Prologue 1: tsunami

Tanabe, Japan — January 27, 1700 A.D. Edo period.

Waaah! Waaah!

In a humble house in the small castle town of Tanabe, the cry of a newborn had just broken the silence of eight hours of labor, and it broke it with the indignation peculiar to the creature who discovers the air for the first time and does not forgive it. The sanba — the Japanese midwife, a woman well into her years and seasoned by her trade after having brought half the prefecture into the world — held the child wrapped in a white cotton cloth, still streaked with blood, and shook her head with a mixture of weariness and joy that to anyone who had seen her without knowing her would have looked unsettling, but which in her, after twenty-five years of births both good and bad, was simply the routine manner of welcoming life. From the futon, the mother, her black hair plastered to her forehead with sweat and her lips cracked from the effort, smiled faintly, the way a woman smiles when she no longer has the strength even to fully close her eyelids. For years, Otsuru had longed to give her husband a son; for years, she had told herself she would not rest until she had given the Nakata clan the heir they expected. Now she had him before her, wrapped in the midwife's cloth, and she could die at peace; though that, of course, was not her intention.

"It's a boy!" the sanba announced, in that hoarse voice of three hours of giving orders, lifting the newborn slightly so the mother could see him from the futon. "A male, my lady, a complete male, and with a fine head of hair!"

"How happy Seijuro will be…" Otsuru whispered, with the last thread of voice she had left, the words barely audible even to the midwife two steps away.

And after the whisper, as if she had handed over with that one phrase the last coin in her purse, she closed her eyes and let herself be taken by the faint. No one, in that instant, noticed. The sanba was attending to the baby. The baby, to the new air. And Seijuro Nakata, who had been waiting two hours in the corridor with his hands cramped from clenching his fists, crossed the fusuma at a run the moment he heard the cry, so quickly that he nearly tore the child from the midwife's arms with the sleeve of his haori.

"It's a boy, it's a boy!" she announced to him, with the genuine joy of one who is paid for a good birth but charges nothing for affection. "A healthy male, my lord, a male all of one piece!"

"Let me see him now."

Seijuro took the baby from the sanba's arms with a delicacy almost comic in a man of his size — over six feet tall, the shoulders of a stevedore, hands that in the army had broken necks thinner than that tiny waist — and remained for long seconds in silence, looking at him, his mouth shut, his jaw tight, his eyes fixed on the child's face as if that face were a map only he could read. The sanba was a little startled by the silence, because in her experience fathers, on first taking their children in their arms, either wept, or laughed, or said some foolish thing; they almost never went quiet with that intensity, which was less the intensity of a father than that of a commander reviewing his troops. But Lord Seijuro, she said to herself, was like that; a little odd, a little military, a little from somewhere else, though he had never failed to show respect to a single servant and always paid in advance. And just as the midwife was already thinking of breaking the silence herself with whatever excuse came to hand, the master spoke.

"Seijuro Nakata."

He said it like that, as one reads a name engraved on a sword, his voice dry, measured, with a slight nod of the head to seal it. Nothing more. As if with three words a matter that had been open for nine months were now closed.

"Eh? What does that mean, my lord?" the sanba asked, looking at him with that respectful confusion of one who does not wish to seem ignorant before an officer, but who also does not understand what she is being told.

"That will be the boy's name," Seijuro answered without taking his eyes from the baby, with the same calm voice. "Seijuro Nakata."

"But that is your name as well, my lord…"

"He will be called what I am called. Like his father." For the first time that night, a muscle twitched in Seijuro's cheekbone, and that briefest of tremors, that flash of feeling hidden beneath a serene surface, was more eloquent than any smile. "Because this child will be my heir, the heir of the Nakata clan, and he will surpass even me, of that I am certain…" He stroked the newborn's cheek with the back of his index finger, once, and added in a lower voice, speaking now directly to the child and no longer to the sanba, in that mocking tone military fathers use to hide tenderness, "though I will not make it easy for you, eh, my son? I will not make it easy at all."

He laughed. A brief, dry laugh, fifteen years of not laughing like that, swollen with a pride he had not felt even on the day of his promotion to officer.

He turned toward the futon.

