Autumn Bridge

Synopsis:

The year is 1311, in the highest tower of Cloud of Sparrows Castle, a beautiful woman watches from the window as the city is set alight and a mob runs riot destroying everything they can lay their hands on. She begins to write down the events unfolding around her and the secret history of the Okumichi Clan. Six centuries later the lost scrolls fall into the hands of American missionary Emily Gibson, a new arrival at Edo Harbour and racing from her tragic past. Emily quickly finds herself translating the text, caught up in the gripping tale of ancestry, heroism and forbidden love. At the same time Emily is desperately trying to unravel the complexities in her own life as two men fight for her love. As Emily sifts through the fragile scrolls, she begins to see threads of her own life woven into the ancient writings. As past and present collide, a hidden history comes to life, and with it a secret prophecy that has been shrouded for centuries and may now finally be revealed.

The second book in the Cloud of Sparrows series

Copyright © 2004 by Takashi Matsuoka

For my grandmothers
Okamura Fudé, born in Wakayama in southern Kansai
Yokoyama Hanayo, born in Bingo Village in Hiroshima Prefecture
For my mother
Haruko Tokunaga, born in Hilo, Hawaii
And for my daughter
Weixin Matsuoka, born in Santa Monica, California
With gratitude and respect
For bringing me as close as I will ever be
to
Lady Shizuka

1281–1311

H
IRONOBU
:
First Great Lord of Akaoka

L
ADY
S
HIZUKA
:
Wife of Hironobu

G
O
:
Hironobu’s bodyguard

1796–1867

K
IYORI
:
Great Lord of Akaoka, 1796–1860

G
ENJI
:
Great Lord of Akaoka, from 1861

S
HIGERU
:
Son of Kiyori, Uncle of Genji

H
IDÉ
:
Genji’s Chief Bodyguard from 1861, later Senior General

T
ARO
:
Second in Command of Genji’s army from 1861

H
EIKO
:
A geisha; Genji’s lover

H
ANAKO
:
A housemaid of the clan, later Hidé’s wife

E
MILY
G
IBSON
:
A Christian missionary

M
ATTHEW
S
TARK
:
A Christian missionary, later a businessman in San Francisco

K
IMI
:
A village girl

G
ORO
:
The village idiot

L
ORD
S
AEMON
:
Rival of Lord Genji

1882

J
INTOKU
:
Abbess of Mushindo Abbey

M
AKOTO
S
TARK
:
Matthew Stark’s son

S
HIZUKA
:
Genji’s daughter, namesake of the first Lady Shizuka

The Great Lord wields a sharp sword, rides a fierce warhorse, commands unruly vassals. He has taken the heads of ten thousand foes. His martial prowess is the marvel of the realm. But did he not enter this world bawling from a woman’s womb? Did he not suckle helplessly at a woman’s breast? And when the cold stars sparkle like ice in the winter sky, and the depth of eternity chills his heart, for what does he yearn more than a woman’s embrace?
AKI-NO-HASHI
(1311)

Lady Shizuka had not changed in the slightest in all the years Lord Kiyori had known her. Her complexion was as smooth as the finest Ming porcelain, with the perfect pallor of a courtly woman of the inner chamber, unlined by the passage of time, unblemished by exposure to sunlight or hardship, without any telltale signs of inappropriate deeds, thoughts, or feelings. Her eyes, when they were not regarding him — shyly or knowingly or beguilingly, as the case may be — looked off into an imaginary distance, with an expression of imminent pleased surprise, an expression accentuated by her high, plucked eyebrows. Her hair was not arranged into a coiffure of the modern type, with its complexity of folds, stacks, waves, and accessory devices, but simply middle-parted and tied with a light blue ribbon into a loose ponytail at her shoulders, from where it continued to flow down her back in an elegance of lustrous ebony all the way to the floor. Her gowns, too, in polished and crepe silks of contrasting textures, were of the classical type, loosely fitted and layered in complementary shades of blue ranging from the brightness of a high mountain pool to the near black of the evening sky. She was the very picture of a princess of the Era of the Shining Prince. An era, he reminded himself, many centuries past.

Outside this room, the great military might of outsider nations crowded in against Japan. The gigantic steam-powered warships of America, Britain, France, and Russia now freely entered Japanese ports. Aboard those ships were cannons that could hurl explosive shells as big as men far past the shore, even beyond inland mountains and forests, and shatter armies concealed from sight before they were close enough to know who was killing them. The ocean that separated the islands of Japan from the rest of the world was no longer a defense. The navies of the outsiders had hundreds of such smoke-belching, cannon-bearing ships, and those ships could bring more than bombardment from afar. From distant shores, they could carry tens of thousands of outsider troops armed with more cannons, and with handheld firearms as well, and land them on the shores of Japan within a few months. Yet here in this room in the highest tower of Cloud of Sparrows Castle, the Japan of old lived. He could pretend, at least for a time, that this was the totality of the world.

She saw him looking at her and smiled. Her expression was simultaneously innocent and conspiratorial. How did she manage it? Even the most brilliant of geisha could rarely blend the two into a single look. Demurely, she lowered her gaze and covered her girlish smile with the wide sleeve of her antique Heian kimono.

“You are embarrassing me, my lord. Is something amiss in my appearance?”

“How can there be?” Lord Kiyori said. “You are and will always be the most perfectly beautiful being in all the realm.”

