1589
I was born in the Age of War.
My land had been riven by fighting for more than a century in which great leaders and their houses rose and fell in a single generation. Living in Mikawa province, we were shielded from the conflicts by the castles Lord Tokugawa had built along our borders and the invisible barriers my mother had erected around my life. My father manned one of those castles, far away from his wife, children, and the aging peasant maid we employed. Coming from a mid-ranked samurai family, we were fortunate to live in a larger home that would have been reserved for a higher ranking family had we not lived far from the main castle in the village of Izumi. We had a private courtyard with a well and a cherry tree, surrounded by an earthen wall topped with a bamboo fence. This pleasant outdoor view contrasted with an interior that always seemed dark and shadowy even on the brightest summer day. The wall panels were stained brown, and we had fewer doors opening to the outside than one would expect in a home of this type. Our interior garden was such a tiny patch that sunlight failed to touch the soil even on the solstice. Were it not for the soft green moss covering the ground, the pervasive darkness would have been a source of melancholy.
Whether or not the house affected the moods of my mother, I was too young to observe. More alert to the visible, I admired how her long black hair framed her pale white face and hung in a perfect line down the centre of her back. Even knowing how much time she spent caring for it with her wooden combs, it was a wonder that so much hair could be trained to stay in place as she attended to her duties around the house. She rarely showed her blackened teeth, but when she offered an unguarded smile, I became entranced by the void in her mouth. Teeth blackening might be customary for samurai women to display their married status, but for my mother it offered a connection to the aristocratic life she admired in Murasaki’s Tale of Genji. Sometimes she would read me stories of gallant princes using poetry and music to charm beautiful young women living in forlorn settings. I did not understand the appeal of these tales, but they did explain why she preferred teaching me how to read and write rather than to uphold the martial traditions of my family.
As soon as I was capable of holding a brush in my hand, she began showing me how to write the syllables in hiragana and katakana. Perhaps because hiragana is known as the woman’s script, it was the one my mother had mastered. She could write its gently curving characters in a flowing manner that suggested she was a reincarnation of Murasaki herself. She encouraged me to emulate her style by copying passages from Genji. Conflicted by an eagerness to please her and an inchoate sense that an overly feminine style was inappropriate for me, my performance was inconsistent. Still, she was a patient teacher, often ignoring my brother and sister to supervise my work.
It was not until my seventh year that she became satisfied enough with my progress to introduce some variety to the lessons. One day, she refrained from involving me in the preparation of the writing materials. She carefully unfolded a piece of fabric and smoothed it out on the straw tatami floor. A heavy inkwell held the fabric in the top right corner, with a rectangular inkstone worn at one end carefully placed beside it. Next, she unrolled a bamboo mat to reveal two brushes which she placed in a wooden vessel of water to soften the bristles made from the hair of wild boar. As she worked, my eyes followed her wrists—so impossibly narrow that I could encircle them with my thumb and finger. Once she laid out the paper over the fabric, I realized why she had not asked me to help prepare for writing. “Mother, we're using different paper today.”
“Aren't you a clever boy? What do you notice that is different?”
“The squares are bigger and they've been divided into quarters.”
“That's right. Do you know why that is?”
“No, mother.”
“Today we begin to learn the writing system we borrowed from the Middle Kingdom.”
Kanji. The imported characters from China that represented ideas. This was the domain of men. Coming from a prominent samurai family, my mother was one of the few women fortunate enough to have been taught some of these ideographs. I leaned in attentively as she dipped her brush and ink, then drew the character for ‘eternity’ 永. “Do you notice how this kanji is perfectly balanced between the four quadrants? These extra lines will help you center the character and ensure that it is properly balanced.”
“But mother, how do you write so neatly on blank paper?”
“It becomes natural once your hand has learned how to write them in proportion.”
“Do you still imagine the squares are there?”
“No, you seem to forget that you ever needed them.”
She dipped her brush again, dabbed off the excess ink, and brushed a horizontal line. She followed it with a quick curving stroke and a diagonal line to complete the kanji for ‘big’ 大. Having learned the fundamental strokes during hiragana practice, I was able to write a passable set of imitations.
“Very good, son. Your brush strokes are too thick, though. Remember that the square not only assists in centering the character, but to illustrate the value of leaving space around it. There is equal beauty in what is written and what is unwritten.”
