The Samurai's Daughter Read Online Free Page A

touched tapers to wicks and an acrid fug of burning tallow mingled with tobacco smoke and the powerful odour of roasting flesh.
    Nobu had followed the rickshaw pullers and the grooms out and was squatting on his heels, chewing the stem of his pipe. Where he came from, good plain food – rice, tofu, vegetables, fish – was what people ate, he thought, not slaughtered animals.
    Shouts and laughter boomed from the inner room. Everyone seemed to have forgotten the disturbance already. Nobu wrinkled his nose and stared under his eyebrows at the dandies in their outlandish tight-sleeved outfits sauntering in and out, waving their hands and flashing their teeth, talking at the tops of their voices. They were like creatures from another world.
    Ever since he’d woken that morning he’d had the feeling that something was in the air. It might have been the icy wind blasting through the crack in the door or the squawks of the crows or the creaks of carts as vendors passed by, singing out, ‘Roasted chestnuts!’ ‘Sweet potatoes!’ ‘Tofu!’
    He’d been gulping down a bowl of miso soup in the Iinuma family’s cramped tenement at the end of a narrow alley in the ‘low city’, Tokyo’s run-down East End, when the master of the house, a stooped beaten-down man with a freckled pate, had told him, shaking his head miserably, that they simply couldn’t keep him any longer. They could barely afford the food to put in their own mouths . Nobu knew that was true. The house was overrun with children and they made a miserable living cutting dried tobacco leaves. He’d been moving from house to house for years now. That was what happened when you had to depend on charity.
    Iinuma-
sama
’s faded wife had wiped her hands on her apron, pressed a few coins into Nobu’s hand and stood waving from the doorway as he set off into the labyrinth of alleys. He’d turned a few corners then, at a loss for what to do, had gone in search of Hiromichi Nagakura, the ex-vice governor of the northern province of Aomori and an old friend of his father’s. Nagakura, a thin man with a gentle face and permanently bemused expression, still dressed like a samurai and did his best to live as though nothing had changed. He had fallen on hard times too but he’d helped Nobu out in the past. He’d given him a letter for a man called Tsukamoto who he said might have an opening for an errand boy.
    Nobu had walked halfway across the city, tramping through piles of fallen leaves, but when he finally found the house, Tsukamoto, a heavy-browed man with a sour expression, had taken one look at him and said, ‘Be on your way. There’s nothing for a scarecrow like you here.’
    ‘A scarecrow like you …’ Nobu felt the blood rush to his face and clenched his fists at the affront. The words thundered in his ears as he stumbled off, barely aware of where his feet were taking him. He was pushing his way through a crowd of people, hearing voices and laughter roaring around him, when a wild-eyed man with his face half hidden in a scarf and a couple of sword hilts poking from his sash barged past, shoving him roughly aside. Nobu recognized him straight away – a southerner, a member of the Satsuma clan, the source of all Nobu’s woes.
    Nobu was sure of one thing: his enemy’s enemy was his friend. Whoever this fellow was out to attack, he would defend them and land a few punches on an enemy jaw at the very least. He’d dashed after him blindly, barely aware of the antechamber full of panicking servants and the diners pushing back their tables and fighting to get out of the intruder’s way.
    And now it seemed he’d won himself a job.
    ‘Quite the hero,’ said a nasal voice. A scrawny fellow with watchful, close-set eyes and the sun-baked pate and sinewy calves of a rickshaw puller prodded him in the ribs. He’d thrown his indigo-blue happi coat wide open to show off the splendid tattoo adorning his bony chest.
    ‘Just charged in without thinking,’ Nobu