1905
They walked past Tsubone's mansion house to the hospital, and then the few trails to the Confucian Garden, Morinaga talking the whole way about hypocrites and the awfulness of the demon slayers – how it got turned into a raccoon–eating, patriot–killing, battle–zone of western wannabes and criminal army officers and homeless children. And look at the police. And look at the leaders. And there wasn't a university graduate who could catch a fish or do five sit–ups. And there were people in the villages who would scrape salt away from the mud when the sea was just there. Was that normal? If not, why did anyone put up with it?
Yoneda Magase, fifteen, asked what it had to do with the demon slayers.
"I don't know," Morinaga said. "I'm thinking about something else."
The Confucian Garden, more than a name, was a tended courtyard at the end of a mud road filled with statues of philosophers yonder. A vain Ubuyashiki who loved such tenets built it long ago. Morinaga pulled off a line of ivy dangling from Hakuseki's shoulder and sighed, looking around: "Miyamoto's not here either. I'll go to the hospital to look again. Where did she wander to…?" And he was gone.
Instinct tugged at Magase to search for Confucius himself. He stood on the highest hill of the garden: an eroded and sugary calcium silhouette, with a nose and finger gone, and a blooming flower in a crack where a pupil should have been; he smiled faintly. A quote embossed into his pedestal was in kanji Magase didn't know. Then his ears pricked up as he heard the crunching noise of leaves, muffled and very faint, and he crouched to trail.
Barefoot Miyamoto was there, hobbling between the robes of two parallel statues. She squatted and fawned with black dust on her arms, and as a nine–year old behaved no differently from any other: Magase kneeled and drummed his thigh and called her to come in a kitten–bearing tone, "We were looking for you. We've been very worried…", and her head turned and she smiled airily.
"I've found someone," she said.
The angle of the sun changed, and Magase squinted through the mist of chrysanthemums until he saw the impossible maiden in her red–cut kimono, embroidered socks that reached her knees, unlaced cowhide boots, and the long black hair allowed to run free down her back to her waist. She stood in natural silence, her chest straight, her nose puckered, ignoring Miyamoto who toddled by her legs, holding a crayon and its box: and Magase looked closer to see that she coloured in the eyes of the sculpture before her. The scene was so immediately strange that for several minutes he did not move. Then he rose warily, and called out to her in a hushed voice that complied with his own universal order not to disturb the silence, and the girl looked at him and came out of reverie.
"I'm Tsutako," she said, because Magase had asked for her name: and the stony expression broke into a radiant smile. The smiled seemed as old as Confucius' and very sad. He couldn't say why he thought so. But bubbling above it were the azure eyes as redolent of royalty as velvet which contained a vision of the future only a rainbow–soaked brush could discolour. Magase, still immersed in his trance, heard Miyamoto say with admiration, "The man she is colouring in was an emperor. Don't you think they're just alike?", and in that second instant he'd known her he could already no longer say that he disagreed.
When Miyamoto Shō died, everyone felt misery alongside Morinaga and Magase, but it took several days for them to believe that she had indeed passed. Many continued to doubt it after seeing her corpse under the thatch hut of cremation, crammed along with a ceremonial kimono and pillows and chrysanthemums over her neck in a white coffin, with sides as sharp as a staple. Her hair had been carefully parted with a wire–clip, and she looked so well before the stone lid was pushed on that she never seemed as dead as was needed for that moment. The apple–scented fire barely brought with it a sentiment of death, and as Numachi stood with the mourning towel over her arm to watch the smoke billow and consummate into a spirit of purgatory that only its presence was enough to convince the others she was dead, she realised she was the single one who had accepted Miyamoto's fate before then. It was a cruelty, an inevitable and true cruelty, because but one person could share her particular ordnance of grief, and they had left…
1916
The vagabond Numachi awoke in the hospital cot, saw the lit incense of apple in the platinum censer, and she realised it had been a dream. But a terrible dream – and no matter how many times she rinsed her face over the chipped malachite basin, the scorching flush of conscience below her eyes never went.
