Now Masa felt sufficiently prepared to set to work.
It was a real stroke of luck that his master didn’t come back until dawn and slept almost until midday – there was enough time to prepare everything properly.
Masa put together an elegant breakfast: he brewed some wonderful barley tea, then took a wooden plate and set out on it pieces of sea centipede, yellow sea-urchin caviar and transparent slices of squid; he arranged the marinated plums and salted radish beautifully; he boiled the most expensive rice and sprinkled it with crushed seaweed; and he could feel especially proud of the absolutely fresh, snow-white tofu and fragrant tender-brown natto paste of fermented soybeans. The tray was decorated according to the season with small yellow chrysanthemums.
He carried this beautiful display into the bedroom, where he sat down on the floor without making a sound and started waiting for his master to wake up at last. But his master didn’t open his eyes; he was breathing calmly and quietly, and the only movement was the trembling of his long eyelashes.
Ai, this was not good! The rice would get cold! The tea would stand for too long!
Masa thought and thought about what to do, and a brilliant idea occurred to him.
He filled his lungs right up with air and gave a great sneeze.
A-tishoo!
His master jerked upright on the bed, opened his strange-coloured eyes and gazed in amazement at his seated retainer.
Masa bowed low, begged forgiveness for the noise he had made and held out one hand spattered with saliva, as if to say: It couldn’t be helped, an impulse of nature.
And then straight away, with a broad smile, immediately held out to his master the magnificent earthenware chamber pot that he had bought for ninety sen. Masa had learned from his former girlfriend that foreigners put this object under the bed for the night and did their gaijin business in it.
But his master did not seem pleased to see the chamber pot and waved his hand, as if to say: Take it away, take it away. Evidently Masa should have bought the white one, not the pink one with beautiful flowers.
Then Masa helped his master get washed, examining his white skin and firm muscles as he did so. He wanted very much to take a look at how a gaijin’s male parts were arranged, but for some reason the master sent his faithful servant out of the room before he washed the lower part of his body,
The breakfast was a magnificent success.
Of course, he had to spend some time teaching his master to use the chopsticks, but gaijins had nimble fingers. That was because they were descended from monkeys – they admitted that themselves, and they weren’t ashamed of it at all.
Masa’s master delighted him with his excellent appetite, and he had an interesting way of swallowing his food. First he bit off a small piece of centipede, then he wrinkled his face right up (no doubt in delight) and finished it off very quickly, washing it down greedily with barley tea. He gagged on the tea and started coughing, his mouth opened wide and his eyes gaped. That was like the Koreans – they belched when they wanted to show how delicious something was. Masa made a mental note that he must prepare twice as much next time.
After breakfast there was a language lesson. Shirota-san had said that the master wanted to learn Japanese – not like the other foreigners, who forced their servants to learn their language.
The lesson went like this.
The master pointed at various parts of his face and Masa told him their Japanese names: eye – meh, forehead – hitai, mouth – kuti, eyebrow – mayu. His pupil wrote these down in a notebook and repeated them diligently. His pronunciation was funny, but of course Masa didn’t permit himself even a tiny little smile.
The master drew a human face on a separate page and indicated its various parts with little arrows. That was clear enough. But then he started asking about something that Masa didn’t understand.
He could make out some words: ‘Rakuen’ and satsumajin – but what they referred to remained a mystery. His master pretended to be sitting there with his eyes closed, then he jumped up, staggered, waved one arm about and prodded Masa in the neck, then pointed to the face he had drawn and said, as if he was asking a question:
‘Meh? Kuti?’
Eventually, having reduced Masa to a state of complete bewilderment, he sighed, ruffled up his hair and sat down.
And then the most unusual part began.
The master ordered Masa to stand facing him, held out his clenched fists and started gesturing, as if he was inviting Masa to kick him.
Masa was horrified and for a long time he refused: how could he possibly kick his onjin? But then he remembered an interesting detail about the gaijins’ intimate life, something that his former girlfriend had told him. She had spied on what the missionary and his wife did when they were in the bedroom and seen her mistress, wearing nothing but a black bodice (apart from her riding boots), beating the sensei with a whip on his bare o-siri, and him asking her to hit him again and again.
That must be how the gaijins did things, Masa guessed. He bowed respectfully and struck his master in the chest with his foot, not very hard – right between absurdly extended fists.
The master fell over on to his back, but jumped up straight away. He clearly liked it and asked Masa to do it again.
This time he started springing about and following Masa’s every movement closely, so Masa couldn’t hit him straight away. The secret of ju-jitsu, or ‘the art of soft combat’, is to follow your opponent’s breathing. Everyone knows that strength enters into you with the air, and it leaves you with the air too; breathing in and out is the alternation of strength and weakness, fullness and emptiness. So Masa waited until his in-breath coincided with his master’s out-breath and repeated the attack.
His master fell down again, and this time he was really pleased. Gaijins truly were different from normal people, after all.
Having received what he wanted, the master put on a beautiful uniform and went to the central part of the building, to serve the Russian emperor. Masa did a bit of tidying and took up a position at the window, with a view of the garden and the opposite wing, where the consul lived (how could servants work for a man with such a shameful name?).
In the morning Masa’s eye had been caught by the consul’s maid, a girl by the name of Natsuko. His instinct told him it would be worthwhile spending a bit of time on her – it could lead to something.
He could see the girl doing the cleaning, moving from room to room, but she didn’t look out of the window.
Masa opened the curtains a bit wider, put a mirror on the windowsill and started pretending to shave – exactly the way his master did. Masa’s cheeks were round and remarkably smooth, no beard grew on them, the Buddha be praised, but why shouldn’t he lather them up with fragrant foam?
Working away gravely with the brush, Masa moved the mirror about a bit, trying to direct a spot of sunlight into Natsuko’s eyes.
He had to break off for a while, because Shirota-san and the dead captain’s yellow-haired daughter came out into the garden. They sat down on a bench under a young gingko tree and the interpreter began reading something out loud from a book, waving his hand about at the same time. Every now and then he cast a sideways glance at the young lady, but she sat with her eyes lowered and didn’t look at him at all. Such a learned man, but he had no idea how to court women, Masa thought, feeling sorry for Shirota-san. He ought to turn away from her completely and be casual, uttering only an occasional word. Then she wouldn’t turn her nose up, she’d start worrying that perhaps she wasn’t attractive enough.