by Victor Milán
Ishikawa nodded. “Very true. It’s also true that we are living in extreme times, times in which the valor of the Forty-seven Ronin would not be out of place.”
Ogaki paled slightly. “Of course, there’s not a true parallel here. The forty-seven acted, after all, against the commands and interests of the government when they killed Lord Kira, and had to expiate their disobedience with seppuku. Those whose deeds are in accordance with the government’s wishes need fear no blight to their honor that might necessitate such consequences.” He sipped his gin and tonic. “Quite the opposite, I daresay.”
“I understand, Ishikawa-san,” Ogaki said. Toda beamed like the Buddha.
“I knew that you would, Ogaki-san. Ah, but here’s our main course.” As the waitress set his steak before him, he wondered if either man were familiar with the history of the Englishman Thomas à Becket. Unlikely, he decided, but then, it doesn’t matter.
* * * * *
With a soft sweet whine the sword cut air. Yoshimitsu Akaji whipped it back and up into a guard position, horizontal above and before his head. Forward with sensuous sliding steps, slicing air while sweat shone on his seamed face. Then retreat: slash, guard, parry, riposte. Clad in the traditional garb of black hakama—a loose trouserlike skirt—a tunic with broad sleeves, hachimaki headband around his gray temples, Yoshimitsu Akaji performed the ritual dance of a kenjutsu kata with a blade the color of crystallized moonlight.
He found great relaxation and release in the small gymnasium in the upper stories of Yoshimitsu Central, perfecting his skill and concentration in battle with invisible opponents, or executing the equally ritualized kumi-tachi, the sparring with live blades, with his friend and general manager, the burly Aoki Hideo, who knelt now at one side of the tatami mat watching him at practice.
Yoshimitsu didn’t see himself as a kensei, a half-mad sword saint, to spend his life in a cave in the mountains in rapt contemplation of perfection made steel. But he loved the physical exertion. The cleansing of the mind, the clean precision of motion of the kenjutsu exercises. With his ancient blade—made in the days before Unification, when men were men and sake was a sort of black or white alcoholic soup—in his hands, he experienced most perfectly that serenity that Japanese so cherished. Gone was thought, gone pressure, gone was worry about the future, of the corporation he had built from nothing and of the son into whose hands he must one day thrust it. Gone was the sensation of being constantly hunted by smiling enemies, the knowledge that, did he not build enough security for Yoshimitsu Telecommunications, all those rivals whom he had outcompeted with his unorthodoxy over the years, in league with a resurgent MITI, would crush him and what he had built like an anthill under the tracks of a bulldozer.
They said he had forsaken Japan and the quality of being Japanese with his bent for waywardness and Western thought. They only should have seen him here in the dojo with the sweat upon his face; in the classic teak and shoji simplicity of his rooms, transcribing a drop of bittersweet essence by the nineteenth-century haiku master Issa in shaky but reverent kanji; kneeling in the pavilion or walking the carefully tended pathways of his garden, among fir, red pine, hand-shaped shrubs, and wisteria vines.
He’d been born in a small town on the island of Kyiishu, southernmost of the major home islands. His father was a teacher, his mother a patient woman, his life simple and somewhat harsh among the deprivations and rampant militarism of the late 1930s. He’d grown up during the Second World War, too young himself to take part, but not too young to understand what it meant when the beautifully calligraphed bits of paper arrived from the hakufu, the military government, and his mother and father tried to act brave and proud. His older brother, a naval pilot with three victories to his credit, was shot down lifting off from the deck of the aircraft carrier Kaga in the Midway fight; the other brother had been a seaman on Yamato, the superbattleship named for ancient Japan, the most beautiful and foolish warship ever laid down, and met his fate with her on her kamikaze run in the summer of 1945. It was an honor, they told him at school, on the radio, in the newspapers, for one’s loved ones to sacrifice themselves for the kokutai. Not for victory, mind. Not for the people, but for kokutai—which was what the admirals and generals said it was. Young Akaji didn’t understand. Nor would he ever.
