The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

XIV Above the Village of Kurozane in Kyôga Domain

Late on the Twenty-second Day of the Tenth Month

Twilight is cold with the threat of snow. The forest’s edges dissolve and blur. A black dog waits on an outcrop. He scents a fox’s hot stink.

His silver-haired mistress struggles up the twisted path.

A dead branch cracks under a deer’s hoof across the loud stream.

An owl cries, in this cedar or that fir… once, twice, near, gone.

Otane carries a twentieth of a koku of rice, enough for a month.

Her youngest niece tried hard to persuade her to winter in the village.

The poor girl needs allies, thinks Otane, against her mother-in-law.

‘She’s pregnant again, too, did you notice?’ she asks her dog.

The niece had charged her aunt with the crime of making the entire family worry about her safety. ‘But I am safe,’ the old woman repeats her answer for the root-truckled steps. ‘I’m too poor for cut-throats and too withered for bandits.’

Her niece then argued that patients could consult her more readily down in the village. ‘Who wants to trek halfway up Mount Shiranui in midwinter?’

‘My cottage is not “halfway up” anything! It’s less than a mile.’

A song thrush in a mountain ash speaks of endings.

A childless crone, Otane concedes, is lucky to have relatives to house her…

But she also knows that leaving her hut would be easier than returning.

‘Come spring,’ she mutters, ‘it’ll be, “Aunt Otane can’t go back to that ruin!” ’

Higher up, a pair of raccoons snarl murderous threats.

The herbalist of Kurozane climbs on, her sack growing heavier with each step.

Otane reaches the gardened shelf where her cottage stands. Onions are strung below the deep eaves. Firewood is stacked below. She puts her rice down on the raised porch. Her body aches. She checks the goats in their stall, and tips in a half-bale of hay. Last, she peers into the chicken coop. ‘Who laid an egg for Auntie today, I wonder?’

In the ripe murk she finds one, still warm. ‘Thank you, ladies.’

She bolts the cottage door against the night, kneels before her hearth with her tinderbox and coaxes a fire into life for her pot. In this she makes a soup of burdock root and yams. When it is hot, she adds the egg.

The medicine cabinet calls her into the rear room.

Patients and visitors are surprised to see such a beautiful cabinet reaching nearly to the ceiling of her humble cottage. Back in her great-great-grandfather’s day, six or eight strong men had carried it up from the village, though as a child it was simpler to believe that it had grown here, like an ancient tree. One by one, she slides out the well-waxed medicine drawers and inhales their contents. Here is toki parsley, good for colicky infants; next, acrid yomogi shavings, ground to a powder for moxibustion; last in this row, dokudami berries or ‘fish mint’ to flush out sickness. The cabinet is her livelihood and the depository of her knowledge. She sniffs soapy mulberry leaves, and hears her father telling her, ‘Good for ailments of the eye… and used with goatwort for ulcers, worms and boils…’ Then Otane reaches the bitter motherwort berries.

She is reminded of Miss Aibagawa and withdraws to the fire.

She feeds the lean flames a fat log. ‘Two days from Nagasaki,’ she says, ‘to “Request an Audience with Otane of Kurozane”. Those were Miss Aibagawa’s words. I was digging manure into my pumpkin patch one day…’

Dots of firelight are reflected in the dog’s clear eyes.

‘… when who appears at my fence but the village headman and priest.’

The old woman chews a stringy burdock root, recalling the burnt face.

‘Can it truly be three whole years ago? It feels like as many months.’

The dog rolls on to his back, using his mistress’s foot as a pillow.

He knows the story well, thinks Otane, but shan’t mind indulging me again.

‘I thought she’d come for treatment, seeing her burnt face, but then the headman introduced her as “the celebrated Dr Aibagawa’s daughter” and “practitioner of Dutch-style midwifery” – as if he knew what such words mean! But then she asked if I might advise her on herbal treatments for childbirth and, well, I thought my ears were liars.’

Otane rolls a boiled egg to and fro on her wooden platter.

‘When she told me that amongst druggists and scholars in Nagasaki the name “Otane of Kurozane” is a guarantee of purity, I was horrified that my lowly name was known by such elevated folk…’

The old woman picks off the fragments of eggshell with her berry-dyed fingernails and remembers how gracefully Miss Aibagawa dismissed the headman and priest, and how attentively she wrote down Otane’s observations. ‘She wrote as well as any man. Yakumosô interested her. “Smear it over torn loins,” I told her, “and it prevents fevers and heals the skin. It soothes nipples inflamed by breastfeeding, too…” ’ Otane bites into the boiled egg, warmed by the memory of the samurai’s daughter acting quite at home in this commoner’s cottage while her two servants rebuilt a goat-pen and repaired a wall. ‘You remember the headman’s eldest son bringing up lunch,’ she tells the dog. ‘Polished white rice, quail eggs and sea-bream, steaming in plantain leaves… Well, we thought we were in the Palace of the Moon Princess!’ Otane lifts the kettle’s lid and drops in a fistful of coarse tea. ‘I spoke more in a single afternoon than I had done all year. Miss Aibagawa wanted to pay me “tuition money” – but how could I charge her a single sen? So she bought my stock of motherwort, but left three times the usual price…’

The darkness opposite stirs and quickens into the form of a cat.

‘Where were you hiding? We were talking about Miss Aibagawa’s first visit. She sent us dried sea-bream the following New Year. Her servant delivered it all the way from the city.’ The sooty kettle begins to wheeze, and Otane thinks about the second visit during the Sixth Month of the following year, when the butterbur was in flower. ‘She was in love that summer. Oh, I didn’t ask, but she couldn’t refrain from mentioning a young Dutch interpreter from a good family named Ogawa. Her voice altered’ – the cat looks up – ‘when she said his name.’ Outside, night stirs the creaking trees. Otane pours her tea before the water boils and embitters the leaves. ‘I prayed that, once they were married, Ogawa-sama would still let her visit Kyôga Domain to gladden my heart, and that her second visit would not be her last.’ She sips her tea, recalling the day when the news reached Kurozane, passed up a chain of relatives and servants, that the head of the Ogawas had denied his son permission to marry Dr Aibagawa’s daughter. Then in the New Year, Otane learned that Ogawa the Interpreter had taken another bride. ‘Despite this unfortunate turn,’ Otane pokes the fire, ‘Miss Aibagawa didn’t forget me. She sent me my shawl made out of the warmest foreign wool, as a New Year’s gift.’

The dog wriggles on his back to scratch his flea-bites.

Otane recalls this summer’s visit, as the strangest of Miss Aibagawa’s three excursions to Kurozane. Two weeks before, when the azaleas were in flower, a salt merchant had brought news to the Harubayashi Inn about how Dr Aibagawa’s daughter had performed ‘a Dutch miracle’ and breathed life into Magistrate Shiroyama’s still-born child. So when she visited, half the village walked up to Otane’s cottage, hoping for more Dutch miracles. ‘Medicine is knowledge,’ Miss Aibagawa told the villagers, ‘not magic.’ She gave advice to the small crowd, and they thanked her, but left disappointed. When they were alone, the young woman confided that it had been a trying year. Her father had been ill, and the careful way she avoided any mention of Ogawa the Interpreter indicated a badly bruised heart. Brighter news, however, was that the grateful Magistrate had given her permission to study on Dejima under the Dutch doctor. ‘Well, I must have looked worried.’ Otane strokes her cat. ‘You hear such stories about foreigners. But she assured me that this Dutch doctor was a great teacher, known even to Lord Abbot Enomoto.’

Wings beat by the chimney flue. The owl is out hunting.

Then, six weeks ago, came the most shocking news of Otane’s recent life.

Miss Aibagawa was to become a Sister at Mount Shiranui Shrine.

Otane tried to visit Miss Aibagawa at the Harubayashi Inn the night before she was taken up the mountain, but neither their existing friendship nor Otane’s twice-yearly delivery of medicines to the Shrine convinced the monk to ignore the prohibition. She could not even leave a letter. She was told that the Newest Sister could have nothing to do with the World Below for twenty years. What sort of a life, Otane wonders, shall she have in that place? ‘Nobody knows,’ she mutters to herself, ‘and that is the problem.’

She turns over the few known facts about Mount Shiranui Shrine.

It is the spiritual seat of Lord Abbot Enomoto, daimyo of Kyôga Domain.

The Shrine’s goddess ensures the fertility of Kyôga’s streams and rice-fields.

None but the Masters and Acolytes of the Order enter and leave.

These men number about sixty in total, and the Sisters, about a dozen. The Sisters live in their own House, within the Shrine walls, and are governed by an Abbess. Servants at the Harubayashi Inn report blemishes or defects that, in most cases, would doom the girls to lives as freaks in brothels, and Abbot Enomoto is praised for giving these unfortunates a better life…

… but surely not, Otane frets, the daughter of a samurai and doctor?

‘A burnt face makes marriage harder,’ she mumbles, ‘but not impossible…’

The scarcity of facts leaves holes where rumours breed. Many villagers have heard how former Sisters of Shiranui received lodgings and a pension for the rest of their lives, but as the retired nuns never stop in Kurozane, no villager has ever spoken with one face to face. Buntarô, the blacksmith’s son, who serves at the Halfway Gate up Mekura Gorge, claims that Master Kinten trains the monks to be assassins, which is why the Shrine is so secretive. A flirty chambermaid at the inn met a hunter who swore he had seen winged monster-women dressed as nuns flying around Bare Peak at the summit of Shiranui. This very afternoon, the mother-in-law of Otane’s niece in Kurozane observed that monks’ seeds are as fertile as any other men’s, and asked how many bushels of ‘angel-making’ herbs the Shrine ordered. Otane denied, truthfully, supplying abortifacients to Master Suzaku, and realised that discovering this had been the mother-in-law’s goal.

The villagers speculate, but they know better than to hunt for answers. They are proud of their association with the reclusive monastery, and are paid for provisioning it; to ask too many questions would be to bite the hand of a generous donor. The monks probably are monks, Otane hopes, and the Sisters live as nuns…

She hears the ancient hush of falling snow.

‘No,’ Otane tells her cat. ‘All we can do is ask Our Lady to protect her.’

The wooden box-niche set into the mud-and-bamboo wall resembles an ordinary cottage altar-alcove, housing the death-name tablets of Otane’s parents and a chipped vase holding a few green sprigs. After checking the bolt on the door twice, however, Otane removes the vase and slides up the back panel. In this small and secret space stands the true treasure of Otane’s cottage and bloodline: a white-glazed, blue-veiled, dirt-cracked statuette of Maria-sama, the Mother of Iesu-sama and Empress of Heaven, crafted long ago to resemble Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy. She holds an infant in her arms. Otane’s grandfather’s grandfather, the story goes, received her from a Holy Saint named Xavier who sailed to Japan from Paradise on a magical flying boat pulled by golden swans.

Otane kneels on painful knees with an acorn rosary around her hands.

‘ “Holy Maria-sama, Mother of Adan and Ewa, who stole Deusu-dono’s sacred persimmon; Maria-sama, Mother of Pappa Maruji, with his six sons in six canoes, who survived the great flood that cleansed all lands; Maria, Mother of Iesu-sama, who was crucified for four hundred silver coins; Maria-sama, hear my-” ’

Was that a twig snapping, Otane holds her breath, under a man’s foot?

Most of Kurozane’s oldest ten or twelve families are, like Otane’s, Hidden Christians, but vigilance must be constant. Her silver hair would grant her no clemency if her beliefs were ever exposed; only apostasy and the naming of other followers might transmute death into exile, but then San Peitoro and San Pauro would turn her away from the Gates of Paradise, and when seawater turns to oil and the world burns, she would fall into that Hell called Benbô.

The herbalist is confident that nobody is outside. ‘Virgin Mother, it’s Otane of Kurozane. Once again, this old woman begs Her Ladyship to watch over Miss Aibagawa in the Shiranui Shrine; and keep her safe from illness; and ward off bad spirits and… and dangerous men. Please give back what has been taken from her.’

Not one rumour, Otane thinks, ever told of a young nun being set free.

‘But if this old woman is asking too much of Maria-sama…’

The stiffness in Otane’s knees is spreading to her hips and ankles.

‘… please tell Miss Aibagawa that her friend, Otane of Kurozane, is thinking-’

Something strikes the door. Otane gasps. The dog is on his feet, growling…

Otane slides down the wooden screen as a second blow strikes.

The dog is barking now. She hears a man’s voice. She arranges the alcove.

At the third knock, she walks to the door and calls out, ‘There is nothing to steal here.’

‘Is this,’ a frail man’s voice replies, ‘the house of Otane the herbalist?’

‘May I ask my honourable visitor to name himself, at this late hour?’

‘Jiritsu of Akatokiyamu,’ says the visitor, ‘is how I was called…’

Otane is surprised to recognise the name of Master Suzaku’s acolyte.

Might Maria-sama, she wonders, have a hand in this?

‘We meet at the shrine’s gatehouse,’ says the voice, ‘twice a year.’

She opens the door to a snow-covered figure wrapped in thick mountain clothing and a bamboo hat. He stumbles over her threshold, and snow swirls in. ‘Sit by the fire, Acolyte.’ Otane barges the door shut. ‘It’s a bad night.’ She guides him to a log-stool.

With effort, he unfastens his hat, hood and mountain boot-bindings.

He is exhausted, his face is taut, and his eyes are not of this world.

Questions can come later, Otane thinks. First, he must be warmed up.

She pours some tea and closes his frozen fingers around the bowl.

She unclasps the monk’s damp robe and wraps her woollen shawl around him.

His throat muscles make a grinding noise as he drinks.

Perhaps he was gathering plants, Otane wonders, or meditating in a cave.

She sets about heating the remains of the soup. They do not speak.

‘I fled Mount Shiranui,’ announces Jiritsu, coming abruptly to. ‘I broke my Oath.’

Otane is astonished, but a wrong word now might silence him.

‘My hand, this hand, my brush: they knew, before I did.’

She grinds some yogi root, waiting for words that make sense.

‘I accepted the – the Deathless Way, but its truer name is “evil”.’

The fire snaps, the animals breathe, the snow is falling.

Jiritsu coughs, as if winded. ‘She sees so far! So very, very far… My father was a tobacco hawker, and gambler, around Sakai. We were just a rung above the outcasts… and one night the cards went badly and he sold me to a tanner. An untouchable. I lost my name and slept over the slaughterhouse. For years, for years, I slit horses’ throats to earn my board. Slit… slit… slit. What the tanners’ sons did to me, I… I… I… longed for someone to slit my throat. Come winter, boiling bones into glue was the only warmth. Come summer, the flies got into your eyes, your mouth, and we scraped up the dried blood and oily shit to mix it with Ezo seaweed, for fertiliser. Hell shall smell of that place…’

The roof-timbers of the cottage creak. Snow is piling up.

‘One New Year’s Day I climbed over the wall closing the eta village and ran away to Osaka, but the tanner sent two men to fetch me back. They underestimated my skill with knives. No man saw, but She saw. She drew me… day by rumour by crossroads by dream by month by hook, She urged me west, west, west… across the straits to Hizen Domain, to Kyôga Domain… and up…’ Jiritsu looks at the ceiling, perhaps towards the summit of the mountain.

‘Does Acolyte-sama,’ Otane grinds her pestle, ‘refer to someone at the Shrine?’

‘They are all,’ Jiritsu stares through her, ‘as a saw is to a carpenter.’

‘Then this foolish old crone doesn’t understand who “She” may be.’

Tears sprout in Jiritsu’s eyes. ‘Are we no more than the totality of our acts?’

Otane decides to be direct. ‘Acolyte-sama: in the shrine on Mount Shiranui, did you see Miss Aibagawa?’

He blinks and sees more clearly. ‘The Newest Sister. Yes.’

‘Is she…’ now Otane wonders what to ask ‘… is she well?’

He makes a deep sad purr. ‘The horses knew I was going to kill them.’

‘How is Miss Aibagawa…’ Otane’s mortar and pestle fall still ‘… treated?’

‘If She hears,’ Jiritsu drifts away again, ‘She shall poke his finger through my heart… tomorrow, I shall… speak of… of that place – but her hearing is sharper at night. Then I am bound for Nagasaki. I… I… I… I…’

Ginger for his circulation, Otane goes to her cabinet, feverfew for delirium.

‘My hand, my brush: they knew before I did.’ Jiritsu’s wan voice follows her. ‘Three nights ago, but it may be three ages, I was in the Scriptorium, at work at a letter from a Gift. The letters are a lesser wrong, “Acts of Compassion”, Genmu says… but… but I left myself, and upon my return, my hand, my brush, had written… had written out…’ he whispers and cringes ‘… I had written out the Twelve Creeds. Black ink on white parchment! Merely to utter them is a profanity, except for Master Genmu and the Lord Abbot, but to record them, so a layman’s eyes might read… She must have been occupied elsewhere or she would have killed me on the spot. Master Yôten passed by, inches behind me… Not moving, I read the Twelve Creeds, and saw, for the first time… the slaughterhouses of Sakai are a pleasure garden in comparison.’

Otane understands little, grates ginger, and her heart feels cold.

Jiritsu slides out a dogwood scroll-tube from his inner clothing. ‘Some few men of power in Nagasaki, Enomoto does not own. Magistrate Shiroyama may yet prove a man of conscience… and abbots of rival Orders shall be eager to know the worst, and this…’ he frowns at the scroll-tube ‘… is worse than the worst.’

‘Then Acolyte-sama intends,’ Otane asks, ‘to go to Nagasaki?’

‘East.’ The aged young man struggles to locate her. ‘Kinten shall follow.’

‘To persuade Acoltye-sama,’ she hopes, ‘to come back to the Shrine?’

Jiritsu shakes his head. ‘The Paths are clear about those who… turn away.’

Otane glances at her unlit butsudan alcove. ‘Hide here.’

Acolyte Jiritsu looks through his hand at the fire. ‘Stumbling in the snow, I thought, Otane of Kurozane will shelter me…’

‘This old woman is glad…’ rats scrat in the thatch ‘… glad you thought so.’

‘… for one night. But if I stay here two, Kinten shall kill us both.’

He says this without drama, as one stating a simple fact.

Fire consumes wood, thinks Otane, and time consumes us.

‘Father called me “boy”,’ he says. ‘The tanner called me “dog”. Master Genmu named his new acolyte “Jiritsu”. What is my name now?’

‘Do you have any memory,’ she asks, ‘of how your mother named you?’

‘At the slaughterhouse, I’d dream of a… motherly woman who named me Mohei.’

‘That was surely her.’ Otane mixes tea with the powders. ‘Drink.’

‘When Lord Enma asks my name,’ the fugitive receives the cup, ‘for the Register of Hell, that’s what I shall tell him, “Mohei the Apostate”.’

Otane’s dreams are of scaly wings, roaring blindness and distant knocks. She wakes in her bed of straw and feathers stitched between sheets of hemp. Her exposed cheeks and nose are pinched by the cold. By cracks of snow-blue daylight, she sees Mohei, lying curled by the dying fire, and remembers everything. She watches him for a while, uncertain whether he is sleeping or awake. The cat emerges from the shawl and pads over to Otane, who sifts their conversation for delirium, delusion, clues and truth. Why he ran away, she understands, is what threatens Miss Aibagawa…

It is written in that dogwood scroll. It is still in his hand.

… and perhaps, Otane thinks, he is Maria-sama’s answer to my prayers.

He could be persuaded to stay a few days until the hunters give up.

There’s room to hide in the under-roof, she thinks, if anyone comes…

She sighs out a plume of white in the cold air. The cat puffs littler clouds.

‘Praise Deusu in Heaven,’ she recites soundlessly, ‘for this new day.’

Pale clouds uncoil, too, from the wet nose of the dreaming dog.

But wrapped in the warm foreign shawl, Mohei is stiller than still.

Otane realises he is not breathing.

XV The House of Sisters, Mount Shiranui Shrine

Sunrise on the Twenty-third Morning of the Tenth Month

The three bronze booms of the Bell of the First Cause reverberate over roofs, dislodge pigeons, chase echoes around the Cloisters, sluice under the door of the Newest Sister’s cell and find Orito, who keeps her eyes shut and begs, Let me imagine I am elsewhere for a moment longer… but the smells of sour tatami, greasy candles and stale smoke deny her any illusion of release. She hears the tap, tap, tap of the women’s tobacco pipes.

During the night, fleas or lice feasted on her neck, breast and midriff.

In Nagasaki, she thinks, just two days east, the maples will still be red…

The manju flowers pink and white, and the sanma saury fat and in season.

A two-day journey, she thinks, which may as well be twenty years…

Sister Kagerô walks past the cell. Her voice stabs, ‘Cold! Cold! Cold!’

Orito opens her eyes and surveys the ceiling of her five-mat room.

She wonders which rafter the last Newest Sister used to hang herself.

The fire is dead, and the twice-filtered light has a new bluish whiteness.

First snow, Orito thinks. The gorge down to Kurozane may be impassable.

With her thumbnail, Orito makes a tiny nick in the wood skirting the wall.

The House may own me, she thinks, but it shan’t own Time.

She counts the notches: one day, two days, three days…

… forty-seven days, forty-eight days, forty-nine days…

This morning, she calculates, is the fiftieth since her abduction.

‘You’ll still be here,’ Fat Rat mocks, ‘after ten thousand notches.’

Its eyes are black pearls and it vanishes in a furry blur.

If there was a rat, Orito tells herself, it didn’t speak because rats don’t.

She hears her mother humming in the passageway, as on most mornings.

She smells her servant Ayame’s toasted onigiri rice-balls rolled in sesame.

‘Ayame isn’t here either,’ Orito says. ‘Stepmother dismissed her.’

These ‘slippages’ of time and senses, she is sure, are caused by the medicine Master Suzaku concocts for each Sister before supper. Hers the Master calls ‘Solace’. She knows the pleasure it brings is harmful and addictive, but unless she drinks it she shan’t be fed, and what hope has a starving woman of escaping from a mountain shrine in the middle of winter? Better to eat.

Harder to tolerate are thoughts of her stepmother and stepbrother waking up in the Aibagawa Residence in Nagasaki. Orito wonders what of hers and her father’s belongings remain, and what has been sold off: the telescopes, their apparatus, books and medicines; Mother’s kimonos and jewellery… It is all her stepmother’s property now, to sell to the highest bidder.

Just like she sold me, thinks Orito, feeling anger in her stomach…

… until she hears Yayoi, next door: vomiting; groaning; and vomiting again.

Orito struggles out of bed and puts on her padded over-kimono.

She ties her headscarf over her burn and hurries into the passageway.

I am no longer daughter, she thinks, but I am still a midwife…

… Where was I going? Orito stands in the musty corridor partitioned from the Cloisters by the rows of sliding wooden screens. Daylight enters through a lattice carved along the top. She shivers and she sees her breath, knowing she was going somewhere, but where? Forgetfulness is another trick of Suzaku’s Solace. She looks around for clues. The night lamp at the corner by the privy is extinguished. Orito places her palm on the wooden screen, stained dark by countless winters. She pushes, and the screen yields a stubborn inch. Through the gap she sees icicles, hanging from the Cloister’s eaves.

An old pine’s branches sag under snow; snow encrusts the seated stones.

A film of ice covers Square Pond. Bare Peak is streaked by veins of snow.

Sister Kiritsubo emerges from behind the pine’s trunk, walking along the Cloisters opposite, trailing her withered arm’s fused fingers along the wooden screen. She circumnavigates the courtyard one hundred and eight times. Upon reaching the gap, she says, ‘Sister is up early this morning.’

Orito has nothing to say to Sister Kiritsubo.

Third Sister Umegae approaches up the inner corridor. ‘This is just the beginning of the Kyôga winter, Newest Sister.’ In the snow-light, Umegae’s dappled stains are berry-purple. ‘A Gift in your womb is like a warm stone in your pocket.’

Orito knows Umegae says this to frighten her. It works.

The stolen midwife hears the noise of vomiting and remembers, Yayoi…

The sixteen-year-old woman bends over a wooden bucket. Gastric fluid dangles from her lips and a slop of fresh vomit is pumped out. Orito breaks the ice on the water-bowl with a ladle and carries it to her. Yayoi, glassy-eyed, nods at her visitor to say, The worst is over. Orito wipes Yayoi’s mouth with a square of paper and gives her a cup of the numbingly cold water. ‘Most of it,’ Yayoi hides her fox’s ears with her headband, ‘went into the bucket this morning, at least.’

‘Practice,’ Orito wipes the splashes of vomit, ‘does make perfect, then.’

Yayoi dabs her eyes with her sleeve. ‘Why am I still sick so often, Sister?’

‘The vomiting can sometimes continue right up to the birth…’

‘Last time, I yearned for dango candy; this time, even the thought of it…’

‘Each pregnancy is different. Now lie down for a little while.’

Yayoi lies back, puts her hands on her bulge, and withdraws into concern.

Orito reads her thoughts. ‘You still feel your baby kicking, don’t you?’

‘Yes. My Gift…’ she pats her belly ‘… is happy when he hears you… but… but last year Sister Hotaru was vomiting late into her fifth month and then miscarried. The Gift had died several weeks before. I was there and the stench was…’

‘Sister Hotaru had not, then, felt the child kick for several weeks?’

Yayoi is both reluctant and eager to agree. ‘I… suppose not.’

‘Yet yours is kicking, so what conclusions can you draw?’

Yayoi frowns, allows Orito’s logic to pacify her and cheers up. ‘I bless the Goddess for bringing you here.’

Enomoto bought me, Orito bites her tongue, my stepmother sold me…

She begins rubbing goat fat into Yayoi’s distended belly.

… and I curse them both, and shall tell them at the next opportunity.

Here is a kick, below Yayoi’s inverted navel; below the lowest rib, a thump…

… adjacent to the sternum, a kick; over to the left, another stirring.

‘There is a chance,’ Orito decides to tell Yayoi, ‘you are carrying twins.’

Yayoi is worldly enough to know the dangers. ‘How sure are you?’

‘Reasonably sure; and it would explain the prolonged vomiting.’

‘Sister Hatsune had twins at her second Gifting. She climbed two ranks with one labour. If the Goddess blessed me with twins-’

‘What can that lump of wood,’ Orito snaps, ‘know about human pain?’

‘Please, Sister!’ Yayoi begs, afraid. ‘It’s like insulting your own mother!’

Here come fresh cramps in Orito’s intestines; here is the breathlessness.

‘You see, Sister? She can hear. Say you’re sorry, Sister, and she’ll stop it.’

The more Solace my body absorbs, Orito knows, the more it needs.

She takes Yayoi’s foul-smelling pail around the Cloisters to the slop barrow.

Crows perch along the ridge of the steep roof, eyeing the prisoner.

‘Of all the women you could acquire,’ she would ask Enomoto, ‘why rob me of my life?’

But in fifty days the Abbot of Shiranui has not once visited his Shrine.

‘In time,’ Abbess Izu answers all her questions and entreaties, ‘in time.’

In the kitchen, Sister Asagao is stirring soup over a huffing fire. Asagao’s disfigurement is one of the more arresting in the House: her lips are fused into a circle that also deforms her speech. Her friend Sadaie was born with a misshapen skull, giving her head a feline shape that makes her eyes appear unnaturally large. When she sees Orito she stops speaking in mid-sentence.

Why do those two watch me, Orito wonders, like squirrels watch a hungry cat?

Their faces inform her that she is uttering her thoughts aloud again.

This is another mortifying trick of Solace and the House.

‘Sister Yayoi is sick,’ says Orito. ‘I wish to take her a bowl of tea. Please.’

Sadaie indicates the kettle with her eyes: one is brown, one is grey.

Beneath her gown, Sadaie’s own pregnancy is becoming visible.

It’s a girl, thinks the doctor’s daughter, pouring the bitter brew.

When Acolyte Zanô’s stuffed-nose shout rings out, ‘Gates opening, Sisters!’, Orito hurries to a point in the inner corridor midway between Abbess Izu’s and Housekeeper Satsuki’s rooms and slides open the wooden screen. From this position, just once, in her first week here, she saw through both sets of gates into the Precincts and glimpsed steps, a cluster of maples, a blue-cloaked master and an acolyte in undyed hemp…

… but this morning, as usual, the acolyte on sentry-duty is more careful. Orito sees nothing but the closed outer gates, and a pair of acolytes bring in the day’s provisions by handcart.

Sister Sawarabi swoops from the State Room. ‘Acolyte Chûai! Acolyte Maboroshi! This snow hasn’t frozen your bones, I hope? Master Genmu’s a heartless one, starving his young mustangs into skeletons.’

‘We find ways,’ Maboroshi flirts back, ‘to keep warm, Ninth Sister.’

‘Oh, but how can I forget?’ Sawarabi brushes her middle breast with her fingertips. ‘Isn’t Jiritsu provisioning us this week, that shameless slug-a-bed?’

‘The acolyte,’ Maboroshi’s levity vanishes, ‘has fallen into sickness.’

‘My, my. Sickness, you say. Not just… early-winter sneezes?’

‘His condition,’ Maboroshi and Chûai begin carrying supplies into the kitchen, ‘is grave, it seems.’

‘We hope,’ cleft-lipped Sister Hotaru appears from the State Room, ‘that poor Acolyte Jiritsu is not in danger of death?’

‘His condition is grave.’ Maboroshi is terse. ‘We must prepare for the worst.’

‘Well, the Newest Sister was a famous doctor’s daughter, in her previous life, so Master Suzaku could do worse than ask for her. She’d come, and gladly, because…’ Sawarabi cups her mouth to her hand and calls across the courtyard to Orito’s hiding-place ‘… she’d die to see the Precincts, so as to plan her escape, wouldn’t you, Sister Orito?’

Blushing, the exposed observer beats a tearful retreat to her cell.

All the Sisters except Yayoi, Abbess Izu and Housekeeper Satsuki kneel at the low table in the Long Room. The doors to the Prayer Room, where the gold-leafed statue of the pregnant Goddess is housed, are open. The Goddess watches the Sisters over the head of Abbess Izu, who strikes her tubular gong. The Sutra of Gratitude begins.

‘To Abbot Enomoto-no-kami,’ the women chorus, ‘our spiritual guide…’

Orito pictures herself spitting on the illustrious colleague of her late father.

‘… whose sagacity guides the Shrine of Mount Shiranui…’

Abbess Izu and Housekeeper Satsuki notice Orito’s motionless lips.

‘… we, the Daughters of Izanazô render the gratitude of the nurtured child.’

It is a passive, futile protest but Orito lacks the means of more active dissent.

‘To Abbot Genmu-no-kami, whose wisdom protects the House of Sisters…’

Orito glares at Housekeeper Satsuki, who looks away, embarrassed.

‘… we, the Daughters of Izanazô render the gratitude of the justly-governed.’

Orito glares at Abbess Izu, who absorbs her defiance, kindly.

‘To the Goddess of Shiranui, Fountainhead of Life and Mother of Gifts…’

Orito looks over the heads of the sisters opposite to the hanging scrolls.

‘… we, the Sisters of Shiranui render the fruits of our wombs…’

The scrolls display seasonal paintings and quotations from Shintô texts.

‘… so that fertility cascades over Kyôga, so famine and drought are banished…’

The centre shows the Sisters’ precedence, ranked by numbers of births.

Exactly like, Orito thinks with disgust, a stable of sumo-wrestlers.

‘… so that the wheel of life shall turn through eternity…’

The wooden tablet inscribed ‘Orito’ is on the far right position.

‘… until the last star burns out and the wheel of Time is broken.’

Abbess Izu strikes her gong once to indicate the sutra’s conclusion. Housekeeper Satsuki closes the doors to the Prayer Room while Asagao and Sadaie bring rice and miso soup from the adjacent Kitchen.

When Abbess Izu strikes the gong again, the Sisters begin breakfast.

Speech and eye contact are forbidden, but friends pour one another’s water.

Fourteen mouths – Yayoi is excused today – chew, slurp and swallow.

What fine foods is Stepmother eating today? Hatred churns Orito’s insides.

Every Sister leaves a few grains of rice to feed the spirits of their ancestors.

Orito does the same, reasoning that in this place, any and all allies are needed.

Abbess Izu strikes the tubular gong to indicate the end of the meal. As Sadaie and Asagao clear the dishes, pink-eyed Hashihime asks Abbess Izu about the sick acolyte, Jiritsu.

‘He is being nursed in his cell,’ replies the Abbess. ‘He has a trembling fever.’

Several of the Sisters cover their mouths and murmur in alarm.

Why such pity, Orito burns to ask, for one of your captors?

‘A porter in Kurozane died from the disease: poor Jiritsu may have breathed in the same vapours. Master Suzaku asked us to pray for the acolyte’s recovery.’

Most of the Sisters nod earnestly, and promise to do so.

Abbess Izu then assigns the day’s housekeeping. ‘Sisters Hatsune and Hashihime, continue yesterday’s weaving. Sister Kiritsubo is to sweep the Cloisters; and Sister Umegae, twist the flax in the storeroom into twine, with Sisters Minori and Yûgiri. At the Hour of the Horse, go to the Great Shrine to polish the floor. Sister Yûgiri may be excused this, if she wishes, on account of her Gift.’

What ugly, twisted words, thinks Orito, for malformed thoughts.

Every head in the room looks at Orito. She spoke aloud again.

‘Sisters Hotaru and Sawarabi,’ continues the Abbess, ‘dust the Prayer Room, then attend to the latrines. Sisters Asagao and Sadaie are on Kitchen duty, of course, so Sister Kagerô and our Newest Sister,’ the crueller eyes turn to Orito, saying, see the fine lady, working like one of her old servants, ‘are to work in the Laundry. If Sister Yayoi is feeling better, she may join them.’

