The Last Concubine (66 page)

‘So did anyone ever find the Tokugawa gold?’ Edwards asked in his direct way. In all these years it was the first time anyone had brought up that harrowing memory.

‘I think we’d have heard if someone did. I expect the old man from Lord Oguri’s village is still up there, digging,’ said Daisuké. He smiled rather sadly.

‘I could never understand why Lord Mizuno didn’t know where it was,’ said Shinzaemon. ‘Didn’t the old man tell you anything when you stayed up there with him, after we’d left?’

‘Apparently Lord Oguri and Lord Mizuno had an argument,’ said Edwards. ‘Someone in the village heard raised voices. That was how the rumours started about the gold. The old man thinks Lord Oguri tricked Lord Mizuno. He found a pretext to send him away somewhere and got rid of the gold before he returned. The old man’s convinced that Lord Mizuno must have had some idea where it was buried. It must be somewhere on that moor. The trouble is, the gold was buried in spring and by summer the whole place had grown over. There’s nothing to distinguish one spot from another. The grass goes on for ever.’

Sachi shivered, remembering the pit. She thought wistfully of Haru. She had been the custodian of their story, entwined with their destinies even before Sachi was born, ever since she was a
child, growing up with Sachi’s mother. She had guarded her secret until she could guard it no longer. And finally it had brought her face to face with Lord Mizuno. Tears came to Sachi’s eyes at the thought that she was no longer there to share these wonderful new experiences with them.

Yet she also understood that her uncle, Lord Mizuno, had had to do what he did. That was how it had always been in the old days. Everyone had known what they had to do and had done it, no matter what, without stopping to think about whether they wanted to do it or whether it was even the right thing to do. They had done their duty.

That was what made Shinzaemon and Daisuké different, and Sachi too. They thought for themselves.

Sachi looked around. On the far side of the crowd, standing apart from everyone else, was a group of women. They were dressed as Sachi and Taki were, as ladies of the court. As Sachi looked, she no longer heard the metallic shrieking of the whistle or the mechanical huffing and puffing of the great engine. In the middle of the group was a small thin woman, her glossy black hair cut short like a widow or a nun. She stood so quietly no one would ever have noticed her. Her eyes were lowered and she was looking at the ground as if she had retreated so deep inside herself it was painful to have to come out. In the whole crowd Sachi could see nothing but her small pale face with its big ethereal eyes. She forgot everything but that special love she always felt for the princess.

A gentle smile crossed Kazu’s face when she saw Sachi.

‘Child,’ she said. ‘The Retired Lady Shoko-in. It’s been so long. You have bloomed like a flower!’

She greeted Taki too with joy.

‘I spend most of my time in prayer and contemplation,’ she said when they asked her how she was. ‘But my nephew the emperor begged me to come out this one time. His Majesty has been very kind to me. He begged me many times to go back to Kyoto and I did go back once for a visit. But now His Majesty has established his court in Tokyo I have moved back here. My life is very quiet. The Shimizu family take care of me still and I write poetry and think. It is a good life.’

Sachi was aware of nothing but the luminous presence of the princess. Standing there in their court robes it was as if time had stood still, as if they were still in the palace.

‘And Haru?’ the princess asked suddenly, looking around. When Sachi told her that Haru had passed away, she stood in silence for a long while, her head bent and her hand to her eyes.

Suddenly Sachi was aware of Shinzaemon watching with his piercing eyes and felt a tremor of fear. What would the princess think when she discovered Sachi had made an alliance with another man instead of spending the rest of her life devoting herself to the memory of the shogun, as she herself had done? Would she not think that Sachi was bound – by honour, if nothing else – to the Tokugawa clan? This was certainly the choice the princess had made.

Trembling, Sachi introduced Shinzaemon. ‘My husband,’ she said. ‘He fought loyally for the Tokugawas to the very last.’

The princess didn’t seem to hesitate.

‘Welcome,’ she said. ‘I am very happy to meet you. Lady Shoko-in has been a devoted friend and sister to me for many years. It is a bond that can never be broken – I as the wife, she as the concubine of the shogun. Had things gone differently, she would have been one of the highest ladies in the land. We are bound for ever to the Tokugawas.

‘We may be relics of a past age, but we are also survivors. We have all found a place for ourselves in this new world. I’m happy to give my blessing to your union.’ The princess inclined her head formally to Shinzaemon.

It was the last secret, the last mystery. Now Shinzaemon knew that Sachi had been not just a court lady but the last concubine of the shoguns. The last veil between them had been lifted. In the old days he, a
ronin
from Kano, and she, the shogun’s concubine, could never have been together. They had succeeded where her parents had failed and had managed to grasp the life they wanted.

To Sachi’s relief Shinzaemon did no more than nod quietly. He looked at her and smiled. In his eyes she read pride, admiration and affection. No, more than that. There had been a word that Edwards had taught her all those years ago when he had taken her hand in the garden. It was not affection, like a man feels for
his parents, he had said, or respect, like a man feels for his wife, or even lust, like a man feels for a courtesan, but more than all those put together. She remembered the strange foreign syllables:
rabu
– ‘love’. That was the only word to express it. In his eyes she saw love.

A man had arrived in an open carriage, surrounded by a huge escort. Sachi knew that it was the same person who had been inside the phoenix car which they had watched enter the castle in grand procession. At that time they had thought they would die if they so much as looked at him. Timidly Sachi glanced up just for a moment. He was in scarlet court trousers, white robes and European boots and was very young – the very age His Majesty the shogun had been when she had known him. She quickly lowered her eyes.

The princess stepped forward. They exchanged a few words, then she beckoned to Sachi. An extraordinary fragrance such as Sachi had never smelt before floated around the young man – the legendary imperial fragrance.

