40.
The Wind and Intransigence

UNLIKE KEIKI, who had come down from Edo in a large and excellent navel vessel, Kyuzo, accompanied by his new apprentice, Ichiro, had traveled to Shimoda in a terrible open boat and ridden ashore in a barge with a dozen bedraggled and penniless samurai. There were other boats by the hundreds on the bay around them, small ones and large ones crowded with curious onlookers. The American fleet stood three hundred feet off shore, anchored with a majesty more likely to be attached to a visiting city—Ned’s image had been right!—than to any of the ships the Japanese were used to seeing.

Before leaving Odawara Kyuzo had had a short meeting with Lord Okubo, and an even shorter one with his beloved Tsune. Lord Okubo had told him that at all costs he must appear business-like, even cordial, to Ueno should he find him. He should do nothing to exact revenge in the Okubo family name, but only look about smartly and collect information that might be helpful to them in the coming fight. And Tsune had told him that he should go immediately to Rendaiji Temple, find Keiki and retrieve that marriage proposal, which might, she believed, still solve everything.

It was late afternoon when they arrived, and men with government crests on their robes chatted and laughed, going in and out of bars and greeting each other far more cordially than they ever would have done in Edo.

“It’s a throwback to the old days,” Kyuzo said. “Would you look at these guys? They act like everyone in Japan is fully employed, like nothing’s changed since the days of Tokugawa Ieyasu.”

They had left the waterfront and were standing at the intersection of two streets, under brightly colored banners. The same wind that had battered their boat on its way down from Odawara was snapping the banners, making sounds like small-calibre pistol shots. Both men were hungry and would not have refused a few cups of saké to settle their stomachs, but Ichiro’s hair had come undone during the voyage and he wanted to step in somewhere first and have it combed, so he wouldn’t have to greet Keiki looking bad. His hair was thick and full, with no part of his head shaved, as was the fashion. Kyuzo’s hair, by contrast, had thinned over the years, yet somehow rode the wind as if it were sculpted out of stone. He cuffed Ichiro’s cheek and said, “I don’t know why we have such difficult styles. When you first saw the Americans did you not notice the efficient shortness of their hair? That’s what I will do if I survive this current trouble. Wear an American hair style!”

Ichiro laughed but kept his eye out for a barber’s sign and, luckily enough, found one before Kyuzo could locate a noodle shop. “It will only take a minute,” he said.

Kyuzo, who for some reason counted barbering among the merchant endeavors he did not quite approve of, nodded but said he would wait outside. The wind wasn’t pushing him anymore, yet across the street he noticed others struggling along one way or another, either leaning into it or trying to keep it from making them run. He saw that he was standing in the lee of two low walls, in a lull like a ship sometimes finds in the trough of a wave. When he put his hand up he could feel his fingers reenter the wind and begin to wiggle of their own accord, like his father’s had during the last few days of his life. He pulled his hand down to make his fingers stop and up again to make them wiggle, down and up twice more. He nodded, as if some previously muddled thought had finally come clear, something he had intended to tell Ichiro during their talk at Odawara Castle, and opened the door to the barbershop.

“Listen, Ichiro,” he said, “there is little we can do about anything. I may be able to defeat you because I am a better swordsman, just as you may be able to cut down another, but that means nothing because the scale we are using, the scope of our thinking, is too small. Let me try to cut this wind out here and it will simply blow against the sharpness of my sword and go around. These fools walking across the street are helpless because they don’t have a wall.”

Ichiro wasn’t alone in the barbershop. Two mid-level bureaucrats were there too, and he was just then sitting down to get his hair combed. Kyuzo’s face in the doorway, the poor condition of his clothing, plus the outright oddness of his comment, all served to make the others wary. No one spoke, however, until the barber asked him to close the door.

“Come in if you like,” he said, “but that wind you mentioned is capricious and might decide to blow dirt into my store.”

The bureaucrats laughed nervously for they knew from experience that masterless samurai could be as capricious as any wind, and they saw no crests on Kyuzo’s clothing that would indicate his attachment to anyone.