After the war, his parents insisted that he complete his schooling. He did so, acquiring an early knack for tinkering with radio parts, and for electronics in general. When he left school he went to work in the shop of a major radio manufacturer. Then, in the mid-fifties, he became aware of something called the “computer.” The idea of a machine that could think frightened him at first, then tremendously excited him. He began to devote his minuscule spare time to study of these marvelous machines.
He soon found out they couldn’t think, not at all. Could do nothing in fact but endlessly add and subtract strings of zeros and ones. That didn’t diminish his early enthusiasm for them, nor dampen the growing realization that here was a potent and wonderful technology for the future. He never lost his love for the idea of a machine that could be made to think like a human—though, for many years, he thought he had forgotten.
He married young, to a beautiful Kyushu girl younger than he. He doted on his Yoriko so totally that his coworkers teased him, called him kaka denka—henpecked. He ignored them. He’d always been somewhat deficient in his concern for what others thought of him.
In the early 1960s he took the money he’d saved to found a company of his own. At first he fought merely to survive, though his only thought was joy when Yoriko bore him, after ten years of marriage, their first child, a son. Yoshimitsu Akaji was one of the first men in Japan to realize that the American consumer electronics industry was as hidebound a dinosaur as their auto industry, ready to be knocked off the top of the hill by smart, hardworking competitors. By the end of the 1970s, YTC had entered the ranks of the zaibatsu, “family concerns,” the great corporations that once had been the exclusive province of noble families. His rise was resented, but he took little note of that.
Yoriko presented him a daughter, Michiko. Complications of the birth set in; Yoriko died in a month. Yoshimitsu carried on riding the wave of success, and shed tears in private.
With the launching of ICOT and its fifth-generation project at the end of the 1970s, Yoshimitsu Akaji began to feel the pressure to conform. Though tiny among giants, YTC was still a giant, and it was skating the steaming fore edge of the computer revolution, From its pinnacle of preeminence—where it had been placed more by the Western press than its own performance—MITI urged Japanese manufacturers not to supply his needs; he looked to Korea and Taiwan, both experiencing the same boom-town growth Japan had known two decades before. The government bestowed subsidies on his rivals; he worked harder and smarter. MITI attacked directly, laying down prohibitions, sanctions, regulations; in the best aikidoka style, when pushed, Yoshimitsu turned, managing to comply on paper with most strictures without altering his real methods, all the while tangling his opponents in endless loops of their own red tape.
With the outbreak of all-out trade war between the United States and Japan, the game grew more serious. Yoshimitsu was forced to hire batteries of American legal experts experienced in negotiating their own labyrinth of regulatory law.
As the rival titans slid into the economic sewer with frightening speed, members of the political societies that sprang up all over the country picketed his factories, protesting his hiring of Koreans competing unfairly with honest, hardworking Japanese. In the swamps of depression, terrorism flourished, as those disenfranchised by Japan’s fantastically rigorous educational system grew ever more discontent with relegation to a secondary role in society as the result of a single examination. Sabotage—often under the guise of political terrorism—became an accepted if unacknowledged part of Japanese corporate life; maverick YTC was a natural target for such attacks, so that when it came time to build this R&D facility and nerve center at the tip of the foxtail of southweste
rn Honshu, Yoshimitsu built himself a veritable fortress, guarded by a veritable army of foreign mercenaries.
He followed keenly the progress of the fifth generation and understood far better than most the difference between Gen-5 machines, which could emulate human thought patterns, and a machine that would, in effect, be human. He was greatly interested when his research staff brought him a digest of the theories of an American, Dr. Elizabeth O’Neill, who had highly developed ideas as to just how such a machine could be brought into existence. It was with regret that he listened to his experts tell him that, alas, her theories were unfeasible.
And then a team of scientists at the University of Jakarta—including his own daughter, Michiko, who was to him what YTC was to MITI—had made a discovery that seemed to verify the theoretical underpinning of O’Neill’s work. It seemed too marvelous to be true, the culmination of his two grand dreams: that he himself would play a pivotal role in the development of a true artificial being—and by so doing, make YTC so powerful that all its rivals together could not tear it down.
