Daughter of the Sword: A Novel of the Fated Blades

by Steve Bein

  Daigoro’s mother hastily arranged for tea to be served in the largest hall in the compound. Shiramatsu sat on the dais at the end of the hall, a spot Daigoro had only seen occupied by his father. The emissary was so slight, and Daigoro’s father had been so large, that Daigoro felt the room had somehow grown much longer, or that his seat was somehow farther away than usual. Daigoro and his family knelt in a row before the dais, their honor guard arrayed behind them, a select few Toyotomi men kneeling behind the emissary. The walls were open to admit the warm evening breeze, yet the air was preternaturally still.

  “The great lord general sends his displeasure,” Shiramatsu began, showing none of the tact Daigoro would have expected from a diplomat. Briefly he wondered whether diplomacy was no longer required when one rose to the heights Toyotomi had achieved. But then the emissary was speaking again and Daigoro focused on his words. “His eminence pacified this region so that he could put it out of his mind and devote his attention to other fronts. To speak more precisely, he treated with Lord Okuma Izu-no-kami Tetsurō, because Lord Okuma was said to speak for all the clans of Izu. Was this a lie?”

  Daigoro heard Ichirō exhale a brooding breath, could almost feel him bristle at the implication that their father was a liar. To Daigoro’s great relief, it was their mother who was the first to speak. “It was no lie, sir.”

  “And do the Okumas still speak for Izu?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So there is an allegiance here after all. Why, then, his eminence wonders, are there so many reports of the region’s best swordsmen being slashed to ribbons in petty conflicts?”

  “Sir, they come to challenge my house,” said Ichirō. “Would you have us ignore our honor?”

  “As I hear it, the challengers are not the ones who have besmirched your honor. But what I would have you do is irrelevant.” The emissary smoothed his mustache, then his beard. “His eminence the great lord general would not have the best men of these islands reduced to cripples. Do you not understand that your challengers come from far and wide? Do you not understand that some of them come from lands his eminence has already brought under his reign? These men are his samurai, to call upon as he sees fit. And you too will be his one day soon, when the great lord general unites Izu and the Kantō and all the eastern lands under one rule. You are not to waste his samurai needlessly, and you are certainly not to create a military disturbance among clans the lord treated with as a single entity. His eminence would retain Izu as a region united. Is that understood?”

  Everyone on Daigoro’s side of the room bowed deeply. “Now then,” the little man said, “I have heard that these challengers come to face the sword of the late Okuma Tetsurō. It is said to be a weapon of the highest quality—an Inazuma, I am told. I am also told that they are routinely denied this honor. Is this so?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ichirō said with a bow.

  “I am sure I will not have to ask why.”

  Before Ichirō could answer, Daigoro said, “Because, sir, it was not my father’s desire that my brother wield the sword, and it is my brother who faces the challengers.”

  “Ah.” The emissary’s thin black eyes fixed on Daigoro. “You are the second son of the late Okuma Tetsurō, are you not? A cripple, I am told.”

  “Correct, sir, on both counts.”

  “Do you lack the will to face these challengers?”

  “No, sir, I am willing.”

  “But you would prefer that your brother does it?”

  “No, sir.” Daigoro paused a moment. “Sir, I do not have a preference, except to be of service to my father’s house. My brother is the better swordsman, hence he faces the challengers instead of me.”

  Shiramatsu stroked his mustache. “I see,” he said with a nod. “Henceforth, if a man comes here to duel, the great lord general Toyotomi would have the duel take place with bokken. If the challenger insists on fighting with steel, only the Inazuma sword will meet the challenge, and the duel will be fought to the death. The lord general will not have his samurai crippled, nor will he have them dying for nothing; you are to give them what they come for. Is this understood?”

  Again everyone on Daigoro’s side of the room touched their foreheads to the floor. Then, as unexpectedly as he had arrived, Lord Toyotomi’s emissary marched off into the night.

  A stunned silence hung over the compound in the wake of the emissary’s departure. Ichirō went to bed, leaving Daigoro and his mother alone to watch the moon rise through the silhouettes of the trees. They stood for a long time before Daigoro broke the silence.

