Forty-two years later — a good twenty-four years off the record — he gets his wife’s note, placed in a bottle and tossed off the Queen Mary. “Kiss my ass,” it says.
“You know”—Claire’s son’s voice is accusing—“how much I hate raw hamburgers. This is all pink in the middle. It’s gross. I can’t eat this.”
“I’m tired of hamburgers,” Claire’s daughter says.
“Is there anything else to eat?” Claire’s husband asks.
Claire smiles at them all. She sends them a message, tapping it out with her fork on the side of her plate. It may take years, but she imagines it will get there eventually.
SHIMABARA
The sea, the same as now. It had rained, and we can imagine that, too, just as we have ourselves seen it — the black sky, the ocean carved with small, sharp waves. At the base of each cliff would be a cloud of white water.
At the top of the cliffs was a castle and, inside the castle, a fifteen-year-old boy. Here is where it gets tricky. What is different and what is the same? The story takes place on the other side of the world. The boy has been dead more than three hundred and fifty years. There was a castle, but now there is a museum and a mall. A Japanese mall is still a mall; we know what a mall looks like. The sea is the same. What about a fifteen-year-old boy?
The boy’s mother, Martha, was in a boat on the sea beneath the cliffs. Once a day she was taken to shore to the camp of Lord Matsudaira for interrogation. Then she could see the castle where her son was. The rest of the time she lay inside the boat with her two daughters, each of them bound by the wrists and the ankles, so that when she was allowed to stand, her legs, through disuse, could hardly hold her up. Add to that the motion of the boat. When she walked on land, on her way to interrogation, she shook and pitched. The samurai thought it was terror, and of course there was that, too.
Perhaps Martha was more concerned about her son in the castle than her daughters on the boat. Perhaps a Japanese mother three hundred and fifty years ago would feel this way. In any case, all their lives depended on her son now. As she lay on the boat, Martha passed the time by counting miracles. The first was that she had a son. On the day of Shiro’s birth, the sunset flamed across the entire horizon, turning the whole landscape red, then black. Later, when Shiro was twelve, a large, fiery cross rose out of the ocean off the Shimabara Peninsula and he was seen walking over the water toward it. He could call birds to his hands; they would lay eggs in his palms. This year, the year he turned fifteen, the sunset of his birth was repeated many times. The cherry blossoms were early. These things had been foretold. Martha remembered; she summoned her son’s face; she imagined the sun setting a fire each night behind Hara Castle. The worst that could happen was that her son prove now to be ordinary. The wind that had brought the rain rocked the boat.
Thirty-seven thousand Kirishitan rebels followed Shiro out of Amakusa to the Shimabara Peninsula and the ruin of Hara Castle. Kirishitan is a word that has been translated into Japanese and come back out again, as in the children’s game of telephone. It goes in as Christian, comes out Kirishitan.
The rebels made the crossing in hundreds of small boats, each with a crucifix in the bow. A government spy stood in the cold shadow of a tree and watched the boats leave. He couldn’t count the rebels. Maybe there were fifty thousand. Maybe twenty thousand. Of those, maybe twelve thousand were men of fighting age. The spy grew weak from hunger and fatigue. Just to stand long enough to watch them all depart required the discipline and dedication of a samurai.
General Itakura Shigemasa pursued the rebels through Amakusa, burning the villages they’d left behind. Many of the remaining inhabitants died in the fires. Those who survived, Itakura put to death anyway. He had the children tied to stakes and then burned alive. It was a message to the fifteen-year-old Kirishitan leader.
Although Hara Castle had been abandoned for many years, it was built to be defended. The east side of the castle looked over the sea; on the west was a level marsh, fed by tides, which afforded no footing to horses, no cover to attackers. North and south were cliffs one hundred feet high. Only two paths led in, one to the front, one to the rear, and neither was wide enough for more than a single man. On January 27, 1637, after ten days of repairs, the rebels occupied Hara Castle.
They hoisted a flag. It showed a goblet, a cross, a motto, and two angels. The angels were fat, unsmiling, and European; the motto was in Portuguese. LOVVAD SEIA O SACTISSIM SACRAMENTO: Praised be the most holy sacrament. In March, when Martha knelt in Lord Matsudaira’s camp to write Shiro a letter, there were one hundred thousand Bakufu samurai between her and her son.
• • •
JANUARY, FEBRUARY, MARCH, and early April passed in a steady storm of negotiations. The air above Shimabara was full of words wound around the shafts of arrows. One landed in the camp outside the castle. “Heaven and earth have one root, the myriad things one substance. Among all sentient beings there is no such distinction as noble and base,” the arrow said. An arrow flew back. “Surrender,” it asked, but obliquely, politely, confining itself, in fact, to references to the weather.
January and February were muddy. General Itakura commanded the Bakufu forces. Government agents tried to dig a tunnel into the castle, but the digging was overheard. The rebels filled the tunnel with smoke and regular deposits of urine and feces until the diggers refused to dig farther.
Itakura planned to pummel the castle walls with cannonballs so large it took twenty-five sweating men to move each one to the front lines. The last days of January were spent pulling and pushing the cannonballs into place, but it proved a Sisyphean labor in the end since no cannon, no catapult, was large enough to launch them.
More letters flew across on arrow shafts. “The samurai in Amakusa cannot fight,” the letters from inside the castle said. “They are cowards and only good at torturing unarmed farmers. The sixty-six provinces of Japan will all be Kirishitan, of that there is no doubt. Anyone who does doubt, the Lord Deus with His own feet will kick him down into Inferno; make sure this point is understood.” “Surrender,” said the arrows going in, but the penmanship was beautiful; the letters could almost have been framed. Meanwhile, Lord Matsudaira Nobutsuna and a fleet of sixty ships were moving up the coast from Kyushu, bringing Martha to her son.
General Itakura received a letter from his cousin in Osaka. “All is well. When Lord Matsudaira arrives, the castle, held as it is by mere peasants, will not last another day.” Itakura translated this letter immediately as mockery. He decided to attack before the reinforcements arrived.
His first try was on February 3, a mousy, hilarious effort; his second on New Year’s Day, February 14. Itakura himself led the bold frontal attack across the marsh and was killed by a rebel sharpshooter. After his death, he was much condemned for inappropriate bravura. He had laid the government open to more ridicule, dying as he had at the hands of farmers.
The night before his death Itakura wrote a poem.
When only the name remains of the flower that
bloomed on New Year’s Day,
remember it as the leader of our force.
He attached it to an arrow and shot it out over the ocean in the direction of Lord Matsudaira’s fleet and the moon.