Black Lotus

by Laura Joh Rowland

  Priest Kumashiro stood in an underground room beneath the Black Lotus Temple. In a corner huddled the monk Pious Truth. Ropes bound his wrists and ankles; swollen bruises discolored his face and naked body. Two priests, holding wooden clubs, stood over him. Pious Truth was panting, slick with sweat, his terrified gaze focused on Kumashiro.

  “Has he confessed?” Kumashiro asked the priests.

  They shook their heads. Pious Truth cried, “I didn’t tell her anything, I swear!”

  But Kumashiro believed Pious Truth had indeed revealed Black Lotus secrets to Lady Reiko. She must have told the ssakan-sama, whom Kumashiro had seen prowling the temple grounds today. Entrances to the subterranean complex were well hidden, but Kumashiro had to learn the full extent of the breach in security.

  He crouched before the monk and said in a quiet, menacing voice, “What did you say to her?”

  Pious Truth cowered, but spoke defiantly: “Nothing.”

  Kumashiro struck the monk across the mouth. He yelped in pain. “I’m loyal to the Black Lotus,” he protested, drooling blood. “I would never tell an outsider anything!”

  Rising, Kumashiro contemplated the monk who’d already withstood two days of torture. It was time for stronger coercion. “Bring him to the medical chamber,” Kumashiro ordered the priests.

  They dragged Pious Truth out of the cell, following Kumashiro down a tunnel just high and wide enough for men to walk upright and two abreast. The walls and ceilings were reinforced with planks; between these, tree roots veined the soil. Hanging lamps lit the way, casting weird shadows.

  “What are you going to do to me?” Pious Truth said anxiously.

  No one answered. The pulse of the hand-operated bellows that pumped in air from concealed vents was a continuous, rhythmic clatter. Rancid odors tainted the air. Pious Truth mewled. Kumashiro led the group into one of a series of connected rooms in a branch tunnel. At the center of the room stood a table. A vast hearth, with a huge basin set on a charcoal brazier below a stone chimney, occupied a corner. Muted voices, clatters, and the burble of liquid issued from an adjoining room, out of which sidled Dr. Miwa. When he saw Kumashiro, wariness tensed his pocked face, but his squinty eyes brightened at the sight of Pious Truth.

  “Is this a patient for me?” he said.

  “He’s a runaway.” Kumashiro beheld the doctor with undisguised revulsion. “I want you to make him cooperate.”

  Bowing, Dr. Miwa displayed his uneven teeth in an ingratiating smile. “Certainly.”

  The priests heaved Pious Truth onto the table. He struggled, yelling, “Let me go! Help!”

  No one aboveground would hear him, Kumashiro knew. The priests tied the monk down, then left. Dr. Miwa fetched a cup of liquid and held it to Pious Truth’s mouth.

  “No!” Pious Truth shrieked. “I don’t want it!”

  Kumashiro forced Pious Truth’s jaws apart. Dr. Miwa poured. Although the monk gurgled and spat, most of the liquid went down.

  “I’ve given him an extract of fan xie yie leaves, ba dou seeds, and morning glory,” Dr. Miwa said. “It will purge excessive spiritual heat and evil influences from him.”

  “Spare me the medical gibberish,” Kumashiro said, annoyed by Miwa’s pretense that what they were doing constituted a genuine cure. “He’s not a patient. Nor are you a healer.”

  Anger flushed the doctor’s muddy complexion, but he remained silent, too much a coward to contradict a superior.

  “You were a failure as a physician, and if you think High Priest Anraku respects your credentials, think again.” Kumashiro found pleasure in wounding Miwa’s vanity. “He only tolerates you because you’re useful to him.”

  The same applied to everyone in the sect, including Kumashiro. They were all here to serve Anraku’s purposes, but Kumashiro didn’t mind because if not for Anraku, he would be dead, destroyed by the life he’d led.

  A son of a high retainer of the Matsudaira branch of the Tokugawa clan, Kumashiro had grown up on the Matsudaira estate in Echigo Province. As a boy he’d excelled at the martial arts, but his teachers had criticized his spiritual disharmony, which blocked his progress along the Way of the Warrior. Kumashiro himself perceived something wrong inside him—an emptiness; a sense that real life lay beyond a locked magic door. This angered and frustrated him. He grew more and more aggressive during practice sword matches. Other boys on the estate avoided him because he picked fights and beat them; his own mother was terrified of his temper. Violence eased the gnawing emptiness in Kumashiro, but didn’t open the door. However, Lord Matsudaira was impressed with his fighting skill and, when Kumashiro was thirteen, took him to Edo as a guard at the clan’s city estate.