  “Did Father get along with his brothers?”

  She pursed her lips. “Not especially, I suppose. I almost never saw them.”

  “Why not?”

  “Your grandfather was a very important man. His sons performed important tasks for him in every corner of Izu. Then, after your grandfather passed on, there was much more work to do. Your father and his brothers had all become important men.”

  “But when you did see them,” Daigoro said, “when you saw Father and his brothers together, was there tension between them?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said. “But then, they only came here when we married, and when you and your brother were born. It would have been most improper for them to spoil our home’s harmony.”

  “So they never came here except for special occasions?”

  His mother searched her memory for a moment. “I suppose not, now that I think of it. Daigoro, why do you ask all these questions?”

  “Is it possible,” he asked, “that they begrudged Father because he was the one to get grandfather’s sword?”

  “Of course they begrudged him, but I don’t think it had anything to do with the sword. Your father was named head of the clan. In effect, your grandfather bequeathed him all of Izu. Who wouldn’t begrudge that?”

  A good samurai wouldn’t, Daigoro thought. He was in no position to judge whether or not they had been good samurai; he knew so little of his uncles. But if he assumed the best of them, if he assumed they followed the path as surely as his father had, then it wasn’t the rulership of the clan that they resented, nor even the mastery of Izu. Despite what his mother had said, Daigoro still suspected the sword.

  BOOK FIVE

  HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22

  (2010 CE)

  40

  Fuchida sat on a chair of golden aluminum and beige cushioning, the fanciest kind of chair that could still be stacked by the dozen and stowed in a closet. Had this been a traditional wa-shiki funeral, there would be no chairs; people would either stand or kneel. There would be hardwood underfoot, or perhaps even dirt, but certainly not carpet. But this was a Western-style funeral parlor. The Fuchida family was nominally Buddhist, but as their temple refused to perform cremation services for an infamous gangster, stackable chairs and maroon carpeting were the order of the day. Not two steps in front of Fuchida’s chair, sitting on the burgundy Berber, was the green plastic box that stored his father’s ashes.

  The box surprised him, though now he wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. An urn? There was hardly any point; after today no one would ever see the urn, for his father was to be interred in the family mausoleum. Fuchida didn’t know what else human ashes came in. Surely not a sack from the grocery store, but he’d never envisioned a green plastic box. It looked like something one might use to house electrical sockets in a garden or public park; the box was the color of plastic army men, the color hose reels and garden caddies came in. It seemed industrial somehow. It was small too, much smaller than he’d thought it would be. His father died at half the size he was in his prime, but still, a human body was pretty big; Fuchida had imagined the ash pile left behind to be a lot bigger than the box in front of him.

  Most of the guests had gone, as had those who had come to pay their respects but couldn’t be called guests, as had most of the funeral home people, and the caterers, and the Shinto priest. Fuchida sat, the small of his back pressed flat against the
chair, his hands resting limply on his belt buckle as he looked at the box. He could hear voices behind him, muted, and the sigh of the air-conditioning passing through a vent somewhere above and behind him. Its breath was cold on his neck, but he didn’t have the energy to go sit elsewhere.

  Footfalls against padded carpet approached, and Fuchida saw movement over his right shoulder. “Shūzō-kun. My condolences for your loss.”

  It was Kamaguchi Ryusuke, then. His lisp was unmistakable. They said someone had bisected his tongue in a knife fight once—stabbed him right through the cheek to do it. That was in his youth; now Kamaguchi had a watermelon of a belly and had to dye his hair black. One of the chairs creaked softly as he settled his weight into it.

  Fuchida did not look up from the green plastic box. “My family thanks you,” he said.

  “There is not so much of your family left,” said Kamaguchi. “Your uncles are all gone. You have inherited leadership of the Fuchidas.”

  It was an obvious statement, and yet it only became fact when Kamaguchi Ryusuke pronounced it. The Fuchidas were beholden to the Kamaguchi-gumi, and their right of succession had always been defined by the parent clan. “I thank you,” said Fuchida, “and I will see to it the family prospers as never before.”

