The 47th Samurai

by Stephen Hunter

  In the beautiful Korean of her consciousness, she was far more articulate: are you demons come to take me? Or drunken, fattened American fools who want a free greek fuck to brag about on the flight home? Or young, angry yaks, annoyed that the boss thinks so little of you and therefore look for someone upon which to express your rage?

  But they were so still they seemed not to be there. In a second she had convinced herself that it was her imagination. It was punishment for thinking unkind thoughts about her father.

  She turned and headed again down Hanaz—

  She heard a sound. There were two men behind her. But she was not stupid or panic-prone. She did not scream and run hopelessly into the middle of the street. Instead she accelerated her pace just enough, tried hard to give no sign that she knew she was being stalked. She tried to think. The streets were dark and it was still half a mile to the bright lights of Shinjuku Dori. They could overtake her at any point.

  She looked for a sudden detour. She could head for either the Lawson’s convenience store or the Aya Café, both of which were open twenty-four hours a day. She could maybe find an alleyway. The prospect of getting home had become meaningless. She cared only to survive the night and if she had to lie in garbage behind some horrid club, she would do that. A better plan was to find one of the all-night joints, where she could nurse a few cigarettes until seven. It would then be pointless to return home. She could spend a couple of hours in the club, then go back on. It would be hard, but she would get through it.

  She came upon an unlit little promenade ahead, not far from a section of fifties bars called the Golden-gai. There was no overhead and she thought if she darted down it, the two men following wouldn’t see. By the time they’d gone beyond it and returned, she’d be out at the other end, on Yasukuni Dori.

  It was called Shinjuku Yuhodo Koen, an anomaly in Kabukicho, a curved, flagstone walk set almost in a glade, two hundred yards behind Hanazono Shrine, lined with trees on either side, almost unknown to the general public and certain to be deserted at this hour. It was dark enough to hide or to not be seen. It was ideal. She darted into it, opened up her gait, and prayed that she had dumped her stalkers.

  Since the promenade was narrow and the trees close, he would use kesagiri, a cut that began at the left shoulder and drove downward on the diagonal, splitting collarbone, the tip of the left ventricle, left lung, spine, lungs, right lung, liver. Well delivered, it sometimes flew through the curls of the intestine to exit at the right hip just above the pelvis. It was a good test for the blade, which in casual experimentation had proven astonishingly sharp. Old Norinaga knew his business, back there in his darkened hovel in 1550 or whatever, working in the light of the bright fire, as in an anteroom of hell, folding and refolding as his crew of young hammerers laid their strength and will into the glowing chunk of steel and iron.

  It was an unusually heavy blade, signifying that it had not been polished often, which meant it had a certain structural integrity. Not much of it had been stoned off in the 450 years since its forging. No hairline vertical cracks, invisible to the eye, ran through the hamon. No niogiri and no breaks in the nioguchi. No ware, no bubbles, no acid damage. It was merely scratched dull by a half century in a scabbard and before that however many years of mundane military duty and before that, who knew? All that was known was what it had accomplished in 1702. He had remounted it, hating the esthetics of the junky army furniture of 1939. Now it wore a simple, pure shirasawa, a wooden sheathing and a wooden handle that assembled neatly into one curved airtight wooden object, almost like a piece of avant-garde sculpture. The shirasawa was called a blade’s pajamas. It was a storage mechanism, not a fighting or a ceremonial one and it meant no tsuba had been affixed, for the tsuba, the handguard that kept the fingers off the sharpness of the blade and caught opposing blades as they slid down toward the hands, was a fighting accouterment or—many were extraordinary works of art in their own right—an esthetic device. But he expected no fight tonight.

  They could see her. She diverted down their little lane, a stout woman still fifty yards off, slightly spooked, moving too quickly, aware that she was being followed, unaware that she was being driven. She wore a cheap cloth raincoat, a scarf, and glasses. Even from this distance, her wooden-soled sandals made a distinct click on the pavement.

  “Now, Nii,” he said. “What did Noguma do wrong?”