“I’m making a serious point,” Kyuzo said, but he did come in and close the door. The barber had Ichiro’s hair out of its ties and hanging down to his shoulders. The barber was about to tell him that combing it without first giving it a much-needed wash was a waste of time, but Kyuzo’s entrance made him forget to say it.

The bureaucrats, both of whom had finished, were simply hanging around. They had come into the barbershop because they were expected to perform official duties first thing in the morning, and they were a little drunk, having just departed a party. One of the bureaucrats lived in Shimoda and was in charge of rice taxation on local peasants, while the other, who was his cousin, had the duty of vetting that taxation on behalf of the Shogunate. The happy coincidence of their employment meant that they were able to meet whenever the vetting cousin came from Edo. A second happy coincidence was that this time they would have the pleasure of observing the official arrival of the Americans.

What they should have done was simply excuse themselves and go home, but something he heard in the barber’s tone when telling Kyuzo to close his door emboldened the bureaucrat from Edo, who, as too often happened, had been looking for a way to show off his superior sophistication to his cousin. He was wearing a sword, this Edo man, but in his case it was strictly ornamental. He put a hand on his cousin’s arm, to properly get his attention, before walking straight up to Kyuzo.

“A man should speak sensibly,” he said, “and what you said just now made no sense at all.”

He used a rude form of speech, but Kyuzo was trying to hold onto his point about the wind and didn’t hear it.

“Wait a minute,” he answered, gesturing vaguely toward the bureaucrat, “I want to remember what I was going to say to this young man.”

The bureaucrat looked over his shoulder, made a face at everyone, and said, “Maybe you were going to offer to cut his hair with your sword.”

It was a boorish kind of comment, embarrassing to his cousin and not very clever as an insult, and he had used rude speech a second time, no doubt because he had gotten away with it in the first place. He looked at his cousin as if to say, “See how times have changed? We often act with such impunity in Edo.”

Ichiro sat up and the barber stepped back out of his way, but the bureaucrat’s voice was no more than an irritating fly buzz to Kyuzo, who, though he had lost a little speed over the years, still had excellent powers of concentration.

“Ichiro,” he said. “Can you imagine cutting the wind with your sword? You cannot imagine, can you, that such a thing could possibly have any value?”

He looked up to hear Ichiro’s answer, but the bureaucrat stood between them.

“I can imagine cutting wind with my ass,” he said. “Can you imagine that?”

“What?” Kyuzo asked. “I beg your pardon?”

Even then, however, he was not so much offended as surprised. He had tried to look nondescript in order to do the work Lord Okubo had assigned him, but he glanced down at himself to see if maybe his bad dress and generally humble appearance were even worse than he thought. His kimono was brown and without markings, his leggings dirty and wet, yet otherwise he did not think he looked so disgraceful as to spawn words of outright insult.

“Say it again, sir,” he told the bureaucrat, “I’m not sure I heard you right.”

He spoke politely and with his forehead furrowed, as if he really did believe the fault could only reside with himself.

The Shimoda cousin took a step forward and bowed. “It was just a poor joke, sir,” he said, “a play on words that didn’t quite work out.”

Had Kyuzo known the men were cousins, one local and the other an Edo-ite, he might have deduced everything and stepped aside. And even as it was he remembered that he was supposed to be circumspect, that his and Ichiro’s mission to gather information would not be furthered by a public fight. But the more he looked into the Edo bureaucrat’s eyes, the less inclined he was to pretend it had all been a misunderstanding.

“Please…” the barber started to say, but everyone knew the next move was Kyuzo’s.

“I was thinking about man’s true weakness in the face of the larger elements,” he told his opponent. “The wind was my example but it could as easily have been earth or fire or water. Or it might have been something more intrinsically human like love for a beautiful woman or intransigence. Anyway, however obvious my observation might be to an established man like yourself, I wanted to point out to Ichiro here, while he is still young enough to care for such things, just how insubstantial we are in the face of real power.”

