The Samurai's Daughter Read online

  My long sword, a gift from Father, was new and of the highest quality. My bow and arrows were new. My horse was young and strong. During those days and nights, alone in the woods, I meditated on all that had happened to me, to Father, to my mother, on how far I’d come. I embraced my father’s heritage and made it my own. I killed a small deer, gutted and skinned it, roasted and ate it. The words the noble warrior had written, about life’s ephemerality, came back to me. I had caused the beautiful animal pain. I had ended its time on this Earth. I had hunted it the way mountain cats hunt rabbits and rodents. I watched the life go out of it and was ashamed. I bowed to it and swore I would only do so again if my own life depended on it. I bowed to the trees, to the moss, to the earth, to the boulders, and to the stream.

  I returned to the castle a different person.

  – XVI –

  As my training continued during my thirteenth and fourteenth years, poems and gifts from Date Tadamune arrived regularly. Everyone agreed that the quality of the poems was too fine to have originated from his pen. Mizuki and Father were alarmed. Yokiko, feeling responsible, withdrew into herself. It was common knowledge that Tadamune was cruel to his women, and everyone in Sendai knew the resentment he felt toward Father, the vow of vengeance he’d taken in the form of a promise to have me in his bed.

  Father decided to speak with the daimyo about it, and he was received in Date Masamune’s private garden. When the daimyo stepped out onto the polished floorboards of the deck, just before a panel slid shut behind him, Father caught sight of a woman he recognized. It was Date Masamune’s favored mistress, the woman who had first presented Father to Yokiko many years earlier. It was rumored that the daimyo had suffered a mild stroke. Mizuki denied it and said her older brother remained in perfect health. But Father looked for symptoms anyway. He did think his lord looked older. He was slightly stooped, and he was slower to sit. The malady was confirmed when his uncle began to speak. Though easy to understand, there was no doubting a slight slurring of his words.

  “It has been my hope,” Father said, “that your son would forget his threat, and that he would move on, to court a more suitable young woman.”

  “He claims to be truly taken by her,” Date Masamune said. “And who would not be? Her beauty is unique, and her grace is identical to your mother’s.”

  “We fear him, my lord,” Father said. “I mean no disrespect, but were he of a more moderate character, we would be honored by such an expression of feeling.”

  “I know,” Date Masamune said, bowing his head. “His mother, who goads him on, grows stronger as I weaken. He grows more assertive as I get older. I am at a loss.”

  Father was shocked by such an admission from so powerful a man. He attributed some of it to the daimyo’s illness, but some of it derived as well from the level of trust and respect Date Masamune was willing to show his treasured nephew.

  “I see,” Father said.

  “What will you do?” his uncle asked.

  “I am not sure,” Father replied. “I have no plan as yet. The only thing I am sure of is that I shall not, under any circumstance, permit it to happen.”

  “I understand,” the daimyo said. “I’m told the girl is turning into a fearsome fighter, but I am not convinced of how that might be of help to her.”

  They both sat in silence for a moment.

  “Do you recall,” Date Masamune asked, “the last time we sat here together?”

  “I do, my lord.”

  “You were the age your daughter is now. You had just become a samurai. It was the day you swore me fealty.”

  “The day you gave me your sword.”

  The daimyo smiled and looked out at the garden.

  “Yes. It was the day I gave you my sword. And the day I swore I would look out for you and your descendants for as long as I lived.”

  “We sat facing the garden, side by side. You never looked at me. I was very nervous. You were like a god.”

  “That was the idea,” Date Masamune said, and both of them laughed. Then he turned serious again.

  “It was I who sent you to Yokiko in the first place. It was I who sent you to the foreigners on a perilous journey to the east. It was because of me you risked your life and the life of your daughter to return here.”

  “It is not your responsibility, Uncle. The decisions were mine.”

  They sat in silence again.

