The Samurai's Daughter (6 page)

‘So what happened?’ asked Haru. ‘Did he refuse to polish it?’

‘Of course not. He polished it so thoroughly I thought he was going to wear it down to nothing. He has to keep up the pretence. So there’s your proof. He’s an Aizu to the core. You brought an enemy into the house! What do you think Father would say? I’m going to throw him out right now.’

Fujino lowered her head and stared at the kimonos in their wrappers piled on the floor. Taka wondered what she was thinking.

It was hard to see Nobu as one of the hated Aizu. Of all the northern clans who had fought for the shogun, the Aizu had been the most stubborn and the most feared. It was only when they were defeated that the war finally came to an end. Her father had told her that the shogun and his supporters had wanted to stop Japan moving forward, that if they hadn’t been driven from power, their country would never have had the chance to acquire civilization and enlightenment like the western nations.

Taka remembered the shogun’s police, thin intense Aizu men with ferocious scowls and burning eyes, hammering at their door in Kyoto while her mother blocked their way, swearing her father wasn’t there. Eijiro had actually fought in some of the battles, it wasn’t surprising he felt strongly about it. But it had all been so long ago – well, five years ago, which to him might not seem so long but to her was almost half her life. She’d been a child then, it hadn’t seemed frightening to her so much as exciting.

Ever since Nobu arrived Eijiro had taken a dislike to him. Taka saw him every day, sweeping the gardens, scuttling up and down the huge rooms wiping the tatami, taking his turn to serve meals along with the other servants. He was always behind the rickshaw when she and Haru went to and from school. He behaved impeccably, did his work quietly, didn’t give himself airs, but there was something about him that set him apart from the other servants. The family all felt it. If he’d been like the others, Eijiro would have treated him as he did them, ignored him except to bark orders. But for some reason he seemed to see him almost as a rival.

She narrowed her eyes. She was still not sure that Nobu really was an Aizu. Eijiro’s proof wasn’t convincing at all. But if it was true, if he really was, then the Aizu couldn’t have been so bad after all, she thought.

It wasn’t her place to speak but the words burst out before she could stop herself. ‘Father’s fair and just,’ she said. ‘You know very well what he would say. I don’t believe Nobu is an Aizu, but even if he is, he was little then. He didn’t fight in the war.’

‘He had plenty of family who did. He’s a degenerate like the rest of them. Walks around with a scowl on his face, never says a word. You can’t tell what he’s thinking. Nothing good, you can be sure of that. You told me what he did to that Satsuma samurai at the Black Peony. He’ll do the same to us one of these days – slit our throats while we’re asleep if we don’t watch out.’

Taka would have laughed if Eijiro hadn’t been so determined. He hadn’t even been there. Nobu had been no match for the samurai at all. ‘He’s not like that,’ she protested. ‘He’s good-tempered and hard-working, isn’t he, Mother?’

‘You’ve been kind to him long enough. You’ve more than paid him back for helping you out at the Black Peony. You don’t owe him anything. He has to go.’

Eijiro set his shoulders. Taka knew women were supposed to obey men, that a woman had to obey her father, then her husband and, when he died, her oldest son. But there was nothing about obeying your brother, especially when that brother’s orders made no sense.

‘You shouldn’t have sent her to that school, Mother,’ Eijiro snapped. ‘Filling her head with silly ideas. Girls should know their place. We should be training her to be a good wife and wise mother. She doesn’t need an education.’

Fujino frowned. She had taken out her fan and was tapping it thoughtfully. ‘Poor Nobu,’ she said. ‘He’s only a child. Taka’s right. Even if he is an Aizu, he’s an honest lad. Your father would agree we should be charitable.’

Taka could tell by the faraway look on her mother’s face that
she
was thinking of Ryutaro. He would have been only a few years older than Nobu when he died. The firstborn, Ryutaro had been their mother’s favourite. Taka had hardly known him. By the time she was old enough to remember, their father had sent for him, and she was only eight when news came that he’d been killed in one of the last great battles of the civil war. Geishas were used to giving up their sons and were expected to be proud when they died in battle, but for their mother his death had come as a terrible blow.

‘Ryutaro would say so too,’ Taka said firmly. She knew how to win her over.

Fujino nodded. ‘Leave him alone, Eijiro,’ she said. ‘You’re not dismissing any of the servants without very good reason.’ She sniffed quietly and dabbed her eyes with her sleeve.

