David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Utako the maid stares at the droplets on the camellia buds.

‘Okinu was wishing me a safe journey, as you are.’

‘Well, plainly they do things differently in Shimonoseki.’

‘She is a long way from home; and it has been a difficult year.’

‘I married a long way from home, and if you’re implying I’m one of those “difficulties”, I can assure you the girl has had it easy! My mother-in-law was a witch from Hell – from Hell, was she not, Utako?’

Utako half nods, half bows and half whispers, ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘No one was calling you a “difficulty”.’ Uzaemon puts his hand on the latch.

‘Okinu,’ his mother puts her hand on the latch, ‘is a disappointment…’

‘Mother, for my sake, would you please be kind to her, as-’

‘… a disappointment to all of us. I never approved of the girl, did I, Utako?’

Utako half nods, half bows and half whispers, ‘No, ma’am.’

‘But you and your father were so set on her: so how could I voice my doubts?’

This rewriting of history, thinks Uzaemon, is breathtaking, even for you.

‘But a pilgrimage,’ she says, ‘is a fine chance to reconsider one’s missteps.’

A moon-grey cat, padding along the wall, catches Uzaemon’s eye.

‘Marriage, you see, is a transaction… Is something wrong?’

The moon-grey cat vanishes into the mist as if it never existed.

‘Marriage, you were saying, mother, is a transaction.’

‘A transaction, yes; and if one buys an item from a merchant, and one finds that item to be broken, then the merchant must apologise, refund the money and pray that the matter ends there. Now: I produced three boys for the Ogawa family, two girls, and although all but dear Hisanobu died in childhood, nobody could accuse me of being a broken item. I don’t blame Okinu for her weak womb – some might, but I am fair-minded – yet the fact remains, we were sold bad merchandise. Who would blame us for returning it? Many would blame us – the ancestors of the Ogawa clan – were we not to send her home.’

Uzaemon sways away from his mother’s magnified face.

A kite swoops low through the drizzle. Uzaemon hears its feathers. ‘Many women have more than two miscarriages.’

‘ “It’s a reckless farmer who wastes good seed on barren soil.” ’

Uzaemon raises the latch, with her hand still on it, and swings open the door.

‘I say all this,’ she smiles, ‘not from malice, but from duty…’

Here it comes, Uzaemon thinks, the story of my adoption.

‘… as it was I who advised your father to adopt you as his heir, instead of a richer or a nobler disciple. This is why I feel a special responsibility in this matter, to ensure the Ogawa line.’

Raindrops find the nape of Uzaemon’s neck and trickle between his shoulder blades. ‘Goodbye.’

Half Uzaemon’s lifetime ago, in his thirteenth year, he made the two-week journey from Shikoku to Nagasaki with his first master, Kanamaru Motoji, the Chief Dutch Scholar to the Court of the Lord of Tosa. After his adoption by Ogawa Mimasaku in his fifteenth year, he visited scholars as far away as Kumamoto with his new father, but since his appointment as Interpreter of the Third Rank four years ago, Uzaemon has rarely left Nagasaki. His boyhood journeys were bright with promise, but this morning the interpreter – if ‘interpreter’, Uzaemon concedes, is what I still am – is hounded by darker emotions. Hissing geese flee their cursing gooseherd; a shivering beggar shits at the loud river’s edge; and mist and smoke obscure an assassin or spy beneath every domed hat and behind every palanquin’s grille. The road is busy enough to hide informers, Uzaemon regrets, but not busy enough to hide me. He passes the bridges of the Nakashima River, whose names he recites when he cannot sleep: the proud Tokiwabashi Bridge; the Fukurobashi, by the cloth merchants’ warehouses; the Meganebashi, whose reflected double arches form round spectacles on bright days; the slim-hipped Uoichibashi; the matter-of-fact Higashishinbashi; upstream, past the execution grounds, Imoharabashi Bridge; the Furumachibashi, as old and frail-looking as its name; the lurching Amigasabashi; and, last and highest, the Ôidebashi. Uzaemon stops by a row of steps disappearing into the mist, and remembers the spring day when he first arrived in Nagasaki.

A voice as small as a mouse’s says, ‘’Scuse, o-junrei-sama…’

Uzaemon needs a moment to realise that the ‘Pilgrim’ is him. He turns…

… and a wren of a boy with a gash for an eye is opening his cupped palms.

A voice warns Uzaemon, He’s begging for coins, and the pilgrim walks away.

And you, a voice admonishes him, are begging for good luck.

So he turns and returns but the gash-eyed boy is nowhere to be seen.

I am Adam Smith’s translator, he tells himself. I don’t believe in omens.

After a few minutes he reaches the Magome ward-gate, where he lowers his hood, but a guard recognises him as a samurai and waves him through with a bow.

Lean and rancid artisans’ dwellings cluster along the road.

Rented looms in unlit rooms tack-ratta-clack-ah, tack-ratta-clack-ah…

Rangy dogs and hungry children watch him pass, incuriously.

Mud splashes from the wheels of a fodder wagon sliding downhill; a farmer and his son pull it from behind, to help the ox in front. Uzaemon stands aside under a ginkgo tree, and looks down to the harbour, but Dejima is lost in the thickening fog. I am between two worlds. He is leaving behind the politics of the Interpreters’ Guild, the contempt of the inspectors and most of the Dutch, the deceits and falsifications. Ahead is an uncertain life with a woman who may not accept me, in a place not yet known. In the ginkgo’s knotted heart a brood of oily crows fling insults. The wagon passes by and the farmer bows as deeply as he can without losing his balance. The false pilgrim adjusts his shin-bindings, secures his shoes and resumes his journey. He musn’t miss his rendezvous with Shuzai.

The Joyful Phoenix Inn stands by a bend in the road, shy of the eight-mile stone from Nagasaki, between a shallow ford and a stone-pit. Uzaemon enters, looking for Shuzai but seeing only the usual citizens of the road sheltering from the cold drizzle: palanquin-carriers and porters, mule-drivers, mendicants, a trio of prostitutes, a man with a fortune-telling monkey, and a bundled-up bearded merchant sitting near, but not with, his gang of servants. The place smells of damp people, steaming rice and pig lard, but it is warmer and drier than outdoors. Uzaemon orders a bowl of walnut dumplings and enters the raised room, worrying about Shuzai and his five hired swords. He is not anxious about the large sum he has given to his friend to pay for the mercenaries: were Shuzai less honest than Uzaemon knows he is, the interpreter would have been arrested days ago. Rather, it is the possibility that Shuzai’s sharp-eyed creditors sniffed out his plans to flee Nagasaki and threw a net around their debtor.

Someone knocks on the post: it is one of the landlord’s girls with his meal.

He asks her, ‘Is it already the Hour of the Horse?’

‘Well past noon now, Samurai-sama, I do believe it is, yes…’

Five Shogunal soldiers enter and the chatter dies away.

The soldiers look around the roomful of evasive faces.

The captain’s eye meets Uzaemon’s: Uzaemon looks down. Don’t look guilty, he thinks. I am a pilgrim bound for Kashima.

‘Landlord?’ calls out one guard. ‘Where’s the landlord of this shit-hole?’

‘Gentlemen!’ The landlord emerges from the kitchen and kneels on the floor. ‘What an indescribable honour for the Joyful Phoenix.’