by John Donohue
Kendo students are supposed to study sword kata, but most people have been seduced by the more sportive element of competition in free fighting. It’s not unusual to see middle-level black belts, impressively ferocious in their sparring skills, fumble through a kata sequence. Yamashita thinks simulated fighting with armor is delusional; Asa thinks kendo kata are neglected. The two men practice very different arts but found common ground in the study of sword kata.
Asa and Yamashita were originally scheduled to open up the demo with the kendo kata. Kendo’s free fighting is fast and subtle; the kata are elegant and more appropriate for a formal gathering. But to everyone’s surprise, Yamashita begged off and put me in his place. He’d damaged the ulnar nerve in his left arm he explained and wouldn’t be able to wield the sword correctly. It was a valid excuse, I suppose. Even though the katana is normally wielded with two hands, only the right guides. The left does most of the real work. In a demonstration of this magnitude, it would be a serious handicap.
The only problem with the excuse was that I had never seen Yamashita with an injury as debilitating as that. And just this morning he had been going at it with some novices, all of whom would have sworn there was nothing wrong—and with good
reason.
The sensei were annoyed. They never come out and say it to your face, but deep down the Japanese feel that no Round Eye can really know the martial arts. Each sensei knew exceptions to the rule, but as a category non-Japanese are thought of as decidedly second string. Yamashita might have vouched for me, but for a public display of this importance, my role was a cause for concern for the other masters.
So here was another thing that worried me. Asa, all dressed up, was now being forced to work with what he considered an inferior product—me. Only his respect for Yamashita and his need to maintain a dignified public appearance kept him from storming out of the room.
To make things more complicated, we were going to be using real swords. Most times, you use wooden weapons for these kata. At formal occasions, steel swords are used, but usually they are unsharpened replica swords known as iaito. They have the balance and look of a katana but they can’t cut. Tonight’s performance, however, would be with shin-ken—real swords.
So. A big crowd. The possible presence of a killer. My brother about to explode. A deeply annoyed performance partner. And live swords. The Burke luck was holding true to form.
Yamashita fussed around me, making sure the line of my garments was right. The paired swords, long and short, that we each would use rested in finely wrought wooden holders in a place of honor. Yamashita checked the sword fittings. The blades are held in by only a small bamboo pin, called a mekugi, that is inserted through the handle. If it breaks, the blades have an alarming habit of flying out when you do a cut. The rumor mill says a hapless spectator was impaled some years ago in Tokyo when a pin snapped and a blade went rocketing across the room. There were probably people who would pay to see Bobby Kay skewered that way, but Yamashita wanted this thing to go off tonight without a hitch.
Some people saw my teacher pick up the swords for inspection. When Yamashita knelt to remove them from the lacquered wooden racks they rested on, a buzz started as people thought the demonstration was about to begin. Yamashita ignored it and went on with his work. Satisfied, he rose and crossed over to the other side of the area to speak briefly with Asa. I tried to stay calm and watched the crowd, looking for anything unusual. What does a killer look like, anyway? It was pretty much a swirl of party heads. You caught a sense of personalities in motion, brief glimpses. But any insight was lost in the crowd’s motion, like a view into another room blocked by a closing door.
My sensei returned to me. “We begin in ten minutes Burke.”
I noticed that a small envelope had been left by Asa’s sword stand while I was distracted. Asa Sensei moved smoothly to the sword rack and picked up the note. He glanced at it and placed it inside his top. Then he picked up his swords. With a final tug on my hakama, I followed suit.
The demonstration finally began. I was relieved, because I couldn’t deal with any more psychic clutter. There was a fanfare and some words of welcome. The mayor, who was up for reelection, had gotten wind of the press coverage, and he was there. It meant that there was some extra verbiage tossed around while Asa Sensei and I edged over to the side of the performance area and worked on our breathing. The crowd clustered around and I scanned the faces. I saw Art, who winked at me. Akkadian, looking pleased. There were lots of strangers. Some looked distracted. Some looked bored. Some looked rich and quite a few looked drunk. But no one looked like a murderer.
The words bubbled away eventually. There was applause and then silence. We were on.
The kata series Asa and I were to perform is highly choreographed and dense with significance. Each of the ten sets is a paired exercise in attack and response; each is an illustration of a vital lesson in the Way of the Sword. Entrance, initiative, attack, and even response are all known ahead of time. But the tension generated throughout the performance is considerable. You expend a great deal of energy looking confident in kata. There can be no hesitation in your actions, no flaw in your technique. Add to this the vagaries of dealing with a partner, and the katana performance becomes a nice test in how you balance the tension created by almost infinite minute variations in human activity with the need to maintain fidelity to the form and spirit of the kata.
When you are done with an exercise like this, perspiration trickles down the small of your back, under the stiff koshita that forms the back of the hakama you wear. Your hands are slick with sweat from handling the sword. Mine were wet even before we started.
Just for kicks, Yamashita had arranged for a tameshi-giri exercise to precede the kata. This is a test cutting that you perform to show the audience that the swords are real. Asa and I faced each other about twenty feet apart. Behind each of us and slightly to one side, three bamboo shoots, each as thick as a man’s wrist, stood upright.