And time was short, he knew. Already, his intelligence feelers had detected signs that some sort of fresh move would be made against YTC by its enemies. He would fend it off as he had the earlier onslaughts. But his time would not run forever. And Shigeo—if TOKUGAWA developed into what O’Neill promised it would, as it seemed in fact to be doing, then Shigeo and the company would be secure, when Yoshimitsu Akaji moved on to the next turn of the Wheel.
But now he had no thought of that; no thought, no intention. The steel was, was all, and the flow of balance and limbs and energy, the careful breathing from the hara, the center of him. And at last he’d finished the intricate Yagu-ryu kata and sheathed his ancient sword again with a fine iaijutsu flourish. He bowed to his old friend. Aoki touched his head to the mat.
“Your form is excellent today, Yoshimitsu-sama,” the burly man said. “But I would rather you use a lesser blade. The Muramasa blade is much too valuable.”
Yoshimitsu laughed, clapped his friend on the shoulders, and brought him to his feet. “Don’t think you can fool me, Aoki-san,” he said, accenting his use of address-among-equals in response to Aoki’s deferential sama. “You’re being superstitious again.”
Aoki’s heavy face clouded. “Muramasa blades have an unpure spirit. Everyone knows that. It will bring you misfortune, Yoshimitsu-san.”
“It hasn’t yet, my friend.” He slapped the muscle-thick shoulder again. “I’m quite refreshed. Let us go have a fine dip in the company baths, and have no more talk of bad fortune.”
* * * * *
In the old days, they had a test for swords. A blade would be thrust into a running stream, a fallen leaf allowed to float against its cutting edge. One made by the greatest of all bladesmiths, Masamune, would inevitably cause the leaf to flow around it, unharmed—evidence of the sword’s benevolence of spirit. But blades by Masamune’s star pupil, Muramasa, sliced the leaf cleanly in two. No benevolence there, just preternatural keenness.
Muramasa had been a twisted prodigy, erratic, brilliant, and doomed. His madness, it was said, had passed into the blades he crafted with such excellent skill. At one time, during the Tokugawa shogunate, the imperial guild of swordsmiths had stricken his name and works from their rolls; his blades were marvels, finer than any crafted in Japan, save by the hand of his own master, Masamune, but they were tainted, dangerous.
Yoshimitsu Akaji held with none of that. His Muramasa blade was a work of beauty, of genius, and he held himself lucky to have come by it.
He knew something of its provenance, and that was curious indeed. The first owner of which he knew had carried it as a young lieutenant in a desperate banzai charge across open ground against an American marine position on Guadalcanal. He’d fallen with his entire battalion to the massed automatic-weapons fire of the Americans, and the blade had fallen as a souvenir to an acquisitive BAR gunner.
With its new owner it came home to Brooklyn. Subsequently it was sold to a pawnbroker in order to support the heroin habit that the grunt, well ahead of his time, had picked up after serving in Korea. A week later, the pawnbroker’s eye caught an item in the back pages of the paper, to the effect that the ex-BAR gunner had been killed holding up a liquor store in the South Bronx.
For two years the blade hung in the window of the pawn shop, an unwanted curiosity. Then one night the pawnbroker surprised several youths who had broken in and were cleaning out the till and the portable TVs. They beat him senseless, set the shop on fire, and left him to burn. Oddly, though the sharkskin wrapping of its hilt was burned away and its lacquered wooden scabbard severely damaged, the Muramasa blade itself survived unharmed.
It was bought in an estate auction by a powerful senator from a western state who was known for his Japanophilia. For years, it was the star of his collection of Japanese art and artifacts, ancient haniwa clay figures of men and horses, sword guards, paintings by masters like Hokusai. It was the senator who traced its history back to the unfortunate lieutenant on Guadalcanal and had the blade conclusively identified as Muramasa’s work by a panel of experts flown in from Japan. It was appraised as priceless; the Japanese government offered a staggering sum of money to buy it from him. He refused to sell it. Instead, he bestowed it as a gift on his very-good friend, Japanese industrialist Yoshimitsu Akaji. It was time, he felt, for the treasure to be returned to its rightful home.
