The 47th Samurai

by Stephen Hunter

  “What matters?”

  “Connections, which you don’t have.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s very hard for foreigners to adopt a child in Japan. First, few of them are available. I’m not sure if she qualifies. Then there’s the shape of your eyes. They’re round. The Japanese are disinclined to let a westerner adopt a Japanese child, unless there’s some prior connection. It’s not like China or Korea where cute girl babies are a cash crop for American yuppies.”

  “There’s no hope?”

  “Not a whisper. Not an eyelash.”

  “Suppose your boss, Mr. Ambassador, used his influence.”

  “He wouldn’t do it for me, why would he do it for you? I don’t have the juice, you don’t have the juice.”

  “That sucks.”

  “It does indeed. But the world is full of terrible injustices. Ninety-eight percent of them can’t be helped or fixed. This is one of them. Concentrate on the two percent that can. Ah, here we are.”

  Nick Yamamoto lived in a quiet Tokyo residential neighborhood a few kilometers geographically and several universes culturally from Kabukicho. His was one of those nondescript wooden homes behind a fence that was attached to other homes on either side, all of them squashed together like french fries in a greasy bag. They had no trouble parking in the quiet neighborhood, slipped through the gate, and knocked.

  Like many Japanese males he was slender, small, wore glasses, moved fluidly. Unlike most Japanese men, he had blond hair. It was thatchy, moussed in odd directions, and suggested some kind of rock star. If you only counted the hair, he looked eighteen; the rest of him was a man of forty-odd years.

  “Do you like it?” he asked Susan.

  “No. It’s stupid.”

  He looked up at Bob.

  “Is she a bitch or what?”

  “She can be pretty tough,” Bob said. “You should get her started on me if you want to hear some ugliness. Anyhow, my name is Bob Lee Swagger. I like your hair.”

  “See, he likes my hair.”

  “What does he know? He’s a gaijin.”

  Bob and Nick shook hands, bonding immediately on their mutual fear of the great and wonderful wizard Susan Okada. Nick took them into the place, all wood floors and luxurious western furniture. A seventy-two-inch TV hung on one wall broadcasting baseball, but everywhere else books were jammed into shelves and framed front pages hung on walls. The smell of grilled meat hung in the air; Nick had just finished dinner.

  “A drink?” Nick asked.

  “Can’t touch the stuff,” said Swagger. “If I do, I’m gone for a month. Please go ahead.”

  “Okada-san?”

  “No, I’m working. This isn’t social.”

  “Tea, coffee, Coke, anything?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Well, I think I will, if you don’t mind.”

  Nick went and got himself a jug and a cup and proceeded to lubricate himself with small sips of sake. He ushered them to the leather sofa and he slipped into a nice Barcelona chair.

  “Nick used to be the Tokyo Times’ Washington bureau chief, which is where I met him. But then he was recalled and in a few months got himself fired. What was it, Nick? I don’t remember. Plagiarism or bribery?”

  “Actually, it was both.”

  “The cocaine made him do it. It wasn’t his fault.”

  “The cocaine made me do it. It was my fault.”

  “Anyhow, he says he’s clean now, and he’s still a one-man show. He publishes, writes and reports, and lays out the Tokyo Flash, a weekly of a disreputable sort. Tokyo has hundreds of them. His is one of the best. If you want to know about Brad and Angelina, or what porn star has just left which studio to go hard-core for two billion yen, Nick would know.”

  “But I know some other stuff too.”

  “He’s published seven books on the yakuza. And he knows a lot more than he’s published.”

  “I’d be dead if I published what I know.”

  “You sound like just the man I need,” said Bob.

  “Well, I’ll try. I owe Susan for something in D.C. So try me.”

  “Kondo Isami.”

  “Ohhhh, I’m impressed. Which one? Kondo the original, or Kondo Two, the Sequel?”

  “I guess the first to start.”

  “You probably couldn’t understand the second without the first.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  Nick poured himself a little more sake. He turned off the TV, fished among his CDs and found one, and popped it into a player.

  “Soundtracks from several samurai movies.”

  “Swagger’s seen a lot of samurai movies. Too many. He has the Toshiro Mifune disease.”

