Commodore Matthew Perry steamed into Edo harbor in July 1853, to compel Japan to accept a trade treaty. He found a nation both mired in rigid feudalism and on the cusp of change. The warlord rule of the Shoguns, which had begun in the 17th century, would end with the Meiji Restoration 14 years later, when the Emperor was returned to power. The strictly caste-bound society began to crumble, and Japan transformed itself into modern, mercantile society. But many Japanese, while adapting themselves to Western ways, still considered Westerners barbarians and yearned for a society cleansed of their evil influences.
The last Shogun was Tokugawa Yoshinobu, also known as Keiki, and his fictive incarnation figures richly in Commodore Perry’s Minstrel Show, Richard Wiley’s latest novel. Wiley, professor of English and associate director of the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, enlists the future and final Shogun in catalyzing events that embroil a family of middling nobility, while Perry’s flotilla sails from Edo to Shimoda. The treaty has been signed, but Lord Abe, who had negotiated with Perry, seizes an opportunity to scuttle it.
His opening takes the form of the title’s minstrel show, a shipboard entertainment arranged by Perry. Two of the blackface performers, Ace and Ned, accept Abe’s disingenuous invitation to tour Edo, and it is left to Manjiro, who supports the treaty and the opening of Japan, to figure out what Abe is up to. Manjiro is the son of Lord Okubo, a lesser noble, and he serves as translator for the more powerful Abe. His machinations behind Abe’s back bring dishonor to the family—for a while, at least.
At the heart of Manjiro’s suspicions is a passage from Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince: “Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them ... to appear merciful, faithful, human, religious, upright and to be so, but with a mind framed that should you require not to be so, you may know how to change to the opposite.”
This passage, which Abe has copied and left in its source volume at Edo’s “Barbarian Book Library,” possibly in hopes it would be discovered, is the essence of what has made Machiavelli’s name a synonym for shrewd, amoral dissembling. In a crucial scene midway through the novel, Abe, called to account by Keiki’s father, powerful Lord Tokugawa, cites both Machiavelli and the American Constitution. He says he wanted first to test Perry, by inviting inland the lowborn minstrels, to see if the Constitution’s promise of equality was true. If so, then arresting the Americans on trumped-up charges would compel Perry to do something about them, presumably voiding the treaty.
Keiki is outraged: “This is so shameful! ... These men will have done nothing, but you are suggesting that we, Japan’s rulers, accuse them anyway? We will have broken the laws of behavior, violated the Bushido ... We won’t have acted like lords.” But Abe argues that “the Bushido doesn’t come into play with foreigners,” and besides, their sage, Machiavelli, condones duplicity.
Sound familiar? When the anxieties Perry set simmering reached their boiling point in 1941, Japanese propaganda about America was as virulent as ours about Japan, and its central theme would be echoed decades later by other extremists—Americans are corrupt and evil and as heathens do not deserve honorable treatment. As if to drive home the parallels, Wiley has Abe voice a resentment with contemporary resonance: “I think they are zealots who want to preach, to convince others of the worth of their beliefs, even more than they want trade. It is like the time of the missionaries all over again, but instead of Jesus Christ, the devil in the middle of everything is ‘American Democracy’!”
World War II deserves mention because it is the centerpiece of Wiley’s first novel, the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning Soldiers in Hiding. Knitting together the denouement of the present book, Wiley makes it the earlier novel’s prequel—one of the minstrels is the ancestor of Teddy Maki, the young Japanese-American man who finds himself stuck in Japan when war strikes in Soldiers, and later becomes a popular entertainer there. It spoils little to reveal that Manjiro’s marital fate is similar to Teddy’s.
Commodore Perry’s Minstrel Show is by far the more satisfying novel. Building slowly, it appears to chronicle a comic clash of cultures, as the Japanese and Americans talk past each other and misread intentions. Even the assault on one of the minstrels, who are all but ridiculous, sustains some comedy after the plot has started turning dark. As it spins toward its tense and grim climax, Wiley’s novel unmasks appearances in both cultures. More importantly, it tests the boundaries of deceit and honor, finding a little of each in the other.
Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show
****
Richard Wiley
University of Texas Press, $24