  “He was too big in his cut,” said young Nii, crouched beside him. Nii had the plastic garbage bags with him. His was the most unpleasant task of the night.

  “Yes, he thought he was in a movie. When he stepped forth, he was consumed in drama. I believe also he stopped to think. At that point it is too late to think. You must be an emptiness.”

  “Yes, Oyabun.”

  “There is no thinking, no willing. Both take time. Time means death, not for your opponent, for you. Do you read western literature?”

  “I listen to western music.”

  “Not quite the same. I think of Conrad. He said something so brilliant it is almost Japanese. Musashi could have said it. Or Mishima. ‘Thinking,’ he said, ‘is the enemy of perfection.’”

  “I understand,” said Nii, who really did not. It was still memorization for him. You did this, then you did that, then you did another thing, all in sequence, and if you did one out of sequence, you got yelled at. But of course all the time you were thinking, your opponent was cutting.

  “Be empty, Nii. Can you be empty?”

  “Yes, Oyabun.”

  The woman felt confident now. Another ordeal had passed. She was down the dark promenade and had stopped twice. The two followers had missed her detour. She was alone. It was all right. She would survive another night in Kabukicho. She would get another glorious day in that adventure known as her life. She would send another 15,000 yen back to—

  He moved so silently, so speedily, he could have been a ghost.

  “Hai!” she said.

  He materialized out of the trees to the right of the promenade like a giant bat, smooth and dark, in flowing garments, his face almost Kabuki white, like a demon’s, yet at the same time so graceful were his movements she could not tear her eyes from him. She knew she was dead. He was a dancer, a magician of the body, a hypnotizer in the fluid, swooping flow of his body as his arms came up. She stared at him, somehow calmed, and there was a frozen moment when she looked into his eyes and felt the compassionate touch of another human mind and then he—

  Arctic Monkeys screamed. Nii simply watched in the dim light and could not look away.

  He saw the oyabun appear in front of the woman so smoothly and so evenly there was no aggression in the move and in some way the woman was not frightened. There was no terror. So charismatic was he that he somehow blinded her and took her into death as if it were a deliverance. She seemed to welcome it as a purification.

  His arms went up into kasumi gamae, the high-right stance, the elbows near, the arms almost parallel, the sword cocked and coiled behind his head, the hands apart on the grip, one up close to the collar, one down low on the very end. He paused, musically almost, as if to obey the ritualistic demands of the drama. Then the strike and its parts: elbows apart came together as he unleashed downward, the blade flashing high over his head, then plunging downward, as the palms rotated inward. The left hand provided the power, the right the guidance as force was applied along the full edge.

  Nii watched: the blade drove on an angle through her with almost utter nonchalance, as if she were liquid, driving across the chest on an angle toward the hip, speeding up as the force continued, but it was so sudden and surgical that she couldn’t scream or jerk or even begin to comprehend what was happening to her.

  Just as easily, just as quickly, he got through her, driving the sword edge through the inner landscape of her body, feeling the different textures and elasticities of the blood-bearing organs, the crispiness of the spine as it split, the tightening of the gristle of her intestines, the final spurt through the epidermis from t
he inside out. Astonishingly, almost illogically, her left quarter, the whole thing, arm, shoulder, neck, and head, slid wetly off the cut and fell to earth, little filaments and gossamer connections breaking as it went, her face with still a look of astonishment, leaving her other three-quarters erect for just a second. A jet of black spurted from the hideous opening of the cut that had become the leading edge of what remained, and when the knees went, clumsily, the whole awkward thing fell to earth, and instantly the blood began to pool blackly in the dim light.

  “Yes,” said Kondo Isami. “It’s very sharp still.”

  Nii said nothing.

  “Now, little Nii. Get this mess cleaned up and disposed. And say a word over her when you bury her. She was good cutting.”

  It was called kirisute gomen, meaning “to cut down and leave.” It was the right of every samurai, according to article seventy-one of the Code of 100 Articles of 1742.

