by Steve Bein
“No.”
“Then one of your students. A grad student? No. Not a lot of criminal types there. It’s one of your martial arts students, isn’t it?”
Yamada bowed deeply, his short silver hair shining like a million stars as it caught the light. “Very good, Inspector. In fact I did meet him at the university. That was before he started training in my dojo. You don’t see a fighter the likes of him more than once or twice in a lifetime.”
“What can you tell me about him?”
Yamada shrugged. “We met when he took my class in Heian era history. A bright young man. Driven. We spoke about sword combat quite a bit, and then he started training under me. I can’t recall anyone making shodan so quickly.”
“Why didn’t you tell me who he was the first time I came out here? I could have made a lot of progress on your case by now.”
“Destiny works at its own pace.”
“Oh, no. I’m not letting you off that easy. Look, what happened here the other night, the night of the breakin…well, I’ll grant you, that was weird. But whatever you think about destiny bringing us together that night, you can’t have known that was coming the first time we met.”
Yamada gave her an impish grin, his eyes twinkling. “You know a lot about destiny for someone who just started believing in it, Inspector.”
Mariko couldn’t decide whether to grin back or strangle him. He was cute in that sweet old man sort of way, but all his fate crap was wearing thin. “Come on,” she said, “you’re telling me you’ve been waiting for ages for a policewoman to come to your door?”
“A swordswoman, actually.”
“I’m not—” An exasperated laugh escaped Mariko’s lips. “You drive me nuts, you know that?”
“As polite as ever, Oshiro-san.”
“Listen, suppose you’re right. Suppose I really was destined to come here, and somehow you’re going to talk me into learning how to sword-fight, and…assume all that stuff. If that’s really what destiny has in store for us, what difference would it have made if you’d told me Fuchida’s name from the beginning? We’d have ended up right here anyway, right?”
“Oh ho,” said Yamada. He raised his wrinkled hands as if she were holding a gun on him. “Not bad, Inspector. I think you’ve got me with my own logic.”
“Damn right I do. So answer the question. Why didn’t you tell me his name on day one?”
Yamada rubbed his face with his hands, then pressed his palms together, his forefingers resting against his lips. He looked like he might be about to pray. At last, peering over his steepled fingertips, he said, “Haven’t you deduced that already, Inspector? Why, it’s embarrassing. Fuchida-san was my student. What does it mean about a professor if his own student comes back to rob him?”
Mariko nodded, ashamed that she’d made him spell it out. Any properly Japanese person would have seen the connection. But Mariko had spent most of her childhood in the States, and she didn’t think of relationships in the way most Japanese did.
Mariko’s father had moved his family back to Tokyo so that his daughters could get into a good Japanese university, which they could never do without going to a good Japanese high school. When Mariko had asked him why, he’d explained gakubatsu to her. She’d tried to understand the word in English, her primary language in those days, but “school clique” didn’t come close to translating gakubatsu. The closest American equivalent was a Marine Corps tattoo: gakubatsu was a badge, a unifying force, a marker of something awfully close to family. It was out of gakubatsu that alumni from the same school hired each other, promoted each other, ran whole corporations and universities and political parties together. And because of gakubatsu, if one person tarnished the good name of the school, everyone else in the school’s family suffered.
“I’m sorry,” Mariko said. “I should have understood. Police work is a bit like university work that way: if I step out of line, I embarrass everyone who wears the badge—especially my CO.” She gave a rueful snicker. “Of course that last part only matters if you respect your CO. I have the luxury of not giving a shit, because my CO’s a total pain in the ass.”
Yamada sipped his tea. “And yet you seem less than liberated, Inspector.”
Mariko sighed. “It’s Saori. You think having your student come back to steal from you is an embarrassment? Try being a narc with a junkie for a sister.”
“Would you care to talk about your sister?”
She didn’t. She wasn’t a fan of having emotional talks with strangers, much less with civilians whose cases she was investigating. But something about Yamada made her open up. It was that damned grandfatherly disposition of his, and even as Mariko wished she could stop herself, she found herself talking. “There’s nothing I can do about her. I keep acting like there is, but I should have learned my lesson by now.”
