The Night of the Screams is an ordeal whose meaning changes with the person who remembers it. For the imprisoned sailors, the cries from Pieterzoon’s torture fill a dark cellar and expose their fear and helplessness; for Kiku, the night is a closely guarded encounter with Yabu, followed by the careful work of restoring calm. Yabu later treats the screams not simply as horror but as an experience that brought him close to nature and the sadness of impermanence. The event leaves no single public account: its secrecy, its survivors’ memories, and Yabu’s private interpretation pull against one another.

Two Experiences of the Night

The event is presented through experiences that overlap without becoming interchangeable. In the cellar, Blackthorne first wakes in total darkness, disoriented enough to believe he has died and been plunged into hell. The screams surrounding him make the confined pit feel like a place from which there is no escape. Only when someone addresses him as Pilot does he understand that he is still alive, though the cellar seems scarcely less dreadful than the place he imagined.

Once Blackthorne is conscious, the sailors tell him what has happened to Pieterzoon and the barrels of seawater. Their questions and pleas accumulate around the unseen suffering: they wonder what is being done to their companion, ask God to help him, and finally wish that he would die so the screaming might stop. The cries do not merely frighten them. They force each man to confront his own response to another person’s torment, and the narrator’s account makes the pit a measure of what the men discover about themselves. None likes what he sees. Blackthorne’s thought that darkness makes everything worse gives the terror a physical condition as well as a moral weight; the night seems endless until the cries finally stop.

At dawn, the survivors see a forgotten samurai huddled against the cellar wall, bruised, nearly naked, and marked by a thick weal around his neck. The detail brings another battered body into view after a night dominated by sound. It also makes the sailors’ fear newly visible: the man appears as frightened as they are, and Blackthorne says so when Baccus van Nekk asks what they should do about him. The scene does not turn the prisoners into rescuers or erase their helplessness; it shows them recognizing fear in someone who has been left among them.

Kiku and Yabu After the Screams

Kiku’s memory follows a different sequence. When the screams have ended, Yabu remains motionless in the moonlight for what seems to her an eternity. She hurries into the adjoining room, where the boy is trying to hide his fear and wiping away tears brought on by torment. Kiku smiles to reassure him, forcing a composure she does not feel. The gesture is small, but it establishes her role in the aftermath: she must tend to another person’s distress while controlling the signs of her own.

Yabu then appears at the door, drenched in sweat, his face taut and his eyes half closed. Kiku helps him remove his swords, kimono, and loincloth, dries him, and dresses him in a fresh kimono with a silken belt. When she begins to greet him, he gently places a finger on her lips. He goes to the window and looks up at the waning moon, swaying slightly. Kiku remains still. The scene offers no definitive account of what happened between them in the bed; her thoughts imagine the questions that clients and storytellers might ask, but they remain questions rather than answers.

That uncertainty is governed by Kiku’s professional world. She imagines the night becoming a ballad repeated in teahouses throughout Izu, with every detail embellished and none of it reliably true. The Willow World’s first rule is absolute secrecy about clients, their habits, and what they paid. A courtesan might communicate through an arched eyebrow, a hesitant shrug, or the deliberate smoothing of her hair or kimono, but not through disclosure. Kiku understands that rumor travels quickly in houses with thin walls, yet she distinguishes rumor from her own testimony: the Lady does not tell. Her trained discretion is also a means of maintaining trust and professional standing.

Kiku’s composure exists within real vulnerability. She understands herself as a high-ranking Lady of the Willow World, to be honored rather than treated lightly, and as someone trained to give pleasure but not pain. She knows that a man can become untamed, with terrible consequences, while a woman in her position has no rights to rely upon. The account therefore places her apparent calm beside the limits governing it. Her reassurance to the boy, her care for Yabu, and her silence are deliberate forms of conduct within a world where safety cannot be assumed.

The Cellar’s Cost

When Father Sebastio calls Blackthorne up from the cellar, Blackthorne asks what happened to Pieterzoon. Father Sebastio explains that Pieterzoon’s mind was gone by the time he was put into the water and that he may not have recognized the priest or anyone else. He says he gave Pieterzoon absolution and prayed for him, then makes the sign of the cross over the cellar. His account confirms the death behind the night’s screams while showing what he could still offer: prayer and absolution, not rescue. Blackthorne translates the news for the sailors who do not speak Portuguese. In the horrified silence, Baccus van Nekk mourns Pieterzoon.

The revelation arrives only after the sound has ceased. During the night, the sailors could hear suffering but could not know its full course; afterward, Father Sebastio’s report replaces fearful speculation with the knowledge of Pieterzoon’s death. The delay matters. The prisoners have already been changed by listening, and the confirmation does not undo that experience. Their shared confinement binds them to the event as witnesses, but it also leaves each man alone with what the cries forced him to recognize in himself.

What the Night Leaves Behind

Yabu gives the night a meaning different from the sailors’ account of terror. Later, he remembers feeling close to the trees, mountains, and earth, and to the sadness of life and its transience; in his reflection, the screams had perfected the experience. He commemorates it materially by offering Kasigi Omi a stone from Kyushu, called the Waiting Stone. Yabu explains that he found it about fifteen years earlier while part of the Taikō’s army, waiting for an order to attack rebels and subdue the island. The stone thus joins the remembered night to an older history of waiting for violence, while its name makes patience and suspended action part of the memorial.

For Kiku, the night also persists as a story that can be approached but not plainly told. On a later occasion, Mariko asks how Blackthorne looked then and whether the Night of the Screams was terrible. Kiku agrees that it was, but turns the conversation away from seriousness and toward a night of pleasure. The recollection confirms the event’s lasting place in memory while showing Kiku continuing to manage what may be said about it. Between her silence, the sailors’ testimony, and Yabu’s stone, the night survives in distinct forms: protected secret, traumatic witness, and private meditation on mortality.