Tokyo Bay (2 page)

High in the distant, starlit darkness above the unseen coasts of
Japan, a strange cone of white light suddenly appeared. To Second Lieutenant Robert Eden of the United States Navy, who was watching from the gently heaving quarterdeck of the steam frigate USS
Susquehanna,
the shimmering light had seemed to float silently upward out of the black depths of the Pacific Ocean without any warning. He stared hard at the ghostly apparition with a mixture of awe and fascination, unable to tear his eyes away from it.
The cone of brightness seemed to hover motionless, two miles high in the heavens. Below it the coastline of the closed and secret land towards which the wooden sidewheel frigate was steaming lay still and indistinct in the darkness. Eden stood alone by the rails on the quarterdeck, and the steady churning of the ship’s great side-wheel paddles was the only sound in the night.
As he watched, the image became almost hypnotic, and a thought of astonishing irrationality flashed through his mind: was this a vision he was seeing? Suspended halfway between heaven and earth, the perfect pyramid of light seemed to pulse with its own luminescence. Could he, he wondered wildly, be gazing at some miracu
lo
us manifestation of a God in whom he no longer believed? In the stillness of the middle watch, was he being rebuked for his angry abandonment of belief in a compassionate and loving creator of mankind? Despite the wildness of this notion, some intuitive reflex forced him to lower his gaze. Continuing to stand motionless by the ship’s rail, he bowed his head slightly without knowing clearly why he did so.
Six feet tall and in his twenty-fourth year, Lieutenant Robert Eden was an impressively athletic figure in his gold-epauletted officer’s frock coat and white drill pantaloons. His shoulders were broad and powerful beneath the dark blue double-breasted coat, and his left hand rested with an easy physical confidence on the gleaming brass hilt of his sheathed sword. Alert and keen-eyed, his demeanour in all was that of a vigorous man who loved nothing more than the challenge of physical action. His gold- braided blue cap with its patent
-
leather visor hid a shock of dark brown hair and his
weather-beaten
complexion was obviously Anglo-Saxon. Yet his broad, handsome face was incongruously high
cheek
-
boned and his eyes were narrow and deep- set, betraying a distant mingling of North American Indian blood with that of the hardy European pioneer-settlers of New England who had been his ancestors. In his expression too there was a fierce, brooding quality which hinted that he might be nursing some inner emotional pain. He smiled only rarely, and consequently the brawny gunners who manned the massive spar deck port cannons under his command never wasted a moment in responding to his crisply given orders.
While standing with his head still bowed, Eden was aware that he was not praying in any way taught to him during his conventional Episcopalian upbringing in a small town on the wooded heights of eastern Connecticut, a few miles inland from Long Island Sound. Instead he found his mind had filled with a deep and awesome silence. The thrashing of the
Susquehanna’s
paddle-wheels and the sounds of the sea seemed to be momentarily blotted out, and be felt strangely spellbound.
The stillness appeared to vibrate gently at some mysterious frequency, producing a feeling far more profound than prayer, and quite unexpectedly images of memory that had haunted him waking and sleeping for six years flashed unbidden into his mind. But now they were more intense than ever before, almost as vivid as real life.
In a darkened, storm-lashed Connecticut woodland his very young w
i
fe lay splayed limply at the foot of a tree. The wheels of an overturned buckboard still spun slowly nearby. A spasm of agony twisted her smooth f
e
atures and he clutched despairingly at the slippery, newborn infant not yet severed from he
r
dying body.
With an almost unbearable intensity Eden felt his own agony again; then the images melted away as swiftly as they had come, and to his astonishment a gentler sense of ease as quickly took possession of his senses. For an instant this feeling of peace was as intense and tangible as the previous pain; then it too was gone, leaving him feeling baffled as to what had prompted such powerful sensations.
