David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

‘Hay and oats for our horses: your stable-boy’s flown off.’

‘Straight away, Captain.’ The landlord knows he will have to accept a credit note that won’t be honoured without a bribe of five times its value. He gives orders to his wife, sons and daughters, and the soldiers are shown into the best room in the rear. Cautiously, the chatter resumes.

‘I don’t forget a face, Samurai-san.’ The bearded merchant has sidled over.

Avoid encounters, Shuzai warned him, avoid witnesses. ‘We never met.’

‘But to be sure we did – at Ryûgaji Temple on New Year’s Day.’

‘You are mistaken, old man. I never laid eyes on you. Now, please-’

‘But we was talking about ray-skins, Samurai-san, an’ scabbards…’

Uzaemon recognises Shuzai under the bedraggled beard and patched cloak.

‘Aye, now you remember! Deguchi, Samurai-san – Deguchi of Osaka. Now, I wonder, might I hope for the honour of joining you?’

The maid arrives with a bowl of rice and pickles.

‘I don’t forget a face.’ Shuzai’s grin is brown-toothed and his accent different.

The maid’s expression tells Uzaemon, What a tedious old fart.

‘No, miss,’ Shuzai drawls. ‘Names slip away, but a face, never…’

‘It’s lone travellers who stick out,’ Shuzai’s voice comes through the grille of his palanquin, ‘but a group of six, on the Isahaya Road? We’re as good as invisible. To any part-time informers at the Joyful Phoenix, a taciturn pilgrim wearing a sword is worth watching. But when you left, you were just a pitiful bastard having his ear drilled by a human mosquito. By making you bored, I made you boring.’

Mist blurs the farmhouses, erases the road ahead, hides the valley walls…

Deguchi’s porters and servants turned out to be Shuzai’s hired men: their weapons are hidden in the modified floor of the palanquin. Tanuki, Uzaemon memorises their false names, Kuma, Ishi, Hane, Shakke… They avoid speaking to Uzaemon, as befits their disguise as porters. The remaining six men will be at Mekura Gorge tomorrow.

‘By the way,’ asks Shuzai, ‘did you bring a certain dogwood scroll-tube?’

Say no now, fears Uzaemon, and he’ll think you don’t trust him.

‘Everything of value,’ he slaps his midriff, visible to Shuzai, ‘is here.’

‘Good. If the scroll had fallen into the wrong hands, Enomoto might be expecting us.’

Succeed, and Jiritsu’s testimony shan’t be needed. Uzaemon is uneasy. Fail, and it mustn’t be captured. How de Zoet could ever use this weapon is a question the interpreter cannot answer.

The river below is a drunk, charging boulders and barging banks.

‘It’s like the Shimantogawa Valley,’ says Shuzai, ‘in our home domain.’

‘The Shimantogawa,’ replies Uzaemon, ‘is a friendlier river, I think.’ He has been wondering about applying for a Court post back in his native Tosa. Upon adoption by the Ogawas of Nagasaki, all ties with his birth-family were severed – and they’d not be happy to see a third son, a ‘cold-rice eater’, come back with no fortune and a half-burnt wife – but he wonders whether his former Dutch teacher might be willing and able to help. Tosa is the first place, Uzaemon worries, Enomoto would look for us.

What is at stake is not just a fugitive nun but the Lord of Kyôga’s reputation.

His friend the Elder Counsellor Matsudaira Sadanobu would issue a warrant…

Uzaemon glimpses the enormity of the risk he is taking.

Would they bother with a warrant? Or just despatch an assassin?

Uzaemon looks away. To stop and think would be to abort the rescue.

Feet splash in puddles. The brown river surges. Pines drip.

Uzaemon asks Shuzai, ‘Are we to lodge at Isahaya tonight?’

‘No. Deguchi of Osaka chooses the best: the Harubayashi Inn at Kurozane.’

‘Not the same inn where Enomoto and his entourage stay?’

‘The very same: come now, what group of bandits planning to steal a nun from Mount Shiranui Shrine would dream of staying there?’

Isahaya’s principal temple is celebrating the festival of a local god, and the streets are busy enough with hawkers and floats and spectators for six strangers and a palanquin to slip through without notice. Street musicians vie for customers, petty thieves trawl the holiday crowds, and serving girls flirt in front of their inns to reel in customers. Shuzai stays inside his palanquin and orders his men to proceed directly to the gate into Kyôga Domain on the east side of the town. The guardhouse is overrun by a herd of pigs. One of the soldiers, dressed in the domain’s austere livery, gives Deguchi of Osaka’s pass a cursory glance, and asks why the merchant has no merchandise. ‘I sent it all by ship, sir,’ answers Shuzai, his Osaka accent grown almost impenetrable, ‘every last piece, sir. By the time every customs man in Western Honshu ’s had his nibble, I’d not be left with the wrinkles on my hands, sir.’ He is waved through, but another, more observant, guard notices that Uzaemon’s pass is issued via the Headman’s Office on Dejima. ‘You’re an interpreter for the foreigners, Ogawa-san?’

‘Of the Third Rank, yes, in the Interpreters’ Guild on Dejima.’

‘I just ask, sir, because of your pilgrim’s clothes.’

‘My father is gravely ill. I wish to pray for him at Kashima.’

‘Please,’ the guard kicks a squealing piglet, ‘step into the inspection room.’

Uzaemon stops himself looking at Shuzai. ‘Very well.’

‘I’ll be with you as soon as we’ve cleared these damn porkers away.’

The interpreter steps into the small room where a scribe is at work.

Uzaemon curses his luck. So much for slipping into Kyôga anonymously.

‘Please forgive this inconvenience.’ The guard appears and orders the scribe to wait outside. ‘I sense, Ogawa-san, you are a man of your word.’

‘I aspire,’ Uzaemon worries where this may lead, ‘to be one, yes.’

‘Then I -’ the guard kneels and bows low ‘- I aspire to your good offices, sir. My son’s skull is growing… wrong, lumpen. We – we daren’t take him outside, because people call him an oni demon. He’s clever, and a fine reader, so it’s not affected his wits, but… he has these headaches, these terrible headaches.’

Uzaemon is disarmed. ‘What do the doctors say?’

‘The first diagnosed Burning Brain, and prescribed three gallons of water a day to quench the fires. “Water Poisoning,” said the second, and bid us parch our son until his tongue turned black. The third doctor sold us golden acupuncture needles to press into his skull to expel the demon and the fourth sold us a magic frog, to be licked thirty-three times a day. Nothing worked. Soon he won’t be able to lift his head…’

Uzaemon recalls Dr Maeno’s recent lecture on Elephantiasis.

‘… so I’m asking all the pilgrims who pass through to pray at Kashima.’

‘Gladly, I’ll recite a healing sutra for him. What is your son’s name?’

‘Thank you. Lots of pilgrims say they will, but it’s only men of honour I can believe in. I’m Imada, and my son’s name is Uokatsu, written on this,’ he passes a folded slip of paper, ‘and a lock of his hair. There’ll be a fee, so-’

‘Keep your money. I will pray for Imada Uokatsu when I pray for my father.’

The Shogun’s policy of isolation preserves his power unchallenged…

‘May I suppose,’ the soldier is bowing again, ‘Ogawa-san also has a son?’

… but sentences Uokatsu and countless others to futile, ignorant deaths.

‘My wife and I,’ more details, Uzaemon regrets, ‘are not yet blessed.’

‘Lady Kannon will reward your kindness, sir. Now, I am delaying you…’