Summary of Kairei
In the final years of the Edo period, a large junk
with a crew of fourteen and a cargo of rice was caught up in a storm, crippled,
and blown off-course to start a string of events which would change the whole
political situation in the Pacific.
The
junk drifts for over a year before crashing on the coast of North America.
There are only three survivors, a man and two teenage boys. They are rescued
and promptly enslaved by the local Pacific Indian tribe, but representatives of
the Hudson Bay Company, which trades in the area, manage to purchase the
freedom of the three castaways. They are hoping that the safe return of the
castaways to Japan will open the doors for trade between Japan and Great Britain.
The
complicated political situation forces the castaways to go through a great deal
of soul searching about their own cultural identities. After a number of years,
the castaways make it as far as Macao. While waiting for another ship to take
them the final leg of their journey home, they come under the care of Gutzlaff,
a German missionary whose dream has been to translate the Bible into Japanese
in preparation for the day that Japan opens its borders.
Considering
that the Tokugawa government in Japan strictly prohibits Christianity, the
castaways are risking their lives if they cooperate with Gutzlaff. Their
prolonged contact with Westerners is itself life-risking. They and their loved
ones could easily be executed if they are suspected of “being tainted,”
assuming they succeed in returning to Japan to face official interrogation.
When
they finally arrive off the coast of their beloved homeland, it is aboard the Morrison, an American ship. Their
careful plans seem to work, then fail, then work again before all hope is lost
and the ship must flee from ferocious canon fire. Years of clinging to the hope
of being reunited with their loved ones are suddenly made meaningless for the
despairing castaways. Yet they have played an important historical role, and
the Pacific will never be the same. The novel ends here, but the author’s
postscript explains subsequent historical events. The insult to the Morrison resulted in the dispatch of the
famous “black ships” under Commodore Perry in July 1853, which threw the Edo
government into turmoil. A new age of openness to the West and its technology
began, ending more than two and a half centuries of Japanese isolationism.
