by John Donohue
“OK, so where’d he get it?” Micky persisted.
I shrugged, and to stall while I thought, I leafed through the pages of Bobby’s show. I was turning a page when something caught my eye. For a minute I couldn’t quite figure out what was bothering me. Then it became clear.
My brother had been fidgeting in impatience but grew still as he read my body language. “What?” he asked.
“This is weird,” I answered. “I had a chance to look at photos of some of the display items when I was writing that piece for Bobby. I remember this sword here,” and I pointed at it. “But the photo of the sword in the catalogue is different.”
Micky slewed the picture around, looking at it with interest. “How so?”
I pointed the features out. “This katana had a tensho-zukuri hilt in the originals. In the catalogue, it’s got a higo-zukuri hilt.”
Micky took a calming breath. “Connor, would you please tell me something in English?”
“The handles are different shapes, Mick,” I explained. “This sword is supposed to be four-hundred years old. Back then, they really used them for things. A tensho-zukuri hilt is fluted toward the butt end. It helps you keep your grip on the sword. Modern swords tend to have a relatively straight hilt, the higo-zukuri.” I looked up at my brother. “Somebody must have gotten the pictures mixed up. Because this sword is not the one I had written about.”
“A sword like this is valuable?” Micky asked. I nodded and he smiled. “And you could still use it?”
“Sure.”
“Well, buddy boy, I think maybe we’ve found where Tomita got his weapon.”
“Huh?”
“Sure. We know he was in the gallery the night he killed Reilly. After you saw the picture of the sword. But before the catalogue was printed. He had opportunity. And a motive.”
“But no katana was reported missing. Just the bokken,” I protested. “You’d think Bobby Kay would want to make an insurance claim.”
Micky got a crafty look on his face. “You know, all this Japanese stuff has really made this whole case hard to figure. Everything is way too exotic for my taste. But this . . . this kinda thing I get. Maybe Bobby didn’t want any more adverse publicity. Maybe he didn’t want to scare away backers . . . Maybe, just maybe his insurance coverage is shady . . .”
“But he had to get all kinds of insurance for this show. He told me. Said it was costing a fortune.”
Micky sat back and made some quick notes. “Precisely. And if you had to come up with a name of someone who might be likely to cut corners, who would you suggest?”
I got the point. “Bobby Kay.”
My brother jumped up. “OK, I’m outta here. Got enough to work on for now.”
“What about me?”
He was shrugging his coat on. “You’ve helped enough. Take off. Go . . . I don’t know. Go do what you do.”
So I did.
The tiny waterfall in Yamashita’s garden flows over gray rocks. It makes a musical sound that fills the small, green space behind the dojo. Yamashita tends the yard with a remorseless intensity. It is (nonetheless) green and soothing in the summer and, like the man himself, the product of discipline and a fierce attention to details. We sat on the little covered porch overlooking rocks and shrubs, watching small birds bounce and flutter in the yard’s stillness. Yamashita talked quietly and evenly, his voice an expression of the garden’s mood. An outsider would never guess he was talking with me about the finer points of killing a man.
When I arrived, the training hall was silent. There was still tension between us, and my teacher and I had drifted down into the empty space, instinctively seeking comfort in the familiar. The afternoon sun slanted in and cast bright stripes on the deep indigo arms of Yamashita’s uniform. He stood alone in the center of the room, holding a wooden sword in gedan no kamae, the low defensive posture. His eyes seemed focused on something far away, but as I joined him, the sword swung up to track me. The motion brought his focus back to the here and now. I had told him what the police were doing. He did not seem particularly surprised at the turn of events. But the awareness of Tomita’s intentions seemed to be still sinking in.
“So . . .” he hissed and looked past me into space. “I suppose this is inevitable. The past cannot be avoided . . .”
“That would be too simple,” I offered.
“Too simple?” Yamashita replied, “No. I think, rather, it is too complicated.”
I looked quizzically at him.
