The 47th Samurai

by Stephen Hunter

  The gaijin was in the JAL line, with his two light bags, casually dressed in jeans and a tan jacket over a polo shirt. His body betrayed no impatience; he waited his turn in line, presented his documents, turned over his luggage. Nii watched from afar, as the American went through security, and watched a little drama transpire as the American was pulled out of line, examined closely by inspectors, had a sensing wand waved over his body time after time, had his papers examined by three different levels of bureaucrat, and finally was waved clear. That was the last he saw of him, a tall stranger with a bland, blank face, not one of those mobile, yappy monster faces the hairy beasts were so known for. The man’s eyes were strangely powerful—that meant bad luck for enemies, the suspicion went—as if the man held a fund of secret knowledge.

  But for now Nii of Shinsengumi was done. The perfect samurai, he took out his cell and called headquarters to report in. They told him to get back fast. Tonight was the night.

  Now it was over. He had his boarding pass, his bags were checked, he’d board the plane in an hour, happy he had an aisle seat. He was headed to the departure gate. The flight would last fifteen hours, but he’d be fine through dinner, then he’d take a pill, and when he awoke they’d be landing in LAX. Then it was an hour or so and off to Boise.

  He felt good. He’d gotten some satisfaction at last. He felt the old man would be pleased. He’d repaid the debt, the obligation, as best he could.

  Hey, old man, I’m still trying to do what you’d want me to do. Sorry you ain’t here to see it.

  Too bad he wasn’t a drinking man anymore. He had an ache in his gut for it. He felt so good he wanted to commemorate duty and closure and pay homage.

  The more he thought about it, the better an idea the drink seemed. Just this once.

  No sirree. So sorry, Charlie. Nada.

  You take one of those and you float away on the tide and god only knows where you come down. It had happened before.

  He had spent most of the seventies drunk, going through jobs, pain, a wife, a couple of houses, the patience of his friends, the respect of his peers, almost pulling the trigger on his sorry self a dozen times. Then, somehow, he beat it, by giving everything up. He couldn’t take the world. He couldn’t take the memories. He had to leave both. So he lived like a monk, among rifles, a dog, hills, and trees, an exile, speaking to no one, reading, shooting, walking, caring for the dog, making do on a tiny retirement, trying somehow to recover what he had lost.

  He could have lived that way forever. But things began to happen. It was a busy time for a while as he was forced to recover skills he thought long gone. They weren’t gone. He still had a little something that could get him through, and the terrible thing was, that was really his best self. The Swaggers were men of war. They were warriors. Nothing else. Could add and read and make polite for a time, but that wasn’t them. That sure wasn’t Earl with his duty-craziness, whether he was walking in through the high tide and blue-white Jap tracers off Tarawa or stalking the cornfields of Arkansas for armed robbers. And that wasn’t Bob, three tours in ’Nam, America’s second-or third-or fourth-leading sniper depending on who was telling the truth.

  So why would you want to drink?

  You do not want to drink.

  It is unnecessary.

  I have a beautiful wife, I have a beautiful kid, I’m building a house where I can look across the meadows of the valley to a purple range of mountains, and whoever thought I’d have that? What old snipers get that? You hunt men and watch them flop and go quiet through the scope close on a hundred times, maybe you get so far out you don’t ever come back.

  I am back, he thought. I don’t need no help.

  But then he thought, Goddammit, I did something for my father today. That pleased him immensely. He remembered the old man from so long ago: the father who didn’t hit him. All the other kids, damn, they’d say, Lord almighty, my father tanned my hide yesterday but good. Wooiee, hurt so bad, I ain’t never missing on sloppin’ them hogs again. But Earl Swagger never hit him, not once. Years later he asked his mother on a rare sober day why.

  “’Cause his daddy whipped both his boys so hard he left scars. Your daddy thought that was the coward’s way, man beating on boys, and he stuck to that rule. That’s the kind of man your daddy was, and Lord I miss him so.”

