Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show Read online

  Commodore Perry’s Minstrel Show

  Richard Wiley

  For Pilar and Morgan

  in whom I am most proud

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART ONE: EDO

  1. Dutch Learning

  2. Oh, What I’ll Find There I Don’t Know

  3. Accident upon Accident

  4. Whitman Sampler

  5. Approach of the Outside World

  6. Tell Him I’m in Mourning!

  7. He Didn’t Care about the Neighbors Anymore

  8. Don’t Get Up on My Account

  9. A Word Overheard Is a Word Forgotten

  10. The Pavilion of Timelessness

  11. Where Has My Heart Gone?

  12. A Fly in the Ointment

  13. Three Tulips in a Boat

  14. Under the Falling Wisteria

  15. The Experiment of America

  16. Rumors

  17. Fine Mornin’, Ain’t It?

  18. Commodore Perry’s Anxiety

  PART TWO: ODAWARA

  19. Everything Wrong Everywhere

  20. Saved from the Realm of Absolute Calamity

  21. “Kambei”

  22. Angelface

  23. Hired for a Bad Cause

  24. Whoa, Nellie

  25. Come to Me, My Dear, Come

  26. I Guess There’s Hooligans Every Damned Where

  27. Twenty Questions

  28. Allergic to Pain

  29. Einosuke’s Anger

  30. Japan’s Conundrum

  31. An Earlier Walker than His Uncle

  32. Extra Circumspect, From Now On

  33. Behold, Your Defeated Lord

  34. We Can’t Have This

  35. Is It Easier to Go or Be Left Behind?

  36. Incense or Prosthetics

  37. Irony Provides Relief

  38. A Fetish without Many Followers

  PART THREE: SHIMODA

  39. Keiki and the Planting, Ueno and the River Trout

  40. The Wind and Intransigence

  41. Hide This in Your Wagon

  42. The Omen of the Crows

  43. I Have Not, Particularly, Saved Myself

  44. Life Is Short. Fall in Love

  45. Strength and Flexibility

  46. I Am Taking You Home

  47. Knowable People

  48. Not Selling Chestnuts

  49. Outraged Periods and Exclamation Points

  50. It’s a Poor Life Anyway

  51. Alas, We Axe Defeated

  Afterword

  Cast of Characters

  THE AMERICANS

  Ace Bledsoe of Pennsylvania, an abolitionist minstrel and director of the minstrel show

  Ned Clark, a minstrel

  Commodore Matthew Perry, commander of the United States East-India Fleet

  THE JAPANESE

  (Family names first, if they have them. Names in italics are as they often appear in the story.)

  Okubo Einosuke, eldest living son of Lord Okubo and his representative in Edo (Tokyo)

  Okubo Manjiro, Einosuke’s brother, youngest son of Lord Okubo and English interpreter for the Shogunate

  Okubo Fumiko, Einosuke’s wife and ward of Lord Tokungawa Nariaki of Mito

  Okubo Keiko, elder daughter of Einosuke and Fumiko

  Okubo Masako, younger daughter of Einosuke and Fumiko

  Okubo Junichiro, infant son of Einosuke and Fumiko

  O-bata, nurse to Junichiro and servant to the Okubo family

  Tsune, Fumiko’s younger sister and ward of Lord Tokungawa Nariaki of Mito

  Lord Okubo of Odawara, leader of his clan, father of Einosuke and Manjiro

  Lord Abe, leader of the Great Council, chief negotiator with Commodore Perry

  Ueno, Lord Abe’s aide and enemy of the Okubo family

  Lord Tokugawa Nariaki of Mito, a “collateral” lord of great influence,

  Lord Abe’s nemisis. No one from a “collateral” clan may ascend to the position of Shogun.

  Tokugawa Keiki, Lord Tokugawa’s seventeen-year-old son, loyal friend of Tsune, and, after the story ends, Japan’s last Shogun

  Kyuzo, a famous samurai in Lord Tokugawa’s employ

  Ichiro, a young samurai who comes under the influence of Kyuzo

  Numbers 75 and III, two members of Ueno’s ronin samurai army, hired by lottery

  Momo and Manzo, cleaners of toilets

  Who can be wise, amazed, temperate, and furious,

  loyal and neutral, in a moment?

