“No matter!” snapped the minister. “Your work has been unsatisfactory from the start. As you know, you came here on probation. Since you have proved inept at all but copying work and are now far behind in that, you cannot afford the luxury of ill health.”
“Yes, Your Excellency. I shall make up the time.”
“No.”
Akitada looked up and caught a smirk of satisfaction on Soga’s face. “I assure your Excellency...” he began earnestly.
“I said no!” thundered the minister. “Your time has run out. You may get your property and leave the ministry this instant.” He slapped a pudgy hand on the document before him. “I have already drawn up the papers of dismissal, and they spell out your gross inadequacies in detail.”
“But...” Akitada sought frantically for some promise, some explanation that might sway the minister’s mind, at least postpone his dismissal. “Your Excellency,” he pleaded, “you may recall that I earned my position by placing first in the university examinations. Perhaps if I had been given some legal work, I might have proved satis...”
“How dare you criticize my decisions?” cried the minister. “It is a typical example of your poor judgment. I shall add a further adverse comment to my evaluation of your performance.”
Akitada bowed wordlessly and left the room. He went straight to his desk, ignoring the curious eyes and whispers of Sanekana and Hirosawa, and gathered his things. These consisted of some writing implements and a few law books and were easily wrapped into a square of cloth, knotted, and tossed over one shoulder. Then he left the ministry.
Suffering under the humiliation of his dismissal, he did not pause to consider the full disaster, the fact that he would no longer draw the small salary which had kept rice in the family bowls and one servant in the house to look after his widowed mother and two younger sisters, until he had passed out of the gate of the Imperial City.
Then the thought of facing his mother with the news made his knees turn to water, and he stopped outside the gate. Lady Sugawara was forever reminding him of a son’s duty to his family and complaining about his inadequate salary and low rank. What would she say now?
Before him, Suzaku Avenue stretched into the distance. Long, wide, and willow-lined, it bisected the capital to become the great southern highway to Kyushu — and the world beyond.
He longed to keep walking, away from his present life, with his bundle of books and brushes. Somewhere someone must be in need of a young man filled with the knowledge of the law and a thirst for justice.
But he knew it was impossible. All appointments were in the hands of the central government, and besides, he could not desert his family. A son’s first duty was to his parent. He despaired of finding a clerkship in another bureau. If only there were someone, some man of rank, who would put in a good word for him, but Akitada was without helpful relatives or patrons of that sort.
He sat down on the steps of the gate and put his head in his hands.
“Young man? Are you ill?”
Akitada glanced up. An elderly gentleman in a formal robe and hat regarded him with kindly interest. Belatedly recognition came. This was the man who had just been turned away by Soga, a fellow sufferer. Akitada rose and bowed.
“Are you not the young fellow who came in while f was with the minister?” the man asked.
“Yes.” Akitada recalled the embarrassing subject under discussion and blushed. “I am very sorry, but I had been sent for.”
“I know. But I thought you had an urgent case to talk over with the minister?”
Akitada blushed again. “I have been dismissed,” he said.
“Oh.”
A brief silence fell. Then the older man said sympathetically, “Well, it looks like we’ve both been dismissed. You look pretty low.” He paused, studying Akitada thoughtfully, then added, “Maybe we can be of assistance to each other.”
“How so?” Akitada asked dubiously.
The gentleman gathered the skirt of his gown and lowered himself to the step next to him.
“I have lost a daughter and need someone to help me find her, someone who knows the law and can quote it to those who keep showing me the door. And you, I bet, could use the experience, not to mention a weekly salary and a generous reward?”
Akitada looked at the gentleman as the answer to a prayer. “I am completely at your service, sir,” he said with fervent gratitude. “Sugawara Akitada is my name, by the way.”
“Good. I am Okamoto Toson.”
“Not the master of the imperial wrestling office?”
The modest man in the grey robe smiled ruefully. “The same. Let’s go to my house.”
Okamoto Toson lived in a small house that stood, surrounded by a garden, in a quiet residential street not far from the palace. He was a widower with two daughters. It was the younger who had disappeared so mysteriously.
Okamoto took him to a room that was, like the rest of the house, small, pleasant, and unpretentious. Yet Okamoto was known to be wealthy, and he was well respected by the nobility and the commoners alike. He was a man of the people who had been drawn into the world of the great due to his knowledge of wrestling and his managerial ability.
The walls were covered with scrolls showing the rankings of wrestling champions, but one scroll was a painting of a court match with nobles seated around a circle where two massive fighters in loincloths strove against one another. The emperor himself had attended and was enthroned under a special tent. Over towards one side of the picture, the artist had depicted the small figure of Okamoto himself.
Akitada wondered why the minister had dismissed such a man without giving him the slightest encouragement.
Okamoto’s story was brief but strange. Recently widowed, he had been left with two young daughters. The older had taken over the running of the household, but the younger, Tomoe, was a dreamer who spent her time reading romantic tales and talking of noble suitors. Being apparently something of a beauty according to her father, whose face softened every time he spoke of her, she had attracted the eyes of a certain nobleman and permitted his secret visits — no doubt after the pattern of the novels she had read — and the man had convinced her to leave with him.
All this had taken place without the father’s knowledge, and Okamoto was apologetic. Akitada gathered that the death of his wife had caused him to withdraw from all but court duties, and since his older daughter Otomi had run the household efficiently, he had seen no cause to worry.
It was, in fact, the older daughter who had reported her sister’s elopement with a nameless nobleman.
At this point in the story Okamoto excused himself to get his daughter Otomi. Akitada stared after him in dismay. Either the girl had been incredibly foolish or someone had played a very nasty trick on her. No member of the aristocracy would take a young woman as his official wife or concubine without her father’s knowledge.
Okamoto returned with a pale, plain young woman in a house dress. He said, “This is my elder daughter Otomi. Please ask her anything.”
Akitada and the young woman bowed to each other. She went to kneel behind her father’s cushion, her eyes downcast and her work-reddened hands folded modestly in her lap.
Akitada was unused to speaking to strange young women, but he tried. “Did you know that your sister had a... er... met someone?”
The young woman shook her head. “My sister did not confide in me. She is a foolish girl. She is always reading stories, and sometimes she makes them up. I did not think anything when she said she had fallen in love with a nobleman.”