The Incense Game: A Novel of Feudal Japan Read online

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  To my fellow survivors of natural disasters, and in memory of those who lost their lives

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Historical Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Map: The Incense Game

  Also by Laura Joh Rowland

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Historical Note

  ON DECEMBER 31, 1703, a powerful earthquake struck a vast area of Japan that included Edo. The castle, the city, and many towns in outlying provinces sustained catastrophic damage. The death toll is difficult to quantify, due in part to the fact that the Tokugawa regime kept secret the number of its people who were killed. Sources estimate that several thousand people died in Edo and more than 100,000 in the entire earthquake zone. Casualties were concentrated along the coast, where a giant tsunami washed villages out to sea, flooded rivers, and drowned inland towns. The earthquake was one of the worst natural disasters in world history.

  The Incense Game is my story of what could have happened before, during, and after the earthquake.

  Real, historical characters in the novel include the shogun, his friend Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, his nephew Ienobu, his mother Lady Keisho-in, and Lord Hosokawa. Yanagisawa did have a son named Yoshisato. Ienobu actually was a hunchback and the shogun’s heir apparent. Lady Keisho-in did have a close relationship with a priest named Ryuko, who was a spiritual advisor to her and the shogun. Lord Hosokawa, the daimyo of Higo Province, played a role in the famous tale of the forty-seven rōnin, the subject of my previous book (The Rōnin’s Mistress). Everyone else is fictional.

  Prologue

  Edo, Month 11, Genroku Year 16

  (Tokyo, December 1703)

  THE EARTH TREMBLED as if a massive, restless dragon were uncoiling beneath the city. On the black expanse of the Sumida River, the moon’s reflection shivered. Thousands of houses shifted, groaning and creaking. Wind chimes tinkled in the icy air. At two hours before midnight, the few soldiers patrolling the streets reined in their skittish horses. Sleepers tossed, troubled by bad dreams.

  In a small house in the Nihonbashi merchant district, three women looked up as the tatami floor where they knelt shook under them and ceramic vessels on shelves rattled. The square white lantern above them swayed, casting eerie patterns of light and shadow across their anxious faces, made up with white rice-powder and red rouge. Breath held, the women didn’t speak.

  The shaking stopped.

  They released their breath.

  Earth tremors were common. Everyone lived with the fear of the great quakes that devastated Japan at unpredictable intervals and went about their business in the meantime.

  The oldest woman turned her attention to the items arranged on a mat before her. Her name was Usugumo. In her forties, she had the sleekness of a cat, her face molded from triangular planes. Silver streaks gleamed in her upswept hair. She picked up metal chopsticks, removed a white-hot coal from a brazier, and dropped it in a celadon ceramic bowl filled with ash. While she mounded the ash over the charcoal, pierced a hole in the mound, and drew a pattern of lines on it, she flicked her narrow-eyed glance at the other women.

  They were sisters, in their twenties. The younger was prettier, the elder more expensively dressed. Usugumo could feel hostility between them. She used tweezers to place a mica plate above the hole in the ash, then picked up three origami packets made of pale green, gold-flecked paper. She shuffled the packets, opened one, and removed a little ball of incense, which she set on the mica plate. Smoke tinged with the aromas of fruit, wood, musk, and spices arose from the bowl as the incense burned. Usugumo sensed anticipation in the air and a tension at odds with the serene ritual. The other women gazed down at the paper, brushes, ink, and inkstones arranged before them, their expressions stony.

  “The incense game begins,” Usugumo said. The sisters sat up straighter, like warriors preparing for battle. “Listen to the incense. Let its voice tell you who it is.”

  She set the celadon bowl on the floor between her and the elder sister and bowed. The elder sister picked up the bowl, holding it on her left palm. She curled her right hand on top of the bowl, forming a small hole between her thumb and forefinger. Her sister watched closely, leaning forward, as if impatient for her turn.

  The earth shuddered again.

  The elder sister lifted the bowl to her face, placed her nose against the hole, closed her eyes, and slowly, deeply, inhaled.

  * * *

  SANO ICHIRŌ, CHAMBERLAIN and second-in-command to the shogun, the military dictator of Japan, was alone in a small boat on a turbulent sea. Thunder boomed in the stormy sky. He clung to the sides of his boat as it rocked and pitched. High up to the crest of an enormous wave he soared; then he came down with a jarring crash.

  He awakened, a yell caught in his throat.

  He was lying in his dark bedchamber. His fingers gripped the heavy quilts that covered him. The rocking and thunder continued. His wife Reiko, beside him, said in a sleepy, worried voice, “Why are you shaking?”

  “It’s not me,” Sano said.

  Their twelve-year-old son Masahiro ran into the room, shouting, “Earthquake!”

  The room heaved and rocked with an erratic, accelerating rhythm and terrible force. Sano and Reiko sat up while doors slid open; cabinets spewed their contents. They heard the rasp of the house twisting, its joints wrenching. Cracking, shattering noises came from above as roof tiles loosened and fell. Crashes reverberated throughout the compound inside Edo Castle, where Sano and his family lived. From her room down the hall his five-year-old daughter screamed.

