David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Yayoi looks at her friend in a wholly new way.

‘His scream woke the house up. His mother came running and ordered the servants away. I told her what her stepson had tried to do. He told her I had begged him to my bed. She slapped the head of the Aibagawas of Nagasaki once for being a liar, twice for being stupid, and ten times for almost wasting the family’s most saleable property. “Abbot Enomoto,” she told him, “will want your stepsister intact when she arrives at his Nunnery of Freaks.” That was how I learnt why Enomoto’s bailiff had been visiting. Four days later I found myself here.’

The storm pelts the roofs and the fire growls.

Orito remembers how all her fathers’ friends refused to shelter her on the night she ran away from her own house.

She remembers hiding all night in the House of Wistaria, listening.

She remembers her painful decision to accept de Zoet’s proposal.

She remembers her final shaming and capture at Dejima’s Land-Gate.

‘The monks aren’t like your stepbrother,’ Yayoi is saying. ‘They’re gentle.’

‘So gentle that when I say, “No,” they stop, and leave my room?’

‘The Goddess chooses the Engifters, just as she chooses us Sisters.’

To implant belief, Orito thinks, is to dominate the believers.

‘At my first Engiftment,’ Yayoi confesses, ‘I imagined a boy I once loved.’

So the hoods, Orito realises, are to hide the men’s faces, not ours.

‘Might you have known a man,’ Yayoi hesitates, ‘who you could…?’

Ogawa Uzaemon, the midwife thinks, is no longer my concern.

Orito banishes all thought of Jacob de Zoet, and recalls Jacob de Zoet.

‘Oh,’ says Yayoi, ‘I’m as nosy as Hashihime tonight. Pay me no mind.’

But the Newest Sister slips from the warmth of their blankets, goes to the chest given her by the Abbess and takes out a bamboo-and-paper fan. Yayoi sits up, curious. Orito lights a candle and opens the fan.

Yayoi peers at the details. ‘He was an artist? Or a scholar?’

‘He read books, but he was just a clerk in an ordinary warehouse.’

‘He loved you.’ Yayoi touches the ribs of the fan. ‘He loved you.’

‘He was a stranger from another… domain. He scarcely knew me.’

Yayoi looks at Orito pityingly, and sighs. ‘So?’

The sleeper knows she is dreaming because the moon-grey cat pronounces, ‘Someone carried this fish all the way up this mountain.’ The cat takes the pilchard, jumps to the ground and vanishes beneath the walkway. The dreamer lowers herself on to the Courtyard, but the cat has gone. She sees a narrow rectangular hole in the foundations of the House…

… Its breath is warm. She hears children and summer’s insects.

A voice up on the walkway asks, ‘Has the Newest Sister lost anything?’

The moon-grey cat licks its paws and speaks in her father’s voice.

‘I know you’re a messenger,’ says the dreamer, ‘but what is your message?’

The cat looks at her pityingly, and sighs. ‘I left through this hole, beneath us…’

The dark universe is packed into one small box that slowly opens.

‘… and reappeared at the House gate a minute later. What does that mean?’

The sleeper wakes up in frosted darkness. Yayoi is here, fast asleep.

Orito gropes, grapples, fumbles and understands. A conduit… or a tunnel.

New Year’s Day, the Twelfth Year of the era of Kansei

The holiday crowds throng and jostle. Boys are selling warblers in cages dangling from a pine tree. Over her smoking griddle a palsy-handed grandmother croaks, ‘Squiiiiiiiiid on a stick-oh, squiiiiiiiiid on a stick-oh, who will buy my squiiiiiiiiid on a stick-oooh!’ Inside his palanquin Uzaemon hears Kiyoshichi shout, ‘Make way, make way!’ less in hope of clearing a path than to insure himself against being scolded by Ogawa the Elder for laziness. ‘Pictures to astound! Drawings to amaze!’ hollers a seller of engravings. The man’s face appears in the grille of Uzaemon’s palanquin, and he holds up a pornographic woodblock print of a naked goblin, who bears an undeniable likeness to Melchior van Cleef. The goblin possesses a monstrous phallus as big as his body. ‘Might I proffer for Sir’s delectation a sample of “Dejima Nights”?’ Uzaemon growls, ‘No!’ and the man withdraws, bellowing, ‘See Kawahara’s Hundred and Eight Wonders of the Empire without leaving your house!’ A storyteller points to his storyboard about the Siege of Shimabara: ‘Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the Christian Amakusa Shirô, bent on selling our souls to the King of Rome!’ The entertainer plays his audience well: there are boos and yells of abuse. ‘And so the Great Shogun expelled the foreign devils, and so the yearly Rite of fumi-e continues to the present day, to weed out these heretics feeding off our udders!’ A disease-gnawed girl, breastfeeding a baby so deformed that Uzaemon mistakes it for a shaven puppy, implores, ‘Mercy and a coin, sir, mercy and a coin…’ He slides open the grille just as the palanquin lurches forward a dozen steps, and Uzaemon is left holding a one mon piece against all the laughing, smoking, joking passers-by. Their joy is insufferable. I am like a dead spirit at O-bon, Uzaemon thinks, forced to watch the carefree and the living gorge themselves on Life. His palanquin tips, and he must grip the lacquered handle as he slides backwards. Near the top of the temple steps a handful of girls on the cusp of womanhood whip their spinning tops. To know the secrets of Mount Shiranui, he thinks, is to be banished from this world.

A lumbering ox obscures Uzaemon’s view of the girls.

The Creeds of Enomoto’s Order shine darkness on all things.

When the ox has passed, the girls are gone.

The palanquins are set down in the Courtyard of the Jade Peony, an area reserved for samurai families. Uzaemon climbs out of his box, and slides his swords into his sash. His wife stands behind his mother, whilst his father attacks Kiyoshichi like the snapping turtle he has come, in recent weeks, to resemble: ‘Why did you allow us to be buried alive in that -’ he jabs his stick towards the thronged steps ‘- in that human mud?’

‘My lapse,’ Kiyoshichi bows low, ‘was unforgivable, Master.’

‘Yet this old fool,’ growls Ogawa the Elder, ‘is to forgive you anyhow?’

Uzaemon tries to intervene. ‘With respect, Father, I’m sure-’

‘ “With respect” is what scoundrels say when they mean the opposite!’

‘With sincere respect, Father, Kiyoshichi could not make the crowd vanish.’

‘So sons now side with menservants against their fathers?’

Kannon, Uzaemon implores, grant me patience. ‘Father, I’m not siding with-’

‘Well, doubtless you find this silly old fool very behind the times.’

I am not your son. The unexpected thought strikes Uzaemon.

‘People will start wondering,’ Uzaemon’s mother declares to the backs of her powdered hands, ‘whether the Ogawas are having doubts about the fumi-e.’

Uzaemon turns to Ogawa Mimasaku. ‘Then let us enter… yes?’

‘Shouldn’t you consult the servants first?’ Ogawa Mimasaku walks towards the inner gates. He rose from his sickbed a few days ago only partially recovered, but to be absent from the fumi-e ritual is tantamount to announcing one’s own death. He slaps away Saiji’s offers of help. ‘My stick is more loyal.’