David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

‘But no joy,’ sighs Umegae, ‘from the fourth one, which killed her.’

‘Let us not disturb the dead,’ the Abbess’s voice is sharp, ‘by digging up misfortunes without reason, Sister.’

Umegae’s maroon skin hides blushes, but she bows in consent and apology.

Other Sisters, Orito suspects, remember her predecessor hanging in her cell.

‘Well,’ says Blind Minori, ‘I, for one, would prefer to ask the Newest Sister what it was that helped her accept the House as her home.’

‘Time,’ Orito threads a needle, ‘and the patience of my Sisters.’

You’re lying, you’re lying, wheezes the kettle, even I hear you’re lying…

The sharper her need for Solace, Orito notices, the worse the House’s tricks.

‘I thank the Goddess every single day,’ Sister Hatsune is restringing her koto, ‘for bringing me to the House.’

‘I thank the Goddess,’ Kagerô is working on Hashihime’s eyebrows, ‘one hundred and eight times before breakfast.’

Abbess Izu says, ‘Sister Orito, the kettle sounds thirsty to me…’

When Orito kneels on the stone slab by the pool to dip the ladle into the ice-cold water, the slanted light creates, just for a moment, a mirror as perfect as a Dutch glass. Orito has not seen her face since she fled her old house in Nagasaki; what she sees shocks her. The face on the pool’s silvered skin is hers, but three or four years older. What about my eyes? They are dull and in retreat. Another trick of the House. She is not so sure. I saw eyes like those in the World Below.

The song of a thrush in the old pine sounds scattered and half forgotten.

What was it, Orito is sinking, I was trying to remember?

Sisters Hotaru and Asagao greet her from the Cloisters.

Orito waves back, notices the ladle still in her hand and remembers her errand. She looks into the water and recognises the eyes of a prostitute she treated in Nagasaki at a bordello owned by a pair of half-Chinese brothers. The girl had syphilis, scrofula, lung-fever and the Nine Sages alone knew what else, but what had destroyed her spirit was enslavement to opium.

‘But Aibagawa-san,’ the girl had implored, ‘I don’t need any other medicine…’

Pretending to accept the Contract of the House, Orito thinks…

The prostitute’s once-beautiful eyes stared out of dark pits.

… is halfway to accepting the Contract of the House.

Orito hears Master Suzaku’s carefree laughter at the gate.

Wanting and needing the drugs take you the rest of the way…

The gate-keeping Acolyte calls out, ‘Inner Gate opening, Sisters!’

… and when it’s been done to you once, why resist any more?

‘Unless you win your will back,’ says the girl in the pool, ‘you’ll turn into the others.’ I shall stop taking Suzaku’s drugs, Orito resolves, from tomorrow.

The stream leaves the pool through mossy grates.

My ‘tomorrow’, she realises, is proof that I must stop today.

‘How do we find our Newest Sister this evening?’ asks Master Suzaku.

Abbess Izu watches from one corner; Acolyte Chûai sits in another.

‘Master Suzaku finds me in excellent health, thank you.’

‘The sky this evening was a sky from the Pure Land, was it not, Newest Sister?’

‘In the World Below, sunsets were never this beautiful.’

Pleased, the man assesses the statement. ‘You were not aggrieved by the Goddess’s judgement this morning?’

I must hide my relief, thinks Orito, and hide that I am hiding it. ‘One learns to accept the Goddess’s judgement, does one not?’

‘You have come on a long journey in a short time, Newest Sister.’

‘Enlightenment can occur, I understand, in a single moment.’

‘Yes. Yes, it does.’ Suzaku looks at his assistant. ‘After many years of striving, Enlightenment transforms a man in a single heartbeat. Master Genmu is so pleased with your improved spirits that he referred to it in a letter to the Lord Abbot.’

He is watching me, Orito suspects, for evidence of annoyance.

‘I am unworthy,’ says the Newest Sister, ‘of Lord Enomoto’s attention.’

‘Be assured, our Lord Abbot takes a fatherly interest in all our Sisters.’

The word ‘fatherly’ evokes Orito’s father and recent wounds ache.

From the Long Room come the sounds and smells of supper being served.

‘We have no symptoms to report, then? No aches or bleedings?’

‘Truly, Master Suzaku, I cannot imagine being unwell in the House of Sisters.’

‘No constipation or diarrhoea? Haemorrhoids? Itches? Headaches?’

‘A dose of my… my daily medicine is all I would ask, if I may.’

‘With the greatest pleasure.’ Suzaku decants the muddy liquid into a thimble-sized cup and proffers it to Orito, who turns away and hides her mouth, as women of breeding do. Her body is aching with anticipation of the relief the Solace will deliver. But before she can change her mind, Orito tips the contents of the tiny cup into her well-padded sleeve where the dark blue hemp soaks it up.

‘It has a – a honeyed taste tonight,’ Orito pronounces. ‘Or do I imagine it?’

‘What’s good for the body,’ Suzaku looks at her mouth, ‘is good for the soul.’

Orito and Yayoi wash dishes whilst Sisters Kagerô and Hashihime are given words of encouragement by their Sisters – some shy and some, to judge from the laughter, not at all shy – before being led by Abbess Izu to the Altar Room to pray to the Goddess. A quarter-hour later, the Abbess leads them to their rooms where they await their Engifters. After the dishes are washed, Orito stays in the Long Room, not wanting to be alone with the thought that in one month’s time it may be her lying with an embroidered hood over her head for a master or acolyte. Her body is complaining about its denied dose of Solace. One minute she is as hot as soup, the next as cold as shaved ice. When Hatsune asks Orito to read the last New Year Letter from the First Wife’s first-born Gift, now a young woman of seventeen, Orito is glad of the distraction.

‘ “Dearest Mother,” ’ Orito peers at the feminine brushstrokes in the lamplight, ‘ “the berries are red along the verges and one may scarcely credit that another autumn is once more upon us.” ’

‘She has her mother’s elegance with words,’ murmurs Minori.

‘My Tarô is a blockhead,’ sighs Kiritsubo, ‘compared to Noriko-chan.’

In their New Year letters, Orito notices, the ‘Gifts’ regain their names.

‘But what hardworking brewer’s lad like Tarô,’ objects proud, modest Hatsune, ‘has time to notice autumn berries? I beg the Newest Sister to continue.’

‘ “Once again,” ’ reads Orito, ‘it is time to send a letter to my dear mother on distant Mount Shiranui. Last spring, when your First Month Letter was delivered to the White Crane Workshop, Ueda-san-” ’

‘Ueda-san is Noriko-chan’s Master,’ says Sadaie, ‘a famous tailor in Miyako.’

‘Is that so?’ Orito has been told ten times before. ‘ “Ueda-san gave me a half-holiday to celebrate its arrival. Before it slips my mind, Ueda-san and his wife send their sincerest compliments.” ’

‘How lucky,’ says Yayoi, ‘to have found such an honourable family.’

‘The Goddess always takes care of her Gifts,’ avows Hatsune.

‘ “Your news, Mother, brought me just as much pleasure as you kindly say my foolish scribblings bring you. How wonderful that you are blessed with another Gift. I shall pray that he finds as caring a family as the Uedas. Please give my thanks to Sister Asagao for nursing you during your chest illness, and to Master Suzaku for his daily care.” ’ Orito pauses to ask, ‘A chest illness?’