Toru: Wayfarer Returns (Sakura Steam Series Book 1) Read online

  PUBLISHED BY PALANTIR PRESS

  www.palantirpress.com

  Leadville, Colorado

  Copyright © 2016 by Stephanie R. Sorensen

  www.stephaniersorensen.com

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters, locations and events portrayed in this novel are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Biserka Design/Facebook

  Cover design images by Phelan Davion and Michael Lars/ www.phelandavion.deviantart.com

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication

  (Provided by Quality Books, Inc.)

  Sorensen, Stephanie R., author.

  Toru : wayfarer returns / Stephanie R. Sorensen. --

  First edition.

  pages cm -- (A sakura steam series novel)

  LCCN 2015917682

  ISBN 978-0-9969323-0-1

  ISBN 978-0-9969323-1-8

  ISBN 978-0-9969323-2-5

  ISBN 978-0-9969323-3-2

  1. Japan--History--Tokugawa period, 1600-1868--

  Fiction. 2. Japan--History--Restoration, 1853-1870--

  Fiction. 3. United States Naval Expedition to Japan

  (1852-1854)--Fiction. 4. Perry, Matthew Calbraith,

  1794-1858. 5. Samurai--Japan--History--19th century.

  6. Alternative histories (Fiction) 7. Steampunk

  fiction. 8. Historical fiction. I. Title.

  II. Series: Sorensen, Stephanie R. Sakura steam series

  novel.

  PS3619.O744T67 2016 813’.6

  QBI15-1734

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015917682

  ISBN: 978-0-9969323-2-5

  FIRST EDITION

  PRONUNCIATION OF JAPANESE WORDS

  Japanese vowels are pronounced as follows:

  “a” as in father

  “i” as in ink

  “u” as in due

  “e” as in feather

  “o” as in over

  Vowels are pronounced separately.

  Syllables are given equal stress.

  The Japanese “r” sound falls delicately between a very soft “d,” an “r” and an “l.”

  O’s and u’s with a macron over them (ō) are held slightly longer.

  Key names in the text that are pronounced quite differently in Japanese

  than they appear from their English spelling include

  Lord Date, two syllables pronounced “Dah-tay”

  and Lord Abe, pronounced “Ah-bay.”

  For Aiko

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Pronunciation

  Dedication

  1852 – SPRING

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  1852 – SUMMER

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  1852 – AUTUMN

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  1852 – WINTER

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  1853 – SPRING

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  1853 – SUMMER

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Tōru

  WAYFARER RETURNS

  1852 Spring

  Year 5 Kaei Era

  CHAPTER 1

  HOMECOMING

  “Every traveler has a home of his own,

  and he learns to appreciate it the more

  from his wandering.”

  – Charles Dickens

  Tōru leaned into his oar, pulling hard, as the open rowboat slipped forward through the calm sea. Silvery light splashed over the four men rowing to shore, lifting their oars in practiced unison. For once the rough sailors were mute, no jokes or boasts ringing out through the night. Tōru glanced back at the sailing ship. She stood, sails furled, her masts black against the full moon hanging low on the horizon. He could see the captain looking down at them, and imagine his cigar a glowing spark even in the bright night.

  A dark moonless night would have been safer, true, but Tōru rejoiced to see the land, the familiar twisted trees and craggy rocks of his homeland. A sea lion watched them from a cluster of rocks. Tōru smiled, as though greeting a long lost friend. She waddled forward and leapt into the waves, the splash loud in the stillness. Soon the men were in the rough, leaping out of the boat and dragging the small craft onto the white sand. Tōru leapt out, tugging her to safety onto the beach, his feet wet in the swirling surf. He listened to the achingly familiar call of the night birds.

  He gestured to his companions to unload the cargo into a patch of trees and undergrowth. Three traveling trunks, a heavy wooden crate and a few baskets, all he possessed in the world, were soon tucked under the trees.

  Tōru bowed deeply to the three men. They clapped him on the back, gruff men awkward at the hushed farewell, but hesitating to leave him. He gestured for silence, his finger to his lips in the American gesture he had learned among them. He bowed again, more deeply this time, bowing into the memory and manner of the boy he had been before his time in America. He remained fixed in this gesture of respect as they pushed off and rowed for their ship. Tōru held the pose long after it was necessary, long after they could no longer see him hidden in the shadows of the trees around him.

  He looked once more to the ship and saw the captain, his arm raised in salute. Only then did Tōru straighten and salute the captain. He knew Captain McHargue could not see him, but he saluted as perfectly and crisply as he knew how. A captain ever on the sea is a bad father to his own sons, who find him a brusque stranger on his rare visits home. But such captains can be good fathers to their crews, and to young men like Tōru, who find themselves far from home. Tōru did not expect to see Captain McHargue again. The thought tightened in his chest, for the captain had been good to him, demanding and fair, on the long wintry voyage back to Japan.

