This display angered Matsudaira even more. “Take her back to the boat,” Matsudaira told the soldiers. “Take her and bind her below where she can’t watch the sun set or see the castle. Her son doesn’t love her enough to see her. What kind of a mother is this?”
• • •
WHEN IT CAME, the final attack was a mistake. On April 12 a fire was misread as a signal. The Nabeshima division rushed forward, soon joined by others. The rebels were completely out of ammunition and the sentries too weak from hunger to hold their posts. The agents easily penetrated the outer perimeter. In the inner rings, the women and children defended themselves with stones and cooking pots. They held out for two more days and nights of steady fighting. On April 15, the defenses collapsed.
By nightfall the government had set up tables to count and collect heads. The count was at 10,869. Headless bodies covered the fields about the castle, clogged the nearby rivers. By April 16, only one person from the castle had survived. As a reward for his letter of March 5, Yamada Emonsaku was spared. Eventually he would be taken back to Edo to serve in Lord Matsudaira’s house as his assistant.
The kubi-jikken, or head inspection scene, is a traditional element of feudal literature. Martha saw Shiro one more time. The soldiers collected every head that might belong to a fifteen-year-old boy and summoned Martha to identify her son. “He is not here,” she told them. Her daughters had been killed and her grandson. Their heads would be displayed in Nagasaki. Her own death was very close now. “He was sent by Heaven and Heaven has protected him. God has transformed him to escape you.” There were many possible heads. She rejected them all. Finally Lord Sasaemon held up a recent victim. The boy had been dressed in silks.
Martha began to weep at once, and once she began there was no reason to stop. She thought of her son throwing stones, playing hiding games, his face when he slept. She took the head and held it in her lap. We can imagine this moment, if we let ourselves, as a sort of Japanese pietà, the pietà translated, like the word Kirishitan, into Japanese and out again. “Can he really have become so thin?” Martha asked.
• • •
EVERY MOTHER CAN easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat with, scold and kiss, their current corporeal forms. We speak to people who have vanished and, when they answer us, they do the same. Naturally, the information in these speeches is garbled in the translation.
I myself have a fifteen-year-old son who was once nine, once five, once fit entirely inside me. At fifteen, he speaks in monotones, sounds chosen deliberately for their minimal content. “Later,” he says to me, leaving the house, and maybe he means that he will see me later, that later he will sit down with me, we will talk. At fifteen, he has a whole lot of later.
Me, not so much. To me, later is that time coming soon, when he will be made up almost entirely of words: letters in the mailbox, conversations on the phone, stories we tell about him, plans he tells to us. And you probably think I would have trouble imagining that thirty-seven thousand people could follow him to their deaths, that this is the hard part, but you would be wrong. No other part of the story, except for the sea, is so easy to imagine.
Isn’t it really just a matter of walking on water? To me, today, this seems a relatively insignificant difference, but of course it is the whole point — along with starvation and persecution, peasant messianism and ronin discontent. Was the boy in the castle God, or wasn’t he? Who saw him walking on water? Who says the sunsets were his?
The story comes to us over time, space, and culture, a game of telephone played out in magnificent distances. Thirty-seven thousand Kirishitans and one hundred thousand Bakufu samurai were willing to die, arguing over the divinity of Amakusa Shiro. But what does this mean to us? Nothing is left now but the flag and the words.
“An angel was sent as messenger and the instructions he transmitted must therefore be passed on to the villagers,” the rebels wrote to someone and, eventually, to us. “And the august personage named Lord Shiro who has these days appeared in Oyano of Amakusa is an angel from Heaven.”
Within one moment, anything is possible. Only the passage of time makes our miraculous lives mundane. For a single moment any boy can walk on water. An arrow can hang in the sky without falling. Martha kneels to write a letter. The sun is in her face. Negotiations continue. CNN is filming. The compound will never be taken. There are children inside.
THE ELIZABETH COMPLEX
Love is particularly difficult to study clinically.
Fathers love as well — Mine did, I know, — but still with heavier brains.
There is no evidence that Elizabeth ever blamed her father for killing her mother. Of course, she would hardly have remembered her mother. At three months, Elizabeth had been moved into her own household with her own servants; her parents became visitors rather than caretakers. At three years, the whole affair was history — her mother’s head on Tower Green, her father’s remarriage eleven days later. Because the charge was adultery and, in one case, incest, her own parentage might easily have come into question. But there has never been any doubt as to who her father was. “The lion’s cub,” she called herself, her father’s daughter, and from him she got her red hair, her white skin, her dancing, her gaiety, her predilection for having relatives beheaded, and her sex.
Her sex was the problem, of course. Her mother’s luck at cards had been bad all summer. But the stars were good, the child rode low in the belly, and the pope, they had agreed, was powerless. They were expecting a boy.
After the birth, the jousts and tournaments had to be canceled. The musicians were sent away, except for a single piper, frolicsome but thin. Her mother, spent and sick from childbirth, felt the cold breath of disaster on her neck.
Her father put the best face on it. Wasn’t she healthy? Full weight and lusty? A prince would surely follow. A poor woman gave the princess a rosemary bush hung all with gold spangles. “Isn’t that nice?” her mother’s ladies said brightly, as if it weren’t just a scented branch with glitter.
Elizabeth had always loved her father. She watched sometimes when he held court. She saw the deference he commanded. She saw how careful he was. He could not allow himself to be undone with passion or with pity. The law was the law, he told the women who came before him. A woman’s wages belonged to her husband. He could mortgage her property if he liked, forfeit it to creditors. That his children were hungry made no difference. The law acknowledged the defect of her sex. Her father could not do less.
He would show the women these laws in his books. He would show Elizabeth. She would make a little mark with her fingernail in the margin beside them. Some night when he was asleep, some night when she had more courage than she had ever had before, she would slip into the library and cut the laws she had marked out of the books. Then the women would stop weeping and her father would be able to do as he liked.
Her father read to her The Taming of the Shrew. He never seemed to see that she hated Petruchio with a passion a grown woman might have reserved for an actual man. “You should have been a boy,” he told her, when she brought home the prize in Greek, ahead of all the boys in her class.