Chapter 1: The Gate of Tears

Edo, Japan. April 11, 1868

The city had been holding its breath for months and now it finally exhaled, and what came out was grief.

Reggie Hemming had bribed his way to a good position — a stone wall overlooking the Sakurada-mon gate of Edo Castle, twenty yards from the road, Kenji beside him smelling of tobacco and resignation. The April morning was sharp and pale, cherry blossoms coming down in slow diagonals off the trees lining the castle road, catching in the mud, catching in the silk, catching in the hair of women who had no hands free to brush them away.

He had heard about the Ooku his entire time in Japan. Every foreign merchant had. Three thousand women behind those walls, hidden from the world, the great secret interior of the Shogun’s palace. You heard about it in the teahouses and the trading offices and the dockside sake dens, always in the same tone men used for things they couldn’t quite believe existed.

Now the walls had opened and they were coming out.

Three thousand women.

Reggie had thought he understood that number. He had been wrong. There was no preparing for what three thousand women in formal kimono looked like moving through a castle gate in a column that had no visible end, the sound of it almost no sound at all — just the soft percussion of geta on stone, the occasional low voice, the rustle of silk against silk against silk. Imperial soldiers lined the road on both sides, standing with the careful blankness of men who had been told to maintain order and were finding it unnecessary. There was no disorder here. There was only grief, and grief moved quietly.

Some of the women wept openly. Most did not. They walked with their eyes forward and their bundles held against their chests and their lives carried in their arms because there was nowhere else to carry them.

Reggie watched and said nothing. There was nothing to say.

Kenji lit a cigarette.

The column moved. And then the morning light, without any particular reason or permission, settled on a woman in blue and silver approximately forty yards from where Reggie stood and simply stayed there.

He saw the kimono first. Cranes across the shoulders worked in silver thread, chrysanthemums at the hem, the blue so saturated it was nearly night against the pale grey of the castle stones. Then the woman wearing it. Small framed, four inches below his shoulder if she were standing next to him, black hair pinned up with lacquered combs and pins, walking in her geta on that ruined road like the road had no right to be beneath her.

Every woman in that column was beautiful. That was simply true, it required no elaboration.

This one was something else.

He became aware that he had stopped thinking about anything except her, which was not a thought exactly but a condition, like weather.

She was not weeping. She was not looking at the ground. Her spine was a straight line drawn by someone who had never entertained the possibility of anything less. Around her the column moved in sorrow and she moved in something that was not sorrow and was not its absence either — something older and more complicated that had no name he knew.

Then, without any change in her pace or her posture, she turned her head and looked directly at him.

Not at the wall. Not at the soldiers. At him.

Smoky black eyes, a tilt of the head, the ghost of something at the corner of her mouth that committed to nothing and promised nothing and stopped his heart completely. Then she faced forward and kept walking.

“Holy God,” Reggie said.

Kenji turned. Followed his eyes. Went very still.

“You see her.” Not a question.

“Who is she?”

Kenji took a long pull on his cigarette and exhaled slowly. “That is Midori. She was Senior Chūrō of the Ooku. The Shogun’s third concubine.” He paused. “Number three, Reggie-san. In the entire palace. She controlled an entire wing of the Castle.”