  “Well, Swagger-san, I’m a writer, so I believe in mood. This is the right music for this story.”

  He took another swig on the sake.

  “Westerners can’t really appreciate the dynamic between shogun and emperor that played, off and on in Japan for three hundred years. I won’t bore you with it in detail, but we had this weird system of a showy but powerless emperor-god on a throne in Kyoto and a guy in armor who’d fought in a hundred battles and outthought everybody else running the show in Edo. They never got along.

  “It came to a head in the middle of the nineteenth century, when aggressive outsiders began pressuring Japan to open up and trade with the West. The shogun opposed the move, the emperor embraced it, more or less, and that set the clans a-warring. The emperor, as I say, lived in Kyoto, the shogun in Tokyo. I’ll call it Tokyo instead of Edo just to keep it simple.”

  “I’m very simple,” said Bob, “but so far I’m with you.”

  “A lot of pro-emperor ronin—masterless samurai, who despised the shogun—came to Kyoto and essentially turned it into Dodge City. It was violent, terrible, a city of anarchy. The year is roughly eighteen hundred sixty-two. In Tokyo, the shogun was embarrassed that he couldn’t keep control of the city where the emperor resided; it made him look foolish.

  “So a lord sympathetic to him, and certainly with his permission, hired a militia. Or maybe you’d call them vigilantes, or regulators, something cowboy. A gang, a posse, an outfit, whatever. They called themselves the Specially Chosen Ones, which in Japanese is Shinsengumi. They were led—well, there was a lot of turmoil in their own leadership, as there always is in Japan, but eventually, with the help of a really good, bloody assassination—by a guy named Kondo Isami. Big guy, tough guy, ran a dojo out west, very ambitious. So Kondo and his Shinsengumi set out to tame Dodge. They did it by killing. It’s been in a thousand movies, but you probably remember either Band of Assassins or When the Last Sword Is Drawn.”

  “Saw ’em both. Poor Toshiro gets beheaded in Band. I guess he was Kondo.”

  “That’s right. Kondo Isami is definitely the Mifune part. That’s what happened to Kondo when the emperor’s clans won and the shogun was replaced. But for a long time, in Kyoto, Kondo was the law, and he and his boys were the bloodiest mob old Japan ever saw. They killed and killed and killed. Kondo himself probably killed a hundred men in sword fights. He was your true-grit samurai, love him or hate him. So any man today calling himself Kondo means to scare you and frighten you and communicate to you that he is willing to kill. That he even likes to kill.”

  “And Kondo Isami Two?” Bob asked.

  “I’ve never seen his name in print. Supposedly it appeared only once and a few weeks later, the reporter’s head was found mounted on a tripod of golf clubs outside his paper, a tabloid called Weekly Jitsuwa. It caused quite a stir. The three clubs were the eight and nine irons and the number three wood. Ya-ku-za, of course, is slang derived from a card game’s losing hand, which is eight-nine-three.

  “Nobody knows who he is, only what he does. He’s an elite yakuza assassin, with a very small team of highly trained men who favor the old traditions. They still kill the old way, with the sword.”

  “You’ll have to explain that to me,” Bob said.

  “For a wes
terner it seems bizarre, I suppose. But in certain applications, the sword is actually far more efficient than the gun, if you don’t mind a lot of sloppy blood around. These guys spend their lives working on it and get very, very good. They can take you down as fast as a gun. It’s an extremely lethal weapon and they have a butcher’s knowledge of anatomy. They know exactly where to cut you or, if they have to, pierce you, to empty you of blood in a split second. They cut your lungs and take out your air supply, they cut your pelvis and shatter your support system, they cleave your brain and it all goes dark. You don’t even feel the pain, you just go down in a heap. And best of all: no noise. You can have a nice little battle, a good triple assassination, a one-on-one to the death, assured that no cops are going to show up. Nobody knows until the next morning when they notice all those pools of sticky red stuff in the gutter. Here, look at these.”

  He went to a cabinet, pulled out a file, and handed it to Bob.

