The 47th Samurai

by Stephen Hunter

  Not Nii of Shinsengumi. He could not disgrace himself before his lord. He would be silent, for in his pain would be the sheer rapture of a warrior’s pure death. That was the way of the warrior. Death was the way—

  The music on his iPod stopped.

  Damn, the battery was running down. Again! He had the worst iPod! It always let him down.

  He’d been listening to Arctic Monkeys live in concert at the Brixton United football stadium, the great song “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not.” The beat had him really pumped up. He’d felt it to his bones.

  Aghhhh. It would be a long night without Arctic Monkeys. He reached for and lit a Marlboro. He sat in a sleek Nissan Maxima, jet black, five on the floor, half a block down from the Yanos’ house.

  His job was the American; he would stay with the American, and he would call in and report to Kondo-san any movement or change in plans. He’d stay the night if he had to.

  He had a Chinese-made wakizashi in saya wedged into his belt diagonally up his back; he had a Smith & Wesson Model 10 .38 Special. He wore a black Italian shirt, a black Italian suit, a black Italian hat, and a pair of extremely expensive Michael Jordan Nikes. He wore Louis Vuitton sunglasses, which had cost him more than 40,000 yen. They were really cool. He wore his hair in a glistening crew, held taut and bristly by Yamada Wax. It was perfectly trimmed. He was twenty-three, strong as a bull, and ready for anything. He had chosen death.

  Nii of Shinsengumi was a very good samurai.

  10

  BLACK RUST

  “The rust,” said Tomoe Yano in English. “Look at the rust, Father.”

  “Oh, what beautiful rust,” said Philip Yano.

  Bob thought, Are they nuts?

  “That’s koto rust. No rust is so black as koto rust.”

  “Beautiful, beautiful black rust,” said Philip. “Oh, so beautiful.”

  Wearing rubber surgeon’s gloves, the father disassembled the sword. He used a small hammer and a pin, perfectly sized, to drive the bamboo peg out of the grip. It popped out effortlessly. He tracked the little nub of bamboo down as it rolled on his bench, then stared at it.

  “Shinto, at least. Maybe original, maybe koto.”

  “Then why so easy? It just fell out.”

  Bob remembered: the peg had been stuck. But he didn’t say anything; what did he know?

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was disassembled recently. I can’t say. One of many questions. This is very interesting.”

  Philip Yano slid the grip off, then carefully disassembled the guard—tsuba, Bob knew—and several spacers, seppa, and finally the collar, habaki, and laid out the parts symmetrically on the bench, blade at the bottom of the formation, grip above, hilt laid flat, and four spacers.

  Then they saw a piece of paper folded tightly about the metal of the tang.

  “The paper,” the young woman said gravely.

  “Yes, I see it.”

  “Father, pick it up. See what it is.”

  “No, no, not yet. Pen ready?”

  “Yes.”

  He spoke in a swift blizzard of Japanese. Then he translated.

  “The tsuba—that is, guard—is government issue, the model of ’thirty-nine also. So when it found its new scabbard, it was rehilted, this is what I tell Tomoe. Spacers—seppa—also military issue, as is habaki, nothing special. Two holes, indicating it has been cut down, but we already knew that.”

  “The rust,” Tomoe said.

  “What is it with the rust?” asked Bob. The tang itself was swallowed in black erosion, so much so a fine black dust had fallen on the bench beneath it.

  “The blacker the rust,” said Philip Yano, “the older the blade. What it means, Swagger-san, is that this sword is at least four hundred years old. Somehow it ended up in the military furniture of nineteen thirty-four.”

  “Is that uncommon?”

  “It happened.”

  “So it’s not a blade manufactured by machine in some factory in the forties. It’s much older. It’s a real samurai thing. That is why it’s so sharp?”

