Death of a Doll Maker (32 page)
Read Death of a Doll Maker Online
Authors: I. J. Parker
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Genre Fiction, #Historical, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Historical Fiction, #Chinese, #Japanese
He laid her note aside and started to tell Tora and Saburo about the death of the baby. To his surprise, they looked stricken. He said, “It was a boy, but he died.”
Saburo shook his head and wiped away tears. Tora said in a thick voice, “Read the other letter, sir.”
Later he would not be able to say when he knew. Was it Saburo’s face when he had smeared Tamako’s make-up by wiping tears from his eyes, or Tora’s choking voice?
Akiko’s letter explained it. It was a short letter for her. He read it and felt the room spin. He read it again, and his hand started shaking so badly that the letter fell from it. He did not have the strength to pick it up.
“I’m very sorry, sir,” Tora said in a half-stifled tone.
Saburo wept openly now. “Me too, sir. We’d both give anything to undo this.”
Akitada could not speak. He nodded and waved a hand, and after a moment they rose and left the room.
Tamako was dead!
Her short note had been her last words to him. An apology. She had barely had the strength to hold the brush; Hanae had helped her. And then she had died. Without him by her side. He had been chasing after villains who meant nothing to him. For a government that had demanded the ultimate sacrifice from him.
Now he was alone and would remain alone. Tamako was such an essential part of him that her place could not be filled—not by the children, though he loved them—not by Tora or Genba or Saburo, though they were his closest friends.
He was alone and nothing mattered any longer.
After a long time, he got to his feet and walked outside. The ground beneath the little tree was white. Snow, he thought. Snow, as pure and cold as death.
But it was not snow. The little tree had shed all its blossoms overnight, and beauty had left the world.
Historical Note
Kyushu—the name means “nine provinces”—is the southernmost of the large Japanese islands and closest to Japan’s neighbors, China and Korea. Historically this is significant because Japan took much of its cultural identity from China, either directly through embassies and an exchange of travelers or via contact with Korea. This included, for example, Buddhism, the structure of its administration, its official language, its art and architecture, and much of its learning.
Diplomatic wrangling required that both China and Japan consider the other nation as a vassal and exchange gifts that were received as tribute. In time, Japan tired of the exchange and closed its borders to foreign visitors. All shipping and travel between Tang China, Korea (Koryo), and Japan was strictly regulated and had to stop in Kyushu, where the Tsukushi Lodge, a reception area for foreigners (
Korokan
) was built near Hakata. Kyushu was heavily fortified against invasions, and its government center was located inland at Dazaifu behind a massive dyke or water fortress (Mizuki) and numerous mountain fortresses guarding its access road. Frontier guards guarded Hakata Bay.
The administration of Kyushu was from the beginning a particularly sensitive one. It was a long distance from the capital so that it took weeks to transmit reports and instructions; it was settled by land-owning nobles frequently hostile to the central government; and it was close to both China and Silla, an enemy on the Korean peninsula. Thus it was administered by a type of viceroy, called a governor general (
sotsu),
from a heavily protected administrative center located at Dazaifu. The governor general was always an imperial prince, who remained in the capital while the business of Kyushu was handled by the assistant governor general, a high-ranking nobleman. He supervised foreign trade and travel, military facilities, and the eleven governors who administered the individual nine provinces of Kyushu and the two island provinces of Tsushima and Iki.
Early on, merchants from Korea and China came in numbers, but in the ninth and tenth centuries formal relations with China and Korea stopped, and trade diminished. Foreign pirates ruled the seaways. In the late tenth century, Kyushu was invaded by the Toi, (”barbarians”), from Mongolia and Northern China. The defense of Kyushu as the gateway to Japan became a priority. The system of importing frontier guards from other parts of Japan was abandoned and local forces were used instead. This strengthened local landowners greatly and led to their gaining power and influence in the administration at Dazaifu. Military control in Kyushu passed to them, and they filled both military and administrative positions where they pursued their private interests.
By the eleventh century, some restrictions against trade with China and Korea loosened because of demand for luxury goods by the ranking nobility and the court, and because of efforts of Buddhist centers to acquire religious documents and art. Foreign merchants managed to bypass government controls by dropping anchor in privately owned harbors to load and unload their goods.
It is against this background that Akitada’s assignment to the office of governor of Chikuzen province must be seen. Chikuzen included Hakata, a major port city on the Inland Sea, Dazaifu, where government headquarters were located, and the Tsukushi Lodge (
korokan),
where all foreigners stayed. The headquarters at Dazaifu, a smaller version of the Greater Imperial Palace (
Daidairi)
in the capital, severely restricted the powers and independence of Kyushu governors. To add to these problems, Hakata had attracted settlements of Chinese and Koreans who had arrived during more favorable times and stayed, while local nobles had usurped certain powers and frequently served in administrative positions. Meanwhile, the central government in the capital was extremely nervous about the erosion of trade restrictions and the threat of new invasions from China or Korea.
As the central government in the capital tried to control distant provinces of the country in order the levy rice taxes and corvee labor, provincial administrations were headed by court nobles from the capital. These men brought their own small staff, but most of the bureaus in the provincial headquarters were headed by local men. Provinces were further subdivided into prefectures (
gun
) and the prefects were again local men. In time, the system eroded further in that governors were absent, leaving the work to the local appointees, or letting a lower-ranking member of the central government substitute. This was certainly the case with the Dazaifu office.
Akitada would have found a poorly staffed headquarters or tribunal, probably lacking the usual amenities, such as military barracks, jails, granaries and storehouses for tax goods, a tax office, and provincial archives. He could not expect help from an assistant governor, an executive officer, an inspector, and a chief magistrate, not to mention tax grain chiefs, corvee directors, scribes or a minimum of four servants for each of these. He could also expect local appointees to be uncooperative.
The manufacture of elaborate dolls is a more recent development in Japanese history, and Hakata dolls are famous. This suggested the idea of the doll maker and the hollow dolls. However, dolls certainly existed long before Akitada’s time. By the eleventh century, they were made both as toys for children and as ritual objects intended to protect a child from evil spirits, either by confusing them or by drawing them into the doll which could then be disposed off.
In the early years, Japan was poor in both silver and gold. As these metals were needed for trade, there was always a great interest in discovering deposits. Silver was being mined in Tsushima early on, but in the Heian period, the only gold came from the north of the country. The gold mentioned in this novel is a fiction, though a rich gold mine was eventually discovered in Osumi province in modern times.
As for details of the location of the places mentioned here, modern archeological digs have confirmed Dazaifu, the
korokan
, the elaborate dam protecting Dazaifu, and the mountain forts that protected it and the Kyushu coastline against foreign invasions. The rest of the historical facts comes from documents dating to the time. Bruce L. Batten’s book GATEWAY TO JAPAN: HAKATA IN WAR AND PEACE, 500-1300 is a good source of information about the area in early times.
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Praise for I. J. Parker and the Akitada Series
Pronunciation of Japanese Words