He sighed as he gathered his thoughts. “Burke, to create a warrior of this skill level is a work of years. It requires great care. Attention must be paid, not only to technique but to the trainees. Their spirit becomes intertwined with their skills. If you take one away, the other suffers. Now we see the results.”
I thought this was an interesting way to avoid dealing with his part in Tomita’s past, but I said nothing.
“I sometimes doubted that the Konoe-tai had the patience to train correctly,” my teacher continued. He looked up and stared at nothing. “They seek to serve the Imperial House, which is a thing of great honor. Their zeal, however, was always greater than their wisdom.”
“But you were part of it,” I said, and regretted it immediately.
Yamashita glided smoothly across the floor. His feet rasped along the polished wood. He placed the bokken in a rack on the wall and turned to face me.
“You will learn Burke, that the true path is not always one we can clearly see. There are times when we lose the Way.” He sounded sad for a minute, and old. “But, “ his voice grew stronger, “this is why we train. Because we seek the Way. And because we can never be sure that we have found it.”
“Is that why you left Japan?”
Yamashita closed his eyes in affirmation. “There was difficulty there, Burke. Budo, the Martial Way, uses the arts of a warrior to foster peace. After a time, I was not sure that the Konoe-tai was preserving this . . . awareness . . . in what they did. After a time, I came here to see whether a different way was possible for me.”
“And did you know about Tomita even then? Is that why you dropped out of sight?” I had always wondered why such a prominent master shunned the limelight so fiercely.
He looked severe for a moment. “I did not run away, Burke. I left. With Tomita . . . I was saddened by the group’s decision. It was a waste of an excellent trainee. But no, I was informed of things by Mori only in the last few days. And now,” he sighed, “I must decide on a course of action.”
“Why now?” I asked.
“Tomita will not cease until he gets what he desires,” Yamashita said. “He will continue to . . . hurt . . . those connected with me. I see that now.” He looked directly at me, his night-dark eyes still and hard. “I will not have him destroy what I have built here.”
“The dojo?”
His head swiveled on his thick neck. “No. He will strike at what I value most, Burke. Those around me. My students.” Again the hard look. “You.”
I felt an electric surge of panic. My face flushed. But I controlled my breathing, and gradually my heartbeat began to slow again. I thought of the destruction Tomita had left, as deep and shocking as a blade’s cut. And now Yamashita was certain there would be more. I needed to think of a way to stop it.
It finally came to me. Why not, I suggested after a time, lay a trap? We knew Tomita’s patterns. And what he was after. How he would go about it. Why not provide him with the victim, in the way a tiger hunter stakes out a goat on a tether?
Yamashita would be the bait. He was the end point on the trail of bodies Tomita had strung across the continent. Yamashita had cast Tomita out of the Konoe-tai. He had been both father figure and sensei to Tomita. And the one who had rejected him. Tomita had been searching for him ever since he got to this country. Now we could dangle Yamashita in front of Tomita as bait. We knew the killer was close, biding his time. He was a predator, slowly circling in the murk, just out of sight.
Tomita needed to be a
ttracted, I urged Yamashita, not just tracked. We would entice him to come to us. The hunt would become a seduction, made alluring by the scent of blood.
Yamashita heard out my proposition as if I were talking about a trip to the country.
“There is a logic in this, Burke,” Yamashita said, nodding his head. “There is also no real trick to being the goat.” He mused about this for a moment. Then those night-dark eyes bored into me. “The trick, of course, is being the goat that survives.”
Which, in retrospect, is when my training really began.
My teacher had agreed to be the bait almost eagerly. There was, after all, honor involved. But he was skeptical about my assurances of safety, despite the fact that I thought that Micky would back us up. All bait, Yamashita said, can be eaten if the trap fails. So can the hunters. As a result, he treated our role in the plan as if either of us might really have to fight Tomita. “It is what he wants, after all, Burke.”And so he had exacted a price from me. Yamashita thought that he would make me practice with him as he prepared for what he thought of as the inevitable confrontation with Tomita. “It will add some variety to your training,” he commented wryly.
