The Fire Kimono by Laura Joh Rowland

asked.
    “He would only say that something had happened,” the monk said. “We asked him what, but he wouldn’t tell us.”
    Hirata wondered if his reason had anything to do with Tadatoshi’s disappearance and murder. “Where did he go?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t think he had a definite place in mind.”
    Hirata envisioned the highways, the cities along them, and the villages off branch roads winding through mountains and forests. Even in this rigidly governed land, a man could get lost.
    “Did you ever see Egen again?” Hirata said.
    “No.”
    “Have you heard from him since?”
    “Not a word.”
    Discouragement filled Hirata, but he couldn’t give up. “Do you know of anyone who might have information about Egen?”
    “I’m sorry, I don’t.”
    “How old would he be now?”
    “About the same age as me. I am sixty-four.”
    Hirata thanked the monk, who wished him good luck on his search. When he joined his men outside the temple, he said, “We’ve got a big manhunt on our hands. Arai-san, organize troops to ride along the highways and post notices asking for information about Egen.”
    Arai looked doubtful. “There’s a lot of area to cover.”
    “We’ll cover it as best we can,” Hirata said. “If we’re lucky, Egen is still alive and he’ll turn up.”
    If not, Sano and his mother might be doomed.
    “And we can always hope that Egen has returned to Edo,” Hirata said. The city was a magnet for all sorts of people, even those with reason to stay away. Maybe Egen had decided that after all this time, it was safe to come back even if he was responsible for Tadatoshi’s murder. “Inoue-san, you’ll help me mount a search in the city. We’ll start by checking the temples in case Egen has joined another order.”
    As Hirata rode back toward town, he recalled his conversation with Midori. Working day and night for the foreseeable future wasn’t the best way to fix their marriage. And the odds were his search for Egen would fail. The tutor was one grain of rice among millions.

    As Sano rode through the city with his entourage, he felt as if he were traveling into the past. He was about to meet people his mother had known before his birth, who knew things about her that he didn’t. He had an uncomfortable sense that he was digging up his own history as well as investigating a crime. He wasn’t the same man he’d been yesterday, oblivious to the trouble sleeping under the earth with Tadatoshi’s skeleton. And the city around him wasn’t the same city as before the Great Fire.
    Gray and brown ceramic tiles covered the roofs of the buildings in the Nihonbashi merchant district. Thatch had been outlawed since the fire; it was too combustible. Sano passed through a gate and the square, open space around it, created to prevent people from being trapped while escaping fires. But these changes were superficial compared to the city’s wide-scale, profound transformation.
    After the Great Fire, a legion of surveyors, engineers, and builders had swarmed over the ruins. They’d resurrected a new, improved Edo. Rearrangement had eased overcrowding and prevented fires from spreading. Tokugawa branch families had moved their estates outside Edo Castle; daimyo clans relocated farther from it. The lesser warrior class had moved into the western and southern suburbs. Peasants had gone farther west and colonized new villages; merchants and artisans had been dispersed to Shiba and Asakusa districts. The metropolis grew to more than double its previous size. Many of the new quarters were marshy, at inconvenient distances from the city center, and unpopular, but relocation was mandatory. The alternative for people who resisted was being convicted of arson and burned to death-punishment for fires that would result if they didn’t go.
    Sano and his men traversed the Ryogoku Bridge, built to encourage settlement on the east bank of the Sumida River. Tadatoshi’s mother and sister lived in Fukagawa, in one