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…’