The Last Concubine (3 page)

The ships had disgorged a delegation of barbarians. Jiroemon had not seen any himself but he had been told they had huge noses and coarse pallid skin covered in red fur and stank of the dead animals they ate. They had not only placed their impure feet on Japan’s sacred soil but insisted that they intended to stay and set up trading stations.

The travellers who passed through Jiroemon’s inn had made it frighteningly clear that the country was in crisis. Only the previous spring, rumours had come winging down the valley that Lord Ii Naosuké, the Great Counsellor and iron-handed ruler of the country, had been cut down right outside the gates of Edo Castle, the shogun’s residence. Some of the assassins were samurai from Mito, the domain of one of the most powerful and high-ranking princes in the country, a blood relation of the shogun. Others were from the wild southern domain of Satsuma, one of the shogun’s traditional enemies. Life for the villagers had always been hard, cruel and unfair; but at least they knew where they stood. Now they could not be sure of anything. They dreaded what might happen next. Old men muttered darkly that the world was mired in the Age of Mappo, the last age described in Buddhist scriptures. Perhaps the end was approaching.

III

The first year of Bunkyu – the year that would go down in history books as 1861 – was unusually cold. It was nearly barley-planting
time but icicles still hung from the eaves, and only the most determined travellers came tramping along the snow-encrusted highway. Then one day the mail courier arrived, urging his horse through the mud and slush. He had a letter for Jiroemon from the district commissioners in charge of transport.

Jiroemon broke the seal with trepidation, opened the box and unscrolled the letter. What new demands could they possibly have dreamed up now? He read it, scratched his head, then studied it until he could decipher the convoluted official language. The commissioners wished to notify him, as headman of the village, that Her Highness Princess Kazu, the emperor’s younger sister, would be passing along the Inner Mountain Road and through the village in the tenth month of that same year. He was to start preparations immediately.

An imperial princess of the highest rank, the daughter of the late emperor and younger sister of the Son of Heaven, passing through their village! Such a thing had never occurred before. Slipping and sliding on the icy paths, Jiroemon rushed back to the cramped quarters where the family lived, in a distant corner of the splendid inn where the daimyos stayed. Smoke swirled out as he slid open the door. Everyone was huddled around the hearth, waiting for him to come back.

‘I’ve never known such times, Mother, in all my years,’ he grunted as he burst into the room. He always called his wife, Otama, ‘
Kaachan
’, the affectionate rural term for ‘Mother’. His usually calm face was crumpled with worry, the furrows in his forehead deeper than ever and his black hair stuck out in tufts.

The children’s grandmother ladled out a helping of gruel for him, then a second one. Her face was as brown and shrivelled as a walnut and her back bent double after a lifetime of hard work.

‘The road always overburdened, the outside villages refusing to supply porters – and now this!’ he said. ‘How many travellers do we get a day, do you think? A thousand? And even that’s far more than we can cope with. It says here there’ll be ten thousand in Her Highness’s party, without even counting the porters. It will take – what? – four, five days for the whole lot to pass. And we’re supposed to find two or three thousand porters. Two or three thousand! And five hundred horses each day that it passes. Six
thousand pillows. Rice. Charcoal. Dishes. And we’re supposed to feed all the lower ranks. How can we possibly do that? It can’t be done!’

Otama was a thin, worn woman, her face criss-crossed with thin lines and her hair twisted into a rough bun. Her hands were swollen, cracked and ingrained with dirt from cleaning, cooking, digging and weeding and her back was beginning to bend from years of planting out rice shoots. Her parents had sent her to marry Jiroemon when she was very young, not much older than Sachi. She bore him child after child but after each one died they had eventually adopted a frail, pale-faced baby girl. They named her Sachi, ‘Happiness’, hoping this one at least would survive.

This much Sachi knew. She had never enquired further. Her young life was far too full ever to think of asking where she had come from or who her parents had been. Half the children in the village were adopted or passed around, depending on which family had a sickly child or needed a son to continue the line, until some people had no idea who their real parents were. No one much cared. You belonged to whichever family you had been adopted into.

