Shinju

“All right,” he said.

As soon as the words left his mouth, he realized that he had committed himself to this when he’d agreed to view the body. He’d taken the first step, and there had never been any choice about the second.

At a nod from Ito, Mura went to the cabinet. From it he took a wooden tray of tools-steel saws, long razors, and a collection of knives and instruments such as Sano had never seen before. They must have been Dutch in origin. Mura set the tray on the table beside the body, then went to the cabinet again and brought out a white cloth. This he tied over the lower half of his face.

His practiced movements told Sano that this was not the first dissection ever performed here. As did a bamboo pipe running from a hole in the table down to a drain in the floor. The room had been prepared for Dr. Ito’s experiments.

Mura turned Noriyoshi’s body onto its back. He picked up a slender knife and held it over Noriyoshi’s chest. Apparently he, not Ito, would do the actual cutting. Despite his unconventional views, Ito followed the tradition of letting the eta handle the dead.

Sano watched with horrified fascination as the blade sliced cleanly into Noriyoshi’s skin and moved down the center from the base of the collarbone to the navel.

“No blood?” he asked, relieved to be spared the sight of it. The raw, pink edges of the cut looked bad enough. His heart was racing; his hands went cold and clammy.

“The dead do not bleed,” Dr. Ito replied.

Now Mura made several cuts perpendicular to the first. He inserted a flat-bladed instrument into one of them.

Sano looked at the glistening red tissue that appeared as Mura folded the skin back from Noriyoshi’s rib cage, and at Mura’s slimy hands wielding the instrument to slice it away. He swallowed hard. Nausea spread through his stomach. Sweat trickled down his face despite the cold air coming through the window. His skin crawled. He fought the sickness by trying to concentrate on something else. He couldn’t have Noriyoshi’s corpse exposed to the public; signs of the dissection would show. When he returned to his office, he must issue a cremation order. But the distraction failed. Not wanting to see, yet unable to look away, he watched as Noriyoshi’s innards were revealed. The pale, gleaming ribs with twin pinkish-gray spongy lobes and a red, meaty object beneath. The coiled tubes of viscera showing at the lower edge of the cut. Like a flayed animal, he thought dizzily. And the smell rising from the open cavity was the same, too: sweet, strong, and rotten.

Like other men his age, he’d never gone to war. He knew about its atrocities, of course: men decapitated with a single sword slash, or shot with guns bought from foreign barbarians. Limbs severed. Bodies hacked to bits. He’d read accounts in the history texts and heard the stories handed down from generation to generation. Somehow he’d always imagined the carnage of battle as noble, necessary, and part of a samurai’s domain. This-this cold, deliberate mutilation of a human body-seemed obscene. It was defilement in its worst form. He could feel the pollution staining his skin, seeping into his nostrils, coating his eyeballs. His stomach lurched. Even his sweat seemed contaminated; he couldn’t bring himself to touch it. He pressed his lips together to keep it from running into his mouth.

“Mura-san, the lower two ribs on the right side,” Ito said.

Sano watched as Mura took one rib between the jaws of a sturdy pair of grips. He closed his eyes at the sickening crack of bone- once, twice. When he opened them again, he saw why Mura had covered his face. Bits of red tissue flecked the white cloth just over the eta’s mouth.

“Good.” Ito nodded. “Now cut… there.” He sketched a line in the air above the place where the ribs had been, over the section of spongy lobe now exposed. To Sano he said, “If there is water, it will be in the breathing sacs.”

Sano nodded quickly, afraid that he would vomit if he tried to speak. He watched the thin knife slice the breathing sac and braced himself for the gush of fluid.

It never came. Instead the sac merely shrank a little, like the punctured swim bladder of a fish.

“No water.” A grim satisfaction suffused Dr. Ito’s face. “This man did not drown. He died before he entered the water. He was murdered, then thrown into the river.”

Sano’s vision darkened, and his legs wobbled beneath him. Then he retched.

“Yoriki Sano-san. Are you ill?”

Sano tried to answer, but bile seared his throat. Without making a proper farewell, he stumbled from the room. He had to get out. Fast.

The jail corridors seemed endless; the prisoners’ cries were the sounds of demons in hell. Somehow Sano made it to the door. He managed to climb onto his horse and get halfway across the bridge. Then his stomach heaved again. Dismounting, he vomited into the canal. But the end to his sickness brought little relief. He felt horribly soiled by his experience. Conscious only of a desire to put as much distance between himself and Edo Jail as possible, he rode blindly through the twilight at a furious gallop.

Then, looming before him like a blessing from the gods, there appeared a building with a dark blue curtain hanging out front. The curtain displayed the character yu: hot water. A bathhouse. Sano jerked on the reins and fell off his horse. Dashing inside, he threw some coins on the counter.

“Sir, the price is only eight zeni!” the attendant cried, holding out Sano’s change.

Sano ignored him. He snatched a bag of rice-bran soap from the counter and shoved his swords at the attendant for safekeeping. Then he stumbled into the bathing area. In the dim, steamy room, men in loincloths and women in thin under-kimonos scrubbed and rinsed themselves, or soaked in the deep tub. Oblivious to their curious glances, he ripped off his clothes, throwing them on the floor in an untidy heap. He scoured his skin with the soap until it hurt. He sloshed a bucket of water over himself. Then he plunged into the tub, completely immersing himself again and again. The water was scalding hot and scummy with soap residue, but he forced himself to keep his eyes and mouth open so that it could cleanse him inside as well as out.

Finally a sense of peace came over him. He no longer felt contaminated. Gasping, he dragged himself out of the tub and went to sit on a bench in the steam room. Then he closed his eyes and groaned as realization struck him.

Noriyoshi had been murdered. Logic told him that Yukiko had, too. But since he couldn’t tell anyone about the illegal dissection, he must find some other way to prove what no one was supposed to know.

Chapter 3

Sano awoke to the sound of footsteps outside his bedchamber in the yoriki barracks. Stirring beneath thick quilts, he lifted his head from his wooden neck rest. A slit of light widened as the door slid open, and the maid entered on her knees, bearing a bucket of hot coals.

“Good morning, yoriki-san,” she said cheerfully, bending to dump some coals into a brazier near his futon.

Through the thin walls came other sounds of morning in the barracks. The veranda that ran past the doors of his and ten other adjoining apartments creaked and shuddered under hurrying feet. Sano’s colleagues called greetings to one another. It had taken him a while to get used to the noise, so different from the quiet of the house where he’d lived with only his parents and one maid-of-all-work. Grimacing at a loud crash from the other side of the wall, he rose cautiously.

To his relief, the queasiness that had continued all yesterday evening after the dissection had passed. He felt refreshed, hungry, and even confident that he could discover who had killed Noriyoshi and Yukiko. Only the lingering fear of disobeying Magistrate Ogyu and concern for his reputation clouded his thoughts.

Hurriedly Sano pulled on his heavy winter robe and went to the entryway for his shoes. Shivering in the chill gray morning, he followed the veranda to the privies attached to the building. He saw none of his colleagues, for which he was glad: the camaraderie they shared didn’t include him.

When Sano returned to his rooms, his manservant helped him wash, then dress in fresh black hakama, white under-robe, dark blue kimono printed with black squares, and a black sash. The maid had stored his bedding in the closet, removed yesterday’s clothes for washing, and swept the