  They were autopsy and crime scene photos of men dead by sword. On the slab, the nude bodies had oval openings the size of footballs, sometimes hard to see because the skin sundered wasn’t white but usually mottled red, black, and green, not from disease, as Bob initially thought, but from the dense, almost obsessive tattooing that marked the bodies. But the cuts were visible once you focused on them amid the dragon’s heads and wolves’ yaps and kanji characters: they exposed a butcher’s festival of sliced meat inside, visible now only because the blood had drained. The cuts were gigantic, and deep, and permanent; they’d empty the sack of fluid that is a human body in a second. In the on-site photos of the rubbed-out of the underworld, the distinguishing feature was not the black suits and shoes, not the sunglasses, not the twisted postures of the fallen or the occasional lopped limb or split head, but the blood, the lakes and lakes of it. Each body sat like an island in the middle of a red sea; it lapped everywhere, spreading in satiny luster, as if by some mad king’s imperial mandate.

  “This Kondo Isami came on the scene about five years ago. An underboss named Otani was having trouble with a Chinese-sponsored hotshot in Kabukicho and was bedeviled by one individual in particular. ‘Bedeviled’ as in ‘cut really bad.’ Kondo Isami introduced himself to Otani by sending a business card and a head. It was very effective. As Otani rose, so did Kondo, specializing in the impossible, the discreet, the hard to do. Evidently, unlike most of the yaks, he is not tattooed. He has to be brilliant, socially adept, and completely presentable. But even so, there are weirdnesses. Many who’ve met him have not seen his face; he goes to great lengths, including masks or theatrical lighting arrangements, to prevent certain people from getting a look at it. But he’ll meet others very casually, it is said. He goes dancing or clubbing. Suddenly, for no reason, he doesn’t care if anybody sees him. Now what the hell could that be about?”

  “Sometimes he’s shy, sometimes he’s not. Maybe that’s all there is to it.”

  “No, there’s more. Nothing’s simple about this guy. He has brilliant sword skills. He’s at the level of almost transcendent technique that some of the legendary sams achieved, like Musashi or Yagyu. His boys may not be quite so advanced, but their internal discipline is tremendous. Only once has a Shinsengumi guy been taken by the cops, and he committed hara-kiri in the station with a fork before he talked. He turned out to be a street gang kid who’d evidently been talent-spotted by Kondo, brought into the unit, trained, and disciplined. They found him soaked in his own blood with a smile on his face.

  “Otherwise, they specialize in the hard to do. Enormously violent. There was a rumor some Chinese gangsters were going to mount a move against Boss Otani, and the Shinsengumi took them out in about thirty seconds in a Kyoto inn, where the group had gathered for recreational indulgence. They caught them in the lounge. The swords came out much faster than the Berettas, and they danced from man to man in seconds, cutting. Kondo himself split a Chinaman from crown to dick. Cut him in two, top to bottom. Amazing strength, but more. You have to know the art of cutting. He does. Then they left no witnesses.”

  “Look, Nick,” said Bob, “I think Kondo has a new client. I think he took out Philip Yano’s family, stole a sword of some rare value that had come Yano’s way, and now he’s got some plan for the sword that I can’t figure out. So can you ask around, see if you can find out who Kondo’s working for and what he’d need a special sword for? And why would he have to wipe out the Yanos? Why couldn’t he just send a burglary team in, crack the vault, and walk out clean? Or even buy the damned thing, not that, come to think of it, Yano would have sold.”

  “Sure, I can ask. But I’m getting something out of this. I’m getting a scoop that’ll make me the man in the tabloid game, and even get me back in the respectable rags.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Nick, be careful,” Okada said.

  “I’ll be careful. Meanwhile, Swagger-san, learn to fight.”

  24

  THE EIGHT CUTS

  The compass no longer held four directions. There was no longer a left or a right. That up/down stuff? Gone totally. As for colors, numbers, signposts, any markers of a universe to be navigated rationally: vanished.

  Instead, all reality consisted of the eight cuts.

  There were only eight cuts.

  Never more, never fewer.

  Tsuki.

  Migi yokogiri.

  Hidari yokogiri.

  Migi kesagiri.

  Hidari kesagiri.

  Migi kiriage.