  “Exactly. Think of some genius in a small shop in near-feudal times—before the year sixteen hundred—working at a forge, turning the orange metal in upon itself time after time, taking two or three different orange pieces and hammering them together after each had been folded over twenty times, beating them into a shape, then quenching them in cooling clay. Then he began filing, shaping, sharpening. It’s three kinds of steel, soft for the spine, which gives it weight and flexibility, a liquid feel; softer still in the core, more pure iron, more flexibility; and a sandwich of harder, tempered steel—yakiba—for the edge, sharp, to cut through armor, flesh, and bone and get deep into the body. Oh, it’s a war sword all right, and if my father carried it on Iwo Jima, he wasn’t the first soldier to sling this beauty about, not at all. It’s old, it’s venerable, it’s been to the dance many a time. Born in fire, cooled in earth, destined for blood. Maybe the inscriptions will tell the story.”

  He indicated the line of Japanese characters deeply chiseled in the tang, as the maker of the blade those centuries ago accounted for himself and his creation, and explained for whom he had toiled.

  “Can you read the inscriptions?” asked Bob.

  “That’ll be the fun part. There were thousands of koto smiths, and we will have to track through the records and find who made this sword. We will be able to learn the smith, maybe even the lord. Then we’ll look at history and begin to assemble a biography of this blade. Where it went, what it did before it somehow came to my father, and then yours, and then their sons.”

  “It all has meaning,” said the girl. “Father, read the nakago for Swagger-san.”

  “Nakago is the rusted tang under the hilt. Even it is full of tantalizing communications from the past. It’s suriage nakago, or possibly an o-suriage nakago. That is, it’s right on the edge between ‘shortened’ and ‘greatly shortened,’ the determining factor being how much of the signature is left. Usually, the butt end, even when shortened, retains the shape of the original. It was as if the desecrator were paying homage to his superior. This style is called Iriyama-gata, which places it sometime in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The cutting-edge side of the tang is at an acute angle to the bottom end of the shinogi line; the other side runs either straight or at a slight upward angle to mune.”

  Lost me, Bob thought.

  But he guessed Philip Yano was telling him the very shape of the end of the tang held clues to its origin.

  “You sure know this stuff.”

  “I know nothing,” said Yano. “There are many to whom this language is as supple and expressive as poetry. I struggle, doubt my knowledge, wish I knew more, curse myself for not knowing yet.”

  “But do I get the bottom line? That this is a very old blade, and it could have some meaning beyond your family? Experts should examine it.”

  “That’s right. It may be nothing. Not every old blade was used by Musashi Miyamoto, just as not every old Colt was carried by Wyatt Earp. So the odds are very small. But still…they exist. Remember, someone always wins a lottery. I will learn what I can before I make any consultations. It’ll take me longer than it should, and it is foolish, as many could know in a flash. That’s all right, though. It’s time spent with my father.”

  “The paper,” said the girl.

  “Yes, finally.”

  “It looks like some kind of note,” Bob said.

  “This is why I fear it. It is possibly a death poem. We do that, we Japanese. It is because death is so welcome to us, that we reach to embrace it and celebrate it with poetry.”

  “Yet you hesitate, Father,” his daughter said.

  “Suppose it says ‘Dear god, save me, I cannot stand this anymore.’”

  “Then it proves your father was human,” said Bob. “I’ve been shot at a lot, and my thoughts have been ‘Dear god, save me, I cannot stand this anymore.’”

  “Swagger-san speaks a truth, Father. You must
face it. You must reach out to your father.”

  “Do you want to be alone?”

  “No, no,” said Yano. “Much better to be with one I love and one I respect.”

  He took the paper off the nakago, shaking it so that an ancient fine powder of black oxidized steel fell away.

  He read it, and began to weep.

  His daughter read it, and began to weep.

  Bob thought it best to say nothing, but the girl looked over at him, the tears running down her face.

  “I think it’s for all the boys of Iwo Jima,” said Philip Yano, “no matter the color of their skin.”

  He read:

  Above the volcano

  a moon over hell

  lights the faces

  of the doomed and dying.

  Soldiers buried in black sand

  on the black island

  await their destiny.

