Then, on the very day, the 15th, there was one more evil omen in addition to all the others. It was Etchū-no-kami’s custom on the 15th of every month to dress in linen ceremonial robes and, with his own hand, to offer sacred saké before the war god, Hachiman Daibosatsu. On that particular morning, however, after he had received the tray holding two round earthenware bottles of sacred saké from the hands of a page and turned to offer it up before the god, both bottles inexplicably toppled over, spilling their sacred contents. As might be expected, everyone in the room went pale.
When Etchū-no-kami proceeded to the Castle later that day accompanied by the Buddhist attendant Tashiro Yūetsu,14 he first entered the Great Hall. Soon afterward, however, he felt the need to move his bowels and, accompanied this time by another Buddhist attendant, Kuroki Kansai, he entered the privy beside the anteroom and relieved himself. He then emerged from the privy and was washing his hands in the dark lavatory when suddenly, from behind, some unknown person cried out and slashed at him with a sword. Taken off guard, he spun around and in that instant the sword flashed again, cutting him down the forehead. Blinded by his own blood, Etchū-nokami could not see the face of his attacker, who used this advantage to rain blow after blow on him. Etchū-no-kami stumbled out of the lavatory and collapsed on the veranda of Chamber Four, just off the hall. The attacker threw down his weapon—a short sword—and disappeared.
Meanwhile, the attendant who had accompanied Etchū-nokami to the privy, Kuroki Kansai, reacted to this unanticipated catastrophe with panic. He fled back to the Great Hall, and then went into hiding, as a result of which no one knew that Etchū-no-kami’s blood had been shed. The victim was finally found some time later by an officer of the Shōgunal guard named Homma Sadagorō, who was on his way from the guardroom to the servants’ quarters. Homma immediately informed the Castle foot patrol, and from that office rushed the chief patrolman, Kuge Zenbē, with such other foot patrolmen as Tsuchida Han’emon and Komoda Niemon. Then the entire castle erupted as if someone had broken open a hornet’s nest.
They lifted the wounded man from where he lay, but his face and body were so covered with blood that no one recognized him. Someone bent toward him and spoke into his ear until, at last, he replied in a feeble voice, “Hosokawa Etchū.”
“Who did this to you?”
His only reply was, “A man in formal dress,” which could have been any man allowed into the Castle. No further questions seemed to reach him. His wounds were recorded as, “Nape of the neck, 7 inches; left shoulder, 6–7 inches; right shoulder, 5 inches; 4–5 cuts on each hand; 2–3 cuts around the head: above the nose, beside the ear, top of the head; diagonal cut down the back to right flank, 1 foot 6 inches.” Attended not only by the duty inspectors, Tsuchiya Chōtarō and Hashimoto Awa-no-kami, but also the Chief Inspector, Kōno Buzen-nokami, the wounded man was carried to the Hearth Room. They set low screens around him and assigned five Buddhist attendants to watch over him, after which one Great Lord after another came from the Great Hall to tend to his needs. Matsudaira Hyōbushōyū treated him most tenderly of all as they were still carrying him in, such that all who witnessed this, it was said, could see the depth of his devotion.
The Senior and Junior Councilors having meanwhile been notified of the emergency, orders went out to lock every gate in the Castle to forestall any eventuality. The crowd of retainers who had accompanied their masters as far as the Great Main Gate saw the huge gate being closed and immediately assumed there was a crisis in the Castle. This set off a tremendous commotion, and though several inspectors came out to try to quiet the men down, time and again the crowd would surge toward the gate like a tsunami. The confusion inside the Castle continued to grow as well. Inspector Tsuchiya Chōtarō took a number of men with him from among the foot patrol and the fire watch. They searched everywhere, including all guard stations and even the kitchen, in a determined effort to find the attacker. They were, however, unable to discover the “man in formal dress.”