It was the second day after the incident at Seventeen Heiseigahama. Fixed like a panorama of a Nightingale hospital in Crimea, the medical faculty housing patients of both Ubuyashiki and Morinaga's cause bustled with the scent of dissent. A Kakushi pushing a dispensary cart handed out the breakfast of fried fish and miso soup, and because they did their job jovially, it seemed as if the revolution could not be more removed from that place: but it was a manufactured, brittle condition. In fact, the Kakushi had the day before declared themselves neutral, and had acquired this facility thinking it most suitable to attend any wounded demon slayer, but no amount of morphine could numb rebellion. The equilibrium of tension in the quarters was as fragile as syringes of fine glass crystal.
"Breakfast?" Numachi was back in the bed, and she looked up and saw the stately nurse looking back down, with stately insistence. She consented and pulled the wheeled table to hover over her lap, but it was all politeness. She didn't feel like eating.
In this place, at this time, Miyamoto's death still hung like a persistent shadow. It was never gradual, never flared – it was a low whirr of an engine in the cabin of the coach; it was the Jehovah's Witness at your door reminding you to convert. Numachi sunk into the watery foam of the mattress, and realising the analogy she had made, quickly reprimanded herself for her cruelty: but it was the truest thing in that moment, amidst the rebels and the agendas and the watered–down medicine, because she had indeed been cruel.
That was why she refused courtesy from the master of the faculty. The night before she was still so exhausted when she entered the silent darkened office that she nearly lost sight of the main question – why would a patient be required to walk to her doctor? She had met Tsubone several times before via her children, and noticed her because she appeared incongruously infatuated with them, who ignored her, an intense and innocent litter. Now it was eleven in the evening and she sat tired and restless in the paperwork and the tobacco smoke, wearing an unbuttoned surgeon's coat, and she had a manual of German medicine open on her desk to while away the time. When Numachi came in her eyes flickered and she sighed, like Magase, which might have represented her weariness with Morinaga, with the dying in the hospital, or with her entire inherited condition.
"You've shaved," she said. "I'm so sorry I had to ask you to come."
"I wasn't asked. I was forced."
"Oh, these Kakushi – they don't understand who we are." She was watching a page of Erstickung as though she forgot the choked were incurable. "I wanted to tell you something about the children. In private."
"I was wondering where they were."
Tsubone rubbed off her cigarette in the agate ashtray, and looked miserable at once. "Giyuu and Kanae have left. For Tokyo. To 'find who killed Miyamoto'."
"I see," Numachi said. She sat and asked dumbly: "Are you worried?"
"Too much. And Morinaga's out there and Kusakabe's dead and Shinobu's going to that damned Final Selection…" She was making everything come down at once. "And we haven't had the chance to give Miyamoto a funeral yet. Numachi, she's still lying on ice in the basement–"
Tsubone lost her breath. She coughed once into her arm, quietly, smally. The break seemed to give respite: "I'm sorry. You shouldn't have to hear all this."
"I don't mind. You are normally quiet."
Tsubone said, "Yes." She acted as if the two syllables conveyed her life more precisely than the life itself did. "A very quiet woman." She sat there in the little dark office waiting for one of them to speak. A fly landed on Numachi's hand but she didn't react. The morphine, she supposed, still calmed her nerves and silenced the mind. It was also the only reason Miyamoto's death was the engine–noise in the cabin and the witness every day – otherwise, it would ransack her.
"I will go to Tokyo. Magase's there, too. I think he has something to do with this," Tsubone said. "In any case, my leaving here will allow this place to be neutral. Everyone knows the side I have taken."
Why was it that Numachi knew she was being insincere? When she was ushered back to bed, the night was so dry and so fragrant her head was suddenly clear: she thought of Tsubone and Miyamoto and Giyuu, what to do next, and it came to her instantly. When the morphine dissipated by morning and the thought lingered, and when Tsubone was no longer there, she knew it had become conviction. Six hours later, on the crux of midday, Numachi would leave as well.
