Bundori

by Laura Joh Rowland

  “Please,” Sano said.

  He expected her to summon Mimaki to back her alibi, but O-tama called the maid and said to her, “Remove the screen.”

  “But my lady …” The maid gasped in alarm. “The master …”

  O-tama’s shadowy hand rose, silencing her protests. “Do as I say.”

  Casting a nervous glance toward the door, the maid dragged the screen aside.

  Sano’s jaw dropped. Revulsion followed shock.

  Supported on piled silk cushions, O-tama’s small, thin body was twisted like a gnarled tree. Her right arm, bent and drawn up against her side, ended in a leathery stump. Only one dainty stockinged foot protruded from beneath her rich red satin kimono. Most horrible was her face, a shocking contrast to the perfect black wig on her head. A mass of puckered, mottled scar tissue had obliterated the features of the right side. On the intact left side, the half-open eyelid revealed a cloudy, sightless eye.

  Sano, glad that she couldn’t see his reaction, bowed his head in pity and awe. The fire at the Water Lily had freed O-tama from a sordid profession, but had ravaged her body. The public had no idea just how great Mimaki’s love for her had been. He’d taken the blind, disfigured, and crippled prostitute into his home, to cherish and care for, to live with her in seclusion not because of jealousy, but to hide her terrible secret. He’d planted the fragrant garden and hung the birdhouses and wind chimes so she could enjoy its smells and sounds, if not its sights. He pushed her in the strange wooden seat along paths she couldn’t walk. And, from the way his face had looked after he’d spoken to her, he loved her still. No one could have imagined a more poignant ending for the scandalous romance.

  Or a better alibi for the murders.

  “So you see, sōsakan-sama.” The charming voice that so richly evoked O-tama’s lost beauty issued from her deformed mouth. “I couldn’t possibly be the killer you seek.”

  28

  “My informant claims he knows who the assassin was, sōsakan-sama,” Hirata said. “Gomen nasai—I’m sorry to make you walk so far, but he wouldn’t come to the police compound. He doesn’t want anyone to know he works for me.”

  “That’s all right, Hirata, you’ve done well,” Sano said. After the interview with O-tama, he desperately needed any evidence that might identify the Bundori Killer as someone other than Chamberlain Yanagisawa.

  They were walking through Nihonbashi, toward their noon rendezvous with Hirata’s cautious informant, in hastily improvised disguise. They both wore wide wicker hats, and had left Sano’s expensively equipped horses at the police stables. Sano wore an old cloak of Hirata’s to hide the Tokugawa crests on his own garments. With his single short sword, shabby kimono, and no jitte, Hirata made a convincing rōnin. Beneath his hat, his eyes glowed; his white smile flashed in boyish delight at Sano’s approval. Sano, in his excitement at receiving the news, had forgotten to discourage Hirata’s attachment. Now, though hating to hurt the young doshin again, he tried to counteract his spontaneous praise.

  “Let’s just hope your informant is telling the truth,” he said coldly.

  Hirata turned his face away, but not before Sano saw his smile fade. “This way, sōsakan-sama,” he said in chastened tones.

  They cut through the woodworkers’ district, where carpenters sawed, hammered, and nailed in open storefronts. Along with more wild tales about the murders, newssellers distributed reports on the continuing fire, whose smoke filtered the sunlight.

  “The fire must have spread,” Sano said, concerned despite his relief at seeing the fearmongers’ attention focused on something besides the murders. Edo’s fire brigades usually managed to contain and extinguish the frequent blazes with admirable efficiency. “I wonder why it hasn’t been put out yet.”

  “There’s trouble in that district,” Hirata said. “People have been burning candles and incense, to drive away the ghost. Last night, a house caught fire. And some men formed a gang to patrol the streets. They killed what they thought was a ghost carrying a severed head. But it was an old man with a jar of pickles. His sons went looking for revenge. A riot started. The fire spread because the fire brigade can’t get in to put it out.”

  His worst fears realized, Sano looked away, speechless. The simmering tensions caused by the murders had finally erupted. All because he hadn’t caught the Bundori Killer soon enough. Sano knew that other factors had contributed to the disaster—Chamberlain Yanagisawa’s sabotage; the townspeople’s superstition and unruliness; the police’s failure to maintain order. But Sano couldn’t help feeling responsible. Guiltily he wondered whether, fearing what he must do if Yanagisawa was the killer, he was expending his best effort on the investigation.