During breaks from the writing lessons, I would sit on the shaded verandah, hoping to feel a fresh breeze. While idling there with my feet hanging over the edge, I saw a stranger stride proudly through the gate, back erect, wearing two swords at his side. He had the confident air of a leader, unafraid of any challenger who might stand in his path. I ran inside, shouting “Mother there is a strange man in our yard! I think he's a ronin.” The look of alarm in my mother's eyes was intensified by her movement to reach the short sword she kept hidden in her obi. I began crying. She attempted to reassure me briefly, but was forced to thrust me into the arms of the maid so that she could rush out to see who had frightened me. The maid tried to calm me, saying that we were not in danger. I let out a loud sob which she struggled to suppress by pulling my face into the rough cloth of her smoke-smelling robe.
I heard my mother’s voice. “Sonsuke, come to the entrance please. We have a visitor.”
I could not seem to move despite the rough pushes the maid was giving me. Then a man's rough, loud voice boomed out, “Sonsuke, come meet your father who has walked so far to see you.”
The man I had seen was my father? Although I could not believe it, there was an underlying warmth in his authoritative voice which drew me out to the verandah. My eyes widened as I saw the man up close in his new kimono, standing there with one arm assuredly resting on the upper sword hilt, too well-kept to be a ronin. He looked at me approvingly, as pleased with me as he was with himself. My mother was bowing to him, her head a hair's width above the floor. I was too awestruck to kneel and bow myself, forcing my mother to raise up her arm in an attempt to pull me down while keeping her face parallel with the floor.
My father intervened.
“Let him stand. He is the man of the house now.” My mother immediately bowed again and apologized for her presumption. My father dismissed her without acknowledgment of the apology. “It is time for men to speak about the affairs of the world.” She exited unobtrusively while my father swooped me up in his left arm and sat on the verandah facing the lone cherry tree in the courtyard. Up close, I could see the follicles on his clean shaven pate. His oiled topknot glistened in the sunlight, but there was not a single excess drop touching his skin.
I was transfixed by the hilts separating me from my father. Noticing this, he drew his katana and held it out in front of me. “You must learn to wield this sword. From this day your training begins.” He held it with the butt of the hilt lightly touching my belly. I wondered how heavy it was and feared I would drop it. Even more afraid of displeasing my father, I grasped the sword in two hands, my left at the base, my right above his, tight against the guard. He let go without warning, but the sword’s sharp tip barely dipped in my hands. It was surprisingly light and I wondered that a boy my age could hold it. My father was pleased, “You hold the sword like the true son of a samurai. When you are old enough we will fight in Lord Tokugawa's army together.”
I followed him everywhere that day. We sat on the floor and polished his swords. He cared for the long katana, while I was entrusted with the shorter and seldom used wakizashi. Although it had other uses, its reputation as the implement of self-disembowelment during the seppuku ritual made me feel squeamish while handling it. My father mistook my expression for distaste and reprimanded my mother for raising a monk in his absence. I cringed at the insult. It was not until we shared a hot bath that night that I felt able to relax in his presence again.
“There are few greater pleasures than sharing a bath with your comrades.”
“How do you all fit into one bath father?”
He laughed at my innocence. “There are baths in this land large enough for a hundred men.”
“A hundred? The women must be boiling water all day to make a bath that big!”
“No Sonsuke, the water is heated underground by the demons our ancestors defeated long ago. It’s so hot that you can bathe outdoors in winter without discomfort.”
“I can’t wait until I’m old enough to see one!” Through the steam I could see my father’s smiling face as I imagined the walls were snowy mountainsides.
The next morning, my father left. Mother was again bowed low on the wooden verandah, while I approximated a samurai’s one-kneed bow. He examined us silently before grunting, “A samurai has no thought of his wife and family.” With that proverb, he turned and strode across the courtyard and through the gate without a backward glance. Despite his gruff dismissal of us, I henceforth sought to emulate him. My desire to learn the martial arts made me disenchanted with my mother's writing lessons. Moreover, I lacked the motivation to follow her artistic example. “Mother, why does it matter what my characters look like as long as they are correct?”
“Men will judge your character by your hand.”
“No they won't. All they care about is how you fight.”
“Is that so? Then why does Lord Tokugawa dance parts in the Noh performances at his castle? Even the most powerful man in the land, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, has become a master of the tea ceremony.”
“Who is Lord Toyotomi?”
“He is the Kanpaku.”
“Is Kanpaku higher than Shogun?”
“Since there is no Shogun right now, I suppose it is.”
“Does this mean Lord Tokugawa is not the most powerful lord in the land?”
“He is the most powerful lord in our part of the land and he is at peace with the Kanpaku.” She looked at me knowingly. “Are you really so concerned about our lord's status, or is this your way of avoiding calligraphy practice?”