The Laundry, a long annex to the Kitchen, has two hearths to heat water, a pair of large tubs for washing linen, and a rack of bamboo poles where laundry is hung. Orito and Kagerô carry buckets of water from the pool in the Courtyard. To fill each tub costs forty or fifty trips and the two do not talk. At first the samurai’s daughter was exhausted by the work, but now her legs and arms are tougher, and the blisters on her palms are covered with calloused skin. Yayoi tends the fires to heat the water.

‘Soon,’ Fat Rat balances on the slop barrow, ‘your belly shall look like hers.’

‘I shan’t let the dogs touch me,’ mutters Orito. ‘I shan’t be here.’

‘Your body isn’t yours any more.’ Fat Rat smirks. ‘It’s the Goddess’s.

Orito loses her footing on the kitchen step and spills the bucket of water.

‘I don’t know how,’ says Kagerô, coolly, ‘we ever coped without you.’

‘The floor needed a good wash, anyway.’ Yayoi helps Orito mop the spillage.

When the water is warm enough, Yayoi stirs in the blankets and nightshirts. With wooden tongs, Orito transfers them, dripping and heavy, on to the laundry vice, a slanted table with a hinged door that Kagerô closes to squeeze out the water from the linen. Kagerô then hangs the damp laundry on the bamboo poles. Through the Kitchen door, Sadaie is telling Yayoi about last night’s dream. ‘There was a knocking at the gate. I left my room… it was summer – but it didn’t feel like summer, or night, or day… The House was deserted. Still, the knocking went on, so I asked, “Who is it?” And a man’s voice replied, “It’s me, it’s Iwai.” ’

‘Sister Sadaie was delivered of her first Gift,’ Yayoi tells Orito, ‘last year.’

‘Born on the Fifth Day of the Fifth Month,’ says Sadaie, ‘the Day of Boys.’

The date makes the women think of carp-streamers and festive innocence.

‘So Abbot Genmu,’ Sadaie continues, ‘named him Iwai, as in “Celebration”.’

‘A brewer’s family in Takamatsu,’ Yayoi says, ‘called Takaishi adopted him.’

Orito is hidden by a cloud of steam. ‘So I understand.’

Asagao says, ‘Phut you uur spheaking a’out your drean, Sister…’

‘Well,’ Sadaie scrubs at a crust of burnt-on rice, ‘I was surprised that Iwai had grown up so quickly, and worried that he’d be in trouble for breaking the Rule that bans Gifts from Mount Shiranui. But,’ she looks in the direction of the Prayer Room and lowers her voice, ‘I had to unbolt the Inner Gate.’

‘The ’olt,’ Asagao asks, ‘’os on the inside oph the Inner Gate, you say.’

‘Yes, it was. It didn’t occur to me at the time. So the gate opened-’

Yayoi provides a cry of impatience. ‘What did you see, Sister?’

‘Dry leaves. No Gift, no Iwai, just dry leaves. The wind carried them away.’

‘Now that,’ Kagerô puts her weight on the vice’s handle, ‘is an ill omen.’

Sadaie is unnerved by Kagerô’s certainty. ‘Do you really think so, Sister?’

‘How could your Gift turning into dead leaves be a good omen?’

‘Sister Kagerô,’ Yayoi stirs the cauldron, ‘you’ll upset Sadaie.’

‘Just speaking the truth,’ Kagerô squeezes out the water, ‘as I see it.’

‘Could you tell,’ Asagao asks Sadaie, ‘I’ai’s phather phon his phoice?’

‘That’s it,’ says Yayoi. ‘Your dream was a clue about Iwai’s father.’

Even Kagerô shows interest in the theory: ‘Which monks were your Engifters?’

Housekeeper Satsuki enters the Laundry carrying a new box of soap-nuts.

The rarefied sunset turns the snow-veined Bare Peak a bloodied fish pink and the evening star is as sharp as a needle. Smoke and smells of cooking leak from the Kitchen. With the exception of the week’s two cooks, the women’s time is their own until Master Suzaku’s arrival prior to supper. Orito embarks on her anti-clockwise walk around the Cloisters to distract her body from its clamorous longing for her Solace. Several Sisters are gathered in the Long Room, whitening one another’s faces or blackening their teeth. Yayoi is resting in her cell. Blind Sister Minori is teaching a koto arrangement of ‘Eight Miles Through a Mountain Pass’ to Sadaie. Umegae, Hashihime and Kagerô are also taking exercise, clockwise, around the Cloisters. Orito is obliged to stand aside as they pass. For the thousandth time since her kidnapping, Orito wishes she had the means to write. Unauthorised letters to the outside world, she knows, are forbidden, and she would burn anything she wrote for fear of her thoughts being exposed. But an ink-brush, she thinks, is a skeleton key for a prisoner’s mind. Abbess Izu has promised to present her with a writing set after her first Gifting is confirmed.

How could I endure that act, Orito shudders, and live afterwards?

When she turns the next corner, Bare Peak is no longer pink but grey.

She considers the twelve women in the House who do endure it.

She thinks about the last Newest Sister who hanged herself.

‘Venus,’ Orito’s father once told her, ‘follows a clockwise orbit. All her sister and brother planets circle the sun in an anti-clockwise manner…’

… but the memory of her father is chased away by jeering ifs.

Umegae, Hashihime and Kagerô form a shuffling wall of padded kimonos.

If Enomoto had never seen me, or chosen to add me to his collection…

Orito hears the chop chop chop of knives in the Kitchen.

If Stepmother was as compassionate a woman as she once pretended…

Orito must press herself against the wooden screen to let them pass.

If Enomoto hadn’t guaranteed Father’s loans with the money-lenders…

‘Some of us are so well-bred,’ Kagerô remarks, ‘they think rice grows on trees.’

Or if Jacob de Zoet had known I was at Dejima Land-Gate, on my last day…

The three women drift by, hems traipsing along the wooden planks.

A Dutch alphabet V of geese crosses the sky; a forest monkey shrieks.

Better a Dejima wife, Orito thinks, protected by a foreigner’s money…

A mountain bird on the old pine sings with intricate stitches.

… than what happens to me in the Engifting Week, if I don’t escape.

The walled stream enters and leaves the courtyard under the raised Cloister floor, feeding the pool. Orito presses herself against the wooden screen.

‘She supposes,’ says Hashihime, ‘a magic cloud shall whisk her away…’

Stars pollinate the banks of Heaven’s River, germinate and sprout.

Europeans, Orito remembers, call it the ‘Milky Way’. Her soft-spoken father is back. ‘Here is Umihebi, the Sea Snake, there Tokei, the Clock; over here, Ite, the Archer…’ she can smell his warm smell ‘… and above, Ranshinban, the Compass…’

The bolt of the inner gate screeches open: ‘Opening!’

Every Sister hears. Every Sister thinks, Master Suzaku.

The Sisters gather in the Long Room, wearing their finest clothes, save for Sadaie and Asagao who are still preparing supper, and Orito, who owns only the work-kimono in which she was abducted, a warm quilted hakata jacket and a couple of headscarves. Even lower-ranked Sisters like Yayoi already have a choice of two or three kimonos of fair quality – one for every child born – with simple necklaces and bamboo hair-combs. Senior Sisters, like Hatsune and Hashihime, have acquired, over the years, as rich a wardrobe as that of a high-ranking merchant wife.

Her hunger for Solace is now an incessant pounding, but Orito also has the longest wait: one by one, in order of the List of Precedence, the Sisters are summoned to the Square Room where Suzaku holds his consultations and administers his potions. Suzaku spends two or three minutes with each patient; for some Sisters, the minutiae of their ailments and the master’s thoughts on the same are a fascination second only to the New Year Letters. First Sister Hatsune returns from her consultation with the news that Acolyte Jiritsu’s fever is worsening, and Master Suzaku doubts he shall survive the night.

Most of the Sisters express shock and dismay.

‘Our masters and acolytes,’ swears Hatsune, ‘are so very rarely ill…’

Orito catches herself wondering what febrifuges have been administered, before thinking, He is no concern of mine.

The women swap memories of Jiritsu using the past tense.

Sooner than expected, Yayoi is touching her shoulder. ‘Your turn.’

‘How do we find the Newest Sister this evening?’ Master Suzaku gives the impression of a man perpetually on the brink of laughter that never comes. The effect is sinister. Abbess Izu occupies one corner and an acolyte another.

Orito answers her usual answer: ‘Alive, as you see.’

‘Do we know’ – Suzaku indicates the young man – ‘Acolyte Chûai?’

Kagerô and the meaner Sisters nickname Chûai ‘The Swollen Toad.’

‘Certainly not.’ Orito does not look at the acolyte.

‘The first snow,’ Suzaku clicks his tongue, ‘is not sapping our constitution?’

Don’t plead for Solace. She says, ‘No.’ He loves you to plead.

‘We have no symptoms to report, then? No aches or bleedings?’

The world, she guesses, is his own vast private joke. ‘Nothing.’

‘Or constipation? Diarrhoea? Haemorrhoids? Thrush? Migraines?’

‘What I am suffering from,’ Orito is goaded into saying, ‘is incarceration.’

Suzaku smiles at Acolyte Chûai and the Abbess. ‘Our ties to the World Below cut us, like wire. Sever them, and be as happy as your dear Sisters.’

‘My “dear Sisters” were rescued from brothels and freak-shows and perhaps, for them, life here is better. I lost more, and Enomoto’ – Abbess Izu and Acolyte Chûai flinch to hear the Abbot named with such contempt – ‘hasn’t even faced me since he bought me; and don’t dare’ – Orito stops herself pointing at Suzaku like an angry Dutchman – ‘spout your platitudes about Destiny and Divine Balance. Just give me my Solace. Please. The women want their supper.’

‘It scarcely behoves the Newest Sister,’ begins the Abbess, ‘to address-’

Suzaku interrupts her with a respectful hand. ‘Let us show her a little indulgence, Abbess, even if undeserved. Contrariness, often, is best tamed by kindness.’ The monk decants a muddy liquid into a thimble-sized stone cup.

See how painstakingly he moves, she thinks, to sharpen your hunger…

Orito stops her hand snatching the cup from the proffered tray.

She turns away to conceal with her sleeve the vulgar act of drinking.

‘Once you are Engifted,’ promises Suzaku, ‘your sense of belonging shall grow, too…’

Never, Orito thinks, never. Her tongue absorbs the oily fluid…

… and her blood pumps louder, her arteries widen, and well-being soothes her joints.

‘The Goddess didn’t choose you,’ says Abbess Izu. ‘You chose the Goddess.’

Warm snowflakes settle over Orito’s skin, whispering as they melt.

Every evening, the doctor’s daughter wants to ask Suzaku about the ingredients of Solace. Every evening, she stops herself. The question, she knows, would initiate a conversation, and conversation is a step towards acceptance…

‘What’s good for the body,’ Suzaku tells Orito’s mouth, ‘is good for the soul.’

Dinner is a festive occasion compared to Breakfast. After a brief blessing, Housekeeper Satsuki and the Sisters eat tofu in tempura batter, fried with garlic and rolled in sesame; pickled eggplant; pilchards and white rice. Even the haughtiest Sisters remember their commoners’ origins when such a fine daily diet could only be dreamt of, and they relish each morsel. The Abbess has gone with Master Suzaku to dine with Master Genmu, so the mood in the Long Room is leisurely. When the table is cleared and the dishes and chopsticks washed, the Sisters smoke pipes around the table, swap stories, play mah jong, reread – or have reread – their New Year Letters, and listen to Hatsune play her koto. The effects of Solace wear out a little earlier every night, Orito notices. She leaves, as usual, without saying good-night. Wait till she’s been Engifted, she feels the women think. Wait till her belly is as big as a boulder, and she needs us to help her scrub, fetch and carry.

Back in her cell, Orito finds that someone has lit her fire. Yayoi.

Umegae’s spite or Kagerô’s hostility encourage her to reject the House.

But Yayoi’s kindness, she fears, makes life here more tolerable…

… and ushers closer the day when Mount Shiranui becomes her home.

Who knows, she wonders, that Yayoi is not acting under Genmu’s orders?

Orito, troubled and shivering in the icy air, wipes herself with a cloth.

Under her blankets, she lies on her side, gazing into the fire’s garden.

The persimmon’s branches sag with ripe fruit. They glow in the dusk.

An eyelash in the sky grows into a heron; the gawky bird descends…

Its eyes are green and its hair is red; Orito is afraid of his clumsy beak.

The heron says, in Dutch, of course, You are beautiful.

Orito wishes neither to encourage him, nor wound his feelings.

She is in the courtyard of the House of Sisters: she hears Yayoi groan.

Dead leaves fly like bats; bats fly like dead leaves.

How can I escape? Distraught, she replies to nobody. The gate is locked.

Since when, mocks the moon-grey cat, do cats need keys?

There is no time, she is knotted by exasperation, to speak in riddles.

First, persuade them, says the cat, that you are happy here.

Why, she asks, should I ever give them that false satisfaction?

Because only then, answers the cat, shall they stop watching you.

XVI The Shirandô Academy at the Ôtsuki Residence in Nagasaki

Sunset on the Twenty-fourth Day of the Tenth Month

‘I conclude,’ Yoshida Hayato, the still-youthful author of an erudite monograph on the true age of the Earth, surveys his audience of eighty or ninety scholars, ‘this widely-held belief that Japan is an impregnable fortress is a pernicious delusion. Honourable Academicians, we are a ramshackle farmhouse with crumbling walls, a collapsing roof and covetous neighbours.’ Yoshida is succumbing to a bone disease, and projecting his voice over the large sixty-mat hall drains him. ‘To our north-west, a morning’s voyage from Tsushima Island, live the vainglorious Koreans. Who shall forget those provocative banners their last embassy flaunted? “Inspectorate of Dominions” and “We Are Purity”, implying, naturally, “You Are Not”!’

Some of the scholars grizzle in agreement.

‘North-east lies the vast domain of Ezo, home to the savage Ainu, but also to Russians who map our coastlines and claim Karafuto. They call it Sakhalin. It is a mere twelve years since a Frenchman…’ Yoshida prepares his lips ‘… La Pérouse, named the straits between Ezo and Karafuto after himself! Would the French tolerate the Yoshida Straits off their coast?’ The point is well made and well received. ‘The recent incursions by Captain Benyowsky and Captain Laxman warn us of a near future when straying Europeans no longer request provisions, but demand trade, quays and warehouses, fortified ports, unequal treaties. Colonies shall take root like thistles and weeds. Then, we shall understand that our “impregnable fortress” was a placebo and nothing more; that our seas are no “impassable moat” but, as my far-sighted colleague Hayashi Shihei wrote, “an ocean-road without frontiers which links China, Holland and Edo’s Nihonbashi Bridge ”.’

Some in the audience nod in agreement; others look concerned.

Hayashi Shihei, Ogawa Uzaemon remembers, died under house arrest for his writings.

‘My lecture is finished.’ Yoshida bows. ‘I thank the Shirandô for its gracious attention.’

Ôtsuki Monjurô, the Academy’s bearded Director, hesitates to ask for questions, but Dr Maeno clears his well-respected throat and raises his fan. ‘First, I wish to thank Yoshida-san for his stimulating thoughts. Second, I wish to ask how best the threats he enumerates can be countered?’

Yoshida takes a sip of warm water and a deep breath.

A vague and evasive answer, thinks Uzaemon, would be safest.

‘By the creation of a Japanese Navy, by the foundation of two large shipyards, and by the establishment of an academy where foreign instructors would train Japanese shipwrights, armourers, gunsmiths, officers and sailors.’

The audience was unprepared for the audacity of Yoshida’s vision.

Awatsu, an algebraist, is the first to recover. ‘Is that all?’

Yoshida smiles at Awatsu’s irony. ‘Emphatically not. We need a national army based on the French model; an armoury to produce the newest Prussian rifles; and an overseas empire. To avoid becoming a European colony, we need colonies of our own.’

‘But what Yoshida-san proposes,’ objects Dr Maeno, ‘would require…’

A radical new government, thinks Uzaemon, and a radical new Japan.

A chemist unknown to Uzaemon suggests, ‘A trade mission to Batavia?’

Yoshida shakes his head. ‘ Batavia is a ditch, and whatever the Dutch tell us, Holland is a pawn. France, England, Prussia or the energetic United States must be our teachers. Two hundred bright, able-bodied scholars – a criterion that,’ he smiles sadly, ‘excludes me – must be sent to these countries to study the arts of industry. Upon their return, let them spread their knowledge, freely, to the ablest minds of all classes so we may set about constructing a true “Impregnable Fortress”.’

‘But,’ Haga the ape-nosed druggist raises the obvious objection, ‘the Separate Nation decree forbids any subject to leave Japan, on pain of death.’

Not even Yoshida Hayato dare suggest, thinks Uzaemon, the decree be annulled.

‘Hence the decree,’ Yoshida Hayato is outwardly calm, ‘must be annulled.’

The statement provokes fearful objections, and some nervous assent.

Should someone not save him, Interpreter Arashiyama glances at Uzaemon, from himself?

He’s dying, the young interpreter thinks. The choice is his.

‘Yoshida-san,’ calls out Haga the druggist, ‘is naysaying the Third Shogun…’

‘… who is not a debating partner,’ the chemist agrees, ‘but a deity!’

‘Yoshida-sama,’ counters Ômori the Dutch-style painter, ‘is a visionary patriot and he should be heard!’

‘Our society of scholars,’ Haga stands up, ‘debates natural philosophy-’

‘- and not matters of state,’ agrees an Edo metallurgist, ‘so-’

‘Nothing is outside philosophy,’ claims Ômori, ‘unless fear says it is.’

‘So whoever disagrees with you,’ asks Haga, ‘is, therefore, a coward?’

‘The Third Shogun closed the country to prevent Christian rebellions,’ argues Aodo the historian, ‘but its result was to pickle Japan in a specimen jar!’

Clamour breaks out, and Director Ôtsuki strikes two sticks together for order.

When relative quietness is re-established, Yoshida wins permission to address his detractors. ‘The Separate Nation decree was a necessary measure, in the day of the Third Shogun. But new machines of power are shaping the world. What we learn from Dutch reports and Chinese sources is a grave warning. Peoples who do not acquire these machines of power are, at best, subjugated, like the Indians. At worst, like the natives of Van Diemen’s Land, they are exterminated.’

‘Yoshida-san’s loyalty,’ concedes Haga, ‘is beyond question. What I doubt is the likelihood of an armada of European warships sailing into Edo or Nagasaki. You argue for revolutionary changes to our state, but why? To counter a phantom. To address a hypothetical “what if”?’

‘The present is a battleground,’ Yoshida straightens his spine as best he can, ‘where rival what-ifs compete to become the future “what is”. How does one what-if prevail over its adversaries? The answer -’ the sick man coughs ‘- the answer, “Military and political power, of course!” is a postponement, for what is it that directs the minds of the powerful? The answer is “Belief”. Beliefs that are ignoble or idealistic; democratic or Confucian; Occidental or Oriental; timid or bold; clear-sighted or delusional. Power is informed by Belief that this path, and not another, must be followed. What, then, or where, is the womb of Belief? What, or where, is the crucible of ideology? Academicians of the Shirandô, I put it to you that we are one such crucible. We are one such womb.’

During the first interval the lanterns are lit, braziers are stoked against the cold and conversations stew and bubble. Interpreters Uzaemon, Arashiyama and Goto Shinpachi sit with five or six others. The algebraist Awatsu apologises for disturbing Uzaemon, ‘but I hoped to hear news of an improvement in your father’s health…’

‘He is still bedbound,’ replies Uzaemon, ‘but finds ways to wield his will.’

Those who know Ogawa the Elder of the First Rank smile downwards.

‘What ails the gentleman?’ Yanaoka is a sake-blushed doctor from Kumamoto.

‘Dr Maeno believes Father suffers from a cancer of the-’

‘A notoriously difficult diagnosis! Let us hold a consultation tomorrow.’

‘Dr Yanaoka is kind, but Father is particular about who-’

‘Come, now, I have known your honourable father for twenty years.’

Yes, thinks Uzaemon, and he has despised you for forty.

‘ “Too many captains,” ’ Awatsu quotes, ‘ “sail the ship up the mountain.” Dr Maeno is no doubt doing an excellent job. I shall offer prayers for his swift recovery.’

The others promise to do the same, and Uzaemon expresses due gratitude.

‘Another missing face,’ Yanaoka mentions, ‘is Dr Aibagawa’s burnt daughter.’

‘You didn’t hear, then,’ says Interpreter Arashiyama, ‘about her happy ending? The late doctor’s finances were found to be in so parlous a state, there was talk of the widow losing the house. When Lord Abbot Enomoto was apprised of the family’s hardships, he not only paid every last sen of the debts – he found space for the daughter in his convent on Mount Shiranui.’

‘Why is that a “happy ending”?’ Uzaemon regrets opening his mouth already.

‘A full rice bowl every day,’ says Ozono, the squat chemist, ‘for reciting a few sutras? For a woman with such an unmarriageable blemish this is a jubilant ending! Oh, I know her father encouraged her to play the scholar, but one must sympathise with the widow. What business has a samurai daughter to be dabbling with birth and mingling with sweaty Dutchmen?’

Uzaemon orders himself to say nothing.

Banda is an earthy engineer from marshy Sendai. ‘During my stay in Isahaya, I overheard some strange rumours about Abbot Enomoto’s shrine.’

‘Without you want,’ Awatsu warns Banda cheerfully, ‘to accuse a close friend of Matsudaira Sadanobu and senior Academician of the Shirandô of impropriety, then you should ignore any rumours whatsoever about Lord Enomoto’s Shrine. The monks live their lives as monks and the nuns live their lives as nuns.’

Uzaemon wants to hear Banda’s rumours, but he doesn’t want to hear.

‘Where is Abbot Enomoto tonight, anyway?’ asks Yanaoka.

‘In Miyako,’ says Awatsu, ‘settling some abstruse clerical point.’

‘At his court in Kashima,’ says Arashiyama. ‘Exercising justice, I heard.’

‘I heard he went to the Isle of Tsu,’ says Ozono, ‘to meet Korean traders.’

The door slides opens: a welcoming hubbub sweeps through the hall.

Dr Marinus and Sugita Genpaku, one of the most celebrated living Dutch scholars, stand at the threshold. Half-lame Marinus leans on his stick; elderly Sugita leans on a house-boy. The pair enjoys a verbal tussle over who should enter first. They settle the matter by a game of Scissors, Paper, Stone. Marinus wins, but uses his victory to insist that Sugita takes precedence.

‘But look,’ says Yanaoka, his neck craning, ‘at that foreigner’s hair!’

Ogawa Uzaemon sees Jacob de Zoet hit the crown of his head on the door-frame.

‘Just thirty years ago,’ Sugita Genpaku sits on the lecturer’s low plinth, ‘there were just three of us Dutch scholars in all Japan and a single book: this old man you see before you, Dr Nakagawa Jun’an and my dear friend Dr Maeno, whose more recent discoveries,’ Sugita’s fingers loop his stringy white beard, ‘surely include the elixir of immortality, for he has aged not a day.’

Dr Maeno shakes his head with embarrassment and delight.

‘The book,’ Sugita tilts his head, ‘was Kulmus’s Tafel Anatomia, printed in Holland. This I had encountered on my very first visit to Nagasaki. I desired it with my whole being, but I could no more pay the asking price than swim to the moon. My clan purchased it on my behalf and, in so doing, determined my fate.’ Sugita pauses and listens with professional interest to Interpreter Shizuki translate his words for Marinus and de Zoet.

Uzaemon has avoided Dejima since the Shenandoah departed, and avoids de Zoet’s eye now. His guilt about Orito is knotted up with the Dutchman in ways Uzaemon cannot disentangle.

‘Maeno and I took the Tafel Anatomia to Edo ’s execution ground,’ continues Sugita, ‘where a prisoner named Old Mother Tea had been sentenced to an hour-long strangulation for poisoning her husband.’ Shizuki stumbles on ‘strangulation’: he mimes the action. ‘We struck a bargain. In return for a painless beheading, she gave us permission to conduct the first medical dissection in the history of Japan on her body, and signed an oath not to haunt us in revenge… Upon comparing the subject’s inner organs with the illustrations in the book, we saw, to our astonishment, the Chinese sources that dominated our learning were grossly inaccurate. There were no “ears of the lungs”; no “seven lobes of the kidneys”, and the intestines differed markedly from the descriptions by the Ancient Sages…’

Sugita waits for Shizuki’s translation to catch up.

De Zoet looks gaunter, Uzaemon thinks, than he did in the autumn.

‘My Tafel Anatomia, however, corresponded with our dissected body so precisely that Drs Maeno, Nakagawa and myself were of one mind: European medicine surpasses the Chinese. To say so nowadays, with Dutch medical schools in every city, is a self-evident truth. Thirty years ago, such an opinion was patricidal. Yet, with just a few hundred Dutch words between us, we resolved to translate Tafel Anatomia into Japanese. A few of you may have heard of our Kaitai Shinsho?’

His audience savours the understatement.

Shizuki renders ‘patricidal’ into Dutch as ‘great crime’.

‘Our task was formidable.’ Sugita Genpaku straightens his tufted white eyebrows. ‘Hours were spent in pursuit of single words, often to discover that no Japanese equivalent existed. We created words that our race shall use,’ the old man is not immune to vanity, ‘for all eternity. By dint of example, I devised “shinkei” for the Dutch “nerve”, over a dinner of oysters. We were, to quote the proverb, “The one dog who barks at nothing answered by a thousand dogs barking at something…” ’

During the final interval, Uzaemon hides in the not-quite-winter garden Courtyard from a possible encounter with de Zoet. An unearthly wail from the Hall is accompanied by appalled laughter: Director Ôtsuki is demonstrating his bagpipes, acquired earlier this year from Arie Grote. Uzaemon sits under a giant magnolia. The sky is starless and the young man’s mind recalls the afternoon a year and a half ago when he asked his father for his views on Aibagawa Orito as a possible bride. ‘Dr Aibagawa’s a notable scholar, but not so notable as his debts, I am informed. Worse yet, what if that singed face of his daughter is passed on to my grandsons? The answer must be no. If you and the daughter have exchanged any sentiments,’ his father’s expression suggested a bad smell, ‘disown them, without delay.’ Uzaemon begged his father at least to consider an engagement a little longer, but Ogawa the Elder wrote an affronted letter to Orito’s father. The servant returned with a short note from the doctor, apologising for the inconvenience his over-indulged daughter had caused, and assuring him that the matter was closed. That grimmest of days ended with Uzaemon receiving one last secret letter from Orito, and the shortest of their clandestine correspondence. ‘I could never cause your father’, it ended, ‘to regret adopting you…’

Uzaemon’s parents were prompted by the ‘Aibagawa Incident’ into finding their son a wife. A go-between knew of a low-ranking but wealthy family in Karatsu who had thriving business interests in dyes and was eager for a son-in-law with access to sappanwood entering Dejima. Omiai interviews were held and Uzaemon was informed by his father that the girl would be an acceptable Ogawa wife. They were married on New Year’s Day, at an hour judged to be fortunate by the family’s astrologer. The good fortune, Uzaemon thinks, is yet to reveal itself. His wife endured a second miscarriage a few days ago, a misfortune attributed by his mother and father to ‘wanton carelessness’ and ‘a laxness of spirit’ respectively. Uzaemon’s mother considers it her duty to make her daughter-in-law suffer in the same way she suffered as a young bride in the Ogawa Residence. I pity my wife, Uzaemon concedes, but the meaner part of me cannot forgive her for not being Orito. What Orito must endure on Mount Shiranui, however, Uzaemon can only speculate: isolation, drudgery, cold, grief for her father and the life stolen from her and, surely, resentment at how the scholars of the Shirandô Academy view her captor as a great benefactor. For Uzaemon to interrogate Enomoto, the Shirandô’s most eminent sponsor, about his Shrine’s Newest Sister would be a near-scandalous breach of etiquette. It would imply an accusation of wrongdoing. Yet Mount Shiranui is as shut to enquiries from outside the domain as Japan is closed to the outside world. In the absence of facts about her well-being, Uzaemon’s imagination torments him as much as his conscience. When Dr Aibagawa had seemed close to death, Uzaemon had hoped that by encouraging, or, at least, by not discouraging, Jacob de Zoet’s proposal of temporary marriage to Orito, he might ensure that she would stay on Dejima. He anticipated, in the longer term, a time when de Zoet would leave Japan, or grow tired of his prize, as foreigners usually do, and she would be willing to accept Uzaemon’s patronage as a second wife. ‘Feeble-headed,’ Uzaemon tells the magnolia tree, ‘cock-headed, wrong-headed…’

‘Who’s wrong-headed?’ Arashiyama’s feet crunch on the stones.

‘Yoshida-sama’s provocations. Those were dangerous words.’

Arashiyama hugs himself against the cold. ‘Snow in the mountains, I hear.’

My guilt about Orito shall dog me, Uzaemon fears, for the rest of my life.

‘Ôtsuki-sama sent me to find you,’ says Arashiyama. ‘Dr Marinus is ready, and we are to sing for our supper.’

‘The Ancient Assyrians,’ Marinus sits with his lame leg at an awkward angle, ‘used rounded glass to start fires; Archimedes the Greek, we read, destroyed the Roman fleet of Marcus Aurelius with giant burning-glasses at Syracuse, and the Emperor Nero allegedly employed a lens to correct myopia.’

Uzaemon explains ‘Assyrians’ and inserts ‘the island of’ before ‘ Syracuse ’.

‘The Arab Ibn al-Haytham,’ continues the doctor, ‘whose Latin translators named Alhazen, wrote his Book of Optics eight centuries ago. The Italian Galileo and the Dutchman Lippershey used al-Haytham’s discoveries to invent what we now call microscopes and telescopes.’

Arashiyama confirms the Arabic name and delivers a confident rendering.

‘The lens and its cousin the polished mirror, and their mathematical principles, have evolved a long way through time and space. By virtue of successive advancements, astronomers may now gaze upon a newly discovered planet beyond Saturn, Georgium Sidium, invisible to the naked eye. Zoologists may admire the true portrait of man’s most loyal companion…

… Pulex irritans.’ One of Marinus’s seminarians exhibits the illustration from Hooke’s Micrografia in a slow arc whilst Goto works on the translation. The scholars do not notice his omission of ‘successive advancements’, which Uzaemon can make no sense of either.

De Zoet is watching from the side, just a few paces away. When Uzaemon took his place on the stage, they exchanged a ‘Good evening’, but the tactful Dutchman has detected the interpreter’s reticence and not imposed further. He may have been a worthy husband for Orito. Uzaemon’s generous thought is stained by jealousy and regret.

Marinus peers through the lamp-lit smoke. Uzaemon wonders whether his discourses are prepared in advance or netted from the thick air extemporaneously. ‘Microscopes and telescopes are begat by Science; their use, by Man and, where permitted, by Woman, begets further Science, and Creation’s mysteries are unfolded in modes once undreamt of. In this manner Science broadens, deepens and disseminates itself – and via its invention of printing, its spores and seeds may germinate even within this Cloistered Empire.’

Uzaemon does his best to translate this, but it isn’t easy: surely the Dutch word ‘semen’ cannot be related to this unknown verb ‘disseminate’? Goto Shinpachi anticipates his colleague’s difficulty and suggests ‘distribute’. Uzaemon guesses ‘germinate’ means ‘is accepted’, but is warned by suspicious glances from the Shirandô’s audience: If we don’t understand the speaker, we blame the interpreter.

‘Science moves,’ Marinus scratches his thick neck, ‘year by year, towards a new state of being. Where, in the past, Man was the subject and Science his object, I believe this relationship is reversing. Science itself, gentlemen, is in the early stages of becoming sentient.’

Goto takes a safe gamble on ‘sentience’ meaning ‘watchfulness’, like a sentry. His Japanese rendition is streaked with mysticism, but so is the original.

‘Science, like a general, is identifying its enemies: received wisdom and untested assumption; superstition and quackery; the tyrants’ fear of educated commoners; and, most pernicious of all, man’s fondness for fooling himself. Bacon the Englishman says it well: “The Human Understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolours the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.” Our honourable colleague Mr Takaki may know the passage?’

Arashiyama deals with the word ‘quackery’ by omitting it, censors the line about tyrants and commoners, and turns to the straight-as-a-pole Takaki, a translator of Bacon, who translates the quotation in his querulous voice.

‘Science is still learning how to talk and walk. But the days are coming when Science shall transform what it is to be a Human Being. Academies like the Shirandô, gentlemen, are its nurseries, its schools. Some years ago, a wise American, Benjamin Franklin, marvelled at an air-balloon in flight over London. His companion dismissed the balloon as a bauble, a frivolity, and demanded of Franklin, “Yes, but what use is it?” Franklin replied, “What use is a newborn child?” ’

Uzaemon makes what he thinks is a fair translation until ‘bauble’ and ‘frivolity’: Goto and Arashiyama indicate with apologetic faces that they cannot help. The audience watch him, critically. In a low tone, Jacob de Zoet says, ‘Toy of a child.’ Using this substitute, the anecdote makes sense, and a hundred scholars nod in approval at the Franklin anecdote.

‘Had a man fallen asleep two centuries ago,’ Marinus speculates, ‘and awoken this morning, he should recognise his world unchanged in essence. Ships are still wooden, disease is still rampant. No man may travel faster than a galloping horse, and no man may kill another out of eyeshot. But were the same fellow to fall asleep tonight and sleep for a hundred years, or eighty, or even sixty, on waking he shall not recognise the planet for the transformations wrought upon it by Science.’

Goto assumes ‘rampant’ is ‘deadly’ and must reconstruct the final clause.

Marinus’s attention, meanwhile, has drifted away over the scholars’ heads.

Yoshida Hayato clears his throat to indicate that he has a question.