  Alone under the trees, Tōru fished around in his baskets and found the worn and tattered clothes he had been wearing two years ago when another American trading ship pulled him from stormy waters. He removed the riveted Levis favored by miners digging for gold in California, his blue cotton shirt and sturdy leather boots. He put on his Japanese clothes, rough and battered though they were. Against this day, he had carried the old rags with him everywhere he went for the two long years of his sojourn in America. They were clean and strangely familiar. He tightened his sash and inspected himself as best he could in the dark.

  No shoes.

  Strange, after two years in leather boots, to find himself barefoot.

  No matter. He would find footwear soon enough.

  Across the flat sea, Tōru could see his friends climbing aboard their ship and hoisting up the rowboat. Captain McHargue had vanished below. They were too far away for Tōru to hear the grunts of the men as they hoisted anchor, but he could see them battling the weight. He saw the buzz of activity as the sailors unfurled the sails, hoping to catch a breath of wind offshore on the calm evening. He stood watching as the gentlest of breezes bore his companions away, leaving him alone on the beach.

  Tōru smiled at the memory of the previous evening as he watched them sail away. His hangover
still plagued him a day later. Captain McHargue had declared a rare night of festivity in honor of Tōru, a farewell party for the young man about to leave their company. Opening up his own liquor supply, a singular event in the memory of his men, Captain had encouraged much toasting and singing in honor of their departing charge.

  Tōru’s English was quite good after two years in America, but as drink slurred their speech and the company grew boisterous, he was certain he missed a phrase here and there from his friends. He knew, though, the Americans were fond of him, and he of them. He had come to understand this strange loud people. Not perfectly, to be sure. But well enough.

  They still shocked and amazed him, even until his last day on American soil, when Mrs. Hutchins had grabbed him to her considerable bosom and embraced him tightly. Tears welled from her big round eyes and dripped off the tip of her long red nose as she fussed over him and begged him to stay on with them longer. To be clutched at so, by a respectable woman, and to be wept over so noisily, with much wailing and waving of handkerchiefs, was all so much too much. Even the coarsest peasant in his village would be horrified by such a dramatic display. And yet, he knew the indomitable Mrs. Hutchins to be a good and much respected person among the Americans, wife of the Governor no less. And so he suffered with good grace her exuberant and ample embrace.

  He even ventured a small hesitant hug in return. This gesture unleashed a whole new wave of wailing from Mrs. Hutchins.

  “See! He is American now, even knows how to give a proper hug! Oh my boy, my poor boy! Stay here with us!”

  The strangest thing of all about them was their fervent conviction that everyone on the whole round earth wanted to come to America and be Americans. So proud of their brash young country, they firmly believed anyone who still lived elsewhere either planned to migrate to America immediately and live in loud democratic liberty or had not yet but soon would come to the conclusion they should.

  Tōru’s kind hosts found incomprehensible his fixed determination to return home.

  He had come to understand they considered his land backward and unsophisticated, lacking such marvels as trains and telegraphs and democracy. He tried and failed to explain the subtle poetry and ancient history of his people, the etiquette and protocol of the great courts, the dignity and martial skills of the samurai, the grace of even the meanest farmer’s wife. The Americans were too busy, in too much of a hurry, settling their vast land, building their railroads, digging for gold, and creating businesses, to listen for more than a sentence or two about matters of poetry or history or the swaying grace of a silk-clad noblewoman or the plucking sweet sound of a shamisen in the evening.

  So Tōru had fallen silent about Japan and learned much about the Americans.

  His small pile of possessions was a treasure trove of knowledge, a small but excellent lending library with a technology bent. Engineering and science books in English, and even a few in German and French. No matter that he could not read any except the English ones. He coveted the knowledge within their covers and trusted that he would be able to extract the foreign learning when needed. Dictionaries of several European languages, maps, a globe. A fine clock, ornately carved and decorated with brass. Designs for all manner of gadgets and machines and ships and contraptions. Several Bowie knives, pistols and a repeating rifle. A copy of the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Books by Locke, Hume, Smith, Franklin as well as the literary and poetic works of Edgar Allen Poe, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Herman Melville. Haltingly, he had read them all during his travels, an English dictionary in one hand, English book in the other, his Japanese brain struggling in between.

  He carried with him as well an exquisitely illustrated Bible, wrapped in silk bound up within a protective grease cloth inside a leather pouch. He had read no more than a verse here and there when he was taken occasionally to church by one or another of his hosts. This book, heavy and ornate, bound in stamped black leather, provoked in him a certain thudding dread. He found himself reluctant to open its heavy leather binding to touch the delicate gold-leafed pages. As Tōru knew, possessing a Bible in the Shogun’s realm was a crime punishable by death, ever since the Christians had been killed and driven underground centuries before by the Shogun’s ancestors.

  However, illegal or not, he had brought the fearsome Bible with him. Every American home he visited, rich or poor, boasted a Bible and several guns, all prominently displayed. Tōru knew he could not understand this people without understanding their most treasured book and their guns.

