Linnear 02 - The Miko (47 page)

“Akiko!” Sato jumped up like a puppy seeking its master’s lap. “I did not expect you back until tomorrow afternoon.”

“Auntie was feeling poorly,” she said by rote. “There was no point in my staying longer.”

“You remember Linnear-san. You met at the wedding.”

Akiko lowered her eyes as she advanced across the shining moonlit pebbles. They were so white against the darkness of her shadow as she passed over them. “Of course. I am so sorry about the passing of Tomkin-san. Please accept my condolences.”

For the longest time it seemed as if she did nothing but stare into his shadowed face. She barely paid attention to Sato’s fussing as to drinks and something to eat for her after her long and tiring journey. It occurred to her that her husband wanted to be rid of her; she wondered what it was the two men had been discussing when she had broken in on them.

To Sato’s ire, she sat down on the stone perch he had used earlier in the evening. She wore a brocaded traveling kimono with flights of white herons crossing its dark blue background. Japanese invariably wore their best clothes while traveling. She held the bone handle of a rice-paper janomegasa with its point down against the pebbles.

Sato was doing all the talking but it was as if an aura surrounded her and Nicholas, as if they were the only two people left on earth. And inside the overlapping field of their powerful wa something was happening, something Akiko could never have anticipated.

She felt giddy, lighter than air. All hara seemed to have left her; she could not ground herself and without that centering she was utterly powerless.

She felt the first painful flutterings of panic take wing inside her and decided that she must do something immediately to forestall this loss of the Void. What was happening to her?

The more she stared into that face she had come to know so well, to hate with an almost inhuman passion, the greater her sense of helplessness became. She was spinning out of control. Why? What was he doing to her?

Dizzily she downed the hot sake Sato had brought her, heard herself ask for another in a thin, strangled voice she could barely recognize. This too she tumbled down her throat, almost choking on it.

Yet she went on watching him, tracing each contour of his head and face as if she were touching him physically. She felt as if she were being embraced and she felt her thighs tremble, her throat constrict. She felt a tingling at the back of her neck as if she were being caressed there and the fine hairs were raised like the whiskers of an animal.

She closed her eyes in an effort to steady herself, but found, instead, that she was compelled to see him again. Her eyes snapped open. He was still there. Sato was still prattling on about Buddha only knew what.

Years raced before her opened eyes like veils parting before a freshening wind. Years of laborious training, obsessive dedication. A heart filled with burned love and from those bitter ashes a thirst for revenge that smoldered and, fanned by hate, had burst into full flame. Vengeance will be mine. How often during the painful years of growing up had that one phrase given her the courage to close her eyes and sleep so that she could live another day. Without that phrase to hold to her like a blanket on a frosty night, she might never have survived unto this day.

To become aware of this moment, an arrow piercing her heart. Dear Amida! she cried silently. Now she began to tremble in earnest with the knowledge of what Nicholas Linnear was engendering in her. Wildly her mind sought this avenue and that in order to avoid what she already suspected was an inescapable truth.

Oh, Buddha, she thought, I want him. I want him so much I can’t see straight.

TOKYO AUTUMN 194?-AUTUMN 1963

Ikan lived within the pale green and caramel walls of Fuyajo. The Castle That Knows No Night had been her home ever since she was eight years old.

That year, so long ago now, had been a time of ill omens and poor crops throughout the countryside. Bow-backed farmers had no money and little hope of making it through to the end of the year.

It is said in Japan that hard times are the best friend of tradition for it is during these periods that the people fall back most heavily on the ways of their ancestors.

And so it was with Ikan’s family that year. Her father’s crops were no better than those of his neighbors, which was to say no good at all. It was as if the earth refused to release its nutriments that year.

The first Ikan suspected something serious was amiss was when she returned from the fields with a handful of reeds and saw her mother weeping.

The next morning Ikan was driven from the farm in a dusty, backfiring truck that smelled of cabbage and tomatoes, a small bag filled with the pitifully tiny pile of her possessions, the savior of her family destined for the precincts of the Yoshiwara.