A few years later Otama bore Jiroemon a boy, little Chobei. He survived and other babies followed. She was strong, healthy, hard-working, quiet – everything a man like Jiroemon could want in a wife – and he was devoted to her. Now that Granny had become old and infirm, she was the power in the house.

She had been watching him closely as he spoke. Silently she laid her bowl and chopsticks beside the hearth, knelt behind him and began to knead his shoulders with her thumbs. He grimaced as she worked on a particularly stubborn knot.

Finally she spoke. ‘I suppose they told you what a great honour and privilege it is,’ she said. ‘I doubt we’ll see a single copper penny or a grain of rice. They know very well we only have a couple of hundred men at most and fifty-odd horses. Even if we go to all the villages round about we still can’t round up that many.’

‘The letter said there might be some sort of financial recompense. But of course they’re not guaranteeing anything.’

‘You’ll find a way,’ she said soothingly, pressing her thumbs into his shoulders. ‘You always do.’

Usually Sachi barely listened to adult talk. It was always jobs that needed to be done, plans, worries, money, gossip, the day’s routine. She let it all flow by and drifted off into her own thoughts. But today was different. Her parents had always been reassuring presences who protected her, admonished her and solved her problems. She had taken for granted that they were not affected by worries and fears, as she was. Now she saw that they were as weak and helpless as her. It made her feel frightened and alone.

Yet at the same time she was strangely entranced. A princess, passing through their village . . . Princesses had never entered her mind before. Sometimes she saw wealthy merchants travelling with women, some of whom had skin nearly as pale as hers. Perhaps the princess too had white skin.

She fingered the comb in her kimono sleeve, as she always did when anything was on her mind. She was nearly an adult, and she knew she would be sent away in a year or two. She had seen the older girls disappear. One had gone off to a cousin’s house to enlarge her knowledge of the world and make her a more useful bride, a couple had been taken into service in a samurai household, and the rest had been sent to be married. Soon it would be her turn. What else could there be? Her grandmother’s words echoed in her mind: ‘How do you expect her to get a husband, so pale and sickly as she is? What good is “pretty” for a farmer’s wife?’ Supposing she was too small and whey-faced to be accepted by another family as a bride? Maybe when all the other girls left home she would still be living with her parents, a shame and a burden to them, pitied by everyone in the village.

To make things worse, the village geishas teased her that she ought to become one of them. They covered their brown country faces in thick white paint, they told her, giggling coyly in that way geishas had. But her face was already as white as the full moon, as white as a mountain cherry blossom, and without any makeup at all. And she was pretty, too, and getting prettier. To hear them say such things only made her feel more of an oddity. When her mother heard them, she would smile her tired smile and lead her firmly away.

The morning after the villagers heard that the princess was to
pass through, Sachi took up her usual place beside the workstained loom, spooling cotton on to bobbins and passing them to her mother, while her grandmother sat in the corner, bent so close to the spinning wheel that her nose brushed against it. For a while the only sound was the rhythmic clack of the bobbin flying to and fro, the banging of the loom and the creaking and clattering of the wheel. Finally Sachi took a deep breath.

‘
Kaachan
,’ she said tentatively. ‘Mother. The princess . . . Can you tell me . . . ? What kind of . . . ?’

Otama had stopped throwing the bobbin back and forth to wind on a newly woven length of fabric. She thought for a moment.

‘Well, Little Sa,’ she replied. ‘I don’t know. Your father says she’s going to Edo to be the shogun’s bride.’

To be the shogun’s bride! It was like one of those fairy tales her grandmother sometimes told. Was the shogun old and ugly, she wondered, wizened and dried up like the village priest? Or was he young and full of life? The image of Genzaburo’s lean young body darting about in the river came to her mind.

In the days that followed, travellers brought rumour after rumour. Every night the oil lamps in the meeting house smoked and guttered until late and the family waited longer and longer for Jiroemon to come home for dinner. He would rush in exhausted and swallow a few bowls of barley, then towel down over a pan of steaming water and throw himself on to the rough straw sleeping mats next to the children. The villagers were to pave the road with flat white rocks throughout the village and for one or two
ri
on each side. The road had to be twelve
shaku
wide, even if that meant knocking down the walls in front of people’s houses.