  —Macbeth

  “IT’S LIKE A CITY. Like more than one. It’s like little cities near each other with nothing in between ‘em but the dark,” said Ned.

  “There’s water in between them,” Ace pointed out, “and all manner of fish just under the surface, easy to catch. I do believe a man could scoop them up with his hands if he was quick enough. If you want to get a dinghy we could row out and give it a try right now.”

  Ned leaned way over the ship’s railing and looked down, his face clouding up. “We’d get throttled twice for a trick like that,” he said. “First by the fleet’s high muckamucks and then by the Japanese. Neither one of ‘em want us goin’ where they can’t keep an eye on us, Ace. How many times have we been told?”

  He leaned out farther still, staring down at the black and silent sea. “I do wonder if they’re strange tastin’ though, them fish I can’t quite see. It’s another world under the ocean, Ace. Another world in Japan, too. Another world pretty much everywhere we ain’t been.”

  Ace put his hands on Ned’s shoulders, drawing him back until both his feet were firmly planted on the ship’s planks once again. Both men stood at the port railing of the Pohatan, the flagship of the East India fleet, commanded by Commodore Matthew Perry. Seaward and across a short expanse of bay they could see the low-burning lanterns of the Susquehanna and the Lexington, two of the “little cities” Ned had been talking about. There were dots of liquid light from other American vessels, too, farther down the inlet, bobbing yellow like rays of fallen stars tangled up on buoys.

  “Yessir, like houses across a dark prairie,” Ned said, “like little homes away from home. It gives me the urge to get back where I belong, Ace. I hope we ain’t here too long. There’s surely another blue-eyed woman, waitin’ somewhere to meet me.”

  He would not have been able to say it this way, but what Ned was after with the images he was making was an apt enough metaphor for Ace to want to pound into a lyric later on. Ned thought Ace had the rarest of gifts when it came to music, while Ace thought of music as a path to something else, to a calling that he couldn’t quite hear yet. And when he only nodded, lost in those thoughts, Ned yawned and went below, for the wind was high by then and it was cold.

  ONCE HE WAS FINALLY ALONE Ace held his right fist up, blocking out the lights from the Susquehanna and the Lexington, then extended the top two fingers of that fist, to block out the wan half moon, as well. He had, indeed, thought to write a song about this armada of American sailors, strung out across a vast and lonely world, some of them true naval men, some adventurers or solitary wanderers like himself. But the images Ned had made were obstacles to his imagination, not a help to it, so he soon gave up. He crossed to the ship’s landward side, where the quality of light was duller, where dark Japan offered up images of its own. Now he could see parts of a village and more lights moving in the forested hills, as if men on horseback were carrying lanterns. Now again, in the dimmest possible way, quite as if a finger had scratched it on the velvet curtain of the night, he believed he could also see the paper doors of a farmhouse, mournful and low, a whole family of farmers sleeping behind them. Or perhaps awake and staring back at him, curi
osity about the coming world pouring from their narrow eyes.

  At eleven o’clock, sounded out in high-pitched eighth notes on the ship’s triangle, Ace went astern to read in a book of essays that he prized above anything else and had brought on deck with him. But he found instead a group of sailors, sitting and listening to one of their number sing “Buford Holden,” a ballad Ace had written for this current minstrel show they were about to perform for the Japanese. The sailor had a decent voice, and knew the lyrics well enough, but in other ways he got the song all wrong. “Buford Holden” was a freed slave who, while heading north on a railroad train, imagined the glory of the cities he would see, and how grandly he would be welcomed when he arrived in the free states. When Ace sang the song it was ironic, abolitionist to its core, but the sailor seemed to miss the point entirely, lauding instead the natural beauty of the American landscape.

  So though Ace was intent on reading, he started singing along behind the sailor, to try and correct the misconception of the song.

  Oh, what I’ll find there I don’t know,

  Wide boulevards? Big houses, all in a row?

  Or maybe I’ll find myself on Commerce Street,

  Where the bosses will shake my hand.

  “Glad to have you, Buford,” they’ll say…

  As he sang Ace could see Buford Holden’s face reflected in the window of that northbound train.

