The Samurai's Daughter (7 page)

Taka kicked through the blossom sulkily, barely aware of Nobu following behind her. Now that she was supposed to be a samurai girl, she wasn’t allowed to mix with boys any more. But servants were different, they didn’t count as boys or men, they were another species.

‘I hate school,’ she said fiercely. She was well away from the
house
, tramping up the slope that led to the woods. She could see the trees ahead of her, an enticing tangle of foliage. A breeze rustled the leaves. ‘I’m never going back.’

‘You must.’ She turned in surprise. She hadn’t been expecting a reply. ‘It’s the only way you’ll learn. You’re so lucky to be going to school.’ Nobu stopped when she stopped, keeping a proper distance between them.

A wind had blown up and bats flittered under the trees. A bird sang out forlornly.

Taka looked at him appraisingly. He had dark intelligent eyes and a rather prominent, strangely aristocratic nose. He was a servant but not a servant. She couldn’t be sure where he belonged. The other servants would never understand what her life was like, but there was just a chance that he might.

She sighed. ‘All the others are good at history and arithmetic and know the classics. They’ve all been studying ever since they were little but all I did was learn to sing and dance and play the shamisen. When my father was here they kept their mouths shut but now he’s gone they don’t care. Today we started
The Tale of the Heike
. Everyone knew it except me. They were whispering behind their hands, laughing every time I made a mistake. And then … And then …’ She couldn’t bear to recount the humiliation of how she’d forgotten herself and begun to sing and dance. Her eyes filled with tears.

There was a silence, then Nobu murmured something. At first Taka didn’t catch his words. His voice was so soft she hardly heard him. Then she realized what he was saying. ‘ “The Gion Temple bells toll the impermanence of all things; the sala flowers beside the Buddha’s deathbed bear testimony to the fact that all who flourish must decline. The proud do not endure, they vanish like a spring night’s dream. The mighty fall at last like dust before the wind.”’ He was reciting the first lines of
The Tale of the Heike
, the ancient epic that she’d been struggling with that morning. She stopped, hardly daring to breathe, waiting for him to continue.

He didn’t repeat mechanically, by rote, as they had at school. They were not just characters to be learned. He spoke with feeling, as if the words were wrenched from his soul. Suddenly, for the first time, Taka understood the meaning. ‘The mighty fall at last …’ Now she and her people were the mighty ones, but once, maybe, Nobu’s had been. In any case, all were destined to fall at last ‘like dust before the wind’.

The faint notes of shamisens and the sound of singing drifted across from the house on the other side of the grounds.

‘How do you know that?’ she asked, astonished.

He scowled and hung his head. ‘I learned it when I was little.’

‘You mean … you can read?’

His scowl deepened. ‘I haven’t studied for years. I just remembered it.’

Taka stared at him, her heart touched. He was probably a couple of years older than her, tall and gangly with dark hair sprouting on his cheeks. He shifted from foot to foot. There was so much she wanted to know about him – about his life, his childhood. But now that Eijiro had told her he was an Aizu she hardly dared ask. She felt he had a dark secret she ought not to probe.

She remembered when he first came to their rescue. He had seemed part of another world. Now he was just one of the servants, yet she could see that, like her, he was different. She was different from the other girls, he was different from the other servants. She chewed her lower lip thoughtfully.

‘I’m so behind,’ she said. ‘Will you help me? I need to practise my writing. Why don’t we find somewhere to sit and I’ll show you the characters I learned today.’

She didn’t want him to feel patronized. He seemed so touchy, she knew it would be all too easy to offend him. She had the feeling he’d just disappear one day. He’d flit away and be gone and no one would know where he was, they’d simply never see him again.

He looked at her and his face lit up. She could see his black eyes
shining
in the gloom. He was completely transformed. Then he frowned. ‘But it’s wrong for you to be alone with me. I’m a man.’

‘I’m allowed to be with servants.’ They both knew that wasn’t quite true. Again she was afraid she’d offended him but he didn’t seem to notice. ‘Come. I’ll show you my secret place.’

