Pieterzoon in the cauldron

Vinck cannot make his legs climb the ladder. The crew fights the samurai in the slime and overpowers one, Masijiro, but three knife-men drop through the trapdoor, Blackthorne is beaten senseless, and Omi drags the shrieking Pieterzoon up instead. Offal is poured in again and the crew turns on the unconscious pilot as the cause of it all. Up the hill, Yabu kneels in Omi's moonlit garden composing a poem on falling blossom while Pieterzoon's screams rise from the shore. Omi's mother complains of the noise and of Omi's absent wife, Midori, whom Omi sent away before Yabu came; the courtesan Kiku massages the old woman. Omi walks down past the villagers unloading cannon and finds Pieterzoon parboiled in the whale-blubber cauldron under Zukimoto's care. Omi reports "the essence of madness" in the man's eyes, and Yabu asks him for a poem.

The torture is heard rather than seen, filtered through Yabu composing a poem, so the horror lands as aesthetics. Clavell cross-cuts cellar, garden and cauldron to establish the book's habit of intercutting parallel scenes. The crew turning on the unconscious pilot begins the long separation of Blackthorne from his own men.