Like many young girls throughout the ages before her, Ikan was to be sold into prostitution by her family in order to retrieve them from the indignity of bankruptcy.

Yet unlike the Western view, the Japanese view of prostitution was filled with nobility mixed with an odd poignancy. As he did with many other institutions, the Shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa created the legitimate need for baishun, the selling of, as it is known in Japan, spring.

Because he was obsessed with his own powerthe only force able to tame the multiple feuds of the regional daimyo that had kept feudal Japan in a constant state of civil war for years before his ascendancyhe required that each daimyo make a pilgrimage to Edo, now Tokyo, every other year, along with his samurai, where they would stay for a year. This sankinkotaiseido served two purposes. First, it cut into the daimyo’s solidification of his own power in his native ryochi and second, the long, often arduous trip helped deplete his coffers of accumulated wealth.

The daimyo and the wealthier samurai were able to avail themselves of the services of their mistresses. But the poorer samurai were forced to turn to prostitutes for, as leyasu himself said, prostitution was needed in order to negate the possibility of adultery.

In 1617, a year after the Shogun’s death, a feudal lord in Edo petitioned the Tokugawa government to allow him to create a sanctioned area within the city for baishun. He found a desolate field filled with reeds, hence the name Yoshiwara. In the succeeding years, a different character was substituted for “reedy,” and the Yoshiwara became known as the happy field.

The original red-light sector was destroyed in a fire and in 1656 was rebuilt in the Asakusa district of Edo, where it remained until April of 1958.

In 1649, Ikan subsequently was taught by her sensei, the government declared that all rice grown was subject to confiscation by the Imperial samurai. In its place farmers were told they had to subsist on millet.

Stricken, farmers were forced to put their wives to work sewing or weaving and to send their young children to toil in the city. Yet even this was not enough, and so often one female child was selected to be sold to the brothels in order for her family to survive.

There was no loss of face in this. On the contrary, these young girls were looked upon with a mixture of great respectfor submitting to their gin of filial pietyand pity, for it was generally known that while a prostitute might on a very rare occasion become the mistress of a wealthy samurai, once she crossed the moat that surrounded the Yoshiwara she surrendered all hope of becoming a wife and creating her own home. So there was always an air of mystery tinged by the purity of sadness that drew men into the arms of geisha in the same way it drew them to Ueno each spring to view the cherry blossoms.

Dean began life at Fuyajo, the most ancient of such establishments in the Yoshiwara, as a kamuro, a kind of apprentice who fetched for the oiran, the higher-level prostitutes, when she was not busy cleaning and polishing.

In this capacity she was constantly busy yet she always found time to observe and to learn from her observations, often imitating the motions and delicate swirls of the oiran early in the mornings before, exhausted, she fell on her futon.

When she was twelve, Ikan took a strenuous examination and passed on to the level of shinzo, where she began her courses in the study of baishun. These included singing, the difficult art of haiku, ikebana, chano-yu, dancing, a study of literature, and, of course, lovemaking.

Her training took five years, at the end of which she was required to take another exam. This was the crucial one for, if she failed to pass it, she would return to the level of kamuro and spend the rest of her days at Fuyajo doing nothing more than taking out the garbage.

She had no serious trouble and, at the age of seventeen, rose to the exalted station of oiran. For four years she plied her difficult and complex trade diligently and well, her open, inquisitive mind allowing her to absorb the best from the more experienced women around her, her innate sensitivity to creating all forms of pleasure in a man, intellectual, esthetic, as well as physical, creating an ever-expanding world that she alone could explore.

And on the day of her birth, twenty-one years after she was born, Ikan became tayu, the loftiest of the three stations of oiran. Never in the history of the Castle That Knows No Night had there been a tayu of such tender years, and a celebration was thrown in her honor.

And it was in that most festive of atmospheres, when the sake was flowing freely and the samisen spangled webs of music in the steamy air, that Ikan first encountered Hiroshi Shimada.