  He and Hirata followed an eerily quiet street that Sano couldn’t remember ever seeing before. The open storefronts contained unappealing merchandise: cheap, mismatched crockery; trays of stale cakes. The few pedestrians—all disreputable-looking samurai and male commoners—eyed them warily. Outside empty teahouses, the proprietors sat smoking pipes and lazing in the sun. Instead of trying to entice Sano and Hirata inside, they glared.

  “This is it.” Hirata stopped before a teahouse. To the proprietor, he said, “Wild Boar is expecting us.”

  The proprietor scrutinized them, then waved them inside. Sano and Hirata ducked under the faded blue curtain and entered the empty room. Hirata led the way through a doorway at its rear, from which muffled voices and laughter issued. Then Sano understood the real purpose of the deserted stores and teahouses.

  Kneeling men jammed the dim back room. Their pipes added more smoke to the already thick air. Spread on the floor before them lay tobacco boxes, metal baskets of burning coals, cups and decanters of sake, playing cards and stacked coins. Intent on their games, the men ignored Sano and Hirata as they muttered their plays and bets, hands moving cards and coins with expert rapidity. This, like its neighboring establishments, was one of Edo’s illegal gambling dens: domain of the city’s burgeoning underclass of thieves, con men, gangsters, and other outlaws. The “proprietors” outside were lookouts, on the watch for police or rival gangsters.

  Hirata eased past the gamblers, motioning Sano to follow him through another curtained doorway. This led to a dank, urine-smelling passage. Shouts, laughter, and clanking noises echoed from its other end.

  “Sōsakan-sama, I want you to know that this isn’t my district,” Hirata whispered, obviously shamed by this lapse in police control. “I don’t like the practice of taking bribes to let these places operate. But they do have their uses!”

  They entered a hot, stifling room, whose shuttered windows and flaring oil lamps gave it a sinister, nighttime look. The reek of vomit, smoke, sweat, and liquor assailed Sano. At the center of the large, low-ceilinged space, rough wooden railings defined a combat ring where two young men, clad only in loincloths and cotton headbands, circled each other, gazes locked in fierce concentration. Both held kusari-gama—short, sharp-bladed scythes with weighted chains attached to the ends of wooden handles. This was a weapon normally used by peasants to disarm maurauding swordsmen, but here employed in a perverted and dangerous form of combat. Each fighter gripped his weapon’s handle in his left hand; with his right, he spun the deadly chain in accelerating circles. Sweat glistened upon the fighters’ tensed muscles; their savage grimaces bared broken teeth. Old scars and fresh wounds crisscrossed their skin.

  Cheering, hooting samurai and peasants crowded around the ring. Many of the latter had elaborate tattoos on their arms and torsos—a mark of the organized gangster clans. Sano had seen men like these before, but never in such numbers. Here must be where they hid out while honest men were at work. Hirata was right: What better source of information about illicit activities could there be than this?

  Hirata led Sano to the ring’s far side, where a short, bald, muscular man was taking coins from eager customers—bets on the fight, judging from their shouts:

  “Ten coppers on Yoshi!”

  “Twenty on Gorō!”
>
  On closer inspection, Sano saw that the banker wasn’t much older than himself, and not really bald. His hair was cut so close to his domed head that in the dim light he’d at first appeared to have none. He had a crooked, flattened nose, puffy eyes and mouth. His kimono hung open to reveal a spectacular tattoo: a beautiful naked woman with winged demons suckling at her breasts.

  Hirata approached the banker, who was apparently the informant, Wild Boar. “I’ve come for the goods I ordered,” he shouted over the audience’s cheers.

  All traces of his usual deference had disappeared; he sounded brusque and rough, befitting his disguise, and confident like a man who expects satisfaction. Sano felt a touch of admiration for his assistant, who’d already demonstrated his talent for detection. Once again, he regretted the probable short tenure of their partnership.

  Wild Boar jerked his head at Sano. “Who’s your friend?” He spoke out of one corner of his mouth. His half-closed eyes showed no whites; the dark irises watched the fighters.

  “The goods are for him,” Hirata said. “Before you get the other half of your money, they have to meet his approval.”

