Snowblood

Chapter 17: The Museum

Nobody felt like getting up early the next day, as jet lag had caught up with all of them, but that was all right, because all they were doing was going to one museum, the Edo-Tokyo Museum, and they could take as long as they liked to go through it. It was a big white building resembling a traditional warehouse, only built with modern materials and construction methods. If it was not as big as a football stadium, it was not that much smaller, to Kari's eye.

Once they were inside, "Why don't we split up and look at what interests us the most?" Yukie suggested. "Everything is labeled in several languages, and the English translations are very accurate, or so I understand. This is the Edo half. Shall we phone each other in an hour or so and then move on to the Tokyo part?"

"Okay," Kari agreed.

Most of the exhibits were models built to various scales showing the city of Tokyo as it was before it was called Tokyo, from life-size like the replica Kabuki theatre, to the model-train size cityscape. This was the world of the Kurosawa movies she'd seen, with all the little figures of townspeople in kimonos.

It was wonderful. There were the streets, thronging with life-here were women shopping in the market, and a fishmonger with two baskets of shining silver fish hanging from the yoke on his shoulders. There was a bridal procession taking the newly-wedded lady to her new home in a palanquin hung with silk, so only her sleeves showed. On that street was a coffin being carried to a funeral, accompanied by priests and mourners. Would the two processions cross paths, life beginning and life ended?

Then there were the larger town houses. Going from one to the other along a typical street, she saw all sorts of scenes—a craftsman in his work-shop, a silk merchant measuring out goods—a family scene where a new mother sat up in bed, watching the midwife wash her newborn, while her older children and her husband looked on.

That scene made Kari pause. What if Yukie and her father had a baby together? That question awoke a turbulent storm of reaction in her, both positive and negative, from 'Wow, I'd be a big sister!' to 'Please God, NO!' and 'But maybe it would be okay!' and even all the way to 'Then I wouldn't be the baby anymore!'

She tried to rein in her thoughts. Her dad had been a pretty good father, as they went, up until what happened to Drew. She didn't adore him anymore the way she did when she was really little, but he was okay. And so was Yukie, for that matter...maybe. Kari wasn't as afraid of being forgotten or replaced as she was before yesterday, but still it nagged at her.

What did she really know about her father? Nothing about where he grew up or went to school, nothing about his family... He'd once said he was born the day he joined the Army, but he didn't start living until he met her mother. That was during one of the times they were getting along.

Even if he told me the truth, even if I knew what the truth was when I heard it...

What made him the way he was?

She realized she'd been staring at the scene with the little family for a very long time and shook her head. There was no point in thinking about it now. She was in a museum and she was going to make the most of it. Looking at the nearest signage, she started reading.

After wandering through the museum for some time almost at random, reading the displays as she went, Kari had learned a lot.

First and foremost was that Edo was one of the names by which Tokyo was known before it was named Tokyo. It was also the name of the era when the Tokugawa clan had reigned as Shogun, from 1603 to 1868. During that time, the Tokugawa had made it a matter of national policy to have as little to do with the outside world as possible. Any and all foreign trade had to be conducted on the islands of Nagasaki and Decima, all ships were deliberately built to be too flimsy for long ocean voyages, and those who left Japan, except on state approved missions, were not allowed to return, ever.