The 47th Samurai

by Stephen Hunter

  But who had it? That would take some digging. It had never been reproduced, but if any book held the key, it would be that one.

  Then a thought occurred to him.

  He went to his computer terminal, swiftly logged on. He checked e-mail and saw nothing, not that there was ever anything, and he went to Google in English. He typed in “Koto Bengi” and the system searched the computer universe and churned out ten possibilities.

  Hmmm, one was an online encyclopedia, another few conventional sword-for-sale sites where blades were traded to wealthy Americans at only a 700 percent markup; a few others were indexes or rings that connected to still other sword sites; and a few led to shops offering books or sword memorabilia or small sword accessories like meuki, the metal inlays for the grip, or seppa, spacers, or kozuka, the small sub-sword blades that were sometimes inserted into the saya.

  An hour into his search he came upon a small store in Tulsa, Oklahoma (!), calling itself the Samurai Shop. He looked briefly at the overpriced but clearly genuine swords (many were papered, meaning they’d been examined and certified by the Japan Sword Association), then finally clicked on “Books” and called up a list of volumes. Halfway down the list he found it: Koto Bengi, 1823 edition, very rare, good condition, spine weak, spots on cover, $1,750.

  For $1,750!

  Certainly there was a Koto Bengi in Japan that could be examined; a library would have one in its collection, or a shrine.

  Samurai had become international and you were just as likely to find rare artifacts in the American Midwest or the Scottish highlands or the Italian peninsula as anywhere in Japan. The collectors were like swarming insects: they came, they bought crazily, they resold, and many of them learned. That was the oddest thing: many of the most knowledgeable men in the world on blades were not Japanese at all. Here, a sword scholar in Japan in 1823 had examined blades of the late 1400s through the year 1600, had meticulously redrawn or taken rubbings of nakago for a volume that survived a tumultuous 184 years of war, strife, revolution, and extreme violence and had ended up in a store in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a clever merchandiser displayed it on something called the Internet. Now it flashed back across time and centuries to a retired soldier in the suburbs of Tokyo!

  The website for the Samurai Shop displayed the cover of the treasured old volume and its title page, and there were further icons for “Random Pages” and a lengthy description.

  All right, he thought. I’ll play your little game, Mr. Oklahoma Samurai.

  He clicked on “Random Pages,” and one by one, a set of pages flashed before his eyes.

  And then he stopped. He realized as he looked at the tang of a long-lost blade that it was his sword. That was the Yano blade.

  Yes, that was it.

  It had to be.

  The tang on the computer screen was longer, of course, because the barbarians of the Naval Edge Company preparing for the Sphere’s mad war had not yet sheared off half the kanji lettering.

  But Yano looked closely at the very end of his tang, and there indeed he saw the nub of three letters that had been rudely cut by the band saw or the file. They matched perfectly.

  The computer screen showed the complete and undistorted tang of the very blade he held before him in his rubber gloves; he had its pedigree, its smith, the lord or house for whom it had been prepared, the results of its cutting test, the—

  He saw with a quick pang of disappointment that it was not a Muramasa blade. No, how could it be? That’s a one-in-a-million shot, like a lottery ticket paying off big. He wasn’t familiar with the smith’s name, which he read in its two kanji, one for nori and the second for naga, thereby a yeoman called Norinaga, possibly of the Yamato school (the blade looked Yamato). But Norinaga-san, you’re one of thousands. This happens to be your sharpest blade; you should be proud.

  But then he noticed another thing, a small indentation on the hilt, almost too small to see against the dapples of the black rust and the rise and fall of the rough unpolished old steel.

  He got out a jeweler’s loupe and studied the mark carefully, turning it in the light.

  It was a symbol, not a kanji, what is called a family crest, in Japanese a mon.

  Taking up a pencil and a sheet of paper, he drew what he saw, and when he looked at it, it astounded him. It looked like a naval propeller, three-bladed, mounted on a hanging medal of some sort. It puzzled him, the contemporariness of it. It was some device an Imperial Navy torpedoman would have worn. It seemed to have nothing to do with the seventeenth century.

