The Nicholas Linnear Novels (105 page)

There was nowhere left to go but to Kyoto. Nangi had not forgotten the promise he had made to Gōtarō to see to his younger brother, Seiichi.

The ancient capital had been spared much of the devastation that had turned Tokyo into a smoldering blackened skeleton, but food was still scarce and starvation was rampant. Nangi had acquired a small loaf of black bread, a pot of jam, a bit of butter, and six
daikon
—white radishes. These he brought to the Sato house as a gift against the disruption and inconvenience of his visit.

He found only an old woman at home, a straight-backed, stiff-lipped creature with iron gray hair pulled back flat to her skull and the eyes of an inquisitive child behind a face full of wrinkles.

“Hai?”
The interrogative was somewhat defensive and Nangi recalled what Gōtarō had said about his grandmother. There had been a great deal of suffering and death in this family, and he could not bring himself to be the bearer of more bad tidings. With the current chaos of the war it was all too likely that news of the death of her grandson would not have reached her.

He bowed politely and, handing her the packet of food, told her that he had served alongside Gōtarō and that he sent his best respects to her.

She sniffed, her nose lifted slightly, and said, “Gōtarō-chan never paid me any respect while he was living here.” But clearly she was pleased with this message and, bowing, she backed away from the doorway to allow him entrance.

It was still difficult for Nangi to negotiate, and she turned away in such a natural and graceful way he could never be certain that she had done it on purpose to avoid him embarrassment.

Obā-chama—for Nangi would know her only as others did, as “Grandma”—went to make him tea, a signal honor in those drear days without hope. They sat on opposite sides of the room with the break in the
tatami
between them as was customary between host and guest,
sensei
and pupil, sipping weak tea, leaves that had obviously been used more than once.

Obā-chama spoke and Nangi listened, at times answering her sharp perceptive questions as best he could, fabricating a skein of lies when it came to Gōtarō’s whereabouts.

“The war has destroyed this family,” she said, sighing, “just as it is destroying this country. My son-in-law is buried; my daughter in a hospital from which she will never leave. Japan will never be the same no matter what the Americans do to us.” Her eyes were hard and glittery and Nangi found the idea of being her enemy frightening. “But it is not the Americans I fear.” She sighed again and, shaking her head from side to side, took a delicate sip of her tea.

Just when he believed she had lost her train of thought, she began again, leading him slowly into the rhythm of her life. “The Russians have joined the war.” The words had the pronouncement of a death sentence. “They waited until the last moment, until the outcome was clear even to their slow, bearlike brains. Now they have jumped in with their swords rattling and they will want a piece of us, too.” Her white hands, with skin as translucent as porcelain, gripped the tiny handleless cups with unnatural tension.

“Do you see these cups, my grandson’s friend?” Nangi dutifully looked; they were beautiful, impossibly thin so that light falling through the window penetrated from outside in, turning the material they were made of milky and glowing. Nangi nodded his head.

“They are quite magnificent.”

Obā-chama sniffed again. “They were a recent gift. From a distant relative of mine. It was all that was left of his family. He stopped here on his way out of Tokyo to the countryside. He had become
sokaijin.*
I urged him to stay here, but the bombing of Tokyo had been too much for him and he could no longer tolerate being within a city’s limits. Any city. Poor thing, he did not even understand the nature of his flight, but at least he was smiling.

“‘Obā-chama,’ he said, ‘the fire raids on Tokyo have forced me to move four times in the past three months, first out of my house, which is no more, then from temporary shelter to temporary shelter. With each move my priceless collection of T’ang Dynasty antiques was diminished. Fire took some of the scrolls here, a stumble on the street destroyed a vase there.’ He handed me these cups. ‘Here, Obā-chama, I see that your life is still calm. Please take these. They are the last of my collection. Now I have been freed to start my life anew without dragging my collection behind me like a burdensome hump. The war has made me appreciate other things in life.’”

Obā-chama turned the cup in the light using only her thumb and index finger. “Imagine! It is the T’ang Dynasty I hold in my hand!”