Rather than these men, the culprit was found by a Buddhist attendant named Takarai Sōga, much to everyone’s surprise. Sōga was a bold young fellow, and he went around searching in places that the group had ignored. When he peeked into the privy near the Hearth Room, he found there, crouching like a shadow, a man whose hair had come loose at the temples. Because it was dark inside, he could not be sure what he was seeing, but it looked as though the man had pulled a scissors from his leather pouch and was cutting the disordered locks. Sōga leaned into the privy and called out to the man:
“Sir… may I ask who you are?”
The man replied hoarsely, “I am a man who is cutting his hair15 because he has just killed someone.”
This left no room for doubt. Sōga immediately called for help and they pulled the man from the privy, entrusting him for the moment to the foot patrol.
The foot patrol in turn brought him to the Sago Palm Room, where the Chief Inspector and the other inspectors gathered and interrogated him about the bloody attack. All he did, however, was stare blankly at the Castle’s great commotion, offering no coherent reply. And when he did open his mouth, it was to say something about a cuckoo. Now and then his blood-stained hands would tear at the hair of his temples. Shuri had lost his mind.
Hosokawa Etchū-no-kami drew his last breath in the Hearth Room. By secret order of His Sequestered Lordship Yoshimune, he was removed from the Castle as having been “wounded,” his palanquin carried through the Middle Gate to the Hirakawa Gate. Formal announcement of his death did not come until the 21st of the month.
On the actual day of the murder, Shuri was put in the custody of Lord Mizuno Kenmotsu of Okazaki and removed from the Castle, also through the Middle Gate to the Hirakawa Gate, but in a palanquin covered with green netting and surrounded by fifty Mizuno foot soldiers. The men were uniformly dressed in brand-new dark-orange jackets and brand-new white breeches, and they carried brand-new poles, the ends of which they set on the ground with each step. The display was said to have won Kenmotsu praise as evidence that he was always well prepared for any eventuality.
Seven days later, on the 22nd of the month, acting as the envoy of the Shōgun, Chief Censor Ishikawa Tosa-no-kami read the official verdict to Shuri: “Although you are judged to have become mentally deranged, whereas Hosokawa Etchū-nokami died from the untreatable wounds you inflicted upon him, you are hereby ordered to commit seppuku in the residence of Mizuno Kenmotsu.”
Shuri sat formally on his heels in the presence of the envoy, but though he was presented with a short sword in the customary manner, his limp hands remained on his knees. When he made no move to lift the sword from its tray and slash himself across the belly, the Mizuno retainer assigned to second him, Yoshida Yasōzaemon, did what he had to do, lopping off Shuri’s head from behind. The cut could not have been more perfect, leaving a flap of skin at the throat so that the head did not drop to the ground. Yasōzaemon lifted the head and displayed it to the Shōgun’s official witness. With its high cheekbones and yellowed skin, the head was almost painful to look at. The eyes, of course, were not closed.
The witness examined the head and, smelling the blood, expressed his satisfaction to the swordsman: “An excellent cut.”
That same day, at the residence of Itakura Shikibu, Tanaka Usaemon was punished with strangulation. The bill of indictment against him read as follows: “Although Itakura Sado-nokami had expressly ordered Usaemon to enforce the domiciliary confinement of Shuri due to the latter’s illness, Usaemon, at his own discretion, allowed Shuri to enter the Castle, thus bringing about the present calamity, leading to the confiscation of Shuri’s 7,000- koku estate. This is an inexcusable offense.”
Needless to say, other Itakura relatives such as Itakura Suō-no-kami, Itakura Shikibu, Itakura Sado-no-kami, Sakai Saemon-no-jō, and Matsudaira Ukon Shōgen were ordered to undergo a period of house arrest. In addition, Kuroki Kansai, the Buddhist attendant who had abandoned Etchū-no-kami at the time of the attack, was deprived of his stip
end and banished from the capital.
