David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Emerging from the rear privy, Uzaemon looks across the vegetable patch and sees a figure watching him from the bamboo grove. He squints through the half-light. Otane the herbalist? She has the same black hood and mountain clothes. She could be. She has the same bent back. Yes. Uzaemon raises a cautious hand, but the figure turns away, with a slow, sad shake of her grey head.

‘No’, he mustn’t acknowledge her? Or ‘No’, the rescue is doomed?

The interpreter puts on a pair of straw sandals left on the veranda and crosses the ruckled vegetable patch to the bamboo. A path of black mud and white frost winds through the grove.

Back at the inn, the rooster crows in the forecourt.

Shuzai and the others, he thinks, will be wondering where I am.

Straw shoes offer little protection for a clerical samurai’s soft feet.

Sitting on a snapped cane at eye-level is a waxwing: its mouth opens…

… its throat vibrates, spatters out a tuneless tune, and it flies away…

In short arcs it hops, from perch to perch, through the thick grove.

Uzaemon follows through slanted bars of light dark and dark dark…

… through the pressing confinement; thin panes of ice shatter underfoot.

Up ahead, the waxwing beckons him onwards, or over to one side?

Or are two waxwings, Uzaemon wonders, toying with one human being?

‘Is anyone there?’ He dares not raise his voice. ‘Otane-sama?’

The leaves shuffle like paper. The path ends at a noisy river, brown and thick like Dutchmen’s tea.

The far bank is a wall of gouged rock…

… rising up beneath splayed boughs and knuckled roots.

A toe of Mount Shiranui, Uzaemon thinks. At its head, Orito is waking.

Upriver, or downriver, a man is shouting in a hunchbacked dialect.

But the path back to the rear garden of the Harubayashi Inn delivers Uzaemon into a hidden clearing. Here, on a bed of dark pebbles, several dozen head-sized sea-smoothed rocks are enclosed within a knee-high stone wall. There is no shrine, no torî gate, no straw ropes hung with paper twists, so it takes the interpreter a little time to recognise that he is in a cemetery. Hugging himself against the cold, he steps over the wall to examine the headstones. The pebbles grind and give beneath his feet.

Numbers, not names, are engraved on the rocks: up to eighty-one.

Invasive bamboo is kept back, and lichen is cleaned from the stones.

Uzaemon wonders if the woman he mistook for Otane is a caretaker.

Perhaps she took fright, he thinks, at a samurai charging her way…

But what Buddhist sect spurns even desultory death-names on its headstones? Without a death-name for Lord Enma’s Register of the Dead, as every child knows, a soul is turned away from the Next World’s Gates. Their ghosts drift for all eternity. Uzaemon speculates that the buried are miscarried children, criminals or suicides, but is not quite convinced. Even members of the untouchable caste are buried with some sort of name.

There is no birdsong, he notices, in winter’s cage.

‘More than likely, sir,’ the landlord tells Uzaemon back at the inn, ‘it was a certain charcoal-burner’s girl you saw. She lives with her father ’n’ brother in a tumbledown cottage an’ a million starlings in the thatch, up past Twelve Fields. She drifts this-a-way ’n’ that-a-way up ’n’ down the river, sir. Weak-headed an’ stumble-footed, she is, an’ she’s been with child twice or three times, but they never take root ’cause the daddy was her daddy, or else her brother, an’ she’ll die in that tumbledown cottage alone, sir, for what family’d want such impureness dilutin’ its blood?’

‘But it was an old woman I saw, not a girl.’

‘Kyôga mares are fatter-hipped than the princesses o’ Nagasaki, sir: a local girl o’ thirteen, fourteen’d pass for an old mare, specially in half-light…’

Uzaemon is dubious. ‘Then what about this secret graveyard?’