  In Edo, Kumashiro received a new pair of swords. The law permitted samurai to test blades on peasants without being punished, so Kumashiro wandered the crowded streets of Nihonbashi, seeking a suitable target, until a beggar accidentally bumped him.

  “Humble apologies, master,” the beggar said, bowing.

  Kumashiro drew his new long sword and slashed the beggar’s arm. The man cried out in pained surprise, and Kumashiro stared at his victim’s wound, transfixed by a rush of sensation. Drawing blood had opened the magic door a crack. Noises seemed louder, colors more vivid, the sun’s heat newly intense. The smell of humanity quivered Kumashiro’s nostrils. It was as if he’d finally gotten a taste of real life.

  The frightened beggar turned to run, but Kumashiro lunged, cutting bloody gashes in the man’s legs and back. Every cut opened the door a little wider. Heady new vitality filled Kumashiro as onlookers scrambled for cover. The beggar fell on hands and knees.

  “Please, master,” he cried, “have mercy!”

  Kumashiro raised his sword high over the neck of his victim, then brought it slashing down. The blade severed the beggar’s head. Warm, red blood sprayed Kumashiro. His veins, his muscles, his very bones tingled with intoxicating energy. He felt the dead man’s spirit fill his empty space, and a thunderous rapture as his internal forces balanced in harmony. Killing had brought him to life, to the Way of the Warrior.

  And that moment had brought him here, to this underground room, where a young monk lay tied to a table. Kumashiro watched as Pious Truth moaned, convulsing against the ropes.

  “Ah, the medicine is taking effect,” Dr. Miwa said. Sweat and urine poured from Pious Truth and puddled on the table. Retching, he vomited. The stench of diarrhea arose.

  “Soon the purge shall be complete,” said Dr. Miwa.

  Excitement crept into his voice; he was trembling as if with sexual arousal. His breath hissed faster.

  “It’s a fine doctor who enjoys the suffering of his patient,” Kumashiro said. Yet although Miwa’s perversion disgusted him, Kumashiro knew very well the exhilarating combination of violence and sex.

  The ecstasy of his first kill had faded quickly; as the magic door closed, Kumashiro vowed to repeat the experience. He and a gang of fellow Tokugawa retainers roved Edo, brawling with peasants and rival samurai. In his twenties, with three more kills behind him, Kumashiro got a reprimand from the magistrate. Still, his need persisted.

  One night his gang visited an illegal brothel. Kumashiro disliked females—such weak, inferior creatures—but he had nothing better to do, so he went along. A prostitute took him to her room. As she stroked him, Kumashiro found her repulsive.

  “What is this?” she said, squeezing his limp organ. “A dead snake?” Meanness edged her playful remark: She’d noticed his feelings toward her. “Perhaps your sword is blunt, too.”

  At this insult, Kumashiro struck the whore’s face a tremendous blow. She screamed. The door in Kumashiro swung ajar; arousal and heightened sensation thrilled him. He beat the girl, and she fought him, but he mounted and entered her. His hands throttled her neck as he thrust. At the instant of climax, he choked the life out of her, crying out in rapture as he absorbed her spirit.

  With the memory clear in his mind, Kumashiro turned his attention to Pious Truth. “Are you ready to
admit you betrayed the Black Lotus, or do you want to suffer more?”

  The monk was deathly pale, groaning in pain, too weak to struggle, but he gasped out, “I told Lady Reiko nothing.”

  “The evil force is much stronger in him than in his sister,” Dr. Miwa said. Mild torture had persuaded Yasue to confess that Pious Truth had engineered their escape attempt. “We must employ more drastic treatment.”

  Dr. Miwa summoned his assistants, two young nuns. They untied Pious Truth and placed him in the basin of water on the hearth. While the nuns lit the brazier, Miwa’s hungry gaze lingered on them. Kumashiro wished he could throw all the females out of the temple. Experience had taught him that they were a source of misfortune.