"What do you say, Otsuru?" he asked, in a completely different tone, the intimate tone of one who addresses the companion of four years of marriage, his voice lowered, warm, almost smiling. "Do you like that he should bear my name, or are you going to tell me now, you who always kept your opinions to yourself, that you don't like it at all?"

Silence was his only answer.

The sanba furrowed her brow. For the first time in several minutes, she took her eyes from the baby and looked at the mother. The color drained from her own face.

"Damn it, she's fainted!"

"What's happening?" Seijuro asked, his voice changed all at once, the combat voice, the one he used in the garrisons when something had to be decided in two seconds. "Damn it, woman, answer me!"

The sanba, already kneeling beside the futon, placed the back of her hand to Otsuru's forehead. She pressed her lips together. She checked the pulse at her wrist. She looked beneath the cloth that covered the lower part of the mother's body, lifted it for an instant, and let it fall again with a swiftness that did not mean to be eloquent but was.

"She has lost too much blood, my lord," she said, without raising her eyes. "Too much. And she has a fever. A high fever. She's burning up."

"Send for a doctor, now!"

Seijuro laid the baby in the makeshift cradle they had prepared beside the futon and made to bolt out with the same mechanical efficiency of a man executing a military order rather than his own will. He had taken three steps toward the door when it opened from the other side.

It was his father.

Jirōbei Nakata, high-ranking officer of the army, a man whom forty years of service had taught never to present himself anywhere with the folds of his haori out of place, appeared in the threshold with his collar loose, his sandals stained with red mud, and his breathing betraying a long run. Seijuro read all of that in the half-second it took his father to open his mouth, and he read it with a growing unease that did not at all subside when the old man spoke.

"Father, you've come at exactly the right moment," Seijuro began, in a rush, speaking as fast as his tongue would allow him, determined to fit into the fewest possible words everything the new arrival needed to know. "The boy has been born healthy and is a male, but Otsuru is unconscious, the sanba says she has lost too much blood and has a high fever, we need a doctor as soon as possible. Stay here with the baby and help the midwife while I go find—"

His father raised his right hand to cut him off. He did so with the same impersonal authority with which in his day he had brought entire regiments to a halt by the throat, and he looked at him with the sadness of one about to say something he would rather not say. He drew a breath. He let one second pass. Another. Then he pronounced, with the exact cadence with which bad news was delivered in the army, a single word.

"Tsunami."

He said it sharply, adding nothing, as if he expected his son to grasp the situation in those three syllables; and his son, indeed, grasped it. Seijuro felt his stomach contract to the size of a child's fist.

"Eh?" he stammered, with that incredulous voice in which one asks things already knowing the answer, with the absurd hope that, by some merciful chance, the answer might be different from the one one already knew. "What do you mean, tsunami, Father?"

"I've come from the coast." Jirōbei spoke now with the operational coldness of the old soldier, sentences short, facts precise, his face fully composed in spite of the disordered haori. "The sea has pulled back nearly two chō — almost two hundred and forty yards — in less than a quarter of an hour. The fishermen are out of their wits, the seabed lies exposed, the guards have already begun evacuating the city, and I came straight here the moment I knew. We must leave. Now. Not in an hour. Now."

The silence that followed was more devastating than the news itself. Father and son looked at each other for the precise time it took for both at once to grasp two things: that the earth had not shaken first, and that nevertheless, the sea was coming. And Seijuro, who had seen too much in the forests of the north to be frightened by what was known, felt the clean cold fear of the unexplainable bury itself in his chest like a well-thrown nageyari. But he did not let his emotions take hold of him at such a crucial moment, and he closed his eyes for an instant. That instant was enough. To a trained officer, instants are enough.

We don't have time, he thought.

He opened his eyes.

"Father, listen." And his voice came out now already composed, with the characteristic serenity that in House Nakata was inherited the way swords are inherited, for Seijuro spoke as his father did, and his father as his own father had. "Take the newborn and carry him to the base at Osaka. We have friends there, military men we trust, men who will answer for you and for him without hesitation. This city will be wiped out. I will carry Otsuru and go now to find a doctor. We will meet up with the men at Osaka in a few days; we may have to remain there for a time, but the important thing is to be out of Tanabe today."

Jirōbei nodded with solemnity. He did not argue with the plan: in forty years of service he had learned to recognize good orders even when they came from his own son, and that one was good.