By imperceptible means she found herself in the Tokyo railway station, a brutal and skeletal building, with a mercurial glimmer under the afternoon glare. She hid and saw them descend from the newly–arrived coach: Kanae with the doe's step and the funny sun hat, and the Saigon blouse damp from the douse of perfume; and then Giyuu, to whom exhaustion drooped focused eyes; but they were equally quiet while they loaded onto the taxi. Numachi followed them to Café Paulista and sat where she could not be seen. The arrogance was unignorable when it came: she watched Yoneda Magase enter alongside and sit parallel, and heard, "You killed Tsutako Tomioka," and, "I've got a good idea who killed Miyamoto," from the murmuring conversation. Every time someone said kill she thought her coffee became redder. Then the thunder of the gun abruptly resounded and the cup tipped and shattered into a slather of crimson.
Giyuu had been shot in the face. His whole sixteen years drained slowly on the wall behind him as his body, limp and loose like an old belt, doubled in the chair. When Kanae realised she cried, and Numachi nearly thought to intervene; but Magase put up his hand, as if to fend the impending nature of his sin, and said, "Look closely." Everything was immediately silent in the sea of fleeing women and men.
Like an electric relay, Giyuu's torso jerked, then his thighs and knees. He was still for a long while, but Numachi realised it was only from her angle he was still and that something rose from the stump of his neck, a red and organic bubble, that burst and inside it was a miniature seeming to be of what was once there. Under a minute it had ballooned and Numachi had witnessed the occurrence in its entirety, without saying a word: that Giyuu had regrown his head. His eyes were closed, but she knew they remained blue like always and that he was as well as he had ever been. There was enough relief to override shock, and then Numachi felt hit by the clarity that came with realisation, and the ecstasy. "If this is ever destroyed, it'll mean the end of Baoyuan's dream," she murmured, barely conscious. "I guess I'd do anything to stop that, no matter how awful!"
The next morning, Kanae had kept them a table in a café below the hotel, and opposite the window the bustle of horse–carts and solitary hawkers carrying banana cloves stood in the hot street like an enemy. When Giyuu came back to his seat she was waiting to eat. They proceeded with breakfast demurely: coffee … a piece of toast … an egg … would you pass the salt please … where is Magase? Realisation caught up to Kanae. She looked up and Giyuu repeated, "Do you have any idea where he went?"
"I don't," she said.
"At least, did he say anything to you?"
"Nothing. He left right after…"
Giyuu said, "You seem quiet," and crossed his fork over the plate. Too sweet. It might have meant he already lamented Tokyo. He looked out and saw the colonial buildings blue like an adversary in a canyon and the powdered men who leaned against stucco walls and yawned pipe smoke. "Kanae," he said, looking closer at one of the men, a tall and nasal spouse, "we need to find Magase. He said it. He knows who killed Miyamoto." The man emptied the tobacco and stamped it; he looked into an alleyway; perhaps he waited. "If we go back, then we'd have gotten nothing useful out of this." When Kanae glanced his woman had found him and they disappeared down the street with their arms tucked around each other, looking proud.
She said, "You are going too fast."
"I have to."