It had only been a few hours since that statement, and, as we sat there on the porch, I was sore in all the ways familiar to me from decades of martial arts training. The only difference was that now I hurt everywhere all at once. The tiny muscles in my feet ached. My stomach muscles spasmed involuntarily in certain positions. And I was tired.
“He hunts at night, this one,” the master intoned. “He uses the body’s rhythm as a weapon. The murders occur in the dark, when our ki, our vital energy, is ebbing.”
I thought about the killings. All nocturnal. Most well after midnight. The quiet time, the small hours when infants awake for comfort, when sleep cycles shift. The time when the old and the ill and the weak let life slip away and are folded into oblivion.
“We will need to work on rhythms, Burke. You will need to be here all through the training.” It was a statement, not a question. The link between sensei and student was too strong for doubt. In some ways, it was a return to the balance of our former relationship. Yamashita sat comfortably, a dark blue training uniform stretched over his thick torso, squinting out into the garden as he spoke.
I moved gingerly, and he looked at me. His eyes were flat. “Are you tired? You will be more so. We will work more on your meditation. It will help with the fatigue.”
Yamashita had a hard time getting out of the role of instructor. Even though this training was really for him, he insisted on talking like it was something he was doing for me. I had ceased to notice it and just nodded wearily in resignation.
“Physically, there is little room for improvement. But your skills . . . “ he paused as if internally rating the catalogue of my ability. He smiled tightly, as if to himself. Small sparrows sputtered in the waterfall’s pond, scattering droplets in a fine spray. “You are a good student, Professor. Among my best. At each step, you have struggled, but you persevere. I like that.”
I wasn’t sure what he liked more about me: the fact that I had to struggle or the fact that I eventually learned much of what he taught me. It was typical of him. With Yamashita, grading, like everything else, is a bit different from that of other arts. Martial artists talk about rank and belts and promotion. Yamashita Sensei uses a far older system. We don’t wear colored belts. Some of the newer students come with their black belts wrapped around them under the hakama like a security blanket. Eventually, we all stop wearing them. It is not just that the belts don’t make you feel secure in his dojo. It’s that they are revealed as totally irrelevant.
In Yamashita’s dojo there are seven different stages, ranging from kirigami, or initiate, to the level where the student has mastered the complete syllabus of the art, known as menkyo-kaiden. Each level is not really a promotion, however. It’s just an acknowledgment that you can do some things and are ready to try some more. It doesn’t signal an end to training; there is no such thing. Only the invitation to learn more.
So when Yamashita paused and smiled, I was sure he was mentally listing my faults and reliving my past struggles, all as a preparation for judging whether I could follow him further.
“This, I think, will be hard for you.” He emerged from his interior reflection and focused on me. The sounds of the world outside were muted and far away. As he spoke, they faded further, or his words swelled despite their quiet tone, so that all I could focus on was his teaching.
“It requires a total focus on the struggle. An absence of compassion. I have watched you for years. You are a good man. This type of concentration and ruthlessness are hard for you. But it would be hard for any of us. And yet, very necessary.
“The evil to be faced . . .” He inhaled suddenly as if being confronted with it directly for the first time “. . . is powerful.”
As he talked, he joined his hands and whispered a word. I saw the fingers knit. “Rin” he intoned.
I sat up a bit straighter.
“It will be as relentless as fire, Burke.”
Again the pause and a new configuration of the hands. The mantra was barely audible: “Pyo.”
His breath was cadenced. His body grew still, dense with presence, like a rock in his garden.
A new movement and the hissed word: “Toh.”
“All techniques are needed to defeat this demon. All that the body can bear.” The chant and the hand gestures continued.
Sho.
“But there is more to learn.”
Kai.
“The spirit must be focused.”
“Jin.”
“There cannot be the least gap in concentration.”