Ôtsuki Monjurô looks at the still-absent Marinus, then nods his consent.

Yoshida writes Dutch more fluently than many interpreters, but the geographer fears making a mistake in public, so he addresses Goto Shinpachi in Japanese. ‘Please ask Dr Marinus this, Interpreter: if Science is sentient, what are its ultimate desires? Or, to phrase this question another way, when the doctor’s imagined Sleeper awakens in the year 1899, shall the world most closely resemble Paradise or the Inferno?’

Goto’s fluency is slower in the Japanese-to-Dutch headwind, but Marinus is pleased by the question. He rocks gently to and fro. ‘I shan’t know until I see it, Mr Yoshida.’

XVII The Altar Room at the House of Sisters, Mount Shiranui Shrine

The Twenty-sixth Day of the Eleventh Month

Don’t let it be me, Orito prays, don’t let it be me. The Goddess is disrobed for the Annunciation of Engifting: her exposed breasts are ample with milk; and her belly, devoid of a navel, is swollen with a female foetus so fertile, according to Abbess Izu, that the foetus’s own tiny womb encloses a still smaller female foetus, which is, in turn, impregnated with a still smaller daughter… and so on, to infinity. The Abbess watches the nine unEngifted Sisters during the Sutra of Supplication. For ten days, Orito has acted the part of the penitent Sister in hopes of earning access to the Precincts and a quiet escape over the wall, but her hopes have come to nothing. She has dreaded this day since she saw Yayoi’s pregnant belly and understood what it must mean, and now that day is here. Speculation about the Goddess’s choice has been rife. To Orito it has been unbearable. ‘One of the Two has to be the Newest Sister,’ said Umegae, with cruel satisfaction. ‘The Goddess will want Sister Orito to feel at home here as soon as possible.’ Blind Minori, in her eighteenth year here, says that Newest Sisters are Engifted by the fourth month, at the latest, but not always the second. Yayoi suggested that the Goddess may give Kagerô and Minori, neither of whom conceived a Gift last month despite being chosen, another chance, but Orito suspects that Yayoi said so to calm her fears, not because it is true.

The Prayer Room falls silent. The sutra is over.

Don’t let it be me. The waiting is unendurable. Don’t let it be me.

Abbess Izu strikes her tubular gong. The chime rises and falls in waves.

The Sisters press their head against the tatami mat in obeisance.

Like criminals, Orito thinks, waiting for the executioner’s sword.

The Abbess’s ceremonial clothes rustle. ‘Sisters of Mount Shiranui…’

The nine women all keep their foreheads on the floor.

‘The Goddess has instructed Master Genmu that, in the Eleventh Month -’

A fallen icicle shatters on the Cloister walkway and Orito jumps.

‘- in the Eleventh Month of the Eleventh Year of the Kansei Era -’

This is not where I belong, Orito thinks. This is not where I belong.

‘- the two Sisters to be Engifted in her name are Kagerô and Hashihime.’

Orito smothers a groan of relief but cannot quieten her pounding heart.

Won’t you thank me, the Goddess asks Orito, for sparing you this month?

I can’t hear you. Orito is careful to keep her mouth closed. Lump of wood.

Next month, the Goddess laughs like Orito’s stepmother, I promise.

Engiftment Days usher holiday mood into the House of Sisters. Within minutes, Kagerô and Hashihime are being congratulated in the Long Room. Orito is dumbfounded at the sincerity of the other women’s envy. Talk turns to the clothes, scents and oils the Goddess’s choices shall wear to welcome their Engifters. Rice-dumplings and azuki beans sweetened with honey arrive for breakfast; sake and tobacco are sent from Abbot Enomoto’s storehouse. Kagerô’s and Hashihime’s cells are decorated with paper ornaments. Orito feels nauseous at this celebration of obligatory impregnation and is grateful when the sun shows its face and Abbess Izu has her and Sawarabi collect, air and beat the House’s bedding. The straw-filled mattresses are folded over a pole in the Courtyard and, in rapid turns, struck with a bamboo beater: a faint fog of dust and mites hangs in the cold bright air. Sawarabi is a sturdy daughter of peasants from the Kirishima plateau but the doctor’s daughter soon lags behind. Sawarabi notices, and is kind enough to suggest that they have a short rest, and sits on a pile of futons. ‘I hope you aren’t too disappointed that the Goddess overlooked you this month, Newest Sister.’

Orito, still catching her breath, shakes her head.

Across the Cloisters, Asagao and Hotaru are feeding crumbs to a squirrel.

Sawarabi reads others well. ‘Don’t be afraid of Engiftment. You can see for yourself the privileges Yayoi and Yûguri are enjoying: more food, better bedding, charcoal… and now the services of a learned midwife! What princess would be so pampered? The monks are kinder than husbands, much cleaner than brothel customers, and there are no Mothers-in-Law cursing your stupidity for giving birth to daughters but turning into Jealousy Incarnate when you produce a male heir.’

Orito pretends to agree. ‘Yes, Sister. I see that.’

Thawed snow falls from the old pine with a flat thud.

Stop lying, Fat Rat watches from under the Cloisters, and stop fighting.

‘Really, Sister,’ Sawarabi hesitates, ‘compared to what blemished girls suffer…’

The Goddess, Fat Rat stands on its hind legs, is your gentle, patient mother.

‘… down there,’ Sawarabi says, ‘in the World Below, this place is a palace.’

Asagao and Hotaru’s squirrel darts up a Cloister pillar.

Bare Peak is so sharp it might be etched on to glass with a needle.

My burn, Orito cannot add, doesn’t diminish the crime of my abduction.

‘Let’s finish the futons,’ she says, ‘before the others think we’re idling.’

The chores are done by mid-afternoon. A triangle of sunshine still lies over the pool in the Courtyard. In Long Room, Orito helps Housekeeper Satsuki repair nightgowns: needlework, she finds, numbs her longing for Solace. From the Training Ground across the Precincts ebbs the sound of the monks practising with bamboo swords. Charcoal and pine-needles rumble and snap in the brazier. Abbess Izu is seated at the head of the table, stitching a short mantra into one of the hoods worn by the Sisters at their Engiftment. Hashihime and Kagerô, wearing blood-red sashes as a mark of the Goddess’s favour, are applying each other’s face-powder; one of the few objects denied even to the highest-ranked Sisters is a mirror. With ill-concealed malevolence, it is Umegae’s turn to ask Orito whether she has recovered from her disappointment.

‘I am learning,’ Orito manages to say, ‘to submit to the Goddess’s will.’

‘Surely the Goddess,’ Kagerô assures Orito, ‘shall choose you next time.’

‘The Newest Sister,’ observes Blind Minori, ‘sounds happier in her new life.’

‘It certainly took her long enough,’ mutters Umegae, ‘to come to her senses.’

‘Getting used to the House,’ counters Kiritsubo, ‘can take time: remember that poor girl from Goto Island? She sobbed every night for two years.’

Pigeons scuffle and trill in the eaves of the Cloisters.

‘The Sister from Goto found joy in her three healthy Gifts,’ states Abbess Izu.

‘But no joy,’ sighs Umegae, ‘from the fourth one, which killed her.’

‘Let us not disturb the dead,’ the Abbess’s voice is sharp, ‘by digging up misfortunes without reason, Sister.’

Umegae’s maroon skin hides blushes, but she bows in consent and apology.

Other Sisters, Orito suspects, remember her predecessor hanging in her cell.

‘Well,’ says Blind Minori, ‘I, for one, would prefer to ask the Newest Sister what it was that helped her accept the House as her home.’

‘Time,’ Orito threads a needle, ‘and the patience of my Sisters.’

You’re lying, you’re lying, wheezes the kettle, even I hear you’re lying…

The sharper her need for Solace, Orito notices, the worse the House’s tricks.

‘I thank the Goddess every single day,’ Sister Hatsune is restringing her koto, ‘for bringing me to the House.’

‘I thank the Goddess,’ Kagerô is working on Hashihime’s eyebrows, ‘one hundred and eight times before breakfast.’

Abbess Izu says, ‘Sister Orito, the kettle sounds thirsty to me…’

When Orito kneels on the stone slab by the pool to dip the ladle into the ice-cold water, the slanted light creates, just for a moment, a mirror as perfect as a Dutch glass. Orito has not seen her face since she fled her old house in Nagasaki; what she sees shocks her. The face on the pool’s silvered skin is hers, but three or four years older. What about my eyes? They are dull and in retreat. Another trick of the House. She is not so sure. I saw eyes like those in the World Below.

The song of a thrush in the old pine sounds scattered and half forgotten.

What was it, Orito is sinking, I was trying to remember?

Sisters Hotaru and Asagao greet her from the Cloisters.

Orito waves back, notices the ladle still in her hand and remembers her errand. She looks into the water and recognises the eyes of a prostitute she treated in Nagasaki at a bordello owned by a pair of half-Chinese brothers. The girl had syphilis, scrofula, lung-fever and the Nine Sages alone knew what else, but what had destroyed her spirit was enslavement to opium.

‘But Aibagawa-san,’ the girl had implored, ‘I don’t need any other medicine…’

Pretending to accept the Contract of the House, Orito thinks…

The prostitute’s once-beautiful eyes stared out of dark pits.

… is halfway to accepting the Contract of the House.

Orito hears Master Suzaku’s carefree laughter at the gate.

Wanting and needing the drugs take you the rest of the way…

The gate-keeping Acolyte calls out, ‘Inner Gate opening, Sisters!’

… and when it’s been done to you once, why resist any more?

‘Unless you win your will back,’ says the girl in the pool, ‘you’ll turn into the others.’ I shall stop taking Suzaku’s drugs, Orito resolves, from tomorrow.

The stream leaves the pool through mossy grates.

My ‘tomorrow’, she realises, is proof that I must stop today.

‘How do we find our Newest Sister this evening?’ asks Master Suzaku.

Abbess Izu watches from one corner; Acolyte Chûai sits in another.

‘Master Suzaku finds me in excellent health, thank you.’

‘The sky this evening was a sky from the Pure Land, was it not, Newest Sister?’

‘In the World Below, sunsets were never this beautiful.’

Pleased, the man assesses the statement. ‘You were not aggrieved by the Goddess’s judgement this morning?’

I must hide my relief, thinks Orito, and hide that I am hiding it. ‘One learns to accept the Goddess’s judgement, does one not?’

‘You have come on a long journey in a short time, Newest Sister.’

‘Enlightenment can occur, I understand, in a single moment.’

‘Yes. Yes, it does.’ Suzaku looks at his assistant. ‘After many years of striving, Enlightenment transforms a man in a single heartbeat. Master Genmu is so pleased with your improved spirits that he referred to it in a letter to the Lord Abbot.’

He is watching me, Orito suspects, for evidence of annoyance.

‘I am unworthy,’ says the Newest Sister, ‘of Lord Enomoto’s attention.’

‘Be assured, our Lord Abbot takes a fatherly interest in all our Sisters.’

The word ‘fatherly’ evokes Orito’s father and recent wounds ache.

From the Long Room come the sounds and smells of supper being served.

‘We have no symptoms to report, then? No aches or bleedings?’

‘Truly, Master Suzaku, I cannot imagine being unwell in the House of Sisters.’

‘No constipation or diarrhoea? Haemorrhoids? Itches? Headaches?’

‘A dose of my… my daily medicine is all I would ask, if I may.’

‘With the greatest pleasure.’ Suzaku decants the muddy liquid into a thimble-sized cup and proffers it to Orito, who turns away and hides her mouth, as women of breeding do. Her body is aching with anticipation of the relief the Solace will deliver. But before she can change her mind, Orito tips the contents of the tiny cup into her well-padded sleeve where the dark blue hemp soaks it up.

‘It has a – a honeyed taste tonight,’ Orito pronounces. ‘Or do I imagine it?’

‘What’s good for the body,’ Suzaku looks at her mouth, ‘is good for the soul.’

Orito and Yayoi wash dishes whilst Sisters Kagerô and Hashihime are given words of encouragement by their Sisters – some shy and some, to judge from the laughter, not at all shy – before being led by Abbess Izu to the Altar Room to pray to the Goddess. A quarter-hour later, the Abbess leads them to their rooms where they await their Engifters. After the dishes are washed, Orito stays in the Long Room, not wanting to be alone with the thought that in one month’s time it may be her lying with an embroidered hood over her head for a master or acolyte. Her body is complaining about its denied dose of Solace. One minute she is as hot as soup, the next as cold as shaved ice. When Hatsune asks Orito to read the last New Year Letter from the First Wife’s first-born Gift, now a young woman of seventeen, Orito is glad of the distraction.

‘ “Dearest Mother,” ’ Orito peers at the feminine brushstrokes in the lamplight, ‘ “the berries are red along the verges and one may scarcely credit that another autumn is once more upon us.” ’

‘She has her mother’s elegance with words,’ murmurs Minori.

‘My Tarô is a blockhead,’ sighs Kiritsubo, ‘compared to Noriko-chan.’

In their New Year letters, Orito notices, the ‘Gifts’ regain their names.

‘But what hardworking brewer’s lad like Tarô,’ objects proud, modest Hatsune, ‘has time to notice autumn berries? I beg the Newest Sister to continue.’

‘ “Once again,” ’ reads Orito, ‘it is time to send a letter to my dear mother on distant Mount Shiranui. Last spring, when your First Month Letter was delivered to the White Crane Workshop, Ueda-san-” ’

‘Ueda-san is Noriko-chan’s Master,’ says Sadaie, ‘a famous tailor in Miyako.’

‘Is that so?’ Orito has been told ten times before. ‘ “Ueda-san gave me a half-holiday to celebrate its arrival. Before it slips my mind, Ueda-san and his wife send their sincerest compliments.” ’

‘How lucky,’ says Yayoi, ‘to have found such an honourable family.’

‘The Goddess always takes care of her Gifts,’ avows Hatsune.

‘ “Your news, Mother, brought me just as much pleasure as you kindly say my foolish scribblings bring you. How wonderful that you are blessed with another Gift. I shall pray that he finds as caring a family as the Uedas. Please give my thanks to Sister Asagao for nursing you during your chest illness, and to Master Suzaku for his daily care.” ’ Orito pauses to ask, ‘A chest illness?’

‘Oh, the trouble my cough caused! Master Genmu sent Acolyte Jiritsu – may his Soul be at rest – down to Kurozane to procure fresh herbs from the herbalist.’

A crow, Orito aches, could reach Otane’s chimney in a half-hour.

She recalls this summer’s journey to Kurozane and wants to weep.

‘Sister?’ Hatsune notices. ‘Is anything the matter?’

‘No. “What with two large Court weddings in the Fifth Month and two funerals in the Seventh, the White Crane was inundated with orders. My year has been a lucky one in any respect, Mother, though I blush to write about it. Ueda-san’s principal supplier of brocade is a merchant named Koyama-san, who visits the White Crane with his four sons every two or three months. For a couple of years the youngest son, Shingo-san, would exchange pleasantries with me as I worked. Last summer, however, during the O-bon Festivities, I was summoned to the garden teahouse where, to my surprise, Shingo-san, his parents, Ueda-san and my mistress were drinking tea.” ’ Orito glances up at the enraptured Sisters. ‘ “You shall have guessed already what was afoot, Mother – but, being a dull-witted girl, I did not.” ’

‘She isn’t dull-phitted,’ Asagao assures Hatsune, ‘just phure and innocent.’

‘ “Small-talk was made,” ’ Orito continues, ‘ “about Shingo-san’s many talents and my own pitiful accomplishments. I did my best to master my shyness, without seeming too forward, and afterwards-” ’

‘Just as you advised her, Sister,’ clucks Sawarabi, ‘two years ago.’

Orito watches the Sister swell with pride. ‘ “And afterwards, my mistress congratulated me on the favourable impression I had made. I returned to my duties, honoured by the praise but expecting to hear nothing more about the Koyamas until their next visit to the White Crane. My foolishness was short-lived. A few days later, on the Emperor’s Birthday, Ueda-san took all his apprentices to Yoyogi Park to enjoy the fireworks along Kamo River. How magical were the brief-blooming reds and yellows against the night sky! Upon our return, my master summoned me into his office, where my mistress told me that the Koyamas had proposed that I become the wife of their youngest son, Shingo. I knelt there, Mother, as if a fox had put a spell on me! Then Ueda-san’s wife mentioned that the proposal had come from Shingo. That such an upstanding young man desired me as his bride caused tears to flow down my cheeks.” ’

Yayoi hands Hotaru a paper cloth to dab her own eyes.

Orito folds the last page and unfolds the next. ‘ “I asked Ueda-san’s permission to speak frankly. My master urged me to do so. My origins were too obscure for the Koyamas, I said; my loyalties lay with the White Crane Workshop; and that if I entered the Koyama family as a bride, tongues would wag that I had used low cunning to ensnare such a fine husband.” ’

‘Oh, just grab the lad,’ Yûgiri cackles, a little drunk on sake, ‘by his dragon!’

‘For shame, Sister,’ scolds Housekeeper Satsuki. ‘Let the Newest Sister read.’

‘ “Master Ueda replied that the Koyamas were well aware of my origins as the Daughter of a Shrine, but saw no objection. They want a daughter-in-law who is dutiful, modest, resourceful and not a” ’ – Orito’s voice is joined by Sisters who lovingly recite the sobriquet – ‘ “a prissy sherbet-guzzling miss who thinks ‘Hard Work’ is a town in China. Lastly, my master reminded me that I am a Ueda by adoption, and why did I suppose the Uedas to be so very far below the Koyamas? Blushing, I apologised to my master for my thoughtless words.” ’

‘But Noriko-san didn’t mean that at all!’ Hotaru protests.

Hatsune warms her hands at the fire. ‘He is curing her shyness, I believe.’

‘ “Ueda-san’s wife told me that my objections did me great credit, but that the families had agreed that our engagement could last until my seventeenth New Year -” ’

‘That would be this New Year coming,’ Hatsune explains to Orito.

‘ “- when, if Shingo-sama’s feelings are unchanged -” ’

‘I pray to the Goddess to keep his heart constant,’ says Sadaie. ‘Every night.’

‘ “- we shall be married on the first auspicious day in the First Month. Ueda-san and Koyama-san shall then invest in a workshop to specialise in obi-sashes where my husband and I can work side by side and train apprentices of our own.” ’

‘Imagine!’ says Kiritsubo. ‘Hatsune’s Gift, with apprentices of her own.’

‘Children of her own, too,’ says Yûgiri, ‘if young Shingo has his way.’

‘ “Looking at these lines, my words read like a dreaming girl’s. Perhaps, Mother, this is the greatest gift our correspondence gives us: a space in which we can dream. You are in my thoughts every day. Your Gift, Noriko.” ’

The women look at the letter, or else the fire. Their minds are far away.

Orito understands that the New Year letters are the Sisters’ purest Solace.

Early in the Hour of the Boar, the Gate opens for the two Engifters. Every Sister in the Long Room hears the bolt slide. Abbess Izu’s footsteps leave her room and pause at the Gate. Orito imagines three silent bows. The Abbess leads two sets of male footsteps along the Inner Passageway, towards Kagerô’s room and then to Hashihime’s. A minute later, the Abbess’s footsteps make their return journey past the Long Room. The candles hiss. Orito expected Yûgiri or Sawarabi to try to catch a glimpse of the chosen Engifters in the unlit corridor, but instead they play a sober game of mah jong with Hotaru and Asagao. Nobody so much as acknowledges the arrival of the master and acolyte in the Chosen Sisters’ rooms. Hatsune is singing ‘The Moonlit Castle’ very softly to her own accompaniment on the koto. Housekeeper Satsuki is repairing a sock. When those carnal negotiations the House terms ‘Engiftment’ are actually occurring, Orito sees, the jokes and gossip all cease. Orito also understands that the levity and lewdnesses are not a denial that the Sisters’ ovaries and wombs are the Goddess’s, but a way of making their servitude endurable…

Back in her room Orito watches the fire through a chink in her blanket. Male footsteps left Kagerô’s room some time ago, but Hashihime’s Engifter is staying longer, as an Engifter may when both parties are willing. Orito’s knowledge of lovemaking is derived from medical texts and the anecdotes of the women she treated in Nagasaki brothels. She tries not to think of a man under this blanket, pinning her body against this mattress, just one short month from now. Let me cease to be, she begs the fire. Melt what I am into you, she begs the darkness. She finds her face is wet. Once again, her mind probes the House of Sisters for a means of escape. There are no outside windows to climb through. The ground is stone and cannot be dug through. Both sets of gates are bolted from inside, with a guardroom between them. The eaves of the Cloisters jut far over the Courtyard, and cannot be reached or climbed over.

It’s hopeless. She looks at a rafter and imagines a rope.

There is a knock at her door. Yayoi hisses. ‘It’s me, Sister.’

Orito jumps out of bed and opens the door. ‘Is it your waters?’

Yayoi’s pregnant shape is fattened further by blankets. ‘I can’t sleep.’

Orito bundles her inside, afraid of a man stepping out of the darkness.

‘The story goes,’ Yayoi curls Orito’s hair around her finger, ‘that when I was born with these’ – Yayoi taps her pointed ears – ‘the Buddhist priest was called. His explanation was that a demon had crept into my mother’s womb and laid his egg there, like a cuckoo. Unless I was abandoned that very night, the priest warned, demons would come for their offspring, and carve up the family as a celebratory feast. My father heard this with relief: peasants everywhere “winnow the seedlings” to rid themselves of unwanted daughters. Our village even had a special place for it: a circle of pointed rocks, high above the tree-line, up a dry stream-bed. In the Seventh Month, the cold could not kill me, but wild dogs, foraging bears and hungry spirits were sure to do the job by morning. My father left me there and walked home without regret…’

Yayoi takes her friend’s hand and places it on her belly.

Orito feels the bulges move. ‘Twins,’ she says, ‘without a doubt.’

‘Arriving at the village that very night, however,’ Yayoi’s tone becomes low and droll, ‘so the story goes, was Yôben the Seer. For seven days and seven nights a white fox had led the holy man, whose halo of starlight lit his path, under mountains and across lakes. His long journey ended when the fox jumped on to the roof of a humble farmhouse above a village that barely warranted a name. Yôben knocked, and at the sight of such a personage, my father fell to his knees. When he heard about my birth, Yôben the Seer pronounced,’ Yayoi changes her voice, ‘ “The fox’s ears of the baby girl were no curse, but a blessing from our Lady Kannon.” By abandoning me, Father had spurned Kannon’s grace and invited her wrath. The baby girl had to be rescued, at all costs, before disaster struck…’

A door along the passageway is slid open and shut.

‘As my father and Yôben the Seer approached the Place of Winnowing,’ Yayoi continues her recital, ‘they heard all the dead babies wailing for their mothers. They heard wolves bigger than horses, howling for fresh meat. My father quivered with fear, but Yôben uttered holy incantations so they could pass through the ghosts and wolves unhurt, and enter the circle of pointed rocks, where all was calm and warm as the first day of spring. Lady Kannon sat there, with the white fox, breastfeeding Yayoi, the magical child. Yôben and my father sank to their knees. In a voice like the waves of a lake, Lady Kannon commanded Yôben to travel throughout the empire with me, healing the sick in her holy name. The mystic protested he wasn’t worthy, but the baby, who at one day old could speak, told him, “Where there is despair, let us bring hope: where there is death, let us breathe life.” What could he do but obey the Lady?’ Yayoi sighs and tries to make her distended stomach more comfortable. ‘So whenever Yôben the Seer and the Magical Fox Girl arrived at a new town, that was the story he put about to drum up trade.’

‘May I ask,’ Orito lies on her side, ‘whether Yôben was your real father?’

‘Maybe I say, “No,” because I don’t want it to be true…’

The night wind plays a rattling flue like a rank amateur plays shakuhachi flute.

‘… but certainly, my earliest memories are of sick people holding my ears as I breathe into their rotten mouths, and of their dying eyes, saying, “Heal me”, of the filthiest inns, of Yôben standing in marketplaces, reading “testimonials” to my powers from great families.’

Orito thinks of her own childhood amongst scholars and books.

‘Yôben dreamt of audiences at palaces, and we spent a year in Edo, but he smelt too much of the showman… of hunger… and, simply, he smelt too much. During our six or seven years on the road, the quality of our inns never improved. All his misfortunes, of course, were my fault, especially when he was drunk. One day, near the end, after we’d been chased out of a town, a fellow healing-trickster told him that where a magical fox girl could squeeze money from the desperate and dying, a magical fox woman was another matter. That got Yôben to thinking, and within the month he sold me to a brothel in Osaka.’ Yayoi looks at her hand. ‘My life there, I try hard to forget. Yôben didn’t even say goodbye. Perhaps he couldn’t face me. Perhaps he was my father.’

Orito wonders at Yayoi’s apparent lack of rancour.

‘When the Sisters tell you, “The House is far, far better than a brothel,” they don’t mean to be cruel. Well, one or two may, but not the others. For every successful geisha with wealthy patrons vying for her favours, there are five hundred chewed-up, spat-out girls dying of brothel diseases. This must be cold comfort for a woman of your rank, and I know you’ve lost a better life than the rest of us, but the House of Sisters is only a Hell, a prison, if you think it is. The masters and acolytes treat us kindly. Engiftment is an unusual duty, but is it so different from the duty any husband demands from his wife? The duty is certainly paid less often – much less.’

Orito is frightened by Yayoi’s logic. ‘But twenty years!’

‘Time passes. Sister Hatsune is leaving in two years. She can settle in the same town as one of her Gifts, with a stipend. Departed Sisters write to Abbess Izu, and they are fond and grateful letters.’

Shadows sway and coagulate amongst the low rafters.

‘Why did the last Newest Sister hang herself?’

‘Because being parted from her Gift broke her mind.’

Orito lets time pass. ‘And it’s not too much for you?’

‘Of course it hurt. But they haven’t died. They are in the World Below, well fed and cared-for, and thinking about us. After our Descent we can even meet them, if we wish it. It’s a… strange life, I don’t deny it, but earn Master Genmu’s trust, earn the Abbess’s trust, and it needn’t be a harsh life, or a wasted one…’

The day I believe this, Orito thinks, is the day Shiranui Shrine owns me.

‘… and you have me here,’ says Yayoi, ‘whatever this is worth.’

XVIII The Surgery on Dejima

An hour before dinner on the Twenty-ninth Day of the Eleventh Month

‘Lithotomy: from the Greek lithos for “stone”; and tomos, for “cut”.’ Marinus addresses his four pupils. ‘Remind us, Mr Muramoto.’

‘Remove stone from bladder, kidneys, gall-bladder, Doctor.’

‘ “Till Kingdom Come…” ’ Wybo Gerritszoon is drunk, senseless, naked between his nipples and his socks, and trussed on the backward-slanting operating table like a frog on a dissection board. ‘ “Who Art Unleavened Bread…” ’

Uzaemon takes the patient’s words to be a Christian mantra.

Charcoal in the brazier rumbles; snow fell last night.

Marinus rubs his hands. ‘Symptoms of bladder stones, Mr Kajiwaki?’

‘Blood in urine, Doctor, pain to urine, and wants to urine but cannot.’

‘Indeed. A further symptom is fear of surgery, delaying the sufferer’s decision to undergo his stone’s removal until he can no longer lie down without aching to piss, notwithstanding that these few…’ Marinus peers at Gerritszoon’s dribble of pink urine in its specimen dish ‘… drops are all he can muster. Implying that the stone is now positioned… where, Mr Yano?’

‘ “Hello’ed be thy Daily Heaven…” ’ Gerritszoon belches. ‘Howz’ fockit go?’

Yano mimes a constriction with his fist. ‘Stone… stop… water.’

‘So,’ Marinus sniffs, ‘the stone is blocking the urethra. What fate awaits the patient who cannot pass urine, Mr Ikematsu?’

Uzaemon watches Ikematsu deduce the whole from the parts, ‘cannot’, ‘urine’ and ‘fate’. ‘Body who cannot pass urine cannot make blood pure, Doctor. Body die of dirty blood.’

‘It dies.’ Marinus nods. ‘The Great Hippocrates warned the phys-’

‘Will yer cork yer quack’n’ an’ do thef’ckin’t’doit yer f’ck’r…’

Jacob de Zoet and Con Twomey, here to assist the doctor, exchange glances.

Marinus takes a length of cotton dressing from Eelattu; tells Gerritszoon, ‘Open, please’, and gags his mouth. ‘The Great Hippocrates warned the physician to “cut no stones” and leave the job to lowly surgeons; the Roman Ammonius Lithotomus, the Hindoo Susruta and the Arab Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi – who, en passant, invented the ancestor of this -’ Marinus wiggles his blood-encrusted double-sided scalpel ‘- would cut the perineum’ – the doctor lifts the outraged Dutchman’s penis and indicates between its root and the anus – ‘here, by the pubic symphysis.’ Marinus drops the penis. ‘Rather more than half the patients in those bad old days died… in agonies.’

Gerritszoon abruptly stops struggling.

‘Frère Jacques, a gifted French quack, proposed a suprapubic incision, above the corpus ossis pubis,’ Marinus traces an arc with his fingernail to the left of Gerritszoon’s navel, ‘and entering the bladder sideways. Cheselden, an Englishman, combined Jacques le Quack with the ancients to pioneer the lateral perineal lithotomy, losing less than one patient in ten. I have performed upwards of fifty lithotomies and lost four. Two were not my fault. The two were… Well, we live and learn, even if our dead patients cannot say the same, eh, Gerritszoon? Cheselden’s fee was five hundred pounds for two or three minutes’ work. But luckily,’ the doctor slaps the trussed patient’s buttock, ‘Cheselden taught a student named John Hunter. Hunter’s students included a Dutchman, Hardwijke, and Hardwijke taught Marinus, who today performs this operation gratis. So. Shall we begin?’

The rectum of Wybo Gerritszoon releases a hot fart of horror.

‘View halloo.’ Marinus nods at de Zoet and Twomey; they secure a thigh each. ‘The less movement, the less the accidental damage.’ Uzaemon sees the seminarians are uncertain of this pronouncement, so he translates it for them. Eelattu kneels a-straddle the patient’s midriff, holding Gerritszoon’s flaccid penis back and blocking his view of the knives. Marinus asks Dr Maeno to hold the lamp close to the patient’s groin and takes up his scalpel. His face becomes the face of a swordsman.

Marinus sinks the scalpel into Gerritszoon’s perineum.

The patient’s entire body tenses like a single muscle; Uzaemon shudders.

The four seminarians, peer, transfixed.

‘Fat and muscle thickness vary,’ says Marinus, ‘but the bladder-’

Still gagged, Gerritszoon releases a loud noise not unlike a man in orgasm.

‘- the bladder,’ continues Marinus, ‘is about a thumb’s length in.’

The doctor lengthens the bloody incision with his scalpel: Gerritszoon shrieks.

Uzaemon forces himself to watch: lithotomies are unknown outside Dejima, and he has agreed to supplement Maeno’s report to the Academy.

Gerritszoon snorts like a bull, his eyes water and he groans.

Marinus dips his left forefinger into rape-seed oil and inserts it into Gerritszoon’s anus up to its knuckle. ‘Thus the patient should void his bowels beforehand.’ There is the smell of rotting meat and sweet apples. ‘One locates the stone through the rectal ampulla…’ with his right hand Marinus inserts the tweezers into the blood-brimming incision ‘… and pushes it from the fundus up towards the incision.’ Liquid faeces ooze out of the patient’s rectum around the doctor’s hand. ‘The less one pokes around with the tweezers, the better… One puncture is quite enough, and – ah! Almost had it… and – aha! Ecco siamo!’ He takes out the stone, retrieves his finger from Gerritszoon’s anus and wipes both on his apron. The stone is as big as an acorn and the yellow of a diseased tooth. ‘The gash must be staunched before our patient dies of blood loss. Domburger, Corkonian, pray stand aside.’ Marinus pours another oil over the incision and Eelattu covers it with a scab-crusty bandage.

Gagged Gerritszoon sighs as the pain lessens from unendurable to gruelling.

Dr Maeno asks, ‘What is oil, Doctor, if you please?’

‘Extract of the bark and leaves of Hamamelis japonica – which I named myself. It’s a local variety of witch hazel, which lessens the risk of fevers – a trick taught me by an unschooled old woman, many lifetimes ago.’

Orito too, remembers Uzaemon, learnt from old mountain herbalists.

Eelattu changes the dressing, then binds its replacement against Gerritszoon’s waist. ‘The patient should lie down for three days, and eat and drink in moderation. Urine shall leak through the wound in his bladder wall; one must be ready for fevers and swellings; but urine should be appearing by the usual means within two or three weeks.’ Marinus now unties Gerritszoon’s gag and tells him. ‘About the same time required by Sjako to walk again in the wake of the drubbing you gave him last September, no?’

Gerritszoon unscrews his eyes. ‘Yer f’ckin’ yer, yer… f’ckin’ f’ckin’ yer…’

‘Peace on Earth,’ Marinus puts his finger on the patient’s lips, badly blotched with cold sores. ‘Goodwill to all Men.’

Chief van Cleef’s Dining Room is noisy with six or eight conversations in Japanese and Dutch; silver cutlery clinks on the best tableware; and though it is not yet evening, the candelabra are lighting a battlefield of goat bones, fish spines, breadcrusts, crab claws, lobster shells, blancmange gobbets and holly leaves and berries, fallen from the ceiling. The panels between the Dining Room and the Bay Room are removed, affording Uzaemon a view all the way to the distant mouth of open sea: the waters are slate-blue, and the mountains half erased by the cold drizzle turning last night’s snow to slush.