  “Do you know what impresses, perhaps more than anything, my lord?” Father finally said. “The boulder there in the garden, and the Akamatsu tree beside it. They were here the day I became a samurai, and they are here now. During all the time, and all of the events that have transpired, since we first sat here together, the boulder and the tree have persisted, quietly, without moving.”

  “Or caring,” Date Masamune said.

  “Or caring,” Father agreed.

  ***

  Father learned later that it was after this meeting with Date Masamune that Mizuki arranged to speak with the daimyo’s wife, Megohime. She suggested that since the original grievance had stemmed from the frustrated execution of Yokiko, the grievance and its associated vow of vengeance might be alleviated by revisiting the sentence of death. It was thought that Megohime discussed the idea with Date Tadamune, and that an agreement was reached. And thus it happened that I woke one morning and found Yokiko cold and still, curled into a ball, dead from poison.

  I was spared the death of my mother in Spain because I was only minutes old when it happened. The loss of Maria Elena in Venice and then of Caitríona were hard, their effects difficult to gauge. Apart from Mizuki, Yokiko was the mother I had the longest, during the years most crucial in a woman’s life. Together with Mizuki, she led and guided me, from girlhood to early womanhood. That she could be alive one day, alive to the world’s light and sensations, alive to her thoughts and inner yearnings, and then be dead the next, reduced to a mound of insensate hair and flesh, pained me deeply. How could life be so wondrous and yet so cruel? How could Mizuki have done such a thing?

  Father was incapable of accusing his mother of such an act, but after the funeral services, after sending Yokiko’s spirit to the pure land, he moved to other quarters and took Nobuko and me with him. Then, as if to double the devilry, Date Tadamune reneged on the agreement, an agreement he denied ever sanctioning. He renewed his courtship of me. As the following months passed, the poems and the gifts came more frequently. In early winter, tension reached a breaking point. Mizuki kissed me goodbye and took herself to a nunnery. In the space of a season, I had lost both of my Japanese mothers.

  Before she left, Mizuki came to say farewell to her son, and told him something that shocked him. She told him that Katakura Kojuro was not, in fact, his biological father. She told him she had always been surprised by how easily people believed her cover story. “Look at you,” she said to my father, “tall and slim and graceful, and then look at Katakura Kojuro, short and squat. Look at all of his other children, short and squat. I have always been flattered,” she said, “to hear how everyone, including my brother, attributed your physical demeanor entirely to me. But it is not so.”

  Father looked at her, amazed, and said nothing.

  “I did have a relationship with Katakura Kojuro. He was kind to me at a difficult time. And he does believe you are his son. But the man I loved, however briefly and even more than my first husband, was a Chinese monk—your father, who was passing through Sendai. Ingen was his name. He arrived. We loved each other. And then he departed, leaving you inside of me. He was as beautiful to look at as he was in spirit.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “I do not know,” she said. “Years later I heard he founded a temple here in the kingdom. But I do not know where, or if it is true.”

  “I am half Chinese,” he said.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “Why have you never told me?”

  “Because the last time we said goodbye I held on to the hope you would return,” she said, her eyes
welling with tears. “But this time I know we shall never see each other ever again.”

  She lowered her head and cried bitterly. He wanted to comfort her. She was his mother. But the murder of Yokiko hung over them both.

  ***

  One night, after packing some clothing and gathering my weapons, after giving my cat to Nobuko, Father and I left Sendai.

  – XVII –

  I never remembered seeing Father use his sword. What happened aboard that ship in the Indian Ocean was buried deep. The little I remember from it are just sounds, because my eyes were closed. During the many winters we lived in Sendai, he carried his treasured katana with him often, and sometimes he would let me use it for practice. All I knew about his fighting skills came from stories told to me by older samurai when they drank too much. But when some of Date Tadamune’s warriors caught up with us between Misawa and Lake Ogawara, I witnessed it firsthand.

