David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Uzaemon stores the name-paper in his inrô pouch. ‘I wish I could do more.’

The Twenty-second Night of the First Month

The swaying flames are moonflower blue and silent. Enomoto is seated behind a sunken hearth at the far end of a thin room. The roof is vaulted and ill-defined. He knows Orito is there but does not yet look up. Nearby, the two motionless boy-acolytes stare at a Go board: but for the twitching pulses in their necks, they could be cast from bronze. ‘You look like an assassin, hovering there…’ Enomoto’s sinewy voice reaches her. ‘Approach, Sister Aibagawa.’

Her feet obey. Orito sits across the watery fire from the Lord of Kyôga. He is examining the craftsmanship of what may be a bladeless sword-hilt. In the strange firelight, Enomoto looks a full decade younger than she remembers.

If I were an assassin, she thinks, you would already be dead.

‘What would happen to your Sisters without my protection, and the House?’

It is faces he reads, thinks Orito, not minds. ‘The House of Sisters is a gaol.’

‘Your Sisters would die, miserably and early, in brothels and freak-shows.’

‘How is that to justify their captivity here as monks’ playthings?’

Click: an aspirant has placed a black counter on the board.

‘Dr Aibagawa, your honourable father, respected facts, not opinions twisted out of shape.’

The sword-hilt in Enomoto’s hand is, Orito sees, a pistol.

‘The Sisters are not “playthings”. They dedicate twenty years to the Goddess, and are provided for after their Descents. Many spiritual orders make similar pacts with their adherents, but demand lifelong service.’

‘What “spiritual order” harvests infants from its nuns like your private sect does?’

Darkness uncoils and slides around the edges of Orito’s vision.

‘The fertility of the World Below is fed by a river. Shiranui is its spring.’

Orito sifts his tone and words for cynicism but finds faith. ‘How can an academician – a translator of Isaac Newton – speak like a superstitious peasant?’

‘Enlightenment can blind one, Orito. Apply all the empirical methodology you desire to time, gravity, life: their genesis and purposes are, at root, unknowable. It is not superstition but Reason that concludes the realm of knowledge is finite and that the brain and the soul are discrete entities.’

Click: an acolyte has placed a white counter on the board.

‘You never treated the Shirandô Academy to this insight, as I recall.’

‘We are a spiritual order of limited numbers. The Way of Shiranui is no more the Way of the Scholar than it is the Way of the Common Herd.’

‘What noble words for a squalid truth. You coop women up for twenty years, impregnate them, snatch the infants from their breasts – and forge letters to their mothers from all the dead ones as they grow up!’

‘Just three sadly deceased Gifts have their New Year Letters written: three out of thirty-six – or thirty-eight, including Sister Yayoi’s twins. All the others are genuine. Abbess Izu believes this fiction is kinder to the Sisters, and experience bears her out.’

‘Do the Sisters thank you for this kindness when they discover that the son or daughter they wish to join after Descent died eighteen years ago?’

‘This misfortune has never occurred during my Abbotship.’

‘Sister Hatsune is intending to join her dead daughter Noriko.’

‘Her Descent is two years away. If her mind is unchanged, I will explain.’

The Bell of Amanohashira rings for the Hour of the Dog.

‘It saddens me,’ Enomoto leans into the fire, ‘that you view us as gaolers. Perhaps it is a consequence of your relative rank. One birth every two years is a lighter levy than most wives in the World Below must endure. To most of your Sisters, the masters delivered them from servitude into a Pure Land on Earth.’

‘ Mount Shiranui Shrine is far from my imagining of the Pure Land.’

‘The daughter of Aibagawa Seian is a rare woman and a singular case.’

‘I’d prefer not to hear Father’s name on your lips.’

‘Aibagawa Seian was my trusted friend before he was your father.’

‘A friendship you repay by stealing his orphaned daughter?’

‘I brought you home, Sister Aibagawa.’

‘I had a home, in Nagasaki.’

‘But Shiranui was your home, even before you heard its name. Learning of your vocation in midwifery, I knew. Watching you at the Shirandô Academy, I knew. Years ago, recognising the Goddess’s mark on your face, I-’

‘My face was burnt by a pan of hot oil. It was an accident!’

Enomoto smiles like an adoring father. ‘The Goddess summoned you. She revealed her true self to you, did she not?’

Orito has spoken to no one, not even Yayoi, about the spherical cave and its strange giantess.

Click: an acolyte places a black counter on the board.

There was a secret seal on the door, Logic assures her, entering the tunnel.

Wings beat in the spaces overhead, but when Orito looks up, she sees nothing.

‘When you ran away,’ Enomoto is saying, ‘the Goddess called you back…’

Once I believe this lunacy, Orito thinks, I am truly Shiranui’s prisoner.

‘… and your soul obeyed, because your soul knows what your mind is too knowledgable to understand.’

‘I came back because Yayoi would have died if I hadn’t.’

‘You were an instrument of the Goddess’s compassion. You shall be rewarded.’

Her dread of Engiftment opens its ugly mouth. ‘I… can’t have done to me what is done to the others. I can’t.’ Orito is ashamed of these words, and ashamed of her shame. Spare me what the others endure, the words mean, and Orito begins to tremble. Burn! she urges herself. Be angry!

Click: an acolyte has placed a white counter on the board.

Enomoto’s voice is a caress. ‘All of us, the Goddess most of all, knows what you sacrificed to be here. Look at me with your wise eyes, Orito. We wish to offer you a proposal. No doubt a doctor’s daughter like yourself has noticed Housekeeper Satsuki’s poor health. It is, sadly, a cancer of the womb. She has asked to die on her home island. My men shall take her there in a few days. Her post as housekeeper is yours, if you want it. The Goddess blesses the House with a Gift every five or six weeks: your twenty years at the Shrine would be spent as a practising midwife, helping your Sisters and deepening your knowledge. Such a valuable asset to my Shrine would never be Engifted. In addition, I shall procure books – any books – you wish – so you can follow in your father’s scholarly footsteps. After your Descent, I shall purchase you a house in Nagasaki, or anywhere else, and pay you a stipend for the rest of your life.’

For four months, Orito realises, the House has bludgeoned me with fear…

‘You’d be less a Sister of Shiranui Shrine than a Sister of Life.’

… so that this proposal seems not a tether, or a noose, but a rope lowered to a drowning woman.

Four knocks at the door send ripples across the room.

Enomoto glances past Orito and nods once. ‘Ah, a long-expected friend has arrived to return a stolen item. I must go and present him with a token of gratitude.’ Midnight-blue silk flows upwards as Enomoto stands. ‘Meanwhile, Sister, consider our offer.’

The Twenty-second Morning of the First Month