The Chief’s Malay servants finish one song on flute and violin, and begin another. Uzaemon remembers it from last year’s banquet. It is understood by the ranked interpreters that ‘Dutch New Year’ on the Twenty-fifth Day of December coincides with the birth of Jesus Christ, but this is never acknowledged in case an ambitious spy one day accuses them of endorsing Christian worship. Christmas, Uzaemon has noticed, affects the Dutch in strange ways. They can become intolerably homesick, even abusive, merry and maudlin, often all at once. By the time Arie Grote brings up the plum pudding, Chief van Cleef, Deputy Fischer, Ouwehand, Baert and the youth Oost are somewhere between quite drunk and very drunk. Only the soberer Marinus, de Zoet and Twomey converse with any of the Japanese banqueters.

‘Ogawa-san?’ Goto Shinpachi looks concerned. ‘Are you ill?’

‘No, no… I’m sorry. Goto-san asked me a question?’

‘It was a remark about the beauty of the music.’

‘I’d rather listen,’ declares Interpreter Sekita, ‘to butchered hogs.’

‘Or a man having his stone cut out,’ says Arashiyama, ‘eh, Ogawa?’

‘Your description murdered my appetite.’ Sekita stuffs another devilled egg into his mouth, whole. ‘These eggs really are very good.’

‘I’d trust Chinese herbs,’ says Nishi, the monkey-faced scion of a rival dynasty of Nagasaki interpreters, ‘before I’d trust a Dutch knife.’

‘My cousin trusted Chinese herbs,’ says Arashiyama, ‘for his stone -’

Deputy Fischer laughs his galloping laugh as he bangs on the table.

‘- and died in a way that would truly murder your appetite.’

Chief van Cleef’s current Dejima wife, wearing a snow-patterned kimono and jangling bracelets, slides open the door and bows demurely to the room. Several conversations fall away and the better-mannered diners stop themselves ogling. She whispers something in van Cleef’s ear that makes his face light up; he whispers back and slaps her buttocks like a farmer slapping an ox. Feigning coquettish anger, she returns to van Cleef’s private chamber.

Uzaemon suspects van Cleef contrived the scene to show off his possession.

‘More’s the pity,’ croons Sekita, ‘she’s not on the menu.’

If de Zoet had had his way, thinks Uzaemon, Orito would be a Dejima wife, too…

Cupido the slave distributes a bottle to each of the two dozen diners.

… giving herself to one man, Uzaemon bites, instead of being given to many.

‘I was afraid,’ says Sekita, ‘they’d be forgoing this pleasant custom.’

That’s your guilt talking, Uzaemon thinks. But what if my guilt is right?

The Malay servant Philander follows, uncorking each bottle.

Van Cleef stands and chimes a spoon on a glass until he has the table’s attention. ‘Those of you who honoured the Dutch New Year Banquet under Chiefs Hemmij and Snitker shall know of the Hydra-headed Toast…’

Arashiyama whispers to Uzaemon, ‘What’s a hydra?’

Uzaemon knows but shrugs, unwilling to lose more of van Cleef’s sentences.

‘We make a toast, one by one,’ says Goto Shinpachi, ‘and -’

‘- and get drunker and drunker,’ belches Sekita, ‘minute by minute.’

‘… whereby our joint desires,’ van Cleef sways, ‘forge a – a – brighter future.’

As the custom dictates, each diner fills his neighbour’s glass.

‘And so, gentlemen,’ Van Cleef raises his glass, ‘to the Nineteenth Century!’

The room echoes the toast, despite its irrelevance to the Japanese calendar.

Uzaemon notices how unwell he is feeling.

‘I give you friendship,’ Deputy Fischer says, ‘betwixt Europe and the East!’

How often, wonders Uzaemon, am I doomed to hear these same hollow words?

Interpreter Kobayashi looks at Uzaemon. ‘To soon recovery of very dear friends, Ogawa Mimasaku and Gerritszoon-san.’ So Uzaemon must stand and bow to Kobayashi the Elder, knowing that he is manoeuvring at the Interpreters’ Guild to have his son promoted over Uzaemon’s head to Second Rank when Ogawa the Elder accepts the inevitable and retires from his coveted post.

Dr Marinus’s turn is next: ‘To the seekers of truth.’

For the benefit of the inspectors, Interpreter Yoshio proposes in Japanese, ‘To health of our wise, beloved Magistrate.’ Yoshio also has a son in the Third Rank with high hopes for the upcoming vacancies. To the Dutch, he says, ‘To our rulers.’

This is the game one must play, thinks Uzaemon, to rise at the Guild.

Jacob de Zoet swirls his wine. ‘To all our loved ones, near or far.’

The Dutchman happens to catch Uzaemon’s eye, and they both avert their gaze whilst the toast is chorused. The interpreter is still turning his napkin ring moodily when Goto clears his throat. ‘Ogawa-san?’

Uzaemon looks up to find the entire company looking at him.

‘Pardon, gentlemen, the wine stole my tongue.’

Goblin laughter sloshes around the room. The diners’ faces swell and recede. Lips do not correspond to blurred words. Uzaemon wonders, as consciousness drains away, Am I dying?

The steps of Higashizaka Street are slippery with frozen slush and strewn with bones, rags, decayed leaves and excrement. Uzaemon and bow-legged Yohei climb past a chestnut stall. The smell makes the interpreter’s stomach threaten rebellion. Unaware of the approaching samurai, a beggar up ahead is pissing against a wall. Lean dogs, kites and crows squabble over the street’s mean pickings.

From a doorway comes a funerary mantra and tendril of incense.

Shuzai is expecting me for sword practice, Uzaemon remembers…

A heavily pregnant girl at a crossroads is selling pig-fat candles.

… but to pass out twice in one day would start unhelpful rumours.

Uzaemon bids Yohei buy ten candles: the girl has cataracts in both eyes.

The candle-seller thanks her customer. Master and servant continue climbing.

Through a window, a man shouts, ‘I curse the day I married you!’

‘Samurai-sama?’ a lipless fortune-teller calls out from a half-open door. ‘Someone in the World Above needs your deliverance, Samurai-sama.’

Uzaemon, irritated by her presumption, walks on.

‘Sir,’ says Yohei, ‘if you’re feeling unsteady again, I could-’

‘Don’t fuss like a woman: the foreign wine disagreed with me.’

The foreign wine, Uzaemon thinks, on top of the surgical procedure.

‘Reports of my momentary lapse,’ he tells Yohei, ‘would worry Father.’

‘He’ll not hear it from my lips, sir.’

They pass through the ward-gate: the warden’s son bows to one of the neighbourhood’s most important residents. Uzaemon returns a brisk nod, and thinks, Nearly home. The prospect does not bring much comfort.

‘Might Ogawa-sama be generous enough to spare a little time?’

Waiting for his gate to be opened, Uzaemon hears an elderly voice.

A bent-backed mountain woman climbs from the thicket by the stream.

‘By what right,’ Yohei obstructs her, ‘do you use my master’s name?’

The servant Kiyoshichi opens the Ogawa gates from inside. He sees the mountain woman and explains, ‘Sir, this feeble-minded creature knocked at the side door earlier, asking to speak with Interpreter Ogawa the Younger. I bade the crazed old crow be gone but, as Sir can see…’

Her weathered face, framed by a hat and straw coat, lacks the seasoned beggar’s cunning. ‘We have a friend in common, Ogawa-sama.’

‘Enough, Grandmother,’ Kiyoshichi takes her arm. ‘Time for you to go home.’

He checks with Uzaemon who mouths, ‘Gently.’

‘The ward-gate is this way.’

‘But Kurozane is three days away, young man, on my old legs, and-’

‘The sooner you start back home, then, the better, don’t you think?’

Uzaemon steps through the Ogawa gate and crosses the sunless stone garden where only lichen thrives on the ailing shrubs. Saiji, his father’s gaunt and bird-faced manservant, slides opens the door to the Main House from inside: a beat before Yohei can open it from the outside. ‘Welcome home, sir.’ The servants are jostling for position ahead of the day when their master is not Ogawa Mimasaku but Ogawa Uzaemon. ‘The senior master is asleep in his room, sir; and Sir’s wife is suffering from a headache. Sir’s mother is nursing her.’

So my wife wants to be alone, thinks Uzaemon, but Mother won’t let her.

The new maid appears with slippers, warm water and a towel.

‘Light a fire in the library,’ he tells the maid, intending to write up his lithotomy notes. If I am working, he hopes, Mother and my wife may keep their distance.

‘Prepare tea for the master,’ Yohei tells the maid. ‘Not too strong.’

Saiji and Yohei wait to see whom the Master-in-Waiting chooses to attend him.

‘Attend to…’ Uzaemon sighs ‘… whatever needs attending to. Both of you.’

He walks down the cold, waxed corridor, hearing Yohei and Saiji blame each other for the master’s bad mood. Their bickering has a marital familiarity, and Uzaemon suspects they share more than a room at night. Gaining the sanctuary of the library, he shuts the door on the cheerless household, the mountain madwoman, the Christmas banquet’s babble and his ignominious exit, and sits at his writing-table. His calves ache. He enjoys scraping his ink-stone, mixing a few drops of water and dipping his brush. The precious books and Chinese scrolls sit on the oaken shelves. He remembers his awe at entering the library of Ogawa Mimasaku fifteen years ago, never dreaming then that he might one day be adopted by its master; much less become its master.

Be less ambitious, he warns the younger Uzaemon, and more content.

Catching his eye on the nearest shelf is de Zoet’s Wealth of Nations.

Uzaemon marshals his memories of the lithotomy.

There is a knock: the servant Kiyoshichi slides open the door.

‘The weak-witted creature shan’t be troubling us again, sir.’

Uzaemon needs a moment to make sense of the sentence. ‘Good. Her family should be told what a nuisance she is making of herself.’

‘I asked the warden’s son to do so, sir, but he didn’t know her.’

‘Then she might be from… Kurozaka, was it?’

‘ “Kurozane”, begging sir’s pardon. I believe it’s a small town on the Ariake Sea Road, in Kyôga Domain.’

The name sounds familiar. Perhaps Abbot Enomoto mentioned it once.

‘Did she say what her business with me was about?’

‘ “A private matter” was all she said, sir, and that she was an herbalist.’

‘Any addled crone able to brew fennel calls herself an herbalist.’

‘Indeed, sir. Perhaps she heard about the house’s ailments, and wanted to peddle some miracle cure. She deserves a beating, really, but her age…’

The new maid enters with a bucket of coals. Because of the cold afternoon, perhaps, she has put on a white headscarf. A detail from Orito’s ninth or tenth letter comes back to Uzaemon. ‘The Herbalist of Kurozane,’ it read, ‘lives at the foot of Mount Shiranui, in an ancient mountain hut, with goats, chickens and a dog…’

The floor tilts. ‘Fetch her back.’ Uzaemon hardly knows his voice.

Kiyoshichi and the maid look at their master in surprise, then one another.

‘Run after the herbalist of Kurozane – that mountain woman. Fetch her back.’

The astonished servant is unsure whether to trust his ears.

First I faint on Dejima, Uzaemon realises how oddly he is behaving, and now this fickleness over a beggar. ‘When I prayed for Father at the temple, a priest suggested that the sickness may be due to a – to a want of charity in the Ogawa household, and that the gods would send a – an opportunity to make amends.’

Kiyoshichi doubts that the gods employ such malodorous messengers.

Uzaemon claps. ‘Don’t make me ask you again, Kiyoshichi!’

‘You are Otane,’ begins Uzaemon, wondering whether to give her an honorific title, ‘Otane-san, the herbalist of Kurozane. Earlier, outside, I did not understand…’

The old woman sits like a curled-up wren. Her eyes are sharp and clear.

Uzaemon dismisses the servants. ‘I apologise for not listening to you.’

Otane accepts her due deference but says nothing, yet.

‘It is two days’ journey from Kyôga Domain. Did you sleep at an inn?’

‘The journey had to be made, and now I am here.’

‘Miss Aibagawa always spoke of Otane-san with great respect.’

‘On her second visit to Kurozane,’ her Kyôga dialect carries an earthy dignity, ‘Miss Aibagawa spoke about Interpreter Ogawa in a similar fashion.’

Her feet may be sore, thinks Uzaemon, but she knows how to kick. ‘The groom who marries according to his heart is a rare man. I had to marry according to the dictates of my family. It is the way of the world.’

‘Miss Aibagawa’s visits are three treasures of my life. Despite our great difference in rank, she was, and remains, a precious daughter to me.’

‘I understand Kurozane is at the foot of the trail that leads up Mount Shiranui. Is it possible,’ Uzaemon can endure hope no longer, ‘you have met her, since she entered the Shrine?’

Otane’s face is a bitter negative. ‘All contact is forbidden. Twice yearly I take medicines to the Shrine’s doctor, Master Suzaku, at the Gatehouse. But no lay person is permitted further, unless invited by Master Genmu or Lord Abbot Enomoto. Least of all-’

The door slides open, and tea is brought in by Uzaemon’s mother’s maid.

Mother wasted no time, Uzaemon registers, in sending her spy along.

Otane bows as she receives the tea on a walnut-wood tray.

The maid departs for a thorough interrogation.

‘Least of all,’ continues Otane, ‘an old herb-gatherer.’ She wraps her bowl of tea with her medicine-stained bony fingers. ‘No, it is not a message from Miss Aibagawa I bring but… Well, I will come to this shortly. Some weeks ago, on the night of first snow, a visitor sought shelter in my cottage. He was a young acolyte from Mount Shiranui Shrine. He had run away.’

Yohei’s blurred outline crosses behind the snow-lit paper window.

‘What did he say?’ Uzaemon’s mouth is dry. ‘Is she… is Miss Aibagawa well?’

‘She is alive, but he spoke about cruelties committed by the Order against the Sisters. He said that if these cruelties were widely known, not even the Lord Abbot’s connections in Edo could defend the Shrine. That was the acolyte’s plan – to go to Nagasaki and denounce the Order of Mount Shiranui to the Magistrate and to his court.’

Someone sweeps snow in the Courtyard with a stiff-bristled broom.

Uzaemon is cold, despite the fire. ‘Where is this defector?’

‘I buried him the next day between two cherry trees in my garden.’

Something scurries at the corners of Uzaemon’s vision. ‘How did he die?’

‘There exists a family of poisons that, once ingested, remain in the body, harmlessly, so long as an antidote is taken daily. But without that antidote, the poison will kill its host. This would be my best guess…’

‘So the acolyte was doomed from the moment he left?’

Down the corridor, Uzaemon’s mother is scolding her maid.

‘Did the acolyte speak about his Order’s practices before he died?’

‘No,’ Otane tilts her old head closer, ‘but he wrote its creeds on a scroll.’

‘These creeds are the same “cruelties” endured by the Sisters?’

‘I am an old woman of peasant stock, Interpreter. I cannot read.’

‘This scroll.’ His voice, too, is a whisper. ‘Is it… is it in Nagasaki?’

Otane stares at him like Time itself, made human. From her sleeve, she withdraws a dogwood scroll-tube.

‘Are the Sisters,’ Uzaemon makes himself ask, ‘obliged to lie with the men? Is this the – the cruelty that the acolyte spoke of?’

His mother’s sure footsteps approach along the creaking corridor.

‘I have grounds to fear,’ Otane hands the scroll-tube to Uzaemon, ‘that the truth is worse.’

Uzaemon hides the dogwood tube in his sleeve just as the door opens.

‘But excuse me!’ His mother appears in the doorway. ‘I had no inkling you had company. Shall your…’ she pauses ‘… your guest be staying for dinner?’

Otane bows very low. ‘Such generosity far exceeds what an old grandmother deserves. Thank you, madam, but I must not impose upon your household’s charity a minute longer…’

XIX The House of Sisters, Mount Shiranui Shrine

Sunrise on the Ninth Day of the Twelfth Month

Sweeping the Cloisters is a vexing chore this afternoon: no sooner is a pile of leaves and pine-needles gathered than the wind kicks it away again. Clouds unravel on Bare Peak and spill icy drizzle. Orito removes bird lime from the boards with a scrap of sacking. Today is the ninety-fifth day of her captivity: for thirteen days she has turned away from Suzaku and the Abbess and tipped her Solace into her sleeve. For four or five days she suffered from cramps and fever, but now her mind is her own again: the rats no longer speak and the House’s tricks have dwindled away. Her victory is limited, however: she has not won permission to explore the Precincts, and although she escaped another Engiftment Day, a Newest Sister’s chances of being so lucky a fourth time are meagre and a fifth escape would be unprecedented.

Umegae approaches in her lacquered sandals, click-clack, click-clack.

She shan’t be able to resist, Orito predicts, making a stupid joke.

‘So diligent, Newest Sister! Were you born with a broom in your hand?’

No reply is expected, none is given, and Umegae walks on to the Kitchen. Her jibe reminds Orito of her father praising Dejima’s cleanliness, in contrast to the Chinese factory where rubbish is left to rot and rats. She wonders if Marinus misses her. She wonders if a girl from the House of Wistaria is warming Jacob de Zoet’s bed and admiring his exotic eyes. She wonders if de Zoet even thinks of her now, except when he needs his lost dictionary.

She wonders the same thing about Ogawa Uzaemon.

De Zoet shall leave Japan never knowing she had chosen to accept him.

Self-pity, Orito reminds herself yet again, is a noose dangling from a rafter.

The gatekeeper shouts, ‘The gates are opening, Sisters!’

Two acolytes push in a cart loaded with logs and kindling.

Just as the gate closes, Orito notices a cat slip through. It is bright grey, like the moon on blurred evenings, and it swerves across the courtyard. A squirrel runs up the old pine, but the moon-grey cat knows that two-legged creatures offer better pickings than four, and it leaps on to the Cloisters to try its luck with Orito. ‘I never saw you here before,’ the woman tells the animal.

The cat looks at her and miaows, Feed me, for I am beautiful.

Orito proffers a dried pilchard between finger and thumb.

The moon-grey cat inspects the fish indifferently.

‘Someone carried this fish,’ scolds Orito, ‘all the way up this mountain.’

The cat takes the fish, jumps to the ground and goes beneath the walkway.

Orito lowers herself on to the Courtyard, but the cat has gone.

She sees a narrow rectangular hole in the foundations of the House…

… and a voice on the walkway asks, ‘Has the Newest Sister lost anything?’

Guiltily, Orito looks up to see the housekeeper carrying a pile of robes. ‘A cat pleaded for a scrap of food, then slunk away when he got what he wanted.’

‘Must be a tom.’ The housekeeper is doubled over by a sneeze.

Orito helps her pick up the laundry and carry it to the Linen Room. The Newest Sister feels some sympathy towards Housekeeper Satsuki. The Abbess’s rank is clear – below the masters, above the acolytes – but Housekeeper Satsuki shoulders more duties than she enjoys privileges. By the logic of the World Below, her lack of disfigurements and freedom from Engiftment make her position an enviable one, but the House of Sisters has its own logic, and Umegae and Hashihime contrive a dozen means a day to remind the housekeeper that her post exists for their convenience. She rises early, retires late and is excluded from many of the Sisters’ shared intimacies. Orito notices how red are the housekeeper’s eyes, and how poor her colour. ‘Pardon my asking,’ says the doctor’s daughter. ‘But are you unwell?’

‘My health, Sister? My health is… satisfactory, thank you.’

Orito is sure the housekeeper is concealing something.

‘Truly, Sister, I’m well enough: the mountain winters slow me, a little…’

‘How many years have you spent on Mount Shiranui, Housekeeper?’

‘This will be my fifth,’ she seems happy to talk, ‘in the Shrine’s service.’

‘Sister Yayoi told me you’re from a large island in Satsuma Domain.’

‘Oh, it’s a little-known place, a full day’s sail from Kagoshima Port, called Yakushima. Nobody’s heard of it. A few island men serve the Lord of Satsuma as foot-soldiers – they bring back stories they spend their lives embroidering, but otherwise very few islanders ever leave. The interior is mountainous and trackless. Only cautious woodsmen, foolish hunters or wayward pilgrims venture there. The island’s kami gods aren’t used to humans. There is just one notable shrine, halfway up Miura Mountain, two days’ journey from the port, with a small monastery, smaller than Shiranui Shrine.’

Minori passes the Linen Room’s doorway, blowing into her hands.

‘How did you come,’ Orito asks, ‘to be appointed housekeeper here?’

Yûgiri passes in the other direction, swinging a bucket.

The housekeeper unfolds a sheet to fold again. ‘Master Byakko visited Yakushima on a pilgrimage. My father, a fifth son of a lesser family of the Miyake clan, was a samurai in name only – he was a rice and millet merchant, and owned a fishing boat. As he supplied the Miura monastery with rice, he offered to guide Master Byakko up the mountain. I went to carry and cook; we Yakushima girls are bred sturdy.’ The housekeeper risks a rare, shy smile. ‘On the return journey, Master Byakko told my father that the small nunnery attached to Mount Shiranui required a housekeeper who wasn’t afraid of hard work. Father jumped at the chance: I was one of four daughters, and the master’s offer meant one less dowry to find.’

‘What were your thoughts about vanishing over the horizon?’

‘I was nervous, but excited, too, at the idea of seeing the mainland with my own eyes. Two days later, I was on a boat, watching my home island shrink until it was small enough to fit into a thimble… and then there was no going back.’

Sawarabi’s spiked laughter carries through from the Kitchen.

Housekeeper Satsuki is looking backwards through time: her breath is short.

You are more ill, Orito guesses, than you are admitting…

‘Well, what a gossip I am! Thank you for your help, Sister, but you mustn’t let me keep you from your chores. I can finish folding the robes on my own, thank you.’

Orito returns to the Cloisters and takes up her broom again.

The acolytes knock on the gate to be allowed back into the Precincts.

As it opens, the moon-grey cat darts between their legs. It swerves across the Courtyard; a squirrel darts up the old pine. The cat heads straight to Orito, slinks against her shins and looks up at her, meaningfully.

‘If you’ve come back for more fish, you rogue, there isn’t any.’

The cat tells Orito that she is a poor dumb creature.

‘In the domain of Bizen,’ First Sister Hatsune strokes her forever-shut eyelid as the night wind blows around the Shrine, ‘a ravine climbs northwards from the San’yôdo Highway to the castle town of Bitchu. At a narrow twist in this ravine, two footsore pedlars from Osaka were overtaken by night, and made camp at the foot of an abandoned shrine to Inari, the Fox God, underneath a venerable walnut-tree, draped in moss. Now the first pedlar, a cheerful fellow, sold ribbons, combs and suchlike. He’d charm the girls, cajole the young men, and business had been good. “Ribbons for kisses,” he’d sing, “from all the young misses!” The second pedlar was a knife-seller. He was a darker-spirited fellow who believed that the world owed him a living, and his handcart was full of unsold merchandise. On the night this tale begins, they warmed themselves at their fire and talked about what they would do on their return to Osaka. The ribbon pedlar was set on marrying his childhood sweetheart, but the knife-seller planned to open a pawnbroker’s shop to earn the most money with the least work.’

Sawarabi’s scissors snip snip snip through a band of cotton.

‘Before they slept, the knife-seller suggested that they pray to Inari-sama for his protection through the night in such a lonely spot. The ribbon pedlar agreed, but as he knelt before the abandoned altar, the knife-seller chopped off his head with a single stroke of his biggest unsold axe.’

Several of the Sisters gasp and Sadaie gives a little shriek. ‘No!’

‘Phut Sister,’ says Asagao, ‘you told us the two nen were phriends.’

‘So the poor ribbon-seller thought, Sister. But now the knife-seller stole his companion’s money, buried the body and fell sound asleep. Surely nightmares, or strange groans, plagued him? Not at all. The knife-seller woke up refreshed, enjoyed his victim’s food for breakfast and had an uneventful journey back to Osaka. Setting himself up in business with the murdered man’s money, he prospered as a pawnbroker, and soon he was lining his robes and eating the daintiest delicacies with silver chopsticks. Four springs came and four autumns went. Then, one afternoon, a spruce, bushy customer in a brown cloak walked into the pawnbroker’s shop and produced a box of walnut wood. From inside, he removed a polished human skull. The pawnbroker said, “The box may be worth a few copper mon, but why are you showing me this old lump of bone?” The stranger smiled at the pawnbroker with his fine white teeth and commanded the skull: “Sing!” And as I live and breathe, Sisters, sing it did, and here is the song that it sang:

‘ “With Beauty shall you Sleep, on Pleasure shall you Dine,

By the Crane and the Turtle and the Goyô Pine…” ’

A log cracks open in the hearth and half the women jump.

‘The three tokens of good fortune,’ says Blind Minori.

‘So thought the pawnbroker,’ continues Hatsune, ‘but to the spruce and bushy stranger he complained that the market was flooded with these Dutch novelties. He asked whether the skull would sing for anyone or just the stranger? In his silky voice, the stranger explained that it would sing for its true owner. “Well,” grunted the pawnbroker, “here’s three koban: ask for one mon more, and the deal’s off.” The stranger said not a word but bowed, placed the skull on its box, took his payment and left. The pawnbroker lost no time in deciding how best to turn his magical acquisition into money. He clicked his fingers for his palanquin, and rode to the den of a certain masterless samurai, a dissolute sort of ronin given to strange wagers. Being a cautious man, the pawnbroker tested his new purchase as he rode and ordered the skull, “Sing!” And sure enough, the skull sang,

‘ “Wood is Life and Fire is Time,

By the Crane and the Turtle and the Goyô Pine!” ’

‘Once in the samurai’s presence, the pawnbroker produced his new acquisition and asked for a thousand koban for a song from his new friend, the skull. Quick as a blade, the samurai told the pawnbroker that he’d lose his head for insulting his credulity if it didn’t sing. The pawnbroker, who had expected this response, agreed to the wager in return for half the samurai’s wealth, if the skull did sing. Well, the crafty samurai assumed that the pawnbroker had lost his wits… and saw an easy fortune to be had. He objected that the pawnbroker’s neck was worth nothing and claimed all his visitor’s wealth as a prize. Delighted that the samurai had taken the bait, the pawnbroker raised the stakes again: if the skull sang, his rival must pay all his wealth… unless, of course, he was losing his nerve? In reply, the samurai bade his scribe draw up the wager as a blood-oath, witnessed by the ward headman, a corrupt fellow well used to such shady goings-on. Then the greedy pawnbroker placed the skull on a box and ordered: “Sing!” ’

The women’s shadows are the uneasy shades of slanted giants.

Hotaru is the first to crack. ‘What happened, Sister Hatsune?’

‘Silence was what happened, Sister. The skull uttered not one squeak. So the pawnbroker raised his voice a second time. “Sing. I command you. Sing!” ’

Housekeeper Satsuki’s busy needle has fallen still.

‘The skull said not a word. The pawnbroker turned pale. “Sing! Sing!” But still the skull was mute. The blood-oath lay there on the table, its red ink not yet dry. The pawnbroker, in despair, shouted at the skull – “Sing!” Nothing, nothing, nothing. The pawnbroker expected no mercy, nor received any. The samurai called for his sharpest sword whilst the pawnbroker knelt there, trying to pray. Off came the pawnbroker’s head.’

Sawarabi drops a thimble: it rolls to Orito, who picks it up and returns it.

‘Now,’ Hatsune nods, ponderously, ‘too late, the skull chose to sing…

‘ “Ribbons for kisses, from all the young misses!

Ribbons for kisses, from all the young misses!” ’

Hotaru and Asagao stare wide-eyed. Umegae’s mocking smile is gone.

‘The samurai,’ Hatsune leans backwards, brushing her knees, ‘knew cursed silver when he saw it. He donated the pawnbroker’s money to Sanjusandengo Temple. The spruce and bushy stranger was never heard of again. Who knows that he wasn’t Inari-sama himself, come to avenge the wickedness committed against his shrine? The skull of the ribbon-seller – if his it was – is still housed in a remote alcove in a rarely visited wing of Sanjusandengo. One of the older monks prays for its repose every year on the Day of the Dead. If any of you passes that way after your Descent, you may go and see it for yourself…’

Rain hisses like swinging snakes and gutters gurgle. Orito watches a vein pulsating in Yayoi’s throat. The belly craves food, she thinks, the tongue craves water, the heart craves love and the mind craves stories. It is stories, she believes, that make life in the House of Sisters tolerable, stories in all their forms: the Gifts’ letters, tittle-tattle, recollections and tall tales like Hatsune’s singing skull. She thinks of myths of gods, of Izanami and Izanagi, of Buddha and Jesus; and perhaps the Goddess of Mount Shiranui, and wonders whether the same principle is not at work. Orito pictures the human mind as a loom that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception.

‘I can’t stop thinking,’ Yayoi murmurs, ‘of the girl.’

‘Which girl,’ Orito wraps Yayoi’s hair around her thumb, ‘Sleepyhead?’

‘The ribbon-seller’s sweetheart. The one he planned to marry.’

You must leave the House and leave Yayoi, Orito reminds herself, soon.

‘So sad.’ Yayoi yawns. ‘She’d grow old and die, never knowing the truth.’

The fire glows bright and dim as the draught blows strong and weak.

There is a leak over the iron brazier: drips hiss and crackle.

The wind rattles the Cloisters’ wooden screens like a deranged prisoner.

Yayoi’s question comes from nowhere. ‘Were you touched by a man, Sister?’

Orito is used to her friend’s directness, but not on this subject. ‘No.’

That ‘No’ is my stepbrother’s victory, she thinks. ‘My stepmother in Nagasaki has a son. I’d rather not name him. During Father’s marriage negotiations, it was settled that he’d train to be a doctor and a scholar. It didn’t take long, however, for his lack of aptitude to betray itself. He hated books, loathed Dutch, was disgusted by blood, and was despatched to an uncle in Saga, but he returned to Nagasaki for Father’s funeral. The tongue-tied boy was now a seventeen-year-old man of the world. It was “Oy, bath!”; it was “Hey, tea!” He watched me, as men do, with no encouragement. None.’

Orito pauses as footsteps in the passageway come and go.

‘My stepmother noticed her son’s new attitude but said nothing, not yet. Until Father died, she passed as a dutiful doctor’s wife, but after the funeral she changed… or changed back. She forbade me to leave our residence without her permission, permission that she rarely gave. She told me, “Your days of playing at scholars are over.” Father’s old friends were turned away until they no longer called. She dismissed Ayame, our last servant from Mother’s time. I had to take over her duties. One day my rice was white: from the next, it was brown. What a pampered creature that must make me sound.’

Yayoi gasps slightly at a kick in her uterus. ‘They’re listening, and none of us thinks you were a pampered creature.’

‘Well, then my stepbrother taught me that my troubles had not yet begun. I slept in Ayame’s old room – two mats, so it was more of a cupboard – and one night, a few days after Father’s funeral, when the whole house was asleep, my stepbrother appeared. I asked him what he wanted. He told me that I knew. I told him to get out. He said, “The rules have changed, dear stepsister.” He said that as head of the Aibagawas of Nagasaki’ – Orito tastes metal – ‘the household’s assets were his. “This one, too,” he said, and that was when he touched me.’

Yayoi grimaces. ‘It was wrong of me to ask. You don’t have to tell me.’

It was his crime, Orito thinks, not mine. ‘I tried to… but he hit me as I’d never been hit before. He clamped his hand over my mouth, and told me…’ to imagine, she remembers, he was Ogawa. ‘He swore that if I resisted, he would hold the right side of my face over the fire until it matched the left side, and do what he wanted to do to me anyway.’ Orito stops to steady her voice. ‘Acting frightened was easy. Acting submissive was harder. So I said, “Yes.” He licked my face like a dog and unfastened himself and… then I sank my fingers deep between his legs and squeezed what I found there, like a lemon, with all my strength.’

Yayoi looks at her friend in a wholly new way.

‘His scream woke the house up. His mother came running and ordered the servants away. I told her what her stepson had tried to do. He told her I had begged him to my bed. She slapped the head of the Aibagawas of Nagasaki once for being a liar, twice for being stupid, and ten times for almost wasting the family’s most saleable property. “Abbot Enomoto,” she told him, “will want your stepsister intact when she arrives at his Nunnery of Freaks.” That was how I learnt why Enomoto’s bailiff had been visiting. Four days later I found myself here.’

The storm pelts the roofs and the fire growls.

Orito remembers how all her fathers’ friends refused to shelter her on the night she ran away from her own house.

She remembers hiding all night in the House of Wistaria, listening.

She remembers her painful decision to accept de Zoet’s proposal.

She remembers her final shaming and capture at Dejima’s Land-Gate.

‘The monks aren’t like your stepbrother,’ Yayoi is saying. ‘They’re gentle.’

‘So gentle that when I say, “No,” they stop, and leave my room?’

‘The Goddess chooses the Engifters, just as she chooses us Sisters.’

To implant belief, Orito thinks, is to dominate the believers.

‘At my first Engiftment,’ Yayoi confesses, ‘I imagined a boy I once loved.’

So the hoods, Orito realises, are to hide the men’s faces, not ours.

‘Might you have known a man,’ Yayoi hesitates, ‘who you could…?’

Ogawa Uzaemon, the midwife thinks, is no longer my concern.

Orito banishes all thought of Jacob de Zoet, and recalls Jacob de Zoet.

‘Oh,’ says Yayoi, ‘I’m as nosy as Hashihime tonight. Pay me no mind.’

But the Newest Sister slips from the warmth of their blankets, goes to the chest given her by the Abbess and takes out a bamboo-and-paper fan. Yayoi sits up, curious. Orito lights a candle and opens the fan.

Yayoi peers at the details. ‘He was an artist? Or a scholar?’

‘He read books, but he was just a clerk in an ordinary warehouse.’

‘He loved you.’ Yayoi touches the ribs of the fan. ‘He loved you.’

‘He was a stranger from another… domain. He scarcely knew me.’

Yayoi looks at Orito pityingly, and sighs. ‘So?’