I left my brush in the ink well, ignoring my mother's hint. “I'm never going to be a daimyo like Lord Tokugawa or the Kanpaku, so why should it matter how I write? Father would be angry if he knew I was wasting my time like this.”
I was afraid that I had upset her by calling calligraphy practice a waste. However, she seemed to conceal a smile. “Your father's anger is my concern.”
Another writing lesson that my mother tried to impress upon me was that kanji were not static two dimensional characters on the page, but living three dimensional embodiments of the ideas they represent. This was a difficult thing for me to appreciate. How could these black lines on a page take a form?
My confusion lasted until the night I had an unusual dream. The boxy character for 'mouth' 口 was lying flat on the white, sandy ground. Without warning, it stood up in the sand as though carpenters were pulling up the wall of a house with invisible ropes. It was then the thickness of the character revealed itself. The seeped ink extended horizontally like frozen carp banners blown by a perfectly constant wind. I entered the character and emerged on the other side to see the kanji for 'person' 人 stride by me while another rested under a shady 'tree' 木. 'Convex' 凸 and 'concave' 凹 were as deep as they were wide and tall. 'Tea' 茶 seemed like a house I could walk inside. There may have been others, but I could not recall them in the morning. However, the dream affected the way I perceived and wrote kanji. I could not show the depth of each character on a flat page, but my sense of each kanji's architecture helped me balance them better inside the practice squares.
Although my mother had a strong distaste for weapons, I was drawn to the sword. I enjoyed sneaking away from the house, pretending that I was on a secret mission, when in truth, it was only to meet my playmates in a wooded ravine near our homes. We always chose sticks to stage sword fights, disdaining such dishonorable weapons as the matchlock, bow, and spear that allowed you to strike someone from a safer distance. I imagined storming into battle side by side with my father, taking heads, gaining glory, and enlarging the reputation of the Ishikawa name throughout Mikawa.
After taking turns dueling in the center of a circle, someone shouted out a challenge for a fight to the death. We dispersed to hiding places in the ravine while the strongest boy in our group counted to one hundred. When he finished, it was silent enough to believe that we had all returned home. Few birds were active during the day and not even the buzz of insects could be heard.
“Kakare!” Someone yelled the signal to charge and the sound of clashing sticks soon proved the sincerity of his challenge. The first boy cried out his victory, which prompted two or three more pairs of feet to run along the trails. I crept toward the clearing as my playmates rushed into the fray. Wooden swords swirled and victims dramatically fell dead upon receiving any clear strike to the upper body. I readied myself to attack a victor only to see him engage another combatant. Realizing that I had been forgotten, I watched as they tired themselves out. To my amazement, the first boy survived until the end. He lifted his mock sword in triumph and yelled, “Do any remain who challenge me?”
I answered by charging toward him holding my own weapon above my head. He swung at me as I ran by him, losing his balance when the momentum of his missed strike carried him to his knees. I stopped and lunged toward him, landing a strike on his back before he could recover. The quiet returned to the woods as everyone tried to comprehend how a boy my age could defeat another three years his senior.
“Ishikawa won!”
“He’s the champion!”
“Amazing!”
The boys gathered around me to offer congratulations. Their adulation caused me to raise my shoulders and thrust my chest out.
“Is he a champion or a coward?”
The circle parted to reveal the boy I had defeated.
“What do you mean? Don’t be sore just because you lost,” someone said.
“I’m not sore. We all know I’m the best fighter here. It just bothers me that we’re calling him a champion when all he did was hide in the shadows and wait for the fight to finish before he attacked.”
My tongue pressed against the roof of my mouth as I tried to muster an answer. I thought I was just being smart waiting for the battle to end. If I admitted that, would it be an acknowledgement of cowardice?
“Look, his face is turning red!”
“Ishikawa knows he is a coward!”
“Coward! Coward! Coward!” The boys pressed toward me, shouting in my face. I felt tears welling in my eyes.
“Look! The champion’s crying now! Run home little baby!”
Someone shoved me backward a couple steps, making flight seem like a better option than attempting to silence their taunts. When I turned, I felt a branch hit my back. It was not the only strike I received as they chased me out of the ravine. I returned home barely able to breathe from the pain in my rib cage. Hearing that my mother was occupied with my younger siblings, I crept into the house to lie down in an unoccupied room, still struggling to understand why it was cowardly to enter the battle when I did.
So, which chapter do you think would make the best opener for the novel? Osaka 1615 for establishing some of the major themes or 1589 because it “begins at the beginning”? Share your thoughts at the bottom of the following blog post.