  The bulkiest and most valuable omiage of all was the souvenir he had brought back for his mother. This gift occasioned no small amount of grumbling from the Captain and, it is true, all his officers, for the heavy weight and huge space it commanded on their small vessel. The sturdy wooden crate held a lavish extravagance, bestowed upon him with considerable ceremony by the Governor at Mrs. Hutchins’ persistent request: one of the first Singer sewing machines ever made, along with its treadle desk, gently wrapped and padded in yards and yards of the finest New England textiles.

  “She can sew you proper men’s suits with this. None of this Japanese skirt nonsense for a young man like you!” Mrs. Hutchins had thoughtfully included fashion plates and patterns from the latest magazines, Godey’s and Peterson’s, with men’s styles from London and women’s from Paris, so he would be able to help his mother sew clothing in modern style.

  Tōru thanked her profusely, but he was as certain of two things as he was of his own name. First, his mother would never be able to puzzle out these patterns, intricate overlays of multiple patterns on single large sheets of fine paper. Second, neither he, nor his mother, nor for that matter any other Japanese would ever voluntarily wear the stiff and binding clothing preferred by the Americans. But he grasped quite well a sewing machine could stitch a yukatta or hakama as well as a suit coat or ball gown. Technology serves a culture but need not define it.

  Mrs. Hutchins had sent one of her maids over to instruct Tōru on the threading, maintenance and use of the noisy contraption. She apologized for teaching him women’s work, but, “How else will your mother learn how to use it if you cannot show her?”

  Tōru was fascinated by the clicking bite of the sewing needle as it throbbed into the cloth, leaving a perfect seam in its wake as smooth as the neatest hand stitching of the most careful seamstress in all of Japan. He carefully disassembled and reassembled the machine after the maid left, failing at first to get it to work again after his impromptu surgery. He persisted though, until again it sang its clackety clack song as he drove the machine with his foot on the treadle. Satisfied, he sewed seam after aimless seam on bits of scrap cloth begged of Mrs. Hutchins, certain he could show his mother how to use this marvel.

  The men on the ship teased Tōru mercilessly over his beloved sewing machine. Why a man needed such a thing was beyond them, when they could repair a sail by hand as well as any seamstress, and their wives and girlfriends kept them in clothes. But he took their jibes in good humor, for he had seen what a simple machine could do and the impact it could have, when good quality clothing could be made quickly and cheaply for ordinary people. He wanted this machine for his mother, and ten thousand copies for his country.

  The ship vanished over the horizon on a silver sea reflecting the moon, now high in the clear velvet sky.

  Tōru turned from the sea from whence he had come to his homeland.

  He found himself facing six armed samurai, their swords at his throat. Slowly he extended his arms to show he carried no weapon and meant no harm. He would have bowed, or knelt, but for the blades at his throat. He had hoped the small inlet would be far enough from nearby towns so he could come ashore unobserved. Obviously the watch on the coastline had only been tightened in his absence. Not a good sign, for it meant also the sakoku policy of isolation decreed by the Shogun was still in effect. By returning home from a foreign land, he was considered by the S
hogun a traitor who had committed an offense punishable by death.

  Angry and fierce though the tone was, the sounds of his native tongue, unheard for over two years, were sweet to Tōru’s ears.

  “Omae wa dare da? Who are you? Whose ship is that? Why are you here?”

  They forced Tōru to his knees.

  He bowed down to the sand and spoke in the rough unhewn Japanese of a fisherman.

  “Noble sirs, I am Tōru, of the village Iwamatsu, some days’ travel north of here. I was fishing with my father. A terrible storm destroyed our boat and cast us all into the sea. My father gave me a piece of wreckage to cling to as everything sank.”

  Tōru struggled a moment, the words and flow of his native language catching on his lips after more than two years without a soul to speak with in Japanese. The memory of the storm and his last memory of his father that night rose up before him.

  He steadied himself as the men listened intently, their swords never wavering from his throat, nor their gaze from his face.

  He chose his next words carefully.

  “That night was the last I saw my father. I was picked up by an American ship and taken to America.”

  He bowed down to the sand again, easing between the blades.

  “This night I am returning, to look after my mother. She has no other child to care for her, and no husband to feed her. The Americans brought me home, so I might do my duty by my mother and my people. I beg you, forgive me any crimes I may have committed by landing on your lord’s shore, and allow me please to return to my home.”

  As he looked up into their eyes, he saw they would permit no such thing.

  CHAPTER 2

  TRAITOR

  “Everyone who does not agree with me is a traitor.”

  – George III

  The daimyō’s retainers pushed Tōru to his knees before their lord. His hands and feet bound, he fell forward and lay helpless until the daimyō nodded for someone to pull him up to his knees. Tōru bowed low and waited for permission to speak. He dared not look up and examine the lord’s outer hall, nor count the many men lining its long walls. He could smell the straw of the tatami mat pressed against his nose.