The sleeper knows she is dreaming because the moon-grey cat pronounces, ‘Someone carried this fish all the way up this mountain.’ The cat takes the pilchard, jumps to the ground and vanishes beneath the walkway. The dreamer lowers herself on to the Courtyard, but the cat has gone. She sees a narrow rectangular hole in the foundations of the House…

… Its breath is warm. She hears children and summer’s insects.

A voice up on the walkway asks, ‘Has the Newest Sister lost anything?’

The moon-grey cat licks its paws and speaks in her father’s voice.

‘I know you’re a messenger,’ says the dreamer, ‘but what is your message?’

The cat looks at her pityingly, and sighs. ‘I left through this hole, beneath us…’

The dark universe is packed into one small box that slowly opens.

‘… and reappeared at the House gate a minute later. What does that mean?’

The sleeper wakes up in frosted darkness. Yayoi is here, fast asleep.

Orito gropes, grapples, fumbles and understands. A conduit… or a tunnel.

XX The Two Hundred Steps leading to Ryûgaji Temple in Nagasaki

New Year’s Day, the Twelfth Year of the era of Kansei

The holiday crowds throng and jostle. Boys are selling warblers in cages dangling from a pine tree. Over her smoking griddle a palsy-handed grandmother croaks, ‘Squiiiiiiiiid on a stick-oh, squiiiiiiiiid on a stick-oh, who will buy my squiiiiiiiiid on a stick-oooh!’ Inside his palanquin Uzaemon hears Kiyoshichi shout, ‘Make way, make way!’ less in hope of clearing a path than to insure himself against being scolded by Ogawa the Elder for laziness. ‘Pictures to astound! Drawings to amaze!’ hollers a seller of engravings. The man’s face appears in the grille of Uzaemon’s palanquin, and he holds up a pornographic woodblock print of a naked goblin, who bears an undeniable likeness to Melchior van Cleef. The goblin possesses a monstrous phallus as big as his body. ‘Might I proffer for Sir’s delectation a sample of “Dejima Nights”?’ Uzaemon growls, ‘No!’ and the man withdraws, bellowing, ‘See Kawahara’s Hundred and Eight Wonders of the Empire without leaving your house!’ A storyteller points to his storyboard about the Siege of Shimabara: ‘Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the Christian Amakusa Shirô, bent on selling our souls to the King of Rome!’ The entertainer plays his audience well: there are boos and yells of abuse. ‘And so the Great Shogun expelled the foreign devils, and so the yearly Rite of fumi-e continues to the present day, to weed out these heretics feeding off our udders!’ A disease-gnawed girl, breastfeeding a baby so deformed that Uzaemon mistakes it for a shaven puppy, implores, ‘Mercy and a coin, sir, mercy and a coin…’ He slides open the grille just as the palanquin lurches forward a dozen steps, and Uzaemon is left holding a one mon piece against all the laughing, smoking, joking passers-by. Their joy is insufferable. I am like a dead spirit at O-bon, Uzaemon thinks, forced to watch the carefree and the living gorge themselves on Life. His palanquin tips, and he must grip the lacquered handle as he slides backwards. Near the top of the temple steps a handful of girls on the cusp of womanhood whip their spinning tops. To know the secrets of Mount Shiranui, he thinks, is to be banished from this world.

A lumbering ox obscures Uzaemon’s view of the girls.

The Creeds of Enomoto’s Order shine darkness on all things.

When the ox has passed, the girls are gone.

The palanquins are set down in the Courtyard of the Jade Peony, an area reserved for samurai families. Uzaemon climbs out of his box, and slides his swords into his sash. His wife stands behind his mother, whilst his father attacks Kiyoshichi like the snapping turtle he has come, in recent weeks, to resemble: ‘Why did you allow us to be buried alive in that -’ he jabs his stick towards the thronged steps ‘- in that human mud?’

‘My lapse,’ Kiyoshichi bows low, ‘was unforgivable, Master.’

‘Yet this old fool,’ growls Ogawa the Elder, ‘is to forgive you anyhow?’

Uzaemon tries to intervene. ‘With respect, Father, I’m sure-’

‘ “With respect” is what scoundrels say when they mean the opposite!’

‘With sincere respect, Father, Kiyoshichi could not make the crowd vanish.’

‘So sons now side with menservants against their fathers?’

Kannon, Uzaemon implores, grant me patience. ‘Father, I’m not siding with-’

‘Well, doubtless you find this silly old fool very behind the times.’

I am not your son. The unexpected thought strikes Uzaemon.

‘People will start wondering,’ Uzaemon’s mother declares to the backs of her powdered hands, ‘whether the Ogawas are having doubts about the fumi-e.’

Uzaemon turns to Ogawa Mimasaku. ‘Then let us enter… yes?’

‘Shouldn’t you consult the servants first?’ Ogawa Mimasaku walks towards the inner gates. He rose from his sickbed a few days ago only partially recovered, but to be absent from the fumi-e ritual is tantamount to announcing one’s own death. He slaps away Saiji’s offers of help. ‘My stick is more loyal.’

The Ogawas pass a queue of newly-wed couples waiting to breathe in incense smoke curling from the bronze Ryûgaji dragon’s mouth. Local legend promises them a healthy baby son. Uzaemon senses that his wife would like to join them, but is too ashamed of her two miscarriages. The temple’s cavernous entrance is strung with twists of white paper to celebrate the forthcoming Year of the Sheep. Their servants help them out of their shoes, which they store on shelves marked with their names. An initiate greets them with a nervous bow, ready to guide them to the Gallery of Paulownia to perform the fumi-e ritual away from the prying eyes of the lower orders. ‘The Head Priest guides the Ogawas,’ Uzaemon’s father remarks.

‘The Head Priest,’ the initiate apologises, ‘is busy with te-te-te -’

Ogawa Mimasaku sighs and stares off to one side.

‘- temple duties,’ the stutterer is mortified into fluency, ‘at present.’

‘Whatever a man is busy with, that is what, or whom, he values.’

The initiate leads them to a line of thirty- or forty-strong. ‘The wait should,’ he takes a deep breath, ‘n-n-n-nnn-n-n-not be long.’

‘How, in Buddha’s name,’ asks Uzaemon’s father, ‘do you say your sutras?’

The blushing initiate grimaces, bows, and returns the way he came.

Ogawa Mimasaku is half smiling for the first time in many days.

Uzaemon’s mother, meanwhile, greets the family ahead. ‘Nabeshima-san!’

A portly matriarch turns around. ‘Ogawa-san!’

‘Another year gone,’ croons Uzaemon’s mother, ‘in the blink of an eye!’

Ogawa the Elder and the opposing patriarch, a rice-tax collector for the Magistracy, exchange manly bows; Uzaemon greets the three Nabeshima sons, all close to him in age and employed in their father’s office.

‘The blink of an eye,’ sighs the matriarch, ‘with two new grandsons…’

Uzaemon glances at his wife, who is withering away with shame.

‘Please accept,’ says his mother, ‘our heartfelt congratulations.’

‘I tell my daughters-in-law,’ huffs Mrs Nabeshima, ‘ “Slow down: it isn’t a race!” But young people nowadays won’t listen, don’t you find? Now the middle one thinks she has another on the way. Between ourselves,’ she leans close to Uzaemon’s mother, ‘I was too lenient when they arrived. Now they run amok. You three! Where are your manners? For shame!’ Her forefinger plucks her daughters-in-law one step forward, each dressed in a seasonal kimono and tasteful sash. ‘Had I worn my mother-in-law down like these three tormentors, I would have been sent back to my parents’ house in disgrace.’ The three young wives stare at the ground, whilst Uzaemon’s attention is drawn to their babies, in the arms of wet-nurses over to one side. He is assailed, as he has been countless times since the day of the herbalist of Kurozane’s visit, by nightmarish images of Orito being ‘Engifted’; and, nine months later, of the masters ‘consuming’ the Goddess’s Gifts. The questions begin circling. How do they actually kill the newborn? How is it kept secret from the mothers, from the world? How can men believe that this depravity lets them cheat death? How can their consciences be amputated?

‘I see your wife – Okinu-san, isn’t it?’ Mrs Nabeshima regards Uzaemon with a saint’s smile and a lizard’s eyes ‘- is a better-bred girl altogether than my three. “We” are as yet’ – she pats her stomach – ‘unblessed, are we?’

Okinu’s face-paint hides her blush, but her cheeks quiver slightly.

‘My son does his part,’ Uzaemon’s mother declares, ‘but she is so careless.’

‘And how,’ Mrs Nabeshima tuts, ‘have “we” settled into Nagasaki?’

‘She still pines for Shimonoseki,’ says Uzaemon’s mother. ‘Such a crybaby!’

‘Homesickness may be’ – the matriarch pats her belly again – ‘the cause…’

Uzaemon wants to defend his wife, but how to combat a painted mudslide?

‘Could your husband,’ Mrs Nabeshima is asking Uzaemon’s mother, ‘spare you and Okinu-san this afternoon, I wonder? We’re having a little party at home, and your daughter-in-law may benefit from the advice of mothers her own age. But – oh!’ She regards Ogawa the Elder with a dismayed frown. ‘What must you think of such an imposition at so short a notice, given your husband’s health-’

‘Her husband’s health,’ the old man interrupts, ‘is excellent. You two,’ he sneers at his wife and daughter-in-law, ‘do whatever you wish. I’m going to have sutras recited for Hisanobu.’

‘Such a devout father,’ Mrs Nabeshima shakes her head, ‘is a model for the youth of today. All’s settled, then, yes, Mrs Ogawa? After the fumi-e, come back to our-’ She breaks off her sentence to address a wet-nurse. ‘Silence that mewling piglet! Have you forgotten where we are? For shame!’

The wet-nurse turns away, bares her breast and feeds the baby.

Uzaemon peers at the queue into the gallery, trying to gauge its speed.

The Buddhist deity Fudô Myôô glares from his candlelit shrine: his fury, Uzaemon was taught, frightens the impious; his sword slices their ignorance; his rope binds demons; his third eye scrutinises human hearts; and the rock on which he stands signifies immovability. Seated before him are six officials from the Inspectorate of Spiritual Purity, dressed in ceremonial attire.

The first official asks Uzaemon’s father, ‘Please state your name and position.’

‘Ogawa Mimasaku, Interpreter of the First Rank of Dejima Interpreters, head of the Ogawa household of the Higashizaka Ward.’

The first inspector tells a second, ‘Ogawa Mimasaku is present.’

The second finds the name on a register. ‘Ogawa Mimasaku’s name is listed.’

The third writes the name. ‘Ogawa Mimasaku, hereby registered as present.’

A fourth declaims, ‘Ogawa Mimasaku will now perform the act of fumi-e.’

Ogawa Mimasaku steps on to the well-worn bronze plaque of Jesus Christ, and grinds his heel on the image for good measure.

A fifth official calls out, ‘Ogawa Mimasaku has performed fumi-e.’

The Interpreter of the First Rank steps off the idolatrous plaque, and is helped by Kiyoshichi to a low bench. Uzaemon suspects he is suffering more pain than he is willing to show.

A sixth official marks his register. ‘Ogawa Mimasaku is registered as having performed the act of fumi-e.’

Uzaemon thinks about the foreigner de Zoet’s Psalms of David and the narrowness of his own escape when Kobayashi had the Dutchman’s apartment burgled. He wishes he had asked de Zoet about his mysterious religion last summer.

Festive noise washes in from the commoners’ ritual in a neighbouring hall.

The first official is now addressing him: ‘Please state your name and profession…’

Once the formalities are completed, Uzaemon steps up to the fumi-e.

He glances down and meets the pained eyes of the foreign god. Uzaemon presses his foot down on the bronze, and thinks of the long line of Ogawas of Nagasaki who have stood on this same fumi-e. On previous New Year’s Days, Uzaemon felt proud to be the latest in this line: some ancestors would, like him, have been adoptive sons. But today he feels like an impostor, and he knows why.

My loyalty to Orito, he phrases it, is stronger than my loyalty to the Ogawas.

He feels the face of Jesus Christ against the sole of his foot.

Whatever the cost, Uzaemon vows, I shall free her. But I need help.

The walls of Shuzai’s dojo hall echo with the two swordsmen’s shrieks and the crack of bamboo poles. They attack, parry, counter, rout; attack, parry, counter, rout. The sprung wooden floor creaks under their bare feet. Drips of rainwater are caught by buckets, which, when full, are changed by Shuzai’s last remaining apprentice. The practice bout comes to an abrupt end when the shorter of the two combatants deals his partner a blow on his right elbow, causing Uzaemon to drop his pole. The concerned victor slides up his face-mask, revealing a flat-nosed, well-weathered and watchful man well into his forties. ‘Is it broken?’

‘The fault was mine.’ Uzaemon is clutching his elbow.

Yohei hurries over to help his master unfasten his mask.

Unlike his teacher’s face, Uzaemon’s drips with sweat. ‘There’s no breakage… look.’ He bends and straightens his elbow. ‘Just a well-deserved bruise.’

‘The light was too poor. I should have lit lamps.’

‘Shuzai-san mustn’t waste oil on my account. Let us end here.’

‘I hope you won’t oblige me to drink your generous gift alone?’

‘On such an auspicious day, your engagements must be pressing…’

Shuzai looks around his empty dojo hall and shrugs at Uzaemon.

‘Then,’ the interpreter bows, ‘I accept your courteous invitation.’

Shuzai orders his pupil to light the fire in his private apartment. The men change out of their practice clothes, discussing the New Year Promotions and Demotions announced earlier by Magistrate Ômatsu. Stepping up into the teacher’s quarters, Uzaemon recalls the ten or more young disciples who ate, slept and studied here when he first took lessons from Shuzai, and the pair of matronly neighbourhood women who cajoled and cared for them. The rooms are colder and quieter nowadays, but as the fire comes to life, the two men slip into informal manners and their native Tosa dialect, and Uzaemon is warmed by his and Shuzai’s ten-year-old acquaintance.

Shuzai’s boy pours the heated sake into a chipped flask, bows and leaves.

Now is the time, Uzaemon prompts himself, to say what I have to say…

The thoughtful host and his hesitant guest fill each other’s cups.

‘To the fortunes of the Ogawas of Nagasaki,’ proposes Shuzai, ‘and to the speedy recovery of your honourable father.’

‘To a prosperous Year of the Sheep for the dojo hall of Master Shuzai.’

The men empty the first cup of sake, and Shuzai sighs contentedly. ‘But prosperity is gone for good, I fear. I pray I’m wrong but I doubt I am. The old values are decaying, that’s the problem. The smell of decadence hangs everywhere, like smoke. Oh, samurai enjoy the notion of wading into battle like their valiant ancestors, but when the storehouse is hungry, it’s swordsmanship they say goodbye to, not their concubines and silk linings. Those who do care about the old ways are the very ones who fall foul of the new. Another of my students quit last week, with tears in his eyes: his father’s stipend at the Armoury has been paid at half-rate for two years running – and now the gentleman learns that his rank won’t be eligible for a New Year payment. This at the end of the Twelfth Month, when the money-lenders and bailiffs do their rounds, badgering decent people! Have you heard Edo ’s newest advice to its unpaid officials? “Cover your indulgences by breeding goldfish.” Goldfish! Who has money to waste on goldfish, other than merchants? Now if merchants’ sons were permitted to carry swords -’ Shuzai lowers his voice ‘- I would have a line of pupils stretching from here to the Fish Market, but better to plant silver coins in horse-shit than wait for Edo to pass that edict.’ He refills his cup and Uzaemon’s. ‘Ah, so much for my woes: your mind was on other things during sword-practice.’

Uzaemon is no longer surprised by Shuzai’s perspicacity. ‘I don’t know if I have the right to involve you.’

‘To a believer in Fate,’ replies Shuzai, ‘it’s not you who is involving me.’

Damp twigs on the weak fire crackle as if trodden upon.

‘Some disturbing news came into my possession, some days ago…’

A cockroach, shiny as lacquer, crawls along the base of the wall.

‘… in the form of a scroll. It concerns the Order of the Shrine of Shiranui.’

Shuzai, privy to Uzaemon’s intimacy with Orito, studies his friend.

‘The scroll lists the Order’s secret precepts. It’s… deeply disturbing.’

‘It’s a secretive place, Mount Shiranui. You are certain this scroll is genuine?’

Uzaemon produces the dogwood scroll-tube from his sleeve. ‘Yes. I wish it was a forgery, but it was written by an acolyte of the Order who was no longer able to bury his conscience. He ran away, and to read the scroll is to understand why…’

The rain’s innumerable hoofs clatter on the streets and roofs.

Shuzai holds out his open palm for the scroll-tube.

‘To read it may implicate you, Shuzai. It could be dangerous.’

Shuzai holds out his open palm for the scroll-tube.

‘But this is’ – Shuzai speaks in an appalled whisper – ‘this is insanity: that this…’ he gestures at the scroll on his low table ‘… murderous garble could purchase immortality. The phrases are misshapen but… these Third and Fourth Creeds – if the “Engifters” are the initiates of the Order and the “Bearers” are the women and their newborn the “Gifts”, then the Shrine of Shiranui is a – a – not a harem but…’

‘A farm.’ Uzaemon’s throat tightens. ‘The Sisters are livestock.’

‘This Sixth Creed, about “Extinguishing the Gifts in the Bowl of Hands”…’

‘They must drown the newborn children, like unwanted puppies.’

‘But the men doing the drowning… they must be the fathers.’

‘The Seventh Creed orders five “Engifters” to lie with the same “Bearer” over as many nights so no one can know that he is killing his own offspring.’

‘It – it violates Nature: the women, how could…’ Shuzai aborts his sentence.

Uzaemon forces himself to voice his worst fears. ‘The women are violated when they are most fertile, and when the children are born, they are stolen. The women’s consent, I presume, is not a matter of concern. Hell is Hell because there evil passes unremarked upon.’

‘But might some not prefer to take their own lives to this?’

‘Perhaps some do. But look at the Eighth Creed: “Letters from the Extinguished”. A mother who believes that her children are living good lives with foster-families may, perhaps, endure what she must – especially if she can nurture hopes of meeting her children again, after her “Descent”. That these reunions can never occur is a truth that, evidently, never reaches the House of Sisters.’

Shuzai passes no comment, but squints at the scroll. ‘There are sentences I cannot decipher… see this last line of all: “The Final Word of Shiranui is Silence.” Your runaway apostate must translate his testimony into plain Japanese.’

‘He was poisoned. To read the Creeds, as I said, is dangerous.’

Uzaemon’s servant and Shuzai’s apprentice talk as they sweep the hall.

‘Yet Lord Abbot Enomoto,’ Shuzai speaks with incredulity, ‘is known as a…’

‘A respected judge, yes; a humane lord, yes; an Academician of the Shirandô, a confidant of the great, and a dealer in rare medicines, yes. Yet it appears he is also a believer in an arcane Shintô ritual that buys blood-drenched immortality.’

‘How could these abominations be kept a secret for so many decades?’

‘Isolation, ingenuity, power… fear… These achieve most ends.’

A clutch of drenched New Year revellers hurries along the street outside.

Uzaemon looks at the alcove where Shuzai’s master is honoured: a mildewed hanging proclaims, ‘The hawk may be starving, yet he won’t touch corn.’

‘The author of this scroll,’ Shuzai says cautiously, ‘did you meet him face-to-face?’

‘No. He gave the scroll to an old herbalist living near Kurozane. Miss Aibagawa visited her, two or three times, which is how the herbalist knew my name. She sought me out in the hope that I have the will and the means to help the Shrine’s Newest Sister…’

The two men listen to the percussion of dripping water.

‘The will I have; the means are another matter. If a Dutch interpreter of the Third Rank mounted a campaign against the Lord of Kyôga armed with nothing but this scroll of illegitimate provenance…’

‘Enomoto would have you beheaded for casting a slur on his reputation.’

This minute, Uzaemon thinks, is a crossroads. ‘Shuzai, if I had persuaded my father to let me marry Miss Aibagawa, as I once promised, she wouldn’t be enslaved in this…’ he jabs at the parchment ‘… farm. Do you understand why I have to free her?’

‘What I understand is that if you act alone you’ll get sliced like a tuna fish. Give me a few days. I may take a short journey.’

XXI Orito’s Room at the House of Sisters

The Eighth Night of the First Month in the Twelfth Year of the Era of Kansei

Orito considers the luck required in the hours ahead: the cat’s tunnel must be wide enough to admit a slim woman and not barred at its exit; Yayoi must sleep until morning without checking on her; she must descend an ice-bound gorge without injury, and pass the Halfway Gate without alerting the guards; and by dawn, she must find Otane’s house and trust her friend to give her sanctuary. All of which, Orito thinks, is just the beginning. Returning to Nagasaki would mean recapture, but escape to the relative safety of Chikugo Domain, or Kumamoto or Kagoshima, would mean arriving in a strange town as a homeless, friendless woman without a sen to her name.

Engiftment is next week, Orito thinks. Next week is your turn.

Inch by cautious inch, Orito slides open her door.

My first footstep, she thinks, as a fugitive, and passes Yayoi’s room.

Her heavily pregnant friend is snoring. Orito whispers, ‘I am sorry.’

For Yayoi, Orito’s escape will be a brutal abandonment.

It’s the Goddess, the midwife reminds herself, who forces you to do this.

Orito slides her feet around the passageway to the Kitchen where a screen serves as the curfew exit out on to the Cloisters. Here she binds a pair of straw-and-canvas shoes on to her feet.

Outside, icy air soaks into her padded jacket and mountain trousers.

A gibbous moon is grubby. Stars are bubbles, trapped in ice. The old pine is gnarled and malign. Orito navigates the Cloisters back to the place the cat showed her a few weeks ago. Watching the shadows, she lowers herself on to the frost-fused stones. She ducks underneath the walkway, bracing herself for a shout of alarm…

… but there is no shout. Orito crawls under the inner passageway until her groping hand finds the rectangle between the foundation stones. She found it once again after the moon-grey cat showed it to her, but in doing so earned the attention of Sisters Asagao and Sawarabi, and had to concoct a dubious story about a dropped pin. In the nine days since, she has not risked reconnoitring the tunnel. If, she thinks, it is a tunnel, and not just a few missing blocks in the foundations. Head first, she inserts herself through the black rectangle and crawls forward.

Inside, the ‘roof’ is knee-height, the walls a forearm apart. To move, Orito must wriggle laterally, like an eel, less elegantly but as quietly. Soon her kneecaps are scraped, her shins are bruised and her fingertips hurt as they grapple for traction on the frozen stones. The floor feels smoothed, as if by running water. The darkness is one degree short of absolute. When her probing knuckles slap a stone block, she despairs, thinking she is come to a dead end… but then the conduit bends to the left. Twisting her body around the sharp corner, she pushes onward. She shivers uncontrollably and her lungs hurt. She tries not to think of giant rats or entombment. I must be under Umegae’s room, she supposes, imagining the Sister pressed against Hashihime, just two layers of floorboard, a tatami mat and an under-futon above her.

Is the darkness ahead, she wonders, growing less dark?

Hope pushes her onwards. She makes out another corner.

Rounding it, Orito sees a small triangle of moonlit stone.

A hole in the House’s outer wall, she realises. Please, please let it be big enough.

But after a minute’s slow struggle, she finds the hole little bigger than a fist: just the right size for a cat. Years of ice and sun, she guesses, loosened a single lump of stone. Were the hole any larger, she thinks, it would have been noticed from the outside. Anchoring herself, she places her hand against the stone adjacent to the hole and pushes with all her strength until a painful crick in her bent neck obliges her to stop.

Some objects are potentially movable, she thinks, but this one, never.

‘That’s it then.’ Her murmured breath is white. ‘There’s no escape.’

Orito considers the next twenty years, the men, and the children removed.

She retreats to the second bend, turns around with difficulty and propels herself forwards, feet first, back to the outer wall and wedges herself tight: she plants her heels on the adjacent stone and pushes…

I may as well, Orito gasps for breath, try to shift Bare Peak.

Then she imagines Abbess Izu, announcing her Engiftment.

Jack-knifing herself, she kicks at the stone with the flat of her feet.

She imagines the Sisters’ congratulations: gleeful, spiteful and sincere.

Barking her shins, she kicks at the stone again, again and again…

She thinks of Master Genmu pawing and gnawing her.

What was that sound? Orito stops. Was that a grating sound?

She imagines Suzaku pulling out her first baby; her third; her ninth…

Her feet kick the stone until her calves hurt and her neck throbs.

Grit trickles on to her ankles – and suddenly not one but two blocks tumble away and her feet are sticking out into empty space.

She hears stones thump down a low slope, and settle with a thud.

The snow is scabby and ruckled underfoot. Orientate yourself, Orito is dazed to be outside the House, and quickly. The long gully between the ramped foundations of the House of Sisters and the Shrine’s outer wall is five paces wide, but the wall is high as three men: to reach its ramparts, she must find the stairs or a ladder. Left, towards the northern corner is a Moon Gate in the Chinese style: this, Orito has learnt from Yayoi, leads into a triangular courtyard and Master Genmu’s fine quarters. Orito hurries in the opposite direction towards the eastern corner. Passing the end of the House of Sisters, she enters a small enclosure accommodating the hen-coop, dovecote and stalls for the goats. The birds stir slightly as she passes, but the goats stay asleep.

The eastern corner is connected by a roofed walkway to the Masters’ Hall; by a small storehouse, a bamboo ladder is propped against the outer wall. Daring to hope that escape is just a few moments away, Orito climbs up to the rampart. Level with the Shrine’s eaves, she sees the ancient Column of Amanohashira, rising from the Sacred Coutyard. Its spike impales the moon. Such arresting beauty, Orito thinks. Such silent violence.

She pulls up the bamboo ladder and lowers it over the wall’s outer face…

The dense pine forest comes to within twenty paces of the Shrine.

… but the ladder’s feet don’t reach the ground. Perhaps there is a dry moat.

The thick shadow below the wall makes it impossible to guess at the drop.

If I jump and break my leg, she thinks, I’ll freeze to death by sunrise.

Her numb fingers lose their grip and the ladder falls and shatters.

I need a rope, she concludes, or the means to fashion one…

Feeling as exposed as a rat on a shelf, Orito hurries along the rampart towards the Great Gate in the southern corner, hoping that freedom can be won over the body of a soundly sleeping sentry. She climbs down the next ladder to a gully between the outer wall and the barn-sized Kitchen and Dining Hall. There is the smell of latrines and soot. Amber light leaks from the Kitchen door. Knives are being sharpened by an insomniac cook. To disguise her footfalls, Orito steps in time to the metallic scrape. The next Moon Gate leads her into the Southern Courtyard, overlooked by the Meditation Hall and populated by two giant cryptomeria: Fûjin, the Wind God, bent under his sack of the world’s winds; and Raijin, the Thunder God, who steals navels during thunderstorms, holding up his chain of hand-drums. The Great Gate, like Dejima’s Land-Gate, consists of tall double-doors for palanquins, and a smaller door through the gatehouse. This door, Orito sees, stands slightly ajar…

… so she creeps closer along the wall until she smells tobacco and hears voices. She crouches in the shadow of a large barrel. ‘Any more charcoal?’ a voice drawls. ‘My nuts are nuggets of ice.’

A scuttle is rattled empty. ‘That’s the last,’ says a high voice.

‘We’ll throw dice,’ says the drawler, ‘for the privilege of getting more.’

‘So what are your chances,’ says a third voice, ‘of having those nuggets melted in the House of Sisters during Engiftment?’

‘Not good,’ admits the drawler. ‘I had Sawarabi three months ago.’

‘I had Kagerô last month,’ says the third voice. ‘I’m at the back of the queue.’

‘The Newest Sister’s bound to be chosen,’ says the third voice, ‘chances are, so we acolytes shan’t snatch a peep all week. Genmu and Suzaku are always the first to dig their hoes into virgin soil.’

‘Not if the Lord Abbot visits,’ says the drawler. ‘Master Annei told Master Nogoro that Enomoto-dono befriended her father and guaranteed his loans, so that when the old man crossed the Sanzu the widow had a stark choice: hand over her stepdaughter to Mount Shiranui or lose her house and everything in it.’

Orito has never considered this: here and now, it is sickeningly plausible.

The third voice clucks admiringly. ‘A master of strategy, our Lord Abbot…’

Orito wishes she could tear the men and their words to pieces, like squares of paper…

‘Why go to all the bother to get a samurai’s daughter,’ asks the high voice, ‘when he can pick and choose from any brothel in the Empire?’

‘Because this one’s a midwife,’ answers the drawler, ‘who’ll stop so many of our Sisters and their Gifts dying during labour. Rumour has it she brought the Nagasaki Magistrate’s newborn son back from the dead. Cold and blue, he was, until Sister Orito breathed life back into him…’

That single act, Orito wonders, is why Enomoto brought me here?

‘… I’d not be surprised,’ continues the drawler, ‘if she’s a special case.’

‘Meaning,’ asks the third voice, ‘that not even the Lord Abbot honours her?’

‘Not even she could stop herself dying in childbirth, right?’

Ignore this speculation, Orito orders herself. What if he’s wrong?

‘Pity,’ says the drawler. ‘If you don’t look at her face, she’s a pretty thing.’

‘Mind you,’ adds the high voice, ‘until Jiritsu is replaced, there’s one less-’

‘Master Genmu forbade us,’ exclaims the drawler, ‘ever to mention that treacherous bastard’s name.’

‘He did,’ agrees the third voice. ‘He did. Fill the charcoal bucket as penance.’

‘But we were going to throw dice for it!’

‘Ah. That was prior to your disgraceful lapse. Charcoal!’

The door is flung open: bad-tempered footsteps crunch towards Orito who crouches into a terrified ball. The young monk stops by the barrel and removes its lid, just inches away. Orito hears his teeth chatter. She breathes into her shoulder to hide her breath. He scoops up charcoal, filling the scuttle lump by lump…

Any moment now, she shakes, any moment now…

… but he turns away, and walks back to the guardhouse.

Like paper prayers, a year’s good luck was burnt away in seconds.

Orito gives up trying to leave through the gates: she thinks, A rope…

Her pulse still fast and frightened, she slips from the purple shadows through the next Moon Gate into a courtyard formed by the Meditation Hall, the Western Wing and the outer wall. The Guest Quarters are a mirror reflection of the House of Sisters: here the laymen of Enomoto’s retinue are housed when the Lord Abbot is in residence. Like the nuns, they cannot leave their confinement. General supplies, Orito gathers from the Sisters, are kept in the Western Wing, but it is also the living and sleeping quarters of the Order’s thirty or forty acolytes. Some will be sound asleep, but some will not. In the north-western quarter is the Lord Abbot’s Residence. This building has been vacant all winter, but Orito has heard the housekeeper talk about airing the sheets in its linen cupboards. And sheets, it occurs to her, can be knotted into ropes.

She creeps down the gully between the outer wall and the Guest Quarters…

A young man’s soft laughter escapes the doors, and falls silent.

The fine materials and crest identify the house as the Lord Abbot’s.

Exposed from three angles, she climbs up to the gabled doors.

Let them open, she prays to her ancestors, let them open…

The doors are shuttered fast against the mountain winter.

I’d need a hammer and chisel to get inside, Orito thinks. She has nearly walked around the perimeter, but is no nearer escaping. The lack of twenty feet of rope means twenty years of concubinage.

Across the stone garden of Enomoto ’s Residence is the Northern Wing.

Suzaku, Orito has learnt, has his quarters here, next to the Infirmary…

… and an infirmary means patients, beds, sheets and mosquito nets.

Entering one of the wings is a reckless risk, but what choice is left?

The door slides six inches before emitting a high, singing groan. Orito holds her breath to hear the noise of running footsteps…

… but nothing happens, and the fathomless night smooths itself.

She squeezes through the gap: a door-curtain strokes her face.

Reflected moonlight delineates, dimly, a small entrance hall.

An odour of camphor locates the Infirmary through a right-hand door.

There is a sunken doorway to her left, but the fugitive’s instinct says, No…

She slides open the right-hand door.

The darkness resolves itself into planes, lines and surfaces…

She hears the rustling of a straw-filled futon and a sleeper’s breathing.

She hears voices and footsteps: two men, or three.

The patient yawns and asks, ‘ ’S anyone there?’

Orito withdraws to the entrance hall, slides the Infirmary door shut and peers around the shrieking door. A lantern-bearer is less than ten paces away.

He is looking this way, but the glow of his light impairs his vision.

Now Master Suzaku’s voice can be heard in the Infirmary.

The fugitive has nowhere to run but the sunken doorway.