Nangi heard the awe in her voice and was not surprised. He looked anew at his own cup, marveling at its artistry and age. He too felt the common appreciation most Japanese had for this most revered of all the Chinese dynasties.

Obā-chama carefully put down the antique and closed her eyes for a moment. “But of what use is talk of art and antiquity now? The Russians will soon arrive along with the Americans, and then we will truly be undone.” Beneath the despair Nangi heard the deep and abiding undercurrent of rage and fear directed at the Soviets. He felt a violent urge to reach out across the intervening space that tradition and courtesy dictated must forever remain and touch her, assure her that everything would be all right. But he could not. The words stuck in his throat like needles in the knowledge that everything would
not
be all right for them.

He was about to open his mouth to say something—anything to break the taut, painful thread of silence—when there came a sharp rapping on the door. Obā-chama’s eyes cleared and, bowing, she excused herself.

Nangi sat silently without turning around. His back was to the front door; all he could hear was the soft murmur of voices, a short silence, the murmuring beginning again. Then the door closed softly, and he heard nothing until Obā-chama returned to his view.

She sat back down opposite him. Her head was slightly bowed, throwing her eyes into shadow. “I have had news of Gōtarō-chan.” Her voice was like a wisp of smoke, gently drifting, a shell only, transparent and empty within. “He will not be coming home.”

Perhaps she always spoke of death thus with a poet’s poignancy, but Nangi suspected not. Gōtarō had been special to her as, in the brief but incredibly intense time Nangi had known him, Gōtarō had been special to him.

The space between them danced with dust motes twisting in the heat of the sunlight. Their false life only accentuated the emptiness there.

The thin sounds of the uncaring traffic outside came to him remote as the memories brought to life by a faded photograph. An era was passing before them, a slow and heavy cortege filled with black roses. The scent of the past was everywhere, with only the dark uncertainty of the unknowable future to keep it company.

A kind of despair seeped slowly from Obā-chama though she bravely strove to be resolute and inwardly calm.

The helplessness of his situation affected Nangi profoundly as they sat facing each other. Her tissue-paper face had been crumpled by
karma,
and his heart ached with the burden of her newest loss, one in a string of bitter beads.

Then what came into his mind was a poem—not quite a
haiku
but exquisitely moving—by Chiyo, the eighteenth-century poet, considered the greatest of all of Japan’s female poets. It was what she wrote after the death of her small son, notable for what it did not say as well as what it expressed.

He spoke it now: “‘The dragonfly hunter—today, what place has he / got to, I wonder….”

Of a sudden, they were both weeping and Obā-chama, appalled at her lack of good manners, turned quickly away so that he could see only her thin shoulders moving. And above, her bowed gray head.

After a time, he said quietly, “Obā-chama, where is Seiichi-san? He should be here with you.”

Her eyes scored the nap of the
tatami,
searching perhaps for imperfections. She would not raise them. Then, her body moved, as if she were steeling herself to speak. “He is on his pilgrimage. To the mausoleum of the Tokugawa in Nikko Park.”

Nangi bowed. “Then with your permission, Obā-chama, I will go and fetch him. His place is here; it is a time for family.”

Now the old woman raised her head and Nangi became aware of the tiny nerve tremor that kept it in constant motion. “I would be most…grateful to have my other grandson beside me again.” The corners of her eyes were diamond bright with the hint of tears she was holding back with a supreme effort of will.

Nangi thought it was time he left her to the privacy of her grief. He bowed to her formally, thanking her for her hospitality in these evil times, and with some difficulty rose to leave.

“Tanzan-san.” It was the first time she had spoken his name. “When you return with Seiichi”—her head was held very straight; a tendril of hair swept down across one ear, feathering with her minute tremble—“you will stay here with us.” Her voice was firm. “Every young man needs a home to return to.”