  Hidari kiriage.

  Shinchokugiri.

  Or thrust, side cut left to right, side cut right to left, diagonal cut right to left, diagonal cut left to right, rising diagonal cut from right to left, rising diagonal cut from left to right, and vertical downward, the head-splitter.

  He stood, sweating, the very sharp blade in his hand so that his concentration wouldn’t wander. A mistake with a thing so sharp could cut him badly and he already bled in small quantities from a dozen brushes with the yakiba, the tempered edge, of the wicked thing. Doshu paid the blood no mind: the message was, if you work with live blades, you get cut. That’s all. No big thing. Get used to blood. It goes away or it needs stitches and there’s nothing in between.

  “Migi yokogiri!” the bastard commanded, and Bob obligingly performed the downward right to left cut, not a slash, not a lunge, not a thrust: a cut.

  “Kire! KIRE!” the man yelled at him.

  Cut.

  Bob realized there was magic to the Japanese in the word. It wasn’t like “cutting classes” or “cutting the rug” or “damn, I cut myself” or “don’t cut corners,” all those little metaphorical indulgences on the principle of the sharp thing encountering the soft thing, the sort of expressions a society might create that had never taken blades too seriously.

  To the Japanese the word cut had special significance. You didn’t toss it about lightly; it was almost a religious term. With a sword, you cut. To cut was to kill, or to try to kill. The weapons were meant for that purpose only; they were dead-zero serious, no jokes, no jive, no sport, no fun. In their way, they were as meaningful, emotionally, as loaded guns and possibly more so because a gun could be unloaded but a sword never could.

  “Left diagonal cut!”

  “Right sideways cut!”

  “Rising left diagonal!”

  There were only eight of them. But everything depended upon those eight. If you could not master those eight, you had no chance.

  “No, no. Angle all wrong! Angle bullshit. Angle must be perfect. Go slow!”

  How long had this been going on? It felt like the crazed exercise at Parris Island, back when Parris Island meant something, where you were on a seventy-two-hour field exercise and nights bled into days, which bled into nights, until you were so aching you thought it would never end and your movements had gotten stupid with fatigue. What was your name? Where were you from?

  But that’s what got Swagger through ’Nam three times, so as much as every second of it sucked hard and long, it was som
ehow worth it. You had to do it.

  “Rising left diagonal! No, no, blade bent, no! Feel!”

  The small man came behind the sweating gaijin and with vicelike fingers took his arm through the motion, controlling his elbow, controlling the angle of the blade, which had to be precisely aligned to the angle of the cut, else the whole process broke down, you got a blown cut and the sword torqued its way from your grip, or at least took you out of timing so that your opponent could get in and cut you bad.

  No, not cut you bad.

  The Japanese would say, Bassari kiru.

  Cut you through.

  He thought he’d pass out. But if the little man with the wispy goatee could keep going, so, somehow, could he. But it went on for hours and hours and hours until:

  “Put sword away.”

  Bob bowed, not knowing how or why.

  He found the saya, remembered to extend it from him, and dropped it over the extended sword, whose edge he’d turned to self according to etiquette, and then returned it to the rack in the deity alcove.

  When he turned, Doshu was tightening a men around his head and had already gotten on the body padding.

  “Come, come. Now, you, me, fight. Fight hard. You kill me with wood. Good cuts. Make good cuts.”

  Bob must have groaned; all he wanted was a nap.

  “Come on. Only do for six, maybe ten more hours. Then I give fifteen-minute break.”

  Bob realized—a rarity. A joke.

  Hmmm. He found out quickly that he could fight or he could cut. But it was damned hard to do both. He was as fast as Doshu and now and then got his licks in, though perhaps Doshu was going light on him, even if the whack of the wooden edge against his unprotected arms or torso would leave welts and bruises for days. But when he hit, he hit sloppily. When he cut well, he cut slow.

  “I can’t stay with you.”

  “No ‘stay with.’ Sickness. Sickness of ego. No win, no lose. You must fight in one mind.”

  One mind. Now what the fuck did that mean?

  “Concentrate but no concentrate. See but no see. Win but no win.”

  What language was this?