David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Bestowals are akin to bereavements, Orito thinks, but the mothers cannot even mourn.

The third boom of the Bell of Amanohashira brings the scene nearly to a close.

Suzaku empties a few drops from the conical bottle between Shinobu’s lips. ‘Sweet dreams,’ he whispers, ‘little Gift.’

Her brother Binyô, still in Yayoi’s arms, groans, burps and farts. His recital does not delight, as it should. The picture is flat and melancholy.

‘It is time, Sister Yayoi,’ states the Abbess. ‘I know you’ll be brave.’

Yayoi smells his milky neck one last time. ‘May I feed Binyô his Sleep?’

Suzaku nods and passes her the conical bottle.

Yayoi presses the pointed mouth against Binyô’s; his tiny tongue slurps.

‘What ingredients,’ Orito asks, ‘does Master Suzaku’s Sleep contain?’

‘One midwife.’ Suzaku smiles at Orito’s mouth. ‘One druggist.’

Shinobu is already asleep: Binyô’s eyelids are sinking, rising, sinking…

Orito cannot help guessing: Opiates? Arisaema? Aconite?

‘Here is something for brave Sister Yayoi.’ Suzaku decants a muddy liquid into a thimble-sized stone cup. ‘I call it “Fortitude”: it helped at your last Bestowal.’ He holds it to Yayoi’s lips, and Orito resists the urge to slap the glass away. As the liquid drains down Yayoi’s throat, Suzaku lifts her son off.

The dispossessed mother mutters, ‘But…’ and stares, cloudily, at the druggist.

Orito catches her friend’s drooping head. She lays the numbed mother down.

Abbess Izu and Master Suzaku each carry out a stolen child.

Dawn on the Twenty-first Day of the First Month

Uzaemon kneels by his father’s bed. ‘You look a little… brighter today, Father.’

‘Leave those flowery fibs to the women: to lie is their nature.’

‘Truly, Father, when I came in, the colour in your face-’

‘My face has less colour than Marinus’s skeleton in the Dutch hospital.’

Saiji, his father’s stick-limbed servant, tries to coax the fire back to life.

‘So, you’re making a pilgrimage to Kashima, to pray for your ailing father, in the depths of winter, alone, without a servant – if “serve” is what the oafs sponging off the Ogawa storehouse do. How impressed Nagasaki shall be with your piety.’

How scandalised Nagasaki shall be, thinks Uzaemon, if the truth is ever known.

A hard brush is scrubbing the stones of the entrance hall.

‘I don’t make this pilgrimage to earn acclaim, Father.’

‘True scholars, you once informed me, disdain “magic and superstitions”.’

‘These days, Father, I prefer to keep an open mind.’

‘Oh? So I am now-’ He is interrupted by a scraping cough, and Uzaemon thinks of a fish drowning on a plank, and wonders if he should sit his father upright. That would require touching him, which a father and son of their rank cannot do. The servant Saiji steps over to help, but the coughing fit passes and Ogawa the Elder bats him away. ‘So I am now one of your “empirical tests”? Do you intend to lecture the Academy on the efficacy of the Kashima Cure?’

‘When Interpreter Nishi the Elder was ill, his son made a pilgrimage to Kashima and fasted for three days: by his return, his father had not only made a miraculous recovery, but walked all the way to Magome to meet him.’

‘Then choked on a fish-bone at his celebration banquet.’

‘I shall ask you to exercise caution when eating fish in the year ahead.’

The reeds of flames in the brazier fatten and spit.

‘Don’t offer the gods years off your own life just to preserve mine…’

Uzaemon wonders, A thorny tenderness? ‘It shan’t come to that, Father.’

‘Unless, unless, the priest swears I’ll have my vigour restored. One’s ribs shouldn’t be prison bars. Better to be with my ancestors and Hisanobu in the Pure Land than be trapped here with fawners, females and fools.’ Ogawa Mimasaku looks at the butsudan alcove where his birth-son is commemorated with a funeral tablet and a sprig of pine. ‘To those with a head for commerce, Dejima is a private mint, even with the Dutch trade as bad as it is. But to those dazzled by’ – Mimasaku uses the Dutch word ‘Enlightenment’ – ‘the opportunities are wasted. No, it shall be the Iwase clan who dominates the Guild. They already have five grandsons.’

Thank you, Uzaemon thinks, for helping me turn my back on you. ‘If I disappoint you, Father, I’m sorry.’

‘How gleefully,’ the old man’s eyes close, ‘life shreds our well-crafted plans.’

‘It’s the very worst time of year, husband.’ Okinu kneels at the edge of the raised hallway. ‘What with mudslides and snow and thunder and ice…’

‘Spring,’ Uzaemon sits down to bind his feet, ‘will be too late for Father, wife.’

‘Bandits are hungrier in winter, and hunger makes them bolder.’

‘I’ll be on the main Saga highway. I have my sword and Kashima is only two days away. It’s not Hokurikurô, or Kii, or anywhere wild and lawless.’

Okinu looks around like a nervous doe. Uzaemon cannot recall when his wife last smiled. You deserve a better man, he thinks, and wishes he could say so. His hand presses his oilcloth pack; it contains two purses of money, some bills of exchange and the sixteen love-letters Aibagawa Orito sent him during their courtship. Okinu is whispering, ‘Your mother bullies me terribly when you’re away.’

I am her son, Uzaemon groans, your husband and not a mediator.

Utako, his mother’s maid and spy, approaches, an umbrella in hand.

‘Promise me,’ Okinu attempts to conceal her true concerns, ‘not to risk crossing Omura Bay in bad weather, husband.’

Utako bows to them both; she passes into the front courtyard.

‘So you’ll be back,’ Okinu asks, ‘within five days?’

Poor, poor creature, Uzaemon thinks, whose only ally is me.

‘Six days?’ Okinu presses him for a reply. ‘No more than seven?’

If I could end your misery, he thinks, by divorcing you now, I would…

‘Please, husband, no longer than eight days. She’s so… so…’

… but it would bring unwanted attention on the Ogawas. ‘I don’t know how long the sutras for Father are going to take.’

‘Would you bring back an amulet from Kashima for brides who want-’

‘Hnn.’ Uzaemon finishes binding his feet. ‘Goodbye, then, Okinu.’

If guilt were copper coins, he thinks, I could buy Dejima.

Crossing the small courtyard denuded by winter, Uzaemon inspects the sky: it is a day of rain that never quite reaches the ground. Ahead, waiting by the front gate, Uzaemon’s mother is standing under an umbrella held by Utako. ‘Yohei can still be ready to join you in a matter of minutes.’

‘As I said, Mother,’ says Uzaemon, ‘this pilgrimage is not a pleasure trip.’

‘People may wonder whether the Ogawas can no longer afford servants.’

‘I rely on you to tell people why your stubborn son went on his pilgrimage alone.’

‘Who, exactly, is going to be scrubbing your loincloths and socks?’

A raid on Enomoto’s mountain stronghold, Uzaemon thinks, and it is ‘loincloths and socks’…

‘You shan’t think the matter so amusing after eight or nine days.’

‘I’ll be sleeping at inns and guest dormitories in temples, not in ditches.’

‘An Ogawa mustn’t joke, not even joke, about living like a vagabond.’

‘Why don’t you go inside, Mother? You’ll catch a dreadful cold.’

‘Because it’s a well-bred woman’s duty to see her sons or husband off from the gate, however cosy it may be indoors.’ She glares at the main house. ‘One can only wonder what my green-pepper head of a daughter-in-law was whimpering about.’