The Incense Game

Prologue

Edo, Month 11, Genroku Year 16

(Tokyo, December 1703)

The earth trembled as if a massive, restless dragon were uncoiling beneath the city. On the black expanse of the Sumida River, the moon’s reflection shivered. Thousands of houses shifted, groaning and creaking. Wind chimes tinkled in the icy air. At two hours before midnight, the few soldiers patrolling the streets reined in their skittish horses. Sleepers tossed, troubled by bad dreams.

In a small house in the Nihonbashi merchant district, three women looked up as the tatami floor where they knelt shook under them and ceramic vessels on shelves rattled. The square white lantern above them swayed, casting eerie patterns of light and shadow across their anxious faces, made up with white rice-powder and red rouge. Breath held, the women didn’t speak.

The shaking stopped.

They released their breath.

Earth tremors were common. Everyone lived with the fear of the great quakes that devastated Japan at unpredictable intervals and went about their business in the meantime.

The oldest woman turned her attention to the items arranged on a mat before her. Her name was Usugumo. In her forties, she had the sleekness of a cat, her face molded from triangular planes. Silver streaks gleamed in her upswept hair. She picked up metal chopsticks, removed a white-hot coal from a brazier, and dropped it in a celadon ceramic bowl filled with ash. While she mounded the ash over the charcoal, pierced a hole in the mound, and drew a pattern of lines on it, she flicked her narrow-eyed glance at the other women.

They were sisters, in their twenties. The younger was prettier, the elder more expensively dressed. Usugumo could feel hostility between them. She used tweezers to place a mica plate above the hole in the ash, then picked up three origami packets made of pale green, gold-flecked paper. She shuffled the packets, opened one, and removed a little ball of incense, which she set on the mica plate. Smoke tinged with the aromas of fruit, wood, musk, and spices arose from the bowl as the incense burned. Usugumo sensed anticipation in the air and a tension at odds with the serene ritual. The other women gazed down at the paper, brushes, ink, and inkstones arranged before them, their expressions stony.

“The incense game begins,” Usugumo said. The sisters sat up straighter, like warriors preparing for battle. “Listen to the incense. Let its voice tell you who it is.”

She set the celadon bowl on the floor between her and the elder sister and bowed. The elder sister picked up the bowl, holding it on her left palm. She curled her right hand on top of the bowl, forming a small hole between her thumb and forefinger. Her sister watched closely, leaning forward, as if impatient for her turn.

The earth shuddered again.

The elder sister lifted the bowl to her face, placed her nose against the hole, closed her eyes, and slowly, deeply, inhaled.

Sano Ichiro, Chamberlain and second-in-command to the shogun, the military dictator of Japan, was alone in a small boat on a turbulent sea. Thunder boomed in the stormy sky. He clung to the sides of his boat as it rocked and pitched. High up to the crest of an enormous wave he soared; then he came down with a jarring crash.

He awakened, a yell caught in his throat.

He was lying in his dark bedchamber. His fingers gripped the heavy quilts that covered him. The rocking and thunder continued. His wife Reiko, beside him, said in a sleepy, worried voice, “Why are you shaking?”

“It’s not me,” Sano said.

Their twelve-year-old son Masahiro ran into the room, shouting, “Earthquake!”

The room heaved and rocked with an erratic, accelerating rhythm and terrible force. Sano and Reiko sat up while doors slid open; cabinets spewed their contents. They heard the rasp of the house twisting, its joints wrenching. Cracking, shattering noises came from above as roof tiles loosened and fell. Crashes reverberated throughout the compound inside Edo Castle, where Sano and his family lived. From her room down the hall his five-year-old daughter screamed.

“Akiko!” Clad only in her night robe, Reiko ran out the door, her long braid of hair flying.

Sano was up now, too, shivering in the winter air. He said to Masahiro, “Help me get everybody outside before the buildings come down.”

They raced through corridors, where they met guards and maids already fleeing. They leaped over gaps that opened between sections of the mansion. “Be careful!” Sano shouted. “Hurry!”

Ceiling beams crashed behind them. Lattice-and-paper partitions collapsed. Sano and Masahiro herded people between leaning walls and down tilted floors. The crowd stumbled free of the mansion into the icy night.

“Reiko!” Sano called, looking frantically around.

“I’m here!” Reiko trudged toward him, carrying Akiko on her back.

The family huddled together in the courtyard with Sano’s retainers and the servants. The barracks that enclosed the compound shuddered as the earth rocked harder and faster. Roof tiles flew like missiles. Cracks zigzagged across plaster facades. Buildings began to crumble.

“Go out!” Sano yelled. “It’s not safe here!”

The crowd surged through the gate to the stone-paved avenue. Across from this, estates belonging to other government officials occupied a lower level of the hill on which Edo Castle stood. Buildings collapsed like strips of silk curling in a breeze. Screams of terror and agony came from people trapped and injured. Sano looked up to see trees, walls topped with covered corridors, and guard towers sliding down the hill. Groans swept the crowd.

“Merciful gods,” Reiko exclaimed.

Sitting astride Reiko’s back, Akiko cried, “Look!”

Sano turned in the direction she was pointing. With the estates across the avenue gone, a new, clear view of the city below had opened up. Sano, his family, and his household gazed down in stricken fascination, clinging to one another as the world bucked with thunderous jolts. In the dim moonlight Sano could see that Edo’s skyline had flattened. Faint, distant screams rose amid scintillating dust clouds. Orange lights flared like torches across the landscape. Fires inevitably followed earthquakes, when lamps, braziers, and stoves were knocked over and ignited the houses.

“The city is burning,” Akiko said, her voice hushed with awe, her eyes round and solemn.

Sano and Reiko looked at each other in horror: The world as they knew it was ending.