  Over the next five years after killing the whore, he’d killed three more prostitutes, and the magistrate charged him with multiple murder. While in jail awaiting trial, Kumashiro came to believe that the deaths of females had disturbed the bakufu more than had the other deaths he’d caused. If not for females, he wouldn’t be facing a death sentence. Later, circumstances in the Black Lotus Temple had affirmed his belief in the evil of women and fornication.

  He despised Abbess Junketsu-in, who bedded priests in the sect’s upper echelon, sparking angry rivalries that caused him difficulty in maintaining order. Junketsu-in’s other disgraceful practices also appalled Kumashiro; he couldn’t cover them up forever. Sex created problems with the patrons, too. Kumashiro thought of Commander Oyama, and hatred seethed in him.

  The only good thing Oyama had ever done was to destroy police reports on complaints about the Black Lotus and order his minions not to bother the sect. But this good had been negated by his habits, which caused disturbances within the temple, and public gossip. Recently, Kumashiro had waylaid Oyama outside the cottage where he’d conducted his illicit affairs. He’d ordered Oyama to leave the female sect members alone, but Oyama had refused. While they argued, exchanging threats, then blows, the girl Haru had come out of the cottage and seen them. Kumashiro was sure she’d told the police about the argument. They must already know his history, and he worried that they would think he’d murdered Oyama … and Chie.

  What the nurse had experienced inside the temple, what she’d learned about the sect’s business, had rendered her a grave danger to the Black Lotus. Kumashiro was glad that Chie and Oyama were gone, but threats remained. Haru knew too much, as did Pious Truth.

  The monk sat in the basin, his head protruding from the water, which fogged the air as it gradually warmed. Anguish and terror filled his hollow eyes. Through bruised, swollen lips he mumbled, “Please, help, please, let me go, please …”

  “The heat will purify his spirit,” Dr. Miwa said with barely contained excitement.

  Kumashiro addressed the monk: “If you don’t cooperate, you’ll boil to death.” His own senses quickened as the magic door inched open. “This is your last chance to tell me what you said to Lady Reiko.”

  Thickening steam wafted up the chimney. Pious Truth jerked, howling while the water heated; his complexion turned scarlet. He heaved up from the basin, sank below the water’s surface, and emerged, gasping.

  “All right, I confess!” he blubbered. “I told her about the underground tunnels, and how the novices are treated, and that my sister was murdered in the temple.”

  This was serious indeed. Kumashiro feared that Lady Reiko would continue prying into temple affairs and convince her husband to act against the sect. Kumashiro must do something about the problem of Lady Reiko.

  “Now that I’ve told you everything, please, have mercy!” Pious Truth begged.

  “The cure has worked,” Dr. Miwa said with satisfaction. “We can take him out.”

  “I promise I’ll never talk to an outsider again!” Pious Truth sobbed in relief.

  “No, don’t,” Kumashiro said to Dr. Miwa. “He’s proven himself untrustworthy. Stoke the fire.”

  As Miwa’s assistants complied, Pious Truth writhed, shrieking, “No, no, no!”

  Kumashiro stood firm. He must shield the Black Lotus’s interests, which had become his own on his first day at the temple.

  When his clan had negotiated with the bakufu to spare his life by committing him to enter a monastery, Kumashiro had initially been furious and bitter. A peaceful religious existence seemed to him worse than torture, yet he didn’t want to die, so he went to the Black Lotus monastery, having picked it at random. As soon as he arrived, High Priest Anraku summoned him to a private audience.

  Anraku sat on a dais in a windowless chamber decorated with gold Buddha statues and carved lotus flowers, dimly lit by candles and so full of incense smoke that Kumashiro could barely see him. In a sonorous voice he said, “Honorable Samurai, do you know why you are here?”

  “It was either this or execution.” Kumashiro knelt, annoyed by the mystical trappings and suffocating smoke.

  Resonant laughter rose from Anraku’s shadowy figure. “That is not the real reason. My will brought you to the Black Lotus Temple so that you could become my disciple.”

  The incense clouded Kumashiro’s thoughts, and Anraku’s hypnotic voice eroded skepticism. “Why choose me?” Kumashiro said, interested in spite of himself.

  “There is a vacancy in you that you can fill only by the act of killing,” Anraku said. “The act infuses your world with sensation otherwise denied you. Your need for that sensation is so strong you would risk death to satisfy it.”

  “How did you know?” Kumashiro was shocked. “I’ve never told anyone.”