  Bob missed him too: he remembered the old man in the black-and-white state police cruiser in June of 1955 pulling out of the farm. He didn’t look back, but he caught his son in the rearview mirror and raised a hand, and Bob waved back. “Bye, Daddy, bye.” The old man was dead two hours later. Bob was nine.

  So he thought, I have done something my father would have liked. If he’s up there, he’s smiling. I paid off an Earl Swagger obligation, the last one in the world, and I have served the old man. If anything calls for a drink, that does.

  And so he wandered out of security and went up into Narita’s flashy mall of restaurants and souvenir shops and duty-free jewelry places and found a little bar, almost French-looking, not Japanese at all, all brown wood and brown bottles, the whole place with the comforting feel that only a bar can give a thirsty man. He slid to a stool and caught the eye of the young man behind it in a white coat, and said, “Could I have a sake, please?”

  The kid smiled. He looked like so many young men Bob once knew, even if this one was Japanese.

  “Sure,” the youngster said, speaking his English well, almost without accent. “You want it heated?”

  “How do y’all drink it? I saw a fellow who drank it out of a little ceramic pan, like. A tiny, flat little glass thing.”

  “Oh, we drink it that way. But we also drink it in a square wooden box called a masu. Want to try that? We even heat it! Yep, I can fire it up in the microwave if you want, sir. That’d make you a Japanese through and through.”

  “Son, I don’t think your beautiful country is ready for the likes of me. Nah, I’ll have it like my friend Philip Yano, straight, but in one of those little flat deals.”

  “Coming up.”

  The boy pulled a large bottle off the shelf, unlimbered a kind of flattened dish about half an inch high, and poured just a small jolt of the clear fluid into it.

  Bob held the odd cup up, sniffed it. It had a medicinal quality. He thought of all the time he’d spent in hospitals, too much time, and fluids that had come out or gone into him, or that burned when some orderly put them on his ruptured flesh.

  “Semper fi,” said Bob, “catch me if I fall now.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Hmmm. I see how you could grow to like it. It’s all right.”

  It had a biting odor to it, then in the throat a kind of subtle sweetness, not overpowering, with a hint of fruit, but it left an afterburn as it went down, suggesting the presence of fire under the sweetness.

  “Another?”

  “Hell, why not. I’ve still got an hour before my plane and I’m not going to do anything on the plane but sleep the Pacific away.”

  He semper-fied the second one down, then had one for the road, one more for the Corps, one for the dead of Vietnam, one for the dead of the Pacific, one for the living, one for the thought-they-were-living-but-were-dead, and one for the hell of it. Somewhere in there he wondered whose feet were on the ends of his legs, and meantime the boy responded to him, as boys did to men who clearly knew their way about the world, as many young marines had, and bought him another. He then had to buy the boy one, it made perfect sense. Then of course he had to go to the bathroom and he got directions, found the room, and went in to discover what he already knew, the Japanese bathrooms were like science fiction, and somehow on their own they stayed perfectly clean. He negotiated that transaction, then checked his watch, realizing it must be time to board. He headed to the departure gate.

  Then he made a disturbing discovery. They’d come and changed the airport while he’d been sitting at the bar. It was now a different airport, and the more he tried to find his gate, the stranger it got. He noticed h
e’d tired considerably, probably from carrying someone else’s feet around, and decided to take a rest.

  He awoke as a janitor shook him, but quickly went back to sleep, and awoke a second time to find a policeman shaking him, looking stern.

  Lord, what a headache! It felt as if someone had put his head in a vise and a couple of sumo wrestlers had put their full weight against the tightener.

  Then he thought, Hell, I am not on an airplane.

  He looked at his watch.

  It was 6:47 a.m. Tokyo time.

  The plane was long gone.

  He sat there for a second, aware that his life had just gotten extremely complicated.

  Oh, you stupid fool. You moron. You cannot ever touch even the first drop or this is what happens.