“And that is?”
“That nothing I can do can stop Saori from using. That she’s going to kill herself one of these days and there’s not a damn thing I can do to stop it.”
Mariko sniffed. Thin ribbons of steam spiraled up from her pale orange cup of pale green tea. She watched them, then gave a light exhalation and watched how they wheeled and whirled in response. If only she had as much influence over Saori.
“You wish to surrender my case and look for your sister?”
“No. Well, yes, of course I do, but I can’t. My CO’s a jackass, and cops don’t usually spare much time for missing junkies anyway. Besides, those hooks are in deep on her. They pull her down, out of sight, to places I don’t even know about.”
She gave a sighing, hopeless laugh. “I’ve had this straitlaced, prim and proper life,” she said, “all the way until I became a cop. You know I never even saw meth before I went to academy? They lit a joint for us too, to recognize the smell, and all these smiles lit up around the room. Memories from their partying days, you know? And it was the first time I ever smelled it. I don’t know how she got so mixed up in that shit when I was always so far away from it.” Mariko looked up—she’d been watching the steam all this time—and she saw a compassionate smile on Yamada’s face. “Why are you smiling?”
“Because the only alternative is to cry,” he said. “Let me tell you a story. Something to take your mind off things, but also a story like yours. This one is about something that gets its hooks in too, something that goes on to destroy families. Would you like to hear it?”
Mariko sighed and drank her tea.
“It begins with a famed samurai from Echizen,” Yamada said, “a man called Motoyori Hidetada. He had a sword named Beautiful Singer. This was about eight hundred years ago, though by then his sword was already nearly a hundred years old. His house fell to ruin when he should have been at his prime. Beautiful Singer is passed down to his sister’s eldest son, a warlord by the name of Nagafusa. The Nagafusas, a powerful clan, are destroyed within a decade.
“The sword passes out of history for a while, reappearing about a century later in the hands of one Kanayama Osamu. Lord Kanayama’s house falls to shame and infamy when he flees like a common criminal rather than committing seppuku. Immediately after the fall of Kanayama, another esteemed house, the Saitos, suffers a similar fate. Not twenty years later, the house of Nakadai is laid to waste. The Saitos and the Nakadais were closely allied with House Kanayama. Historical records cannot confirm that they possessed the sword, but nor do they offer any concrete reason for the ruin of any of those houses.
“The sword does not appear again until the Meiji Restoration, when it is mistakenly called Glorious Sun. Again, its wielder falls ingloriously. It appears again in the Second World War, in the hands of an officer named Iwasaki. Iwasaki goes on to take a command role in the butchery that the world now calls the Bataan Death March. Before that he brought the sword to Nanking, China. The butchery there was worse.”
“Nice bedtime story,” said Mariko.
Yamada winced. “Iwasaki was killed too, by the way—shot by his own men. It took a lot of work
to connect Glorious Sun to Beautiful Singer, and even more work to piece its story together. I devoted twenty years of my life to discovering the truth of it and never wrote a book about it.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because Beautiful Singer was crafted by Master Inazuma. You must understand, Inspector: no one in academia believes Inazuma ever existed. I see him as the first of the great sword smiths, but no one else will believe me.”
“Why not?”
“He used tempering techniques we don’t see again for over a century. You cannot underestimate his genius. The two most celebrated sword smiths in history are Masamune and Muramasa, but Inazuma perfected Masamune’s high-heat forging style more than a hundred years before Masamune was born. The oldest shinogi-zukuri-style sword we have is a Yukimasa from the late Heian period. I date Beautiful Singer fully twenty-five years earlier than the Yukimasa.”
Mariko blinked. “I’m not stupid, Dr. Yamada, but you’re going to have to run that by me again.”