"He tried to shoot you. He did shoot you. In the…"
"The arm?" Giyuu said, because Kanae did not finish. "If he wanted to kill me, he would've aimed somewhere else, or shot twice." He flailed his bandaged arm to prove it: "Anyway, I'm fine, see?" The claim was meant humorously, but it struck as cold as the bullet: he had not realised. Kanae was brought back below Magase's intolerant gaze, in Café Paulista, at five–fifteen in the afternoon, and her jacket was suddenly humid with a stench like urea. She looked down and saw the topaz necklace transition to ruby and then Giyuu silent across her lap. A matt of hair covered his neck. She lifted it and saw everything that terrified her; the head not there…
Magase had indeed said to her something: "Kanae, I have known you for long; I want you not to follow this boy around any longer. I am indebted to his sister in a way you don't need to understand. Look at him again. He lives, a demonic and untrue life…"
That night Kanae awoke from one of those restless sleeps, twenty minutes long, and found Giyuu as he had always been, long and inept in some AM hour, picking the leaves out of the typewriter. Nothing could be heard in the hotel besides the twang of the keys as he depressed them, and she thought, while she washed her face over the malachite basin, that she ought to be at ease: in headlong anxiety she made a gash in Giyuu's arm and used that to explain the blood. She hoped he would never know better.
At breakfast, Kanae said aloud, "I wonder how he knew your sister," and it plucked Giyuu for a moment from the world of Magase. They thought in silence, and she finally realised that since the moment they had met, four years and three months ago in the zen garden, she had not ever made the effort to know her. But when he said so distantly, "I don't remember who she was," the intention of what she assumed to be vengeance became clearer as but a quest for her memory, above her confusion: and it occurred that Giyuu was as far from her as his sister was from him. Kanae stretched in the chair and began to ponder about her own sister ... where is Shinobu now? … and that was when the crow knocked on the window clutching news of selection.
1905
They were alike, Magase conceded, because of the long limestone hair and the maternal pose, even though the sculpture had half its head battered, and with thin lips was obviously masculine. Magase assumed that atop the lost half of his head should have been the extravagant felt crown. Otherwise, he looked innocuous as a peasant without rain: Morinaga once said, a man humble only because he had nothing to wield.
Tsutako put down the crayons and sat on a tarnished bench just there. Magase did the same. Miyamoto squatted again and started making shapes in the sand; it got later and the sky turned yellow. The chrysanthemums stayed still.
"The girl, Miyamoto," Tsutako said, "told me she lived with two men who trained and read and cleaned too much; but most of the time they trained. They never bought furniture, and said they never needed to, even though there were so many books in the house she had to lay them against the wall so the older one, the father, wouldn't complain: he always complained, about countries and police and laws, while the younger one listened. The younger one spoke too little. But he loved neckties and danced tangoes with broomsticks while he thought nobody was home."
Magase dropped his head into his hands. "That's too much…"
"But I don't know you for that," Tsutako said. "I saw that man with you. That's Uncle Morinaga…" – she was the kind who kept honorifics behind people – "…I'm guessing you're his Tsuguko. Maga… Maga…"
"Magase."
"They say you're talented."
"Who?"
"The people you want to hear saying so," Tsutako offered. "I don't suppose it matters."
Magase scratched his chin. He felt a hair, but normally unbothered, he plucked it. "And who is this?" He heard her feet shuffle and he nearly said, I don't suppose it matters, but strangely, he had no desire to hurt her, who seemed so innocent, or even to hurt himself. She stood up again with the box of crayons and resumed colouring.
He watched Tsutako with his chin on his knee; she kept changing colours; she spoke without chronology and without interest. "This is an old emperor … he was riding his horse one day and he knocked his head on the city gate … he had a good Japanese friend, named Kaemon. You ask what emperor he was? Of China…" Magase lost attention. Where was it going? "…he always had trouble with the Göktürks … he had some sort of obsession with going and seeing the world … he died at forty–nine looking very young. Maybe he wanted to live forever. He wrote a story once of such. He liked to wander; he never married." Tsutako listed it like a poem begrudgingly memorised.
Magase said, "That's very exciting."
"You don't have to pretend. I know it isn't." Tsutako gave the crayons back to Miyamoto and wiped her hands; she stretched her thin back. "Gosh, I talked for long, didn't I?"
"I don't think so."
"Anyway, it's getting late."
"You'll be going?" Magase lifted his head.
"Oh, yes, but I'd like to see you again, Magase." She sighed and giggled. "I'll only be here for tonight. My brother – he misses me too easily. How about the discotheque?"
