The Last Concubine Read Free Page A

summon him for a chat, though no one ever forgot the huge discrepancy in rank. Jiroemon knew very well that, as far as they were concerned, he was a mere rustic, though a clever one.
    A couple of times Jiroemon himself had been up to Edo, that fabled metropolis in the Musashi plain, a fourteen day tramp through the mountains. He brought back startling news. Some eight years earlier, four Black Ships, iron-clad monsters bristling with cannons and spouting smoke and steam, had appeared on the horizon and dropped anchor on the coast near Shimoda. Soon afterwards a succession of disasters had occurred – violent earthquakes and tidal waves – and a comet had appeared in the sky, clearly presaging doom.
    The ships had disgorged a delegation of barbarians. Jiroemon had not seen any himself but he had been told they had huge noses and coarse pallid skin covered in red fur and stank of the dead animals they ate. They had not only placed their impure feet on Japan’s sacred soil but insisted that they intended to stay and set up trading stations.
    The travellers who passed through Jiroemon’s inn had made it frighteningly clear that the country was in crisis. Only the previous spring, rumours had come winging down the valley that Lord Ii Naosuké, the Great Counsellor and iron-handed ruler of the country, had been cut down right outside the gates of Edo Castle, the shogun’s residence. Some of the assassins were samurai from Mito, the domain of one of the most powerful and high-ranking princes in the country, a blood relation of the shogun. Others were from the wild southern domain of Satsuma, one of the shogun’s traditional enemies. Life for the villagers had always been hard, cruel and unfair; but at least they knew where they stood. Now they could not be sure of anything. They dreaded what might happen next. Old men muttered darkly that the world was mired in the Age of Mappo, the last age described in Buddhist scriptures. Perhaps the end was approaching.
    III
    The first year of Bunkyu – the year that would go down in history books as 1861 – was unusually cold. It was nearly barley-plantingtime but icicles still hung from the eaves, and only the most determined travellers came tramping along the snow-encrusted highway. Then one day the mail courier arrived, urging his horse through the mud and slush. He had a letter for Jiroemon from the district commissioners in charge of transport.
    Jiroemon broke the seal with trepidation, opened the box and unscrolled the letter. What new demands could they possibly have dreamed up now? He read it, scratched his head, then studied it until he could decipher the convoluted official language. The commissioners wished to notify him, as headman of the village, that Her Highness Princess Kazu, the emperor’s younger sister, would be passing along the Inner Mountain Road and through the village in the tenth month of that same year. He was to start preparations immediately.
    An imperial princess of the highest rank, the daughter of the late emperor and younger sister of the Son of Heaven, passing through their village! Such a thing had never occurred before. Slipping and sliding on the icy paths, Jiroemon rushed back to the cramped quarters where the family lived, in a distant corner of the splendid inn where the daimyos stayed. Smoke swirled out as he slid open the door. Everyone was huddled around the hearth, waiting for him to come back.
    ‘I’ve never known such times, Mother, in all my years,’ he grunted as he burst into the room. He always called his wife, Otama, ‘ Kaachan ’, the affectionate rural term for ‘Mother’. His usually calm face was crumpled with worry, the furrows in his forehead deeper than ever and his black hair stuck out in tufts.
    The children’s grandmother ladled out a helping of gruel for him, then a second one. Her face was as brown and shrivelled as a walnut and her back bent double after a lifetime of hard work.
    ‘The road always overburdened, the