Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show by Richard Wiley Page B

man until she saw that the book attendant followed right along behind them, a little like a dog in heat. He, too, had also taken up the habit of pressing against the edges of his table while the herb man gave his talk, it seemed, and he left Manjiro fast, saying only, “Read at your leisure, sir, I know you have the verifications. I remember you from before.”
    So that is how Manjiro was able to mirror Lord Abe’s time in the Barbarian Book Room alone. He remembered the room exactly. During the first thirty years of its existence books had been translated and added to the collection regularly, but it had stopped growing a decade ago. Now there were forty strange and wonderful foreign titles, each arranged on its own low table.
    He could see in an instant that no book was missing. To speak precisely there were eighty books, for in every case the Japanese translation and the original text lay together, the Japanese version inevitably larger, as if the information contained in each volume had been augmented by its translator, exploded by Japanese grammar and syntax. While Manjiro gazed at the books he thought again of his tutor, an ex-priest and wayward intellectual named Wilhelm Mundt, whom he had rescued from Nagasaki some five years ago, and who had finally been forced to leave Japan only six months earlier, at the beginning of this current antiforeign furor. His tutor’s dream had been to add another book to the collection in this marvelous room. He had completed his work before he left, and it sat in their study in Shimoda, silent in both its languages, waiting for Manjiro to collect it and bring it to this room. Its title was Faust , and Manjiro loved a particular line from it that read, “If ever I lay down in sloth and base inaction, then let that moment be my end.” It was how he hoped to live his life—with that thought as his admonition.
    Manjiro glanced back out at the men before going over to the book attendant’s table and turning the ledger around. The ledger recorded the names and interests of all visitors to the room, but though it went back more than forty years, it was still only one-third full. He found his own name, with notations next to it telling how long he had stayed and what he had done, and he saw that after him no more than a half dozen people had visited the room. Lord Abe’s name was not among them. Now what would he do? He could tell from the quickening pace of the herb official’s monologue that his time alone might be short.
    Starting on the left side of the room, Manjiro opened each book in the wild hope that he would be able to guess Lord Abe’s interest from the title or the first few lines, when suddenly he remembered Einosuke saying that the book Lord Abe took with him had been small, that Lord Abe had held the volume in one hand. He picked up the nearest book and found that he could only carry it comfortably under his arm, so he put it down again and stood in the middle of the room, surveying all of the books, this time forgetting content and paying attention only to size. The largest book, rising off the floor to mid-calf level, was the Christian Bible, and the smallest, which he knew immediately could not be the one, was a volume of sonnets by the English poet William Shakespeare.
    Manjiro crossed the room to the only other book that could be taken out of the room in one hand, but before opening it he parted the shoji a little, so that he could see the backs of the caretakers again, a dozen feet away. He could also see Tsune, who had drawn her kimono sleeve back and was just then pulling a ginseng root out of a large-mouthed jar. It was a gesture that made his mouth water.
    â€œShow me,” she was saying. “Can you cut it a little? I have never seen it before.”
    Manjiro closed the shoji and picked the book up off the floor. The original volume was in Spanish, or perhaps Italian. The Japanese title was Ooji , Prince, and it had been