  In the ring, the tall fighter launched an assault on his opponent. The other man didn’t parry soon enough. The chain slammed across his chest. Shouts erupted from the audience. Wild Boar’s eyes followed the action as he retorted, “You said nothing about this when we made our deal. Who is he? Why should I trust him?”

  Hirata shrugged and started to walk away. Sano, fighting the urge to protest, followed his bluff.

  “Wait.” The informant’s hand shot out and grabbed Hirata’s sleeve. “You win.” Rancor closed his eyes still more as he positioned himself between Sano and Hirata. Keeping his gaze on the ring, where the second fighter flailed his chain and thrust his scythe in a series of counterattacks, he began to speak.

  “The man of the melon seeds and the fox’s face was a rōnin named Nango Junnosuke. A stranger to Edo, as snow is to summer.” Wild Boar’s speech had a poetic quality that contrasted sharply with his gruff voice. “He came here four nights ago. He said he was just arrived from the Kantō.”

  Because the overlapping of shogun’s and daimyo’s authority had undermined police power in the eight agricultural provinces outside Edo, they’d become a center of criminal activity. Sano wasn’t surprised to learn that the assassin had come from there. And “Junnosuke” was the name on the torn note in his pouch.

  “Daikoku, great god of fortune, didn’t bless Nango,” Wild Boar went on. “He lost much money on cards and fights, then begged for credit, saying he would soon have enough money to cover his debts.”

  “How much money, and how soon?” Sano interrupted.

  “Ten koban, the next night.”

  The exact sum found on the assassin’s body, at the designated time. Sano’s excitement grew with the certainty that Nango was his man. “Did he say how he planned to get it?”

  “Said he’d been hired by someone important to kill a high-ranking citizen. But the gang didn’t trust him. He had eyes that darted like minnows in a stream. So they made him leave. Afterward, they thought he might have been telling the truth. Because he was good with his sword, he was. Took five men to throw the ugly little fox out. And he cut them all.”

  Wild Boar’s description of Nango’s behavior fit the assassin: a good fighter whose rashness had gotten him in trouble during his life, and, in the end, destroyed him.

  “Did he say who hired him, or who his target was?” Sano asked.

  The informant laughed in derision: a grunt not unlike his namesake’s. “If it was true, he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut. But I’ll tell you this. I’ve seen his kind before. They blow into town like a typhoon, do their evil, and blow out to sea again. And their master is the man up there on the hill.”

  A typhoon of foreboding swirled around Sano’s heart. “Which man?”

  “People come to me for facts, not opinions. But if you want, I’ll tell you what I think.” Wild Boar paused, then leaned closer to Sano. His sour, liquor-scented whisper rasped against Sano’s face. “It’s the Second Dog.”

  The shogun, Chamberlain Yanagisawa, and Senior Elder Makino were nicknamed “The Three Dogs”—all born in the year of the dog; all associated with Tsunayoshi’s Dog Protection Edicts. The shogun was First Dog by right of rank. Yanagisawa, the Second Dog, led the pack. The typhoon over Sano’s heart sent its fierce winds gusting into his throat.

  “The Second Dog hired Nango?” he asked, resisting belief.

  “I’d lay odds on it, friend.”

  “Why?” Sano pressed.

  The informant’s ripe breath blew the answer into Sano’s face. “Miyagi Kojirō. Attacked and killed by an unknown swordsman three years ago while traveling along the Tōkaidō. The killer was never found. But I’ve got friends at highway post stations who saw a seed-eating, fox-faced man tailing Miyagi. A man not unlike the one we speak of now.”

  Sano remembered Noguchi telling him about Miyagi, once the shogun’s adviser and Chamberlain Yanagisawa’s rival. Whose secret murder, rumor said, had been ordered by the chamberlain. “But couldn’t someone else have hired Nango?” Sano persisted, forgetting caution in his need to dispute Wild Boar’s statement. The informant seemed rather too knowledgeable. Was he telling the truth, or inventing stories to give value for his price? “Chūgo Gichin, for instance. Or Matsui Minoru. Men with money and influence.”

  Wild Boar grunted again. “Chūgo keeps to the castle like the emperor to his palace. Thinks he owns it. No connections to men of Nango’s sort, or none I know of. Word on him is, if he wanted someone killed, he’d do it himself. And Matsui has other ways of getting his way.”

