The article was a short one.
Shunsuke looked up words in the dictionary, Monta picked them out one by one, and between the two of them they finally grasped its meaning.
Choshu has been firing its cannon on foreign ships passing through the strait at Shimonoseki. The strait is effectively closed, and no nation's merchant vessels can get through. Four powers, Britain, France, the Netherlands and America, intend to send a combined fleet and teach Choshu a lesson.
The gas lamp in the sitting room hissed softly.
"Four powers..."
Shunsuke's voice cracked.
"Those warships we saw in Shanghai. They're the ones coming."
Monta slapped the newspaper down on the table.
"Dozens of those ships, coming to Shimonoseki. Choshu's batteries won't last half a day. Hagi, Yamaguchi, they'll be burned to the ground."
That night the five gathered in a room of the Williamson house.
"I'm going back."
It was Monta who said it.
"I'm going back to stop them. A war with the foreigners can't be won. And the only people in all of Japan who know that are the five of us here in this room."
"I'm going back too."
Shunsuke followed.
For a while no one spoke.
It was Yozo who broke the silence. His voice was as quiet as it had been on the ship in Shanghai, when he had talked Monta down.
"Monta. In Shanghai I told you that if we went back then, all we could say was that we'd seen some ships. It's the same now. We don't have anything yet. We've only been here half a year."
"I know."
Monta looked straight back at him.
"But listen, Yozo. Whatever we learn here, what happens if there's no country left to bring it home to? If the house burns down, you can carry all the machines back you like. There'll be nowhere to set them up."
Yozo fell silent.
"You three stay."
Monta looked at each of their faces in turn.
"Stay, and learn everything you can. Shunsuke and I will go back and make sure there's still a country. You get hold of what we'll bring home to it. That way the five of us are still one."
Yakichi bit his lip and looked down. Kinsuke held a hand over his mouth, as though holding back a cough.
At last Yozo slowly nodded.
"...Don't get yourselves killed."
"Right."
Monta laughed.
"If I die, I'll never pay off my debts."
Spring, 1864. Monta and Shunsuke left London.
Mrs. Williamson packed food for their journey and gave them several English books. The professor, with his weak arm, took each of their hands in turn.
The other three saw them off on the station platform.
The whistle blew. Yakichi never forgot that sound as long as he lived. The three of them stood watching until the train carrying the two had grown small beyond the smoke.
The two reached Yokohama in the 6th month of the 1st year of Genji (1864).
The voyage out had taken more than four months. Going home, changing from one steamer to the next, they made it back far sooner.
They went straight to the British legation.
The minister, Alcock, was surprised by his unexpected visitors. Two young men of Choshu who had been studying in Britain had come home, they said, to talk their own domain round.
"If your domain stops its attacks and opens the strait, there is no reason for war."
Alcock said.
"If you can persuade your domain, we will wait. We will take you close to Choshu aboard a warship."
To go home aboard a warship of the very country they had once tried to burn.
Watching the islands of the Inland Sea from the deck, Shunsuke turned the strangeness of it over in his mind.
The 24th day of the 6th month, the 1st year of Genji.
The two came ashore at a small beach called Tomi, in Suo.
To set foot on Choshu soil in Western clothes and without topknots was to invite being cut down on the spot, and they could hardly have complained. First they tumbled into a shipping agent's house near the beach.
The master of the house took one look at them and nearly fell over.
"Who in the world are you..."
"We're Choshu men. Don't ask why."
Monta said.
"Lend us swords. And kimonos."
They put their arms into borrowed kimonos and pushed borrowed swords through their sashes. After a year without one, the sword hung heavy at the hip.
Shunsuke rested his hand on it and found himself thinking. On that night at Gotenyama, this weight had been something that made him strong. Now it felt like nothing more than ballast, for keeping himself alive.
The domain government in Yamaguchi was thick with menace.
Before the senior officials, the two described what they had seen in Britain. The number of warships. The size of the guns. The hammers of the ironworks. Screws by the hundreds of thousands. The harbor at Shanghai. Chinese towns guarded by foreign soldiers.
"If we fight, Choshu will lose. It will certainly lose."
Monta placed his hands on the tatami.
"Open the strait now, while there's still time. Talk with the foreigners. It's the only way Choshu survives."
The officials' faces were cold.
"So the barbarians have bewitched you."
Someone said it.
"A year eating barbarian food, and they come home barbarians themselves."
"Expelling the barbarians is the will of the Imperial Court. How can we back down now?"
However many words they spent, it was like talking to a wall. As they left the domain offices, they heard someone in the dark of the corridor spit out a single word.
"Traitors."
Their efforts at persuasion came to nothing.
And all the while, Choshu kept sliding into a deeper abyss.