  “Akiko!” Clad only in her night robe, Reiko ran out the door, her long braid of hair flying.

  Sano was up now, too, shivering in the winter air. He said to Masahiro, “Help me get everybody outside before the buildings come down.”

  They raced through corridors, where they met guards and maids already fleeing. They leaped over gaps that opened between sections of the mansion. “Be careful!” Sano shouted. “Hurry!”

  Ceiling beams crashed behind them. Lattice-and-paper partitions collapsed. Sano and Masahiro herded people between leaning walls and down tilted floors. The crowd stumbled fr
ee of the mansion into the icy night.

  “Reiko!” Sano called, looking frantically around.

  “I’m here!” Reiko trudged toward him, carrying Akiko on her back.

  The family huddled together in the courtyard with Sano’s retainers and the servants. The barracks that enclosed the compound shuddered as the earth rocked harder and faster. Roof tiles flew like missiles. Cracks zigzagged across plaster façades. Buildings began to crumble.

  “Go out!” Sano yelled. “It’s not safe here!”

  The crowd surged through the gate to the stone-paved avenue. Across from this, estates belonging to other government officials occupied a lower level of the hill on which Edo Castle stood. Buildings collapsed like strips of silk curling in a breeze. Screams of terror and agony came from people trapped and injured. Sano looked up to see trees, walls topped with covered corridors, and guard towers sliding down the hill. Groans swept the crowd.

  “Merciful gods,” Reiko exclaimed.

  Sitting astride Reiko’s back, Akiko cried, “Look!”

  Sano turned in the direction she was pointing. With the estates across the avenue gone, a new, clear view of the city below had opened up. Sano, his family, and his household gazed down in stricken fascination, clinging to one another as the world bucked with thunderous jolts. In the dim moonlight Sano could see that Edo’s skyline had flattened. Faint, distant screams rose amid scintillating dust clouds. Orange lights flared like torches across the landscape. Fires inevitably followed earthquakes, when lamps, braziers, and stoves were knocked over and ignited the houses.

  “The city is burning,” Akiko said, her voice hushed with awe, her eyes round and solemn.

  Sano and Reiko looked at each other in horror: The world as they knew it was ending.

  1

  A MONTH AFTER the earthquake, Edo was a landscape from hell. Entire neighborhoods were leveled. The few intact areas stood like islands amid a sea of wreckage. Edo Castle resembled a beehive after a monster has shaken and mauled it to steal the honey. Up and down the hill, laborers swarmed, cleaning up timbers, plaster, and roof tiles from fallen buildings. The cold air rang with their shouts, the din from their shovels and hammers, and the rattle of the oxcarts that carried the debris downhill. Dust hazed a wintry blue sky darkened by smoke that rose from bonfires as Edo’s million people—the majority now homeless—tried to keep warm.

  Accompanied by troops, officials, and secretaries, Sano inspected the palace. His chief bodyguard, Detective Marume, walked ahead of him, clearing a path through crowds of porters hauling planks. Sano strode through gardens once beautifully landscaped, now awash in mud and manure, while men sawed boards, mixed plaster, and lugged supplies. Much of the huge complex had collapsed during the earthquake. Although the wreckage had been cleared away, new framework for only one section—the shogun’s private chambers—had been erected. Other sections were nothing but bare foundations. Sections that hadn’t collapsed leaned precariously.

  “When can you finish?” Sano asked the chief architect.

  “I wish I knew.” One of thousands of samurai officials in the bakufu—Japan’s military government—the architect had the grimy, haggard appearance of them all, including Sano. They’d been working day and night to rebuild the castle and the city and help the survivors of the earthquake. “We haven’t enough skilled carpenters, or building materials, or food for the workers. Can you get us some more?”

  “I’ll try.” Sano was in charge of the rebuilding and disaster relief. People came to him for everything. “But I can’t make any promises. The other carpenters are busy fixing the bridges.” Most of the bridges that spanned Edo’s rivers and canals were down; movement through the city was severely limited. “I’ve ordered building materials from the provinces, but they’ll be slow getting here because the bridges along the highways are down. Food shipments are delayed, too.” Would that they arrived before a famine started! Much of Edo’s food supply had been destroyed by the fires, and what remained was quickly dwindling.

  A clerk carrying a scroll hurried up to Sano. “Excuse me, Honorable Chamberlain, here is an urgent communication.”

  Sano unfurled the scroll and read it. His spirits sank lower. “The death toll in Edo is now at three thousand,” he said to Marume.

  Every new count was higher than the last. This was the worst disaster Sano had ever seen. He still couldn’t believe it had happened.

  Sano continued reading. “There’s more bad news. The treasury is already seriously depleted by earthquake relief and repairs.” The Tokugawa regime, which had endured for a century, was nearing insolvency.

