The Tokaido Road (1991)(528p) (69 page)

After spending the day at Sengakuji, then being questioned by a government inspector, Oishi, his son Chikara, and fourteen of his men were put in Lord Hosokawa’s care. The rest of the AkM retainers were divided among three other lords while the government deliberated their fate. They were treated as honored guests while controversy raged through Edo. Because they had acted in the true spirit of the warrior’s Way, petitions were raised asking the government to spare them. Finally, after six weeks, an envoy delivered the verdict.

The government’s Great Council had been lenient. It had decided that the forty-seven loyal
rMnin
of AkM should be granted the deaths of
samurai
instead of criminals. Apparently they agreed with the powerful abbot of Ueno who pointed out that if the AkM
rMnin
lived, they might do something later that would sully the purity of their deed. The greatest lords in the country gathered in Lord Hosokawa’s garden to see the sentence carried out.

Cat and Hanshiro came early, before the others arrived. A bamboo screen hid them, but they could watch the sad proceedings through the latticework woven into the screen. The cherry tree nearby was white with blossoms, but their fragrance was too faint to be detected over the metallic scent of blood pervading the garden.

Cat wore the unadorned
kimono
of mourning. Hanshiro was dressed in formal robes,
hakama,
and winged vest bearing the crest of Matsudaira Aki-no-Kami. Lord Asano’s family had been a minor branch of Aki-no-Kami’s clan, and at Oishi’s request he had discreetly offered Cat and Hanshiro, and their loyal servants, Kasane and Shintaro, places in his Edo household. But when Cat and Hanshiro married, they held the ceremony at Lord Hosokawa’s mansion so Oishi could be there.

Beyond the screen shielding Cat and Hanshiro was a corner of bare ground. It was bordered on two sides by the raised floor of the veranda of Hosokawa’s mansion. Lining the veranda and seated in rows on
tatami
mats on the ground were the lords. In the center of the open space three mats had been turned upside down and laid side by side. A white cloth had been spread in the middle of them, but it didn’t completely cover the smears of fresh blood.

Behind the low dais, a curtain of white silk hung from ropes stretched between poles. The silk billowed gently in a light spring breeze. It hid the platform from the view of the fifteen men who had approached it, one by one, this morning. The executions had been carried out according to rank, and only one man was left.

Cat had bid Oishi good-bye the night before, but she wished she could have told him today that his son had died well. She saw the man who would serve as second approach the dais. He drew his sword and took his stance behind the white cloth.

Hanshiro glanced over at Cat. “Victor and vanquished,” he murmured.

Cat finished the poem silently.
Victor and vanquished are but drops of dew, bolts of lightning, illusion.

The silent men in the garden seemed to give a collective sigh as Oishi strode out from the door of the mansion. He turned at the end of the curtain, stepped onto the dais, bowed, and knelt. As Cat watched him through her tears, his figure seemed to shimmer there.

Fare you well,
sensei, she thought. And she knew the ancients were right. Her thoughts and her love would accompany him on his long journey.

A book could be written about the eccentricities of the fifth Tokugawa
shMgun,
Tsunayoshi, known as the dog
shMgun.
The years of his rule were called the Genroku period. Genroku officially lasted from 1688 to 1703, but its flowering of art and literature and drama extended into the next two decades of the two hundred and fifty years known as the Tokugawa or Edo period.

Saikaku Diara, the son of a seventeenth-century merchant, wrote many entertaining novels detailing life and love among the common people of that time. His works, such as
Five Women Who Loved Love, Some Final Words of Advice, The Life of an Amorous Man, This Scheming World,
and
Comrade Loves of the Samurai
are available in paperback editions.

Howard Hibbert’s work,
The Floating World in Japanese Fiction,
and Stephen and Ethel Longstreet’s
Yoshiwara
give a good account of the demimonde of Tokugawa Japan’s pleasure districts and
kabuki
theaters. Charles Dunn’s
Everyday Life in Traditional Japan
is also a wealth of detail about the period.

Jippensha Ikku’s comic novel
Shank’s Mare,
translated by Thomas Satchell, follows two picaresque vagabonds down the TMkaidM. Hiroshige Ando’s famous series of woodblock prints depicting the
fifty-three post stations of the TMkaidM Road
are also available in book form. Because of the Tokugawas’ resistance to change and their refusal to allow foreign commerce, both Jippensha’s and Hiroshige’s works, although done over a hundred years after this story, impart the ambience of the time.

Various nonfiction accounts, with embellishments, have been written in English about the AkM-Asano affair. The two most widely read are found in A. B. Mitford’s
Tales of Old Japan
and John Allyn’s
The Forty-Seven RMnin Story.

One study mentions that Lord Asano Takumi-no-Kami had a daughter and that Oishi Kuranosuke tried to arrange an adoption for her. Other research indicates that Lord Asano had no offspring. I chose the middle ground, postulating that he had a child
by
a secondary wife. This was a common occurrence and the children of such unions were often adopted.

The AkM rMnin’s loyalty raised the issue of civil law versus a higher moral imperative. The common folk were loud in their support of the forty-seven and scholars argued the case at great length. As a consequence, almost more has been written about the aftermath of the vendetta than about the raid itself.

Oishi Kuranosuke and his men walked five miles through the center of Edo and no one interfered with them. After washing Kira’s head in the well at Sengakuji and visiting Lord Asano’s tomb, they surrendered to the abbot there. Sentence was passed on the fourth day of the second lunar month, about the third week in March by the Gregorian calendar. In the mansions of the lords who had hosted them, forty-six of the
rMnin,
including Oishi’s sixteen-year-old son, committed
seppuku
on the same day. They were buried with their lord at Sengakuji.

After the raid on Lord Kira’s mansion, the lowest ranking member of the league was dispatched to Hiroshima to take the news to Lord Asano’s brother. Two years later the messenger surrendered and begged to be allowed to commit
seppuku,
and join his comrades. The
shMgun,
perhaps unwilling to reawaken the whole tumultuous affair, denied his request and he lived to be eighty-three years old.

Within two weeks of the incident, the first play about the heroic forty-seven appeared. The events in it were only thinly disguised as having happened in an earlier century. Since then hundreds of plays, books, essays, and movies about the story have been produced. The version written in 1748, by the famous playwright Chikamatsu, is still performed every year on the anniversary of the raid. The two movies, called
Chushingum,
about the forty-seven loyal retainers, are broadcast nationwide on that same day.

At the quiet temple of Sengakuji, near the subway stop by that name on the outskirts of Tokyo, their graves are still visited by those who honor them. Clouds of incense burned in their memory always hang over them. Their names have become immortalized in Japan, and each of them is a national hero.

Be sure to read the complete collection of

Lucia St. Clair Robson

Native American historicals from Ballantine Books

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