  He looked up and down the airport, saw that somehow he’d taken a wrong turn out of the bathroom and compounded that error with other errors and ended up in a wrong corridor. He tried to map out what he had to do: return to the main terminal, get in line, turn in his unused boarding pass and ticket, get himself rebooked on the next available LAX-bound flight—how much would that cost?—call Julie and let her know, then get something to eat and hunker down. He’d have to catch up with his luggage at LAX and the anger he now felt was because of the possible loss of the calligraphy Philip Yano had given him: Steel cuts flesh / steel cuts bone / steel doesn’t cut steel.

  You idiot.

  Next thought (his mind was moving so slowly!): maybe there was a way to rebook without leaving the departure terminal, which would spare him the nonsense with security.

  So finally he got up and decided on a first course of action: coffee. Then food. Then he’d be ready to face the ordeal his own stupidity had created.

  So he walked the terminal and, in ten minutes or so, indeed found a JAL office and counter. Unfortunately it wasn’t open yet. It opened at eight, still an hour and a half off. Down the way, he found the flashy international departure mall, and soon enough a Starbucks, and managed to talk the young men behind the counter into firing up a coffee for him, though they weren’t technically open. The new USA Today International was out, so he read it, then an International Herald Tribune and an Asian edition of Newsweek.

  Eight o’clock rolled around; he went back to the JAL counter, was first in line, turned in the boarding pass and ticket, gave a somewhat vague description of his adventure with the sake and the bathroom, and without difficulty was rebooked on a 1 p.m. flight to LAX; he even got another aisle seat. There was no problem with his luggage; it would be held at U.S. Customs at LAX. She even smiled at him.

  Then he found an international phone, called his wife, who was out, thankfully. He left a message and decided it was best to tell the truth; she’d be unpleasant for a week, but in the end it was better than a pointless fib.

  Now, by nine, he was done and caught up and only had to wait another few hours.

  I won’t be sad to leave this damn airport.

  He sat down, took his load off, and decided on another course of action. He found that Starbucks, waited in a long line, got another cup. The place was crowded so he wandered into the terminal and found a seat.

  That was when—it was 10:30 a.m.—he noted an image on one of the television monitors. It took a while to organize in his slow-moving mind: it ran from something vaguely familiar to something sharper until finally it became knowable.

  It was Philip Yano.

  Then came a family portrait of the Yanos, one that he’d seen in their home. Philip, Suzanne, the grave doctor-to-be Tomoe, the sons Raymond and John, and finally the little sweetie, Miko.

  Then the house in which he’d spent such pleasant hours—in flames.

  Bob simply sat there, trying to make sense of it, trying to get it organized in a way he could deal with.

  He turned to the person next to him, a Japanese man in a suit.

  “Sorry, sir, the TV. What does it say?” he blundered, not even remembering to ask the man if he spoke English.

  But he did.

  “It’s very sad,” the man said. “He was a hero. A fire. He, his family. Wiped out.”

  13

  KONDO ISAMI

  He was in his shop. His family slept above him, but late in the night Philip Yano was alone with his father’s blade before him.

  It lay, with its broad curvature, its obscured hamon where hard cutting metal met soft supporting metal, its mesh of scratches, burrs, blurs, spots of rusts, chips, and ware, on the bench before him. The light gleamed dully on its surface, showing its imperfections, with stains of toxins running riot, radiating stench and miasma.

  What secrets do you hold? he wondered.

  Should I invest six months and 15,000 yen per inch to have you polished? And suppose that reveals…nothing. Suppose you’re a tired old hag of a blade, polished so many times that now you’re brittle and will shatter at the merest breath. You yearn for oblivion, and another polish—the tenth, the fiftieth, the five hundredth?—would just take away more of you, make you weaker and yet more nondescript.

  I would waste my money, my time, and my spirit on you.

  He tried to accept what lay before him: an unremarkable ancestral blade created sometime in a forgotten past by a smith of no particular talent. You were all right. You served: a war here, an execution there, maybe a duel, an ambush, a plot, maybe politics and ambition and strategic planning, an Edo or Kyoto ceremony or two, and finally, hundreds of years after your birth in fire and clay, you were clapped in military furniture and went off to war and ended up briefly in the possession of a forgotten officer named Hideki Yano, who died on Sulfur Island in service to—well, to what? His forgotten ancestors. Of what significance could that be? Almost none: it’s the story of a million other blades and a million other men.

