The Incense Game (3 page)

“On a tour of inspection. The shogun wants me to bring him some good news.”

Sano and Hirata looked around at the ruins. Expressionless, they looked at each other. Then they burst out laughing. Finding good news for the shogun seemed so ludicrously impossible, it was funny. Sano’s men laughed, too, except for Detective Marume.

Humor quickly fled as they rode through the townspeople’s quarters. Survivors picked through leveled neighborhoods, looking for anything salvageable. Water-sellers roved, their buckets suspended from poles on their shoulders. The prices they called out were exorbitant, but people paid. Sewage and debris clogged the canals, wells had been blocked by shifts in the rock underground, and the system of wooden pipes that channeled water from the hills had been damaged. Clean water was at a premium.

In the intact areas, a few shops and market stalls had reopened. Long lines of people waited at each. Merchants lucky enough to have goods left to sell demanded prices ten times higher than usual, making fortunes off the earthquake. Crowds gathered on the Nihonbashi River banks as a lone fishing boat docked. Many other boats had sunken or burned. Fights over the catch broke out. Army troops tried to keep order. Sano and his men rode through areas that had burned into deserts of black timbers. Soot drifted; the air reeked of smoke.

Along the banks of the Sumida River floated remains from warehouses and docks. Soldiers stood around the few existent warehouses, guarding the rice that the regime paid out as stipends to its retainers. The rice normally fed thousands of samurai and their households, and the surplus was sold to merchants for cash that funded the government; the townspeople consumed the surplus rice. But much of it had been swept into the river during the earthquake or burned up in the fires. Hungry citizens clamored outside the warehouses. Food riots were becoming frequent.

Where the Ry
ō
goku Bridge’s high wooden arch had once connected the city with the opposite shore, only a few pilings jutted up from the water. This was the site of one of the earthquake’s worst disasters. Fleeing crowds had massed so tightly on the bridge that they were stuck. The bridge had collapsed under their weight. Hundreds of people had drowned in the river, which had been heated almost to a boil by burning debris.

“We’ve seen enough for now,” Sano said quietly.

They headed back to the castle, through an area crisscrossed by huge cracks that had swallowed entire houses. Townspeople who wore cloths over their faces, thick cotton gloves, and leather boots climbed down into the cracks, searching for victims. Decayed, stinking corpses lay on the street. Sano felt nausea turn his stomach. He doubted that anyone could still be alive underground, but he couldn’t help hoping so. He jumped off his horse and said, “Let’s help.”

He and Hirata and their troops joined the townsmen in lifting heavy roof beams off a wide chasm. The townsmen removed their cloth masks to cool their perspiring faces. A sweet odor wafted up from the darkness underground.

“Is that incense?” Sano asked.

“Yes.” Hirata’s nostrils flared as he employed his keen sense of smell. “There are people down there, but they don’t smell dead.”

The hope of rescuing survivors spurred the group to work faster. They cleared a hole above a room in which three women lay curled on their sides. Diarrhea stained their vividly colored robes and the tatami around them. One woman’s hair was streaked with gray, the others’ glossy black. Vomit crusted their mouths. But the skin on their faces, and their outstretched hands, was unmarked by decay. Their eyes were open.

“They’re alive!” exclaimed a young townsman with bristly hair. He squeezed through the hole feetfirst, without putting on his mask. He jumped down to the room, calling to the women, “Hey, we’re here to save you!”

They neither answered nor moved. Sano and Hirata frowned in puzzlement.

The townsman touched the women’s bodies. Recoiling, he cried, “They’re all dead! And their eyes! What is this?” He thrust his hands up and yelled, “Get me out of here!”

His comrades pulled him up. He sat on the ground, panted, and babbled. Sano and Hirata flung away more beams until the entire room was exposed. Now they saw what had frightened the young man. The dead women were eerily, disturbingly well preserved, their eyes a bright, gleaming red. The other townsmen exclaimed in shock.

Concern, curiosity, and the instincts honed by fifteen years of detective work compelled Sano to say to Hirata, “We’d better investigate this.”

