Laura Rowland: The Iris Fan

“Dead?” Manabe said. “No. But he’s seriously injured.”

An avalanche of relief overwhelmed Sano.

“What happened?” Yanagisawa spoke in a strange, toneless voice.

Manabe shook his head. Lord Ienobu said, “We’d better go to the palace and find out.” He scuttled out the door faster than Sano had ever seen him move.

Yanagisawa hurried after him; Sano followed. Manabe stuck close behind Sano, in case Sano should decide to bolt. The night echoed with yells as troops stationed throughout the castle spread the news. Ienobu’s hunched figure led the rush along the dim passage up the hill through falling snow. The palace compound was lit up as if for an unholy festival. Soldiers stood around the tile-roofed, half-timbered building. Their lanterns and torches splayed yellow light on the snowy grass, shrubs, and paths. Their silence was eerie, their anxiety palpable.

“Let us through!” Yanagisawa said.

He and Lord Ienobu, Sano, and Manabe sped into the palace, through a maze of corridors where frightened servants huddled and more troops stood guard. Sentries admitted them to the shogun’s private quarters. Moans filled the passage along which Sano and his companions raced. The paper wall of the shogun’s bedchamber was bright with lights behind it. The lattice crisscrossed the moving shadows of people inside. The sliding door was open; the moans issued from it. Lord Ienobu and Yanagisawa bumped against each other in their hurry to enter. When Sano crossed the threshold, the smells hit him-diarrhea and the salty sweet, iron odor of blood. The shogun lay facedown and naked on the futon with two deep, ragged, bleeding cuts between his ribs and two lower ones on either side of his spine. The white sheet under him and the quilt at the foot of the bed were red with blood and foul with excrement released from his bowels. The chief palace physician-an elderly man dressed in the long, dark blue coat of his profession-hovered by a medicine chest. Two male servants were trying to remove the soiled sheet. As they pulled on it and lifted the shogun, he screamed.

“Stop! It hurts!”

Alarmed by the shogun’s injuries, Sano was also amazed at how much the shogun had aged since he’d last seen him four years ago. His hair was all gray, his body spindly. Lord Ienobu struggled to hide his disappointment-he must have hoped the shogun would be dead by now. Yanagisawa swallowed hard as he beheld the lord whose lover he’d been when he was young, whose patronage had raised him from a lowly vassal to the heights of political power.

The other person in the room was Captain Hosono of the palace’s night guard, a samurai about forty years old. He stood in a corner, his usually pleasant face terror-stricken because the attack had occurred on his watch.

“If you won’t let the servants make your bed clean, we’ll have to move you to another room,” the physician told the shogun.

“No! I can’t bear to be moved. Give me some more opium!” the shogun begged.

“I’ve already given you the maximum dose,” the physician said.

The shogun screamed while the servants eased the sheet from under him and covered the stained mattress with fresh sheets. One carried out the soiled bedding; the others washed the shogun. The physician dabbed his wounds with a pungent herbal solution. The shogun moaned, his frail body tense with pain. The measles rash was bright red against the white pallor of his skin. Afraid of contagion, Lord Ienobu and Yanagisawa stood near the door by Sano.

“Uncle, how are you?” Ienobu asked with exaggerated concern.

“Can’t you see? Or are you blind as well as ugly?” The shogun had once been a meek, timid man, afraid to speak his mind and offend. It wasn’t just pain that made him rude now. He’d turned over a new leaf several years ago. “Ouch, you’re hurting me!”

“I’m being as gentle as I can,” the physician said. “I have to clean your wounds.”

“Fie upon the whole medical profession! You’re nothing but a bunch of quacks!”

“What happened?” Lord Ienobu asked Captain Hosono.

“His Excellency was in bed. Somebody sneaked in and stabbed him.”

“Who was it, Your Excellency?” Yanagisawa’s voice was tight, as if he were trying not to retch.

“I didn’t see. I was asleep.” As the doctor cleaned another wound, the shogun shrieked, “Damn you!”

Sano shifted his mind from its focus on Yoshisato’s murder to the attack on the shogun. It felt like pushing a cart and trying to turn its wheels out of deep ruts they’d been rolling in for more than four years.

“Where were His Excellency’s bodyguards?” Lord Ienobu asked.

“He sent them away,” Captain Hosono said. “He had a concubine with him.”

Sano had heard that the shogun had become impotent and any distraction, such as people outside his chamber, prevented him from performing sexually. “Where is the concubine?”

Captain Hosono looked surprised that Sano was present after he’d been banned from court. “In here.” He opened the wooden sliding door between the bedchamber and the adjacent room, the shogun’s study.

A small boy who’d been kneeling on the tatami, his ear pressed against the door, fell into the chamber and scrambled to his feet. He looked about nine years old. The shogun preferred sex with males, especially children and adolescents; he rarely slept with women. That was one reason Sano didn’t believe Yoshisato was his son. Sano also had doubts about whether the shogun had actually fathered his daughter.

“Eavesdropping, were you?” Captain Hosono said to the boy.

The boy nodded sheepishly. A white blanket wrapped around his body slipped to reveal bare, thin shoulders. He pulled it up and brushed back his tousled hair. His innocent face was as delicate and lovely as a girl’s.

Sano felt sorry for him. He was the shogun’s sexual toy, he’d been sharing a bed with the shogun at the risk of catching measles, and he’d been present during a violent attack. Sano went to him and said, “What’s your name?”

“Dengoro,” the boy said in a clear, sweet voice.

“Dengoro, can you tell me who stabbed His Excellency?”

The boy shook his head. Encouraged by Sano’s friendly manner, he said, “I was asleep. I woke up when His Excellency started screaming. Somebody ran out of the room.”

“Can you describe the person?”

“No. It was too dark to see.”

The physician prepared to stitch the shogun’s cuts with a long needle. Sano dismissed the boy. The shogun panted and shivered. Yanagisawa and Lord Ienobu regarded him with frowning speculation. Sano asked Captain Hosono, “Who was first on the scene?”

“His Excellency’s valet. He called the bodyguards.” Hosono anticipated Sano’s next question. “He didn’t see anything, either. The attacker was already gone.”

Sano persisted even though he was just a patrol guard and this wasn’t his case to solve. “Were any clues found?”

“The weapon.” Captain Hosono walked to the bedside table, picked up a long, narrow object wrapped in a white cloth, and handed it to Sano. “It was lying by the bed. I thought I’d better wrap it up for safekeeping.”

Sano uncovered a large, folded fan with ribs that came to long points at one end and a green silk tassel attached by a braided green cord at the other. The points were red, bloodstained. Sano unfolded the fan, displaying an arc of heavy gold rice paper painted with blue irises on leafy green stalks. Irises symbolized boldness, courage, and power. Perhaps they’d served as a talisman for the would-be assassin.

“How could a fan do that?” Ienobu pointed his crooked finger at the shogun’s back. The doctor threaded the needle with a long horse tail hair.

The fan felt abnormally heavy in Sano’s hand. “The ribs are made of iron. They’re sharpened at the ends.” This was no ordinary fan used to create cooling breezes in summer. It was a weapon of the kind used for self-defense, often by merchants, peasants, or women. The law permitted only samurai to carry swords.