At Yamashita’s command, we strode forward, closing the gap between us and crossing to the opposite side. I drew my sword and cut at the bamboo. You have to hit it just right with the sword. Although lethally sharp, you need to draw the blade in so you cut at the target a bit. If you don’t, the katana will actually bounce off.
I got it right and sliced though the green stalks, one after the other. As I spun to face Asa, the bamboo stumps quivered and swayed slightly with the force of the attack. Then the kata began.
It only takes about six and a half minutes to perform the entire kendo kata set. But when you do it, time feels different. We slid toward each other, the balls of our feet rasping across the floor, the tips of our swords pointed high over our heads in the position known as jodan. Our hips drove us forward.
Asa exploded into an attack. In the first kata, the attacker tries to cleave you in two by cutting through the top of your head. I dodged the blow by stepping back just far enough for the cut to miss. When you’re using wooden swords in this kata, it’s a bit dicey because you can get clonked pretty good if you misjudge the distance. With live blades, it’s infinitely more interesting.
Asa’s intent was to cleave me in half down to the waist, and he followed through with his blow. It presented the critical opening needed. I dodged back, then slid forward and countered with a decisive cut to the head, my shout of attack coming a split second after his and punctuating the decisive moment in the exercise.
We concluded this kata. We met and our swords crossed. They say a good swordsman can make your sword “stick” to his at this juncture. Asa’s blade and mine felt held together by a magnetic force. We broke and backed up to our initial starting points, eyeing each other warily, feet dragging along the ground as if we were wading through thick mud.
Each of the next nine exercises contained different techniques, but the same tension. After number seven, I switched to using the short sword, which reduced the margin for error even more. When I put the long sword down in the pause bet
ween the seventh and eighth series, the cloth wrapping on the handle was dark with perspiration.
When it was finally over and we bowed out, I had no real idea how the audience thought we had done. In many ways, the reality of the crowd had faded for me during the performance and it seemed as if the universe were filled only by the blades, their points and edges, and the threatening darkness of Asa’s eyes. I had some vague memory of crowd noise washing over the sibilant whisper of my partner’s blade as it whipped by my head a few times, but that was it. Asa, it seemed to me, had not been as precise as I would have expected, but it was only an impression of a microsecond’s hesitation. Not something a casual viewer would have noticed.
The crowd applauded. We stepped out of the performance area, sat in the formal posture, and, bowing, thanked each other. I’m sure his error bothered him, but even when they’re annoyed, the Japanese are usually polite. Asa got up and went to Yamashita. He bowed to my sensei and they spoke for a moment. Then Asa left. It was a surprise, but maybe he felt the need to get out of the area after what I’m sure he thought of as an embarrassing performance.
I turned to watch the next demonstration. I spotted Art and Micky, but they were looking at the faces focused on the performance area.
A noted karate master strode to the center of the crowd’s attention. Thick and confident, he bowed to the makeshift dojo shrine and to the assembled masters. He stood silently for a moment, the breath coming and going with a tidal rhythm. His hands rose up in front of him higher than his head. The thumbs and forefingers of the open hands touched, making a triangle shape through which he looked for a moment. It was Kanku Dai, one of my favorite black belt routines. The name was suggested by the hand posture: Gazing at the Sky.
I felt a presence behind me. “Burke,” Yamashita hissed in my ear, “something is amiss. Get your brother.”
We gathered behind the audience, off in a corner. There were small clusters of people more interested in the free champagne than what was going on in the stage area. Back here, you could hear people talking and the occasional discreet laugh.
Micky and Art listened quietly, still watching the crowd, as the sensei explained.
“Something is wrong. Asa Sensei.” He looked at me. “You noticed?”
“He wasn’t as focused as I thought he would be.”
Yamashita nodded. “So. He took two tries at one of his cuts. There were moments where his awareness seemed clouded.”
“He looked pretty scary to me,” Art said.
Yamashita smiled tightly. “Yes. You would not know.”
“Is that all,” Micky asked with some exasperation. “The guy was off his game?”
“No, detective. That is not all.” Yamashita’s tone was not something they were used to hearing from people, and Micky and Art turned on him with the full power of their cop stare. My sensei didn’t flinch. “As he left, Asa Sensei apologized to me for his faltering performance.” He turned to face me. “He asked me to offer congratulations to you on the level of your skill, Professor.”
“Yeah,” Micky said, “I give it a nine and it’s got a good dance beat. Can we get to the point?” My brother was still a bit cranky.
Yamashita was not used to being addressed like that, either. I saw it in his eyes, but he went on. “Asa Sensei apologized and told me that he had received a note. And that he hoped to be able to redeem our honor tonight.”
The only reason we were able to catch up with Asa at all was that he took a while to fold his formal uniform. Even with all that was on his mind, Asa Sensei was a methodical man. His hakama would be neatly folded, his other items carefully packed. He had spent a lifetime learning not to cut corners and that night was no exception.
