“In addition,” the shogun continued, “you will have the services of the castle’s chief shrine attendant, a mystic who has the power to communicate with the spirit world. I have ordered her sent directly to your residence. Now,
Sano bowed deeply. “Thank you, Your Excellency, for the great honor of being allowed to serve you,” he said, hiding his surprise and skepticism at the mention of the mystic. Never had he heard of one assisting in a criminal investigation-it wasn’t standard police procedure-but he couldn’t challenge the shogun’s decision. “I shall do my humble best.”
He would have gone on to express his appreciation for the assistance granted him, but the shogun’s gaze wandered toward the stage. Obviously he was eager for the auditions to resume.
“Many thanks, Your Excellency,” Sano repeated, turning to leave the theater.
He fought to keep the bounce out of his step, and his exuberance from erupting in an unseemly smile. Earlier this morning, his hope of distinguishing himself had looked minimal. Now he had a chance to prove himself a worthy practitioner of Bushido; to perform an act that could earn his family name a place in history. A chance to experience excitement and danger, and, even more important, to find truth, deliver a criminal to justice, and possibly save lives. Furthermore, with such a wealth of resources at his disposal, success seemed almost assured. Self- confidence flowed through Sano in a warming rush. The assignment offered great potential rewards at small risk.
As he left the palace and stepped out into the bright spring morning, Noguchi’s warning and Chamberlain Yanagisawa’s initial hostility made only a small dark shadow in the back of his mind.
Chapter 2
The way to Sano’s residence led down the hill through another series of passages and guarded checkpoints, over a bridge that spanned the castle’s inner moat. From there, he passed through another gate into the Official Quarter, composed of the office-mansions of the shogun’s chief retainers and highest officials.
Sano entered the quarter, experiencing his usual disbelief that he actually lived there. Splendid estates lined the roads, each surrounded by two-story barracks with whitewashed walls decorated with black tiles laid in diagonal patterns, and rows of barred windows. Roofed gates with twin guardhouses punctuated the long expanses of black and white. Past them moved a stream of well-dressed officials and their attendants, ladies in palanquins carried by strong bearers, servants and porters, bands of samurai both mounted and on foot. Sano exchanged brief, formal bows with his colleagues, most of whom he knew only slightly, then stopped before his residence. There the two guards bowed and opened the gate. He passed into a paved courtyard. The empty barracks, meant for retainers he didn’t yet have, loomed around him. A high wooden fence enclosed the main house. With the reluctance he always felt upon arriving home, Sano walked through the inner gate.
From atop a high stone foundation, the house, a huge, half-timbered building with a heavy brown tile roof that spread deep eaves over a broad veranda, seemed to repel rather than welcome him. Dark lattices covered the windows; wooden steps ascended to a protruding entrance porch. Sano entered, remembering the day he’d moved to the castle.
When he’d protested that the house was too big for one man, and its stable of horses unnecessary, the official who’d welcomed him had said, “If you refuse that which His Excellency has bestowed upon you, he will think you ungrateful.”
Sano had acquiesced and taken possession of the house. Now it swallowed him up in its vast, hushed space. He left his shoes in the entryway. Then, resisting the urge to tiptoe, he walked down the corridor and into the main hall.
“Has the shrine attendant sent by His Excellency arrived yet?” Sano asked the manservant who greeted him.
“No, master.”
Sano grimaced in annoyance. He would rather begin his investigation by examining the murder scene, where vital evidence might be lost if he didn’t get there soon enough. He could ill afford to wait for some elderly woman to hobble over from the shrine, and he felt a strong resistance toward the shogun’s plan. He didn’t share Tokugawa Tsunayoshi’s superstitious belief that communication with the spirit realm would reveal the killer’s identity. Practical means would more likely provide the answers. But the shogun had as good as ordered him to consult the mystic. For the first time, Sano suspected that his new position, for all its prestige and authority, might have constraints that would make solving a murder case harder instead of easier.
The servant was waiting for his orders. Sano, realizing he was hungry, said, “I’d like a meal now.” With much work ahead of him, he didn’t know when he might get another chance to eat. He could do so while he waited for the mystic.
“Yes, master.” Bowing, the servant left the room.
Sano knelt on the dais and surveyed his new domain with customary awe and discomfort. Fine tatami covered the floor. A brilliant landscape mural decorated the wall behind him. Sliding doors stood open on both sides of the room. Through them to his left, he could see past the veranda to a garden of flowering cherry trees, mossy boulders, and a pond. Sunlight shone upon the teak-wood shelves, cabinets, and desk in the study niche, and lit the scroll and the vase of lilies in the alcove. On the right, he looked across the corridor to his bedchamber, where a maid was dusting the lacquer cabinets and chests. Faint sounds told him that other servants were at work in the kitchen, the bathchamber, the privies, the six other bedchambers, or the long corridors. But to Sano the house seemed empty, unlived-in. With his books and clothes stowed away in cabinets, nothing of him showed, except for the Buddhist altar in a corner of this room, where incense burners, a cup of sake, and a bowl of fruit stood before his father’s portrait. Accustomed to close quarters, he couldn’t expand to fill the house’s space. Neither could he relax in its grandeur.
He’d lived for most of his life in a crowded Nihonbashi neighborhood, in the small house behind his father’s martial arts academy, with his parents and their maid Hana. The four tiny rooms had walls so thin that they could never escape one another’s sounds, or those of the city outside. His rooms in the police barracks had been larger but just as noisy. The relative silence of his new mansion unnerved him. But even worse than the silence was the loneliness.
After his father’s death, he’d brought his mother and Hana to live with him, but his mother hadn’t taken to life at the castle. Afraid to go outside, afraid of the sophisticated neighbors and servants, she’d refused to leave her bedchamber. When Sano tried to comfort her, she just stared at him in mute misery. She couldn’t eat or sleep.
After ten days, Hana said to Sano, “Young master, your mother will die if she stays here. Send her home.”
Reluctantly Sano had complied, regretting that he couldn’t share his new affluence with his mother. His loneliness worsened after she and Hana left. He spent as much time as possible at the training grounds, in the archives. He went to parties given by the shogun’s other retainers, who didn’t understand why their lord had promoted him, because circumstances prohibited them from knowing. Consequently they resented him, even as they courted his favor. But after martial arts practice, work, and recreation ended, there always came that dreaded moment when he must return home, alone.
Perhaps a marriage with Ueda Reiko would fill the emptiness in his life. Sano hoped the
A maid entered and placed a tray laden with covered dishes before him. He ate vegetable soup, rice, grilled prawns, sashimi, pickled radish, quail eggs, tofu, steamed sweet cakes-all tasty, prettily arranged, and in abundant quantity. Whatever he disliked about life at the castle, he couldn’t complain about the food or service. He was just finishing when he heard footsteps in the corridor. Looking up, he saw a woman, escorted by his manservant, enter the room.
“His Excellency’s shrine attendant,” the servant announced.
Sano had never visited the Momijiyama, the Tokugawa ancestral worship site in the castle’s innermost precinct. He’d therefore based his notion of its attendant on the old crones who tended the peasants’ Shinto shrines in the city. Now he felt a jolt of surprise when he looked at her.
