Bundori: A Novel Of Japan

Chapter 4

High above Edo Castle, the keep’s gloomy top story echoed with the footsteps of guards patrolling the corridors and stairways below. Afternoon sunlight filtered through the barred windows to hang in thin, dusty shafts in the air. Chamberlain Yanagisawa stood facing a window, his tall, elegant form silhouetted against the alternating bands of light and dark.

“So, kunoichi,” he said. A sneer curled the edges of his voice. “What information have you and your spy network managed to collect regarding Sōsakan Sano?”

Aoi, standing behind him, flinched at the way he’d addressed her. Kunoichi: female ninja; practitioner of the dark martial arts, descended, as legend claimed, from demons with supernatural powers. She didn’t object to the term; she was proud of what she was. But Yanagisawa’s open contempt started a slow, angry fire in her blood. Deeper than that of a man for a woman, superior for inferior, it echoed that in which the samurai had held the ninja since time immemorial. They despised her people as dirty mercenaries who used stealth, sabotage, covert assassination, espionage, and deception instead of the forthright samurai martial arts. Aoi wondered whether Chamberlain Yanagisawa realized that his class had created the demons themselves. Once peace-loving Buddhist mystics, the ninja had developed their famed, deadly skills as a defense against the ruling samurai who burned the temples and killed the worshippers in an attempt to destroy what they didn’t understand. However, this aversion had never stopped Yanagisawa and his kind from employing the ninja to do work that they themselves considered dishonorable, cowardly, and beneath them.

Like using her to spy on a helpless subordinate.

Swallowing her own contempt for her master, Aoi said, “Sano rises early to practice the martial arts every day. He works long hours in the archives. He eats and drinks moderately.” Rigorous training enabled her to purge her voice of all emotion as she related the information reported to her by Sano’s servants. “He never goes to the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, but does visit his old mother. He doesn’t gamble, or squander money on trifles. When he attends parties, he always returns home early to sleep alone.”

While she spoke, Aoi pictured herself standing at the end of a long line of ninja that began more than two hundred years ago and spanned the long wars that had preceded the Tokugawa regime. She saw Fumo Kotarō, who had aided Lord Hōjō Odawara though secret night attacks on the enemy Takeda; Saiga Magoichi, master of firearms and explosives; and the Hattori ninja, who had established the metsuke and served as chief of security at Edo Castle. And always behind the scenes, the women, shadowy figures whose names did not appear in any historical account. Disguised as servants, prostitutes, entertainers-or shrine attendants like herself-they’d acted as spies and assassins, compromising the enemy in ways that male agents couldn’t.

But now the wars were over. Most surviving ninja had returned to their secret mountain villages. Some had become criminals or private security guards in the cities. The line of ninja who aided the ruling warrior class in their military and political schemes ended with her. She was an anachronism, serving the Tokugawa under the same threat used against her ancestors: annihilation of their kind. If she refused to obey, the Tokugawa would kill her, then send troops into the mountains to destroy her clan and the other families that comprised their small ninja school. It had happened before; it could happen again. In Japan, families were routinely punished for a member’s offenses. Aoi fought her impotent rage, reminding herself that negative emotions are sources of strength, but only if used properly.

“Sano doesn’t have a mistress, or force himself on the maids or stableboys,” she finished. “From what my informers tell me, he’s exactly what he seems: A man focused entirely on his duties. A perfect samurai.”

Unlike Yanagisawa, who possessed all the vices and weaknesses that Sano did not. What a despicable creature!

Yanagisawa’s silk robes hissed and slithered against the floor as he turned to face her. The bright window backlit him, leaving his face shaded, but Aoi, with her keen vision, saw the anger that rendered his handsome features ugly.

“ ‘A perfect samurai.’ ” His mocking repetition issued from between clenched teeth.

Aoi’s sharp senses detected the slight turbulence in the air around him, and the faint bitter scent that his body exuded. Both betrayed his overweening fear and hatred of Sano. Focusing her trained concentration upon Yanagisawa, she probed for the reason he would waste such strong emotions and relentless effort on an underling. He had a reputation for ruining early the careers of men who might eventually rise to compete with him for status and power. And Sano, by virtue of having saved the shogun’s life, was in a unique position to do so. But Yanagisawa’s next words distracted her, masking his motives.