"The what?" he said, but Tsutako was already on the hill of the horizon, exclaiming the time, the place, the shades to wear – all of them – and she waved childishly. Suddenly it felt for Magase like everything was going right that day. He smiled and looked back at the statue behind him, into the eyes that Tsutako coloured, but was seized: for they were rainbow, of all colours. He wondered if she perhaps forgot to blend them, or the turmeric evening had played some trick on her sight, but she was gone before he could ask: the kanji at its feet he could read – Sun Baoyuan – but it was just a name too unimportant to remember.
1916
Magase recalled lastly Morinaga's reaction when he told him his plans to go that evening: the instant of disdain and the forced composure; the protocol questions – protocol, even if that was his first time; the lecture on indulgence and steel; the "I know how it is," allure of western things – he didn't know it was accompanying another person; that it was eventually and only Miyamoto who convinced him. Now it was he who took a woman to tango in a marble–laden hotel and Magase who sat on tatami mats in an unfurnished office, ordering the deaths of men! Indeed, his reminiscence of Tsutako and Miyamoto had been cast from much less than innocence.
That was why he ignored the detonating beetles between the stacks of books and the violence of a cold lamp at midnight. He held the acrylic blue pen with a discipline of order, the paper centred under a square weight: as if it had not been a stray impulse which drove him to write that letter, even if its instructions were already decided. He began writing in clear, immature script, made a mistake, began again at the wrong place, and when he was finally satisfied he rewrote the envelope without imperfection and held it to the lamp as to confirm its totality. It said:
"For the reasons we discussed,
go forward as planned.
Endou is away with Morinaga.
There is no need for a confession from anyone.
Kill them all."
The letter fell five hours later into the hands of one of those uptight lieutenants, packed around a pale fire with other men who outfaced their palms for warmth, and they nodded solemnly to its orders. Those who wished not to participate stayed. When the drizzle broke through the canopy the remainder crossed the forest and reached the foundations of the hospital nearly cloaked by a gummy fog that had drifted in from the valley. The Kakushi who stood at the entrance froze when she saw the lieutenant come forward, his face unsympathetic, his rifle slung behind his elbow, the golden wrap around his shirt glimmering shyly in the half–dawn that said rebellion. They took the wraps off and walked to the room where the patients lay and opened the blinds and rattled their fists on the cupboards to awaken. A nurse who imagined what was coming came in shouting and was taken away – the others knew the same and gripped the skirts of their apostolic black outfits staying quiet. In the extinguished censer the aroma of apple still stirred. Then the lieutenant took out his list and paced by the beds, asking the patients' names. "Araki Eiji." "Go outside." "But my leg is broken, your excellency." "One of you help him, then." "Nonaka Kyou." "Go outside." "Hoga Seiichi." "Stay here." "Horiuchi Kame." "Go outside." The list drew to a close: everyone had been sorted. Through the open door the flies came whirring in. The lieutenant went back outside and covered his ears and looked away into the forest.
At the same time, a crackle in the distant trees awoke Ubuyashiki Kagaya from a nap on the porch of the Rengoku house. He remembered slowly how he was forbidden to be there: he could be seen through the sparse hedgerows … from the mountains, too … if it was the wrong person Rengoku's neutrality would be invalidated … both his and their families would then be in danger. He rolled up his futon and turned to go inside when he saw a boy hiding in the hallway. He saw only his face, the oversized eyes and the apricot–coloured hair, but he knew him for all that. The boy came from behind the corner and looked at his feet.
"Senjuro," Ubuyashiki said. He knew before the boy had time to tell him that he brought a message from his father. "I'm sorry. I know I shouldn't be here."
"It's not that," he murmured. "Did you hear that noise?"
Ubuyashiki remembered: indeed, it had been a noise that awakened him. He said, "We'd better talk inside," and walked past Senjuro.