  17

  INO

  “He says,” said Big Al, “that it’s not an official form, it’s a draft. It was just typed from notes.”

  “So there’s no way of telling if it’s authentic. It could be a forgery.”

  They sat in an office behind Sushi Good Friends, a profitable restaurant owned by Al Ino. Al also owned three other sushi restaurants, two strip malls, a couple of pizza joints, two Hair Cutteries, three gas stations, and two McDonald’s around Oakland, a few more in San Francisco, and one or two way out in Carmel County. He was a retired master sergeant, USMC, whom Bob had found through a contact in Marine HQ, under the category Japanese language specialists, as Ino had spent twenty-four years in Marine Intelligence, most of it in Japan.

  “He doesn’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he says that although it’s not an official form it is organized like an official form. He’s seen a lot of coroner’s reports. He was a homicide detective in Osaka for eleven years, Gunny.”

  The “he” was the father-in-law of one of Al Ino’s sons, who had retired to America to be close to his daughter. Al said he was a top guy who knew Japanese crime up one side, down the other.

  “That’s Osaka. Maybe they do it different in Tokyo.”

  “Trust me on this one, Gunny. They don’t do it different in Tokyo.”

  “Gotcha.”

  They were discussing the document Bob had received a few days earlier, shipped by SAL, the big Japanese shipping company. It had turned out quickly enough that the return address was phony, as was the name of the shipper, one John Yamamoto.

  “It seems like—”

  “They’re Japanese, Gunny. They’re very careful. Every i is dotted, every t crossed at every step. They’re thorough, methodical, and they have infinite patience. They work like dogs. That’s how I ended up owning half of Oakland.”

  Bob looked at the document. It was thirty pages long, column after column of kanji characters arranged vertically on the pages, with never a strikeover or erasure, now and then a crude stick-figure drawing with arrows or dotted lines signifying this or that mysterious pathology.

  “No names?”

  “No names. Just scientific fact on the burned remains of five humans found in the Prefecture of Tokyo at such and such a time at such and such a place. Five dead human beings, and some remarks, some oddities, some things he couldn’t figure out.”

  “I’m not sure I can get through this. I once had my own father autopsied, if you can believe it, and I got through that. I’m not sure—”

  He trailed off. He needed a drink. A splash of sake would taste so good. It would calm him just enough. Al Ino was a drinking man and Bob could see a whole rack of bottles on a cabinet on the other side of the office. In any one of them, paradise hid.

  “Well, it’s pretty hard stuff,” said Al. “Maybe I could submit a report to you, Gunny. You could look at it at a better time.”

  “No, I’ve got to do this. Just tell me. Is it bad?”

  “Well, here’s one thing I’ll bet you didn’t know. Whoever the oldest male victim is, he got one of them.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yeah, there was a lot of blood soaked into his trousers, and they didn’t burn because they were so wet. The blood typology and DNA matched nobody in the family. Does that make you feel any better?”

  Bob was surprised: it did.

  Here’s to you, Philip Yano. You were tough at the end. You defended your family. You went down hard. You cut.

  “Is it a surprise?”

  “Nah. He was pure samurai. That’s how he’d go.”

  “Good news, bad news,” Al went on. “Good news. I suppose, some mercy on a cruel night. The family members were shot. Nine-millimeters, head shots, once, twice. Someone went upstairs silently, from room to room with a pistol, and put them down. So there was no pain, there was no torture, there was no rape.”

  “Only murder,” said Bob glumly.

  “The ‘young female’ was shot twice, once in the jaw, once in the head. She must have risen, he got her as she was getting up, then he stood over her as she was still breathing and fired again. The others, the boys and the mother, it was clean.”

  Bob put his head in his hands. God, he needed a drink so bad! He thought of grave Tomoe and what she would have brought into the world as a doctor, with her care, her precision, her commitment to obligation, her love of her father and mother. Shot in the face, then in the head. Lying there as he came over, she probably understood what was happening, what had happened to her family.

  “Is there more?”

