Kaze turned and looked at the merchant. He had a long, horsey face and baggy eyes. He hardly looked the part of a lovesick swain, but it was obvious that he was enchanted with his wife.
Hishigawa’s hair was shaved like a samurai’s, and at one time his family had undoubtedly been samurai, which was why he affected two names. Commoners, including merchants, were supposed to have only one name; only samurai and nobles were supposed to have two.
After the great battle of Sekigahara, fifty thousand ronin samurai were left without a use for their sword except mischief and banditry. More and more of these samurai, in despair and desperation, were taking their hand to different endeavors, such as farming and other occupations. Many were returning to the soil, maintaining farms. Two generations before, almost all samurai had been soldier-farmers. A professional class of warrior was a relatively recent development, spurred by the wars to unite Japan into a single country. From the looks of Hishigawa, however, the decision to follow the path of the merchant was not a recent one.
Kaze had mixed feelings about the choice of becoming a merchant. As one of the lowest trades in the social class, the grubbing for money seemed somehow beneath the dignity of a warrior. Yet, he knew one of the foundations and strengths of the Tokugawas’ ascendancy was the legendary tightfistedness of Tokugawa Ieyasu.
Ieyasu knew that money could be translated into men and arms and power, and he waited, biding his time and gathering his resources until the previous ruler of Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, died, leaving a young son and a widow to try to protect his legacy.
Then Ieyasu acted. He attacked the forces loyal to the Toyotomi at Sekigahara during the month that has no Gods. It was the largest battle ever fought by samurai.
At the start of the battle, Ieyasu was outnumbered because his son had been diverted besieging a castle, and one-third of Ieyasu’s army was not on the field. But Ieyasu had two secret weapons: betrayal and greed. He used some of the money he had gathered over a lifetime to bribe forces on the side of the Toyotomi before the battle. They agreed to remain neutral or to turn on their allies in the heat of battle and fight on the Tokugawa side. Ieyasu started the battle seemingly outnumbered, but as the long day wore on, key Toyotomi forces would not attack when ordered to. At the critical moment of the battle, the disloyal troops under the command of Kobayakawa attacked their erstwhile allies. By the end of the battle, Ieyasu was the undisputed ruler of Japan.
To Kaze, Ieyasu’s victory was based on promoting disloyalty. This lack of loyalty and honor struck at the very heart of bushido, the warrior’s code, the core of Kaze’s beliefs.
Now Hideyoshi’s widow and son were trapped in Osaka Castle, not quite prisoners, but certainly not free. Ieyasu still paid perfunctory respect to them, but there was no doubt who the real ruler of Japan was. There was also no doubt that it was Ieyasu’s intention to declare himself Shogun.
By tradition, only members of the Minamoto family, the same family that built the Tsurugaoka Shrine in Kamakura, dedicated to Hachiman, the God of War, could become Shogun. The Tokugawas had never been considered as Minamotos. Then, as Tokugawa Ieyasu’s power increased and becoming Shogun became a possibility, he suddenly “discovered” that his lineage was actually connected to the Minamotos, although no such link had been claimed before. So now Ieyasu was suddenly qualified to take the title of Shogun, and people loyal to the Toyotomi, such as Kaze, found themselves penniless. At the same time, people like Hishigawa, who had seen the trend in the new Japan and had capitalized on it, were able to wander the countryside with pushcarts holding a chest full of gold.
“You must love your wife very much,” Kaze said.
“It goes beyond love,” Hishigawa said. “It goes beyond passion and it goes beyond need. This woman is my life and my existence.”
A poetic song from a mud frog, Kaze thought. Love can do amazing things. “You’ve been married a long time?”
“No. Less than a year.”
The newness of the marriage could explain the merchant’s infatuation, but Kaze was still surprised. It was not often that a Japanese man would find passion in his marriage. That’s what concubines, or perhaps young boys, were for.
From the way Hishigawa was talking, it sounded like his marriage was one of those bonding of souls that sometimes occurs in life. This happened much less often in the warrior class than in other classes, because in the warrior class marriages were arranged according to economic and military advantage, with no regard for the feelings of the people actually involved.
Kaze’s own marriage had been arranged this way-a dry alliance between Kaze’s family and the family of his bride. Although his marriage had been proper and respectful, it was not filled with love or passion. He did love the two children the marriage produced, and he grieved for their death much as he grieved for the loss of the Lady.
Kaze had actually only seen his wife once before their wedding. The negotiations between his family and her family were handled by a go-between, and consideration was given to the political and economic consequences of the union, but scant attention was given to the state of Kaze’s heart, save for the fact that he found his new wife acceptable in appearance.
After the marriage, he went through the process of adjustment and sexual accommodation with her, but it was not a relationship that grew to great affection and depth of spirit or passion. He had two children with her and his marriage was normal for a person of his station, with the exception that Kaze never took a concubine or male page for a lover. His taking a lover would have been perfectly acceptable to his wife, but Kaze didn’t choose to, keeping the reason in the secret recesses of his heart.
All in all, his was an extremely proper samurai marriage. So proper that when the castle that he lived in fell in the immediate aftermath of the climactic battle of Sekigahara, Kaze’s wife killed her own children before taking a dagger and shoving it into her own throat to kill herself. This was done to spare the children and herself from humiliation and torture if they were captured alive.
The Lady, the wife of Kaze’s Lord, did not kill her daughter when her castle fell. Kaze never asked her why, but he knew it was because she loved her daughter too dearly and could not bring herself to do what samurai tradition expected of her. She also didn’t kill herself, and Kaze knew this was also related to her daughter. If her daughter was alive, the Lady would also want to be alive, not for her own sake, but so she could fight for and try to protect her daughter. Kaze knew the Lady would not refuse to take her own life out of cowardice. He had seen enough examples of her courage to know that she would not hesitate to do what was required of her. But the love of her daughter changed the requirements of what was proper.
It seemed strange to Kaze that the heart of this aging merchant should be so captivated by a new wife. Still, the Taiko himself, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, had found satisfaction and passion with a new wife at the end of his life. And this new wife had given Hideyoshi a child. In fact, she had given Hideyoshi two children. When the first child died, a second was conceived and born-a son. Since Hideyoshi had a long-standing relationship with his first wife and at least a hundred concubines, there was endless speculation on how Yododono, the mother of the child, could have created such a miracle. The pious believed it was because Yododono had prayed to the proper gods. The cynical believed that Yododono had taken other means, or perhaps other men, to guarantee her conception. In either case, Hideyoshi believed the child to be his and tried to ensure his son would succeed him to the rulership of Japan.
Now the child and his mother ruled only Osaka Castle and there was speculation that they would not be ruling that for long. Ieyasu continued to give proper respect to the memory of Hideyoshi, but his forces were gathering the threads of power and weaving them into a mighty and enveloping tapestry.