Yamada nodded, his blind eyes twinkling. She smiled despite herself; she’d never seen him this excited. “All right,” he said, “imagine how historians would react if I claimed Henry Ford based his design for the Model T on a car built by Galileo in 1600.”
“They’d flip their lids.”
“Exactly. Now imagine if you’d never heard of Galileo because the historians all think he’s a fairy tale. If I were to publish a book on Inazuma, it would discredit all the rest of my work.”
“Even if what your book said was true?”
“The nail that sticks up gets hammered down, Inspector.”
“But you’re not basing this on nothing. You’re a historian. You have evidence.”
“Why, there’s evidence and then there’s what’s publishable. Even if I could find a publisher, I question the wisdom of drawing attention to Beautiful Singer. That sword should be destroyed and then forgotten.” He refilled Mariko’s teacup, then topped off his own. “But this is too grim a subject for a night like this. Would you like to hear another story?”
“Is it a good one?” Mariko said.
“This one also stars a sword. Tiger on the Mountain, it’s called. It’s said that so long as this blade is within a castle, that castle can never fall.”
“Let me guess: there’s nothing in the history books about it?”
“No, indeed. But now and then you can find records of an entire village burned to the ground, save one house only. An earthquake topples candles onto spilled oil, drops roofs into fireplaces, even brings the local castle down, but not that one house. One fisherman’s house stands, and a castle falls.”
“This is Japan, Professor. Earthquakes and weird coincidences go together like rice and shoyu.”
“Of course. So naturally you will think it mere coincidence that here and there a tsunami will strike, erasing every hut but one. Or a bombing raid in the Great War: again, it levels every house in the neighborhood but one. Wherever you find the lone standing building, there you find some connection to the Tiger on the Mountain.” He smiled and winked. “Coincidence, I’m sure.”
Mariko smiled back at him. “Which sword is upstairs?”
“Neither. Would you like to hear that story too?”
“Is it another cursed sword?”
Yamada let out a wry laugh. “Hard to say. But there is another story, the most stunning of all, for the tales of all three swords are interwoven. All three were made by the same master sword smith, a man whose story has fallen out of the histories altogether. I am the only scholar left who even believes he existed.”
“Master Inazuma,” Mariko said.
“Precisely.”
Mariko nodded. “I’m sure you’ve got a good story for him too. But I’m more impressed by the way you tell your stories. I make a point of knowing when people lie to me. But you—you really believe every word, don’t you?”
“I can prove every word. Dates, families, wills bequeathing this and the other swords from generation to generation. It was my life’s work to find them.”
“And no mention of this in any of your books?”
“Not a word. You must understand: even when I first discovered the existence of Master Inazuma, there were already serious doubts about his very existence—and that was nigh on seventy years ago. We fought and lost a war since then. We’ve redefined ourselves as a nation several times over. No one takes the time to study the old ways anymore. Most react as you did: with scorn. There’s no such thing as magic, neh?”
Mariko felt ashamed. Scorn was a harsh word, though she didn’t have a ready replacement. But she also noted that he’d spoken of her scorn in the past tense. He regarded her as she was increasingly regarding herself: as a woman who believed in magic. Or if not magic, then whatever the right name was for the powers of fate expressing themselves through a sharpened length of steel.
“Fuchida Shūzō,” she said, her voice distant even to herself. “You told him about the swords?”
“Of course.”
“Why?”
“I thought he could help me destroy Beautiful Singer.” Yamada’s shoulders sagged a bit, and his unseeing gaze fell to the tabletop. “He’s a man of remarkable focus. As diligent a martial artist as any I’ve seen. When I first met him, he was already in the habit of inuring himself to pain. He collects tattoos, you see. Always by the traditional method, and usually on sensitive areas: pressure points, soft tissues, neh? I wonder now why I couldn’t see the dark side in that, but at the time he impressed me. Only a man of focus and resilience could subjugate the will of Beautiful Singer. Or at least that’s what I thought back then.”
“And now?”