  We are the broken jade

  of Sulfur Island.

  11

  STEEL

  On Tuesday night, the boy Raymond had a baseball game and got a single and a double. He played left field, appeared to have a sound arm and an instinct for the ball. On Wednesday, the daughter Tomoe had a recital; she played the cello, and to Bob at least, she was superb.

  It wasn’t that the kids were so well behaved and such high performers that so thoroughly attracted him, or even that the darling little Miko reminded him of his own daughter, Nikki—Y2K4 she had christened herself when young. It was that in some way the family unit was like an idealized Marine Corps. Everyone knew his duties and did them; there were no rogue neuroses, no raw egos, no angry resentments; if there were, they were held so far inside that they were never seen and never blew. But the Yanos laughed a lot and seemed genuinely to enjoy each other’s presence, to the exclusion of the world. He really felt happy among them.

  “No, I’ve enjoyed it so much, and you’ve been so hospitable. But I have to go; I have a life back in the States.”

  “I had hoped to have news for you on the sword before you left,” said Mr. Yano. “I have exhausted all my books and have begun to make inquiries. There are many antique volumes from the nineteenth century, with much information. The Book of the Sword was published in many editions in the last one hundred years. The best collection is in Osaka at the university there. I had planned a trip; you would enjoy that part of Japan.”

  “I’m sure I would; I have a wife and daughter, however, several businesses to look after, and remember that field I was cutting? I still want to finish that damned thing. Remember, I’m the Tin Man. Chop chop chop.”

  “I understand.”

  On the last night, he and Philip Yano sat up after the family had gone to bed. Yano drank sake from a ceramic bottle, in a little flat cup. Bob had tea. It was time to talk of that which united them and made them trust: war and wounds.

  “How is the hip? Is it painful?”

  “You get used to it. It’s always ten degrees colder than everything else, and as I said, getting through airport security is a mess. It’s not so funny now.”

  “You have other wounds?”

  “I seem not to be able to get out of the way of little pieces of flying steel. I have been shot and wounded a variety of times. That one was the worst. It took a friend from me, I am sorry to say, and he was a boy who would have given the world many gifts, so I mourn for him still. The other wounds sting sometimes, but it ain’t nothing I can’t live with.”

  “My daughter says you sleep poorly.”

  “Sorry, hope I didn’t scare nobody. My dreams aren’t the softest. I took many lives. I thought I was a big samurai. And for what? Nothing I can lay a hand on. Well, something called ‘duty.’ I ain’t smart enough to define it, but I felt it then, and goddammit, no matter what, I still feel it. They ain’t takin’ it away.”

  “That is the burden of the samurai, that commitment to duty. That is why we are only happy among other samurai, who have taken lives, seen blood and ruin, tasted defeat and bitterness. No one else can truly know. They can guess; they cannot truly know.”

  “I’d drink to that if I was still a drinking man. I have to ask you, Philip. Your eye. You don’t talk of it. But I recognize scar tissue when I see it.”

  “Oh, that. Really nothing. Iraq.”

  Bob thought he misheard. Had he been drinking? Did the guy say Iraq, where the marines were still fighting?

  “I thought that was our little pile of bad news.”

  “Japan, in a spirit of support, sent small numbers of noncombat support troops, nominally guarded by Dutch combat troops, assigned engineering duties in a town in the south called Samawah. But you know the thorough, boring Japanese. We didn’t quite trust the Dutch, and so secretly a small unit of paratroopers was sent as actual security. It was my honor to be selected as commanding officer. They even postponed my retirement. Normally, you must leave at fifty-five, but because they trusted me, they asked me to stay in uniform through the assignment.”

  “You must have been a superb officer. That’s not a job they give to second-raters. But I already knew that.”

