A Deadly Kind of Love

by Victor J. Banis

  “Exactly,” Nakamura said with a laugh. “How is your case progressing, if I may ask?”

  “It’s coming,” Tom said. “At this stage, it’s a matter of collecting details, sorting things out.”

  “We like to consider what each soil will bear and what each refuses,” Stanley said.

  Nakamura raised an admiring eyebrow. “I must say, I have never heard a detective quote Virgil before.”

  “You watch too many old movies,” Stanley said—which even he knew was ironic, since he was an avid fan of old movies.

  “Touché,” Nakamura said. He hesitated briefly and made a gesture in the direction of the sunlit patio visible beyond sliding glass doors. “Please, I thought we might have drinks by the pool, if that is agreeable.”

  He ushered them through the living room to the patio outside, only slightly smaller and less grand than the one at the Winter Beach Inn. A handsome young Japanese man in a white jacket stood behind a glass and chrome bar. He flashed a bright smile at them—at Chris in particular, it seemed to Stanley—and waited to take their drink orders.

  “Please, have whatever you would like,” Nakamura said. “Yoki is an excellent bartender, and I think we are well stocked.”

  The boys debated and settled on vodka gimlets. Yoki nodded his approval at the suggestion and made them with fresh-squeezed limes, which in turn met with Stanley’s approval.

  “I’ll just have a beer,” Tom said.

  “Very good, sir,” Yoki said and reached into the miniature refrigerator under the bar. The bottle he handed across to Tom was like a work of art, sheathed in copper and looking like a miniature brewery vat. It made the usual glass bottle look shoddy in comparison.

  Tom admired the bottle and read the label aloud. “Samuel Adams Utopia.”

  “It is an excellent beer, in my humble opinion. Are you familiar with it?” Nakamura asked.

  “I’ve heard of it,” Tom said. He did not add that, at a hundred dollars a bottle, he had never felt inclined to treat himself to any. He took a cautious swig—it was also the world’s strongest beer—and decided it was probably worth the price—if you liked to throw that kind of money around. Still, he felt like he could very easily get used to the stuff, so long as someone else was buying.

  Stanley and the boys took seats at the glass and granite patio table next to the sparkling pool.

  “Danzel-san,” Nakamura addressed him.

  “Tom, please.”

  “Very well then, Tom,” Nakamura said, “perhaps you would like to see my samurai collection?”

  “I’d like that very much. Stanley, want to come with us?”

  But Stanley was in the middle of sharing a funny story with the others, and he waved his hand dismissively. “You two go ahead. Not to be rude, but Rashomon is as far into that subject as I get.”

  “An excellent film,” Nakamura said, but he took no apparent offense at Stanley’s lack of interest. Stanley did not look to be the samurai sort.

  Tom left his beer on the patio table and went with Nakamura back into the house, to a room off the large front room—a room, Tom noted, kept locked. Nakamura took a key from his pocket and fitted it into the lock with an apologetic look.

  “Some of these items are very valuable,” he said. “More than just monetarily valuable, I should add. To a serious collector, especially to another Japanese, some of them can be precious far beyond what they could command in a marketplace. So, they must be protected.”

  He stepped aside for Tom to precede him into the room. Tom went through the doorway and paused, taking in a deep breath. At a first impression, it was like entering a room of glass. Glass cases rested on tables, more of them stood on the floor, and the walls were covered with still more glass cases, holding a deadly array of blades.

  What really caught Tom’s eye, though, were two suits of samurai armor mounted on clothes dummies in the far corners of the room. At a quick glance, a pair of samurai warriors might have been waiting to greet them.

  “Wow,” Tom said, impressed more than he had expected to be. He’d seen armor like this in his movies, but never the real thing—and here were two complete outfits. Authentic, he’d have bet money.

  “You like my friends?” Nakamura said. He indicated the armor to the left. “This one is from the Sengoku jidai, the period of the warring states, when different princes sought to achieve supremacy. The helmet, or kabuto, is of iron, and the menpō, the face mask, of leather. The horizontal steel plates across the chest and the back are typical, but the variegated lacing is a bit unusual.”