Eijiro scowled. ‘I’ll find one.’ His brow darkened and he turned on his heel and left.

Taka allowed herself a smile of victory. She didn’t know why she’d championed Nobu so vigorously. Perhaps it was because Eijiro was set against him and anything Eijiro opposed she defended. Or perhaps it was because Nobu was young, like her, and she could see how hard his life was, much harder than hers. She was just a thirteen-year-old girl, she didn’t have any power at all, but she knew unfairness when she saw it. If she caught Eijiro bullying him she’d stand up for him, she told herself. Eijiro might be out to cause Nobu trouble but she could be just as stubborn. She vowed to herself that from that moment on she would do all she could to protect him.

4

IN THE DAYS
and weeks that followed, everyone was so busy preparing for Haru’s wedding that even Eijiro had no time to worry about the new servant.

Once again New Year came early, when there was still snow on the ground, long before the first aubergine-coloured buds brightened the gnarled branches of the plum trees. Taka tried to forget that this was the last New Year she and her sister would ever spend together. They played the poem card game and the flower card game and Haru won every time. And so began the 7th year of Meiji, a wood dog year, 1874 by the new calendar.

One spring day, a couple of months later, when the cherry trees were coming into bud, Haru stepped into her wedding palanquin. Taka had helped with her make-up and formal black kimono with the family crest on the sleeves and collar and thought she had never looked so lovely, like a porcelain doll. Once she was settled on her knees inside and the go-between, hairdresser, attendants, porters and trunks were all lined up, the bearers lifted the litter on to their shoulders and the procession set off. Taka and her mother and the maids and servants watched from the gate as the line of people grew smaller and smaller until they disappeared under the trees. Tears ran down Taka’s cheeks and she could hear her mother sniffing. Haru wasn’t going far – her new family lived in Tokyo, close to the imperial palace – but she wouldn’t be able to come back to visit until her mother-in-law allowed her to.

A few days later a letter arrived. Taka read it over her mother’s
shoulder
. ‘Greetings,’ Haru had written. ‘I hope you are keeping well in this changeable weather. Just to let you know that I am in good health and fine spirits. The Fukuda family take care of me and my husband is kind.’ The letter ended, ‘I am very busy about the house and grateful to my mother-in-law for her patience in enduring my stupidity and clumsiness. Your daughter, Haru.’

Tears came to Taka’s eyes, thinking of Haru, dear Haru, in a house among strangers. She must be so lonely. Taka sighed. Soon she too would be writing just such a letter, full of empty phrases, giving away nothing, for soon she too would be sent to another house.

The cherry trees in the gardens were heavy with blossom when Fujino announced that some of her geisha friends were coming to visit the following day. A famous dance master was in town and he was going to teach them some new dances and then they would have a tea ceremony and a meal.

‘Don’t bother us,’ she told Taka. ‘Take care of yourself for a few hours when you get back from school.’

Next day Taka was up well before dawn. The sky was streaked with pink and the air was fresh when she came out of the house and saw Nobu standing beside the rickshaw, holding her books and lacquered lunch box. Washed and shaved and with his hair oiled into a topknot, wearing the striped robe and narrow sash her mother had given him, he looked really distinguished. All the girls at school had footmen to carry their books but theirs were stunted, bandy-legged Edo lads, like Gonsuké, the rickshaw boy. None was handsome like Nobu. As Taka climbed in and they set off, rattling and bouncing along, she looked back at Nobu running behind in the dust. It seemed terrible that he would never have the chance to go to school himself.

The school Taka went to was in a building that had been a Buddhist temple, with dark corridors running alongside musty rooms where girls sat on their knees at low desks, studying in the faint light that glimmered through the paper shoji screens.

Most girls, as Taka’s mother regularly reminded her, were just taught the basic alphabet and a few
kanji
characters and had to learn by heart books such as
The Greater Learning for Women, The Classic of Filial Piety
and
One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets
before being sent off to needlework school at the age of thirteen to learn to make clothes. The theory was that girls were simple-minded creatures, weak of body and weak of mind, who didn’t need to be able to read or write much more than the slip to tell the dyer how to colour the yarn. But Taka’s was a school for the daughters of the elite. They had to learn seven to eight thousand
kanji
characters so that they would be fully literate. They studied poetry-writing, arithmetic and the use of the abacus, memorized the Confucian and other classics and even learned English, all subjects usually restricted to boys.

