David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

‘If I am able to answer it, Your Honour, I shall.’

‘Why did the English sail away before Dejima was destroyed?’

‘This same mystery troubled me all night long, Your Honour.’

‘You must have seen how they loaded the cannons on the quarterdeck.’

Jacob has Goto explain how cannons are for punching big holes in ships and walls, whereas carronades are for punching small holes through lots of men.

‘Then why did the English not kill their enemy’s chief with the “carronades”?’

‘Possibly the Captain wanted to limit damage to Nagasaki.’ Jacob shrugs. ‘Possibly it was an…’ He has Goto translate ‘Act of Mercy’.

A child’s voice can be heard, muffled by two or three rooms.

The Magistrate’s celebrated son, Jacob guesses, delivered by Orito.

‘Perhaps,’ Shiroyama examines the joints of his thumb, ‘your courage made your enemy ashamed.’

Jacob, recalling his four years of living with Londoners, doubts the suggestion but bows at the compliment. ‘Will Your Honour be travelling to Edo to submit your report?’

Pain flashes across Shiroyama’s face and Jacob wonders why. The Magistrate addresses his difficult-to-understand answer to Goto. ‘His Honour says…’ Goto hesitates ‘… Edo requires a – the word is a merchant’s word, “settle of accounts”?’

Jacob is being instructed to leave this deliberate vagueness alone.

He notices the Go board in its corner; he recognises the same game from his visit two days ago, just a few moves further on.

‘My opponent and I,’ says Shiroyama, ‘can rarely meet.’

Jacob makes a safe guess: ‘The Lord Abbot of Kyôga Domain?’

The Magistrate nods. ‘The Lord Abbot is a master of the game. He discerns his enemy’s weaknesses, and uses them to confound his enemy’s strengths.’ He considers the board ruefully. ‘I fear my position is without hope.’

‘My position on the Watchtower,’ says Jacob, ‘was also without hope.’

Chamberlain Tomine’s nod to Interpreter Goto indicates, It is time.

‘Your Honour.’ Nervously, Jacob produces the scroll from his inner jacket. ‘Humbly, I beg you to read this scroll when you are alone.’

Shiroyama frowns and looks at his chamberlain. ‘Precedent would instruct,’ Tomine tells Jacob, ‘all letters from Dutchmen to be translated by two members of the Interpreters’ Guild of Dejima, and then-’

‘A British warship sailed into Nagasaki and opened fire and what did precedent do about it?’ Shiroyama is irritated out of his melancholy. ‘But if this is a petition for more copper, or any other matter, then Chief de Zoet should know that my star in Edo is not on the rise…’

‘A sincere personal letter, Your Honour. Please forgive its poor Japanese.’

Jacob senses the lie deflate Tomine’s and Goto’s curiosity.

The innocuous-looking scroll-tube passes into the Magistrate’s hands.

The Ninth Day of the Ninth Month

Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike-topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by mule-drivers, mules and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunchbacked makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed from kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges. Gulls fly through clouds of steam from laundries’ vats; over kites unthreading corpses of cats; over scholars glimpsing truth in fragile patterns; over bath-house adulterers; heartbroken slatterns; fishwives dismembering lobsters and crabs; their husbands gutting mackerel on slabs; woodcutters’ sons sharpening axes; candle-makers, rolling waxes; flint-eyed officials milking taxes; etoliated lacquerers; mottled-skinned dyers; imprecise soothsayers; unblinking liars; weavers of mats; cutters of rushes; ink-lipped calligraphers dipping brushes; booksellers ruined by unsold books; ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers; filching page-boys; runny-nosed cooks; sunless attic nooks where seamstresses prick calloused fingers; limping malingerers; swineherds; swindlers; lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and ageing rakes by other men’s wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; statues of Jizo anointed with posies; syphilitics sneezing through rotted-off noses; potters; barbers; hawkers of oil; tanners; cutlers; carters of night-soil; gate-keepers; bee-keepers; blacksmiths and drapers; torturers; wet-nurses; perjurers; cut-purses; the newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator; and around again, where their flight began, over the balcony of the Room of the Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night’s rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.

Kawasemi holds up a white under-robe for Shiroyama. She is wearing her kimono decorated with blue Korean morning-glories. The wheel of seasons is broken, says the spring pattern this autumn day, and so am I.

Shiroyama inserts his fifty-year-old arms into the sleeves.

She ducks in front of him, tugging and smoothing the material.

Kawasemi now wraps the obi-sash above his waist.

She chose a rare green and white design: Green for life, white for death?

The expensively trained courtesan ties it in an expert figure-of-ten cross.

‘It always takes me ten times,’ he used to say, ‘to get the knot to stay.’

Kawasemi lifts the thigh-length haori jacket: he takes it and puts it on. The fine black silk is crisp as snow and heavy as air. Its sleeves are embroidered with his family’s crest.

Two rooms away he hears Naozumi’s twenty-month-old footsteps.

Kawasemi passes him his inrô box: it contains nothing, but without it he would feel unprepared. Shiroyama threads its cord through the netsuke toggle: she has chosen him a Buddha carved in hornbill.

Kawasemi’s steady hands pass his tantô dagger in its scabbard.

Would that I could die in your house, he thinks, where I was happiest…

He slides its scabbard through his obi-sash in the prescribed manner.

… but decorum must be seen to be observed.

‘Shush!’ says the maid in the next room. ‘Suss!’ laughs Naozumi.

A chubby hand slides the door open and the boy, who looks like Kawasemi when he smiles and like Shiroyama when he frowns, darts into the room, ahead of the mortified maid.

‘I beg Your Lordship’s pardon,’ she says, kneeling at the threshold.

‘Found you!’ sing-songs the toothy grinning toddler and trips over.

‘Finish packing,’ Kawasemi tells her maid. ‘I’ll summon you when it’s time.’

The maid bows and withdraws. Her eyes are red from crying.