Taka led the way, pushing aside branches and brambles and stepping over fallen tree trunks. Deep in the woods there was a hidden grove where she and Haru used to play. They’d dragged out logs to sit on and made a little roof to creep under when it rained.

They sat side by side on a tree trunk. Taka cleared away pebbles and gravel and smoothed out a patch of ground while Nobu sharpened a stick.

‘Write “man”,’ Taka said. It was best to start at the beginning.

Now he really was offended. ‘Every child knows that,’ he snorted. He drew two strokes on the ground to make a stick body above a pair of forked legs.

‘Now “big”.’

He smoothed out the ground, then drew another stick man with an extra horizontal stroke like arms stretched out.

‘“Mother”.’ He frowned. A shadow crossed his face as he bent and wrote the character. They went on till they came to one he didn’t know.

‘ “Purity”.’ She wrote it for him then he copied it, writing it again and again, stroke by stroke. They did ten new characters then she tested him on the first one. By now it was so dark they could barely see the characters scratched on the ground.

Taka jumped up, suddenly aware that they would both be in dreadful trouble if they were found out. Nobu would be in more trouble than her. He might be beaten or dismissed or worse.

‘We must go.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘For helping me.’ She flushed, aware of his eyes on her. As they scrambled through the bushes and ran back to the house she realized she hadn’t felt so happy since Haru had left.

That evening she sorted through her books. There were simplified versions of the classics – the poems of Ariwara no Narihira,
The Tale of Genji, Yamato Library: Teaching One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets
and
Crimson Brocade: A Great Treasury of One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets
. There were books listing the eight celebrated landscapes with the poems associated with each, including Narihira’s famous poem on Mount Fuji. Then there was
A Japanese Fabric of Selected Practices for Women, Old Courtly Practices for Women: A Thin Pocketbook
and
A Treasury of Precepts for Women
. She picked out the ones she’d finished with, that she thought would be the most useful. Then she dug out a spare writing set – an ink block, stick of ink, water dropper and brushes – and a new workbook. She was already planning a whole learning programme for him.

The problem would be to get him away from the other servants and out of her mother and Eijiro’s sight so she could teach him. She knew her mother would never approve and Eijiro would be outraged if he found out. Taking a servant away from his work, spending time alone with a young man – it was utterly scandalous. It would be Nobu who would suffer. Eijiro would beat him or dismiss him, maybe even kill him. He was a mere servant, their property, Eijiro could do as he pleased with him.

She gazed thoughtfully at the screens painted with landscapes and birds and animals that formed the walls of the room, at the oil lamps glimmering inside their shades, at her small writing desk piled with books she’d chosen, at the alcove with a few flowers casually arranged in a vase and a scroll hanging behind on the wall, at the delicate shelves and great wooden chests, at the tobacco box and the brazier with the kettle on its iron hook hanging above it and the teapot and cups on the edge, at her own shadow moving fitfully with every breeze that shivered the lantern flames.

Then she started to smile. Okatsu. That was it. She would take her maid, Okatsu, into her confidence. Okatsu would be their chaperone. She could always say she needed Nobu to help her
with
such and such a task. She was a resourceful girl, she’d think of something. Best of all, Taka knew her brother had a soft spot for Okatsu. If anyone could twist him round her little finger, she could. She could keep an eye out and distract him if he started asking questions or nosing around.

Taka knew she was breaking all the rules but that only made it all the more thrilling, most of all the fact she was defying Eijiro. She was full of excitement. She had a project at last.

5

SUMMER WAS AT
its height, when people ate oily dishes like grilled eel and braised aubergine and kept cool by going to the kabuki theatre to watch gruesome ghost stories that sent shivers down their spines. The servants had taken out the wooden rain doors that formed the walls of the house and the painted fusuma doors between the rooms, turning the mansion into a vast pavilion floored with cool tatami smelling faintly of rice straw, with nothing but slender wooden pillars to mark where one room ended and the next began. From time to time a breeze wafted through. Fujino lounged inside, mopping her brow and flapping her fan.