Taka knew how privileged she was to be going to such a special school. But as the rickshaw boy lowered the shafts she felt a rising sense of panic, as she did every day. She went in, turned her wooden nameplate face up, helped unstack the desks and took her place with her writing box in front of her, but she still had a gnawing sense of foreboding.

Most of the girls were of samurai stock, the daughters of her father’s colleagues. While Taka had spent her early years learning to be a geisha, they had been studying reading and writing and samurai arts like horse-riding and sparring with the halberd, the women’s weapon. Taka had soon discovered that singing and dancing were skills practised by vulgar townswomen or, worse still, geishas, who were so low class they didn’t even feature in the class system. Such skills were certainly not practised by well-brought-up samurai girls, who wouldn’t have dreamed of behaving like performing monkeys, which was what they considered entertainers to be. Taka had done all she could to lose her Kyoto accent and geisha ways, but it didn’t matter. Everyone knew perfectly well that her mother was a geisha.

While her father, the famous General Kitaoka, had been in town, no one had said a word, added to which Haru was so cool
and
dignified that no one would have dared question her samurai credentials. But now everything had changed. Taka had thought that, with Haru gone, she might make friends at school, but she was too different from the others.

The day began with morning recitation, in which the girls all read aloud at the tops of their voices. They all read different passages, whatever they were working on, so there was quite a noise. Then came writing practice. The teacher brushed a character for Taka and she wrote it again and again till she’d mastered it, then moved on to the next. Her hands were soon covered in ink.

That day they started on a classic text. The others all read confidently but when it came to Taka’s turn she was stumbling.

Later, as they collected their books to go home and ran up and down, sweeping the classroom, the girls were talking about the cherry blossoms that hung low over the streets and temple grounds.

‘We’re taking a picnic and going cherry-blossom viewing tomorrow,’ said tall, slender Ohisa. She carried herself with an aristocratic air and was so fashionable she wore western clothes even to school.

‘Yes, today’s the day,’ said short, bespectacled Yuki. ‘My mother says the cherry blossoms are at their height.’

‘Wasn’t there a song about cherry blossom?’ asked Ohisa, glancing round at Taka. Taka smiled and nodded, pleased to be included in the conversation, and hummed ‘Sakura, Sakura’, the famous song that the geishas sang at this season, letting her hands rise and fall to the rhythm of the tune. She half thought the others would join in but instead they stared at her and burst out laughing. Too late she realized she’d fallen into a trap.

‘You would know it, wouldn’t you?’ said Ohisa, drawling out each word in slow deliberate tones. ‘What did they say your mother was? A geisha, wasn’t it?’

Taka fell silent and dropped her head. She’d been shown up for the fake she was. Cheeks burning, still smarting from the sting of the words, she ran out to the rickshaw, her eyes brimming with
tears
. Even the sight of Nobu waiting there with Gonsuké couldn’t lighten her mood.

Back home, her mother’s party was in full swing. The tinkle of shamisens and the geishas’ shrill laughter made Taka feel a hundred times worse. She swung on her heel and headed out into the grounds. She would walk under the cherry trees. That might make her feel better.

She heard her maid Okatsu’s high-pitched voice behind her. ‘Madam, madam, where are you going? It’ll be dark soon. There might be snakes or foxes. You can’t walk alone.’

‘Walk with me then.’

Taka’s mother’s voice floated out from the house. ‘Okatsu, where are you? I need you, right now.’

There was silence. Taka was already well away from the house. Okatsu’s voice rang out. ‘Nobu, you lazy fellow. What are you doing? Go with the young mistress.’

Feet came running after her. She paid no attention.

In the five or six years they’d lived there Taka had explored every corner of the estate. It was huge, like a chunk of countryside on the edge of the city, large enough to get completely lost in. It took an army of gardeners to keep it all in perfect shape. Parts were landscaped, modelled after scenic places in Japan, complete with hills and lakes, arbours, bridges and winding paths, with stone lanterns and teahouses cunningly tucked away so that the stroller came upon them unexpectedly, with a pleasing sense of surprise. Other parts were deliberately left wild. At the back of the grounds paths led past bamboo groves into woodland. Pale pink cherry blossom drifted like snow, forming piles along the paths and heaping up against rocks and tree trunks.