki boy like me can hardly bear it. But compared to me, you’ve risen in the world by leaps and bounds now that Lord Sawa has become the foreign minister. I’m jealous!”

  Once he’d aired his grievance, Seizaemon sniffed and took the saké cup handed to him. Oyō poured him a drink.

  “So, has the Tsuwano domain managed to change the minds of those Kirishitans?” Hondō asked. “I understand that Governor Kamei Koremi claimed he could persuade them with reason.”

  “High-class gentlemen like him with their fine educations can’t spout off anything besides hot air. Kirishitan peasants who gave the magistrate such a hard time aren’t going to cave in that easily. They’re at their wits’ end over there.”