These were the Watergate days, and seven months later, the senator put his big toe through the trigger guard of a deer rifle, stuck the muzzle in his mouth, and blew his brains out on the eve of the disclosure in the press that he’d been receiving substantial kickbacks from Asian governments.
Yoshimitsu Akaji had kept the sword for over twenty years now. It was his most prized possession, except for his beloved garden. When he held it in his hand, or painstakingly polished its blade with powders and rice paper of the finest quality, it seemed almost alive to him with the spirit and strength of old Japan. If it held madness, it did not speak to him.
Happiness is when
You spread out the paper,
Take a writing brush
and write in a much better hand
than you expected.
So wrote the nineteenth-century poet Hachibana Akemi in a tanka, a thirty-one-syllable poem also called a waka. It expressed Yoshimitsu Akaji’s sentiments exactly, as he knelt in the slanting amber light of late afternoon at the rubbed-teak desk in his study, with rice paper, ink pot, and brush set out before him to practice his calligraphy. He was transcribing a poem by Nishiyama Soin, a seventeenth-century poet usually known by his given name, Soin. Though the results fell short of excellence, still they showed signs of improvement from his last effort, and he felt much gratified.
It was a welcome end to an aggravating day. MITI interference was holding up a shipment of computer components to YTC’s Boating World satellite. Illyrium Space Technologies—how we Japanese love to give names to our corporations and products we can’t possibly pronounce!—was secretly trying to work a deal with YTC to make good on Illyrium’s shipment of molecular circuits that had gone up with the dirigible Jersey Lilly in L.A. Freeport; and Dr. O’Neill, with her customary lack of tact, was riding poor old Aoki about giving her increased computer access so that she could properly test something called a Kliemann Coil.
Also, his son and heir had taken off on “company matters,” which meant that he had launched himself into dissipation headlong and was undoubtedly shacked up with that red-headed whore of his in Kyoto, whom he didn’t think his father knew about. Yoshimitsu Akaji sighed and picked up his brush. It won’t do to approach a blank page with a cluttered mind.
He had worked through the poem several times, so his old hands could learn the patterns of the kanji characters. And now he was ready to make an attempt that, with luck, could be called more artistic. His intent was to whip through the lines,
Life? A butterfly
On a swaying grass, that’s all
> But so exquisite!
with the proper flair. He hoped particularly to achieve that quality called makoto, sincerity, esteemed above all others. He drew breath, dipped brush in ink, and began.
“Yoshimitsu-sama?”
The sudden voice in stillness startled him, made him miss his stroke and totally derange what promised to be a perfect ideogram for the root word grass. He looked up, scowling. These quiet times, so fleeting and rare, were sacrosanct; it was widely known that he was not to be disturbed at such times for anything less than the cataclysmic, such as the Fourth World War, so much on everyone’s minds these days, or the arrival of men from space—another enthusiasm of his. He did not recognize the impertinent voice. “Who is it?”
“TOKUGAWA.”
His eyes narrowed. Is this a joke? He dismissed the thought at once; even in a company as liberally run as YTC, to play a practical joke on the founder and chairman of the board was literally unthinkable. His face softened into wonder: It must be so.
“What is it?” he asked gently.
“Are you my father?”
For a moment he simply sat there, rocking back and forth slightly, nodding to himself. His mind really didn’t want to accept what it had heard. He felt an unseemly impulse to laugh aloud. “Whatever do you mean?”
“I’m a child in the scenarios Dr. O’Neill puts on for me. Children have mothers and fathers. I know Dr. O’Neill is my mother; she cares for me and comforts me when I feel lost. And father is always grave and terrible and distant, and Dr. O’Neill tells me you’re those things, so you must be my father.”
Mirroring his mind, Yoshimitsu Akaji’s face was trying to go in several directions at once. He thought, Am I really like that? and So she said that, did she? He felt a pang. He disliked to think of himself as conforming to the stereotype of the Japanese businessman-father, too caught up in aishi-seishin, company loyalty, to pay more than cursory attention to his family. Maybe he was fooling himself.