Mizuchi picked at her kimono. “I suppose. But the journey across the Great Sea is dangerous. And would he be allowed to return here for good? To see him for a few months, a decade from now—I think it would break my heart.”
“And then there’s the religious issue,” Takuma reminded her.
“Yes, in Lord Sakai’s house, he could not be a Christian. And if he does not remain in the Faith, he is damned.”
“So . . . we refuse?” she asked hopefully. “With extreme apologies, of course?”
Takuma fidgeted. “I wish I was sure the decision is ours alone. If we displease Lord Sakai, what will happen to us? Not just our family, but to all of us?” Takuma was now a respected if junior member of Shigetsuna’s staff; he had heard the rumors that the lord commissioners had power to cut off the colonists’ umbilical cord back to the motherland. What would the grand governor do if Lord Sakai was angry? Hiraku might be taken from them, even without their consent. The three of them might be sent off to the cinnabar mine, or forced to leave and live, if they could, with the wilderness Indians. And their friends could be made to suffer on account of their refusal.
They talked about it for hours. If only they had not lost Takuma’s father. They needed his counsel now. They opened the butsudan, and burned incense before it. Even as they prayed for his guidance, they despaired. More than forty-nine days had passed, and so he was no longer merely a spirit of the dead, a shrei, he was a niisenzo, a new ancestor. But it would be thirty-three years before he was a full ancestral spirit, a sorei.
They could, in theory, pray to the sorei of earlier generations. But they were Buddhists; only Takama’s father had been a kirishitan, and thus likely to be sympathetic to their plight.
They prayed, also, for the intercession of Maruya-sama, the Virgin Mary. She had refused to marry the king of Roson, according to the stories they had heard; perhaps she would reveal to the Yamaguchis how they could safely refuse the commissioner’s offer to adopt Hiraku.
The next morning, Mizuchi told her husband, “Maruya-sama came to me in a vision, she said to speak to Iroha-hime, the grand governor’s daughter.”
* * *
Iroha heard them out, then gave them her opinion. “I will not say whether this adoption is a good thing or a bad one, only how it might be prevented without dangerous repercussions.
“By itself, the fact that your son has been raised as a Christian is not likely to be considered a strong enough objection.”
“To take him out of the Church will doom him to hell!”
Iroha-hime sighed. “That’s not how the lord commissioner will see it. You know the proverb; ‘there are many paths up the Mountain, but the view of the Moon from the top is the same.’ Lord Sakai thus would not think it consequential to ask Hiraku to change from one Buddhist sect to another. And considering that Christianity is now labeled ‘the evil religion,’ he may think he is doing your son a favor to lead him back to Buddhism, whichever temple he chooses.
“But I think it helpful that you are not a mere Christian follower, you are a baptizer. A member of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, neh? And so we can remind the lord commissioner that many of the Shinto priestly posts are hereditary.”
“What of it? I am not a priest! And the Christian priesthood is not hereditary. Why, the priests don’t even marry!”
“Those are details we need not trouble the lord commissioner with. And besides, from what I have heard, it is not unusual among the European nobility for the second son of each generation to enter the priesthood. That makes it hereditary in a practical sense, I think.
“Anyway, he cannot interfere with the normal inheritance of priestly positions without the approval of the commissioner of Temples and Shrines. Who is, alas, an ocean away.”
Takuma and Mizuki relaxed, ever so slightly.
“And I think there is a second string we can fit to this bow. There is the matter of filial piety. He is your only child, who else is there to care for you in your old age?
“Let me speak with your son; I must coach him as to exactly what to say.”
* * *
Hiraku bowed deeply. “Most Honorable Lord Commissioner,” he piped. “I have spent hours in prayer and meditation, seeking to understand whether it is the will of Heaven that I accompany you back to Japan.” He declined to mention whether he had the Christian or Buddhist Heaven in mind.
“I must consider, not only what is best for me, but what is best for my family and my community.”
The lord commissioner nodded in approval.
“Greatly though I would value the opportunity to accompany you across the Great Ocean, I must remember the teachings of Confucius: ‘If your parents are living, don’t go on a long trip.’