  “And now we come to that,” said the old, fat man. “I hear rumors of a new mover in town.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Pushing drugs I have not authorized. A fatal mistake—one I am sure you are not stupid enough to make. And yet I hear your name connected to these rumors. What do you know about it? Is there new activity in your territory?”

  Fuchida shrugged. “Nothing. The usual guys slinging speed in neighborhoods where my people collect, but that’s nothing I’d call ‘new.’”

  “Look at me,” Kamaguchi said. “Tell me you have no involvement.”

  Fuchida looked away from the little green box for the first time in their conversation. He turned his head and looked Kamaguchi in the eye. Kamaguchi’s black hair was punch-permed. A hairless scar the shape of a bullet stared out of the middle of his left cheek. His eyes seemed too small; his lower jaw seemed too long, his lower teeth just visible as they touched his upper lip. He wore a blue-gray suit with a blue tie and a pair of big gold-rimmed sunglasses hanging from the left breast pocket. Fuchida thought of a boar wearing the same suit.

  “I have no involvement with selling drugs.” The lie flowed easily; Fuchida’s heart did not quicken. It never quickened, not even when he lied right to the face of an underboss from the Kamaguchi-gumi. The only man he could never lie to was now reduced to ashes in a green plastic box. “Not in any of my neighborhoods. Not anywhere else either.”

  Kamaguchi nodded, making the fat of his neck fold around his shirt collar. “That’s good. This is no time to be changing our arrangement with the police, Shūzō-kun. That business a couple of years back with the Takahashi-kai still has the cops on edge. They won’t tolerate another gunfight in the streets. And believe me, drugs bring shooting.”

  In other company, Fuchida would have disagreed. The ruckus with the Takahashis was old news, and even then it hadn’t been much of a gunfight; more like an assassination. Only one side did the shooting, and if it happened over people’s lunch hour, so be it; let the people of Tokyo remember why they once feared the ninkyō dantai. The last time Fuchida visited an onsen, no one had even taken the trouble to clear out of the bath.

  They would have if he’d had the sword with him. He wished he had her now. Even Kamaguchi Ryusuke would think twice about telling him what to do if there were a blade near at hand. But the sword was at home—Fuchida’s mother would have been embarrassed by it, so he’d left it behind—and here was Kamaguchi telling him what to do. The same man who had ordered him to kill his childhood friend, Endo, so many years before; the same man whose commands Fuchida’s father had followed all his life. Once again a Kamaguchi was telling a Fuchida what to do. Fuchida bowed with his head only, and did not bother to get up from his chair.

  “So we are in agreement,” Kamaguchi lisped. “Your father was a good earner, Shūzō-kun, and I would like to believe he has passed that on to you. But if I hear one more word of you disrupting the status quo, you’ll have a little green plastic box just like your father’s. You will see to it that no more rumors reach me of your drug peddling.”

  “I certainly will,” said Fuchida, and he meant it sincerely. Heads would roll for this.

  41

  Mariko looked at the medical examiner’s reports with a growing sense of dread. The first of the homicides was a familiar face. Sagamihara Kintarō usually went by “Saga,” and he had been Mariko’s first narcotics arrest. On her first weekend with the Narc guys she’d busted him for possession, a charge that should have stuck on anyone with Saga’s drug priors but one that Saga wriggled out from because he had a baby’s face and an unusually incompetent prosecutor. Now Saga was dead at nineteen, his throat slashed in the garden below Tokyo Tower, with three missing fingers that suggested he’d raised his arms in defense against an edged weapon.

  The next homicide, a man named Hitoshi, was probably Saga’s supplier. They seemed to have been killed in the middle of a deal. Murders during drug deals weren’t unheard of, but this one was weird. Usually it was one pusher making a move against another, but this time the evidence suggested the two vics were accosted by an unrelated assailant with a large edged weapon. Homicide’s initial notes said Hitoshi, a chubby little toad of a man, bled out from a pair of stab wounds, one through the belly button and one puncturing the left lung from behind. That didn’t feel right to Mariko, so she called the ME and asked him to see if it was a through-and-through. Her desk phone rang even as she studied the crime scene photos.