He was a man of quiet intensity, not a handsome man by any but the broadest of standards, yet possessed of a strength of spirit that she found most attractive.

For his part, Shimada had singled her out almost at once. His eyes fell upon her stately alabaster beauty and his heart turned to water. He felt a great cry rising up from within him, and for a moment he had to put a hand out to grasp the knurled wooden stairpost for support. When his knees stopped shaking, he began to breathe again. His head felt light, as if he had been drinking sake long into the night; there was an odd metallic taste in his mouth as if he had bitten down into a piece of tinfoil.

It never occurred to him that he might be falling in love. One did not fall in love with a geisha, one came to her for comfort, relaxation, and a night of total enjoyment. And yet at the moment he first saw Ikan, her awesome physicality struck from his consciousness any thought he might have held of any other woman, his wife included.

There was an aura about Ikan that was undeniable. Even the other oiran whispered of it in clandestinely envious tones among themselves. For she had achieved what all members of the floating world aspire to: that ineffable merging of the ethereal and the animal that unfailingly set men under its almost magic spell; an aphrodisiac for all the senses, all the pleasures. For her clients loved her just as strongly when she was reading to them from Genji Monogatari, when she arranged day lilies just for them or wrote a haiku in their honor, as when she bedded them.

Thus Shimada found himself drawn to Ikan’s side, his gaze lovingly caressing each elegant fold of her glittering kimono, the three translucent tortoiseshell kanzashi angled through the gleaming black pile of her hair, the kushi, the simple traditional comb of tsuge wood at the back of her head.

And when he spoke his first word to her through cracked lips, merely the gesture of her turning her head in his direction sent flutters of desire through his chest.

There was, of course, no chance for them to be alone at the party and, in any event, a proper assignation had not been arranged beforehand as was the strict policy at Fuyajo. But the next week, when Shimada could take time out from his busy schedule, he returned to the Yoshiwara.

On the threshold of the pale green and caramel structure he paused, trembling. Rain pattered on the conical shelter of his ama-gasa and he looked up, watching it drip off the eaves just beneath the curved tiles of the roof. As the samurai in olden days had done he had disguised himself somewhat before setting out on his trek to the red-light district.

It was not that he was ashamed of coming here or that he wished to hide his presence at Fuyajo from his wife. On the contrary, it was to her that the Castle That Knows No Night sent the bills for his sojourns of pleasure.

Rather it was the unsettling political and economic climate within the bureaucracy that caused him to act with caution. As vice-minister of MCI he had many enemies and he had no wish to present his ill-wishers with fodder for his political demise.

A chill gust of wind bowled down the street, making him shiver and pull his long capelike raincoat closer about him. That SCAP hound, Colonel Linnear, was already sniffing around for incriminating bones and though Shimada was quite certain he had buried his deeply and well, he nevertheless refused to relax his vigilance, for he knew that in the wake of the war’s end he could not rely on his Prime Minister for refuge if the truth were to come out. In fact, knowing Yoshida, he would be among the first to deliver Shimada up as a sacrificial lamb to the gaijin war crimes tribunal.

War. The thought made Shimada shiver. Always it came back to the war. How he wished now that Japan had taken another course. In retrospect, he saw his own rabid ideas of expansionism, his close ties to those warmongers in the zaibatsu as tantamount to slashing open his own belly. And yet there was no dignity in the association. His hands were soiled by the clandestine work he had done for his friends in the zaibatsu both before the war and during it. Shimada had been a key figure within the Ministry of Munitions and had been saved from the war crimes tribunal by a mixture of his own cunning in hiding his past and the decision of his superior to break apart the ministry at the last moment, turning it into the Ministry of Commerce and Industry before SCAP had set itself up and begun its own purge.

Shimada looked down at his hands. His palms were slick with sweat. He took a deep breath, calming himself. He resolved to stop by the Shinto shrine on his way home and petition the gods and kami for the gift of confidence and the blessing of forgetful-ness. If not for the gaijin Linnear, all would be peaceful, he knew.