Laura Rowland - The Fire Kimono

Etsuko, Doi, and Egen stood over his body. The forest was silent except for their rapid, fevered breathing. As her temper cooled, Etsuko realized what they’d done. She began to cry.

The men embraced her. Doi said, “Don’t be upset. It’s over.” His cheek against hers was wet with his own tears. Egen said, “We did what we had to. It’s all right, Etsuko.”

The sound of footsteps crunching through dried leaves silenced her sobs. “Someone’s coming. We have to get out of here. Hurry!”

They ran far from the scene of their crime before they stopped in a clearing. “Swear that you’ll never tell what we did,” Doi said, extending his hand palm-down to Egen and Etsuko.

Etsuko laid her hand atop Doi’s. Egen pressed his hand onto hers. “I swear,” they all said.

They returned to the city and joined the thousands of homeless people who drifted around, searching for family, friends, and places they’d known. They ate stew cooked in camps set up by the government, but relief was inadequate. Every day they saw more dead bodies, of people who’d frozen or starved. At night they slept bundled together in quilts they’d stolen from an abandoned house. They hardly spoke; they couldn’t look at one another. They were too ridden by their shared guilt.

Days later, Etsuko learned from a stranger that Hana was looking for her. She and her friends rushed to the tent city. When she found Hana, Egen and Doi walked away: They were too ashamed to face anyone they knew. Etsuko broke into shuddering, uncontrollable sobs.

Hana exclaimed, “There’s blood all over you!”

Etsuko and her friends hadn’t washed Tadatoshi’s blood off their clothes; there’d been no place to wash. When Hana asked what had happened, Etsuko refused to tell and became violently ill. For days she lay in the tent, so nauseated she couldn’t keep food down. She thought her sickness was a punishment from the gods.

Not until a month later did she learn its real cause.

By then she and Hana were reunited with her parents, at her family home that had survived the fire. Etsuko hadn’t seen Egen. Maybe he didn’t know where she was, and she couldn’t go looking for him. Her parents wouldn’t let her outside because Edo was a chaotic, dangerous place. She sat in her room and prayed, Please let him come!

One day her mother called, “Etsuko! We have visitors!”

Her heart rejoiced; it must be Egen and Doi. When she went to the parlor she found Doi-sitting with his parents and hers. Doi’s father said, “Now that the fire is over, we’d like to set a date for our children’s wedding.”

“That would be fine with us,” said Etsuko’s father.

Etsuko was horrified. She saw in Doi’s eyes that he still wanted her and was willing to forget the past. If only Egen would appear and save her from this loveless union!

Doi’s mother regarded Etsuko with a suspicious, penetrating gaze. “Come closer. Give me a look at you.”

Etsuko obeyed. The woman studied her swollen figure, then announced what Etsuko had been hiding. “You’re with child.”

Her parents exclaimed in appalled shock. Doi looked stunned. His father said, “Since Etsuko is no longer a virgin, we must break the engagement.”

Etsuko was so ashamed that she ran sobbing from the house. Doi followed her into the alley. “Is it Egen’s?” he demanded.

She couldn’t answer; she didn’t have to. Doi looked ready to cry himself. “Does he know?”

“No. I didn’t have a chance to tell him.”

“Well, you won’t ever have one.” Anger darkened Doi’s face. “He’s left town. He said he’s not coming back. Because he can’t stand to see me, or you, ever again.”

As Etsuko wept, heartbroken because Egen had deserted her and would never marry her as she’d prayed he would, Doi shouted, “It serves you right! You’re nothing but a whore!”

He slapped her face so hard that she fell. Then he walked out of her life.

That night Etsuko miscarried the child. She grieved, for it was all she’d had of her beloved. Her parents were upset because she was still damaged goods. What man would marry her now?

Six months later, her parents heard of a man who might be willing. They took her to meet him, and Etsuko’s heart sank. He was at least ten years older than she, and so severe! Even worse, from her parents’ standpoint, he was a ronin who operated a martial arts school. What a grievous comedown from the match they’d planned for her with Doi! But he made a proposal of marriage, and her parents accepted, eager for him to take their wayward daughter off their hands.

Etsuko had no choice but to marry the ronin. Her parents disowned her, and she lost contact with everyone and everything familiar. She swallowed her grief and pride, accustomed herself to living in near poverty, and worked hard at keeping house for her husband. She never told him about the murder. She bore him a son, who eventually became the shogun’s second-in-command.

“Now you know why I couldn’t tell you the truth,” Sano’s mother said.

Shocked beyond words by her tale, Sano turned away from her, rubbed his hand down his mouth, and gazed into space.

“Egen and Doi and I killed Tadatoshi,” she said. “We were all responsible, but I was the most.”

Reiko had known the gist of the story, albeit not the details, Sano thought. He should have listened to his wife.

Now he knew why the real tutor had skipped town, and why Colonel Doi was bitter toward Etsuko after all these years. Sano had been right about Doi having a hand in the murder. Perhaps Doi’s guilt had motivated his heroism during the relief efforts after the fire. Sano also knew he could never prove his mother’s innocence, for she was as guilty as he’d ever feared. Her hands that had nursed him during his childhood had once taken a life in cold blood. But he felt sick and shaken for a reason even more personal.

His earlier discoveries had contradicted facts he’d taken for granted about his family background, but his mother had just demolished the foundations of his self. He wasn’t only the son of a poor but upstanding ronin; he was the son of a fallen woman, a murderess. His emotions in turmoil, he couldn’t separate what he thought about the fact that she was guilty of the murder from what he felt about the rest of her confession.

“How could you?” he said, turning on his mother, venting his emotions in fury.

She extended her hands, palms up. “It was right.”

Her fear and weakness had vanished. Telling her story had given her a calm, dignified strength. But it had undone Sano.

“You not only had an affair with the tutor, you bore his child,” he said. Hana knew that part of the story, if not the rest; that explained her reluctance to talk. “Then you married my father and pretended it never happened. You hid your crime from him. Our whole life was a lie.”

Her secret was a skeleton that had been buried beneath the surface of their existence while Tadatoshi’s bones lay in his hidden grave. Those bones had conveyed messages from the past, and repercussions for the future, to Sano. They were indeed oracle bones.

“How can I not be angry?” Sano demanded.

His mother rose, undaunted by his outburst. “It wasn’t a lie. Your father and I were as happy together as most married couples. He was a decent man, and I served him faithfully until he died.”

That sounded meager compared with her passionate love for Egen-and Sano’s own for Reiko. Even in the heat of his rage Sano could pity his mother. He could begin to see her life from her point of view.

“You gave up everything,” he said, shaking his head in wonder. “Your life of luxury, your samurai status, your honor.” He was appalled by her disgrace and knew she must have felt the same. “How could you bear it?”