The townsmen inserted a ladder into the hole. Sano and Hirata descended. Seen up close, the women’s condition was even more unnerving. Their eyes looked as if fresh blood filmed the irises and whites. Their skin was as fresh as life, their makeup smooth.

“Something prevented them from rotting,” Hirata said.

Sano bent to examine each woman. “They don’t seem to have been injured.”

“What killed them, then? Underground gases?”

“I don’t know.” Sano turned his attention to items on the floor—writing brushes and paper, inkstones and cakes of black ink, small jars for water. The gray-haired woman had a charcoal brazier, green paper packets, metal chopsticks, and silver tweezers by her. A celadon ceramic bowl of ashes lay tipped on its side.

“They were playing an incense game,” Sano said.

Incense games originated from a tradition called
kodo
, the art of incense, that had begun more than a thousand years ago. A great industry for formulating and manufacturing incense had grown up in Nara and Kyoto. Incense-makers procured ingredients from around the world—Japanese camphor, pine, and magnolia wood; frankincense from Arabia; clove and nutmeg from Java; patchouli, sandalwood, and cinnamon from India; cedarwood and star anise from China; ambergris from sperm whales; musk from Himalayan deer. They ground the ingredients, blended them with honey and oil, and shaped the mixture into sticks or pellets. The emperor’s court ladies perfumed their hair and their kimonos with incense, which also became an important element of religion.

At Buddhist temples priests lit incense sticks that symbolized the Buddha. Shinto priests offered incense to the spirits at every shrine. The sweet smoke rose from earth to heaven, summoned the deities to hear prayers, facilitated meditation and trances, led the souls of the dead to the netherworld. Incense had practical applications, too. Some incense blends were stimulants, sleep aids, or aphrodisiacs. It was also used to fumigate diseased places, mask body odor, and sweeten the smell of cremation.

The samurai class had embraced
kodo
. During the civil war era that had ended a century ago, samurai going into battle carried pouches of incense around their necks, to help their spirits find their way to heaven if they died. Today,
kodo
was a fashionable hobby. Cultured folk from all classes employed incense experts to teach them how to blend and appreciate incense. Games were an important aspect of
kodo
. They had elaborate rules by which players burned incense samples, smelled the smoke, and attempted to guess what type they were. The games weren’t really competitions; winning mattered less than sharing the enjoyment of the incense.

“It looks like the women didn’t finish the first round,” Sano said. “Only one packet is open, and all the score sheets are blank.”

“This is one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of strange things since the earthquake,” Hirata said. “What happened? And who are these women?”

3

A VAST CAMP
occupied the Nihonbashi merchant district. Where shops and houses had stood there were now rows upon rows of tents made from anything available—oiled paper and cloth, quilts and tatami mats, costly silk brocade and rags, bamboo poles and scrap wood. Inside the tents huddled thousands of homeless people—mostly women, children, the elderly, wounded, and sick. Able-bodied men and boys had been sent to clean up debris or help rebuild Edo Castle. A few old men played cards outside the tents; blind musicians tootled on flutes; children danced in mud and laughed. But the general atmosphere reeked of misery and sewage. The outcasts who usually collected human waste couldn’t haul their carts out to the fields to dispose of it because the roads were blocked. Night soil removal was suspended indefinitely.

A gong boomed. People trudged, bowls in hand, toward a large tent in which Lady Reiko and four other women stood behind a table laden with pots of rice, tureens of stew made from miso, tofu, vegetables, and fish, and barrels of pickled radish and turnips. Soldiers prevented pushing, taking cuts and fights while the ladies served the food. Many people didn’t have chopsticks; they ate with their hands. Many didn’t have bowls; they shared with others or used roof tiles. They all took turns drinking from a common cup tied to a water barrel. Some, injured during the earthquake and fires, had bandaged heads or broken limbs tied to wooden splints. People carried food to those who couldn’t walk because they were too badly wounded or too sick from the diseases that ravaged the camp. Reiko saw samurai whose masters didn’t have enough food for them. Shamed, they bowed their heads. Their suicides numbered among the deaths that occurred daily in the camp, the earthquake’s never-ending casualties. Reiko saw two men carry away a corpse. She felt a terrible pity for her people. Although women of her class didn’t usually work or mix with the public, she came here every day because she wanted to help.