  The guard captain’s own words agreed with Wild Boar’s assessment of Chūgo, and Sano’s impressions of the merchant supported the informant’s statement about Matsui. Sano had no knowledge with which to contradict any of what he’d just heard. Suddenly he found the room’s frenetic atmosphere unbearable. He watched the tall fighter lash out with the scythe’s curved blade. It sliced his opponent’s shoulder. Blood poured from the gash. Gasping, the man fell against the railing. Four men from the audience leapt into the ring and dragged him out. With the first drawing of blood, the fight was over. But Sano couldn’t share the crowd’s uproarious glee.

  Father, he prayed silently, let the truth be other than it appears now! But reality didn’t change. His father’s spirit wouldn’t come to him, and, to his dismay, he found he could no longer envision his father’s face.

  “Thank you, Wild Boar,” he said abruptly. “Hirata, let’s go.”

  Wild Boar ignored Sano’s thanks. Turning to Hirata, he said, “I’ve delivered the goods. Now pay up.”

  Hirata pulled out his money pouch. Sano realized that his loyal assistant had bought the information with his own funds. Reaching across Wild Boar, he touched Hirata’s arm.

  “Let me. How much?”

  “No,” Hirata protested. “I made the deal, I’ll pay.”

  Sano shot him a stern glance. From his own pouch he counted out the huge sum that Hirata reluctantly named, and paid for the knowledge that endangered his own life.

  29

  The shrine attendant’s tiny thatched hut stood hidden in the forest surrounding the Momijiyama. A narrow path wound through the trees to the doorway, which in turn led into an entry porch filled with equipment necessary for maintaining the shrine—brooms, buckets, cleaning cloths, soap, candles, lamps, incense—all arranged neatly on shelves. Beyond this lay a single room with a clean tatami floor, a hearth for cooking, a tub for bathing, a rough wooden cabinet for possessions, and a small window looking out on the forest: the bare necessities of the shrine attendant’s life and work.

  In the middle of the room, Aoi knelt and carefully unfolded the two kimonos that Sano had given her last night. To her he’d entrusted the task of identifying his missing witness, the mysterious woman who had disappeared from Zōjō Temple after the priest’s murder. Her fingers tr
embled with anticipation and anxiety. She must help Sano find evidence against Chamberlain Yanagisawa. To fail would mean sacrificing their chance for freedom and happiness.

  She spread both kimonos on the floor before her, but did not immediately examine them. Instead she sat motionless for a long moment, letting her vision blur. Then she began to take slow, deep breaths. Her lungs expanded to their limit, then expelled the air, contracting to complete emptiness. In. Out. For inspiration, she summoned the memory of her father. She pictured his stern face, heard his quiet voice.

  “The special ninja breathing exercise cleanses the body and blood, Aoi,” he said. “It calms the mind and enhances concentration.”

  Soon Aoi felt the power radiating from her spiritual center in her abdomen: a great, erratic pulse that shuddered through her body. Over its thunder, her father’s voice came to her across time and space:

  “Fearful outsiders call the ninja’s power the ‘dark magic.’ But it’s not magic. It’s the power that every human has within himself, but only we know how to tap.”

  And this turbulent, swirling energy wasn’t dark, either, but shot through with sparks of light that exploded behind her eyes. She envisioned it as a deep, restless sea filled with luminescent living things. She could hear the waves roaring in her ears, crashing against the shores of her consciousness. Resisting the tide that could carry her into chaos and madness, she clasped her hands. Her trained fingers automatically arranged and rearranged themselves in a series of intricate positions, interlocking, weaving, twisting, pointing.

  “Many a samurai, seeing a ninja adversary perform this exercise, has dropped dead from fright,” her father had taught her. “Use their fear as you would any weapon. But remember that the hand positions aren’t an evil magic curse, but a silent chant, a manual mantra designed to harness, focus, and direct your energy.”

  As Aoi’s fingers flexed and laced, the turbulent sea within her grew quiet, its pulse slow and rhythmical. She floated in a cold, exhilarating atmosphere of heightened sensory perception. She could smell houses burning in the city below the castle, hear snow melting on distant mountains. She tasted the river’s fishy water and experienced the pressure of her clothes against her skin as a crushing weight of layered stone. All these sensations, though, were extraneous. The last hand position banished them to the edges of her mind. Her father’s image faded, as did his voice, saying “Now you are ready, my daughter.”