Itakura Shuri might have killed Hosokawa Etchū-no-kami by mistake. The nine-circle crest on formal clothing of the Hosokawa family so closely resembled the nine-circle crest worn by members of the Itakura family that Shuri may have meant to kill Itakura Sado-no-kami. Precisely this kind of mistaken identity had occurred in the slashing of Mōri Mondo-no-shō by Mizuno Hayato-no-shō.16 Such an error would have been particularly easy to commit in the dark lavatory—or so went the most widely-held opinion at the time.
Only Itakura Sado-no-kami objected to this view. Whenever the subject came up, he would fume, “Shuri had absolutely no reason to kill me. He was a madman. He killed Etchū-no-kami for nothing at all. This wild speculation about a mistaken identity I find deeply offensive. How much more proof do you need that he was mad? What did he talk about when he appeared before the Chief Inspector? Cuckoos! Maybe he thought he was killing a cuckoo!”
(February 1917)
MODERN TRAGICOMEDY
THE STORY OF A HEAD THAT FELL OFF
1
Xiao-er threw his sword down and clutched at his horse’s mane, thinking I’m sure my neck’s been cut. No, perhaps the thought crossed his mind only after he started hanging on. He knew that something had slammed deep into his neck, and at that very moment he grabbed hold of the mane. The horse must have been wounded, too. As Xiao-er flopped over the front of his saddle, the horse let out a high whinny, tossed its muzzle toward the sky, and, tearing through the great stew of allies and enemies, started galloping straight across the corn field that stretched as far as the eye could see. A few shots might have rung out from behind, but to Xiao-er they were like sounds in a dream.
Trampled by the furiously galloping horse, the man-tall corn stalks bent and swayed like a wave, snapping back to sweep the length of Xiao-er’s pigtail or slap against his uniform or wipe away the black blood gushing from his neck. Not that he had the presence of mind to notice. Seared into his brain with painful clarity was nothing but the simple fact that he had been cut. I’m cut. I’m cut. His mind repeated the words over and over while his heels kicked mechanically into the horse’s lathered flanks.
Ten minutes earlier, Xiao-er and his fellow cavalrymen had crossed the river from camp to reconnoiter a small village when, in the yellowing field of corn, they suddenly encountered a mounted party of Japanese cavalry. It happened so quickly that neither side had time to fire a shot. The moment the Chinese troops caught sight of the enemy’s red-striped caps and the red ribbing of their uniforms, they drew their swords and headed their horses directly into them. At that moment, of course, no one was thinking that he might be killed. The only thing in their minds was the enemy: killing the enemy. As they turned their horses’ heads, they bared their teeth like dogs and charged ferociously toward the Japanese troops. Those enemy troops must have been governed by the same impulse, though, for in a moment the Chinese found themselves surrounded by faces that could have been mirror images of their own, with teeth similarly bared. Along with the faces came the sound of swords swishing through the air all around them.
From then on, Xiao-er had no clear sense of time. He did have a weirdly vivid memory of the tall corn swaying as if in a violent storm, and of a copper sun hanging above the swaying tassels. How long the commotion lasted, what happened during that interval and in what order—none of that was clear. All the while, Xiao-er went on swinging his sword wildly and screaming like a madman, making sounds that not even he could understand. His sword turned red at one point, he seemed to recall, but he felt no impact. The more he swung his sword, the slicker the hilt grew from his own greasy sweat. His mouth felt strangely dry. All at once the frenzied face of a Japanese cavalryman, eyeballs ready to pop from his head, mouth straining open, flew into the path of Xiao-er’s horse. The man’s burred scalp shone through a split in his red-striped cap. At the sight, Xiao-er raised his sword and brought it down full force on the cap. What his sword hit was not the cap, though, nor the head beneath it, but rather the other man’s steel slashing upward. Amid the surrounding pandemonium, the clash of swords resounded with a terrifying transparency, driving the cold smell of filed iron sharply into his nostrils. Just then, reflecting the glare of the sun, a broad sword rose directly above Xiao-er’s head and plunged downward in a great arc. In that instant, a thing of indescribable coldness slammed into the base of his neck.