  “You said they are of special value to collectors,” Tom said, “but this baby has to have monetary value too. If you don’t mind my asking…?”

  “Yes, yes, it does. I paid fifty thousand for it, American dollars.” Tom whistled. “But that is nothing. This one—” Nakamura led the way to the armor in the opposite corner. “—would command twice as much, at least. It is a rare treasure indeed. Edo, seventeenth century, gomai-do yukinoshita. This might have been, probably was, worn by one of the ronin, the roving samurai of the time. Even the kabuto, the helmet, is special—suji bachi, black lacquered. You do not see that often.”

  Tom leaned closer to look at a small imperfection in the chest armor. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Nakamura nodded. “Yes, it is a bullet hole. The matchlock gun, the arquebus, was introduced into Japan in the sixteenth century, and by this time, the Edo period, its use among the samurai was widespread. But the sword remained the symbol of the true samurai. Perhaps too much so.”

  “What do you mean, too much so?”

  “In the movies the emphasis is on the swords to the exclusion of every other weapon, but the samurai armed himself with more than just his sword. He carried clubs, too, kanabō. Like this one, for an example.”

  He opened a glass case and handed a wooden club to Tom. It was perfectly balanced, fitting into Tom’s hand as if made for it. “There were clubs made of iron, too, many strips of iron welded together, some of them with iron spikes. They are not often documented in art and literature, and you almost never see them in the movies, but they were commonplace—and very effective weapons.”

  “I’ll bet,” Tom said, handing the club back.

  Nakamura returned the club to its case, locking it again carefully, while Tom looked around the room.

  Despite the occasional club, and what he took to be one of those matchlock rifles Nakamura had mentioned, what he saw was mostly swords. It was a room of blades, dozens of them in the glass cases mounted on the walls, glittering wickedly in the sunlight from the patio, looking almost like living things.

  Nakamura opened another case and took a short sword from it. “This is the wakizashi,” he said, “the samurai’s weapon of honor. It never left his side. He slept with it under his pillow and even when he entered a house and left his main weapons outside as protocol demanded, he took the wakizashi with him, for personal defense, if need be. Being shorter, you see, it would not catch on ceilings or doorjambs when it was swung, so it was ideal for use in a fight as an indoor sword, but in the hands of a samurai, it could be as deadly as the long sword, the katana.”

  He took a still smaller blade from the same case. “And this is the tantō, the little friend, as it was known to the samurai. It can slash and cut, of course, but it was not made primarily for cutting like the others, rather for thrusting at close range. If a samurai put his weight and strength behind it”—he demonstrated, holding the knife out straight in front of him and lunging forward on one foot—“he could drive it right into the heart.”

  “Lethal, for sure.”

  “Yes, certainly. But the special importance of both the tantō and the wakizashi was that they were the means by which a disgraced warrior could avoid dying in shame.”

  “Suicide,” Tom said.

  “Seppuku, yes, disembowelment of a highly ritualized sort. The samurai rams the blade into the left side of his stomach, here”—he indicated the spot on his
abdomen—“and he draws it across just below the navel.”

  “And pulls out his guts, right?”

  “Only if that is necessary. If the samurai does it right, and cuts deeply enough, the intestines slip right out of their own accord, which is, of course, to be hoped for. But yes, if they do not fall out, then he must help them. Either way, death is very nearly instantaneous. Eight seconds, it is said.”

  “But a hell of a tough eight seconds, I’d guess.”

  “As it was intended. The samurai must suffer this pain to offset whatever disgrace has befallen him.”

  “The samurai were really as tough as that?” Tom asked. “As tough as the legends and the movies have them?”