  He went from there to his Mon: The Japanese Family Crest, assembled by one of the western pioneers in Asian arts, a strange California man named Willis M. Hawley, who dedicated his life to all things samurai. Hawley was one of the few westerners admired by the polishers and sword makers of the ’50s and ’60s and his specialty was the encyclopedic. He alone in the West would have the patience to collect and classify thousands of Japanese mon.

  Yano sighed. It would take him hours to track through the pages and pages of symbols. He looked at his watch. It was so late. He should be in bed.

  And then he thought: Well, start. Just start. Then tomorrow, do some more.

  But it turned out the book was organized not alphabetically but by pattern. He slid through the pages, looking at the eighteen or so renditions of patterns in stark black-and-white, seeing such images as the ever-popular chrysanthemum, the persimmon, the melon, the arrowroot, the Chinese bellflower—but of course no torpedo propeller. But there was a maple, a chestnut, the hawk feathers, the roll of silk, the rabbit, the bat, the dragonfly, the arrow notch. Then—the torpedo propeller! No, no, it was the military fan. It was a fan!

  He quickly turned to page fifty-nine, found eighteen variations on the fan, none of which matched, went back a little and found dozens of other fan shapes—the cypress fan, the feather fan, the folding fan, the hemp fan. He applied his tired eyes to each three-bladed symbol, until there it was. He compared the three images over and over again. The slightly fuzzy image in the loupe, brought out by the correct angle into the light, built of tiny chisel marks four hundred-odd years old; his own much larger but necessarily cruder rendition of it in pencil on the white sheet; and Hawley’s bold black-and-white variation, barely an inch by an inch, but nevertheless bone clear: three blades, mounted atop some kind of V device that he now saw represented the fan. Who knew what the three propeller blades meant? It didn’t really matter, now that he had found it. He tracked over to the kanji name of the family, then the romanized version…

  It was the House of Asano in Ako.

  He sat back, astonished. His heart began to pound.

  It was from the house of the most famous samurai in history.

  Yet elation was not what he felt.

  A ghost returned. If the blade could be rooted in the Asano house and its bloody history, and if the name Norinaga could be likewise linked to Asano, then suddenly the blade was of inestimable worth, but to Yano what mattered was the glory: this would be the rare “cultural treasure,” worthy of careful restoration and display in the great museums of Japan. Its provenance associated it with a plot, a raid, a fight, a death, then the mass seppuku, belly splitting, that perfectly summed up the samurai ethos and represented at its purest and highest what the samurai meant to Japan and to the world.

  He thought, How could—?

  But it was more than possible. His mind ran through possibilities. The blade is stolen or lost somehow after it is confiscated from whichever of the ronin carried it on that bloodiest of all samurai nights, and no one, for a hundred years, realizes its meaning, as the story is devoured by other stories, just as violent, just as bloody. But then in 1748 comes the puppet play Kanadehon Chushingura, Treasury of Loyal Retainers, which popularizes the story and becomes the basis for many kabuki plays. But it is the woodblock artists who make the story immortal, among them Utamaro, Toyokuni, Hokusai, Kunisada, and Hiroshige. However, the most famous are those by Kuniyoshi, who produces eleven sepa
rate series on the subject, as well as twenty triptychs.

  By that time the sword is lost: it floats from family to family, from sword shop to sword shop and somehow is turned in to the government in a spasm of great patriotic fever, along with a hundred thousand other blades, and it is hacked and shortened and ground and machine-polished—buffed, buffed!—and sent off to war, where it has its further adventures, ending up finally in his father’s hands and then in an American’s hands. And now it’s back.

  Yano felt fear.

  It wasn’t a fortune he had discovered but an immense responsibility. The sword wasn’t just worth millions but was an artifact of the nation. That made it worth killing for. It was leverage, it was status, it was fame, it was…

  If anyone knew.

  That was the key question: Did anyone know? Who would know?

