Ando was going over the household accounts. Because she was a woman, she could not hold the title of Chief Steward or Chief Accountant. But the reality was that, except for the guards, she ran the business as well as the household.
All her life, Ando had been devoted to the Hishigawa family and the man she still thought of indulgently as the Young Master. She had first started serving Hishigawa when she was eight and Hishigawa was four. She could barely lift the chubby boy, strapping him to her back with a cloth like a Japanese grandmother. Hishigawa’s mother found it cute that the young servant girl was so devoted to her son and let Ando dote on the child.
The Young Master had been shrewd in time of war, trading weapons and other goods in the years leading up to the climactic battle of Sekigahara. After Sekigahara, the trading was not quite as lucrative, but Hishigawa had adapted his business admirably to match the times and availability of merchandise and was still making much gold in his various enterprises.
Throughout his entire career, Hishigawa had shown a single-mindedness and tenacity that always got him what he wanted. Perhaps that was what made him a success, although Ando thought this same single-mindedness about Yuchan’s love was sometimes a bother. Still, as a devoted servant, it was not Ando’s role to question her master’s whims. It was her role to help him achieve them.
Ando had also achieved some of her own goals. She was powerful and feared and wielded more authority than any other woman she knew. To reach this height, she had overcome many obstacles, starting with her husband.
As good masters, the Hishigawas had decided to arrange a marriage between their son’s young nursemaid and the son of the Andos, another of their servants. To the bride, the marriage was a bother and a bore. She had focused her devotion on the Young Master and found the social and physical demands of marriage a tremendous distraction. She found no pleasure in the body of her husband and chafed under the numerous new restrictions on her as a married woman.
She knew her new husband would never have the drive and ambition to rise in the hierarchy of Hishigawa family servants, so she decided to do something about it. She started nagging her husband, urging him to devote more hours and show more initiative in his service to the Hishigawas. At first he complied, but as her nagging grew more strident, he started showing his annoyance by ignoring her and talking back. Finally, on the advice of his fellow males, he struck Ando during one particularly violent argument.
Ando stopped talking to him immediately after her husband slapped her face. She said nothing for the rest of the evening but seemed to welcome his sexual advances that night. Her husband congratulated himself, thinking he had subdued the shrew with his firmness.
The next morning, she went to the woods and searched out a certain mushroom. She knew about the various types of plants and fungi used in cooking, which things to eat and which things to avoid. She was looking for a mushroom that was normally one to avoid and she found it.
That night, her husband ate oden, a vegetable stew Ando had prepared. He complained that it had a bitter taste. By midnight, Ando’s husband was retching into a wooden bucket while squatting over a privy with diarrhea.
The husband’s distress continued through the night and into the next day. Ando made sure everyone knew of her husband’s illness. He was in such misery that he moaned that he wished to die. But Ando knew he wouldn’t die from the mushrooms. They were not mushrooms that killed. They only sickened and made one weak, which is exactly what Ando wanted. Had she wanted to kill, she would have used neko-irazu, literally “cat not needed,” a deadly rat poison. No, physical weakness in her husband was exactly what she wanted.
That afternoon, with her exhausted husband lying asleep on his futon, Ando took a basin of water, a cloth, and a thick piece of paper to the side of her spouse. She took the paper and soaked it in the water, making sure it was soft and pliable. When the paper was soaked to Ando’s satisfaction, she removed it from the water and placed it on the cloth.
She took the cloth and paper and flipped them over so the wet paper was on the bottom. Then, holding the cloth and paper with both hands, she brought them down on her husband’s face.
The soaked paper molded itself to her husband’s face. The water-logged paper cut off all air to the sick man, and the cloth allowed Ando to press it down hard without leaving marks.
With his air supply cut off, her husband immediately roused himself from sleep and tried to throw off the suffocating presence on his face. His cries were muffled by the paper and the cloth. He reached up and grasped Ando’s wrists. He tried to pry her hands away, but the sickness caused by the mushrooms had weakened him so much that he didn’t have the strength to dislodge her.
Ando felt the weakness of her husband’s grip, and she knew that the mushrooms had worked exactly as she had planned. She would be the victor, and it would come at her own hands. She liked seeing his body thrash about in distress and found she enjoyed the sensation of his grip weakening on her wrist as his life ebbed away. She thought of releasing the cloth, not to save her husband’s life but simply to toy with the dying man. She wanted to revive him just enough to pull him back from the edge of death. Then she would press down again, so she could feel his life slipping away under her hands. Before she could put this plan into action, however, her husband released her wrists and his hands fell limply to the futon.
Disappointed, Ando removed the cloth and paper and watched intently to see if her husband would revive. If he did revive, she intended to smother him again, but his spirit had departed. He lay there limp and lifeless.
Ando used the edge of the cloth to wipe the dampness from her husband’s face. Then, after removing the cloth, paper, and basin of water, she set to wailing in a manner that she thought would be suitable for a new widow.
Afterward, it was easy to prey on the Hishigawas’ sympathies to regain her old position as the Young Master’s protector. She was able to indulge the young man’s every whim and nurtured him to grow up thinking he was a merchant prince and not just a grubby trader. If she had been asked, she would have gladly shared the young man’s bed, giving her body to please him, although she found no pleasure in the act. She would often slip into his bed on cold winter nights to warm the futon before the Young Master got in. But as the boy turned into the man, he expressed no inclination to use his nursemaid in this fashion, even though she was only a few years older.
Since she could not sacrifice her body for her Master, she took a hand in arranging a series of accommodating concubines for Hishigawa. Intent on growing his business after his father and mother died, he seemed content with this arrangement and passed up several chances at marriage. Then he met Yuchan.
Hishigawa came back from a business trip obsessed with this woman. He was in a fever to have her and wanted desperately for her to love him with the same passion and need he had for her. This last part, that she love him, was as important to the Young Master as having her.
Ando volunteered to act as a go-between to arrange a match. She secretly thought that perhaps she could actually arrange to have the girl come as another of the Young Master’s concubines. But, if necessary, she would even arrange a marriage if that would get the young girl for the Master.
When she first saw Yuchan, Ando had to admit she was pretty enough. She had a certain grace that came from the training in flower-arranging, dance, and the other indulgences that rich samurai could afford for their children. How such a creature was able to raise the lust and desire of a superior man like the Young Master was something Ando could not fathom. Ando thought that surely she must be a witch.