  “Tougher, really. But understand, please, for them it was not only a matter of toughness in battle. In that regard, the legends have become distorted. They were not just battle-hardened mercenaries, as they can seem to be in the movies. Samurai were expected to be cultured men, too, and literate. You must remember that they served lords and princes. The great warrior Tadanori was as famous for his skill with the pen as with the sword. They called it the ‘bun bu ryo do,’ the harmony of learning and fighting. By the time of the Edo period, the era of that armor you looked at over there, Japan had a higher literacy rate than Europe, probably higher than anywhere else on earth. And that was thanks mainly to the samurai.”

  He put the two knives back into their case. “But of course it is the swords that you want to see, the katana, as the long sword was called. Here, this is what you Americans might call a real beaut.”

  Nakamura opened one of the tall cases on the wall and brought out a sword in its wooden scabbard. “This one dates from the seventeenth century, the year sixteen fifty-one. The Edo warrior who wore that armor over there might have carried this very sword, or one much like it.”

  He handed Tom the sheathed sword. Tom looked at it reverently. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  “Yes. The katana was considered the soul of the samurai. Go ahead, please,” Nakamura said, “remove it from the bed where it sleeps. But be careful, it is very sharp. I keep all of them in pristine condition. And these swords like to cut. It is what they were born for.”

  Tom drew the weapon cautiously from the scabbard, or saya, of white wood. The sword looked delicate, like a work of art, but it was heavier than what he had expected. The blade was slightly curved. It seemed oddly alive in his hands, as if it did indeed want to cut something. Or somebody.

  “The blade is made mostly of soft steel, for easier shaping,” Nakamura said, “but the edge is harder, for cutting. This was the invention of the great swordsmith Masamune in the fourteenth century. See, there, that dappling along the blade is where the two steels meet. Each weds its greatness to the other. Together, they become invincible.”

  A groove went up each side of the blade, and the tip was not just a point, as one might expect, but a strange pattern of upturned ridges. The handle was big enough to hold in two hands, but the sword was so well balanced that it could be wielded one-handed as well. Tom lifted it into the air, swishing it cautiously back and forth. The blade thrummed faintly with speed, the grooves making it almost sing.

  He very gently returned the sword to the saya and handed them to Nakamura, who bowed to him as he accepted them.

  “Why don’t you show me some of the old moves?” Tom suggested. “I would be honored.”

  Nakamura hesitated for a moment. “Very well, if you wish,” he consented, bowing again. “I will demonstrate for you the kasumi gamae. The initial stance.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, seeming to turn within himself. Then, abruptly, his eyes flew open, blazing with a fierce, dark light. He cried, “Ai,” loudly, and unlike the careful manner in which Tom had unsheathed the sword, he snapped it from its saya in one lightning-fast movement and immediately struck a familiar pose, his knees slightly bent, the sword held two handed above and slightly to the right of his head. Tom had seen the same stance in a score of samurai movies—maybe even seen this same man in the pose.

  He felt a faint shiver zigzag up his spine. To a casual observer, it could have looked as if Nakamura meant to cleave Tom in two, and Tom had no doubt he could do so if he chose. The blade of the katana seemed to blink at him. Tom found he could not take his eyes from its glistening surface. Like being hypnotized by a swaying cobra, he thought, and wondered if the samurai’s victims felt like that before the sword descended upon them, hypnotized into surrender.

  Nakamura gave a little self-deprecating laugh instead and sheathed the sword once again, then returned it to its glass case and carefully locked that. “No,” he said, “it is like trying to capture curls of smoke, or recall to your tongue the bubbles of some old glass of champagne. Shall we rejoin your friends?”

  The only non-samurai item in the room was a large framed portrait that hung on the wall next to the door, hidden from view when they came in, but which now caught the eye as they went out. Tom paused to glance at it—a portrait of a beautiful woman in what looked to his untrained eye like full Geisha regalia.

  “My late wife,” Nakamura said, following his glance. “She left the earth three years ago. Cancer of the, what do you call it, the esophagus.”

  Tom was surprised to hear about a wife. Nakamura, watching his face, said, “You are thinking about those pretty boys at the Inn. Yes, it is true, I, too, avail myself of their charms.”