  “I worked hard but of course have no genius for it as do you. You were a hero, I was an officer who tried his best. On the third of February, two thousand four, an IED went off next to a Japanese troop carrier, which was pitched over and started to burn. Some men had difficulty getting out. As commanding officer, it fell to me to make the effort. We did in fact get them all out, but not before one of those RPGs detonated nearby and my face was sliced open, my eye destroyed. That was it. Thirty-three years of service, ten seconds’ worth of action, and a career-ending wound. So it goes. I did what I could, I got my people out, and I trust that the men remember me with respect.”

  “Getting blown up in somebody else’s war ain’t no picnic.”

  “The funny thing was that since we didn’t officially have combat troops in the engagement, my eye wasn’t officially damaged. However, my eye disagrees with that assessment. In any event, it was enough to serve.”

  “Well, your father would be proud of you. He would salute you, if nobody else did. And so would mine. They knew.”

  “You are very kind. Now I have a gift for you.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes, very Japanese. Perhaps it will mean nothing. But it’s a credo to live by, as in our ways, we both have, after the ways of our fathers, who were the better men.”

  “Yes, by far.”

  Yano left and came back with a carefully wrapped package, which looked like a book or something book-size.

  “Should I open it now?” Bob asked.

  “Yes, as I must explain.”

  The paper had been so perfectly folded that Bob again felt like a desecrator. Inside the ruptured nest of paper was an oblong frame in some ancient wood. Turning it over, he came across a series of Japanese characters in beautiful calligraphy, running down the center of a piece of yellowed rice paper. Looking at it, he felt something in the brushstrokes: lightness, deftness, precision, artistry, like falling water or the color of leaves.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  “The calligraphy belongs to the man called Miyamoto Musashi. He is regarded as Japan’s greatest swordsman. He fought over sixty duels and won them all. He is revered though for his wisdom; he retreated from the world and wrote The Book of Five Rings, his guide to the sword and to life. To him, the sword was life.”

  “I see,” said Bob. “A professional.”

  “Yes. Samurai. Warrior. My father, your father, the same. So I give this to you. No, it’s not original, for that would be priceless, but the calligraphy was done by hand by a superb local after Musashi.”

  “Please tell me what it says.”

  “He wrote this in sixteen forty-five. The old one knew. He says, ‘Steel cuts flesh / steel cuts bone / steel does not cut steel.’ Do you see?”

  Bob saw.

  “The rest of them: they are flesh and bone. They will be cut. The regular people. The sleepers, the dreamer
s. The soft. We are the hard. We are the warriors. We cannot be cut. That’s our job. And that’s why they need us in ways they can’t even imagine,” said Philip Yano.

  12

  SAKE

  Nii of Shinsengumi stayed with the American all the way out. The man took a taxi from the Yanos’ after a bright morning’s formal good-bye in the front yard, but not to the station, as you might expect, but to Yasukuni, the shrine dedicated to the fallen of Japan’s wars.

  It wasn’t a place most westerners went to. While the taxicab with his luggage sat racking up the yen in the parking lot, the American went into the shrine and stood humbly before the altar for some time. Nii wondered, What the fuck is this all about? It made no sense to him whatsoever.

  Then the man walked the grounds. He was a gaijin and others avoided him, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. He walked about slowly, with that odd trace of a limp, again as if trying to make communion with something immaterial. He stayed longer than the young yakuza could imagine anybody staying. He stood under the soaring steel torii gate that seemed to reflect the spirit of the samurai who died in battle. That it was steel, and not wood like the many conventional Japanese gates, seemed to mean something to him; he touched it several times and looked at it as though it communicated a certain meaning. Then he walked the broad concrete promenade all the way to the white and timbered shrine 250 yards from the gate. He examined the screen of serene trees that cut this place off from the craziness of Tokyo. He went to the shrine, looked in, possibly meditated—who could tell with gaijin?

  But finally he returned to his cab and the driver fought through traffic to a JR station. Nii simply abandoned his car on a wayside street—it would be towed, of course, but was easily retrievable—bought a ticket from the machine on the JR Narita express, took up a position down the aisle, and watched the American go all the way to Terminal 2, forty miles outside Tokyo.