‘Fuji! . . . Fuji
-
san!’
As though answering his unspoken question, a voice close beside him in the darkness spoke in an urgent whisper. Higher-pitched in contrast to the slow-drawling speech patterns of the
Susquehanna’s
American crew, the voice was sibilant and unfamiliar. Turning, Eden saw a diminutive Asian had stolen up beside him, and he recognized the man instantly as Sentaro, a Japanese castaway whom the
Susquehanna
was carrying homeward for repatriation. Rescued from a sinking fishing junk in mid-Pacific, he had been carried to San Francisco by an American merchant ship, and spent almost four years there working as a port stevedore. Eden was about to remonstrate with him for slipping unseen onto the quarterdeck, but the scrawny Japanese had already fallen to his knees, his face turned towards the shimmering triangle of light. As Eden watched, he bent his thin body double in an elaborate self-abasing bow, until his face was pressed against the planks of the deck. He held this reverent posture for some moments and when at last he sat up and turned his head to glance at Eden, the American saw that his broad cheeks were agleam with tears.
‘Many times since my shipwreck I dream of this sight of Mount Fuji,’ Sentaro whispered in Japanese. ‘When it catches the moonlight, it becomes a silver spirit floating in the night. I am very happy to see it again
-
but I am frightened too.’
Finding himself moved by the simple fisherman’s tears, Eden decided to offer no reprimand. Before the US Navy squadron’s departure from its home base, and during the long voyage, he had befriended the castaway who slept and lived in a cramped and uncomfortable storage space under the fo’c’s’le deck. He had visited him there frequently and on occasions had invited him discreetly to his own cabin as part of his effort to master the rudiments of the Japanese language. Sentaro had already confided to him that he was approaching his homeland with a mixture of exhilaration and fear; after long years away he yearned to see his family and native country again
-
but, knowing how fiercely laws banning all travel outside Japan were enforced, he was deeply fearful for his personal safety once he landed.
‘Everything will be all right, Sentaro,’ said Eden soothingly in Japanese, gazing out over the rail again. ‘I am sure this first beautiful sight of Mount Fuji is a good omen. .
The Japanese stared up at him doubtfully, his expression anxious. ‘I hope so, master.’ He bowed his head for another long moment, then turned and crept silently into the darkness, heading for the ladder that led down to the spar deck. Eden watched him go, then peered once more towards the ethereal image of Japan’s sacred volcano. The moonlight was strengthening, and he was able to make out for the first time the shadowy outline of the entire mountain, which rose from the inky darkness beneath
it
in the shape of a perfect cone. The newly risen moon, he could see now, had
il
luminated
the snow- flanked summit suddenly to create the illusion that it was drifting free in space like a disembodied wraith. He had been searching previously much lower in the sky to catch his first glimpse of the spectacular mountain, and its first appearance high in the nighttime heavens only added to the aura of mystery which seemed to surround it.
Eden remembered suddenly the passage describing Fuji in the history book translated from Dutch which he had flung down on his cabin bunk before coming up on deck to begin his spell as second officer of the middle watch. The book had described how the fiery mountain had been hurled aloft from the flat eastern plains during a ferocious night of earthquakes some two thousand years before
-
at the same period that Japan’s first emperor was said to have become the nation’s ruler. Ever since, both emperors and the mountain alike had been worshipped as sacred divinities, and as Eden continued staring towards its snow-covered summit, another shudder of awe moved up his spine.
‘That must be the most beautiful mountain in the world he murmured to himself. ‘It hardly seems real.’