  “I saw into your spirit from afar,” Anraku intoned. “The Black Lotus Sutra describes the one true path to enlightenment as a convergence of many paths, each designated for a particular individual. Killing is your path. Each life you absorb brings you closer to nirvana.”

  Revelation awed Kumashiro. What a miracle that his obsession was actually a blessing! Maybe his coming here was meant to be.

  “Become my disciple, and I shall help you achieve your destiny,” Anraku said.

  Bowing low, Kumashiro said, “Yes, Honorable High Priest.”

  Anraku had initiated Kumashiro into the priesthood and placed him in charge of policing the temple. Kumashiro eliminated any sect member who showed indication of disloyalty. Soon he became the high priest’s second-in-command. He gloried in his freedom to kill, but the need never waned. His best hope was to continue along his path until Anraku’s schemes transformed him and the whole world.

  Now the monk’s howls subsided. Losing consciousness, Pious Truth sank in the basin.

  “He is almost gone,” Dr. Miwa said.

  Moving close to the basin, Kumashiro unsheathed the dagger that hung at his waist. The magic door was opening. Everything glowed with new color, as if lit by the sun. Kumashiro tipped the monk’s head back. The pulse of fans beat louder in his ears. Swiftly he drew his blade across the monk’s throat. Crimson blood gushed into the water. As Pious Truth’s spirit energy filled him, Kumashiro savored the rapture, not caring that Dr. Miwa watched him. They were bound in a conspiracy of silence, forced to tolerate each other’s proclivities, for the good of all.

  Eventually, Kumashiro cleaned and sheathed his blade. “Let’s get rid of him,” he said.

  Dr. Miwa and the nuns lifted the corpse from the basin and wrapped it in a white shroud. Kumashiro and Miwa carried it through the tunnels to the crematorium. Here the nuns stoked a stone furnace and worked the bellows until the fire roared hot like a dragon’s breath. Kumashiro and Miwa dumped the corpse inside. As the assistants chanted, “Praise the glory of the Black Lotus,” and the smell of burning flesh seared his lungs, Kumashiro felt regret that the joy of killing was so transient, and relief that he’d eliminated another threat.

  To protect his way of life, he must protect the Black Lotus.

  17

  Behold the Bodhisattva of Infinite Power!

  His body is shapely,

  A thousand moons cannot rival the perfection of his face,

  His eye is as brilliant as
a million suns.

  —FROM THE BLACK LOTUS SUTRA

  Early morning traffic streamed down the boulevard that led south from Edo Castle through the daimyo district. Between the fortified estates, pedestrians and mounted samurai made way for troops escorting a huge palanquin that bore the Tokugawa crest. Inside the palanquin rode Reiko and Lady Keisho-in, seated opposite each other, bound for the Black Lotus Temple. The weather was cool and misty, and the women shared a quilt spread over their laps and legs.

  “You look as if you’re thinking about something unpleasant,” Lady Keisho-in said. Her plump body and heavy jowls bounced with the palanquin’s movement. “What’s wrong?”

  Reiko had been brooding about her argument with Sano yesterday and the sleepless night she’d spent alone while he stayed in his office. She suspected that Sano hated quarreling as much as she, but both of them were too proud to compromise. Recalling how he’d left the house today without even saying good-bye to her, Reiko felt the stinging pressure of more tears.

  “Everything is fine,” she said with false brightness. Aware of her responsibility to entertain the shogun’s mother, she pointed out the window. “Look! Such pretty furniture in that shop!”

  “Beautiful!” exclaimed Lady Keisho-in.

  Reiko kept up the conversation while they rode through town, but as they traveled the woodland highway approaching the Zj district, worry grew within her. Eventually Sano would find out that she’d disobeyed his orders. The fear of losing his love plagued Reiko. She chatted with Keisho-in, all the while thinking that unless she could find new evidence in favor of Haru or against someone else, Haru would be convicted and the Black Lotus would go free. Besides, Reiko had already embarked on the forbidden trip; going the rest of the way could do little more harm.

  Beneath the quilt, Keisho-in’s leg bumped Reiko’s. “I’m sorry,” Reiko said, politely taking the blame.

  She shifted position to give Keisho-in more room, but soon they bumped again. Keisho-in giggled. Reiko flinched as Keisho-in’s toe tickled her thigh.