The 47th Samurai

by Stephen Hunter

  “You used it, then?”

  “I knew my lord would understand. I had to know the blade, and to know a blade one must kill with it. And now I know the blade.”

  “Was it risky?”

  “No, Lord. It was well planned. The woman was alone; she had no relatives. She was a Korean prostitute working in one of Otani’s clubs. It worked out very well.”

  “You say it cut well.”

  “‘The moon in a cold stream like a mirror.’”

  “That well, eh?”

  “Musashi himself would have been well pleased.”

  “I hope we haven’t lost too much time.”

  “Lord, I have made arrangements. Even now the blade will go to old Omote, the best polisher in Japan; then it will go to Hanzaemon, who makes koshirae like no other man alive; then finally, to Saito, the saya maker, again the best. Normally these men take forever, if at all. They will work quickly, however, for the Shogun.”

  “Excellent. I trust you in these matters.”

  “When it is done, it will be magnificent. When you make the presentation—”

  “You must understand how important this is,” said the Shogun. “What is at stake. I stand for a certain Japan. That Japan must be protected. I am that Japan even as I protect it. I cannot lose my power, and the presentation of the blade will guarantee my position for years and years to come, plus win me the adoration of the masses.”

  Kondo had heard this speech many times, but he pretended, for the sake of everybody, that he had not. “If you play your cards right,” he said, “it might even win you the Supreme Order of the Chrysanthemum from the emperor.”

  “Hmmm,” said the Shogun. “I think the Supreme is a little much to hope for. But one of the lesser badges. That would be very nice.”

  “Lord, I promise you. I am your samurai, to you I am pledged, and I will make this thing happen. I will not fail you.”

  “You too stand for the old ways, Kondo-san, and I will never forget it. With you at my side, I can do anything. You give me strength. You, too, are Japan, the old Japan.”

  “My reward is your happiness.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Well, your happiness and the four million dollars you’re paying me.”

  “Four million buys a lot of loyalty.”

  “It bought mine, I’ll say.”

  “All right, then. The blade is secure. No suspicion attaches to you or to me. The blade will be restored and I will make the presentation and the people shall love me and my position and my clan’s importance will be guaranteed. Imperial will go away and die. The Americans behind it will go away and die. We will have won a great culture victory. Our Japanese art will stay forever Japanese.”

  “I pledge myself.”

  “Excellent.” The Shogun checked his watch. “Now I must hasten. I have a crisis to attend to. You know, Kondo-san, all this rough business, all this maneuvering and plotting and violence, I hope it never affects the artist in me.”

  It wasn’t the boy, it was the teacher.

  It wasn’t her clothes: her clothes were perfect. She had on low heels, a pair of panty hose from Tashiroya, a severe skirt cut just to her knees, a white silk blouse, some very nice pearls, and a conservative jacket. She wore glasses—the glasses were so important!—and her hair was up, pinned securely. Her makeup was exquisite.

  It wasn’t the set. It looked exactly like any other classroom: the phalanx of desks, the chalk-frosted blackboards, the maps, the flag on a pole in the corner. It had the dusty, shabby look of thousands and thousands of classrooms and any Japanese male would grasp its essential reality in seconds.

  It wasn’t the lighting. Technically, his people were very good. Here, for example, at the casual pinnacle of their professionalism, they had duplicated exactly the pale wash of the ubiquitous high school fluorescents, though with enough soft underlighting to give everything within it a kind of white, dull gleam. For some reason, some magical reason, in this bath of lucidity, flesh itself took on an almost alchemical palpability. Even as each detail was revealed, each flaw, each hair follicle, the end product never looked raw or sordid. It had a kind of majesty to it, classically Japanese (as were all the other motifs) as if delicately painted on a silk scroll by a master in a satin kimono sometime in the koto age.

  It wasn’t the director, an old pro, it wasn’t the camera, the stagehands, the experience level, it wasn’t any of these things, but it took the Shogun’s expert eye to see in a second what the problem was. It was the actress.