  There were ten of them. At first, they behaved with exaggerated politeness. Their code demanded it, and they had been sworn to bring me back unscathed. But Father refused their entreaties, bowed, and unsheathed his sword. I, too, unsheathed mine. This caused Date Tadamune’s men to laugh, and Father took advantage of their mirth by attacking first. I had never seen such classic, sober swordsmanship put to such deadly effect. He killed them all, except for one who, his right hand severed, begged for mercy. Father looked at me and spoke calmly. “If we spare his life he will return and tell them where we are.” I approached the man and “sliced the reed.” His head rolled off of him. I shall never forget the noise it made hitting the hardened wintry earth.

  After that, as we continued north toward Mutsu on the bay, heading for Oma, we spoke very little. He had first thought to ask the shogun to intervene on my behalf, but decided against it, thinking it might be interpreted as a gesture of disrespect toward Date Masamune. Father was thirty-seven years old that year. He was not the eighteen-year-old samurai who had landed in Spain and courted my mother. Killing Date Tadamune’s men after so many years of peaceful life in Sendai, casting himself out as a renegade, a ronin on the road, traveling light with a fifteen-year-old girl into an uncertain future, must have weighed upon him. Seeing him kill all those men, and my own beheading of a samurai who had begged for mercy, weighed upon me as well. And he knew it. But we did not speak of it.

  Another thing I never spoke about to him was how flattered I had been by the poems and gifts sent to me by Date Tadamune. I confess that back then, the idea of living in his household, of sharing his bed upon occasion, filled me with excitement. One day he would become the daimyo of Sendai, which up until then had been my world. As for his bad reputation with respect to women, I, in my youth, and with what Yokiko had taught me, was certain I could reform him. I even found his lack of physical appeal easy to ignore, for his robes were sumptuous and his manner that of a man accustomed to great luxury.

  In Oma we boarded a small ship north, to the island of Ezo, where the Ezochi people lived. They were a race of fishermen who worshipped nature, and who kept themselves separate from the Japanese, toward whom they harbored centuries of suspicion. We did not stop traveling until we found a small village on the sea near the town of Nemuro, just as the snows began.

  It was clear to the villagers that Father was a runaway samurai and a man of stature. Once they learned I was his daughter and not his wife, and as he began to speak with them more, and help them with their fishing in exchange for food and a roof over our heads, bonds were formed. It was not until the third large snowstorm that blanketed the thatch-roofed houses and narrow streets that I mustered the courage to ask him what we were going to do.

  We were sitting by the hearth in the middle of the room, where an iron pot simmered with fish and herbs. Outside the wind howled.

  “I thought we might stay here for the rest of our lives,” he said. “And you could marry one of the fishermen, and have many babies, and spend your days mending nets and cooking seaweed.”

  I looked at him in the flickering light, holding my breath, until he began to laugh.

  “Perhaps not,” he said, stirring the pot with his short sword. “After all, I am a prince and you a noblewoman with an inheritance to claim, in a part of the world where women are not crucified for refusing to work in a brothel.”

  “Spain,” I said.

  “Spain,” he replied.

  “But it is so very far away,” I said. “How could we possibly get there? It is against the law for us to leave these islands.”

  “The distance is the problem,” he said, “not the law. We are already outlaws here.”

  He used the word muhōmono, meaning fugitive or bandit, and I liked the way it sounded.

  “It is a long and perilous journey which I have taken twice in my life,” he said. “Despite my promise to your great-aunt, it is one I had hoped never to take again. But it was a mistake to bring you here. I apologize to you from the bottom of my heart, Masako. Now it is time to fulfill that other promise I made, some thirteen years ago, even though it was to someone surely buried by now.”