The day after the last of the snow disappeared, Sachi slipped on a pair of clog-like
geta
, checked the old wooden pail to see if it was still watertight and skipped down to join the line at the well. As usual, the group of women there were chatting excitedly. Fetching water was a young woman’s job. It was the perfect excuse to escape from their shrewish mothers-in-law and gossip among themselves.

‘You know she’s only fifteen?’ twittered Shigé from the inn
across the road. ‘My father-in-law says so.’ She was fifteen herself, plump and girlish with sunburned cheeks and a mouth jostling with crooked teeth. She was the bride of the eldest son of the house and the mother of his son and heir, and brimming with her own importance. Genzaburo was her husband’s younger brother. Sachi was in awe of her. She could not imagine ever being so grown-up and confident.

‘Is that right?’ squealed Kumé, the child bride of the clogmaker’s son. She had been born with one leg shorter than the other and walked with a limp, but could spin as fine a thread as the oldest woman in the village. ‘But you know what I heard? They say she didn’t want—’

‘That’s right,’ Shigé butted in. ‘She refused several times. Imagine that – a woman refusing to go as a bride!’

There was a chorus of high-pitched whinnies of disbelief.

‘She was already betrothed,’ Shigé persisted. ‘To an imperial prince. She had been promised to him when she was six. She said she’d rather become a nun than marry the shogun.’

‘My father-in-law says it’s a scandal to send such a young girl so far away!’ said Kumé, finally managing to interject. ‘Edo’s a soldiers’ city. Not a place for someone who’s been brought up so delicately.’

‘How beautiful she must be,’ whispered Oman from the inn next door to Sachi’s. She had only recently arrived as a bride from a nearby village and was still subdued and prone to tears. ‘I heard they are bringing spring water for her bath all the way from Kyoto.’

‘That can’t be!’ gasped the others, tilting their heads in disbelief.

‘It’s true,’ sighed Oman. ‘She is too delicate for our Kiso water. What would I give to see her, just for one second!’

There were shocked giggles at the audacity of the thought. ‘That’s right,’ said the young women, nodding. ‘Too bad none of us will ever see a princess. No one ever gets to see a great lady like that!’

Sachi listened in silence. So the princess was not much older than herself. How sad she must feel, plucked from her home and sent on a long journey to a place she did not know, to marry
someone she did not know and did not want to marry. In that respect her life was no different from that of the poorest villager. Only in her case she had dared to refuse; though in the end she had been overruled. She was one of the greatest ladies in the land yet she too had no say over her own life.

‘She probably has white skin, even whiter than yours, Little Sa,’ said Oman.

‘Perhaps she looks like you, Little Sa,’ said Kumé. ‘With that long face of yours and that high nose.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ sneered Shigé, with the air of a woman of the world. ‘The princess is beautiful. She doesn’t look anything like any of us.’

The year went by in a flurry of festivals, lucky days and unlucky days. In the spring Sachi was up before dawn every morning, scrambling around the lower slopes of the mountain harvesting fiddlehead ferns, horsetail shoots, burdock root and all the other edible roots and shoots that grew there. Then came the spring festival, followed by the girls’ festival, then the planting out of the rice shoots. In the summer the children were busy working on the road and in the fields, but whenever they could they sneaked down to the river. There they would tear off their clothes and plunge in, joyfully splashing around in the cool water. Genzaburo led expeditions into the woods to climb trees, play games and chase the rabbits, foxes and badgers that lived there. In the seventh month, when it was so hot it was hard to move and everyone was soaked with sweat, came the Bon festival when the ancestors returned from the dead and the villagers danced until late at night. Then in the autumn Sachi was up in the hills again, collecting mushrooms.

Otama cleaned, polished, swept and cooked, making sure the inn was always pristine for each of the grand guests who passed through. The loom clattered and Granny’s spinning wheel whirred. Yet as the women went about their everyday tasks, they were all too aware of Jiroemon’s frantic efforts to prepare for the great procession. He negotiated endlessly with the headmen of more and more distant villages to ensure there would be enough porters and horses. It was not a question of whether: it had to be done.