*

As the steam frigate and its three sister ships drew nearer to the coast, the pyramid of light appeared to glimmer ever more intensely. Eden wondered melodramatically whether it had emerged suddenly from the darkness to act as a timely guiding beacon, to show the way to this host of strangers now approaching silently from the outside world. For more than two hundred years foreigners of every race had been resolutely barred from these mysterious islands
-
and it was this fact, which he had uncovered in the library of the new US Naval Academy at Annapolis during his last cadet year, which had prompted him later to volunteer for the voyage. Now, he reflected, that long period of Japan’s seclusion was about to end, and he would play a small role himself in its ending. On the silvered sea around the
Susquehanna
he could see the dark silhouettes of the other three slow- moving US Navy ships: two high-masted sailing vessels, the
Plymouth
and the
Saratoga,
and a second barque-rigged wooden
side-wheeler
, the
Mississippi,
were forging slowly northwards through Japan’s coastal waters, under the command of Commodore Matthew Ca
l
braith Perry:
In the grandest cabin of the
Susquehanna,
which he had made his flagship, the commodore was carrying strict orders from the President of the United States. His mission was to break down the barred gates of this tantalizing oriental land and open it to American ships and trade. Perry was carrying a formal request to the present Emperor from President Millard Fillmore, inscribed on parchment and secured in a polished rosewood box. But he also possessed a well-armed body of US marines and enough heavy guns to do the job by force, if necessary Robert Eden remembered this as he watched the moonlight shimmer on the far-off mountaintop, and for the first time his feelings of exhilaration were tempered by a stab of unease.
Might the bri
ll
iant white peak of Mount Fuji, he wondered, be flashing a warning to the approaching American naval squadron instead of acting as a beacon? Could this be interpreted as a last firm warning to retreat? Or at least to draw near to an ancient and mysterious land only with the greatest caution?
From the same Dutch history book that he had devoured avidly during the long voyage from the United States, Eden had learned that fierce hordes of warriors equipped with metal and leather armour still loyally served their feudal lords in medieval crag- top castles. In mountain temples, warriors and peasants alike worshipped the sun goddess, their divine emperor, and a host of mysterious spirits. These same warriors rode and fought beneath multicoloured heraldic banners; in victory they beheaded their enemies without mercy, but if defeated they slashed open their own bowels before shame could demean them.
Their divine emperor, the book explained, was believed to live in mysterious seclusion. Rural towns were often ablaze with street processions and theatres.
The earth of the islands was green and fertile, the trees were famous for their dazzling spring blossoms, and the graceful, delicate-limbed women of the land traditionally cultivated the arts of music and singing to a striking degree. Some, the book added archly, were trained to perform the duties of love with a grace matched by no other nation.
Coloured sketches, which had imprinted themselves in his mind, depicted these Japanese females as diminutive, doll-like creatures. Swathed in bright- coloured silken gowns, they wore their dark hair piled high in elaborate styles bristling with ornaments. The male warriors, narrow
-
eyed and fierce of expression, also dressed their hair strangely
-
in topknots and pigtails
-
and garbed themselves in silks that were loose-sleeved and exotically baggy As Eden continued to peer towards Fuji’s moonlit outline, the keen sense of curiosity and excitement which these words and images had generated at first reading intensified. How, he wondered, would cold reality compare, once they set foot on land?
He pondered the question endlessly as he paced the deck during the rest of his watch, glancing frequently towards the shadowy land. On returning to his cabin after being relieved, he stretched out on his bunk without undressing. Taking up the discarded history book, he thumbed through
it
until he found the same section on Mount Fuji. A verse written in praise of the volcano by a Japanese poet of the ninth century caught his eye and he read
it
through several times, until the last vivid stanzas were instilled in his memory

Great Fuji-yama towering to the sky,
A treasure art thou, given to mortal man,
A god protector watching o‘er
Japan
On thee forever let me feast mine eye.

After he’d laid the book aside and closed his eyes Eden found that the haunting image of the shining mountain still filled his mind. For a long time he could not sleep, but lay listening restlessly to the thump of the
Susquehanna’s
paddle-wheels driving them nearer to landfall. Twice he rose and peered out through the port scuttle, searching the darkness to landward. To his disappointment, however, the mountain was no longer visible. Taking a leather- bound private journal from his cabin trunk he wrote in it avidly for several minutes, still glancing occasionally towards the shore.
When at last he slept, the glittering peak reappeared immediately in his dreams. His eyes seemed to fill with dazzling light, as he found himself on the mountain, ascending easily and lightly across the snow, heading towards the lip of its volcanic crater. Above, in the deep darkness of the sky, millions of stars were shining brilliantly, and on reaching the very top, instead of looking down into the crater, he found himself reaching up with his arms into the midnight heavens. Without difficulty he began pulling at the sky, and drawing down the dark stuff of the night. It came easily into his hands like glistening silk. The silver stars continued to shine as he wrapped them around his body in a loose and beautiful cloak which trailed across the snow behind him. Pulling this cloak tighter about himself, he felt a sense of wonder and contentment suffuse his mind and body in a way he had never known before.
Turning, he saw a temple had appeared on the mountain peak, its roof
s
curved and its woodwork red. A giant silver mirror to one side reflected a second image of the temple, and he hurried towards this. Just short of the mirror he halted, afraid suddenly of what he might see in it. Then he caught a glimpse of his marvellous new garment in the mirror, and to his relief the stars still shone dazzlingly in the deep blue darkness of its folds.
Reassured he stepped nearer. But when he studied his reflection, he suffered a sudden deep sense of shock. In place of his own familiar features, he found he was staring into the unsmiling face of a Japanese samurai. The top of the warrior’s head was shaven, and a long oiled pigtail was tied in a topknot across his crown. Dark eyes bore into his unwaveringly, their expression hostile one moment and enigmatically quizzical the next. Then, as Eden watched, this fierce male face dissolved slowly, to be replaced by the softer countenance of a
beautiful
Japanese girl. This time the almond eyes were downcast and the hair was enchantingly glossy pierced by glittering silver pins. Like the samurai before her, she also inhabited the blue silken gown of stars in his place. After a moment she began to lift her head to look at him but, before their eyes could meet fully, the mountaintop and all the stars above
it
exploded without warning in a sudden blinding flash of white light
-
and the dream ended as abruptly as
it
had begun.