“Make the portions smaller,” she told the other women, her friends from Edo Castle. “We need to stretch the food as far as possible.”

The stores of grains and seeds, pickled vegetables and fruit, salted and dried fish that usually tided the population over the winter were running low. Jars had broken during the earthquake; food had burned in the fires or spoiled in the rain that leaked into damaged houses. Spring crops hadn’t been planted yet. Harvests were months away. Food requisitioned from the provinces had yet to arrive. Reiko had heard of people catching and cooking rats and birds, in defiance of the Buddhist prohibition against killing animals and eating meat.

“The food is going to run out anyway,” grumbled the wife of the finance superintendent.

“There are too many people,” her daughter complained. “We can’t feed them all.”

They didn’t want to be here. Neither did the other two women. After the earthquake they’d begged Reiko to ask Sano for favors—the return of their servants who’d been commandeered for the rebuilding effort, carpenters to fix their homes. Instead of helping them, Reiko had roped them into working with her. They couldn’t refuse the wife of the chamberlain, but they muttered about her under their breath:

“Some people don’t know their place. They investigate crimes for their husbands.” Reiko had been doing that since she’d married Sano thirteen years ago. “They don’t know how to be proper wives.” Reiko and Sano had an unconventional marriage in this society where most wives were confined to domestic duties. Reiko’s exploits had furnished much grist for the high-society gossip mill. “So unfeminine. So scandalous.” Most ladies of her class thought that about Reiko. They deplored her father for educating her like a son instead of a daughter. “She even forces well-bred ladies to slave for the peasants.”

Accustomed to criticism, Reiko just worked harder. Every morning she rose before dawn to chop vegetables and clean fish. She rode to town on an oxcart that carried food to the tent camps. After serving the meal, she assisted the doctors who ministered to the inhabitants. She didn’t get home until after dark. She was exhausted, and she missed her daughter Akiko, but she couldn’t bear to sit at home while the townspeople were suffering. Idleness would give her too much time to think about her friends, relatives, and acquaintances who’d died in the earthquake or fires, and to miss those from whom the disaster had separated her. She rarely saw Sano; he was too busy. Masahiro, a page for the shogun, was always on duty. Reiko never saw her father, one of Edo’s two magistrates and a leader in the relief effort. And her best friend Chiyo was nursing her father, who’d broken his leg during the earthquake. Work alleviated Reiko’s grief and loneliness and her horror at what had happened to Edo. Without work to distract her, she might start crying and not be able to stop.

Now, as Reiko scraped the last rice out of the pot, a sudden wave of dizziness swept over her. Her vision swam, then went dark around the edges. She fainted.

*   *   *

SANO AND HIRATA
climbed the ladder out of the hole. “Bring the women up,” he told the townsmen. Their bodies needed to be identified, if possible, then disposed of at Z
ō
j
ō
Temple, where the remains of earthquake victims were burned in the crematoriums every night.

Four townsmen went into the hole, while four above ground threw down ropes. They hauled up the bodies and laid them in a row on the street. Sano and Hirata stood over the bodies, paying their silent respects to the dead. Smoke veiled the sun. The din of hammers, shovels, and picks resounded. Sano mentally increased the death toll in Edo to three thousand and three.

One of the rescuers joined Sano. He was in his forties, with sad features, his eyes red from the dust, his jaws covered with beard stubble. He pointed at the gray-haired woman. “I know her.”

“Who is she?” Sano tried to see past the weird red eyes and the white makeup. Her face reminded him of a cat’s—triangular and feral. She’d been attractive. Her dark green kimono patterned with pinecones was made of cotton; she was a commoner. The sumptuary laws permitted only the samurai class to wear silk. Sano thought of how little these distinctions seemed to matter nowadays.

“Madam Usugumo. She was an incense teacher. That’s her house.” The man said, “I lived down the block. My name is Jiro. I’m the neighborhood headman.” He cast a rueful glance around. “Or at least I was when there was a neighborhood.”

Headmen kept a register of the people on their block. They normally acted as liaison between their residents and the higher authorities. That system had broken down after the earthquake—one reason it was difficult to get an accurate count of the dead.