Ogata stared at the tiny bowl of thin rice porridge on the floor before him and released a long sigh.
“I really want to eat meat…” he muttered softly.
Ogata might have been a samurai, but his life was painfully difficult.
His standard of living was actually worse than that of some farmers.
Although the samurai were the ruling class of the Edo period, their society was divided into numerous ranks.
At the very top stood the shogun.
The emperor was nominally the leader of Japan, but the country’s true supreme ruler was the shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate.
Beneath the shogun were the daimyō who ruled the various domains.
A han, or domain, could be understood as a territory granted to a feudal vassal.
The high-ranking samurai who governed these domains were called daimyō.
Edo-period Japan operated under the bakuhan system, a structure established by Tokugawa Ieyasu in which the shogunate and the domains governed the country together.
Under that system, the shogun was Japan’s highest ruler, and the shogunate was its supreme political authority.
It oversaw the domains throughout the country.
Each domain was governed by a daimyō who owed allegiance to the shogunate and was subject to the sankin-kōtai system of alternate attendance.
Even so, the daimyō retained considerable independence.
Within their own territories, they exercised authority over administration, justice, military affairs, and taxation.
To use an analogy Xu Yi would have understood from Chinese history, the shogun resembled the Son of Heaven under the Zhou dynasty—the lord of all beneath heaven.
The daimyō resembled the feudal lords enfeoffed by the Zhou king, each possessing extensive autonomy within his own territory.
The shogun directly controlled roughly one-quarter of the country’s land.
The remaining three-quarters had been granted to the daimyō.
Below the daimyō were the samurai who possessed no domains of their own.
Even among those landless retainers, there were many different ranks.
Ogata belonged near the bottom.
He was a low-ranking samurai of the Hirose Domain, a small domain in Izumo Province with limited territory and virtually no presence on the national stage.
His annual stipend amounted to only fifty koku.
A koku was a unit of volume.
Receiving fifty koku per year meant that Ogata was entitled to fifty koku of rice from the domain government.
One koku was considered roughly enough rice to feed an adult man for a year.
At first, then, Ogata’s stipend sounded generous: every year, he received enough rice to sustain fifty grown men.
In reality, however, it was so meager that it might not support even a family of three.
Ogata still needed money to buy firewood, oil, salt, and other daily necessities.
Any merchant purchasing the rice would inevitably force the price downward.
After those losses, a stipend of fifty koku could barely sustain three people.
Fortunately, both of Ogata’s parents were dead, leaving him as the only member of his household.
For a man living alone, fifty koku was enough to survive.
It simply was not enough to live well.
Nearly all three of his daily meals consisted of thin rice porridge.
If he ate anything more substantial at every meal, he might eventually face starvation.
Constantly struggling at the edge of subsistence—that was the life of Ogata Issei, a low-ranking samurai.
Of course, even if he had possessed money, he still would have found meat difficult to obtain.
People in old Japan generally did not eat the flesh of land animals.
Money alone could not purchase something that was scarcely sold.
The closest thing to meat in the ordinary Japanese diet was seafood, especially fish.
Only after Japan opened its ports more than half a century later, near the end of the shogunate, would meat gradually become common.
* * *
From the moment he lifted his chopsticks until the moment he set down the bowl, Ogata opened his mouth only four times.
Four mouthfuls were enough to finish the tiny serving of porridge.
The warm food settled in his stomach, slowly easing the hunger that had been tormenting him.
The gnawing emptiness disappeared, but he felt nowhere near full.
After dinner, Ogata found himself with nothing to do.
This was the Edo period at the end of the eighteenth century.
Naturally, there were not many forms of entertainment available to him.
If he had been determined to seek amusement, the era still offered plenty of pleasant ways to spend an evening.
Every one of them, however, required a great deal of money.
A man whose house held almost nothing and whose meals consisted of watery porridge could hardly afford a colorful “nightlife.”
With no better way to occupy himself, Ogata gathered the only two valuable objects in his home—his swords—and sat against a corner of the room.
Cradling the daishō in his arms, he stared blankly across the empty house.
Ever since inexplicably arriving in the Edo period, he had fought three consecutive sword matches.
His nerves had remained tightly strung, leaving him no chance to think about anything else.
Now that he was home with nothing demanding his attention, that tension gradually loosened.
As soon as it did, one strange thought after another surfaced in his mind.
His last memory before arriving here was of reading in his study.
Ogata loved reading, especially books about history.
European history had been his favorite, though he also possessed a reasonable understanding of Japan’s past.
He remembered reading at his desk until drowsiness came over him.
He had closed the book, laid his head on the table, and taken a short nap.
When he opened his eyes again, he was in the Edo period.
He had become Ogata Issei and was crossing bokken with another disciple inside the Sakakibara Dojo.
He did not even know whether this age truly belonged to the Edo period of the Japan he knew from Earth.
It was entirely possible that he had entered a parallel world—or the Edo period of another Earth.
According to the memories in his head, however, history here had unfolded exactly as it had in his original world.
Tokugawa Ieyasu had won a decisive victory at the Battle of Sekigahara, established his bakufu in Edo, and ushered Japan into the age of Tokugawa rule.
This was Kansei 1, or 1789 by the Western calendar.
The devastating Tenmei Famine had ended only recently.
The reigning shogun was the newly installed eleventh shogun, Tokugawa Ienari.
Every historical memory inherited from the former Ogata matched what he had learned from books on Earth.
Based on everything he knew, this did not appear to be a parallel version of the Edo period.
But he could not be completely certain.
Something utterly inconsistent with recorded Japanese history might happen tomorrow.
How had he crossed into this age?
Where had the system inside his mind come from?
Was this truly history, or a parallel world?
After considering those questions for a while, Ogata gave up.
They were the sort of mysteries a man could think about until his head split open and still never solve.
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