  “Oshiro.”

  “Detective Oshiro, this is Saigō, the medical examiner. We spoke earlier?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just wanted to tell you thanks for the beer.”

  “Huh?”

  “Okada from Homicide happened to be down here when you called about your through-and-through. He’s the lead on the Sagamihara/Hitoshi murders? Well, he’s also the one who said it was multiple stab wounds that killed this fatso, and he bet me a case of Kirin that there was no way in hell this was a through-and-through. Said the murder weapon would have to be a meter long to go all the way through him. I told him he was probably right but I’d take him up on it anyway. So now he’s out buying me a case of Kirin.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep.” Dr. Saigō sounded quite pleased with himself. “Single wound channel, probably entered through the abdomen. Hell of a nice catch, by the way. What made you think to even ask about it?”

  “I don’t know,” Mariko said, cagy about mentioning Fuchida. Ko wouldn’t even approve of this phone call, much less her interest in the murders. “Isn’t it sort of standard procedure? You know, investigating every possibility and all that?”

  “Yeah, maybe, but Okada and his partner have both been on Homicide for, like, ten years, and neither of them thought of it. So, you know, thanks for the beer.”

  Mariko laughed. “You’re welcome. Set aside a couple for me.”

  “Oh. Uh…I’ll have them in the cooler when they get here.”

  “So?”

  “Uh. The cooler’s where we keep, you know, dead people.”

  “Right. I’ll take a rain check. Thanks, Dr. Saigō.”

  Mariko hung up the phone, not knowing how to feel. Outdoing the Homicide guys was thrilling; knowing word of it might get back to Ko made her gut freeze solid. Ko would insist these murders had nothing to do with the attempted sword theft he’d assigned her, and Mariko had nothing in the way of a counterargument. Why would Fuchida stage a random assault against a pair of drug dealers? If there was any connection to Yamada’s sword, Mariko couldn’t see it. Her best hope was that the newest homicides were the aftermath of a turf war. If so, then at least she’d know Tokyo Tower was within Fuchida’s territory. That would be her first hint as to h
is whereabouts, and Mariko had logged too many hours looking for this shithead to remain empty-handed.

  Her lack of progress on Fuchida frustrated her to no end. His wanton violence made her want to redouble her efforts, but she had so damned little to go on. Everything Tokyo’s bōryokudan unit had on Fuchida was dated and petty; the man hadn’t seen face time with a cop for almost ten years. Fuchida made no appearance in Yokohama’s police records, nor in the files of any nearby city whose records she could get a warrant to search.

  She did find a few cases connected to Fuchida’s father—none related to narcotics, but it seemed the Fuchida family had been selling stolen merchandise for the Kamaguchi-gumi since at least the 1960s, and carrying out executions when Kamaguchis didn’t care to send their own muscle. The elder Fuchida seemed to share his son’s knack for lying low: he hadn’t set foot in a courtroom in over thirty years, and even back then he managed to outmaneuver his prosecutors. He’d collected four acquittals in four years, and in each case a key witness disappeared just before giving testimony. After that the old man vanished from the justice system entirely.

  Mariko cursed her luck when she read about the elder Fuchida’s death. She couldn’t have asked for an easier opportunity to catch her lead suspect than at his own father’s funeral, but she only learned of the funeral after the fact. There hadn’t been an obituary; she’d only got word of the old man’s passing because someone with the National Health Insurance mistakenly forwarded her his death certificate. The fact that she’d missed the funeral made her feel guilty. Fuchida didn’t commemorate his father by going out and getting blitzed that night like the rest of his gangster buddies. Instead, he murdered two pushers for no apparent reason. Without any hard evidence, Mariko couldn’t have done anything at the funeral except take photos, but still the guilt gnawed at her, and more than once she’d racked her brain trying to figure out a way she could have saved poor, baby-faced Saga from having his throat slashed open at the age of nineteen.