The deep green of the cryptomeria occluded the gray pall that still hovered over burnt-out Tokyo where legions of civilians still picked through the massive tons of rubble and blackened skeletons of the Red Night, urban farmers with ash-covered rakes, unearthing a harvest of despair.

All that remained of the terrible winds of the week before were soft, gusting breezes that bent the tops of the cryptomeria and set up a fibrous rustling whose confluence with the natural buzz of the insects brought about a harmoniousness for which this park was noted.

Nangi crossed to the far side of the stream via a stone footbridge and took a winding hillside path through dense foliage that would lead him to the gold-encrusted Yomei Gate, and the tomb of the Tokugawa. He had not told Obā-chama because the timing had not been right but he, too, had spent many happy hours during his schooldays lost in deep reverie at the verge of this final resting place of much that had made Japan great.

That the Shōgunate of Ieyasu Tokugawa began the history of modern Japan Nangi had absolutely no doubt—but it was only in the difficult and feverish years ahead that he was to come to fully appreciate the insight he had forged for himself. This Shōgun was the first of a line stretching over two hundred years who tamed the myriad feuding
daimyō
, the only one with enough strength and cunning to bend these powerful regional lords to his will.

In so doing, of course, Ieyasu created the great two-hundred-year peace and forever changed the path upon which Japan would walk. For in effect he destroyed the
samurai.
Warriors have no place in peacetime for there is nothing for them to do. And in this interregnum the
samurai
metamorphosed slowly into bureaucrats, working in administrative functions, thus becoming no more than a “service nobility.”

Nangi had heard it often said in school, where astute minds young enough not to have yet been entirely shorn of the objective view which age and full participation in the system would cut from them, that Japanese government was built on the separation of power and authority.

To understand this Nangi had had to return to his studies of history, reading in areas his professors had apparently ignored in their zeal to complete the semesters’ curricula. There, in his books, he found the historical and political imperatives that were his answers.

The twin feudal powers of the Choshu and Satsuma families at last brought to an end the Tokugawa Shōgunate. But the resultant governmental corruption caused such a public outcry that they, in turn, were overthrown by the Meiji oligarchs. And the Restoration began.

What this cabal of leaders arranged was the kind of government similar to that in Bismarck’s Germany. That many of these leaders had strong ties into that German government seems partly the answer as to why they chose that particular system. The other reason was that they wished to clandestinely retain their control of a government which, on the surface at least, would appear responsive to the needs of the public at large.

Toward this end they set about creating what they termed a non-political civil bureaucracy. It seems ironic that the Meiji oligarchs, so fearful of the traditional
samurai
that they officially abolished the class, were obliged to seek out for administrators of their newly coined bureaucracy the remnants of the very class they hated.

But it was their determination to have this vast and powerful buffer unit of bureaucrats in place before 1890 when the National Diet, the new parliament, would open and candidates from political parties began campaigning for public support and power.

The Bismarckian system of “monarchic constitutionalism” also served the Meiji oligarchs well since it made the prime minister and the army responsible not to parliament but to the monarch. The interim result was a relatively weak and ineffectual Diet and a powerful bureaucracy laced with supporters of the Meiji oligarchs. Thus was the will of the people carried out.

And yet for all its subterfuge and illicit lines of power, the growth of the non-political bureaucracy as the center of the government found great favor among the Japanese, for the corrosive memory of the privilege accorded the two families, Satsuma and Choshu, still burned like a fire within them. What they appreciated about the formation of the bureaucracy was that it was open to all men who had trained diligently and well and who displayed the proper aptitude and fortitude in scoring highly in examinations which could not be more impersonal and thus impartial.

And yet the ultimate result was never perhaps anticipated by the Meiji oligarchs. For with the solidification of the bureaucracy’s power as the center of the new government, and with, at last, the passing of the last of the oligarchs, the true power within the government devolved entirely into bureaucratic hands both civilian and, just as importantly, military.

And all this, truly, was the legacy of the Tokugawa. An important lesson, especially for a young man wandering the land of a soon-to-be-defeated country who must think toward the highly uncertain and volatile future.