In the 7th month, Choshu's forces clashed in Kyoto with the troops of the domains guarding the Imperial Palace, and were badly beaten. Kusaka Genzui took his own life in the burning city. Kusaka, whose broad back they had seen on the slope that night at Gotenyama.
Choshu was declared an enemy of the Court. The shogunate ordered the domains to make war on it.
Then, in the 8th month, the combined fleet of the four powers, 17 ships, appeared in the strait at Shimonoseki.
The bombardment was everything Shunsuke had feared.
He watched it from a hill overlooking the strait.
The flanks of the warships lined up offshore all burst into white smoke at once. A beat later came a sound that thudded in his belly. The next instant, dust rose from the batteries on the shore.
Choshu's guns fired back. But their shot only sent up useless columns of water far short of the warships. They could not reach. These guns had nothing like the range of the ones he had seen in Shanghai, in the shipyards of London.
From out beyond the reach of Choshu's batteries, the foreign ships fired accurately and without mercy. One by one the batteries fell silent, and the soldiers who came ashore carried off the remaining cannon one after another.
Choshu had lost.
To negotiate the peace, the domain decided to send Takasugi Shinsaku. The same Takasugi who, at Gotenyama, had raised his hand as the signal to set the fire.
Shunsuke and Monta went with him as interpreters.
In a cabin of the British flagship, Takasugi faced the foreign admirals in full court dress, eboshi cap and hitatare robe, an imposing figure. Beside him, Shunsuke struggled to piece together the words he had learned in Britain.
Words that Mrs. Williamson had taught him one at a time in the sitting room in London. Words a ship's boy had taught him on the deck of the Pegasus.
Now those words stood between Choshu and the foreign powers.
Partway through the talks, the British side made a proposal. Would Choshu lease them Hikoshima, the island lying off Shimonoseki?
When Shunsuke translated it, Takasugi's expression changed.
The foreign concessions in Shanghai flashed through Shunsuke's mind. Lease the land once, and it becomes a foreign town. Your own country's land, and your own people driven off it by foreign soldiers.
Takasugi slowly straightened his back and, in a ringing voice, began to recite something in archaic language.
It was the story of the gods, the tale of how the land of Japan began. Gods appeared in the High Plain of Heaven, the land was born, the islands were born...
Shunsuke was at a loss. How was he supposed to translate this?
The foreign admirals and the official interpreters alike stared at Takasugi, dumbfounded. Takasugi recited on and on, with no end in sight.
In the end, it was the other side that gave up. The matter of Hikoshima was never raised again.
After they left the negotiating table, Shunsuke could not help asking him.
"Takasugi-san, did you do that on purpose?"
Takasugi only grinned.
Even after the peace was concluded, the strife within Choshu only grew fiercer.
A great shogunate army was closing in to punish Choshu. There was nothing for it but to bow our heads and beg forgiveness: those who argued so were gaining power within the domain. To them, Monta and Shunsuke, back from abroad, were comrades of the men who had driven Choshu into this corner, and barbarian-loving traitors besides.
One day in the 9th month, Shunsuke tugged at Monta's sleeve.
"Monta-san. Take attendants with you when you go out. Don't walk the roads alone at night."
"What are you talking about?"
Monta snorted.
"How can a man govern if he's scared of assassins? I've seen the harbor at Shanghai, and the storms off the Cape of Good Hope. A night road in Yamaguchi is nothing."
"Monta-san."
"Don't worry, Shunsuke."
Monta clapped him on the shoulder. It was the same hand that had gripped the rope at the rail of the Pegasus.
"I promised I wouldn't die, didn't I? I promised Yozo."
The night of the 25th day of the 9th month. Yamaguchi.
The domain council did not break up until after dark.
How to face the shogunate that meant to crush Choshu? Those who said the domain should simply bow its head and beg forgiveness clashed bitterly with those who said it should show submission only after strengthening its defenses. Monta took the second position and argued it without giving an inch.
On his way home from the council, Monta was walking a dark road toward his house.
It was near a small bridge called Sodetoki Bridge.
Out of the darkness, figures suddenly sprang at him.
There was more than one.
The first stroke took him in the back. A searing pain shot through him. Monta tried to draw his sword. The next stroke laid open that arm. His face, his shoulder, his side: the blades passed through him one after another.
He could not tell how many there were. He did not remember what they shouted.
When he came to, Monta was lying in a potato field by the road. He smelled earth, and he smelled blood.
The assassins' footsteps faded away.
When they carried Monta into his house, his whole body had been slashed open.
Two doctors were called. Both looked at the wounds and shook their heads. There was nothing to be done, they said.
Through his fading consciousness, Monta heard his elder brother's voice.
"Monta. Monta."
"...Brother."
Monta spoke through a froth of blood.
"Finish me. Quickly. As quickly as you can."
His brother put his hand to his sword. He could not bear to let his younger brother suffer any longer. That was his only thought.
At that moment, someone threw herself over Monta's blood-soaked body.
