Free Black Glass by Karen Joy Fowler Page B

hamburgers,” Claire’s daughter says.
    â€œIs there anything else to eat?” Claire’s husband asks.
    Claire smiles at them all. She sends them a message, tapping it out with her fork on the side of her plate. It may take years, but she imagines it will get there eventually.

SHIMABARA
    T he sea, the same as now. It had rained, and we can imagine that, too, just as we have ourselves seen it—the black sky, the ocean carved with small, sharp waves. At the base of each cliff would be a cloud of white water.
    At the top of the cliffs was a castle and, inside the castle, a fifteen-year-old boy. Here is where it gets tricky. What is different and what is the same? The story takes place on the other side of the world. The boy has been dead more than three hundred and fifty years. There was a castle, but now there is a museum and a mall. A Japanese mall is still a mall; we know what a mall looks like. The sea is the same. What about a fifteen-year-old boy?
    The boy’s mother, Martha, was in a boat on the sea beneath the cliffs. Once a day she was taken to shore to the camp of Lord Matsudaira for interrogation. Then she could see the castle where her son was. The rest of the time she lay inside the boat with her two daughters, each of them bound by the wrists and the ankles, so that when she was allowed to stand, her legs, through disuse, could hardly hold her up. Add to that the motion of the boat. When she walked on land, on her way to interrogation, she shook and pitched. The samurai thought it was terror, and of course there was that, too.
    Perhaps Martha was more concerned about her son in the castle than her daughters on the boat. Perhaps a Japanese mother three hundred and fifty years ago would feel this way. In any case, all their lives depended on her son now. As she lay on the boat, Martha passed the time by counting miracles. The first was that she had a son. On the day of Shiro’s birth, the sunset flamed across the entire horizon, turning the whole landscape red, then black. Later, when Shiro was twelve, a large, fiery cross rose out of the ocean off the Shimabara Peninsula and he was seen walking over the water toward it. He could call birds to his hands; they would lay eggs in his palms. This year, the year he turned fifteen, the sunset of his birth was repeated many times. The cherry blossoms were early. These things had been foretold. Martha remembered; she summoned her son’s face; she imagined the sun setting a fire each night behind Hara Castle. The worst that could happen was that her son prove now to be ordinary. The wind that had brought the rain rocked the boat.
    Thirty-seven thousand Kirishitan rebels followed Shiro out of Amakusa to the Shimabara Peninsula and the ruin of Hara Castle.
Kirishitan
is a word that has been translated into Japanese and come back out again, as in the children’s game of telephone. It goes in as Christian, comes out Kirishitan.
    The rebels made the crossing in hundreds of small boats, each with a crucifix in the bow. A government spy stood in the cold shadow of a tree and watched the boats leave. He couldn’t count the rebels. Maybe there were fifty thousand. Maybe twenty thousand. Of those, maybe twelve thousand were men of fighting age. The spy grew weak from hunger and fatigue. Just to stand long enough to watch them all depart required the discipline and dedication of a samurai.
    General Itakura Shigemasa pursued the rebels through Amakusa, burning the villages they’d left behind. Many of the remaining inhabitants died in the fires. Those who survived, Itakura put to death anyway. He had the children tied to stakes and then burned alive. It was a message to the fifteen-year-old Kirishitan leader.
    Although Hara Castle had been abandoned for many years, it was built to be defended. The east side of the castle looked over the sea; on the west was a level marsh, fed by tides, which afforded no footing to horses, no cover to attackers.