  “Sakura-chan,” he spoke gently to her, “I know this is difficult. But the transition is so important. You have ripened into womanhood. Your flesh has acquired gravity, density, solidity, and amplitude. You have a woman’s body. Your eyes have wisdom, your beautiful face has knowledge, your hair a silky glisten. Our makeup people have transferred your already shocking beauty into something beyond shock; you are truly mythological. Do you hear, my dear?”

  “Yes, Oyabun,” said the beautiful young woman chastely.

  “But I see from the rushes that something is lacking.”

  “I understand.”

  “You are holding back.”

  “It is difficult.”

  It was difficult. Sakura had been in the business three years and was a star. She had a following, was a celebrity, had several magazines and photobooks devoted to her, could get a good table in any restaurant in any city in Japan. The Shogun had invested a great deal of money in her, had her dentition fixed (she’d had a gap between her two front teeth), sent her to the best dermatologists, the most sophisticated manicurists and pedicurists, hired a trainer to develop the muscles of her already willowy, utterly desirable body.

  “I understand how difficult it is,” said the Shogun. “Shirley Temple couldn’t do it. Sandra Dee couldn’t do it. Some even believe that the great Jodie Foster hasn’t done it. It is the hardest thing there is. Only Judy Garland was able to do it cleanly and completely.”

  “I am trying so hard.”

  Her problem: Sakura, in Schoolgirl Sluts nos. 3, 9, 17, and 26 (26 had been a huge hit!), had always played a victim. She had come up the hard way, through entry-level bukkake roles, moving on to her specialty, the schoolgirl rape victim, moving boldly to the geisha motif and quite successfully into a series called Cutie Rangers, where in polyester sci-fi outfits with holes cut so that her perky breasts showed constantly, she moved product in the millions. But her breasts had simply gotten too big and beautiful to continue to play in kilts and ponytails. She had to become an adult woman or she was through.

  It was the third day of filming Woman Teacher in Black Sakura and it wasn’t going well.

  “Possibly you try too hard, my dear,” he said tenderly.

  “I miss the pixels.”

  It was like working without a net. In all her other films, Sakura had been pixellated: that is, in postproduction, a computerized mosaic had been appliqued over her most private parts and the most private parts of her male costars. Of course it was psychological, for on the set, all things were displayed routinely, but somehow knowing that at a certain point the delicate obscurity of the pixellated smear would be applied and that one’s most intimate areas were to be protected had helped liberate her to the incredible frenzy that her directors and her millions of fans so admired.

  But at a certain point in an actress’s career, she had to move beyond the pixels and enter the world of 100 percent nudity. Such product was of course technically illegal in Japan, by mandate of the Commission of Motion Picture Codes and Ethics, but since the commission was under the control of the All Japan Video Society (AJVS) and since the Shogun was president of the AJVS, in fact its dictator, he could sell such product without fear. He was both the criminal and the police in the issue. It was good work if you could get it, and he had gotten it.

  “My darling. You know that the essence of chijo is honesty. You have to move into chijo, you have to put pixels behind you and share the beauty of your womanhood with all J
apan.”

  And chijo was the essence of his empire. Chijo: “lewd woman” or “slut woman.” It was based on a counterintuitive fantasy, that behind those demure Japanese women, soft-spoken and polite, hardworking and demure, all delicate beauty and exquisite wardrobe, there lay a demon of sexual flame.

  The Shogun had been the first to see this. The teacher, revered and feared, so central to the Japanese culture and the Japanese tradition: yet behind her classical looks and reserved dignity lay a wanton, a debauchee, who would assault her students, demand sexual surrender from them, force them into girls’ clothes, literally rape them in all possible positions.

  It started with teachers, moved quickly to the other figures of authority: airline hostesses, office ladies, nurses, campaign girls, even finally, as they grew older, the surprising “mature housewife” category.

  He had tapped a vein. The money just poured in. The hunger out there was amazing.