A playful expression came into her eyes.

“So you say, again and again. Yet when was the last time you did me the honor of visiting me in my chambers?”

“I asked you never to speak of that again.” He knew by the heat in his face that he was blushing. How shameful for a man of his dignity and years to respond like a smitten boy. “That it happened at all is a regrettable error.”

“Because of the difference in our ages?”

Anyone seeing her would take her to be no more than eighteen or nineteen, in the first bloom of womanhood, a highborn lady without doubt, possibly even a virgin. Anyone looking at him would see a man of advanced years, posture unbent by age or defeat, standing in relaxed readiness, his white-streaked hair arranged in the elaborate style of a samurai lord.

The difference in their ages. Yes, there was that, too, wasn’t there? It wasn’t something he ever thought about anymore.

He said, “It will never happen again.”

“Is that prophecy?” Her tone was mocking, but not harsh, as if she were inviting him to share in a joke rather than having one at his expense.

“You know very well it is not.”

“Are you not Okumichi no kami Kiyori, Great Lord of Akaoka? Then surely you are a prophet, as is the leader of your clan in every generation.”

“So people say.”

“People say so because your actions are often not explicable except through foreknowledge. If you are not a prophet, then how can you know the future?”

“How indeed.” He had always felt the burden of the curse of prophecy, but lately, for the first time in his life, he had begun to feel the weight of time as well. Seventy-nine years. According to the records of the ancients, men of old — heroes, sages, the blessed of the sacred gods — often lived to be a hundred and more. He couldn’t imagine it for himself. Indeed, it was a marvel he had lived as long as he had, all things considered. He had acceded to the rule of the domain at fifteen, married at eighteen, had sons late, and had lost his wife at forty. During all that time, he had secretly kept company with Lady Shizuka. How long had it been? This was the fourteenth year of the Emperor Komei. They had met in the seventeenth year of the Emperor Kokaku, whose reign had lasted thirty-eight years. After him, the Emperor Ninko’s twenty-nine years intervened before the ascension of the present sovereign. Was it sixty-four years ago? Out of habit, he double-checked himself using the outsiders’ calendar. The seventeenth year of the Emperor Kokaku was
A
.
D
. 1796. This was
A
.
D
. 1860. Yes, sixty-four years.

She had said she was sixteen when they met. She said she was nineteen now. In Kiyori’s eyes, she had not changed at all. He felt a chill not brought on by the mild winter morning.

“How should I know?” Shizuka said. “You are the one with the visions, are you not?”

“Am I?”

“Surely you are not suggesting it is I who sees?”

“You have always made the claim,” Kiyori said.

“And you have always denied it,” Shizuka said. Concentration brought the slightest of furrows to her brow. She looked boldly into Kiyori’s eyes. “Are you finally conceding the possibility?”

Kiyori was prevented from answering immediately by a voice outside the door.

“The tea is ready, my lord.”

“Enter.”

He distractedly watched the young housemaid, Hanako, silently slide the door open, bow, quickly survey the room, and pause. How thoughtless of him. By standing idly by the window, he gave her no point of reference. She would not know where to serve the tea. But before Kiyori could seat himself across from Lady Shizuka, Hanako went precisely where he would have guided her, at the midpoint between where he stood and where a guest would naturally seat herself in relationship to him. Hanako never ceased to impress him. From the first, when she had entered his service as a nine-year-old orphan, she had exhibited a quick intelligence and a strong intuition superior to that of most of his samurai.

“Thank you, Hanako. You may go.”

“Yes, lord.” Hanako bowed. Walking in reverse so as not to turn her back on the lord, she began to withdraw from the room.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Shizuka said, her voice so faint a whisper it could have been imaginary.

“Hanako. One moment.” What had he forgotten? Oh, yes. “When the courier returns to Edo tomorrow, you will accompany him. There you will join Lord Genji’s household staff at Quiet Crane Palace.”

“Yes, lord.” Although the command had come without warning, Hanako showed no sign of surprise. She assented unquestioningly, which was exactly the correct response.

“You have served me very well, Hanako. Your parents would be proud of you.” Kiyori, of course, neither made apologies nor gave explanations for sending her away with no prior notice.

“Thank you, lord. You have been very kind to put up with my failings for so long.”

He ignored the formal expression of humility. “I will be very grateful if you serve my grandson as well.”

“Yes, lord. I will do my best.”

When she had gone, Kiyori said, “Why am I sending her to Quiet Crane?”

“Are you asking me, my lord?”

“I am only thinking out loud,” Kiyori said. “A bad habit that has given me a reputation for more eccentricity than I deserve.”

“It is good you have thoughts on the matter, since the decision is yours.” She paused before adding, “Is it not?”

Kiyori smiled sourly. He was in the same fix he always got himself into whenever he had conversations with Shizuka. His reasoning in these matters, no matter how logical, was almost always wrong. Such was the difference between logic and prophetic guidance.

He said, “I am sending Hanako to my grandson because now that he has assumed most of the formal duties of the Great Lord of our domain, he is in greater need of reliable servants than I am. This is particularly so because three more Christian missionaries are scheduled to arrive in Edo any day now, and they will live in Japan under our protection. Their presence will trigger a crisis that will determine the future of our clan. Beyond this immediate matter, I am hoping for a mutual blossoming of affection between Hanako and Genji. She is precisely the kind of woman he needs beside him in this perilous age.”