‘Oh, there’s no secret, sir: in the hostellers’ trade it’s what we call our “Long Stayers’ Quarters”. There’s many a traveller who falls sick on the road, sir, specially on a pilgrims’ route, an’ sleep their last in inns, an’ it costs us landlords a handsome ransom, an’ “ransom” is the word: we can’t very well dump the body by the roadside. What if a relative comes along? What if the ghost scares off business? But a proper funeral needs money, same as everythin’ else in this world, sir, what with priests for chantin’ an’ a stonecutter for a nice tomb an’ a plot of earth in the temple…’ The landlord shakes his head. ‘So: an ancestor of mine cleared the cemetery in the copse for the benefit, sir, of guests who pass away at the Harubayashi. We keep a proper register of the guests lyin’ there, an’ number the stones proper too, an’ write down the guests’ names if they said one, an’ if it’s a man or woman, an’ guess their age, an’ whatnot. So if any relatives do come lookin’, we can maybe help.’

Shuzai asks, ‘Are your dead guests often claimed by their relatives?’

‘Not once in my time, sir, but we do it anyway. My wife washes the stones every O-bon.’

Uzaemon asks, ‘When was the last body interred there?’

The innkeeper purses his lips. ‘Fewer single travellers pass through Kyôga, sir, now the Omura Road’s so much improved… Last one was three years ago: a printer gentleman, who went to bed fit as a goat but come mornin’ he was cold as stone. Makes you think, sir, doesn’t it?’

Uzaemon is unsettled by the innkeeper’s tone. ‘What does it make you think?’

‘It’s not just the aged an’ frail Death bundles into his Black Palanquin…’

The Kyôga Road follows the Ariake Sea ’s muddy shore and inland through a wood, where one of the hired men, Hane, falls behind and another, Ishi, runs on ahead. ‘A precaution,’ explains Shuzai, from inside his palanquin, ‘to make sure we aren’t being followed from Kurozane or expected up ahead.’ Several upward shrugs of the road later, they cross the narrow Mekura River and take a leaf-strewn track turning up towards the gorge’s mouth. By a moss-blotched torî gate, a noticeboard turns away casual visitors. Here the palanquin is lowered, the weapons removed from its false floor, and before Uzaemon’s eyes, Deguchi of Osaka and his long-suffering servants turn into mercenaries. Shuzai emits a sharp whistle. Uzaemon hears nothing – unless a twig cracking is something – but the men hear a signal that all is well. They run with the empty palanquin, climbing shallow curves. The interpreter is soon out of breath. A waterfall’s clatter and boom grows louder and nearer, and around a recent rock-fall the men arrive at the lower mouth of Mekura Gorge: a stepped cutting in a low escarpment as high as eight or nine men, cloaked and choked by long-tongued ferns and throttling creepers. Down this drop the cold river plunges. The pool below churns and boils.

Uzaemon becomes a prisoner of the ever-plunging waterfall…

She drinks from this river, he thinks, where it is a mountain stream.

… until a thrush whistles in a flank of wild camellia. Shuzai whistles back. The leaves part and five men emerge. They are dressed in commoners’ clothes, but their faces have the same military hardness as the other masterless samurai. ‘Let’s get this crate on poles -’ Shuzai indicates his battered palanquin ‘- out of sight.’

Hidden by the wall of camellia in a hollow where the palanquin is covered with branches and leaves, Shuzai introduces the new men by false names: Tsuru, the moon-faced leader, Yagi, Kenka, Muguchi and Bara; Uzaemon, still dressed as a pilgrim, is named ‘Junrei’. The new men show him a distant respect, but they look to Shuzai as the leader of the expedition. Whether the mercenaries view Uzaemon as a besotted fool or an honourable man – and maybe, Uzaemon considers, one may be both – they give no sign. The samurai named Tanuki gives a brief account of their journey from Saga down to Kurozane and the interpreter thinks of the small steps that gathered this raiding party: Otane the herbalist’s accurate guess at the contents of his heart; Jiritsu the acolyte’s revulsion at the Order’s Creeds; Enomoto’s nefariousness; and more steps; and more twists; some known, and others not; and Uzaemon marvels at the weaverless loom of fortune.