  You have your father’s blade. It’s enough.

  And yet…and yet…

  It’s so old. It’s koto at least, made sometime in the 1500s. It’s unusually, even mythologically, sharp. Even now, centuries later, when Swagger-san and I throw paper against it, it cuts deep, fast, and straight.

  He thought of a story:

  A disciple of Japan’s greatest swordsmith, Masamune, believes he has finally made a better blade than his teacher. Being vain and ambitious, he demands a competition.

  The old man resists but ultimately relents.

  The young man’s blade is placed in a stream. Things drift down: it cuts…everything, twigs and leaves and fish. It cuts garbage and paper and bubbles. Everything that floats it sunders.

  Then the old man’s blade is placed in the water.

  It cuts…nothing.

  Whatever floats to it is magically diverted.

  After a time, the young man exults.

  I have won! My blade is better! My blade cuts everything, his nothing!

  Old Masamune pulls his blade from the water with a smile.

  Admit it, Master, says the young man. Mine is better. It cuts everything.

  Old Masamune walks away, satisfied.

  The young man sees a priest, who has watched the action.

  Priest, tell him how much better my blade is. Make him see.

  No, says the priest. His blade knew the way. It saw nothing that had to be cut. It brought no harm into the world. It has come to help the world; it is a blade of justice. Your blade, on the other hand, cut everything without discrimination. It is an evil blade. It has no morality. It should be destroyed.

  Yano looked at the dull thing. He had a premonition, like a chill, as if an oni, a demon, had passed through him. It is an evil thing, he thought.

  The young swordsmith’s name was Muramasa, and his blades acquired a reputation; there was something evil about them, they yearned for blood, whoever wielded them became a great killer but died by the blade as well. The blades had a particular hunger for the shogunate’s blood; over the centuries Muramasa blades accounted for several deaths in the Tokugawa family and were finally banned. Those that could be found were gathered up and destroyed; on
ly a few remained. Could this be a Muramasa blade?

  He had never seen a blade cut so straight, so clean, so quick.

  The American didn’t understand it, the child Tomoe didn’t understand it. But he did.

  It cut like a legend. It cut everything. It wasn’t Masamune’s blade, it was the young man’s.

  He looked now at the tang.

  The kanji lettering, each unit a visual poem in itself, climbed the shaft of the metal, blurred by age, subtlety lost in rust, its history written in the holes—three of them—that were drilled each time the blade acquired a new owner-warrior, until finally some dreary mechanic in the Naval Edge Company in Tokyo in 1941 or so clamped it in a set of fixtures, lowered the grinder, and punched a final hole through it, before burying its secrets in the cheap metallic furniture of the shin-gunto-issue 1939 trappings. If it had ever been sublime, it was now banal.

  He examined the inscripted lettering and for hours looked in the volumes he had on hand.

  There was Zusetsu Toso Kinko Meishuroku, of the limited edition of 1,200. There was Sasano Masa’s Tosogu No Kanshu, Kajima’s Tsuba No Bi, and Ikeda Suematsu’s Kano Natsuo Meihin Shu, not that this smith was a gendaito like Natsuo, but possibly Natsuo had gotten an idea from him, and Yano might have recognized it in the steel. Kanzan Shinto was also there, for the same reason, as Nagayama’s The Connoisseur’s Book of Japanese Swords.

  At the university, he would have access to Koson Oshigata, Umetada Meikan, and the first half of Shinto Meijiro, and possibly there was something there. However, almost entirely lacking would be references to the run-of-the-mill koto smiths whose swords form the bulk of most collections, and possibly the answer lay there.

  There was one possibility: a book called Koto Bengi, which included a lot of lesser smiths, with surprisingly accurate reproductions and details of chisel strokes that enabled checking for forgeries. The years from 1345 until 1590 were represented; rubbings that had been taken from almost-new, unrusted tangs yielded clear reproductions.