Death of a Doll Maker

Текст добавлен: 7 октября 2016, 00:22

Текст книги "Death of a Doll Maker "

Автор книги: Ingrid J. Parker

Жанр:

Исторические детективы

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

Назад к карточке книги

YESTERDAY’S BLOSSOMS

Ling was not caught until a week later. By this time Akitada no longer cared. When Maeda informed him, he only said, “Do whatever it takes to make him talk.” Ling confessed quickly. He died on his way to Tsushima.

When Feng was confronted with the evidence against him, he took poison, having been supplied with the means either by accident or design. Akitada did not care about this either.

The Chinese ship was released with a warning, and Korenori, the assistant governor general, congratulated him on solving the murder of governor Tachibana and stopping a dangerous plot against the nation.

Okata was condemned to death and transported.

Matters of much greater importance had happened after Okata’s arrest.

Akitada had returned to the tribunal in the knowledge that he had stopped a dangerous man and a possible invasion by the Chinese. He looked forward with considerable complacency to making his report to Fujiwara Korenori.

But first there were letters from home.

Tora and Saburo were already waiting anxiously for him to open the thick package of official and personal mail. They sat in his study as he undid the oiled cloth that covered mail sent by ship. Laying aside official documents and some letters from friends, Akitada opened a separate package, lovingly tied with a scrap of silk ribbon.

Letters and drawings from the children fell out first. Then he saw a letter from his sister Akiko. Akiko was willful and too conscious of status, in his opinion. Lately she had begun meddling in his work. He laid her letter aside with those of the children. Hanae’s handwriting he recognized and passed to Tora. There were also some missives for Saburo. Finally there was nothing left but a disappointingly thin sheet, folded somewhat badly. It had no superscription, but when he unfolded it, he saw it was from Tamako. The writing was oddly uneven, a mere scrawl, and the letter was only a few lines long.

“My dear husband—we had a son—alas, he died. Forgive your loving wife.”

The death of the child was an unexpectedly painful blow. It was, of course, a common occurrence that newborns died, and this child had been born before his time to a mother who was no longer young. He had not expected to grieve for a creature he only knew from feeling its movements inside its mother’s womb. How like Tamako to ask his pardon in her own grief. There was nothing to forgive. Fate frequently opposed human hope. He sighed and reminded himself that Tamako had already given him two beautiful children—no, three. Yori had also fallen prey to the cruel hand of fate. It was the human lot to suffer such losses. He would write to Tamako. He did not need more children to find happiness in his marriage. She was all he had ever wanted and needed.

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.

Contact Information

Please visit my web site here.

You may contact me at my e-mail address here. (I answer all of my mail, and this way you will be contacted when new books come out.)

Books may be ordered from Amazon and Barnes&Noble. Most of the novels are on Kindle here. The short stories are on Kindle and Nook. Please do post Amazon reviews. They help sell books and keep Akitada novels coming.

Thank you for your support.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Praise for I. J. Parker and the Akitada Series

Also By I.J.Parker

Pronunciation of Japanese Words

Characters

1: THE PARTING GIFT

2: THE PROMOTION

3: THE EMPTY TRIBUNAL

4: THE DOLL MAKERS

5: DAZAIFU