  “Philadelphia!” sang the sailor, quickly abdicating the main part to Ace. He became, instead, the conductor, passing through the third-class car, a man who by then had called out the names of so many cities that Buford had grown confused, forgetting even those he had previously memorized. Ace provided the litany of towns.

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania? Philadelphia, New York?

  I used to know them all by heart so why not now?

  Baltimore, Ohio? Boston, Maine? New Bedford,

  That one I know!

  New Bedford’s in Connecticut!

  Wide boulevards? Big houses, all in a row!

  “Buford Holden” was a long song, a melodrama, really, that followed Buford into the heart of the same northern ambivalence that Ace had always felt. But there were several possible stopping places in the song and tonight, with his book still beckoning, Ace chose this one. The plaintive quality of his tenor voice left its own imprint on both the sailor and the night.

  Ace went to the rail again, to calm himself before reading, but in the quiet that followed something caught his attention from shore. It wasn’t singing, yet it had the depth and clarity of a good human voice.

  “London, England! Paris, France!” it said. And after a while. “Dutch, Amsterdam!”

  Far from growing calmer, Ace’s heart swelled. So he sent his own voice back across the water in a kind of offering. “Oh what I’ll find there I don’t know. Wide boulevards! Big houses, all in a row!”

  The sailor came in behind him, a half a second late and harmonizing with his eyes closed.

  PART ONE

  EDO

  1.

  Dutch Learning

  “A GOVERNMENT ORCHESTRA… They’ve brought a bronze orchestra with a group of government musicians on board.”

  “They don’t call it an orchestra,” said Manjiro, patiently. “An orchestra must have stringed instruments that one plucks as one does a shamisen or koto. Also, what you see glowing in the sun isn’t bronze, Einosuke, but brass. Think how heavy bronze would be. And no one, not even the Americans, could get it to shine that way.”

  “Brass. Bronze. What possible difference could it make? It wouldn’t surprise me if these braggarts made their instruments out of solid gold. But I swear, Manjiro, I don’t know how you remember such trivialities. What do you think we should do now, send out a barge full of shaku-hachi players to sail around them and educate their ears?”

  “Their ears are educated, my brother,” Manjiro said. “It’s called ‘Dutch Learning,’ you know that. Don’t make the mistake of underestimating these Americans. Their ears are educated, but in an entirely different way.”

  Manjiro, the younger of Lord Okubo of Odawara’s two remaining sons—a firstborn had died some years ago—smiled at his older brother to cover the didactic nature of the speech he had made, but Einosuke was irritated and did not return the smile. He didn’t need instruction from a brother who had spent the last five years of his life holed up in a Buddhist temple studying barbarian ways, from a brother who had surpassed him in the eyes of his government simply because he could speak a barbarian tongue. They had been arguing forever about “Dutch Learning,” which to them meant anything that had not originated in China or Japan, but recently their arguments had grown harsher. Einosuke believed Manjiro to be in favor of everything foreign, disdainful of anything traditionally Japanese, and sometimes, though Einosuke’s arguments always equaled Manjiro’s in energy and skill, he imagined himself and his opinions as artifacts heaped upon a dung wagon, his brother the horse that would pull that wagon to the refuge depository! Harmony, Shinto rituals, the purity and beauty of the Japanese race itself—who knew what his brother might want to jeopardize next, or what foreign novelty he might embrace?

  “Please, Manjiro, do me the favor of standing here silently for a moment and just looking at these ships, enjoying the day,” he finally said. “I heard this morning that the points of the treaty are nearly ironed out. That means that you and Lord Abe will be boarding one of these vessels soon, forced to smile into foreign faces and listen to that bronze band. So why not give us a minute of peace, as a favor to your older brother, before all the real trouble begins?”

  Manjiro pursed his lips and nodded. He said the word “brass” again, but was careful to utter it silently, quietly kissing with it the bright March air.