Retsu.
“The luxury of mercy does not exist.”
Zai.
“Or fear.”
Zen.
“Or doubt.”
I had seen this before. The hypnotic chant and the fluid knotting of the fingers. The breath control. Kuji-no-in is an ancient summoning of power. The mudra hand gestures spring from Tantric Buddhism, a ritual in which the “seals” of the gestures have been repeated over centuries to forge a link between body and spirit. The chanted mantra have echoed along dark corridors of the warrior past. They are still used in some schools of the old style as a meditation device. But with Yamashita it was something more.
He quietly began again, and I felt my fingers begin the flow in imitation of my master. This time, it was the full ritual. For each mudra, the chanted word is exhaled for eighty-one breaths. Each mantra has a name: the Single Point, the Inner Binding, the Wisdom Fist. Each is linked to a lesson: the channeling of ki, control, concentration.
The mind’s rhythm rises and falls with the breath. The hands weave their spell. The words are murmured in the still air, small sounds that fill the space around you.
With the ritual of the ninth gesture, known as jo-in, completed, Yamashita lit a candle and drew paper and brush to his side. He beckoned me to approach him.
His voice seemed to come from deep inside him, from a place impossibly remote.
“Thus we intone the kuji-in. For strength. Compassion. Courage. This you have been taught.”
I bowed formally to him. My muscles protested, but it was a curious, muffled sensation, more like a faint message from another place.
“There is yet the ju-in, a tenth seal, Burke. Not many know of it. Not many have the need. I will show you the character.”
He brushed the dark, balanced strokes of an accomplished calligrapher on the small piece of paper. “Look at it,” he ordered me, pointing at what he had written. “Do you recognize it?”
“Yes, Sensei,” I whispered. He raised a hand.
“Do not say it.” Then he reached out for my hand. “Trace its lines. Learn it.”
I did as I was bid, tracing the lines. Yamashita ensured that my finger moved in the correct directions in the correct sequence. Our hands moved together, over and over again until I was sure.
&n
bsp; “Now,” he said, “the kuji-kiri.” The cutting with kuji. He raised his hands and, for each of the nine gestures, made a slash in the air in front of him, as if cutting up space. “Four vertical lines,” he instructed. “Five horizontal. In the center, to-in.”
He showed me how to make the hand shape of the tenth seal and, with my hands in that configuration, how to cut at the air, tracing the character in the center of the lines that, invisible, quivered with power and reality nonetheless.
It was the warrior’s grid. A power symbol And in the middle, ju-in, the tenth seal, called to-in. The Sword Seal.
Only then did Yamashita utter the mantra that accompanied it. He voiced it forcefully, as if pushing against the fabric of the atmosphere. I heard it and repeated.
It was an ancient word, a complex word, jumbled in the passage from Sanskrit to Chinese to Japanese, but whose meaning was clear and sharp: the destruction of evil.
“How’s Art?” I asked Micky wearily. I could hear the surge of my blood in the phone receiver.
“The same,” he said. “Hanging on.”
“That’s something, at least.” I got a grunt. “Any new leads?” It wasn’t a particularly animated conversation.
“We’re workin’ on it. I shook your pal Bobby Kay’s tree a bit.”
“Anything there?”
I could see the shrug, even over the phone line. “Something stinks there, but I don’t have anything solid.” Then he switched gears. “What are you up to? I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“I know,” I apologized. “Sorry. I got involved with something with Yamashita Sensei.” I tried to sound sincere, but it was an effort holding a conversation. Yamashita had worked me ruthlessly for the rest of the day. I was sitting in one of the chairs in his living room upstairs. It was a comfortable seat. And it was good to talk. But some of the small muscles in my left hand were spasming. You could see them jump in the lamplight. My brain felt pulled in two directions.
I hadn’t really told Micky about my scheme yet. I wanted to ease him into it. So I let him know that Yamashita wanted me to do some special intensive training with him. But that was all.