They sat in one of those inward zen courtyards, unused, unwelcoming. But Ubuyashiki had the sensation that on this occasion the garden had been employed, for the terraced lines in the white sand were dishevelled. He said, "We've interrupted someone."
"You haven't. We just don't rake it," Senjuro said. "That sound just now…"
"It sounded like guns."
"I thought the same thing."
Senjuro – as he was already accustomed to – had an answer for everything. He never spoke aimlessly; he was wisened – but sometimes the answers he prepared seemed of a strangeness … they were based on the only life he could remember, the forest and a mother and no children anywhere, except those singing schoolboys he passed going to the bookstore, splendidly. It told something of his personality: he was like those villagers in feudal folklores who hid hungry rebels in their homes and sold moxa to feed them, and sometimes, it made Ubuyashiki wonder where he stood. Senjuro pointed to the room behind him marked guest and asked, "Your mother's left?"
"She went to go lead."
"How come? Shouldn't you?"
"She is the most capable. It is the temporary order of succession…" But strangely, he felt ashamed for saying so. Senjuro went into the kitchen and came back with a tray of tea. It was lukewarm; he had prepared and waited to talk to Ubuyashiki.
He said quietly, "Tsubone's left as well. I heard it from my father."
"She has?" Though Ubuyashiki was unsurprised. "Where to?"
"Wherever Morinaga is. That's what he thinks," Senjuro answered. "Your mother wasn't happy about it."
"And what did your father think?"
"He thinks…" Senjuro paused. "He thinks it should've been you." He put his fingers up for quotes, as if to lighten his comment, as if he felt poorly for it: "He thinks it's a man's job. He thinks you've stayed and wept here for too long."
Ubuyashiki remembered the first day he stepped into the Rengoku's anteroom. After setting his bags down, he saw that door opposite him labelled guest. He went in and closed the slide and sitting with his head against the paper wall he cried. He cried for his father and for Morinaga's betrayal and for his daughter and for all the other dead he had seen in his life. He hadn't done so until then. Eventually it had been Senjuro who saw his silhouette through the paper, and when he came to inquire in his strange way, he witnessed the patriarch watching bitterly through the slit, and he understood why. It might have been the same reason Tsubone left: only if he went away would they allowed to be truly neutral.
"Is that so…" Ubuyashiki muttered, and that was when Shinjuro Rengoku walked in on them. He looked distraught and more antagonising than before; when he huffed the coarse skin on his open chest buzzed like a heavy drum.
He kneeled and said, "Oyakata–sama." He made Senjuro bow too, continuing breathlessly: "I have received a letter from my eldest son. Unlike us, he intends to fight for your cause. I have failed in sending any reply possible that might convince him otherwise: he is in Izumo, telling me he sits around campfires with other boys, drinking imitation wine, sharing stories of glory and loyalty like how they would share rainbow candies from the same tin. And it is to you they are loyal and wish to be glorious for."
Ubuyashiki did not meet his eyes: they scared him like typhus and cholera rife in an abandoned harbour. But Shinjuro looked up and forced it through. "So I have come to make a request of you," he said, his tone desperate. "I know Senjuro must have told you what I said. I don't blame him; I believe children must be neutral. But you are the exception. Surrender yourself, and stop this war!"
Ubuyashiki would have thought he was facing a madman if he had no reason to believe that Shinjuro was inspired by a mixture of delirium and a tormentuous dedication to family: he imagined his dying future self similar, a placid and cleaner version. His first instinct was to condemn the man for requesting of him a fate of such humiliation to his dynasty while his father's ashes still smouldered in the grave. But previous teachings on how to conduct fury in dignity held him back: and before he could reply Yokota Ryo and his lieutenant stepped into the room with the Murata rifles, the rancid scent of rebellion following them the way flies follow mounds of dung scooted away on tractors.
A/N: I'm quite proud of the prose in this chapter. Also, the title was meant to be, "The Children Who Made Disinnocence Wait: Part One", but that was too long...