"I'll wait for you in Osaka."

There were no more words. He took the newborn in his arms with the dry efficiency of a grandfather who had cared for enough other men's children in enough retreats, and in a firm voice he ordered the servants and the sanba to leave the house at once and join the evacuation. Shortly after, Jirōbei was setting off northward in a cart that pulled away through the chaos, the child against his chest, the rumble of the sea growing at his back.

Neither he nor Seijuro knew that this would be the last time the three of them would be together in that house, nor that the name the father had given the son in the final minute would travel twenty years before it returned, intact, to the mouth of someone who would pronounce it for the first time with anger.

---

Streets of Tanabe

Seijuro lifted his wife against his chest, wrapped her in the heavy silk quilt from the room, and stepped out into the street.

"A doctor, please!" he shouted with his voice well projected, the command voice that in the barracks made a hundred men fall silent at once. "My wife is unconscious, she has lost a great deal of blood! A doctor!"

But his shouts were swallowed by the human tide fleeing inland, for the entire avenue had become a river of bodies climbing toward the northeast in search of the mountain, and in that river each man and woman carried his own urgency knotted at the throat. No one stopped. Not out of cruelty, Seijuro told himself with restrained anger, but out of pure instinct of survival; and in disasters, he thought, the indifference of others is not a moral choice but a symptom of one's own haste. A merchant passed before him almost grazing his face with his shoulder. An old woman shoved him without looking. A young samurai, carrying a child who did not seem to be his own, shouted at him to get out of the way. The ground was trembling slightly beneath everyone's feet, not with the nervous tremor of an earthquake, but with the deep continuous vibration of something very large coming very fast.

Seeing that the avenue would yield him no doctor in the next minutes, and that each minute now was a minute Otsuru did not have to spare, he decided to change his strategy. He ran toward the eastern mountains, alongside most of the citizens fleeing the city; but soon, with the inert body of his wife weighing less and less against his chest — a sensation he pushed from his head without even letting it bloom — he turned off onto a steeper, more dangerous path than the conventional route, a goatherds' trail the children used to descend to the rock pools to fish for octopus, because by it he would avoid the crowd and not be slowed. His military training from childhood allowed him to advance quickly and steadily, even bearing the inert weight of his wife; his physical strength, his speed, and his reflexes far exceeded those of any neighbor in Tanabe. Higher up, more hope, he repeated to himself, like one who repeats an old prayer beneath his breath.

"Hold on, damn it, hold on for everything you love, hold on," he begged his unconscious wife as he ran, speaking to her in the low continuous voice with which one speaks to wounded horses to keep them from going down. "Hold on, Otsuru, hold on. There's a doctor somewhere. There are doctors everywhere. Hold on."

Guilt was eating him.

You're not going to die without seeing your son grow up, are you?, he thought, and he cursed himself for having even thought it.

Seijuro lamented, climbing among the cedars, that he was not faster, that he was not stronger; for the first time in his life he felt powerless, and powerlessness, for a Nakata, was an unfamiliar form of pain. Had he been a bad husband? Always away because of the army, always one campaign or another, always promising a quiet season that some akuryō or some far-off uprising would later steal from him without asking permission. He had never been able to give Otsuru the time she deserved; and now, seeing her so close to death, the officer's mind was invaded by thoughts that, he knew himself, did him no good and were not going to save her.

After a stretch, his breath shorter and his conviction growing that climbing without a doctor was not faster than climbing with one, he decided to return to the main road and try once more among the people. Perhaps, with luck, someone among all those fleeing would be a doctor or had seen one.

"Is there a doctor here?" he shouted as he reentered the human current, his voice well projected, sweeping his eyes from face to face.

Silence.

Seijuro cursed his luck. No one answered, and this time he had made sure he was heard. He decided he would get nothing more from the avenue and turned to go back to the shortcut and continue climbing on his own. It was just then, the moment he was already taking his first step out of the current, that a voice rose above the multitude.

"I am a doctor!" someone shouted, and an arm rose above the heads so Seijuro could spot it. "Here! Sir, here, I'm a doctor!"

Seijuro turned as if an angel had appeared to him.

"Are you really?" he asked, with a mixture of hope and suspicion, because in flight people lie as easily as the leaves fall. "My wife… she has a fever and has lost a great deal of blood."