This may be the end, Orito shivers, this may be the end…

The Scriptorium is walled from floor to ceiling with shelves of scrolls and manuscripts. On the other side of the sunken door, someone trips and mutters a curse. Fear of capture pushes Orito into the large chamber before she can be certain that it is unoccupied. A pair of writing-tables is illuminated by a double-headed lantern, and a small fire licks a kettle hanging over the brazier. The side-aisles provide hiding-places, but hiding-places, she thinks, are also traps. Orito walks along the aisle towards the other door, which, she guesses, leads into Master Genmu’s Quarters, and enters the globe of lamplight. She is afraid to leave the empty room but afraid to stay and afraid to go back. In her indecision, she glances down at a half-finished manuscript on one of the tables: with the exceptions of the wall-hangings in the House of Sisters, these are the first written characters the scholar’s daughter has seen since her abduction, and despite the danger, her hungry eye is drawn. Instead of a sutra or sermon, she finds a half-composed letter, written not in the ornate calligraphy of an educated monk but a more feminine hand. The first column she reads obliges her to read the second, and the third…

Dear Mother, The maples are aflame with autumn colours and the harvest moon floats like a lantern, just as the words of The Moonlit Castle describe. How long ago seems the Rainy Season, when the Lord Abbot’s servant delivered your letter. It lies in front of me on my husband’s table. Yes, Koyama Shingo accepted me as his wife on the auspicious Thirtieth Day of the Seventh Month at Shimogamo Shrine, and we are living as newly-weds in the two back rooms of the White Crane obi-sash workshop on Imadegawa Street. After the wedding ceremony a banquet was held at a famous Teahouse, paid for jointly by the Uedas and Koyamas. Some of my friends’ husbands turn into spiteful goblins after capturing their bride, but Shingo continues to treat me with kindness. Married life is not a boating party, of course – just as you wrote in your letter three years ago, a dutiful wife must never sleep before her husband or rise after him, and I never have enough hours in the day! Until the White Crane is well established, we economise by making do with just one maid, as my husband brought only two apprentices from his father’s workshop. I am happy to write, however, that we have secured the patronage of two families connected with the Imperial Court. One is a lesser branch of the Konoe-

The words stop but Orito’s head is spinning. Are the New Year Letters, she wonders, all written by the monks? But this makes no sense. Tens of fictional children would have to be maintained until their mothers’ Descents, and then the subterfuge would be discovered. Why go to so much trouble? Because, twin lamps dot Fat Rat’s knowing eyes, the children cannot write New Year Letters from the World Below for the reason that they never reach the World Below. The Scriptorium’s shadows are watching her react to the implications. Steam rises from the kettle’s spout. Fat Rat is waiting. ‘No,’ she tells it. ‘No.’ There is no need for infanticide. If the Gifts were unwanted by the Order, Master Suzaku would issue herbs to trigger early miscarriages. Mockingly, Fat Rat asks her to explain the letter on the table in front of them. Orito seizes on the first plausible answer: Sister Hatsune’s daughter died from disease or an accident. To save the Sister the pain of bereavement, the Order must have a policy of continuing the New Year Letters.

Fat Rat twitches, turns and disappears.

The door by which she entered is opening. A man says, ‘After you, Master…’

Orito rushes for the other door: as in a dream, it is both near and far.

‘Strange,’ Master Chimei’s voice follows, ‘how one composes best at night…’

Orito slides the door open three or four hand-widths.

‘… but I’m glad of your company at this inhospitable hour, dear youth.’

She is through, and slides shut the door just as Master Chimei strides into the lamplight. Behind Orito, the passageway to Master Genmu’s Quarters is short, cold and unlit. ‘A story must move,’ Master Chimei opines, ‘and misfortune is motion. Contentment is inertia. Hence, into the story of Sister Hatsune’s Miss Noriko, we shall sow the seeds of a modest calamity. The love-birds must suffer. Either from without, from theft, fire, sickness – or, better yet, from within, from a weakness of character. Young Shingo may grow weary of his wife’s devotion, or Noriko may grow so jealous of the new maid that Shingo does start tupping the girl. Tricks of the trade, you see? Storytellers are not priests who commune with an ethereal realm, but artisans, like dumpling-makers, if somewhat slower. To work, then, dear youth, until the lamp drinks itself dry…’

Orito slides her feet along the corridor to Master Genmu’s Quarters, staying close to the wall where, she hopes, the wood is less likely to squeak. She reaches a panelled door. She holds her breath, listens, and hears nothing. She opens it a tiny crack…

The space is empty and unlit: blocks of darkness in each wall indicate doors.

In the middle of the floor lies what might be discarded sacking.

She enters, and approaches the sacks, hoping they can be roped together.

She thrusts a hand into the mound and finds a man’s warm foot.

Her heart stops. The foot recoils. A limb turns. The blankets shift.

Master Genmu mumbles, ‘Stay here, Maboroshi, or I’ll…’ the threat disintegrates.

Orito crouches, not daring to breathe, much less run away…

The quilted hills that are Acolyte Maboroshi shift; a snore snags in his throat.

Minutes pass before Orito is even half sure the two men are asleep.

She counts ten slow breaths before carrying on to the door ahead.

Its sliding rumble sounds, to her ears, loud as an earthquake…

The Goddess, lit by a large votive candle and carved in a fine-flecked silver wood, watches the intruder from her plinth in the centre of the small, luxurious altar room. The Goddess smiles. Do not meet her eyes, an instinct warns Orito, or she shall know you. Black robes with blood-maroon silken cords hang along one wall; the other walls are lined with paper, as in the richer Dutchmen’s houses, and the mats smell resinous and new. To the right and left of the door on the far wall, large ideograms are written in thick ink on the papered walls. The calligraphic style is clear enough, but when Orito peers at them by the light of the candle the meanings elude her. Familiar components are arranged in unknown combinations.

After replacing the candle, she opens the door on to the Northern Courtyard.

The Goddess, whose paint is peeling, watches the surprised intruder from the centre of the mean altar room. Orito is unsure how the Shrine’s outer walls can accommodate it. Perhaps there is no Northern Courtyard. She looks behind her, at the Goddess’s spine and neck. The Goddess ahead is lit by a vigilant candle. She has aged since the first room, and there is no smile on her lips. But don’t meet her eyes, insists the same instinct as before. There is a lingering odour of straw, of animals and people. The boarded walls and floors evoke a farmhouse of middling prosperity. Another one hundred and eight ideograms are written on the far wall, this time on twelve mildewed scrolls hanging at either side of the door. Once again, when Orito pauses for a moment to read the characters, they retreat into troubling unintelligibility. Who cares? she berates herself. Go!

She opens the door on to what must be, surely, the Northern Courtyard…

The Goddess in the centre of the third altar room is half rotted away: she is unrecognisable from her incarnation in the Altar Room in the House of Sisters. Her face might be a tertiary syphilitic’s, far beyond the salvation of mercury medicine. One of her arms lies on the floor where it fell, and by the glow of the tallow candle Orito sees a cockroach twitching on the rim of a hole in the statue’s skull. The walls are bamboo and clay, the floor is straw, and the air is sweet with dung: the room would pass for a peasant’s hovel. Orito speculates that the rooms have been hollowed from a spar of Bare Peak; or even hewn out of a series of caves from which the Shrine grew as the ages passed. Better yet, it occurs to Orito, it may be an escape tunnel dating from the Shrine’s military past. The far wall is caked with something dark – animal blood mixed with mud, perhaps – on which the unreadable characters are daubed in whitewash. Orito raises the poorly made latch, praying that her guess proves accurate…

The cold and darkness are from a time before people and fire.

The tunnel is as high as a man and as wide as outstretched arms.

Orito returns for the candle from the last room: it has about an hour’s life.

She enters the tunnel, proceeding step by cautious step.

Bare Peak is above you, taunts Fear, pressing down, pressing down…

Her shoes click-clack on rock; her breath is hissed shivers; all else is silence.

The candle’s grimy glow is better than nothing, but not by much.

She stands still for a moment: the flame is motionless. No draught yet.

The roof stays at the height of a man and the width of outstretched arms.

Orito walks on. After thirty or forty steps, the tunnel begins to bend upwards.

She imagines emerging into starlight through a secret crack…

… and worries that her escape may cost Yayoi her life.

The crime is Enomoto’s, her conscience objects, Abbess Izu’s, the Goddess’s.

‘The truth isn’t so simple,’ her confined echo tells her conscience.

Is the air becoming warmer, Orito wonders, or do I have a fever?

The tunnel widens into a domed chamber around a kneeling effigy of the Goddess three or four times larger than life. To Orito’s dismay, the tunnel ends here. The Goddess is sculpted from a black stone flecked with bright grains, as if the sculptor chiselled her from a block of night sky. Orito wonders how the effigy was carried in: it is easier to believe that the rock has been here since the Earth was made, and that the tunnel was widened to reach it. The Goddess’s back is erect and cloaked in red cloth, but she cups her giantess’s hands to form a hollow the size of a cradle. Her covetous eyes gaze at the space. Her predatory mouth opens wide. If the Shrine of Shiranui is a question, the thought thinks Orito as much as Orito thinks the thought, then this place is its answer. Inscribed on the smoothed circular wall at shoulder height are more unreadable ideograms: one hundred and eight, she is quite sure, one for each of the Buddhist sins. Something draws Orito’s fingers towards the Goddess’s thigh, and when they touch, she nearly drops the candle: the stone is warm as life. The scholar gropes for an answer: Ducts from hot springs, she reasons, in nearby rocks… Where the Goddess’s tongue should be, something glints in the candlelight. Ignoring an irrational fear of the stone teeth severing her arm, she reaches in and finds a squat bottle, nestling snug in a hollow. It is blown from cloudy glass, or it is full of a cloudy liquid. She removes the cork and sniffs: it has no smell. Both as doctor’s daughter and Suzaku’s patient, Orito knows better than to taste it. But why store it in such a place? She slots the bottle back inside the Goddess’s mouth, and asks, ‘What are you? What is done here? To what end?’

The Goddess’s stone nostrils cannot flare. Her baleful eyes cannot widen…

The candle is extinguished. Blackness swallows the cavern.

Back in the first of the altar rooms, Orito readies herself to pass through Master Genmu’s quarters when she notices the silken cords on the black robes and curses her previous stupidity. Ten of the cords, knotted together, form a light, strong rope as long as the outer wall is high: she attaches another five to make certain. Coiling this up, she slides open the door and skirts the edge of Master Genmu’s room to a side door. A screened passageway leads to an outer door and the Master’s Garden, where a bamboo ladder leans against the ramparts. She climbs up, ties one end of her rope around a sturdy, unobtrusive joist and throws the other from the parapet. Without a backward glance, she takes her last deep breath in captivity and lowers herself to the dry ditch…

Not safe yet. Orito scrambles into a lattice of winter boughs.

She keeps the Shrine wall on her right and refuses to think about Yayoi.

Big twins, she thinks, a fortnight late; a pelvis slimmer than Kawasemi’s…

Rounding the western corner, Orito cuts through a swathe of firs.

One in ten, one in twelve births in the House end with a dead woman.

Through stony ice and needle drifts she finds a sheltered bowl.

With your knowledge and skill, this is no vain boast, it would be one in thirty.

The wind’s quick sleeves catch on the thorny glassy trees.

‘If you turn back,’ Orito warns herself, ‘you know what the men will do.’

She finds the trail where the slope of torî gates begins. Their daylight cinnabar orange is black against the night sky.

Nobody can ask me to submit to enslavement, not even Yayoi…

Then Orito considers the weapon she acquired in the Scriptorium.

To doubt one New Year Letter, she could threaten Genmu, is to doubt them all…

Would the Sisters consent to the terms of the House if they weren’t sure their Gifts were alive and well in the World Below?

Morbid vengefulness, she would add, does not make for fruitful pregnancies.

The path turns a sharp corner. The constellation of the Hunter appears.

No. Orito dismisses the half-thought. I shall never go back.

She concentrates on the steep and icy path. An injury now could ruin her hopes of reaching Otane’s cottage by dawn. An eighth of an hour later Orito turns a high corner above the wood-and-vine bridge called Todoroki, and catches her breath. Mekura Gorge plunges down the mountainside, vast as the sky…

… A bell is ringing at the Shrine. It is not the deep time-bell, but a higher-pitched, insistent bell, rung in the House of Sisters when one of the women goes into labour. Orito imagines Yayoi calling her. She imagines the frantic disbelief prompted by her disappearance, the searches throughout the Precincts, and the discovery of her rope. She imagines Master Genmu being woken: The Newest Sister is gone…

She imagines knotted twin foetuses blocking the neck of Yayoi’s womb.

Clattering acolytes may be despatched down the path, the Halfway Gatehouse will be told of her disappearance, and the domain checkpoints at Isahaya and Kashima will be alerted tomorrow, but the Kyôga Mountains are an eternity of forest for fugitives to vanish into. You shall go back, Orito thinks, only if you choose to.

She imagines Master Suzaku, helpless, as Yayoi’s screams scald the air.

The bell could be a trick, she considers, to lure you back.

Far, far below, the Ariake Sea is burnished by the moonlight…

What may be a trick tonight will be the truth tomorrow night, or very soon…

‘The liberty of Aibagawa Orito,’ Orito speaks out loud, ‘is more important than the life of Yayoi and her twins.’ She examines the truth of the statement.

XXII Shuzai’s Room at his Dojo Hall in Nagasaki

Afternoon of the Thirteenth Day of the First Month

‘I set out early,’ Shuzai reports. ‘At Jizo-sama’s statue at the marketplace I lit a three-sen candle to insure against mishap, and I soon had cause to be grateful for the precaution. Trouble found me by Ômagori Bridge. A captain in the Shogunal Guard on horseback blocked my path: he’d glimpsed my scabbard under my straw cape, and wanted to check that I had the rank to carry one. “Fortune never favours he who wears another’s clothes”, so I gave him my true name. Lucky it was I did. He dismounted, removed his own helmet and called me “Sensei”: I taught one of his sons when I first arrived in Nagasaki. We talked awhile, and I told him I was bound for Saga, for my old master’s seventh-year funeral ceremony. Servants wouldn’t be appropriate on such a pilgrimage, I claimed. The captain was embarrassed by this attempt to disguise my poverty, so he agreed, bade me good luck and rode on.’

Four students are practising their best kendo shrieks in the dojo.

Uzaemon feels a cold blossoming in his sore throat.

‘From Oyster Bay – a midden of fishermen’s hovels, shells and rotting rope – I turned north to Isahaya. Low, hilly land, as you know, and on a dismal First Month afternoon, the road is atrocious. By a crooked bend, four porters appeared from behind a shuttered-up tea-shack – a leerier pack of wild dogs you never saw. Each carried a hefty bludgeon in his scabby hand. They warned me that robbers would pounce upon a luckless, friendless, helpless traveller like myself, and urged me to hire them so I’d arrive at Isahaya unharmed. I drew my sword and assured them I was not as luckless, friendless or helpless as they believed. My gallant saviours melted away, and I reached Isahaya without further excitement. Here I avoided the bigger, more conspicuous inns, and took lodgings in the loft of a talkative tea-roaster’s. The only other guest was a pedlar of amulets and charms from holy places as far off as Ezo, so he claimed.’

Uzaemon catches his sneeze in a paper square, which he tosses onto the fire.

Shuzai hangs the kettle low over the flames. ‘I tapped my landlord for what he knew about Kyôga Domain. “Eighty square miles of mountain with not one town worthy of the name”, save for Kashima. The Lord Abbot takes a cut from the temples there, and harvests rice taxes from the coastal villages, but his real power flows from allies in Edo and Miyako. He feels secure enough to maintain just two divisions of guards: one to keep up appearances when his entourage travels and one barracked in Kashima to quell any local troubles. The amulet pedlar told me how he’d once tried to visit the shrine on Mount Shiranui. He’d spent several hours climbing up a steep ravine called Mekura Gorge, only to be turned back at a gatehouse halfway up. Three big village thugs, he complained, told him that Shiranui Shrine doesn’t trade in lucky charms. I put it to the pedlar that it’s a rare shrine that turns away paying pilgrims. The pedlar agreed, then told me this story from the reign of Kan’ei, when the harvests failed for three years all across Kyushu. Towns as far off as Hirado, Hakata and Nagasaki suffered starvation and riots. It was this famine, swore the pedlar, that led to rebellion in Shimabara and the humiliation of the Shogun’s first army. During the mayhem, a quiet samurai begged Shogun Ieyasu for the honour of leading, and financing, a battalion in the second attempt to crush the rebels. He fought so audaciously that after the last Christian head was hoisted on the last pike, a Shogunal decree obliged the disgraced Nabeshima clan of Hizen to cede the samurai not only a certain obscure shrine on Mount Shiranui but the entire mountainous region. Kyôga Domain was created by that decree, and the quiet samurai’s full title became Lord Abbot Kyôga-no-Enomoto-no-kami. The present Lord Abbot must be his…’ Shuzai calculates on his fingers ‘… his great-great-grandson, give or take a generation.’

He pours tea for Uzaemon, and both men light their pipes.

‘The sea-fog was thick the next morning, and after a mile I struck off east, circling Isahaya from the north, around to the Ariake Sea Road. Better to enter Kyôga Domain, I reckoned, without the guards at the gate seeing my face. I walked along half the morning, passing through several villages with my hood down, until I found myself at the noticeboard of the village of Kurozane. Crows were at work unpicking a crucified woman. It stank! Seawards, the fog was dividing itself between weak sky and brown mudflats. Three old mussel-gatherers were resting on a rock. I asked them what any traveller would: how far to Konagai, the next village along? One said four miles, the second said less, the third said further; only the last had ever been, and that was thirty years ago. I made no mention of Otane the herbalist, but asked about the crucified woman, and they told me she’d been beaten most nights for three years by her husband, and had celebrated the New Year by opening his head with a hammer. The Lord Abbot’s Magistrate had ordered the Executioner to behead her cleanly, which gave me a chance to ask whether Lord Abbot Enomoto was a fair master. Perhaps they didn’t trust a stranger with an alien accent, but they all agreed they’d been born here as rewards for good deeds in previous lives. The Lord of Hizen, one pointed out, stole one farmer’s son in eight for military duties and bled his villagers white to keep his family in Edo in luxury. In contrast, the Lord of Kyôga imposed the rice tax only when the harvest was good, ordered a supply of food and oil for the shrine on Mount Shiranui, and required no more than three guards for the Mekura Gorge gate. In return, the Shrine guarantees fertile streams for the rice paddies, a bay teeming with eels and baskets full of seaweed. I wondered how much rice the Shrine ate in a year. Fifty koku, they said, or enough for fifty men.’

Fifty men! Uzaemon is dismayed. We need an army of mercenaries.

‘After Kurozane,’ Shuzai shows no undue concern, ‘the road passes a smart-looking inn, the Harubayashi, as in “spring bamboo”. A short distance on, an uphill track turns off the coast road and leads up to the mouth of Mekura Gorge. The trail up the mountain is well maintained, but it took me half the day. The guards at the checkpoint don’t expect intruders, that much was clear – one well-placed sentinel would have seen me coming – but…’ Shuzai wrinkles his mouth to indicate an easy climb. ‘The gatehouse seals a narrow mouth of the gorge, but you’d not need ten years of ninja training to climb up around it, which was what I did. Higher up, patches of snow and ice appeared, and pine and cedar muscled out the lowland trees. The track climbs a couple more hours to a high bridge over the river; a stone marker names the place Todoroki. Not long after, there’s a long, steep corridor of torî gates where I left the path and climbed up through a pine-forest. I came to the lip of an outcrop midway up Bare Peak, and this drawing,’ Shuzai removes a square of paper hidden in a folded book, ‘is based on the sketches I made on the spot.’

Uzaemon surveys Orito’s prison for the first time.

Shuzai empties dead ash from his pipe. ‘The Shrine sits in this triangular hollow between Bare Peak above, and those two lesser ridges. My guess is that a castle from the Age of Warring States once sat on the site claimed by Enomoto’s ancestor in the amulet pedlar’s tale – note these defensive walls and the dry moat. You’d need twenty men and a battering ram to force those gates, too. But don’t be disheartened: any wall is only as strong as the men defending it, and a child with a grappling hook would be over in a minute. Nor is there any chance of getting lost once we’re inside. Now this’ – Shuzai points his bowstring-calloused forefinger – ‘is the House of Sisters.’

Unguardedly, Uzaemon asks, ‘Did you see her?’

Shuzai shakes his head. ‘I was too far away. The remaining daylight I spent searching for ways down from Bare Peak other than the Mekura Gorge, but there are none: this north-east ridge hides a drop of several hundred feet; and to the north-west, the forest is so dense you’d need four hands and a tail to make any headway. At dusk, I headed back down the gorge and reached the Halfway Gate just as the moon rose. I climbed over a bluff to the lower path, reached the mouth of Mekura Gorge, crossed the rice terraces behind Kurozane, and found a fishing-boat to sleep under on the road to Isahaya. It was damp and cold, but I didn’t want witnesses coming to share a fire. I returned to Nagasaki by the following evening, but let three days pass before contacting you to hide the link between my absence and your visit. It is safest to assume that your servant is in Enomoto’s pay.’

‘Yohei has been my servant since the Ogawa family adopted me.’

‘What better spy,’ Shuzai shrugs, ‘than one above suspicion?’

Uzaemon’s cold feels worse by the minute. ‘Do you have solid reason to doubt Yohei?’

‘None at all, but all daimyo retain informers in neighbouring domains; and these informers acquire understandings with major families’ servants. Your father is one of only four Interpreters of the First Rank on Dejima: the Ogawas are not people of no importance. To spirit away a daimyo’s favourite is to enter a dangerous world, Uzaemon. To survive, you must doubt Yohei, doubt your friends and doubt strangers. Knowing all this, the question is: are you still intent on liberating her?’

‘More than ever, but’ – Uzaemon looks at the map – ‘can it be done?’

‘Given careful planning, given money to hire the right men, yes.’

‘How much money and how many men?’

‘Less than you’d suppose, is the good news: the fifty koku the seaweed gatherers talked about sounds daunting, but a fair portion of that fifty is eaten by Enomoto’s entourage. What’s more, that building’ – Shuzai points to the lower right corner – ‘is the refectory, and when it emptied after dinner, I counted just thirty-three heads. The women I discount. The masters will be past their prime, which leaves at most two dozen able-bodied acolytes. In Chinese legends, monks may shatter rocks with their bare hands, but the goslings of Shiranui are hatched from much frailer eggs. There was no archery range in the shrine, no barracks for lay-guards, and no evidence of martial training. Five excellent swordsmen, in my opinion, could rescue Miss Aibagawa. My policy of double-insurance calls for ten swords, in addition to yours and mine.’

‘What if Lord Enomoto and his men appear before we attack?’

‘We postpone our venture, disperse and hide in Saga until he leaves.’

Smoke from the struggling fire tastes of salt and bitterness.

‘You’ll have considered,’ Shuzai raises a delicate point, ‘that to return to Nagasaki with Miss Aibagawa would be… would be…’

‘Tantamount to suicide. Yes, I have considered little else this last week. I shall -’ Uzaemon sneezes and coughs ‘- I shall abandon my life here, accompany her to wherever she wishes to go and help her until she orders me to leave. A day, or my lifetime, whichever she chooses.’

The swordsman frowns, nods, and watches his friend and student.

Out in the street, dogs run past, barking murderously.

‘I worry,’ admits Uzaemon, ‘about you being linked to this raid.’

‘Oh, I assume the worst. I, too, shall move on.’

‘You are sacrificing your life in Nagasaki in order to help me?’

‘I prefer to blame Nagasaki ’s particularly menacing creditors.’

‘Won’t our hired men also be making fugitives of themselves?’

‘Masterless samurai are used to looking after themselves. Make no mistake: the man with most to lose is Ogawa Uzaemon. You are exchanging a career, a stipend, a bright future…’ the older man casts around for a tactful phrase.

‘… for a woman – in all likelihood a broken, pregnant woman.’

Shuzai’s expression replies, yes.

‘Or thanking my adoptive father by disappearing without a word?’

My suffering wife, at least, Uzaemon foresees, can go back to her family.

‘Confucianists would scream “heresy!” ’ Shuzai’s gaze settles on the urn housing his master’s thumb-bone, ‘but there are times when the less loyal son is the better man.’

‘My “commission”,’ Uzaemon struggles to articulate himself, ‘feels less a matter of righting a wrong and more a matter of – of role, of “This is what I am for.” ’

‘Now it is you who sounds like the believer in Fate.’

‘Please make the arrangements for the raid. Whatever the costs, I will pay.’

Shuzai says ‘Yes,’ as if there is no other conclusion.

‘Raise your elbow that high,’ a sharp-voiced senior disciple in the dojo hall tells a junior, ‘and one well-aimed uekiri stroke will pound it to rice powder…’

‘Where,’ Shuzai changes the subject, ‘is Jiritsu’s scroll now?’

Uzaemon resists an urge to touch the scroll-tube in an inner pocket. ‘It is hidden…’ if we are captured, he thinks, better not to know the truth ‘… under the floor of my father’s library.’

‘Good. Keep it there for now,’ Shuzai rolls up his own drawing of the Shiranui Shrine, ‘but bring it when we leave for Kyôga. If all goes well, you and Miss Aibagawa will vanish like two drops of rain, but if Enomoto ever tracks you down, that manuscript could be your sole means of defence. I said earlier that the monks pose little danger; I cannot say the same for the Lord Abbot’s vengeance.’

‘Thank you,’ Uzaemon rises, ‘for your clear-headed advice.’

Jacob de Zoet empties the hot water into a cup and stirs in a spoonful of honey. ‘I had the same cold last week. Sore throat, headache, and I’m still croaking like a frog. During July and August, my body forgot what cold weather felt like – quite a feat for a Zeelander. But now it’s that blistering summer heat I can’t remember.’

Uzaemon missed some words. ‘Memory is tricks and strangeness.’

‘That’s the truth,’ de Zoet adds a dash of pale juice, ‘and this is lime.’

‘Your room,’ observes the visitor, ‘is change.’ Additions include the low table and cushions, a New Year’s kadomatsu pine wreath, a competent picture of a monkey drawn in pen and ink, and a folding screen to hide de Zoet’s bed. Which Orito might have shared, Uzaemon suffers a complicated ache, and better that she had. The head clerk has no slave or servant, but the apartment is tidy and swept. ‘Room is comfort and pleasant…’

‘Dejima,’ de Zoet stirs the drink, ‘is to be my home for some years.’

‘You do not wish to take a wife for more comfort life?’

‘I don’t view such transactions as lightly as do my compatriots.’

Uzaemon is encouraged. ‘Picture of monkey is very beauty.’

‘That? Thank you, but I’m an incurable beginner.’

Uzaemon’s surprise is genuine. ‘You draw monkey, Mr de Zoet?’

De Zoet replies with an embarrassed smile and serves the lime and honey drink. He then flouts the laws of small-talk. ‘How may I be of service, Ogawa-san?’

Uzaemon looks at the steam rising from the bowl. ‘I am disturb your office at important period, I fear.’

‘Deputy Fischer exaggerates. There isn’t much to be done.’

‘Then…’ the interpreter touches the hot porcelain with his fingertips ‘… I wish Mr de Zoet keep – to hide – a… a very important thing, safe.’

‘If you wish to use one of our warehouses, perhaps Chief van Cleef should-’

‘No no. This is small thing.’ Uzaemon produces the dogwood scroll-tube.

De Zoet frowns at the item. ‘I shall oblige, of course, and gladly.’

‘I know Mr de Zoet is able to hide items with greatest care.’

‘I shall hide it with my Book of Psalms, until you want it back.’

‘Thank you. I – I hoped you say these words.’ Uzaemon addresses de Zoet’s unasked questions with a foreigner’s directness. ‘First, to answer, “What is the words in this scroll?” You remember Enomoto, I think’ – the name causes de Zoet’s face to cloud over – ‘is Lord Abbot of Shrine in Kyôga Domain, where… where Miss Aibagawa must live.’ The Dutchman nods. ‘This scroll is – how to say? – rules believings laws of Order, of Shrine. These laws are -’ this would be hard in Japanese, the interpreter thinks, sighing, but in Dutch it is like breaking rocks ‘- these rules are… are bad, worse, worst than worst wrong, for woman. It is great suffering… it is not endurable.’

‘What rules? What must she endure, Ogawa, for God’s sake?’

Uzaemon shuts his eyes. He keeps them shut and shakes his head.

‘At least,’ de Zoet’s voice is cracked, ‘tell me if the scroll could be a weapon to attack Enomoto, or shame him into releasing her? Or, via the Magistracy, could the scroll win Miss Aibagawa justice?’

‘I am Interpreter of Third Rank. Enomoto is Lord Abbot. He has more power than Magistrate Shirayama. Justice in Japan is justice of power.’

‘So Miss Aibagawa must suffer – suffer the “unendurable” for the rest of her life?’

Uzaemon hesitates. ‘A friend, in Nagasaki, wish to help… with directness.’

De Zoet is no fool. ‘You plan a rescue? Can you hope to succeed?’

Uzaemon hesitates again. ‘Not he and I alone. I… purchase assistance.’

‘Mercenaries are risky allies, as we Dutch know well.’ De Zoet’s mind works an abacus of implications. ‘But how could you return to Dejima, afterwards? And she would just be recaptured. You’d have to go into hiding – permanently – and – so why – why sacrifice so much – everything? Unless… oh.’

Momentarily, the two men are unable to look each other in the eye.

So now you know, the interpreter thinks, I love her too.

‘I am a fool.’ The Dutchman rubs his green eyes. ‘A myopic, holy fool…’

Two of the Malay slaves hurry down Long Street speaking their language.

‘… but why did you help my – my advances towards her, if you, too…’

‘Better she lives here with you than become locked forever in bad marriage, or be sent away from Nagasaki.’

‘Yet still you entrust me with this’ – he touches the tube – ‘unusable evidence?’

‘You wish her freedom, too. You will not sell me to Enomoto.’

‘Never. But what am I to do with the scroll? I am a prisoner here.’

‘Do nothing. If rescue succeed, I not need it. If rescue…’ the conspirator drinks his honey and lime ‘… if rescue does not succeed, if Enomoto learns of scroll’s existence, he will hunt in my father’s house, in friends’ houses. Rules of Order is very, very secret. Enomoto kill to possess it. But on Dejima, Enomoto has no power. Here he will not search, I believe.’

‘How will I know whether your mission succeeds or not?’

‘If succeeds, I send message when I can, when is safe.’

De Zoet is shaken by this interview, but his voice is steady. ‘You shall be in my prayers, always. When you meet Miss Aibagawa, tell her… tell her… just tell her that. You shall both be in my prayers.’

XXIII Yayoi’s Room at the House of Sisters, Mount Shiranui Shrine

Minutes before sunrise on the Eighteenth Day of the First Month

Housekeeper Satsuki receives Yayoi’s milky-lipped baby daughter. By firelight and dawnlight, Satsuki’s tears are visible. No fresh snow fell during the night, so the track down Mekura Gorge is passable, and Yayoi’s twins are to be taken to the World Below this morning. ‘For shame, Housekeeper.’ Abbess Izu issues a gentle rebuke. ‘You’ve helped with dozens of Bestowals. If Sister Yayoi accepts that she isn’t losing little Shinobu and Binyô, but sending them on ahead into the World Below, surely you can control your feebler feelings. Today is a parting, not a bereavement.’

What you call ‘feebler feelings’, thinks Orito, I call ‘compassion’.

‘Yes, Abbess.’ Housekeeper Satsuki swallows. ‘It’s just… they’re so…’

‘Without the Bestowal of our Gifts,’ Yayoi half recites, ‘Kyôga Domain’s rivers would dry, its seedlings would wither, and all its mothers would be barren.’

Before the night of her escape and voluntary return, Orito would have considered such words to be despicably passive: now she understands that only this belief, that Life requires their sacrifice, makes the separation tolerable. The midwife rocks Yayoi’s hungry son, Binyô: ‘Your sister’s finished, now. Give your mother a little rest…’

Abbess Izu reminds her, ‘We say “Bearer”, Sister Aibagawa.’

‘You do, Abbess,’ Orito responds, as expected, ‘but I am not “we”…’

Sadaie empties crumbs of charcoal on to the fire: they snap and spit.

… We made, Orito holds the Abbess’s gaze, firm understandings: remember?

Our Lord Abbot, Abbess Izu holds Orito’s gaze, shall have the final word.

Until that day, Orito holds the Abbess’s gaze and repeats, ‘I am not “we”.’

Binyô’s face is damp, pink, velvet: it folds into a prolonged squawk.

‘Sister?’ Yayoi receives her son for his last feed from her breast.

The midwife scrutinises Yayoi’s inflamed nipple.

‘It’s much better,’ Yayoi tells her friend. ‘The motherwort works.’

Orito thinks of Otane of Kurozane, who no doubt supplied the herb, and wonders if she can insist on a yearly meeting as part of her terms. The Newest Sister remains the Shrine’s lowest-ranking captive, but her decision on the Todoroki Bridge to forfeit her escape, and her successful delivery of Yayoi’s twins, have elevated her status in many, subtle ways. Her right to refuse Suzaku’s drugs is recognised; she is trusted to walk around the Shrine’s ramparts three times each day; and Master Genmu agreed that the Goddess wouldn’t choose Orito for Engiftment, in return for Orito’s silence about the counterfeit letters. The moral price of the agreement is high; mild friction with the Abbess occurs daily; and Lord Abbot Enomoto may undo these advances… but that is a fight, Orito thinks, for a future day.

Asagao appears at Yayoi’s door. ‘Naster Suzaku is arriving, Avhess.’

Orito looks at Yayoi who is determined not to cry.

‘Thank you, Asagao.’ Abbess Izu rises with the suppleness of a girl.

Sadaie reties her headscarf around her misshapen skull.

With the Abbess’s departure, air and talk flow a little more freely.

‘Calm down,’ Yayoi tells the yowling Binyô, ‘I have two. Here, greedy one…’

Binyô finds his mother’s nipple at last, and feeds.

Housekeeper Satsuki gazes into Shinobu’s face. ‘A full, happy tummy.’

‘A full, smelly swaddling band,’ says Orito. ‘May I, before she’s too sleepy?’

‘Oh, let me.’ The housekeeper lays Shinobu on her back. ‘It’s no trouble.’

Orito allows the older woman the sad honour. ‘I’ll fetch some warm water.’

‘To think,’ says Sadaie, ‘how spidery the Gifts were just a week ago!’

‘We must thank Sister Aibagawa,’ says Yayoi, reattaching the guzzling Binyô, ‘that they’re sturdy enough for Bestowal so soon.’

‘We must thank her,’ adds Housekeeper Satsuki, ‘that they were born at all.’

The ten-day-old boy’s petal-soft hand clenches and unclenches.