“Two months of surveillance, with nothing to show for it but proof of Sano’s good character!” He began to pace the corridor in swift, restless strides. “And now that His Excellency has appointed him to investigate Kaibara Tōju’s murder, it is more important than ever to find a weapon to use against him.”

Yanagisawa halted in midstep before her. “Are you sure the virtuous Sano has no weaknesses that can be exploited?”

Aoi felt a growing sympathy toward Sano, perhaps because of her hatred for this man who schemed against him; perhaps because Sano’s quiet intelligence and modesty made him so different from the typical brutish, egotistical samurai. This sympathy frightened her. She must not let her personal feelings interfere with her mission when so much lay at stake. But just for a moment she envisioned Sano’s face, with its thoughtful, wary expression. She remembered the physical attraction she’d felt toward him- which she knew he shared. He was a man she might have liked, under different circumstances…

She dismissed the idle fantasy and said, “He’s lonely. And loneliness makes people vulnerable.”

How well she knew loneliness. As Yanagisawa continued to rant about Sano, the surface of her trained mind captured his words and committed them to memory. On another, deeper level, she relived her life, starting with the day she’d left her native Iga Province.

She saw herself on that misty autumn day fifteen years ago, at age fourteen, a student at the secret academy in the mountains where young kunoichi learned combat and espionage skills. She was running a woodland obstacle course of trees, rocks, horizontal poles, and inclined planks, in an exercise designed to incorporate speed, balance, agility, and silence into her body’s movements. At the end stood her beloved father: the powerful jōnin-high man-of the Iga ninja school. His tragic expression froze her.

“Father, what’s wrong?” she asked.

“Aoi, the time has come for you to begin the work you’ve been trained for,” he said sadly. “Today you leave for Edo Castle, to become an apprentice spy.”

Aoi hugged herself, buffeted by a desolation as cold as the mountain wind. Her inevitable departure had always belonged to the distant future. But now the future was here.

Her father’s eyes reflected her anguish, but he said only, “It is necessary.”

Trained in ninjutsu since early childhood, Aoi knew better than to ask why. A jōnin made all the clan’s decisions, based on his superior knowledge of the scheme of totality, and lower members must accept them without challenge. But she’d guessed that the ninja, to ensure their own survival, would always serve whoever stood the best chance of gaining and keeping power. And her father was betting on the Tokugawa. That he would send them his best and dearest young kunoichi proved it. Aoi wanted to weep and rage and refuse, but her training forbade her to do anything but say, “Yes, Father. I’ll go and get ready.”

Now Aoi closed her mind to the still-sharp pain of that parting, forcing her thoughts back to the present.

“Sano must not be allowed to solve this murder case, and he will not.” Yanagisawa laughed, a sound of pure, exuberant enjoyment. “How fortunate that I managed to plant the idea of you in His Excellency’s mind!”

That he would sabotage a murder investigation to serve his own purposes seemed criminal to Aoi. Why did he wish the case to remain unsolved? Because he wanted to eliminate Sano as a future rival? Or for some other, even more sinister reason directly related to the murder? But it wasn’t Aoi’s place to question her superior’s motives, or to dwell upon what happened to his unfortunate victims. To do so would only make her work less bearable. Fifteen long years had taught her that.

She’d begun her servitude as a kitchen maid, spying on her fellow servants; desperately homesick, forever isolated from those whom she befriended in order to learn their secrets; lying awake in bed until the maids who shared her room fell asleep, then silently slipping through deserted moonlit courtyards and stone passages to the Momijiyama.

“Ah, Aoi.” Old Michiko’s voice crackled like a wood fire in the great mausoleum’s shadowed entranceway. Bent and wizened, but with bright, youthful eyes, she was a kunoichi from Aoi’s village. She’d been chief shrine attendant-and commander of the palace’s female spy network-since Tokugawa Ieyasu had founded Edo Castle. “What have you to report tonight?”

“The nightwatchmen are planning to steal rice from the shogun’s warehouse,” Aoi would report. Or whatever other crimes she’d discovered.

Michiko’s answer was always the same. “Very good, child. Your father would be proud of you.”

Now, fifteen years later, the thought of her father still made tears sting Aoi’s eyes. He might accept, but never condone the ruin his child had wrought: the men and women beaten, or even executed for petty offenses against the government. As in the past, she toyed with the idea of failing at the task before her, and sparing the new victim. Death would provide the release she sought. But to fail was dishonorable, impossible, and unthinkable. She listened closely to Yanagisawa’s orders.