  Then he heard the glass break.

  He waited, breathless. His heart began to pound again.

  He heard a cry: “Hai!”

  It was a war cry.

  He reached for the only intact weapon close at hand: a shin-shinto katana from 1861.

  Nii listened.

  “Young men of Shinsengumi, this is your blooding. Is this for you? Have you the steel, the strength, the determination? Or are you one of them, one of the dissolute?”

  Kondo-san spoke quickly and fiercely.

  “Do you hang out in the malls and paint your hair blue and your nails black? Do you dance to barbarian rapture, and pierce yourself with gewgaws? Do you have sexual congress like a rabbit, without meaning, rutting in alleyways and gymnasiums? Do you fill your system with drugs and live your life in a blur of pleasure? Or are you hard and resolute, men of bushido, men of courage and commitment? Are you samurai?”

  “We are samurai!” came the cry.

  The four of them were in the back of a truck. It was 4 a.m., in the quiet suburbs of Tokyo. They were parked in front of the Yano house. They wore black hakama kendo trousers and jackets and black tabi over black tabi socks, which isolated the big toe so they could wear the zori sandals. Each carried sharp Chinese-made wakizashi and katana, the two swords, and each carried a silenced Glock 9 mm.

  “Then, my children of the spirit, you must go!” said Kondo, and the four felt the excitement rise and crest.

  Noguma was first, Muyamato second, he, Nii, third, and Natume fourth. They leapt from the truck and advanced in low, stealthy strides to the house.

  The door was locked.

  Noguma kicked it in, and as he kicked it, performed nukitsuke, the drawing cut, except there was no one to cut. Meanwhile, the others unlimbered their swords, possibly without the grace and beauty of Noguma, who had practiced this move a hundred thousand times. It was truly unfortunate that nobody was there to absorb his elegant energy.

  He ran into the house, shouting, “Hai!” and looked for something to cut. There was nothing.

  But downstairs he spied light.

  “Hai!” he shouted again, and raced down the steps to the corridor, followed by Nii, while the other two went upstairs.

  As Noguma ran along the corridor, he saw a man step out of a door with a sword and he raced toward him, full of lust for blood, full of energy, and executed a perfect kirioroshi, that is, downward cut, fully expecting to sunder the man from tip of crown to navel.

  Alas, the man adroitly sidestepped and slipped with oily speed into ukenagashi, or “flowing block,” which enabled him to slide off into a horizontal attack and lay his blade’s edge at full force into Noguma’s guts through the navel, the side, almost to spine, cutting through to the core, slicing entrails and organs and everything else in the way, then withdrawing on the same plane so as not to ensnare the blade, and poor Noguma fell spurting, for the body is really nothing more than a thin bag of blood, and when it is ruptured, it empties rather quickly.

  Brave and determined, Nii meant to unleash kirioroshi on his target and raised his own sword but the man was too fast and drove forward with the hilt of his already-raised weapon and hit Nii under the eye with a thunderous blow, pounding illumination and incoherence into his skull, and he slipped in pain, then lost all traction in the lakes of Noguma’s spewing blood, and went with a crack to the floor.

  Yano cut down the first man in an elementary college kendo move he hadn’t realized he still knew, and the blade bit deep but with stupefying ease, and he didn’t even have time to mark it as his first kill, for now the only thing in his mind was his family.

  He continued through on the same line, minimizing motion, and drove the hilt of his grip hard into the face of the squat second man, sending a vibration through his weapon. He drove a huge gash into the muscleman’s face, and watched him spill out of the way as well, with a possible skull fracture.

  A third was before him, and he coiled around into the power-stance position, elbows back and cocked, and deployed kirioroshi, but this fellow was far trickier, parried the blow, and slipped off and by Yano.

  The father turned as the man flashed out of the way. Yano lifted again, then realized he’d been cut bad. His legs went, his knees went, he slid down, down, down until he lay flat on the floor, staring up.