‘It is thanks to your endurance,’ Orito tells Yayoi, mixing hot water from the kettle with a pan of cold water, ‘your milk, and your mother’s love.’ Don’t talk about love, she warns herself, not today. ‘Children want to be born: all the midwife does is help.’

‘Do you think,’ asks Sadaie, ‘the twins’ Engifter might be Master Chimei?’

‘This one,’ Yayoi strokes Binyô’s head, ‘is a chubby goblin: Chimei’s sallow.’

‘Master Seiryû, then,’ whispers Housekeeper Satsuki. ‘He turns into a Goblin King when he loses his temper…’

On an ordinary day, the women would smile at this.

‘Shinobu-chan’s eyes,’ says Sadaie, ‘remind me of poor Acolyte Jiritsu’s.’

‘I believe they are his,’ responds Yayoi. ‘I dreamt of him again.’

‘Strange to think of Acolyte Jiritsu buried,’ Satsuki removes the soiled cloth from the baby girl’s loins, ‘but his Gifts’ lives just beginning.’ The Housekeeper wipes away the pungent paste with a murky cotton rag. ‘Strange and sad.’ She washes the infant’s buttocks in the warm water. ‘Could Shinobu have one Engifter and Binyô another?’

‘No.’ Orito recalls her Dutch texts. ‘Twins have just one father.’

Master Suzaku is ushered into the room. ‘A mild morning, Sisters.’

The Sisters chorus, ‘Good morning,’ to Suzaku; Orito gives a slight bow.

‘Good weather for our first Bestowal of the year! How are our Gifts?’

‘Two feeds during the night, Master,’ replies Yayoi, ‘and one more now.’

‘Excellent. I’ll give them a drop of Sleep each; they won’t wake until Kurozane, where two wet-nurses are waiting at the inn. One is the same woman who took Sister Minori’s Gift to Niigata two years ago. The little ones will be in the best hands.’

‘The master,’ says Abbess Izu, ‘has wonderful news, Sister Yayoi.’

Suzaku shows his pointed teeth. ‘Your Gifts are to be raised together in a Buddhist temple near Hôfu by a childless priest and his wife.’

‘Think of that!’ exclaims Sadaie. ‘Little Binyô, growing up to be a priest!’

‘They’ll have a fine education,’ says the Abbess, ‘as children of a temple.’

‘And they’ll have each other,’ adds Satsuki. ‘A sibling is the best gift.’

‘My sincerest thanks,’ Yayoi’s voice is bloodless, ‘to the Lord Abbot.’

‘You may thank him yourself, Sister,’ says Abbess Izu, and Orito, washing Shinobu’s soiled swaddling, looks up. ‘The Lord Abbot is due to arrive tomorrow or the day after.’

Fear touches Orito. ‘I, too,’ she lies, ‘look forward to the honour of speaking with him.’

Abbess Izu glances at her with triumphant eyes.

Binyô, sated, is slowing down: Yayoi strokes his lips to remind him to slurp.

Satsuki and Sadaie finish wrapping the baby girl for her journey.

Master Suzaku opens his medicine box and unstops a conical bottle.

The first boom of the Bell of Amanohashira ebbs into Yayoi’s cell.

Nobody speaks: outside the House gate, a palanquin will be waiting.

Sadaie asks, ‘Where is Hôfu, Sister Aibagawa? As far as Edo?’

The second boom of the Bell of Amanohashira ebbs into Yayoi’s cell.

‘Much nearer.’ Abbess Izu receives the clean, sleepy Shinobu and holds her close to Suzaku. ‘Hôfu is the castle town of Suô Domain, one domain along from Nagato, and just five or six days away, if the Straits are calm…’

Yayoi stares at Binyô, and far away. Orito guesses at her thoughts: of her first daughter Kaho, perhaps, sent last year to candlemakers in Harima Domain, or of the future Gifts she must give away before her Descent, in eighteen or nineteen years’ time; or perhaps she is simply hoping that the wet-nurses in Kurozane have good, pure milk.

Bestowals are akin to bereavements, Orito thinks, but the mothers cannot even mourn.

The third boom of the Bell of Amanohashira brings the scene nearly to a close.

Suzaku empties a few drops from the conical bottle between Shinobu’s lips. ‘Sweet dreams,’ he whispers, ‘little Gift.’

Her brother Binyô, still in Yayoi’s arms, groans, burps and farts. His recital does not delight, as it should. The picture is flat and melancholy.

‘It is time, Sister Yayoi,’ states the Abbess. ‘I know you’ll be brave.’

Yayoi smells his milky neck one last time. ‘May I feed Binyô his Sleep?’

Suzaku nods and passes her the conical bottle.

Yayoi presses the pointed mouth against Binyô’s; his tiny tongue slurps.

‘What ingredients,’ Orito asks, ‘does Master Suzaku’s Sleep contain?’

‘One midwife.’ Suzaku smiles at Orito’s mouth. ‘One druggist.’

Shinobu is already asleep: Binyô’s eyelids are sinking, rising, sinking…

Orito cannot help guessing: Opiates? Arisaema? Aconite?

‘Here is something for brave Sister Yayoi.’ Suzaku decants a muddy liquid into a thimble-sized stone cup. ‘I call it “Fortitude”: it helped at your last Bestowal.’ He holds it to Yayoi’s lips, and Orito resists the urge to slap the glass away. As the liquid drains down Yayoi’s throat, Suzaku lifts her son off.

The dispossessed mother mutters, ‘But…’ and stares, cloudily, at the druggist.

Orito catches her friend’s drooping head. She lays the numbed mother down.

Abbess Izu and Master Suzaku each carry out a stolen child.

XXIV Ogawa Mimasaku’s Room at the Ogawa Residence in Nagasaki

Dawn on the Twenty-first Day of the First Month

Uzaemon kneels by his father’s bed. ‘You look a little… brighter today, Father.’

‘Leave those flowery fibs to the women: to lie is their nature.’

‘Truly, Father, when I came in, the colour in your face-’

‘My face has less colour than Marinus’s skeleton in the Dutch hospital.’

Saiji, his father’s stick-limbed servant, tries to coax the fire back to life.

‘So, you’re making a pilgrimage to Kashima, to pray for your ailing father, in the depths of winter, alone, without a servant – if “serve” is what the oafs sponging off the Ogawa storehouse do. How impressed Nagasaki shall be with your piety.’

How scandalised Nagasaki shall be, thinks Uzaemon, if the truth is ever known.

A hard brush is scrubbing the stones of the entrance hall.

‘I don’t make this pilgrimage to earn acclaim, Father.’

‘True scholars, you once informed me, disdain “magic and superstitions”.’

‘These days, Father, I prefer to keep an open mind.’

‘Oh? So I am now-’ He is interrupted by a scraping cough, and Uzaemon thinks of a fish drowning on a plank, and wonders if he should sit his father upright. That would require touching him, which a father and son of their rank cannot do. The servant Saiji steps over to help, but the coughing fit passes and Ogawa the Elder bats him away. ‘So I am now one of your “empirical tests”? Do you intend to lecture the Academy on the efficacy of the Kashima Cure?’

‘When Interpreter Nishi the Elder was ill, his son made a pilgrimage to Kashima and fasted for three days: by his return, his father had not only made a miraculous recovery, but walked all the way to Magome to meet him.’

‘Then choked on a fish-bone at his celebration banquet.’

‘I shall ask you to exercise caution when eating fish in the year ahead.’

The reeds of flames in the brazier fatten and spit.

‘Don’t offer the gods years off your own life just to preserve mine…’

Uzaemon wonders, A thorny tenderness? ‘It shan’t come to that, Father.’

‘Unless, unless, the priest swears I’ll have my vigour restored. One’s ribs shouldn’t be prison bars. Better to be with my ancestors and Hisanobu in the Pure Land than be trapped here with fawners, females and fools.’ Ogawa Mimasaku looks at the butsudan alcove where his birth-son is commemorated with a funeral tablet and a sprig of pine. ‘To those with a head for commerce, Dejima is a private mint, even with the Dutch trade as bad as it is. But to those dazzled by’ – Mimasaku uses the Dutch word ‘Enlightenment’ – ‘the opportunities are wasted. No, it shall be the Iwase clan who dominates the Guild. They already have five grandsons.’

Thank you, Uzaemon thinks, for helping me turn my back on you. ‘If I disappoint you, Father, I’m sorry.’

‘How gleefully,’ the old man’s eyes close, ‘life shreds our well-crafted plans.’

‘It’s the very worst time of year, husband.’ Okinu kneels at the edge of the raised hallway. ‘What with mudslides and snow and thunder and ice…’

‘Spring,’ Uzaemon sits down to bind his feet, ‘will be too late for Father, wife.’

‘Bandits are hungrier in winter, and hunger makes them bolder.’

‘I’ll be on the main Saga highway. I have my sword and Kashima is only two days away. It’s not Hokurikurô, or Kii, or anywhere wild and lawless.’

Okinu looks around like a nervous doe. Uzaemon cannot recall when his wife last smiled. You deserve a better man, he thinks, and wishes he could say so. His hand presses his oilcloth pack; it contains two purses of money, some bills of exchange and the sixteen love-letters Aibagawa Orito sent him during their courtship. Okinu is whispering, ‘Your mother bullies me terribly when you’re away.’

I am her son, Uzaemon groans, your husband and not a mediator.

Utako, his mother’s maid and spy, approaches, an umbrella in hand.

‘Promise me,’ Okinu attempts to conceal her true concerns, ‘not to risk crossing Omura Bay in bad weather, husband.’

Utako bows to them both; she passes into the front courtyard.

‘So you’ll be back,’ Okinu asks, ‘within five days?’

Poor, poor creature, Uzaemon thinks, whose only ally is me.

‘Six days?’ Okinu presses him for a reply. ‘No more than seven?’

If I could end your misery, he thinks, by divorcing you now, I would…

‘Please, husband, no longer than eight days. She’s so… so…’

… but it would bring unwanted attention on the Ogawas. ‘I don’t know how long the sutras for Father are going to take.’

‘Would you bring back an amulet from Kashima for brides who want-’

‘Hnn.’ Uzaemon finishes binding his feet. ‘Goodbye, then, Okinu.’

If guilt were copper coins, he thinks, I could buy Dejima.

Crossing the small courtyard denuded by winter, Uzaemon inspects the sky: it is a day of rain that never quite reaches the ground. Ahead, waiting by the front gate, Uzaemon’s mother is standing under an umbrella held by Utako. ‘Yohei can still be ready to join you in a matter of minutes.’

‘As I said, Mother,’ says Uzaemon, ‘this pilgrimage is not a pleasure trip.’

‘People may wonder whether the Ogawas can no longer afford servants.’

‘I rely on you to tell people why your stubborn son went on his pilgrimage alone.’

‘Who, exactly, is going to be scrubbing your loincloths and socks?’

A raid on Enomoto’s mountain stronghold, Uzaemon thinks, and it is ‘loincloths and socks’…

‘You shan’t think the matter so amusing after eight or nine days.’

‘I’ll be sleeping at inns and guest dormitories in temples, not in ditches.’

‘An Ogawa mustn’t joke, not even joke, about living like a vagabond.’

‘Why don’t you go inside, Mother? You’ll catch a dreadful cold.’

‘Because it’s a well-bred woman’s duty to see her sons or husband off from the gate, however cosy it may be indoors.’ She glares at the main house. ‘One can only wonder what my green-pepper head of a daughter-in-law was whimpering about.’

Utako the maid stares at the droplets on the camellia buds.

‘Okinu was wishing me a safe journey, as you are.’

‘Well, plainly they do things differently in Shimonoseki.’

‘She is a long way from home; and it has been a difficult year.’

‘I married a long way from home, and if you’re implying I’m one of those “difficulties”, I can assure you the girl has had it easy! My mother-in-law was a witch from Hell – from Hell, was she not, Utako?’

Utako half nods, half bows and half whispers, ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘No one was calling you a “difficulty”.’ Uzaemon puts his hand on the latch.

‘Okinu,’ his mother puts her hand on the latch, ‘is a disappointment…’

‘Mother, for my sake, would you please be kind to her, as-’

‘… a disappointment to all of us. I never approved of the girl, did I, Utako?’

Utako half nods, half bows and half whispers, ‘No, ma’am.’

‘But you and your father were so set on her: so how could I voice my doubts?’

This rewriting of history, thinks Uzaemon, is breathtaking, even for you.

‘But a pilgrimage,’ she says, ‘is a fine chance to reconsider one’s missteps.’

A moon-grey cat, padding along the wall, catches Uzaemon’s eye.

‘Marriage, you see, is a transaction… Is something wrong?’

The moon-grey cat vanishes into the mist as if it never existed.

‘Marriage, you were saying, mother, is a transaction.’

‘A transaction, yes; and if one buys an item from a merchant, and one finds that item to be broken, then the merchant must apologise, refund the money and pray that the matter ends there. Now: I produced three boys for the Ogawa family, two girls, and although all but dear Hisanobu died in childhood, nobody could accuse me of being a broken item. I don’t blame Okinu for her weak womb – some might, but I am fair-minded – yet the fact remains, we were sold bad merchandise. Who would blame us for returning it? Many would blame us – the ancestors of the Ogawa clan – were we not to send her home.’

Uzaemon sways away from his mother’s magnified face.

A kite swoops low through the drizzle. Uzaemon hears its feathers. ‘Many women have more than two miscarriages.’

‘ “It’s a reckless farmer who wastes good seed on barren soil.” ’

Uzaemon raises the latch, with her hand still on it, and swings open the door.

‘I say all this,’ she smiles, ‘not from malice, but from duty…’

Here it comes, Uzaemon thinks, the story of my adoption.

‘… as it was I who advised your father to adopt you as his heir, instead of a richer or a nobler disciple. This is why I feel a special responsibility in this matter, to ensure the Ogawa line.’

Raindrops find the nape of Uzaemon’s neck and trickle between his shoulder blades. ‘Goodbye.’

Half Uzaemon’s lifetime ago, in his thirteenth year, he made the two-week journey from Shikoku to Nagasaki with his first master, Kanamaru Motoji, the Chief Dutch Scholar to the Court of the Lord of Tosa. After his adoption by Ogawa Mimasaku in his fifteenth year, he visited scholars as far away as Kumamoto with his new father, but since his appointment as Interpreter of the Third Rank four years ago, Uzaemon has rarely left Nagasaki. His boyhood journeys were bright with promise, but this morning the interpreter – if ‘interpreter’, Uzaemon concedes, is what I still am – is hounded by darker emotions. Hissing geese flee their cursing gooseherd; a shivering beggar shits at the loud river’s edge; and mist and smoke obscure an assassin or spy beneath every domed hat and behind every palanquin’s grille. The road is busy enough to hide informers, Uzaemon regrets, but not busy enough to hide me. He passes the bridges of the Nakashima River, whose names he recites when he cannot sleep: the proud Tokiwabashi Bridge; the Fukurobashi, by the cloth merchants’ warehouses; the Meganebashi, whose reflected double arches form round spectacles on bright days; the slim-hipped Uoichibashi; the matter-of-fact Higashishinbashi; upstream, past the execution grounds, Imoharabashi Bridge; the Furumachibashi, as old and frail-looking as its name; the lurching Amigasabashi; and, last and highest, the Ôidebashi. Uzaemon stops by a row of steps disappearing into the mist, and remembers the spring day when he first arrived in Nagasaki.

A voice as small as a mouse’s says, ‘’Scuse, o-junrei-sama…’

Uzaemon needs a moment to realise that the ‘Pilgrim’ is him. He turns…

… and a wren of a boy with a gash for an eye is opening his cupped palms.

A voice warns Uzaemon, He’s begging for coins, and the pilgrim walks away.

And you, a voice admonishes him, are begging for good luck.

So he turns and returns but the gash-eyed boy is nowhere to be seen.

I am Adam Smith’s translator, he tells himself. I don’t believe in omens.

After a few minutes he reaches the Magome ward-gate, where he lowers his hood, but a guard recognises him as a samurai and waves him through with a bow.

Lean and rancid artisans’ dwellings cluster along the road.

Rented looms in unlit rooms tack-ratta-clack-ah, tack-ratta-clack-ah…

Rangy dogs and hungry children watch him pass, incuriously.

Mud splashes from the wheels of a fodder wagon sliding downhill; a farmer and his son pull it from behind, to help the ox in front. Uzaemon stands aside under a ginkgo tree, and looks down to the harbour, but Dejima is lost in the thickening fog. I am between two worlds. He is leaving behind the politics of the Interpreters’ Guild, the contempt of the inspectors and most of the Dutch, the deceits and falsifications. Ahead is an uncertain life with a woman who may not accept me, in a place not yet known. In the ginkgo’s knotted heart a brood of oily crows fling insults. The wagon passes by and the farmer bows as deeply as he can without losing his balance. The false pilgrim adjusts his shin-bindings, secures his shoes and resumes his journey. He musn’t miss his rendezvous with Shuzai.

The Joyful Phoenix Inn stands by a bend in the road, shy of the eight-mile stone from Nagasaki, between a shallow ford and a stone-pit. Uzaemon enters, looking for Shuzai but seeing only the usual citizens of the road sheltering from the cold drizzle: palanquin-carriers and porters, mule-drivers, mendicants, a trio of prostitutes, a man with a fortune-telling monkey, and a bundled-up bearded merchant sitting near, but not with, his gang of servants. The place smells of damp people, steaming rice and pig lard, but it is warmer and drier than outdoors. Uzaemon orders a bowl of walnut dumplings and enters the raised room, worrying about Shuzai and his five hired swords. He is not anxious about the large sum he has given to his friend to pay for the mercenaries: were Shuzai less honest than Uzaemon knows he is, the interpreter would have been arrested days ago. Rather, it is the possibility that Shuzai’s sharp-eyed creditors sniffed out his plans to flee Nagasaki and threw a net around their debtor.

Someone knocks on the post: it is one of the landlord’s girls with his meal.

He asks her, ‘Is it already the Hour of the Horse?’

‘Well past noon now, Samurai-sama, I do believe it is, yes…’

Five Shogunal soldiers enter and the chatter dies away.

The soldiers look around the roomful of evasive faces.

The captain’s eye meets Uzaemon’s: Uzaemon looks down. Don’t look guilty, he thinks. I am a pilgrim bound for Kashima.

‘Landlord?’ calls out one guard. ‘Where’s the landlord of this shit-hole?’

‘Gentlemen!’ The landlord emerges from the kitchen and kneels on the floor. ‘What an indescribable honour for the Joyful Phoenix.’

‘Hay and oats for our horses: your stable-boy’s flown off.’

‘Straight away, Captain.’ The landlord knows he will have to accept a credit note that won’t be honoured without a bribe of five times its value. He gives orders to his wife, sons and daughters, and the soldiers are shown into the best room in the rear. Cautiously, the chatter resumes.

‘I don’t forget a face, Samurai-san.’ The bearded merchant has sidled over.

Avoid encounters, Shuzai warned him, avoid witnesses. ‘We never met.’

‘But to be sure we did – at Ryûgaji Temple on New Year’s Day.’

‘You are mistaken, old man. I never laid eyes on you. Now, please-’

‘But we was talking about ray-skins, Samurai-san, an’ scabbards…’

Uzaemon recognises Shuzai under the bedraggled beard and patched cloak.

‘Aye, now you remember! Deguchi, Samurai-san – Deguchi of Osaka. Now, I wonder, might I hope for the honour of joining you?’

The maid arrives with a bowl of rice and pickles.

‘I don’t forget a face.’ Shuzai’s grin is brown-toothed and his accent different.

The maid’s expression tells Uzaemon, What a tedious old fart.

‘No, miss,’ Shuzai drawls. ‘Names slip away, but a face, never…’

‘It’s lone travellers who stick out,’ Shuzai’s voice comes through the grille of his palanquin, ‘but a group of six, on the Isahaya Road? We’re as good as invisible. To any part-time informers at the Joyful Phoenix, a taciturn pilgrim wearing a sword is worth watching. But when you left, you were just a pitiful bastard having his ear drilled by a human mosquito. By making you bored, I made you boring.’

Mist blurs the farmhouses, erases the road ahead, hides the valley walls…

Deguchi’s porters and servants turned out to be Shuzai’s hired men: their weapons are hidden in the modified floor of the palanquin. Tanuki, Uzaemon memorises their false names, Kuma, Ishi, Hane, Shakke… They avoid speaking to Uzaemon, as befits their disguise as porters. The remaining six men will be at Mekura Gorge tomorrow.

‘By the way,’ asks Shuzai, ‘did you bring a certain dogwood scroll-tube?’

Say no now, fears Uzaemon, and he’ll think you don’t trust him.

‘Everything of value,’ he slaps his midriff, visible to Shuzai, ‘is here.’

‘Good. If the scroll had fallen into the wrong hands, Enomoto might be expecting us.’

Succeed, and Jiritsu’s testimony shan’t be needed. Uzaemon is uneasy. Fail, and it mustn’t be captured. How de Zoet could ever use this weapon is a question the interpreter cannot answer.

The river below is a drunk, charging boulders and barging banks.

‘It’s like the Shimantogawa Valley,’ says Shuzai, ‘in our home domain.’

‘The Shimantogawa,’ replies Uzaemon, ‘is a friendlier river, I think.’ He has been wondering about applying for a Court post back in his native Tosa. Upon adoption by the Ogawas of Nagasaki, all ties with his birth-family were severed – and they’d not be happy to see a third son, a ‘cold-rice eater’, come back with no fortune and a half-burnt wife – but he wonders whether his former Dutch teacher might be willing and able to help. Tosa is the first place, Uzaemon worries, Enomoto would look for us.

What is at stake is not just a fugitive nun but the Lord of Kyôga’s reputation.

His friend the Elder Counsellor Matsudaira Sadanobu would issue a warrant…

Uzaemon glimpses the enormity of the risk he is taking.

Would they bother with a warrant? Or just despatch an assassin?

Uzaemon looks away. To stop and think would be to abort the rescue.

Feet splash in puddles. The brown river surges. Pines drip.

Uzaemon asks Shuzai, ‘Are we to lodge at Isahaya tonight?’

‘No. Deguchi of Osaka chooses the best: the Harubayashi Inn at Kurozane.’

‘Not the same inn where Enomoto and his entourage stay?’

‘The very same: come now, what group of bandits planning to steal a nun from Mount Shiranui Shrine would dream of staying there?’

Isahaya’s principal temple is celebrating the festival of a local god, and the streets are busy enough with hawkers and floats and spectators for six strangers and a palanquin to slip through without notice. Street musicians vie for customers, petty thieves trawl the holiday crowds, and serving girls flirt in front of their inns to reel in customers. Shuzai stays inside his palanquin and orders his men to proceed directly to the gate into Kyôga Domain on the east side of the town. The guardhouse is overrun by a herd of pigs. One of the soldiers, dressed in the domain’s austere livery, gives Deguchi of Osaka’s pass a cursory glance, and asks why the merchant has no merchandise. ‘I sent it all by ship, sir,’ answers Shuzai, his Osaka accent grown almost impenetrable, ‘every last piece, sir. By the time every customs man in Western Honshu ’s had his nibble, I’d not be left with the wrinkles on my hands, sir.’ He is waved through, but another, more observant, guard notices that Uzaemon’s pass is issued via the Headman’s Office on Dejima. ‘You’re an interpreter for the foreigners, Ogawa-san?’

‘Of the Third Rank, yes, in the Interpreters’ Guild on Dejima.’

‘I just ask, sir, because of your pilgrim’s clothes.’

‘My father is gravely ill. I wish to pray for him at Kashima.’

‘Please,’ the guard kicks a squealing piglet, ‘step into the inspection room.’

Uzaemon stops himself looking at Shuzai. ‘Very well.’

‘I’ll be with you as soon as we’ve cleared these damn porkers away.’

The interpreter steps into the small room where a scribe is at work.

Uzaemon curses his luck. So much for slipping into Kyôga anonymously.

‘Please forgive this inconvenience.’ The guard appears and orders the scribe to wait outside. ‘I sense, Ogawa-san, you are a man of your word.’

‘I aspire,’ Uzaemon worries where this may lead, ‘to be one, yes.’

‘Then I -’ the guard kneels and bows low ‘- I aspire to your good offices, sir. My son’s skull is growing… wrong, lumpen. We – we daren’t take him outside, because people call him an oni demon. He’s clever, and a fine reader, so it’s not affected his wits, but… he has these headaches, these terrible headaches.’

Uzaemon is disarmed. ‘What do the doctors say?’

‘The first diagnosed Burning Brain, and prescribed three gallons of water a day to quench the fires. “Water Poisoning,” said the second, and bid us parch our son until his tongue turned black. The third doctor sold us golden acupuncture needles to press into his skull to expel the demon and the fourth sold us a magic frog, to be licked thirty-three times a day. Nothing worked. Soon he won’t be able to lift his head…’

Uzaemon recalls Dr Maeno’s recent lecture on Elephantiasis.

‘… so I’m asking all the pilgrims who pass through to pray at Kashima.’

‘Gladly, I’ll recite a healing sutra for him. What is your son’s name?’

‘Thank you. Lots of pilgrims say they will, but it’s only men of honour I can believe in. I’m Imada, and my son’s name is Uokatsu, written on this,’ he passes a folded slip of paper, ‘and a lock of his hair. There’ll be a fee, so-’

‘Keep your money. I will pray for Imada Uokatsu when I pray for my father.’

The Shogun’s policy of isolation preserves his power unchallenged…

‘May I suppose,’ the soldier is bowing again, ‘Ogawa-san also has a son?’

… but sentences Uokatsu and countless others to futile, ignorant deaths.

‘My wife and I,’ more details, Uzaemon regrets, ‘are not yet blessed.’

‘Lady Kannon will reward your kindness, sir. Now, I am delaying you…’

Uzaemon stores the name-paper in his inrô pouch. ‘I wish I could do more.’

XXV The Lord Abbot’s Quarters at Mount Shiranui Shrine

The Twenty-second Night of the First Month

The swaying flames are moonflower blue and silent. Enomoto is seated behind a sunken hearth at the far end of a thin room. The roof is vaulted and ill-defined. He knows Orito is there but does not yet look up. Nearby, the two motionless boy-acolytes stare at a Go board: but for the twitching pulses in their necks, they could be cast from bronze. ‘You look like an assassin, hovering there…’ Enomoto’s sinewy voice reaches her. ‘Approach, Sister Aibagawa.’

Her feet obey. Orito sits across the watery fire from the Lord of Kyôga. He is examining the craftsmanship of what may be a bladeless sword-hilt. In the strange firelight, Enomoto looks a full decade younger than she remembers.

If I were an assassin, she thinks, you would already be dead.

‘What would happen to your Sisters without my protection, and the House?’

It is faces he reads, thinks Orito, not minds. ‘The House of Sisters is a gaol.’

‘Your Sisters would die, miserably and early, in brothels and freak-shows.’

‘How is that to justify their captivity here as monks’ playthings?’

Click: an aspirant has placed a black counter on the board.

‘Dr Aibagawa, your honourable father, respected facts, not opinions twisted out of shape.’

The sword-hilt in Enomoto’s hand is, Orito sees, a pistol.

‘The Sisters are not “playthings”. They dedicate twenty years to the Goddess, and are provided for after their Descents. Many spiritual orders make similar pacts with their adherents, but demand lifelong service.’

‘What “spiritual order” harvests infants from its nuns like your private sect does?’

Darkness uncoils and slides around the edges of Orito’s vision.

‘The fertility of the World Below is fed by a river. Shiranui is its spring.’

Orito sifts his tone and words for cynicism but finds faith. ‘How can an academician – a translator of Isaac Newton – speak like a superstitious peasant?’

‘Enlightenment can blind one, Orito. Apply all the empirical methodology you desire to time, gravity, life: their genesis and purposes are, at root, unknowable. It is not superstition but Reason that concludes the realm of knowledge is finite and that the brain and the soul are discrete entities.’

Click: an acolyte has placed a white counter on the board.

‘You never treated the Shirandô Academy to this insight, as I recall.’

‘We are a spiritual order of limited numbers. The Way of Shiranui is no more the Way of the Scholar than it is the Way of the Common Herd.’

‘What noble words for a squalid truth. You coop women up for twenty years, impregnate them, snatch the infants from their breasts – and forge letters to their mothers from all the dead ones as they grow up!’

‘Just three sadly deceased Gifts have their New Year Letters written: three out of thirty-six – or thirty-eight, including Sister Yayoi’s twins. All the others are genuine. Abbess Izu believes this fiction is kinder to the Sisters, and experience bears her out.’

‘Do the Sisters thank you for this kindness when they discover that the son or daughter they wish to join after Descent died eighteen years ago?’

‘This misfortune has never occurred during my Abbotship.’

‘Sister Hatsune is intending to join her dead daughter Noriko.’

‘Her Descent is two years away. If her mind is unchanged, I will explain.’

The Bell of Amanohashira rings for the Hour of the Dog.

‘It saddens me,’ Enomoto leans into the fire, ‘that you view us as gaolers. Perhaps it is a consequence of your relative rank. One birth every two years is a lighter levy than most wives in the World Below must endure. To most of your Sisters, the masters delivered them from servitude into a Pure Land on Earth.’

‘ Mount Shiranui Shrine is far from my imagining of the Pure Land.’

‘The daughter of Aibagawa Seian is a rare woman and a singular case.’

‘I’d prefer not to hear Father’s name on your lips.’

‘Aibagawa Seian was my trusted friend before he was your father.’

‘A friendship you repay by stealing his orphaned daughter?’

‘I brought you home, Sister Aibagawa.’

‘I had a home, in Nagasaki.’

‘But Shiranui was your home, even before you heard its name. Learning of your vocation in midwifery, I knew. Watching you at the Shirandô Academy, I knew. Years ago, recognising the Goddess’s mark on your face, I-’

‘My face was burnt by a pan of hot oil. It was an accident!’

Enomoto smiles like an adoring father. ‘The Goddess summoned you. She revealed her true self to you, did she not?’

Orito has spoken to no one, not even Yayoi, about the spherical cave and its strange giantess.

Click: an acolyte places a black counter on the board.

There was a secret seal on the door, Logic assures her, entering the tunnel.

Wings beat in the spaces overhead, but when Orito looks up, she sees nothing.

‘When you ran away,’ Enomoto is saying, ‘the Goddess called you back…’

Once I believe this lunacy, Orito thinks, I am truly Shiranui’s prisoner.

‘… and your soul obeyed, because your soul knows what your mind is too knowledgable to understand.’

‘I came back because Yayoi would have died if I hadn’t.’

‘You were an instrument of the Goddess’s compassion. You shall be rewarded.’

Her dread of Engiftment opens its ugly mouth. ‘I… can’t have done to me what is done to the others. I can’t.’ Orito is ashamed of these words, and ashamed of her shame. Spare me what the others endure, the words mean, and Orito begins to tremble. Burn! she urges herself. Be angry!

Click: an acolyte has placed a white counter on the board.

Enomoto’s voice is a caress. ‘All of us, the Goddess most of all, knows what you sacrificed to be here. Look at me with your wise eyes, Orito. We wish to offer you a proposal. No doubt a doctor’s daughter like yourself has noticed Housekeeper Satsuki’s poor health. It is, sadly, a cancer of the womb. She has asked to die on her home island. My men shall take her there in a few days. Her post as housekeeper is yours, if you want it. The Goddess blesses the House with a Gift every five or six weeks: your twenty years at the Shrine would be spent as a practising midwife, helping your Sisters and deepening your knowledge. Such a valuable asset to my Shrine would never be Engifted. In addition, I shall procure books – any books – you wish – so you can follow in your father’s scholarly footsteps. After your Descent, I shall purchase you a house in Nagasaki, or anywhere else, and pay you a stipend for the rest of your life.’

For four months, Orito realises, the House has bludgeoned me with fear…

‘You’d be less a Sister of Shiranui Shrine than a Sister of Life.’

… so that this proposal seems not a tether, or a noose, but a rope lowered to a drowning woman.

Four knocks at the door send ripples across the room.

Enomoto glances past Orito and nods once. ‘Ah, a long-expected friend has arrived to return a stolen item. I must go and present him with a token of gratitude.’ Midnight-blue silk flows upwards as Enomoto stands. ‘Meanwhile, Sister, consider our offer.’

XXVI Behind the Harubayashi Inn, East of Kurozane Village in Kyôga Domain

The Twenty-second Morning of the First Month

Emerging from the rear privy, Uzaemon looks across the vegetable patch and sees a figure watching him from the bamboo grove. He squints through the half-light. Otane the herbalist? She has the same black hood and mountain clothes. She could be. She has the same bent back. Yes. Uzaemon raises a cautious hand, but the figure turns away, with a slow, sad shake of her grey head.

‘No’, he mustn’t acknowledge her? Or ‘No’, the rescue is doomed?

The interpreter puts on a pair of straw sandals left on the veranda and crosses the ruckled vegetable patch to the bamboo. A path of black mud and white frost winds through the grove.

Back at the inn, the rooster crows in the forecourt.

Shuzai and the others, he thinks, will be wondering where I am.

Straw shoes offer little protection for a clerical samurai’s soft feet.

Sitting on a snapped cane at eye-level is a waxwing: its mouth opens…

… its throat vibrates, spatters out a tuneless tune, and it flies away…

In short arcs it hops, from perch to perch, through the thick grove.

Uzaemon follows through slanted bars of light dark and dark dark…

… through the pressing confinement; thin panes of ice shatter underfoot.

Up ahead, the waxwing beckons him onwards, or over to one side?

Or are two waxwings, Uzaemon wonders, toying with one human being?

‘Is anyone there?’ He dares not raise his voice. ‘Otane-sama?’

The leaves shuffle like paper. The path ends at a noisy river, brown and thick like Dutchmen’s tea.

