David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

But she also knows that leaving her hut would be easier than returning.

‘Come spring,’ she mutters, ‘it’ll be, “Aunt Otane can’t go back to that ruin!” ’

Higher up, a pair of raccoons snarl murderous threats.

The herbalist of Kurozane climbs on, her sack growing heavier with each step.

Otane reaches the gardened shelf where her cottage stands. Onions are strung below the deep eaves. Firewood is stacked below. She puts her rice down on the raised porch. Her body aches. She checks the goats in their stall, and tips in a half-bale of hay. Last, she peers into the chicken coop. ‘Who laid an egg for Auntie today, I wonder?’

In the ripe murk she finds one, still warm. ‘Thank you, ladies.’

She bolts the cottage door against the night, kneels before her hearth with her tinderbox and coaxes a fire into life for her pot. In this she makes a soup of burdock root and yams. When it is hot, she adds the egg.

The medicine cabinet calls her into the rear room.

Patients and visitors are surprised to see such a beautiful cabinet reaching nearly to the ceiling of her humble cottage. Back in her great-great-grandfather’s day, six or eight strong men had carried it up from the village, though as a child it was simpler to believe that it had grown here, like an ancient tree. One by one, she slides out the well-waxed medicine drawers and inhales their contents. Here is toki parsley, good for colicky infants; next, acrid yomogi shavings, ground to a powder for moxibustion; last in this row, dokudami berries or ‘fish mint’ to flush out sickness. The cabinet is her livelihood and the depository of her knowledge. She sniffs soapy mulberry leaves, and hears her father telling her, ‘Good for ailments of the eye… and used with goatwort for ulcers, worms and boils…’ Then Otane reaches the bitter motherwort berries.

She is reminded of Miss Aibagawa and withdraws to the fire.

She feeds the lean flames a fat log. ‘Two days from Nagasaki,’ she says, ‘to “Request an Audience with Otane of Kurozane”. Those were Miss Aibagawa’s words. I was digging manure into my pumpkin patch one day…’

Dots of firelight are reflected in the dog’s clear eyes.

‘… when who appears at my fence but the village headman and priest.’

The old woman chews a stringy burdock root, recalling the burnt face.

‘Can it truly be three whole years ago? It feels like as many months.’

The dog rolls on to his back, using his mistress’s foot as a pillow.

He knows the story well, thinks Otane, but shan’t mind indulging me again.

‘I thought she’d come for treatment, seeing her burnt face, but then the headman introduced her as “the celebrated Dr Aibagawa’s daughter” and “practitioner of Dutch-style midwifery” – as if he knew what such words mean! But then she asked if I might advise her on herbal treatments for childbirth and, well, I thought my ears were liars.’

Otane rolls a boiled egg to and fro on her wooden platter.

‘When she told me that amongst druggists and scholars in Nagasaki the name “Otane of Kurozane” is a guarantee of purity, I was horrified that my lowly name was known by such elevated folk…’

The old woman picks off the fragments of eggshell with her berry-dyed fingernails and remembers how gracefully Miss Aibagawa dismissed the headman and priest, and how attentively she wrote down Otane’s observations. ‘She wrote as well as any man. Yakumosô interested her. “Smear it over torn loins,” I told her, “and it prevents fevers and heals the skin. It soothes nipples inflamed by breastfeeding, too…” ’ Otane bites into the boiled egg, warmed by the memory of the samurai’s daughter acting quite at home in this commoner’s cottage while her two servants rebuilt a goat-pen and repaired a wall. ‘You remember the headman’s eldest son bringing up lunch,’ she tells the dog. ‘Polished white rice, quail eggs and sea-bream, steaming in plantain leaves… Well, we thought we were in the Palace of the Moon Princess!’ Otane lifts the kettle’s lid and drops in a fistful of coarse tea. ‘I spoke more in a single afternoon than I had done all year. Miss Aibagawa wanted to pay me “tuition money” – but how could I charge her a single sen? So she bought my stock of motherwort, but left three times the usual price…’

The darkness opposite stirs and quickens into the form of a cat.

‘Where were you hiding? We were talking about Miss Aibagawa’s first visit. She sent us dried sea-bream the following New Year. Her servant delivered it all the way from the city.’ The sooty kettle begins to wheeze, and Otane thinks about the second visit during the Sixth Month of the following year, when the butterbur was in flower. ‘She was in love that summer. Oh, I didn’t ask, but she couldn’t refrain from mentioning a young Dutch interpreter from a good family named Ogawa. Her voice altered’ – the cat looks up – ‘when she said his name.’ Outside, night stirs the creaking trees. Otane pours her tea before the water boils and embitters the leaves. ‘I prayed that, once they were married, Ogawa-sama would still let her visit Kyôga Domain to gladden my heart, and that her second visit would not be her last.’ She sips her tea, recalling the day when the news reached Kurozane, passed up a chain of relatives and servants, that the head of the Ogawas had denied his son permission to marry Dr Aibagawa’s daughter. Then in the New Year, Otane learned that Ogawa the Interpreter had taken another bride. ‘Despite this unfortunate turn,’ Otane pokes the fire, ‘Miss Aibagawa didn’t forget me. She sent me my shawl made out of the warmest foreign wool, as a New Year’s gift.’

The dog wriggles on his back to scratch his flea-bites.

Otane recalls this summer’s visit, as the strangest of Miss Aibagawa’s three excursions to Kurozane. Two weeks before, when the azaleas were in flower, a salt merchant had brought news to the Harubayashi Inn about how Dr Aibagawa’s daughter had performed ‘a Dutch miracle’ and breathed life into Magistrate Shiroyama’s still-born child. So when she visited, half the village walked up to Otane’s cottage, hoping for more Dutch miracles. ‘Medicine is knowledge,’ Miss Aibagawa told the villagers, ‘not magic.’ She gave advice to the small crowd, and they thanked her, but left disappointed. When they were alone, the young woman confided that it had been a trying year. Her father had been ill, and the careful way she avoided any mention of Ogawa the Interpreter indicated a badly bruised heart. Brighter news, however, was that the grateful Magistrate had given her permission to study on Dejima under the Dutch doctor. ‘Well, I must have looked worried.’ Otane strokes her cat. ‘You hear such stories about foreigners. But she assured me that this Dutch doctor was a great teacher, known even to Lord Abbot Enomoto.’

Wings beat by the chimney flue. The owl is out hunting.

Then, six weeks ago, came the most shocking news of Otane’s recent life.

Miss Aibagawa was to become a Sister at Mount Shiranui Shrine.

Otane tried to visit Miss Aibagawa at the Harubayashi Inn the night before she was taken up the mountain, but neither their existing friendship nor Otane’s twice-yearly delivery of medicines to the Shrine convinced the monk to ignore the prohibition. She could not even leave a letter. She was told that the Newest Sister could have nothing to do with the World Below for twenty years. What sort of a life, Otane wonders, shall she have in that place? ‘Nobody knows,’ she mutters to herself, ‘and that is the problem.’

She turns over the few known facts about Mount Shiranui Shrine.

It is the spiritual seat of Lord Abbot Enomoto, daimyo of Kyôga Domain.

The Shrine’s goddess ensures the fertility of Kyôga’s streams and rice-fields.