  Marume didn’t answer. Once Sano could have counted on him to make humorous remarks that lightened the direst occasions. But Marume’s partner, Fukida, was among the casualties, killed when the barracks at Sano’s estate collapsed. Sano thought back to that terrible night, when he’d led the search for victims in the ruins of Edo Castle. He remembered Marume sobbing over Fukida’s broken body. The two men had been like brothers. Marume seemed a ghost of himself. His eyes were darkly shadowed. He never smiled anymore.

  Sano felt guilty that his own wife and children were alive and well, when Marume and so many others had suffered such grievous losses. And he missed Detective Fukida, who’d been one of his favorite, most trusted retainers. Although he customarily had two bodyguards, Sano hadn’t assigned Marume a new partner. He didn’t have the heart. Now he felt a wave of exhaustion so powerful that he swayed. He hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in a month. Closing his eyes, he took a moment’s nap on his feet. He couldn’t keep up this pace for much longer.

  He was forty-six years old, and he felt like a hundred.

  Edo had risen from disasters in the past, most notably the Great Fire almost five decades ago. Would Edo rise again? If only Sano could pull it up from the ruins with the strength of his own hands and will!

  Another messenger came running toward Sano. “Excuse me, Honorable Chamberlain, His Excellency the Shogun wants to see you, right now!”

  * * *

  THE SHOGUN’S TEMPORARY quarters were in a minimally damaged guesthouse. A few cracks in its plaster façade had been patched, a few broken roof tiles replaced. Pine trees and a stone wall screened it from the disorder everywhere else in the castle. Sano entered the small reception room, which was stifling hot from the lanterns and charcoal braziers that surrounded the two men seated on the dais. Both men were bundled in quilts up to the chin. The shogun, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, wore a silk scarf around his head under the cylindrical black cap that proclaimed his rank. An angry pink spot on each withered cheek brightened the pallor of his weak, pouting face.

  “I’ve been waiting for, ahh, more than an hour,” he said as Sano knelt on the tatami floor and bowed. Intolerant of disruption under the best circumstances, the shogun had been thoroughly unhinged by the earthquake. He viewed it as a personal affront, and he had more complaints every time Sano saw him. “Why does it always take so long for you to be fetched?”

  He hadn’t seen the devastation created by the earthquake, or how much work there was to do, because he never left his quarters. He vaguely knew that many of his subjects had died and many more had lost their homes, but all he really cared about was his own convenience. A mere month after the disaster, he thought everything should snap back to normal and everyone be restored to his beck and call.

  “My apologies, Your Excellency,” Sano said. A samurai must serve his lord respectfully and unstintingly, no matter how thin his patience was stretched. That was Bushido, the warrior code of honor that Sano lived by. He turned to the other man on the dais, the shogun’s nephew. “Greetings, Honorable Lord Ienobu.”

  “Greetings,” Ienobu said, his voice a tight rasp that sounded squeezed out of his stunted, humpbacked body. He had an abnormally small lower jaw, which made his upper teeth protrude. At age forty-two he looked a decade older. Rumor said he had a hereditary, degenerative bone condition that caused him chronic pain. No one knew for sure except
his physician, a blind acupuncturist. No one spoke openly about his condition because he was a Tokugawa clan member—the only son of the shogun’s deceased older brother Tsunashige—albeit one of dubious status.

  His father’s birth and death had been shrouded in mystery. His mother had been a chambermaid, who’d borne Ienobu when his father was quite young. His parentage was kept secret lest it jeopardize his father’s betrothal to a noblewoman. Ienobu had been brought up by a family retainer and given the retainer’s surname. Not until Ienobu was eight years old, and his father’s noble wife died, was he recognized as Tsunashige’s son and heir and a true member of the Tokugawa ruling clan. Not until this past year had Ienobu emerged from his luxurious villa to renew his slight childhood acquaintance with the shogun, who was sixteen years his senior.

  The shogun said to Ienobu, “Chamberlain Sano leaves me here all by myself. But at least I have you, Nephew.”

  “Yes.” Ienobu smiled; his lips stretched around his protruding teeth. “I’m glad to help you through this difficult time.”

  Sano thought Ienobu had taken advantage of the earthquake to get close to the shogun. With all the court officials busy at work, there was less competition for the shogun’s favor than usual. And Sano doubted it was a coincidence that Ienobu had appeared on the scene ten months ago, after the shogun’s then-favorite male lover, Yoritomo, had died suddenly. That was when Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu—father of Yoritomo, former chamberlain, and long-standing chief advisor to the shogun—had relinquished his control over the government and gone into seclusion. Sano wondered what Yanagisawa, his longtime enemy, was doing, but felt thankful not to have to worry about him. Yanagisawa’s absence had left a political vacuum that Ienobu had filled. Sano suspected that Ienobu had designs on the succession. Ienobu’s pedigree made him a logical candidate to become the next dictator, since the shogun had failed to produce a direct blood heir.

  But today Sano didn’t have time for speculation about Ienobu. “What can I do for you, Your Excellency?” he said, hoping to get it out of the way fast.