  “Think of it this way,” he said to the troubled young beauty. “We have our Japanese ways. The world, particularly the Americans, hunger to dominate us. They would change what we do, and destroy us. Not with atom bombs and firestorms, but with their culture, their crude, aggressive, unknowing ways. You, you little Sakura, you must stand against that. You are not merely an actress, you are a frontline soldier, a samurai, in the battle against America. Do you see, my dear, why it is so incumbent upon you to find within yourself that samurai spirit, to display it before the cameras, to let us distribute it, to become full chijo. Really, chijo is the samurai of the flesh.”

  The girl Sakura delivered a boffo performance.

  19

  DR. OTOWA

  It was through the good auspices of the retired Lieutenant Yoshida of the Osaka Homicide Squad that the distinguished Dr. Otowa agreed to see Bob Lee Swagger. Dr. Otowa, with graying temples, was well tailored, articulate, and multilingual. He did not know Lieutenant Yoshida, but upon receipt of a letter, a quick call to people who would know (and Dr. Otowa was very well connected) proved Yoshida’s bona fides as a first-rate man, almost a legend, who had retired to Oakland, California, to be near his daughter, who had married an American of Japanese ancestry.

  The two men met in Dr. Otowa’s office in the Tokyo Historical Museum, a shrine of antiquities that looked like a cathedral, grand and somber, enshrouded in its own parklands near Ueno, where the doctor was curator of swords, with a specialty (and worldwide reputation) for the Bizen smiths of the fifteenth century. His office, appropriately, was a room of blades: they glinted brightly from their glass cases, wickedly curved constructions that represented to many the highest and most articulated accomplishments of the Japanese imagination for more than a thousand years. The museum had one of the best collections in the country, only a small portion of which was on display to the public.

  “Mr. Swagger, would you care for some sake?”

  “Thank you, sir, but no. I’m a drunk. One sip and off I go.”

  “I understand. I approve of self-control. Now, Lieutenant Yoshida’s letter said there had been some sword thefts in the United States, blades worth many thousands of dollars. A killing as well. As a westerner, you wonder, How could a piece of steel made five hundred years ago for slicing up brigands and executing conspirators and splitting one’s own bowels be worth killing for all these years later?”

  “I know the swords are works of art. They can be incredibly valuable. That would be worth killing for just on the profit motive.”

  “So you are here to find out about the market. But surely you have seen men kill for insignificant sums.”

  “For quarters. For pennies. For harsh words, bad jokes, and cheap gals. Men will kill for anything and nothing.”

  “You know a thing or two, I see.”

  “But I do believe there was some craft here. The killer had to know about swords. Possibly he represented or was himself a high-level collector. Possibly he meant to hold the blade ransom as you would a child. Perhaps…well, I don’t know. But I’ve checked and the very best sword might go for two hundred thousand dollars. Would that justify such a crime?”

  “Possibly it was a historical blade. It had validated provenance and was associated with something extraordinary. That would accelerate its value exponentially. That would be something on the order of Wyatt Earp’s Colt.”

  “Wyatt Earp’s Colt sold for three hundred fifty grand. That’s a lot of money.”

  “Swords mean more to the Japanese than guns to Americans. Such a sword might go for ten times as much here. Say, three point five million. That’s worth killing for easily.”

  “Yes, but the more famous the blade is, the harder it would be to sell for a profit. You could steal Wyatt Earp’s Colt or even the Mona Lisa, I suppose, but who would you sell it to? That’s why the idea of a crime for profit seems not to fit here. Maybe just having it would be enough, but still…it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Possibly not to an American. Possibly to a Japanese,” said Dr. Otowa.

  “I have to hope I can make sense of it. If not, I’m pure out of luck. I have to presume some sanity and logic behind it, sir.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “So let me ask this. Is there one sword? By one, I mean something like a grail. Maybe its beauty, maybe its history, maybe both. It exists only in rumors. It’s never been verified. But if it came to light, it would shake up everybody. I mean a sword so special that…well, I don’t know Japan well enough to say. But it would translate into instant power, prestige, attention, something more valuable than money. Something really worth killing for?”