The doctor came up quickly, making his way through the crowd with discreet elbow-work, and without even introducing himself he pushed aside the cloth that covered Otsuru's face and began examining her with the economy of movements of one who has done it hundreds of times. He touched her forehead. He took her pulse at the neck. He lifted an eyelid with his thumb. All of it without speaking, his brow ever more tense. When at last he spoke, he did so in a voice severe, dry, that struck Seijuro like an unexpected slap.

"Her fever is too high. She is gravely ill. How could you have allowed her to come to this state?"

The accusation did nothing to make Seijuro feel less guilty; on the contrary, it lodged exactly into the crack his guilt had been opening in him all along the path. And perhaps for that reason, because it hurt him precisely where he was already hurt, he reacted with more force than he would have to any other question.

"It was a labor, damn it!" Seijuro roared, and he lifted the quilt a little so the doctor could see the lower part of his wife's body, soaked in fresh and dried blood mingled together. "Can you not see the blood?! She gave birth an hour ago, she has just brought my son into the world, and you ask me how I have allowed her to come to this state?!"

The doctor lowered his eyes. In the trade of the old country physician, as in that of the old soldier, one learned soon enough to recognize when one had picked the wrong tone, and that doctor, without being old, had been at it long enough to know that he had just done so.

"Forgive me, sir," he said, and the sir he placed at the head of his sentence was a discreet way of bowing without bowing. "It was not my intention to judge you. Forgive me."

Seijuro clenched his teeth and did not answer. The doctor returned to Otsuru's body, palpated the lower abdomen above the kimono with two professional fingers, and after a few seconds raised his head with a decision made.

"So a labor that has gone wrong," he murmured, more to himself than to the husband. "All right. Sir, listen to me carefully, because here in the middle of the flight I can do nothing for your wife; without boiled water, without clean cloths and without hands to assist me, we'd lose her in less than an hour. My house is up the path toward the mountains, not far, a short stretch for someone who runs as I imagine you can run. I'm not even from Tanabe, I just come down to the city now and again to help. My wife is there, and she'll know what to do until I arrive; she's a resourceful woman, she has seen more births than I have in these years. You go ahead. I'll come behind as soon as I gather my own. When you get there, tell her that her husband sent you and she'll open the door at the first knock. She'll stop the bleeding if it can still be stopped. And I'll be there before nightfall."

The doctor gave him precise directions — the path, the turn-off, and the torii that served as a landmark; Seijuro listened to it all without interrupting, memorizing each turn with the same attention with which in the military school he had memorized marching orders. The moment the old man finished, he inclined his head in a minimal gesture of thanks and turned again off the main road, this time onto a shortcut that, in his expert judgment, would shorten the journey by a third.

He ran.

---

Path Among the Cedars

He was running faster than he ever had.

At that pace he would arrive in a matter of minutes. He could already picture Otsuru recovering in the arms of that mountain midwife, awake again in a few hours, weak but alive; he pictured himself reaching Osaka days later with his convalescent wife in a cart and his newborn son waiting for them in his grandfather's arms. He pictured the boy growing up with both parents and not with the shadow of a mother dead in childbirth.

"We're almost there…" he whispered, pressing Otsuru's feverish body to his chest. "We're almost there, Otsuru, hold on a little longer."

But suddenly, halfway there, among the Japanese cedars through which Seijuro was passing at full speed, he glimpsed a human silhouette outlined against the copper light of the dusk.

He stopped dead.

His subconscious warned him of something his conscious mind had not yet seen.

The face of the figure began to reveal itself out of the shadows.

Seijuro felt his blood turn to ice.

No.

It could not be.

His fingers tensed around Otsuru's body.

"This cannot be happening now…" he whispered, his arms tightening around Otsuru. "Not while my wife is dying in my arms."

The figure took a couple of steps forward, came out from the shadow of the last cedar, and stopped a few yards away. It was a small silhouette, almost adolescent; blond hair showing beneath her hat, a dark military uniform unbecoming any Japanese woman, two steel chains hanging from her arms like a natural extension of her arms. A faint smile curved her lips.

"Aren't you glad to see me, Seijuro?"

Seijuro did not answer. He could not. Because if that person was there, in the woods, on that very path, at that very minute, then the tsunami was the least of his problems.