We spotted him as left the dressing room. He was less conspicuous in his street clothes, as if they were designed to shield the world from seeing his true nature. He threaded through the crowd and headed out the door. I ducked into the dressing room, grabbed my clothes bag, and headed out with all the speed that I could. Running in sandals is tough work. Besides, I had watched men like Asa move for years and knew how deceptive he would be when he got going.
11.Gazing at the Sky
The car, with its NYPD card on the dash, was pulled up in a No Parking zone close to the Samurai House entrance. Micky and I piled in and we shot down the street.
“He just entered the parking garage.” Art reported as he ran back from the corner and then thudded into the seat beside my brother. Micky had the car in gear before Art’s door was even closed.
“Where’s the exit?”
“Around the block.” Art picked up the radio handset and asked for a record check for auto registration.
“Right or left?”
“Left.”
“Thank God.” The streets here were one way, and Micky was afraid we’d lose Asa if we had to circle around the block.
Micky raced the car across the traffic. His high-speed turn made tires squeal; some of them were ours. The maneuver drew a few cranky horn blasts from a cruising cab and threw me up against the car door. Art worked the radio like nothing was happening. He seemed to be glued to the seat. “How do you spell his name?” he asked me.
“What’s he drive?” Micky demanded.
“A Toyota.”
My brother grunted. “Figures.”
The radio came to life. “Camry four-door,” Art told Micky. He gave him the tag number and they scanned the road ahead. The garage was one of those multilevel affairs buried in the wall of buildings that lined the street. Cars sprung out of the gated exit directly into traffic, like rabbits from a hole. The night road ahead was flecked with red taillights. From the backseat, I couldn’t see their expression, but you could almost feel the eye strain as the two men peered into the distance to try to spot Asa. The tension evaporated and they both settled back into the seat with relief as the Toyota exited the garage.
“OK,” Micky breathed, “here we go.”
We trailed Asa through Manhattan’s night traffic.
Micky was cursing softly under his breath, trying to stay close but not too close to Asa’s car and avoid the vehicles that passed by. Art quietly narrated their progress across town. I noticed that they didn’t bicker at all.
We were headed down the East Side.
“He live down here?” Art asked me. I shook my head no. “OK,” he said quietly. “Is he heading for the bridge or the tunnel?”
“Please God,” Micky said, swerving around and then ahead of a bus that lumbered into our path like a whale breaching, “let it be the bridge.”
Roebling’s bridge is an architectural wonder, even after all these years. It was built in an age when aesthetics and technology hadn’t been split apart. At night, the Brooklyn Bridge is lit up, a brick-and-cable causeway spun across the oily churning of the East River. It could be seen as the initiate’s path to the mysteries of Manhattan or as an escape hatch from the menace of the urban beast. It’s hard to tell. Traffic goes both ways.
“So what’s in Brooklyn?” Micky mused. “Asa have a school there?”
“No,” I replied.
“And he doesn’t live there?” Art reconfirmed. All I could do was shake my head no. “OK. No problem; I got the address,” he said.
My brother shot me a quick look of pure fury. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he breathed. “I told ya these guys were holdin’ out on us, Art.”
“Maybe he’s headed for Little Tokyo,” I suggested lamely.
There was a growing Japanese and Korean community in Queens.
“Seems a roundabout way of getting there,” Micky commented with acid in his voice.
He edged a little closer to the Camry, muscling his way through the close-packed lanes. The exit ramp from the bridge was a bit dicey and he didn’t want to lose Asa. The traffic squeezed in as we reached the Brooklyn side, the drivers getting ready to head north to the Long Island Expressway or south to the Gowanus.
The blacktop was uneven, with seams and holes that made the c
ar grumble. Micky was jockeying around in the middle lane, swinging his head quickly over his right shoulder to check the blind spot in case we had to go in that direction. The exit ramp from the bridge was coming up. “So whattaya think, Art?” my brother asked quietly.
“I think if he was heading to Queens he would have taken the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. I don’t think he’s going home. I think he’s got a meet set up.”
“Me too,” my brother said.
“Why?” I asked. I swallowed when I said it and the word came out with an odd, strangled sound to it.
Micky let out a breath. Then his shoulders shrugged. “Think about it. If you were gonna try to catch this guy, where would you look, Connor?”
“I guess I’d stake out a dojo.”
“Correct,” Art jumped in. “And why is that?”
“Well, because . . . I guess because the other murders took place in dojo. Or places like them.”
“Right.” Micky jerked the car over and followed Asa through the exit toward the Gowanus Expressway. We passed the silent group of warehouses and refurbished office buildings that cluster around the foot of the bridge, and drove along the waterfront for a time. A navy destroyer hulked, a gray form in the grayer expanse of urban night. Then we drove up past the plaza where cars clustered before entering the Brooklyn Tunnel to Manhattan and we moved onto the expressway proper, which led through the Red Hook section toward Bay Ridge. “And the one thing that trips most murderers up, Art?” Micky continued, as if the intervening silence had not existed.
“Pattern. Predictability,” his partner responded.
“So, buddy boy,” Micky continued, “We got your teacher’s pal shootin’ out of the reception like his tail’s on fire. A mysterious message that obviously got to him. And now he’s headin’ somewhere. Not home. My guess is something’s goin’ down.”