Afterword

BUT IF, IN LESS THAN AN HOUR, they could eat and sleep and bathe, think what the coming days and weeks and months could do.

Lord Okubo was so moved by Manzo’s words on behalf of his brother that he went with them the next morning to meet their father, not only in order to praise his sons, but to offer to pay for the repairs to their wagon. And when he returned to the inn he ordered the innkeeper’s corpse removed to the garden, in preparation for his funeral pyre. It had been a bad business, and he wondered at his surprising optimism. He continued to believe it had something to do with the omen of the crows, but more to do with the incredible sleep he had enjoyed. So though he still mourned Einosuke, would never forget such a good and filial son, he could not help wishing he’d had a chance to properly thank Kyuzo, too, for he finally understood that Kyuzo was the real “Kambei” in their midst, the last of the great samurai warriors. He intended to have Kyuzo’s ashes interred at the inn as well, but Tsune insisted that he send them to Kyoto. “In the rain near Nijo Castle, under the falling wisteria” had not, after all, been a call to self-destruction, but directions to the family burial site.

By the time Kyuzo’s ashes got there the wisteria were in full bloom, and rain, at that time of year, was common.

ONE MIGHT THINK that Commodore Perry would have worried over the fact that while two minstrels left him only one came back, but in truth he hardly noticed, for on the day of Ace’s return, April 24,1854, two Japanese stowaways were discovered on board the fleet ship Mississippi, and he had to decide whether or not to honor their requests for political asylum. And a few days later, when a sailor by the name of G. W. Parish plunged to his death from the top of a mast, he never gave the minstrels another thought. He was simply too busy, and, like Keiki and Ichiro, it was not in his makeup to think about the past.

For a time after the American departure Ned and O-bata stayed in Shimoda. They were married in a Buddhist ceremony at Rendaiji Temple, near that monk’s tomato garden, and she bore him two children in eighteen months. A few years later, when peasants were finally allowed surnames, they took the name “Maki,” and had five more children who gained musical reputations, first locally, then throughout the land. One of Ned’s great-grandchildren, in fact, immigrated to California in the 1920s, where he had a son who came back to Japan before World War II, with an American jazz band. That, however, is another story.

And for the rest, as well, life was indelibly altered. Ichiro went to work for the innkeeper’s widow, quitting the samurai life and, some years later, allowing himself to be adopted by her. He hung his sword on that crossbeam, next to the innkeeper’s. He still loved Keiko, and sometimes went to Edo to court her, but Keiko declined to take him as a lover. She stayed single for a decade after her father’s death—eschewing even dancing—until continuing to do so began to hinder Masako’s chances to find a good match. And then she married without complaint, to someone chosen for her, after careful investigation, by her mother and her Uncle Manjiro.

Momo and Manzo, in the meantime, formed the Shimoda Marine Waste Company, and thrived.

ALL OF THIS OCCURRED, or began to occur, within days of Commodore Perry’s departure, but what happened to Manjiro and Tsune and Fumiko, and to Ace Bledsoe, as well, took longer.

Immediately after he left Japan Ace grew reclusive again, for when he’d agreed so readily to come ashore he’d been sure that this would be his story, and it wasn’t. He gave up music much like Keiko gave up dance, and returned to his father’s Pennsylvania farm. Ace had never met John Brown, but he’d read about him, and by early 1857 began frequenting abolitionist meetings where Brown’s name came up. He didn’t speak at those meetings, or otherwise involve himself, until one morning when he found two runaway slave girls sleeping in his barn. He knelt to watch them—the nearest one lovely, the farther one not—and by the time they awoke and clung to each other he had decided to offer his help. A month later he did it again, this time for an entire family, and by the beginning of 1858 he had finally found his passion, the authentic society of his contemporaries. He didn’t worry, this time, about whether or not it was the truly portentous story of his life, perhaps because it was.

In Edo, during those same years, Manjiro was busy learning Einosuke’s old job, as his father’s representative to the Great Council. At first he had difficulty outliving his reputation—to some he would always be a troublemaker, to others a hero named Kambei—but Lord Abe, whose censure had been temporary, needed his language skills and praised him publicly once or twice, and soon talk of what had happened began to die down. He lived in the remodeled Edo house with Fumiko and Keiko and Junichiro, though Masako had found her own life’s path by then, and spent most of her time at her master’s studio, carving Noh masks. She had first gotten the idea from seeing Ned’s nose.

Lord Okubo went to Edo frequently, and when it became clear to him that a match between Manjiro and Tsune was no longer favored by Lord Tokugawa, or even by the principals themselves, he began, ever so slyly, to encourage a union between Manjiro and Fumiko. Such an idea distressed them both at first, but by about the time Ace joined John Brown’s army, crossing the Mason-Dixon line to occupy the United States Armory at Harper’s Ferry, they came to terms with it.

Manjiro and Fumiko were married on October 17,1859, five and a half years after Einosuke’s death and the very day that Ace emptied his rifle into the American militia, and died. Fumiko thought of him that day, briefly wondering what had happened to him. She thought of Einosuke, too, of course, but the match she had hoped to find as a girl, the man she had hoped to marry, that kindred spirit, that jibun no ki no atta hito, slept beside her on her futon that night, and for every night thereafter for the rest of her life.

Tsune never married but stayed near Keiki, advising him as his star began to rise. She took lovers often, never Keiki himself, and never again Manjiro, but always older men, like Kyuzo. She seemed able to visit the Edo house with the same ease of spirit she had always had, an impunity at which the others marveled. She was a good sister to Fumiko, a welcome sister-in-law to Manjiro, and an excellent aunt, not only to Einosuke’s three children, but to the two new babies that arrived.

And when Keiki finally did fulfill his father’s greatest wish, by being adopted into a hereditary family and becoming the last Japanese Shogun, Tsune, for a time, was the most powerful woman in all of Japan.

That was not for another decade, though, and in the intervening years she visited the inn in Shimoda each April, to walk in the garden and mourn Kyuzo. It was easier and more appropriate than going to Kyoto.

Both the inn and the bath are still there today, by the way, in the heart of Rendaiji Village, a forty-five-minute walk up the Inozawa River from the bay.