David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

‘In air,’ the Magistrate continues, ‘the poison hardens into a thin, clear flake. But a liquid – especially a spirit, like sake – dissolves it instantaneously. Hence the coarse Sakurajima cups – to hide the painted-on poison. That you saw through my offensive on the Go board, but overlooked this simple stratagem, amply justifies my death.’

Enomoto, his face distorted by fear and fury, reaches for his sword, but his arm is stiff and wooden and he cannot draw his weapon from its scabbard. He stares at his hand in disbelief and, with a guttural snarl, swings his fist at his sake cup.

It skips across the empty floor, like a pebble skimming dark water.

‘If you knew, Shiroyama, you horse-fly, what you’ve done…’

‘What I know is that the souls of those unmourned women buried behind the Harubayashi Inn -’

‘Those disfigured whores were fated from birth to die in gutters!’

‘- those souls may rest now. Justice is served.’

‘The Order of Shiranui lengthens their lives, not shortens them!’

‘So that “Gifts” can be bred to feed your derangement?’

‘We sow and harvest our crop! Our crop is ours to use as we please!’

‘Your Order sows cruelty in the service of madness and-’

‘The Creeds work, you human termite! Oil of Souls works! How could an Order founded on insanity survive for so many centuries? How could an abbot earn the favour of the Empire’s most cunning men with quackery?’

The purest believers, Shiroyama thinks, are the truest monsters. ‘Your Order dies with you, Lord Abbot. Jiritsu’s testimony is gone to Edo and -’ his breaths grow sparser as the poison numbs his diaphragm ‘- and without you to defend it, Mount Shiranui Shrine will be disestablished.’

The flung-away cup rolls in a wide arc, trundling and whispering.

Shiroyama, sitting cross-legged, tests his arms. They predecease him.

‘Our Order,’ Enomoto gasps, ‘the Goddess, the Ritual harvested souls…’

A guppering noise escapes Chamberlain Tomine. His jaw vibrates.

Enomoto’s eyes fry and shine, ‘I cannot die.’

Tomine falls forward on to the Go board. Both bowls of stones scatter.

‘Senescence undone,’ Enomoto’s face locks, ‘skin unmottled, vigour unstolen.’

‘Master, I’m cold,’ the acolyte’s voice melts, ‘I’m cold, Master.’

‘Across the River Sansho,’ Shiroyama spends his last words, ‘your victims are waiting.’ His tongue and lips no longer co-operate. Some say, Shiroyama’s body turns to stone, that there is no afterlife. Some say that human beings are no more eternal than mice or mayflies. But your eyes, Enomoto, prove that Hell is no invention, for Hell is reflected in them. The floor tilts and becomes the wall.

Above him, Enomoto’s curse is malformed and strangled.

Leave him behind, the Magistrate thinks. Leave everything, now…

Shiroyama’s heart stops beating. The Earth’s pulse beats against his ear.

An inch away is a Go clam-shell stone, perfect and smoothed…

… a black butterfly lands on the White stone, and unfolds its wings.

Morning of Friday the 3rd July, 1811

The cortège proceeds across the cemetery led by two Buddhist priests, whose black, white and blue-black robes remind Jacob of magpies, a bird he has not seen for thirteen years. One priest bangs a dull drum, and another strikes a pair of sticks. Following behind are four eta carrying Marinus’s coffin. Jacob walks alongside his ten-year-old son, Yûan. Interpreters of the First Rank Iwase and Goto walk a few steps behind, with the hoar-frosted, evergreen Dr Maeno and Ôtsuki Monjurô from the Shirandô Academy ahead of the four guards in the rear. Marinus’s headstone and coffin were paid for by the Academicians, and Chief Resident de Zoet is grateful: for three seasons Dejima has been dependent upon loans from the Nagasaki Exchequer.

Droplets of mist cling to Jacob’s red beard. Some escape down his throat, beneath his least-frayed collar, and are lost in the warm sweat drenching his torso.

The foreigners’ enclosure is at the far end of the cemetery, by the edge of the steep forest. Jacob is reminded of the burial place reserved for suicides adjacent to his uncle’s church in Domburg. My late uncle’s church, he corrects himself. The last letter from home reached Dejima three years ago, though Geertje had written it two years before. After their uncle’s death, his sister had married the schoolmaster of Vrouwenpolder, a small village east of Domburg, where she teaches the younger children. The French Occupation of Walcheren makes life difficult, Geertje admitted – the Great Church at Veere is a barracks and stables for Napoleon’s troops – but her husband, she wrote, is a good man and they are luckier than most.

The calls of cuckoos haunt the mist-dripping morning.

Within the foreigners’ enclosure waits a large group of mourners, half hidden under umbrellas. The slow pace of the cortège allows him to peruse some of the twelve or thirteen dozen headstones: his are the first Dutch feet ever to enter this place, so far as he can determine from his predecessors’ Day Registers. The names of the very earliest dead are lost to frost and lichen, but from the Genroku Era onwards – the 1690s, Jacob calculates – inscriptions can be discerned with increasing certainty. Jonas Terpstra, a likely Frieslander, died in the First Year of Hôei, at the beginning of the last century; Klaas Oldewarris was summoned to God in the Third Year of Hôryaku, during the 1750s; Abraham van Doeselaar, a fellow Zeelander, died in the Ninth Year of An’ei, two decades before the Shenandoah sailed to Nagasaki. Here is the grave of the young mestizo who fell from the English frigate, whom Jacob christened in death ‘Jack Farthing’; and Wybo Gerritszoon, dead of a ‘Ruptured Abdomen’ in the Fourth Year of Kyôwa, nine years ago: Marinus suspected a burst appendix, but kept his promise not to cut open Gerritszoon’s body to check his diagnosis. Jacob recalls Gerritszoon’s aggression very well but the man’s face has faded from memory.

Dr Marinus arrives at his final destination.

The headstone reads, in both Japanese and the Roman alphabet, dr lucas marinus, physician and botanist, died 7th year of the era of bunka. The priests intone a mantra as the coffin is lowered. Jacob removes his snakeskin hat and, by way of counterpoint to the heathen chant, silently recites sections of the Hundred and forty-first Psalm. ‘Our bones are scattered at the grave’s mouth…’

Seven days ago, Marinus was in as hale health as ever.

‘… as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth. But mine eyes are unto thee, O God the Lord…’

On Wednesday he announced that he was going to die on Friday.

‘… in thee is my trust; leave not my soul destitute.’

A slow aneurysm in his brain, he said, was hooding his senses.

‘Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense…’

He looked so unworried – and so well – as he wrote his will.

‘… the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.’

Jacob didn’t believe him, but on Thursday Marinus took to his bed.

‘His breath goeth forth,’ says the Hundred and forty-sixth Psalm, ‘he returneth to his earth…’

The doctor joked that he was a grass-snake, shedding one skin.

‘… in that very day his thoughts perish.’

He took an afternoon siesta on Friday and never woke up.

The priests have finished. The mourners look at the Chief Resident.