Yanagisawa’s pacing quickened; the turbulence around him intensified. “You will keep me informed on Sano’s progress. But more important, you must mislead him with false spirit messages. Use your intelligence to gain his respect; his loneliness to secure his affection and trust.”

Ryakuhon no jitsu: the ninja art of winning an enemy’s confidence by pretending to be a comrade. Aoi had perfected this during her first three years at Edo Castle, as she rose from maid to attendant to the women of the shogun’s top officials. Her sympathetic manner, knowledge of medicine, and skills as a masseuse made her popular. Instead of the trivial offenses of servants, she reported to Michiko tales of madness, adultery, perversion, and dissipation at the bakufu’s highest levels. In time, resignation replaced grief; homesickness dulled to a constant but bearable ache. Aoi found a certain fulfillment in exercising her talents. She, like her female ancestors, enjoyed a freedom and mobility greater than that of ordinary women-if only to do her master’s bidding. She lived from day to day, focusing on the work at hand, not allowing herself to think of the future.

Just as she must now. She would help Sano just enough to convince him that her intentions were good and her counsel worth heeding. Then she would betray his trust, destroy him, and never think of him again.

“Another idea has just occurred to me.” Yanagisawa’s intense dark eyes sparkled, lending his face a vibrant charm. Such beauty, wasted on a man so evil. “Perhaps if you seduce Sano and distract him from his work, the shogun will remove him from the case- or even dismiss him for neglecting his duties. And the ruin of his marriage negotiations would be a bonus.”

Yanagisawa laughed again. “I dare say I need not tell you how to destroy a man, kunoichi.”

Aoi kept her face calm, her breathing steady. But ice crystals formed in her blood at the thought of performing monomi no jitsu: finding and attacking the weak point in the enemy’s defenses.

At age twenty, she’d begun spying directly upon the shogun’s men, entertaining-and bedding-high bakufu officials in order to discover their acts of disloyalty and corruption, or to exploit their secret vices until they ruined themselves. She despised their weakness and stupidity; she never thought of the demotions, banishments, or suicides that followed her disclosures. Selective memory erased each victim from her conscience, much the same way that the poisonous herbs she took rid her body of unwanted pregnancies. Until six years ago, when she had destroyed the one man who’d mattered to her.

Fusei Matsugae. An influential member of the Council of Elders when Tokugawa Tsunayoshi had become shogun, he’d encouraged the new dictator’s early efforts at government reform and opposed Yanagisawa’s attempts to usurp power. His intelligence, integrity, and striking physical appearance had attracted Aoi. In him, she finally discovered a samurai worth her regard. For the first time, she experienced sexual pleasure with a man. Unlike the others who had often treated her with callous disrespect, he was kind. And he somehow satisfied her longing for her father and home.

In the beginning, she’d thought her happiness simply meant that the cruelty of her work no longer bothered her. Seeing Fusei grow infatuated with her, she’d believed her satisfaction purely professional. The sexual ecstasy gave her qualms, which she dismissed in her eagerness to explore a new delight. Never having been in love before, she didn’t recognize the danger until it was too late.

Now guilt and self-loathing choked Aoi as Yanagisawa’s innuendo conjured up the image of herself and Fusei on their last night together. The dim lamplight of his bedchamber had failed to obscure the signs of his physical deterioration: the lean, fit body gone weak and stringy; the once-keen eyes bloodshot; the trembling mouth and hands. He reeked of the sake that had ravaged him. She could always identify those men with a dangerous affinity for liquor by the unique smell they gave off as it mixed with their blood, and she’d deliberately encouraged Fusei to drink as she charmed him. But that night, she realized that she missed the man he’d once been, and that she loved him.

“No,” she whispered, stricken by the sudden knowledge of how much bleaker her life would be when she finished destroying the only person in Edo she cared for.

Seated on the floor, Fusei gazed at her, eyes glassy with drunkenness and incipient dementia. “Perform the ritual, Aoi,” he said, his words slurred.