Nobu was out in the grounds, helping the gardeners put up a trellis to support the overgrown branches of an ancient pine. The ear-splitting buzz of cicadas filled the air –
min mi min mi
droned from one tree,
wa wa, tsuku tsuku
from another. He took off the rolled-up towel he’d wrapped around his head and wrung it out, sending sweat splashing on to the dusty ground. He’d knotted his happi coat around his waist and pine needles scratched his skin. Mosquitoes buzzed around his face.

He hummed as he tied the bamboo frame in place and looped rice-straw ropes around the branches. He was happy, happier than he’d ever been since he left his home country. He’d found a new home. Fujino was kind to him, the other servants were friendly and he had a roof over his head and decent clothes to wear. Above all he was studying. His reading and writing were coming on apace.

Whenever Okatsu had a chance, late in the afternoon when Taka was back from school and Nobu was in the kitchens or sweeping the gardens, she would appear and say, ‘Nobu, we need to pick something for dinner.’

Taka had discovered that Nobu knew all the wild plants that grew in the grounds. One day, not long after they began their studies, they’d sneaked off to the woods with their books. He kept half an eye on the ground, as he always did, looking out for edible roots, shoots, buds and leaves springing up in the moss and under the pines. They were stepping across the stream that meandered between the trees when he spotted a delicate beige shoot peeking out from the fringe of grass and wild plants along the edge.

He pushed the undergrowth aside, reached down to the base and snapped it off. It was moist and shiny with a honeycombed oval head and fronds around the tiny stem. He put it to his nose. The faint earthy smell reminded him of his northern home, of saucepans simmering on the soot-blackened stove. He held it out to Taka, beaming as he looked around and saw tiny pale shoots poking up everywhere.

‘Horsetail shoots! I didn’t know they grew here. We must get something to put them in. The cook can fry them up for dinner.’

Taka sniffed the frail stem then wrinkled her nose. He laughed aloud. ‘Up north we eat everything – fiddlehead ferns, coltsfoot, burdock, butterbur, there are so many delicious things that grow in the woods and mountains.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ she said with a giggle, looking at him wide-eyed.

He nodded as seriously as he could. ‘We eat bee grubs too, and locusts, and bear meat when the hunters manage to catch one and bring some back.’ He licked his lips at the thought. ‘But that’s for special occasions. Of all the spring foods, horsetail shoots are the best. You sauté them with soy sauce and a bit of sake. They’re really tasty. We’ll need lots.’

They went back to the house for containers and later in the day
brought
a basketful back to the cook. He was soon eagerly experimenting.

Okatsu was put in charge of finding wild vegetables and Nobu went with her because only he could identify them.

It was the perfect excuse. Nobu and Taka would meet in their secret place in the woods and sit side by side to pore over their books. There were always new characters to learn and text to read. Taka was a strict teacher, testing him and telling him off when he forgot something.

Whenever he had a spare moment he’d practise the latest characters, scratching them on the ground when he was working in the gardens then quickly smoothing them over, writing them with his finger on his hand again and again as he cleaned the house. At night in the servants’ quarters he’d take a lantern, bury his head under the bedclothes and work through the books Taka had given him. Even if it was instructions on how to be a good housewife, every new word added to his vocabulary.

He’d begun to discover there were things he could teach her too – old stories his mother had told him, tales from ancient history that she didn’t seem to know. And sometimes they just talked – about the house, the family, her teachers, her school, her hateful schoolmates, about history, geography, poetry, painting, the Chinese classics and the English books she was starting to read.

‘I’d like to be a poet or an artist or a scholar,’ she told him one day. They were sitting side by side, leaning against a tree. She wriggled closer to him and rested her shoulder against his arm. He sat as still as he could, feeling her warmth and smallness, her body touching his. ‘I can’t think of anything worse than to be sent off as a bride, like my sister Haru was,’ she whispered, looking up at him. ‘I’d rather stay here with you.’

And once, to his intense delight, she danced for him, singing softly, moving to her song, telling a story with her hands – reading an imaginary letter, wiping away imaginary tears. When he applauded she blushed and laughed and threw herself down next to him on the leaves.