The far bank is a wall of gouged rock…

… rising up beneath splayed boughs and knuckled roots.

A toe of Mount Shiranui, Uzaemon thinks. At its head, Orito is waking.

Upriver, or downriver, a man is shouting in a hunchbacked dialect.

But the path back to the rear garden of the Harubayashi Inn delivers Uzaemon into a hidden clearing. Here, on a bed of dark pebbles, several dozen head-sized sea-smoothed rocks are enclosed within a knee-high stone wall. There is no shrine, no torî gate, no straw ropes hung with paper twists, so it takes the interpreter a little time to recognise that he is in a cemetery. Hugging himself against the cold, he steps over the wall to examine the headstones. The pebbles grind and give beneath his feet.

Numbers, not names, are engraved on the rocks: up to eighty-one.

Invasive bamboo is kept back, and lichen is cleaned from the stones.

Uzaemon wonders if the woman he mistook for Otane is a caretaker.

Perhaps she took fright, he thinks, at a samurai charging her way…

But what Buddhist sect spurns even desultory death-names on its headstones? Without a death-name for Lord Enma’s Register of the Dead, as every child knows, a soul is turned away from the Next World’s Gates. Their ghosts drift for all eternity. Uzaemon speculates that the buried are miscarried children, criminals or suicides, but is not quite convinced. Even members of the untouchable caste are buried with some sort of name.

There is no birdsong, he notices, in winter’s cage.

‘More than likely, sir,’ the landlord tells Uzaemon back at the inn, ‘it was a certain charcoal-burner’s girl you saw. She lives with her father ’n’ brother in a tumbledown cottage an’ a million starlings in the thatch, up past Twelve Fields. She drifts this-a-way ’n’ that-a-way up ’n’ down the river, sir. Weak-headed an’ stumble-footed, she is, an’ she’s been with child twice or three times, but they never take root ’cause the daddy was her daddy, or else her brother, an’ she’ll die in that tumbledown cottage alone, sir, for what family’d want such impureness dilutin’ its blood?’

‘But it was an old woman I saw, not a girl.’

‘Kyôga mares are fatter-hipped than the princesses o’ Nagasaki, sir: a local girl o’ thirteen, fourteen’d pass for an old mare, specially in half-light…’

Uzaemon is dubious. ‘Then what about this secret graveyard?’

‘Oh, there’s no secret, sir: in the hostellers’ trade it’s what we call our “Long Stayers’ Quarters”. There’s many a traveller who falls sick on the road, sir, specially on a pilgrims’ route, an’ sleep their last in inns, an’ it costs us landlords a handsome ransom, an’ “ransom” is the word: we can’t very well dump the body by the roadside. What if a relative comes along? What if the ghost scares off business? But a proper funeral needs money, same as everythin’ else in this world, sir, what with priests for chantin’ an’ a stonecutter for a nice tomb an’ a plot of earth in the temple…’ The landlord shakes his head. ‘So: an ancestor of mine cleared the cemetery in the copse for the benefit, sir, of guests who pass away at the Harubayashi. We keep a proper register of the guests lyin’ there, an’ number the stones proper too, an’ write down the guests’ names if they said one, an’ if it’s a man or woman, an’ guess their age, an’ whatnot. So if any relatives do come lookin’, we can maybe help.’

Shuzai asks, ‘Are your dead guests often claimed by their relatives?’

‘Not once in my time, sir, but we do it anyway. My wife washes the stones every O-bon.’

Uzaemon asks, ‘When was the last body interred there?’

The innkeeper purses his lips. ‘Fewer single travellers pass through Kyôga, sir, now the Omura Road’s so much improved… Last one was three years ago: a printer gentleman, who went to bed fit as a goat but come mornin’ he was cold as stone. Makes you think, sir, doesn’t it?’

Uzaemon is unsettled by the innkeeper’s tone. ‘What does it make you think?’

‘It’s not just the aged an’ frail Death bundles into his Black Palanquin…’

The Kyôga Road follows the Ariake Sea ’s muddy shore and inland through a wood, where one of the hired men, Hane, falls behind and another, Ishi, runs on ahead. ‘A precaution,’ explains Shuzai, from inside his palanquin, ‘to make sure we aren’t being followed from Kurozane or expected up ahead.’ Several upward shrugs of the road later, they cross the narrow Mekura River and take a leaf-strewn track turning up towards the gorge’s mouth. By a moss-blotched torî gate, a noticeboard turns away casual visitors. Here the palanquin is lowered, the weapons removed from its false floor, and before Uzaemon’s eyes, Deguchi of Osaka and his long-suffering servants turn into mercenaries. Shuzai emits a sharp whistle. Uzaemon hears nothing – unless a twig cracking is something – but the men hear a signal that all is well. They run with the empty palanquin, climbing shallow curves. The interpreter is soon out of breath. A waterfall’s clatter and boom grows louder and nearer, and around a recent rock-fall the men arrive at the lower mouth of Mekura Gorge: a stepped cutting in a low escarpment as high as eight or nine men, cloaked and choked by long-tongued ferns and throttling creepers. Down this drop the cold river plunges. The pool below churns and boils.

Uzaemon becomes a prisoner of the ever-plunging waterfall…

She drinks from this river, he thinks, where it is a mountain stream.

… until a thrush whistles in a flank of wild camellia. Shuzai whistles back. The leaves part and five men emerge. They are dressed in commoners’ clothes, but their faces have the same military hardness as the other masterless samurai. ‘Let’s get this crate on poles -’ Shuzai indicates his battered palanquin ‘- out of sight.’

Hidden by the wall of camellia in a hollow where the palanquin is covered with branches and leaves, Shuzai introduces the new men by false names: Tsuru, the moon-faced leader, Yagi, Kenka, Muguchi and Bara; Uzaemon, still dressed as a pilgrim, is named ‘Junrei’. The new men show him a distant respect, but they look to Shuzai as the leader of the expedition. Whether the mercenaries view Uzaemon as a besotted fool or an honourable man – and maybe, Uzaemon considers, one may be both – they give no sign. The samurai named Tanuki gives a brief account of their journey from Saga down to Kurozane and the interpreter thinks of the small steps that gathered this raiding party: Otane the herbalist’s accurate guess at the contents of his heart; Jiritsu the acolyte’s revulsion at the Order’s Creeds; Enomoto’s nefariousness; and more steps; and more twists; some known, and others not; and Uzaemon marvels at the weaverless loom of fortune.

‘The first part of our ascent,’ Shuzai is saying, ‘we’ll make in six groups of two, leaving at five-minute intervals. First, Tsuru and Yagi; second, Kenka and Muguchi; third, Bara and Tanuki; next, Kuma and Ishi; then, Hane and Shakke; and last, Junrei,’ he looks at Uzaemon, ‘and me. We’ll regroup below the gatehouse’ – the men cluster around an inked map of the mountainside, their breaths mingling – ‘guarding this natural revile. I’ll lead Bara and Tanuki, Tsuru and Hane over this bluff and we’ll storm the gate from uphill – the unexpected direction – shortly after the change of guard. We’ll bind, gag and bag them with the ropes and sacks. They’re just farm boys, so don’t kill them, unless they insist. Bare Peak is another two hours’ stiff march, so the monks will be settling down for the night by the time we arrive. Kuma, Hane, Shakke, Ishi: scale the wall here…’ Shuzai now unfolds his picture of the Shrine ‘… on the south-west side, where the trees are closest and thickest. First, go to the gatehouse here and let the rest of us in. Then we send for the highest-ranking master. Him we inform that Sister Aibagawa is leaving with us. This will happen peacefully, or over a courtyard of slain acolytes. The choice is his.’ Shuzai looks at Uzaemon. ‘A threat you aren’t willing to carry through is no threat at all.’

Uzaemon nods, but Please, he prays, don’t let any life be lost…

‘Junrei’s face,’ Shuzai tells the others, ‘is known to Enomoto from the Shirandô Academy. Although our obliging landlord informed us that the Lord Abbot is in Miyako at present, Junrei mustn’t risk being identified, even second-hand. That is why you shall take no part in the raid.’

It is unacceptable, thinks Uzaemon, to cower outside like a woman.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ says Shuzai, ‘but you are not a killer.’

Uzaemon nods, intending to change Shuzai’s mind during the day.

‘When we leave, I’ll warn the monks that I’ll cut down any pursuers without mercy. We then withdraw, with the freed prisoner. We’ll cut the vines of Todoroki Bridge to win us more time tomorrow. We pass through the Halfway Gatehouse during the Hour of the Ox, descend the gorge and arrive back here by the Hour of the Rabbit. We carry the woman in the palanquin as far as Kashima. There we disperse and leave the domain before horsemen can be despatched. Any questions?’

Winter woods are creaking, knitted and knotted. Dead leaves lie in deep drifts. Needle-tips of birdsong stitch and thread the thicket’s many layers. Shuzai and Uzaemon climb in silence. Here the Mekura River is a bellowing, roiling, echoing thing. The granite sky entombs the valley.

By mid-morning, the arches of Uzaemon’s blistered feet are aching.

Here the Mekura River is as smooth and green as foreign glass.

Shuzai gives Uzaemon oil to rub into his aching calves and ankles, saying, ‘The swordsman’s first weapon is his feet.’

On a round rock, an immobile heron waits for fish.

‘The men you hired,’ ventures Uzaemon, ‘seem to trust you entirely.’

‘Some of us studied under the same master in Imabari; most of us served under a minor lordling of Iyo Domain who provoked some fierce skirmishes with his neighbour. To have relied on a man to stay alive is a bond closer than blood.’

A splash punctures the jade pool: the heron is gone.

Uzaemon recalls an uncle teaching him long ago to skim stones. He recalls the old woman he saw at sunrise. ‘There are times when I suspect that the mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past, and the might-one-day-be. This mind’s mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice.’ He looks at his friend, who is watching a bird of prey high above them. ‘I am sounding like a drunken priest.’

‘Not at all,’ mumbles Shuzai, ‘Not at all.’

Higher up the mountainside, limestone cliffs wall in the gorge. Uzaemon begins to see parts of faces in the weather-worn escarpments. A bulge looks like a forehead, a protruding ridge a nose, and excoriations and rockslides, wrinkles and sags. Even mountains, thinks Uzaemon, were once young, and age, and one day die. One black rift under a shrub-hairy overhang could be a narrowed eye. He imagines ten thousand bats hanging from its ruckled roof…

… all waiting for one spring evening to ignite their small hearts.

The higher the altitude, the climber sees, the deeper life must hide from winter. Sap is sunk to roots; bears sleep; next year’s snakes are eggs.

My Nagasaki life, Uzaemon considers, is as gone as my childhood in Shikoku.

Uzaemon thinks of his adoptive parents and his wife conducting their affairs, intrigues and squabbles, but not guessing that they have lost their adopted son and husband. The process will take many months.

He touches the place over his midriff where he carries Orito’s letters.

Soon, Beloved, soon, he thinks. Just a few hours more…

By trying not to remember the Creeds of the Order, he remembers them.

His hand, he finds, is gripping his sword-hilt tight enough to blanch his knuckles.

He wonders whether Orito is already pregnant.

I will care for her, he swears, and raise the child as my own.

Silver birches shiver. Whatever she wishes is all that matters.

‘What was it like,’ Uzaemon asks a question he never asked Shuzai before ‘the first time you killed a man?’ Sycamore roots grip a steep bank. Shuzai leads for another ten, twenty, thirty paces, until the path arrives at a wide and lapping pool. Shuzai checks the steep, surrounding terrain, as if for ambushers…

… and cocks his head like a dog. He hears something Uzaemon does not.

The swordsman’s half-smile says, One of ours. ‘Killing depends on circumstances, as you’d expect, whether it’s a cold, planned murder, or a hot death in a fight, or inspired by honour or a more shameful motive. However many times you kill, though, it’s the first that matters. It’s a man’s first blood that banishes him from the world of the ordinary.’ Shuzai kneels at the water’s edge and drinks water from his cupped hands. A feathery fish hovers in the current; a bright berry floats by. ‘That reckless lordling of Iyo I told you about?’ Shuzai climbs on to a rock. ‘I was sixteen and sworn to serve the greedy dolt. The feud’s history is too long to explain here, but my role in it had me blundering through a thicket on the flank of Mount Ishizuchi one stewed night in the Sixth Month, separated from my comrades. The frogs’ racket smothered other sound and the darkness was blinding, and suddenly the ground gave way and I fell into an enemy foxhole. The scout was as unprepared as I was, and the foxhole so stuffed with our two bodies that neither of us could reach our swords. We fumbled and writhed but neither of us yelled for help. His hands found my throat, and clamped and squeezed, tight as Death. My mind was red and shrieking and my throat was crumpling and I thought, This is it… but Fate disagreed. Long ago, Fate had chosen for the enemy lord’s crest a crescent moon. This insignia was attached to my strangler’s helmet so poorly that it snapped off in my hand, so I could slip its sharp metal point through the slit of his eye-mask, through the softness behind it and side to side like a knife in a yam until his grip on my windpipe weakened and fell away.’

Uzaemon washes his hands and drinks some water from the pool.

‘Afterwards,’ says Shuzai, ‘in marketplaces, cities, crossroads, hamlets…’

The icy water strikes Uzaemon’s jawbone like a Dutch tuning fork.

‘… I thought, I am in this world, but no longer of this world.’

A wildcat paces along the bough of a fallen elm, bridging the path.

‘This lack of belonging, it marks us…’ Shuzai frowns ‘… around the eyes.’

The wildcat looks at the men unafraid, and yawns.

It leaps down to a rock, laps water, and disappears.

‘Some nights,’ Shuzai says, ‘I wake to find his fingers choking me.’

Uzaemon is hiding in a deep, weather-sculpted crater, like a molar’s indentation, a wiry-rooted scramble above the track, with the two mercenaries going by the names Kenka and Muguchi. Kenka is a lithe man of many small and fluid motions, whilst Muguchi is a stockier, cut-lipped miser of words. From their crater, the men have a partial view of the Halfway Gatehouse, just an arrow-shot away. Smoke blows down from the structure’s crude vent. Uphill, upwind and above the bluff, Shuzai and four of the men are waiting for the guards to change. Across the river, something tears through the wood.

‘Wild boar,’ mutters Kenka. ‘Sounds like a fat old thumper.’

They hear a shadowy far-off bell that must belong to the Shrine of Mount Shiranui.

As improbable as a theatrical backdrop, Bare Peak hangs in the sky under clouds massy and crumpling.

‘Rain’d be useful,’ remarks Kenka, ‘so long as it waits till we’re done: it’d wipe our tracks, swell the rivers, make the roads worse for horses and-’

‘Voices?’ Muguchi’s hand demands quiet. ‘Listen – three men…’

Uzaemon hears nothing for a minute or more, until the embittered voice on the track below is very near. ‘Before we was married, she was “No, after we’re married I’m yours but not till then,” but since the wedding she’s all “No, I ain’t in the mood so paws off.” All I did was knock sense into her, like any husband would, but since then the demon in the blacksmith’s wife jumped into mine an’ now she won’t look at me. Can’t even divorce the she-viper, for fear her uncle’d take back his boat an’ then where’d I be?’

‘High an’ dry,’ says a second companion, passing below. ‘That’s where.’

The three approach the gates. ‘Open up, Buntarô,’ one calls out. ‘It’s us.’

‘Oh, it’s “us” is it?’ The shout is muffled. ‘An’ who might this “us” be?’

‘Ichirô, Ubei and Tôsui,’ answers one, ‘and Ichirô’s moanin’ ’bout his wife.’

‘We can find room for the first three, but leave the last outside.’

Ten minutes later, the three off-duty guards emerge. ‘So, Buntarô,’ says one, as they draw into earshot. ‘Serve us up the juicy bits.’

‘Those’re ’tween me, Ichirô’s wife and his tell-no-lies futon.’

‘Tight as a turtle’s slit you are, you…’ The voices fade away.

Uzaemon, Kenka and Muguchi watch the gate, wait and listen.

Minute follows minute follows minute follows minute…

There is no sunset, just a steady fading of the light.

Something’s gone wrong, Fear hisses inside Uzaemon.

Muguchi announces, ‘Done.’ One of the gatehouse gates swings open. A form appears and waves a hand. By the time Uzaemon has scrambled down to the track, the other men are halfway to the gatehouse. Waiting for the interpreter at the gate is Kenka, who whispers, ‘Don’t speak.’ Inside, Uzaemon finds a sheltered porch and a long room built on props and stilts over the river. There is a rack for pikes and axes, an upended cooking pot, a smouldering fire and three large sacks, suspended by ropes from a rafter. First one and then another of the sacks moves, and a bulge shifts, betraying an elbow or knee. The nearest sack, however, hangs motionless as a bag of stones.

Bara is wiping a throwing-knife on a bloodied rag…

The river flowing underneath clamours with human syllables.

Your sword didn’t kill him, Uzaemon thinks, but your presence here did.

Shuzai leads Uzaemon up through the rear gates. ‘We told them we meant them no harm. We told them nobody need be hurt. We said that although samurai cannot surrender, farmers and fishermen can. They agreed to be gagged and bound, but one tried to outwit us. There’s a trapdoor in the corner, over the river, and he made a lunge for it. He almost reached it, and had he escaped, things would have gone badly for us. Bara’s throwing-knife opened his throat and Tsuru only just saved the body from being washed down to Kurozane.’

Is Ichiro’s wife, Uzaemon wonders, now both adulteress and widow?

‘He didn’t suffer.’ Shuzai grips his arm. ‘He was dead within seconds.’

By night, Mekura Gorge becomes a primordial place. The twelve-strong raiding party walks in single file. The track now rises above the river, clinging to the steep side of the gorge. The aches and creaks of beeches and oaks give way to heavy-breathing evergreens. Shuzai has chosen a moonless night, but the clouds are disintegrating, and the starlight is bright enough to gild the darkness.

He didn’t suffer, Uzaemon thinks. He was dead within seconds.

He places one sore foot in front of the other and tries not to think.

A quiet life of schoolmastering, Uzaemon sees a future, in a quiet town…

He places one sore foot in front of the other and tries not to think.

Maybe a quiet life was all the slain guard wanted as well…

His earlier zeal to take part in the raid on the monastery has disappeared.

His mind’s mind shows him the scene of Bara wiping his knife on the bloodied cloth, over and over, until at last the men arrive at Todoroki Bridge.

Shuzai and Tsuru discuss how best to sabotage it later.

An owl cries, in this cedar or that fir… once, twice, nearby… gone.

The shrine’s last chime of the day, loud and close, announces the late Hour of the Rooster. Before it rings again, Uzaemon thinks, Orito will be freed. The men wrap their faces in black cloth, leaving only a narrow band for their eyes and noses. They proceed stealthily, not expecting an ambush but not discounting the possibility. When Uzaemon snaps a twig underfoot the others turn around, glaring. The incline lessens. A fox barks. The tunnel-like succession of torî gates begins, slicing the cross-wind. The men stop and gather around Shuzai. ‘The Shrine is four hundred paces uphill…’

‘Junrei-san.’ Shuzai turns to Uzaemon. ‘Here is where you wait. Remember your sage: “One pays an army for a thousand days to use it for one.” That day is now. Hide away from the path, but stay warm. You’ve come further than most “clients” ever do, so there’s no dishonour in waiting here. Once our business in the monastery is accomplished, I’ll send for you, but don’t approach the Shrine until then. Don’t worry. We are warriors. They are a handful of monks.’

Uzaemon climbs a short distance through stony ice and drifts of pine-needles, to a sheltered bowl out of the worst of the wind: he crouches and stands repeatedly until his hamstrings ache but his legs and torso are warmed through. The night sky is an indecipherable manuscript. Uzaemon remembers last studying the stars with de Zoet on Dejima’s Watchtower, back in the summer, when the world was simpler. He tries to imagine a sequence of pictures entitled, The Bloodless Liberation of Aibagawa Orito: here are Shuzai and three samurai scaling the wall; here, three monks in the gatehouse, surprised into submission; and here comes the head monk, hurrying across the ancient courtyard, muttering, ‘Lord Enomoto will be displeased, but what choice have we?’ Orito is woken and ordered to dress for a journey. She ties her headscarf around her beautiful burnt face. The last picture gives her expression when she recognises her rescuer. Uzaemon shivers, and performs some exercises with his sword, but it is too cold to concentrate, so he turns his thoughts to choosing a name for his new life. Unwittingly, Shuzai has selected his given name – Junrei, the pilgrim – but what about a family name? He may discuss this with Orito: perhaps he could adopt her Aibagawa. I am tempting Fate, he warns himself, to snatch my prize away. He rubs his cold-gnawed hands, wondering how much time has passed since Shuzai led the attack, and finds he has no inkling. An eighth of an hour? A quarter? The Shrine bell hasn’t rung since they crossed Todoroki Bridge, but the monks have no reason to mark the hours of the night. How long should he wait before concluding that the rescue has foundered? Then what? If Shuzai’s masterless samurai were overcome by force, what chance would a former Interpreter of the Third Rank have?

Thoughts of death creep through the pine trees towards Uzaemon.

He wishes the human mind were a scroll that could be rolled up…

‘Junrei-san, we have the-’

Uzaemon is so startled by the speaking tree that he falls on his backside.

‘Did we startle you?’ A boulder’s shadow turns into the mercenary Tanuki.

‘Just a little, yes.’ Uzaemon steadies his breathing.

‘We have the woman,’ Kenka appears from the tree, ‘safe and sound.’

‘That’s good,’ says Uzaemon. ‘That’s very, very good.’

A calloused hand finds Uzaemon’s and lifts him to his feet. ‘Was anyone hurt?’ Uzaemon meant to ask, ‘In what state is Orito?’

‘Nobody whatsoever,’ says Tanuki. ‘Master Genmu’s a man of peace.’

‘Meaning,’ adds Kenka, ‘he shan’t have his Shrine polluted by bloodshed for the sake of one nun. But he’s also a wily old fox, and Deguchi-san wants you to come and check that the man of peace isn’t fobbing us off with a decoy before we leave and they barricade the gate.’

‘There are two nuns with burnt faces.’ Tanuki uncorks a small flask and drinks from it. ‘I went inside the House of Sisters. What a strange menagerie Enomoto’s assembled! Here, drink this: it’ll protect you from the cold and bolster your strength. Waiting is worse than doing.’

‘I’m warm enough,’ Uzaemon shivers. ‘There’s no need.’

‘You have three days to put a hundred miles between yourself and Kyôga Domain, preferably on Honshu. You won’t get that far with a chill in your lungs. Drink!’

Uzaemon accepts the mercenary’s gruff kindness. The spirit scalds his throat. ‘Thank you.’

The trio make their way back down to the tunnel of torî gates.

‘Assuming you saw the correct Aibagawa-san, in what state is she?’

The pause is long enough for Uzaemon to fear the worst.

‘Gaunt,’ answers Tanuki, ‘but well enough, I’d say. Calm.’

‘Her mind’s sharp,’ adds Kenka. ‘She’s not asking us who we are: she knows her captors might overhear. I can see why a man might go to all this time and expense for a woman like that.’

They arrive at the track and begin the final climb through the torî gates.

Uzaemon notices a strange elasticity in his legs. Nerves, he thinks, are natural.

But soon the path is undulating like the slow swell of waves.

The last two days have been taxing. He steadies his breathing. The worst is over.

Past the torî gates, the ground flattens. The Shrine of Mount Shiranui rears up.

Roofs hunker behind high walls. Weak light escapes a gap in the gates.

He hears Dr Marinus’s harpsichord. He thinks, Impossible.

His cheek presses the frosted leaf-mould, soft as a woman’s midriff.

Awareness begins in the membranes of his nose and spreads through his head, but his body cannot move. Questions and statements assert themselves like a throng of sickbed visitors: ‘You fainted again,’ says one. ‘You are indoors in Mount Shiranui Shrine,’ says another, and then they all speak at once: ‘Were you drugged?’; ‘You are sitting upright on a cold floor of beaten earth’; ‘Yes, you were drugged: Tanuki’s drink?’; ‘Your wrists are bound behind a pillar and your ankles are tied’; ‘Was Shuzai betrayed by some of his men?’

‘He can hear us now, Abbot,’ says an unknown voice.

The tip of a glass bottle brushes Uzaemon’s nostril.

‘Thank you, Suzaku,’ says a voice he knows, but cannot yet place.

The smell of rice, sake and pickled vegetables suggest a storehouse.

Orito’s letters. There is an emptiness at his midriff. They’re gone.

Wasps of pain crawl in and out through the stump of his brain.

‘Open your eyes, Ogawa the Younger,’ says Enomoto. ‘We aren’t children.’

He obeys, and the Lord of Kyôga’s face rises in the lantern-lit darkness.

‘You are an estimable scholar,’ says the face. ‘You are a risible thief.’

Three or four human shapes watch from the edges of the storeroom.

‘I didn’t come here,’ Uzaemon tells his captor, ‘to steal anything that is yours.’

‘Why oblige me to spell out what is obvious? Mount Shiranui Shrine is an organ in the body of the Domain of Kyôga. The Sisters belong to that Shrine.’

‘She was neither her stepmother’s to sell nor yours to buy.’

‘Sister Aibagawa is a glad servant of the Goddess. She has no wish to leave.’

‘Let her tell me so from her own lips.’

‘No. Some habits of mind from her old life had to be…’ Enomoto pretends to search for the right verb ‘… cauterised. Her scars are healed, but only a negligent Lord Abbot would allow a dithering one-time sweetheart to pick at them.’

The others, thinks Uzaemon. What about Shuzai and the others?

‘Shuzai is alive, well,’ says Enomoto, ‘and drinking soup in the kitchen with my other ten men. Your plot put them all to some trouble.’

Uzaemon refuses to believe. I’ve known Shuzai for ten years.

‘He is a loyal friend,’ Enomoto tries not to smile, ‘but not your loyal friend.’

A lie, Uzaemon insists, a lie. A key to pick the lock of my mind…

‘Why would I lie?’ Midnight-blue watered silk flows upwards as Enomoto reseats himself much closer. ‘No, the cautionary tale of Ogawa Uzaemon pertains to discontent. Adopted into a once-illustrious family, he climbed by talent to a high rank, enjoying the respect of the Shirandô Academy, a secure stipend, a pretty wife and enviable trading opportunities with the Dutch. Who could want more? Ogawa Uzaemon wanted more! He was infected with that sickness the world calls True Love. In the end, it killed him.’

The human forms around the edges bestir themselves.

I shan’t beg for my life, Uzaemon avows, but I shall learn why and how. ‘How much did you pay Shuzai to betray me?’

‘Come! The Lord of Kyôga’s favour is worth more than a hunter’s bounty.’

‘There was a young man, a guard, who died at the Halfway Gate…’

‘A spy in the pay of the Lord of Saga: your adventure gave us a pleasing way to kill him.’

‘Why bother bringing me all the way up Mount Shiranui?’

‘Assassinations in Nagasaki can lead to awkward questions, and the poetry of your dying so very near your Beloved – mere rooms away! – was irresistible.’

‘Let me see her,’ the wasps swarm in Uzaemon’s brain, ‘or I will kill you from the other side.’

‘How gratifying: a dying curse from a Shirandô scholar! Alas, I have empirical proof enough to satisfy a Descartes or even a Marinus that dying curses don’t work. Down the ages, many hundreds of men, women and even quite small children have all vowed to drag me down to Hell. Yet, as you see, I am still here, walking this beautiful Earth.’

He wants to taste my fear. ‘So you believe your Order’s demented Creeds?’

‘Ah, yes. We found some pleasant letters on your person, but not a certain dogwood scroll-tube. Now, I shan’t pretend you can save yourself: your death became pre-ordained from the hour the herbalist came knocking on your gate. But you can save the Ogawa Residence from the ruinous fire that shall incinerate it in the Sixth Month of this year. What do you say?’

‘Two letters,’ Uzaemon lies, ‘were delivered to Ogawa Mimasaku today. One removes me from the Ogawa family register. The other divorces my wife. Why destroy a house that has no connection to me?’

‘Pure spite. Give me the scroll, or die knowing they die too.’

‘Tell me why you abducted Dr Aibagawa’s daughter when you did.’

Enomoto decides to indulge him. ‘I feared I might lose her. A page from a Dutchman’s notebook came into my possession, thanks to your colleague Kobayashi’s good offices. Look. I brought it.’

Enomoto unfolds a sheet of European paper and holds it up:

Retain this, Uzaemon tells his memory. Show me her, at the end.

‘De Zoet draws a fair likeness.’ Enomoto folds it up. ‘Fair enough to worry Aibagawa Seian’s widow that a Dutchman had designs on the family’s best asset. The dictionary your servant smuggled to Orito settled the matter. My bailiff persuaded the widow to ignore funerary protocol and settle her stepdaughter’s future without further delay.’

‘Did you tell that wretched woman about your demented practices?’

‘What an earthworm knows of Copernicus you know of the Creeds.’

‘You keep a harem of deformities for your monks’ pleasure-’

‘Can you hear how like a child trying to postpone his bedtime you sound?’

‘Why not present a paper to the Academy,’ Uzaemon asks, ‘about-’

‘Why do you mortal gnats suppose that your incredulity matters?’

‘- about murdering your “Harvested Gifts” to “Distil their Souls”?’

‘This is your last opportunity to save the Ogawa house from-’

‘And then bottling them, like perfume, and “imbibing” them, like medicine, and cheating death? Why not share your magical revelation with the world?’ Uzaemon scowls at the shifting figures. ‘Here’s my guess: because there’s one small part of you that’s still sane, an inner Jiritsu who says, “This is evil”.’

‘Oh, Evil. Evil, evil, evil. You always wield that word as if it were a sword and not a vapid conceit. When you suck the yolk from an egg, is this “evil”? Survival is Nature’s law, and my Order holds – or, better, is – the secret of surviving mortality. Newborn infants are a messy requisite – after the first two weeks of life, the enmeshed soul can’t be extracted – and a fifty-strong Order needs a constant supply for its own use, and to purchase the favours of an elite few. Your Adam Smith would understand. Without the Order, moreover, the Gifts wouldn’t exist in the first place. They are an ingredient we manufacture. Where is your “evil”?’

‘Eloquent lunacy, Lord Abbot Enomoto, is still lunacy.’

‘I am more than six hundred years old. You shall die, in minutes…’

He believes his Creeds, Uzaemon sees. He believes every single word.

‘… so which is stronger, in the end? Your Reason? Or My Eloquent Lunacy?’

‘Free me,’ Uzaemon says, ‘free Miss Aibagawa, and I’ll tell you where the scr-’

‘No, no, there can be no bargaining. Nobody outside the Order may know the Creeds and live. You must die, just as Jiritsu did, and that busy old herbalist…’

Uzaemon groans with grief. ‘She was harmless.’

‘She wanted to harm my Order. We defend ourselves. But I want you to look at this – an artefact that Fate, in the guise of Vorstenbosch the Dutchman, sold me.’ Enomoto exhibits a foreign-made pistol, inches from Uzaemon’s face. ‘A pearl-inlaid handle, and craftsmanship exquisite enough to confound the Confucianists’ claim that Europeans lack souls. Since Shuzai told me of your heroic plans, it has been waiting. See – see, Ogawa, this concerns you – how one raises this “hammer” to “half-cock”, loads the gun down the “muzzle” thus: first, the gunpowder, and then with a lead ball wrapped in paper. One pushes it down with this “ramrod” stored on the underside of the barrel…’

It’s now, Uzaemon’s heart knocks like a bloodied fist, it’s now, it’s now…

‘… then one supplies the “flash-pan”, here, with a little powder, shuts its lid, and now our pistol is “primed and ready”. Done, in half a Hollander’s minute. Yes, a master archer can string another arrow in the blink of an eye, but guns are manufactured more quickly than master archers. Any son of a shit-carrier could wield one of these and bring down a mounted samurai. The day is coming – you shan’t see it, but I shall – when such firearms transform even our secretive world. When one squeezes the trigger, a flint strikes this “frizzen” as the flash-pan lid opens. The spark ignites the priming powder, sending a flame through this “touch-hole” into the combustion chamber. The main powder ignites, like a miniature cannon, and the lead ball bores through your-’

Enomoto presses the pistol’s muzzle against Uzaemon’s beating heart.

Uzaemon is aware of urine warming his thighs but is too scared for shame.

It’s now, it’s now, it’s now, it’s now, it’s now, it’s now, it’s now…

‘- or maybe…’ The pistol’s mouth plants a kiss on Uzaemon’s temple.

It’s now it’s now it’s now it’s now it’s now it’s now it’s now

‘Animal terror,’ a murmur enters Uzaemon’s ear, ‘has half dissolved your mind, so I shall provide you with a thought. Music, as it were, to die to. The acolytes of the Order of Mount Shiranui are initiated into the Twelve Creeds, but they stay ignorant of the Thirteenth until they become masters – one of whom you met this morning, the landlord at the Harubayashi Inn. The Thirteenth Creed pertains to an untidy loose end. Were our Sisters – and housekeepers, in fact – to descend to the World Below and discover that not one of their Gifts, their children, is alive or known, questions may be asked. To avoid such unpleasantness, Suzaku administers a gentle drug at their Rite of Departure. This drug ensures a dreamless death, long before their palanquin reaches the foot of Mekura Gorge. They are then buried in that very bamboo grove into which you blundered this morning. So here is your final thought: your childlike failure to rescue Aibagawa Orito sentences her not only to twenty years of servitude – your ineptitude has, literally, killed her.’

The pistol rests on Ogawa Uzaemon’s forehead…

He expends his last moment on a prayer. Avenge me.

A click, a spring, a strangled whimper nothing now but

Now Now Now Now now now now now nownownow-

Thunder splits the rift where the sun floods in.