She had often exploited her victims’ religious beliefs and filial piety by evoking the spirits of their beloved dead to influence them. It wasn’t a trick. The dead did speak-through their possessions, through the minds of living persons who had known them. She need only focus her concentration to hear their voices, then use her excellent acting skill to recreate their personae and manipulate vulnerable men like Fusei. But her heart rebelled against performing the act that would complete her lover’s ruin.

“Not tonight, dearest,” she murmured, stroking his face.

Fusei ignored her attempts to entice him to bed. With shaky hands, he lit the incense on the altar. “I am losing all my allies,” he complained. He couldn’t see that his drunken ravings had alienated them, any more than he could see that she was helping him destroy himself. “The whole council has joined Yanagisawa’s clique. I don’t know how to stop this madness. Aoi, I must have my mother’s advice.”

Amid the smoking incense burners, he set the sash that had belonged to his deceased mother, then waited in the same anticipation with which he’d once greeted sex.

Go, Aoi wanted to cry, before all is lost! And take me with you, away from this awful place. Then she thought of her people, whose lives depended on her continued obedience. Sighing mournfully, she laid her hands upon the sash.

“Listen, my son.” She assumed the old woman’s raspy voice, and arranged her features in the expression she’d gleaned from Fusei’s memory.

“Yes, mother.” He leaned toward her eagerly.

“My son, you must take your sword to your enemy.”

“No! I cannot!” Fusei’s clouded gaze cleared; his mother’s message had shocked him sober. “It would be treason!” Then, as he gazed upon what he thought was his mother, speaking through Aoi from the spirit realm, his expression turned resolute. “But if I must, then so be it.”

Holding back her tears took every bit of self-control Aoi possessed. “Yes, my son,” she whispered. Two days later, he was dead in a violent scandal of his own making-and hers. Yanagisawa succeeded to the post of chamberlain without further opposition. Night after night, Aoi lay awake, weeping silently, hating herself and the duty that bound her. Then fate dealt her another blow when Chamberlain Yanagisawa summoned her to the keep for the first of many secret meetings.

“Michiko is dead,” he said. “From now on, you will command the spy network, reporting directly to me.”

The news hit Aoi like a thunderbolt. For years, the lingering dream of freedom had sustained her. She longed to see her father again. And she cherished the wistful hopes that in her own village she might work for good, rather than evil; she might find a man to fill the emptiness that Fusei’s death had left in her soul. But now she would never be free. Like Michiko, she would spend the rest of her life in exile, condemned to do work she despised, for men she hated. She wanted to hurl herself through the barred window and onto the ground five stories below.

But the old threat still held. Instead she’d whispered, “Yes, Honorable Chamberlain.”

“So, kunoichi,” the present-day Yanagisawa said. “Do you understand your orders?”

Aoi nodded in resignation. Six long years had passed since she’d driven her lover to his death and broken her own heart. She wasn’t a foolish young girl now, but a mature professional who knew how to maintain her detachment. She need not involve herself intimately with Sano and risk more pain. She would sabotage his work so badly that his total destruction would be unnecessary. She could satisfy Yanagisawa without adding another murder to her sins.

A movement outside made them both turn toward the window. Above the palace’s rooftops, curving stone walls, shining moats, and green gardens, a hawk wheeled and soared. As they watched, it veered to capture a tiny bird. A shriek of pain, a spatter of blood, and both predator and prey dropped from sight. Aoi winced inwardly.

Yanagisawa contemplated the empty sky for a moment. The voices and footsteps of the patrolling guards drifted up to fill the silence. Then he said, “Will you use the dark forces against Sano?”

Aoi sensed a sudden chill in the emotional climate that surrounded Yanagisawa. His nonchalant manner couldn’t disguise his fear of her. The mysterious “dark forces” were simply a combination of heightened perception, sensory awareness, and a thorough knowledge of the human mind and body. Formidable tools, beyond a samurai’s comprehension, yet hardly supernatural. But Yanagisawa knew she could kill him-with a poison dart, a concealed blade, or one sharp blow-before he could defend himself or summon help. So far she’d never had to commit an assassination, the last, dreaded resort should all other means of completing a task fail. But she would gladly kill Yanagisawa, if not for the death threat he held over her and her people.

Aoi looked Yanagisawa straight in the eye, and saw that he knew it. His smile vanished. The balance of power between them shifted-but only temporarily. She lowered her gaze and bowed.

“I will use whatever means necessary to achieve your aims, Honorable Chamberlain.”