  “Killing not merely a man, though. Killing a family? A wife, a husband…”

  Swagger sat back and squinted at the doctor. “Hmmm. You saw clean through my little game.”

  “Mr. Swagger,” said Dr. Otowa, “I am in regular e-mail contact with blade societies, collectors, and curators all over the world. If a man was killed in America and a rare blade stolen, I would know. On the other hand, several months ago, a man named Philip Yano and his family were destroyed not twenty miles from where we now sit. It was very puzzling, very sad. The next morning an American made a scene at the site of the crime, claiming before witnesses that he had given Yano a rare sword that had been stolen. For his efforts, he was rather unceremoniously asked to leave the country. The investigation concerning Philip Yano has stalled and it seems that nothing is being done, as if certain police officials believe some crimes are best ignored. Now there is an American in my office seeking to discover something about what blades would be worth murdering for. It wasn’t a hard connection to make. I don’t see how you got back in the country, though.”

  “I have a very good fake passport in another name.”

  “You realize what will happen to you if you are caught illegally on Japanese soil.”

  “I know it will go hard.”

  “Yet you risk that?”

  “I do.”

  “The way of the warrior is death. It is not fifteen years of masturbation in a Japanese prison.”

  “I will do what I must do.”

  “Mr. Swagger, I suspect you are a capable man. You had the sponsorship of Yoshida, who would not lend use of his name to a criminal. So the misrepresentation itself speaks of your righteousness.”

  “I only mean to see this thing out, sir.”

  “I’m going to tell you a story. I’m going to tell you the story of a sword. Of a sword worth killing for, a sword worth dying for, a sword that would make its possessor the most important and revered man in Japan. Are you ready?”

  “I am, sir.”

  “All right, Mr. Swagger,” he said, “let’s begin. Now, so that you understand, let me give you something to hold on to.”

  He went to his wall display case, unlocked it, and took out a weapon.

  “Katana. Sixteen fifty-one, used by a man called Nogami.”

  Swagger took the thing.

  “Go ahead, take it out of the saya. Don’t worry about etiquette now. Just pull i
t out and don’t cut a finger or a leg off.”

  Swagger pulled it out. It was heavier than it looked. It had a strange electricity to it.

  The blade wore a slight curve, was dappled along its edge, where the harder steel that cut met the softer steel that supported; a groove ran up one side, and the tip was a unique orchestration of ridges upturned to a chisel point. Why was it like that? Why wasn’t it just a point? There had to be a reason. These people studied cutting and stabbing, made art and science out of them; they knew the sword and no implement in history had been so engineered as a Japanese sword.

  The handle was long enough for two hands and then some, but the whole thing could be used one-handed if necessary.

  It wasn’t beautiful. No, it looked like a weapon, like, say, an M-14 rifle, perfectly, exactly functional, meant to do one thing very well and built by people who cared about nothing but that one thing.

  In his hands, it seemed to come to life. What had Tommy Culpepper said? Oh, yeah: it wants to cut something. It did. It yearned for flesh. A gun was different; you grew used to it, and it became a tool. But the sword thrilled you each time you picked it up.

  He stood and waved the blade artlessly through the air, feeling the slight thrum as it gathered speed and momentum. The grooves made it sing a bit as it sliced left and right.

  “Let’s begin with snow, Mr. Swagger. Snow enters the Japanese imagination by chance on a cold night in what the old calendars call December seventeen-oh-two, but which is by ours January thirty-first, seventeen-oh-three. Think of a column of men, forty-seven of them, trudging through the dark city then called Edo, through the whirling blizzard. They are hunched against the cold, but the weather is not on their minds. Vengeance is.”

  Bob saw snow. He saw men jogging through it, swords such as this one slung, heads down, breaths blowing steam into the dark night air. It could have been Russia, it could have been the Chosin Reservoir, or it could have been Valley Forge. It could have been anywhere men fought for what they believed.