‘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.