The horse went on charging through the corn field with Xiao-er on its back, groaning from the pain of his wound. The densely planted corn would never give out, it seemed, no matter how long the horse kept running. The cries of men and horses, the clash of swords had faded long before. The autumn sun shone down on Liaodong just as it does in Japan.
Again, Xiao-er, swaying on horseback, was groaning from the pain of his wound. The noise that escaped his firmly gritted teeth, however, was more than a groan: it carried a somewhat more complex meaning. Which is to say that he was not simply moaning over his physical pain. He was wailing because of his psychological pain, because of the dizzying ebb and flow of his emotions, centering on the fear of death.
He felt unbearable sorrow to be leaving this world forever. He also felt deep resentment toward the men and events that were hastening his departure. He was angry, too, at himself for having allowed this to happen. And then—each one calling forth the next—a multitude of emotions came to torment him. As one gave way to another, he would shout, “I’m dying! I’m dying!”, or call out for his father or mother, or curse the Japanese cavalryman who did this to him. As each cry left his lips, however, it was transformed into a meaningless, rasping groan, so weak had he become.
I’m the unluckiest man alive, coming to a place like this to fight and die so young, killed like a dog, for nothing. I hate the Japanese who wounded me. I hate my own officer who sent me out on this reconnaissance mission. I hate the countries that started this war—Japan and China. And that’s not all I hate. Anyone who had anything to do with making me a soldier is my enemy. Because of all those people, I now have to leave this world where there is so much I want to do. Oh, what a fool I was to let them do this to me!
Investing his moans with such meaning, Xiao-er clutched at the horse as it bounded on through the corn. Every now and then a flock of quail would flutter up from the undergrowth, startled by the powerful animal, but the horse paid them no heed. It was unconcerned, too, that its rider often seemed ready to slide off its back, and it charged ahead, foaming at the mouth.
Had fate permitted it, Xiao-er would have gone on tossing back and forth atop the horse all day, bemoaning his misfortune to the heavens until that copper sun sank in the western sky. But when a narrow, muddy stream flowing between the corn stalks opened in a bright band ahead of him where the plain began to slope gently upward, fate took the shape of two or three river willows standing majestically on the bank, their low branches still dense with leaves just beginning to fall. As Xiao-er’s horse passed between them, the trees suddenly scooped him up into their leafy branches and tossed him upsidedown onto the soft mud of the bank.
At that very instant, through some associative connection, Xiao-er saw bright yellow flames burning in the sky. They were the same bright yellow flames he used to see burning under the huge stove in the kitchen of his childhood home. Oh, the fire is burning, he thought, but in the next instant he was already unconscious.
2
Was Xiao-er entirely unconscious after he fell from his horse? True, the pain of his wound was almost gone, but he knew he was lying on the deserted river bank, smeared in mud and blood, and looking up through the willow leaves caressing the deep blue dome of the sky. This sky was deeper and bluer than any he had ever seen before. Lying on his back, he felt as if he were looking up into a gigantic inverted indigo vase. In the bottom of the vase, clouds like massed foam would appear out of nowhere and then slowly fade as if scattered by the ever-moving willow leaves.
Was Xiao-er, then, not entirely unconscious? Between his eyes and the blue sky passed
a great many shadow-like things that were not actually there. First he saw his mother’s slightly grimy apron. How often had he clung to that apron in childhood, in both happy times and sad? His hand now reached out for it, but in that instant it disappeared from view. First it grew thin as gossamer, and beyond it, as through a layer of mica, he could see a mass of white cloud.
Next there came gliding across the sky the sprawling sesame field behind the house he was born in—the sesame field in midsummer, when sad little flowers bloom as if waiting for the sun to set. Xiao-er searched for an image of himself or his brothers standing in the sesame plants, but there was no sign of anything human, just a quiet blend of pale flowers and leaves bathed in pale sunlight. It cut diagonally across the space above him and vanished as if lifted up and away.