Yamada sucked at his teeth. “Now?” he said, his tone heavy with resignation. “Now I don’t believe there’s ever been a man alive who could overcome the sword. Nevertheless, it’s been my life’s work to destroy it. You must help me with that, Sergeant Oshiro.”
Mariko’s palms dropped heavily to the table, shuddering the last few drops of tea in their cups. “Well, if no one on earth could pull that off, I don’t see how I’m supposed to help. But I guess we could start by figuring out where this Beautiful Singer is.”
Yamada gave her a nod, lips bunched, eyes slightly narrowed, the kind of expression she would have received from her father on the day she graduated from the academy. “Good. Good. Now, if you want to find the sword, you only need to find Fuchida Shūzō.”
“That part shouldn’t be hard. He seems to want to come to you, or at least to keep sending his men your way. We’ll get someone to talk. But how do you know he’s got the sword?”
Yamada shrugged. “He used it to kill that woman in Kamakura, didn’t he?”
“I hate when you do that,” Mariko said, slapping the tabletop again. “You talk about all these things you couldn’t possibly know as if you were standing in the room when they happened. How the hell did you get to be a better detective than me?”
Yamada gave her a grandfatherly smile. “I beg your pardon. Perhaps I should explain. That woman in Kamakura, what did you say her name was?”
“Kurihara Yuko.”
“When I met her, her name was Matsumori Yuko. The sword I have upstairs is an Inazuma, and an erstwhile heirloom in her family. I bought it from her some years ago to keep it safe. Fuchida killed her to get the sword, no doubt, not knowing she’d sold it. It seems he wants to expand his collection.”
“But that doesn’t explain anything. How do you know Fuchida has Beautiful Singer?”
“Oh, that’s easy. He stole it for me twenty years ago.”
Mariko gawked. She couldn’t help herself. “He what?”
Yamada gave that shrug of his, the one that made the most obscure of facts seem as plain as the table in front of her. “I told you,” he said, “I trained Fuchida because I thought he could help me destroy the sword. He did the first part admirably: he stole it from a private collector—a man who is still alive today, I might add, probably because he no longer owns Be
autiful Singer. It was the second half of his task that Fuchida failed: he never delivered the sword to me. In fact, I haven’t seen him since.”
“But you said he embarrassed you by trying to steal your sword. You were in on the Beautiful Singer theft from the beginning!”
“You misunderstand, Inspector.”
“I think I understand just fine. The Americans have a saying for this, you know: ‘No honor among thieves.’ How can you be shocked if you trained Fuchida to steal swords and now he wants to steal one from you?”
Yamada closed his eyes and sighed. “It is not the theft that wounds me, Inspector. It is the betrayal.” Now he looked at her, and though she was certain she was too far away for him to see her, he seemed to look directly into her eyes. “You must understand, I only involved Fuchida-san in my plot to destroy Beautiful Singer because I thought he was a friend. When he disappeared, it was like a knife in the heart.”
Mariko knew the feeling. Saori’s disappearance stabbed her through the heart too. Once again she felt clumsy in front of this man—this kind old man, whose wounded heart she’d just kicked around because she had all the tact of a drunken baboon.
“I’m sorry,” said Mariko. She could hear crickets chirping in the garden, and she realized it was well past sundown. “Look, I’m…I’m an emotional klutz, okay? But I think we’ve finally gotten to something I can start investigating. You taught at Tōdai, neh? They’ll have some record of Fuchida being a student there, and maybe through that I can find a connection to his finances.”
Yamada’s forehead wrinkled. “Why should you care about his finances?”
“You really are old-fashioned, aren’t you?”
“Polite as ever, Inspector.”
“Sorry.” Once again Mariko found herself blushing in Yamada’s company. His ability to make her feel self-conscious was extraordinary, but no less so than her own ability to put her foot in her mouth when she was around him.
“Let me start over,” she said. “These days, if you buy something expensive, it’s probably in a computer record somewhere. Find that and sometimes you can find other big purchases: cars, down payments on apartments, that kind of thing. It’s not hard to find suspects that way.”