  He spoke these words with such solemnity that I began to cry. The snow, the wind, the meagerness of the dwelling, the isolation of the village, the primitive people who lived there, the two women I loved who had taken such good care of me and who were so far away that night, one of them cremated—it all crushed down upon my heart. Father let me cry. The only other thing he said that night was, “I shall find a way.” Just before I fell asleep, I told him how much I missed Yokiko and Mizuki and Nobuko and my cat and all of the things we had left behind in Sendai. He rubbed my back until the wind died, until all that could be heard were the waves of the sea breaking in the darkness under the falling snow, until at last I fell asleep.

  – XVIII –

  In the spring an Ezochi elder came to the village and told us that more samurai had landed to the south, near Tomakomai, and that they were looking for us. Father was grateful and told the man we would leave the following day so as not to bring trouble upon them. This led to a long discussion with the elder about who we were, and how we had come to be there, and where it was we wished to go.

  “I need to return to the Dutch enclave on the island of Hirado, in the hope of finding a ship sailing for Europe.”

  “Where is Europe?” the elder asked.

  “It is a land far in the east, filled with barbarians of great wealth,” Father replied. “But as I am a wanted man, we cannot reach Hirado traversing the islands of Japan. I could try and get there by sea, but they shall be looking for us along the coast as well. I could go west, but I speak little Chinese and it would take a lifetime to cross all of China and the lands beyond it before reaching Europe.”

  “I know nothing of Europe,” the elder said. “But I do know how to reach the lands east of us.”

  The elder then spent a night consulting with the men in his party. Their decision to help us was not entirely based on goodwill. Some merchants from Japan were making inroads in their markets and some of the Ezochi leaders were garnering wealth. Though they were decent enough to not turn us in, they were eager to be rid of us. On the following morning the elder showed us a map Father had never seen before. It showed Japan and, just to the east, across a stretch of sea not unduly vast, another large landmass.

  “Fifteen years ago, we thought one of our best sailors had perished with his fishing boat in a great storm,” the elder said. “But six months later he returned and told us of another land the winds had pushed him to, a land with vast harbors and friendly natives, and coasts filled with whales and seals. A month later we sent three of our largest fishing boats with him, and found it to be true. Since then we have started a small colony there. After communicating with the natives, we drew this map to show them how their land occupies the Earth.”

  Father studied the map and realized the landmass in question belonged to a place his ship had stopped on the original voyage to Europe, a place they had rested after crossing a much wider part of the ocean. H
e saw this was a shorter route, and on the map at least, it looked as if the distance one would need to travel to cross this new landmass, and reach the island of Cuba, was something he and I might be able to do. The elder spoke to Father again.

  “If you swear not to tell another living soul about our colony there, we can put you on our next ship sailing there.”

  “I swear it,” Father said, putting his hand to his heart.

  “Then gather your things,” the elder said, “for the ship sails in three days, and it will take us two to reach the harbor.”

  – PART THREE –

  – XIX –

  In Spain, my mother had an older brother, Carlos Bernal Fernández de Córdoba y de la Cerda. But I shall simply call him Carlos. Under normal circumstances, he would have been the sole inheritor of his family’s great wealth and properties. But shortly before my mother’s unfortunate marriage, Carlos entered a monastery. Second-born and third-born young men of noble Spanish families, disadvantaged by the laws of primogeniture, often entered the priesthood. After taking the sacrament of Holy Orders, they served as influential confessors at court. Some kept mistresses and had children. The upper strata of society accepted it. But it was unusual for a firstborn son like Carlos to study for the priesthood. In households as distinguished as his, it would be regarded as a great sacrifice, a refusal of the riches of this world in exchange for an eternal life of grace in the next.

  According to Caitríona, my uncle Carlos claimed he did have a true calling, for a time. Though his days in the seminary were constrained by a routine of relative austerity, his spiritual life blossomed. He found himself surrounded by others of his age and station endowed with similar passions. But after three years, as his preparation to take the sacrament reached its culmination, he experienced a change of heart. He told Caitríona that alone in his cell one night, gazing at the moon, he realized he could not see it through, and he resolved to return to society.