  “Unfortunately. Gunny, are you all right?”

  “Let’s just get this over with.”

  “The bad stuff.”

  “If being shot in your bed is good, then…go on.”

  “They were cut.”

  Bob blinked.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Not ‘hurt yourself shaving’ cut. Not ‘hell, I cut my finger’ cut. No. They were cut. Cut.”

  “Christ.”

  “I translate, roughly.”

  Al picked up a sheet of paper out of the document that he had highlighted with a yellow Magic Marker.

  “‘All limbs and necks were severed. Torsos were sundered diagonally and horizontally. In two cases, pelvic bones had been cut through, seemingly with one clean stroke. In another case, rib bones were sheared in two at roughly a forty-five-degree angle to the spine. All spines were severed. The instrumentation in dismemberment appeared to be a number of heavy, extremely sharp sword blades. The cleanness with which the bones were separated at the site of each incision suggests a weapon traveling at considerable velocity, as if at the end of a stroke of an extremely powerful right-handed man. Several less forceful cuts were also noted; in some cases, bones were merely broken and not fully separated, suggesting men of less intense musculature.’”

  “His students.”

  “Yeah. Hmmm, let me see.” Al rose, walked to a bookshelf, and pulled out a volume. It was called The Japanese Sword: The Soul of the Samurai, by Gregory Irvine.

  He flipped through it.

  “Yeah, there’s nothing arbitrary about the cutting that went on that night. It followed prescribed methodology of seventeen ninety-two. Here, look at it. That’s any one of the Yanos.”

  Bob looked at the page, trying to keep his rage buried. Rage was not helpful. Rage got you nothing but dead in a hurry.

  “It’s a cutting scheme according to the Yamada family,” said Al. “It illustrated the various prescribed cuts that could be carried out when testing a sword on a corpse.”

  The line figure depicted a body wrapped in a jocklike towel, with the various dotted lines signifying cuts through center mass. It was headless, and helpful lines pointed out the proper angle through the shoulder on each side of the shorn neck, through the elbow and the wrist and latitudinally across the body from under the arms all the way down to beneath the navel.

  “Okay,” said Bob, “that’s enough.”

  He needed a drink.

  18 />
  THE SHOGUN

  The Shogun liked to meet at the Yasukuni Shrine. He felt at home there, where the spirits of Japan’s many millions of war dead lay consecrated, amid the woodlands and the forests where only rarely could a gaijin be seen, and then never one mad with cameras, hungry for Japanese pussy.

  He was surrounded by bodyguards, for, of course, he had many enemies.

  But it was generally a quiet place, away from the hum and throb of his many organizations, his obligations, his many lords and lieges, all of whom waited for order and direction, his responsibilities, his pleasures, his orchestrations, his plotting, his aspirations. So he could walk and enjoy, from under the steel torii gate that towered over the promenade, which ran two hundred or so yards to the shrine itself, the classical structure of timber and whitewashed stone, ornate and serene at once.

  Kondo joined him precisely at 3 p.m.

  “Kondo-san,” the Shogun said.

  “Lord,” said Kondo, who in street clothes and unarmed appeared to be nothing extraordinary. He was a square, blocky man in his mid-forties whose awesome muscularity was hidden beneath his black salaryman suit, his white shirt, his black tie and shoes. To look at his masculine face was to suspect nothing; no one could know what lay behind his opaque dark eyes. He was neither handsome nor not so handsome; he was in all ways anonymous and therefore unnoticeable. If with sword in hand he was a beacon of charisma, without one he could have been an actuary.

  Kondo bowed from the neck and head, keeping the body taut, the feet close, the hands straight against the seam of the trousers. (Musashi’s rule no. 8: Pay attention to trifles. Thus everything, even the bow, had to be perfect.)

  “Come walk with me. Let’s talk,” said the Shogun.

  “Of course, Lord.”

  “I suppose I should ask for a report.”

  “Yes, Lord. The blade is as reported. It is absolutely authentic. It is the real thing, that I know. I have felt its power.”