  Above him, he saw his antagonist perform chiburi, the ritual flicking of the blood off his blade, then noto, the ceremonial resheathing in saya, a smooth ballet of practiced moves, then lean forward. He had a square, fierce face, eyes bright with exultation, a mouth so short and flat it expressed nothing at all. Yet it was familiar. Who was he?

  “Why?” Yano asked. “God, why?”

  “Certain necessities,” said the man.

  “Who are you?” Yano said.

  “I am Kondo Isami,” said his victor.

  “Kondo Isami has been dead a hundred years. He was a murderer too.”

  “Where is the blade?”

  “Don’t hurt my family. Please, I beg you—”

  “Life, death, it’s all the same. Where’s the blade?”

  “You piece of shit. Go to hell. You are no samurai, you are—” and then he coughed blood.

  “Die well, soldier, for you have nothing else left. I’ll find the blade. It belongs to me, because I was the strongest.”

  With that he turned, leaving Philip Yano in a pool of his own blood in the darkness.

  14

  RUINS

  By the time he arrived by taxi, it was all over. The last of the TV trucks was pulling out. There was a crowd but by now it had thinned. People stood about listlessly, aware that the show was almost over.

  The house smoldered. In a few spots, raw flames still licked timbers, but mostly it had fallen in on itself, a black nest of charred spars, half-burned boards, broken porcelain fittings, blackened flagstones. The odor of burning hung thick in the air.

  The garden was a riot of smashed plants, footprints, the treads of tires where the fire engines had pulled up. A few shingles lay around, a few pieces of broken, scorched furniture.

  He ran to the yellow public-safety tape. A few cops stood by, not particularly interested in the situation, in their navy-blue uniforms with the tiny pistols in the black holsters. Beyond, Bob could see some sort of conclave of investigators, men in suits or light jackets who had gathered at the sidewalk that once led into the Yanos’ vestibule. The whole scene felt moist, somehow, from all the water spent to fight the blaze; the ground was soft, in places muddy, the water pooled into puddles.

  Bob pushed through the crowd, no longer really interested in the rules of politeness that defined the culture of Japan. He didn’t care about the polite mob of witnesses.

  He ducked under the yellow tape that cut off civilian world from public-safety world and immediately attracted the attention of first one, then a second cop, and finally a third.

  “I have to see the investigators,” he said.

  “Hai! No, no, must wait, must—”

  “Come on, no, who’s in charge? I have to see the—”

  Somehow weight was applied to him. The Japanese uniformed officers were amazingly strong given
their height, and with three of them gathered and more assembling, and the investigators looking his way, he felt the urgency of the collective will: go back, do not make a disturbance, you have no place here, you are not a citizen, do not interrupt, these are our ways.

  “I have to see the man in charge!” he yelled. “No, no, let me through,” and he squirmed away and quite logically, it seemed to him, made to approach the investigators or executives or whatever they were. “I have to explain. See, I knew these people, I had business with them, you will want my testimony.”

  It seemed so logical to him. All he had to do was make it clear.

  “Does anybody here speak English, please?”

  But for all his good intentions, he seemed to excite nothing but animosity on the part of the Japanese, who appeared not at all interested in his contributions.

  “You don’t understand, I have information,” he explained to two or three of the men who were forcing him back. “I need to tell people something, please, don’t push me, I have to talk to the man in charge. Don’t touch me, don’t shove me, please, no, I don’t want any trouble, but don’t touch me!”

  The Japanese barking at him seemed to be spewing gibberish, and their faces gathered into ugly, monkeylike caricatures, and he experienced the overwhelming melancholy that they really didn’t care and it infuriated him, and just at this moment, someone pushing on him slipped, a hand broke free and accidentally smashed hard into his chest, and the next thing he knew, he shoved back.

  He swam to consciousness. He was in some kind of ward, his head felt like a linebacker had crushed it against a curb, and he was sore everywhere.

  He tried to sit up, but handcuffs on one wrist had him pinioned to the bed frame.

  The room was pure white, brightly illuminated. How had he been unconscious in such a place?