  EINOSUKE’S WIFE, who went by the name of Fumiko, was at the seaside also, along with their two daughters and their infant son, Junichiro. Manjiro loved his brother’s children, and was devoted to his brother’s wife, the eldest child of a chief retainer of the daimyo from Mito, a vastly larger and more powerful clan than that of Einosuke and Manjiro’s father, Lord Okubo. Fumiko was well educated for a woman, and he secredy believed she shared his political opinions because they shared the same birthday, she was precisely Manjiro’s age. She was beautiful, though the blackened teeth of a married woman, a tradition he disdained above most others, sometimes made her beauty seem distant now, and not only could she expertly use the tools of dignity and decorum, but she had a good sense of humor and fun. She kept Einosuke’s heart light when its natural inclination was to sink in his chest, and she had managed to raise his daughters so that, at seventeen and twelve years old, they were good at learning, but had also retained an unbridled sense of childlike delight, even, most of the time, the elder one. Manjiro believed, in fact, that though Einosuke’s political opinions were perfectly wrong, he had a perfect family. And now that the baby was born, now that his brother had a son, he could tell that Einosuke believed so, also.

  It was cold that morning, but the sun was bright, so Fumiko and the girls walked under umbrellas, as if it were summertime. Fumiko had taken the baby out of his wrap and was letting Keiko, her seventeen-year-old daughter, hold him. It was her younger daughter’s job to keep the umbrella positioned over the baby’s head so that no direct sunlight shone into his eyes. This younger daughter’s name was Masako, and when they reached the two brothers, Keiko was scolding her for doing a bad job.

  “Masako is so infuriating!” she told her father and uncle. “She’s moving the umbrella on purpose, trying to make him squint and cry so she can say it is my style of holding him, my way of walking that’s done it, and carry him herself. She’s tricky, father, and so obvious about it. You just wait, our baby brother’s eyes will be permanently damaged if Masako has her way!”

  Keiko was like her father in that she had a forthright mind and an argumentative style, but spending too much time with Masako often made her forget her age. Of course Masako was guilty of moving the umbrella, everyone kne
w it, but she very calmly lied. “I am holding this umbrella properly and walking at a steady pace,” she said. “Keiko is whimsical lately, she’s thinking too much, that’s the problem. She stops suddenly and tries to show him the American ships, which is ridiculous since he can’t even see the bay. Keiko shouldn’t be worried about the ships but should be walking properly and looking at the ground. She cares nothing for our brother’s eyes, but only wants to show herself off. She’s becoming worldly, father. I can’t be the only one who has noticed it, any fool can see the signs.”

  If it could be avoided no one in the family ever wanted to argue with Masako, who used passion as if it were logic, and threw words around as if they were skipping stones. Masako would never quit, so their mother simply said, “Be quiet girls. At least while we’re with your uncle, at least during our remaining time in Edo, let’s try to have him think us well behaved. We don’t want him to tell the Americans that we squabble all the time.”

  “Mother’s right, Masako,” said Keiko, “we mustn’t let the truth get out. But wait, maybe we can use you as a weapon against the Americans. If they knew about your squabbling that would put an end to all these negotiations. If they heard about you they would turn their ships around and go home.”

  Masako handed the umbrella to her mother and squeezed in between her uncle and her father. “Tell her the medical truth, uncle,” she said. “Tell her what awful things the sun can do to a baby’s eyes.”

  She took a breath to start again but her father put his arm around her and cupped her chin and jaw. Keiko saw him do it and said, “Part of a father’s job is quieting a mouth that will not quiet itself.” But speaking again had been a tactical error, and because of it she was forced to hand the baby back to her mother and go stand by her uncle on his other side.

  IT WAS TRUE that Einosuke and Manjiro had fought over what Japan should do about the Americans, they had argued about politics in general all their lives, but they were close and affectionate brothers in other ways. Einosuke was forty-one, Manjiro thirty-four, and as they strolled away from the shoreline, his daughters’ argument somehow made Einosuke remember carrying Manjiro through another sunny spring, just as Keiko had carried his son today. It was in such ways, by honoring the elder daughter with the right to carry her baby brother before the younger one got the privilege, it was through such traditions as these that strong family bonds continued, that parents could give their children the opportunity to experience true responsibility and a sustained sense of joy. Einosuke didn’t know what would happen when the Americans came, but he believed with all his heart that the world as they knew it would be irreparably changed, and was bereaved by the additional belief that Manjiro wanted it that way.