It was their mother.
"What are you doing?"
Holding Monta in both arms, she glared up at his brother. Her kimono was soaking through with blood.
"If he dies, what can this child do for his country? If you mean to cut him, you'll have to cut his mother too."
His brother's hand stopped.
Just then, a man came running into the house.
Tokoro Ikutaro. A young doctor born in Mino, who had taken refuge in Choshu.
Tokoro took one look at Monta's wounds and spoke.
"I'll stitch him."
He had no proper surgical instruments at hand. Tokoro sent someone to borrow the thick needles a neighborhood tatami maker used for sewing mats. He washed the wounds with shochu and dipped the needle in shochu.
"Hold him down."
The tatami needle pierced Monta's skin.
Monta groaned. He had no strength left even to scream. Without a flicker in his face, Tokoro kept sewing. The back, the arms, the cheek. He had the lamp brought closer, wiped away the blood, and sewed again.
The stitches numbered about 50.
As the night began to pale, Tokoro at last set down the needle.
"The rest depends on how strong this man's life is."
Monta lived.
A miracle, everyone said.
The next day, along with that news, another piece of news raced through Yamaguchi.
Sufu Masanosuke had taken his own life.
As though taking upon himself the responsibility for Choshu's fate, Sufu was gone. Sufu, who had laughed and slapped his knee and said, "Interesting. Truly interesting," and sent the young men off across the sea.
It was some time later that Shunsuke finally reached Monta's bedside.
Monta lay asleep, half his face covered in bandages. From cheek to lip the stitches ran thick and raw.
Shunsuke sat down beside the pillow without a word.
He put a hand inside his kimono. His fingers touched the fragment of melted glass he had picked up in the ashes at Gotenyama.
Destroying is easy.
He had thought so that morning at Gotenyama.
That night, they had burned a British house. And now Choshu was cutting down men of Choshu. The blades that had cried out for the barbarians' blood were turned on a comrade who had seen the foreign world.
Kusaka was dead. Sufu was dead. Monta had come within a hair of dying too.
Shunsuke gripped the fragment of glass hard.
I will never go back to the side that destroys.
I will be one of those who build this country. However many years it takes.
Beyond the shoji screen, the night was beginning to lighten.
History and fiction in this chapter
Historical facts
- In 1864, Ito and Inoue learned from a British newspaper that four powers, Britain, France, the Netherlands and the United States, were preparing to attack Choshu for closing the Shimonoseki Strait, and decided to return home, leaving Yamao, Nomura and Endo behind.
- The two reached Yokohama in the 6th month of the 1st year of Genji (1864), met the British minister Alcock, and offered to persuade their domain. The British carried them by warship to the vicinity of Choshu.
- On the 24th day of the 6th month of the 1st year of Genji, the two landed at Tomi in Suo, borrowed swords and changed their clothes at Irimotoya, a shipping agent, and went to the domain government in Yamaguchi to urge that the fighting stop, but they were not heeded (a monument marking the landing of Ito and Inoue stands in Hofu City).
- In the Kinmon Incident in the 7th month, Choshu was defeated and Kusaka Genzui took his own life. Choshu was declared an enemy of the Court, and the shogunate ordered a punitive expedition against it.
- In the 8th month, a combined fleet of 17 ships from the four powers bombarded Shimonoseki and occupied its batteries. In the peace negotiations Takasugi Shinsaku served as chief envoy, with Ito and Inoue as interpreters.
- On the night of the 25th day of the 9th month, on his way home from a domain council, Inoue was attacked by assassins near Sodetoki Bridge in Yamaguchi and gravely wounded. He asked his elder brother to end his life, but his mother held her blood-soaked son in her arms and stopped him.
- Tokoro Ikutaro, a doctor from Mino, saved his life with an operation of about 50 stitches, using a tatami needle cleaned with shochu.
- At about the same time (the 25th to 26th day of the 9th month), Sufu Masanosuke took his own life in Yamaguchi.
Tradition
- The anecdote that, when Britain asked to lease Hikoshima during the peace negotiations, Takasugi recited the Kojiki (the tales of the age of the gods) on and on until the other side gave up and the matter was dropped is known from Ito's later recollections and other sources, but firm records are scarce.
- His mother's words are handed down as "If he dies, can he serve his country?" The part "If you mean to cut him, cut his mother too" is a dramatization following the oft-told anecdote.
Fiction
- The scene in London where the five discuss returning home, and the farewell at the station.
- The conversations with Alcock, the master of the shipping agent's house, and the domain's senior officials.
- The scene of Shunsuke watching the bombardment from a hill, and the scene of Shunsuke asking Monta not to walk the night roads alone.
- The detailed depiction of the attack, and the scene of Shunsuke sitting at the bedside, with his inner thoughts (when Ito visited Inoue has not been confirmed in the records).