His voice was soft and his words had the odd quality of acceding to and enjoining the Edo bureaucrat at the same time. That is, the man could take it as an explanation or a lesson, the first if he was dead-hearted enough to believe his bluster had cowed Kyuzo, the second if beneath his outer layers of laziness and fat there was still something uncontaminated. Either way Kyuzo seemed to have avoided what he could not allow: an escalation of the argument.

Everyone saw it except the Edo bureaucrat. Ichiro watched with earnest eyes and the barber nodded, and the Shimoda cousin tried to prompt their leaving by rattling the barbershop door. He even said, “I used to think that everyone wanted success. That each man, whatever his station, wanted to be looked up to by some, while at the same time having a larger pool of others to look down upon. But I don’t believe I think so anymore.”

Kyuzo bowed at this, and gave the man a smile. The Edo man, however, seemed not only not to have heard his cousin, but to be on the edge of another insult. He opened his mouth with a quickness, at least, that usually meant unthoughtful words would fall out. But then he closed it again and his features seemed to alter.

“Did you say intransigence?” he asked Kyuzo. “Surely you don’t believe that such things as intransigence are part of nature?”

Kyuzo nodded. “Societies have natures, and if men make them up then men do, also. A man’s nature is as difficult to change, sometimes, as the flow of any river.”

Now the Shimoda cousin grasped the bureaucrat’s arm, and when he felt it he finally understood that in the eyes of this cousin intransigence was one of his great faults. And suddenly, quite as if he’d been caught by a shopkeeper sucking an unpurchased sweet, he felt sorry for it. It wasn’t the first time he had felt this way, too much drink often made him maudlin, but he could not remember when such feelings had struck him simply by listening to the words of some badly dressed stranger, some nameless old man. And, oh yes, the words of his cousin, as well.

“Let’s go, Kiku,” he told his cousin. “Let’s go back to your house.”

His voice was defeated, but his cousin was delighted by it and bowed his thanks to Kyuzo. Kiku! Chrysanthemum! It was the first time the Edo cousin had called him by his childhood nickname in a decade and a half.

When they were gone the barber turned back to Ichiro’s hair, which was in tangles and had to be wetted and combed out again before it could be put into its topknot. So Kyuzo followed the men out into the street to stand between those two walls again and watch them go. Kiku’s arm was across his cousin’s shoulder and both men bent forward, though the wind had lessened and another drizzly rain had begun.

The nearby businesses were shutting down, their outside lanterns dimmed, but the bars and noodle shops were thriving. Kyuzo could hear doors opening and closing, laughter modulated by it like the waves on the beach below. It was the beginning of an evening of storytelling and gaiety. “The American ships are here,” he heard someone say, “like giant black boulders, right out there in the harbor!”

He thought of the lines given him in Edo recently by his dead father’s ghost, “In the rain near Nijo Castle, under the falling wisteria,” and suddenly he wanted to take part in the festivities, to have one last joyous evening among strangers, before the trouble started again and those lines came home to roost.

And so, with that in mind, and with a sense of magnanimity as well, he took the barber’s lantern from its place by the door, killed its flame with his fingers, and went back inside to hurry Ichiro along.

“The bars are filling fast,” he said, “let’s go. The three of us. Now is not a time to think about class. Men of various backgrounds must learn to get along!”

The barber smiled at that, said he knew the best bars in Shimoda, not only those with the prettiest geisha, but also with the best singers, and Ichiro was happy for he believed what Kyuzo, in his deepest heart, even though he had just paid lip service to it, did not; that something had to change in this ridiculous and unnecessary warrior class to which they both belonged. Maybe by turning samurai into merchants and businessmen, by making them innkeepers and traders, scholars and shipping executives, builders and scientists and yes, even barbers, maybe by giving up something that had been begging to be given up for more than two hundred years, they could still somehow save their country from these invaders!

Maybe so. For the moment, however, all such a mood accomplished was a night of happy revelry, the result of which was that they fell into drunken slumber at the barber’s house, and didn’t arrive at the temple where Keiki awaited them, himself hung over from the cheap planting wine, until the middle of the following afternoon.