‘The Retired Lady Shoko-in, only concubine of his Late Majesty Lord Iemochi,’ said the princess, introducing her. ‘She has been my devoted friend and sister, a comfort to me for many years.’

Sachi bowed low.

‘Ah, Lord Iemochi,’ said the emperor. He had a youthful piping voice and spoke the special language that only the emperor spoke. ‘I remember him well,’ he said. ‘A very gentle man. So tragic that he died so young. My late father was very fond of him. We’ve had so much loss, so much tragedy. It’s good that we now go forward together. I’m very happy to meet you, my lady.’

Then the emperor moved on. He made a speech as smoke poured from the engine, then he and a few other dignitaries got on board. Sachi, Shinzaemon, Daisuké and Taki watched as the princess disappeared inside.

The whistle shrieked, the huge wheels started to move, at first very slowly then faster and faster. The train rumbled off and disappeared into the distance.

Afterword

During my research for
The Last Concubine
, I came across a reference to the lost Tokugawa gold, in a footnote in a history of the Mitsui company. Apparently Lord Oguri had smuggled the shogun’s hoard of gold coins out of Edo when Lord Yoshinobu was still in power and buried it somewhere in the foothills of Mount Akagi. He was beheaded shortly afterwards and all trace of it disappeared. The author added that treasure hunters had been digging for it for three generations, riddling the lower slopes of Mount Akagi with tunnels and trenches.

Tantalizing though it was, that was the only reference to the gold I could find in any of the many books I researched, so in the end I concluded it was just a rumour. Nevertheless the idea of the gold and the hopeless quest for it had stirred my imagination.

When I was nearing the end of writing this book I decided to go to Mount Akagi. I didn’t expect to hear anything about the gold; I just wanted to get an idea of the place and the landscape. Mount Akagi is way off the beaten track, not in any Englishlanguage guidebook, but I finally found the address of a hotspring inn. I took the bullet train to Takasaki, then drove up a long winding mountain road.

Once there I decided I might as well ask the owner of the inn about the Tokugawa gold, absurd though it seemed. To my
amazement he was not remotely surprised. ‘It’s not here,’ he said in very matter-of-fact tones. ‘It’s on the other side of the mountain.’ He showed me a map. The next day, I set off through the rain in search of it. Thoroughly lost, I asked in a lonely store and was directed through the woods and across some allotments to a dilapidated house. Next to it was a hummocky expanse of overgrown woodland with a mechanical digger in the middle. I ended up having tea with a man whose family has indeed been digging for the gold for three generations. His account of how the gold got to Mount Akagi is different from my fictional version but nevertheless I was thrilled to discover that the Tokugawa gold might actually exist – though no one has found it yet – and so it became part of my tale.

Sachi and her story are fiction but the world in which she lived is not. I’ve done my best to make the historical framework as accurate as possible (though I have taken the odd liberty in the interests of telling a good story). The battles, political events and even the weather (miserably cold and wet in summer 1868) were pretty much as described. The individual shoguns (who in books on Japanese history are usually referred to only as ‘the shogun’) really existed and the details of their stories are largely true. Princess Kazu really was sent to marry Shogun Iemochi when she was only fifteen and took the Inner Mountain Road through the Kiso region to Edo, to live in Edo Castle.

Very little is known about life inside the women’s palace. It was kept strictly secret and those who lived there were prohibited from speaking about it. After it was dismantled a few maids recorded their recollections. I have used these in imagining life there. The stories of intrigue and murder are all true, the names of the concubines – old Lady Honju-in and the others – all as they were. Princess Kazu really did insist on dressing in the imperial style, feuded with her mother-in-law, Lady Tensho-in (the Retired One), and after the women were evicted from the palace moved to the Shimizu mansion. Before the shogun set off on his last journey to Kyoto, she gave him a farewell gift: a concubine. After his death she remained a nun and died of beriberi in 1877, at the age of thirty-one.

Lady Okoto too, Sachi’s mother, really existed and the story of her liaison with the handsome carpenter is largely true. She was a member of the Mizuno family and the last and favourite concubine of the twelfth shogun, Lord Ieyoshi. We don’t know the name of her lover (he was not a carpenter, in fact, but a carpenter’s agent, a sort of building contractor); but we do know that he looked just like the ravishingly handsome kabuki actor Sojiro Sawamura. Her brother’s machinations to get her into the shogun’s palace and her sad end too are true. I made a couple of changes. The events actually happened in 1855, after Lord Ieyoshi was dead, not 1850; and there’s no record that she had a child.

Japan in the 1860s was an extraordinary place. No one knew their world was about to change, not gradually, as ours did in the Victorian West, but overnight. Everyone assumed that life as they knew it would go on for ever. It was a world in which scent played a large part and wheeled vehicles were used only to transport goods; people walked or travelled by palanquin. Gunpowder was little used, samurai fought with swords and samurai women were trained in the halberd. I researched the clothes, the hair-styles, the incense, how people lived and, as far as possible, how they thought and felt. I’ve also kept to the Japanese calendar of the time and used the Japanese clock and Japanese distances.

Women’s lives were very different from our own. High-class women seldom left the home and were expected to maintain an impassive demeanour at all times, no matter what dreadful calamity befell them. This was a society in which the concept of love and the word for it had yet to be introduced from the West. When people fell in love, the experience took them by surprise. To be so overwhelmed by brute passion that one failed to do one’s duty was a disaster. Kabuki plays and Japanese novels on the subject end not with marriage but with love suicide. There was also no word for ‘kiss’. The kiss was one of the geishas’ esoteric sexual techniques and decent women like Sachi didn’t know anything about it. It was a challenge to write a love story set in a society in which there was no concept of romantic love – and without ever using the word ‘love’!