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 o j o 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.
Sano introduced himself and Hirata and Detective Marume. The headman bowed, awed to meet such important personages.
“What about the other women?” Hirata said. “Do you know them?”
“I’ve never seen them before. They’re probably pupils of Madam Usugumo.” Jiro added, “She was very private. She didn’t mix with the neighbors.”
Sano studied the two other women. Their robes had the luster of expensive silk; they were from the samurai class. They had youthful, rounded features and a family resemblance. “Sisters,” Sano deduced.
One’s lavish brocade kimono was a deep rose color; she was the elder sister, probably married. The other’s was a brighter pink, appropriate for a maiden. Their hair was elaborately coiffed, studded with jade beads on lacquered spikes. A motif in the patterns of their sashes caught Sano’s attention. It was a large dot circled by eight smaller dots.
“I know who their family is.” Sano pointed to the symbol. “That’s the Hosokawa clan crest.”
Dismay mixed with his satisfaction at finding a clue to the women’s identities. Lord Hosokawa was one of Sano’s top political allies, who headed an ancient family that controlled the fief of Higo Province. Higo was a top rice-producing domain and the Hosokawa clan one of Japan’s largest, wealthiest landholders.
“I’ll have to inform Lord Hosokawa,” Sano said, even though he had a million other urgent things to do. This was too sensitive a matter to delegate to a subordinate. “I’d better take some of their personal effects to show him.” Sano gingerly untied the women’s sashes and tucked them in his horse’s saddlebag.
A loud groan came from the bristly haired young townsman. He staggered as if he were drunk; he held his head in both hands. “Ow, my head aches!” Wheezing, he cried, “I can’t breathe!” and then he fell to the ground.
His friends hurried to his aid. He vomited violently.
“What’s the matter, Okura?” the headman asked.
A stench arose as Okura’s bowels moved and diarrhea gushed down his legs. “I don’t know,” he said between retches and gasps. “My stomach hurts. I hurt all over.” Dazed, he looked around at the ruins as if seeing them for the first time. “What happened? Where am I?”
Sano started to say, “Fetch a doctor,” then remembered that since the earthquake doctors were too few and too far between.
Detective Marume said, “Vomiting, diarrhea-the women had those symptoms, too.”
“You’re right,” Sano said. “I think they were poisoned.”
“Okura must have breathed the poison when he went down in the hole,” Hirata said.
Okura went into shuddering convulsions while the other townsmen tried to soothe him. The headman said, “But we all went down. Why is he the only one who’s sick?”
“The rest of us didn’t go down until the hole was opened up and the fresh air got in,” Sano recalled. “And he didn’t wear his mask.”
“Is he going to die?” the headman asked anxiously.
“I don’t know.” But if Sano was right about the poison, it had already killed three people. “He’s young and strong. Maybe he got only a small dose of the poison and he’ll recover.”
Sano did know that the likelihood of poison complicated the matter of the dead Hosokawa women. He said to Hirata and Marume, “This looks like murder to me.”
Laura Joh Rowland
The Incense Game: A Novel of Feudal Japan
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