  “Not my business,” Tom said. He was hoping Nakamura would think it was, though. It did seem curious.

  “It is quite simple, really. Your Freud never made it to Japan, you know. Neither did Christianity. Japanese men do not have all those hang-ups about sex—kinky sex, homosexual sex, whatever, it is just a bodily function to us. Some people do it one way, some people do it another. We think Americans are crazy the way you get your, how do the boys say it, your panties in a knot over sex.”

  “Makes sense, probably,” Tom said.

  “Take you, for instance, if I may be so bold. I sense you are not altogether comfortable in the world of the homosexual. When I saw you at the bar last night, you looked to me like a man out of place.”

  “I guess I was, sort of. Am.”

  Tom glanced in the direction of the patio, at Stanley, laughing, his head tilted back. He looked like a little boy. Something tightened in Tom’s chest. It always did when he looked at Stanley.

  Nakamura followed his glance. “Ah,” he said, nodding sagely. “But, you know, that is very samurai.”

  “Is it?” Tom was surprised.

  “Yes. Again, that is not as well-known, but to the samurai, shudō, the love between an older and a younger warrior, was thought to be the very flower of the samurai spirit. It was an honored practice in the higher-class samurai, the main way in which the ethos and the skills were passed down through the generations.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “No, unfortunately it is usually left out of the movies. It was called bido, too, the beautiful way, but bido sometimes referred to a close friendship that was not necessarily sexual in nature. Those partners were not always physical lovers, but senpai and kōhai. Perhaps Stanley is your kōhai?”

  Tom gave him a blank look. “I don’t know that expression.”

  “The senpai is the older of the pair, and the younger man is his kōhai. That, too, is a traditional samurai relationship.”

  “Stanley talks a lot about the ancient Greeks. They had that sort of thing, too, didn’t they?”

  “Yes, similar, but not quite the same. The senpai is the kōhai’s….” He paused, seeking for the correct word.

  “His tutor?” Tom suggested.

  “Ah, more like a loving parent, I think you would describe it. The senpai is expected to indulge his kōhai, to put up with his youthful excesses.”

  “Well, Stanley has his youthful excesses, but I don’t think either of us thinks of me as his parent.”

  Nakamura laughed. “No, I suppose not, not even his daddy, as gay men like to put i
t. I suppose one would say he is your fair torment.”

  Tom looked back at him without laughing, not willing to discuss that relationship with someone who was, really, no more than a stranger.

  “He can be a fair torment,” he said aloud. “But we all can, can’t we? Relationships are never easy.”

  Nakamura’s gaze seemed to turn briefly inward. “No, they never are,” he agreed in something very near a whisper.

  And who, Tom wondered, was his fair torment? But he thought it was time to change the subject.

  “Can I ask a personal question?”

  “You may ask,” Nakamura said, with no assurance of an answer.

  “When you gave all that up—the samurai business—”

  “I gave up the movies.”

  “Okay, you gave up the movies, and you went into the business world. Has that worked for you?”

  “Let me say that the business world is only a part of my life. I like to read the poetry—the haiku—of the ancient masters. Sometimes I write my own. When I read the old scrolls, I think I hear the breath of men who have vanished, and when I write, I like to think that eyes centuries from now will caress the words I pen.”

  “Is that enough to keep you happy?”

  “Few men find true fulfillment in life. Ultimately, one has to choose between the struggle and acceptance—between the Titans and Olympians, as those Greeks you mentioned might have expressed it.”

  Which maybe, Tom thought, was an answer, or maybe it wasn’t.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE MACARONI and cheese Nakamura’s chef prepared for lunch was a far cry from the Pacific Rim food at the Winter Beach Inn—an authentic and delicious Southern style macaroni and cheese, but topped, as Nakamura pointed out, with Japanese panko bread crumbs.

  “So my chef can maintain his honor,” he said. “Otherwise, he might commit seppuku. Suicide,” he added for the benefit of the others.

  “Like Madame Butterfly,” Stanley said. “To die with honor is better than to live with dishonor.”