Daughter of the Sword: A Novel of the Fated Blades

by Steve Bein

  Fuchida Shūzō was nonexistent on Google. He didn’t pay taxes or claim health insurance benefits. He’d paid his tuition to Tōdai in cash. No car had ever been purchased in his name; ditto with airfare; ditto with houses, apartments, condos, storefronts, retail spaces, or empty lots. He had no bank accounts, no post office boxes, no landlines or cell phones under his name. Apart from a few dated police records, she hadn’t produced so much as a single receipt with his name on it.

  Mariko knew she’d never get back to Narcotics until she put Dr. Yamada’s sword case behind her, which of course was exactly the reason Lieutenant Ko had given her the case in the first place. He couldn’t have guessed that Fuchida was an electronic ninja, master of the art of bureaucratic invisibility, but he’d known full well that property crimes like this were damn near impossible to solve. The clock was ticking: her probationary period on Narcotics was dwindling away day by day, and if at the end of the year her arrest record wasn’t impressive enough, Ko would be well within his rights to deny her transfer.

  If there were any justice in the world, then if she couldn’t hunt down Fuchida, at least she could have found Saori. But there was no justice, and no luck either, because Saori was still a phantom. Their mother was a nervous wreck, and as she had no one else to call, Mariko was the one to absorb all the fallout. Dealing with her mother’s stress left Mariko no energy to cope with her own.

  Not for the first time, Mariko wished she was back at academy, for that was the one time in her life where bashing something with a stick had been a regular part of her day. She remembered it fondly, that satisfying shudder moving up the baton and into the bones of her arm. She was all too aware that all she had to do was pop by Dr. Yamada’s and she could start a brand-new phase of combat training. But that would expose her to another talk about magic and destiny and all that crap, and she liked Yamada too much to tell him to shut the hell up.

  It was ultimately the little things that broke her. Three minutes after she hung up the phone with Dr. Saigō, the computer in her cubicle crashed. It was annoying but manageable: leaving the baby-faced photos of Saga on her desk, she tried calling the bōryokudan unit across town to talk about which yakuzas controlled the territory around Tokyo Tower. No sooner did they pick up than her line went dead. Then she remembered the morning’s briefing: an IT crew was finally upgrading the precinct’s DSL service to fiber, so lines would be cutting in and out all day.

  Again, annoying but manageable. She figured a good walk might get the stress out her system anyway, so she went to take a train across town to the bōryokudan unit. It took two trains to get there, and both times she sprinted up to the platform only to watch the doors slide shut right in front of her face. She felt her blood pressure rising as she called her contact in the bōryokudan unit to tell him she’d be late—to beg him, in fact, to stay on a little while after his shift ended. But an automated message answered instead, telling her that her own phone number was no longer in service.

  “Great,” she said to herself. It was a computer snafu, easy enough to fix if only she could give Docomo a call. But this was her only phone, and she couldn’t just head back to precinct to take care of it. Even if the IT guys had finished, Ko forbade personal calls at work. Leave it to a damn cell phone company to highlight yet one more way her CO could piss her off.

  She didn’t have the patience to go all the way to the bōryokudan unit just to find out her contact there had already left for the day, nor did she have the patience to go back and try to deal with a tetchy office computer and its spotty Internet access. “Fuck it,” she said to herself in English. She resolved to get on the next train, wherever the hell it was heading, and just sit on it for a few minutes and try to get her heart rate to simmer down.

  The next train in the station was bound for Machida. Yamada’s neighborhood. Destiny.

  So it was that she found herself breathing the cool air of Yamada’s backyard, trying to enjoy it, trying to leave the rest of the world outside. Her fingers wrapped tightly around the haft of the heavy Inazuma sword, feeling oddly natural there. Her toes dug into the cold grass. A high slat fence surrounded her on three sides, with the back of the house on the fourth. The fence was the color of milk tea, overgrown in places with clematis and climbing fern. A wooden lattice arched behind her, all but invisible beneath the luxurious wisteria that hung from it like white clouds in a perfect summer sky. Her forearms ached with the weight of the blade, and she’d only been holding it for a few minutes.

  “Shoulders over your hips,” Yamada said. He was sitting on a stone bench settled within a species of chrysanthemum different from the one growing along the front of the house. Those were pink; these were white. “Settle your weight.”

  “If you say so,” Mariko said. She didn’t see how her weight could be anything but settled. What else was it supposed to do, float?

  “The correct response is, ‘Yes, Sensei.’ If you want to train, do it seriously.”

  But I don’t want to train, some part of Mariko’s mind responded. But here you are training, another part said; do as you’re told.

  “Better,” Yamada said. He stood, unsheathed the sword he’d had lying across his lap—the old man had a small arsenal in the house—and stood in front of her. She mirrored his stance, then aped his movements as he led her through the first drill. Stepping and striking, stepping and striking, back and forth, over and over. In ten minutes her bruised ribs felt like coals in a fire—the idea of stopping in for an X-ray seemed better and better by the minute—and her thighs burned hotter still.

  “This sword is too big for me,” she said, eyeing the smaller blade Yamada held so easily.

  “That sword is too big for everyone.”

  “Then let me use yours.”

  Yamada clicked his tongue.

  “Sensei,” she added hastily.

  “Swords are not like shoes; one does not break them in. You must accustom yourself to the weapon. Again.” And he led her through the exercise once more.

  “Sloppy,” Yamada said, watching her.

  My arms are tired, Mariko thought. What do you expect? But she said nothing.

  “Getting sloppier,” he said. “You’re just swinging it now.”

  This time she almost spoke her mind. She caught herself with her mouth open, took a panting breath instead, and consciously avoided his gaze. If she looked at him, she thought the next chop might come down on his stubbly head.

  “Where is your concentration? If you’re just going to waste time here, I’d rather see you out on the streets looking for your sister.”

  Mariko stopped the sword in midair, her fists clenched tight with anger. She wanted to stab a hole in the fence. She wanted to chop down the lattice archway and hack at its remains.

  “Perfect!”

  Mariko shot a sidelong glare at Yamada. “Perfect!” he said again. “That is the energy you need. Without the rage, though. Power, but with focus. Do you understand?”

  She scoffed. “I don’t even understand why I’m doing this, much less how.” Her shoulders slumped; the sword was heavy again in her trembling, aching hands.

  Yamada walked close enough that he could set his fingertips on her shoulder. “Do you know what you just did? You controlled the weight of Glorious Victory Unsought. You arrested it in midswing, and in doing so you were still ready to attack. You did think about attacking me, didn’t you?”

  Mariko was sure her cheeks would have flushed, if only they weren’t already red under the sheen of sweat. “Actually,” she said, “that time I thought about killing your lattice archway. I was thinking about killing you earlier.”

  Yamada laughed, and Mariko did too. “Good,” he said. “You’re releasing that tension of yours. You’ve got a lot of it, you know.”

  “Work. Saori. The usual.”

  “It feels good to let it go, neh?”

  Mariko let her mind rove over her body. Everywhere it touched down—her shins, her thighs, her elbows, her neck—it found
pain, but not in a painful way. It was like a tongue exploring the gap left by a missing tooth, odd but satisfying. The idea of a satisfying pain didn’t make much sense to her, but there it was. Even the soreness from running a triathlon wasn’t the same: she enjoyed the endorphins, and even the feeling of rubbery, totally exhausted muscles, but the hurting itself was still something she’d rather avoid. But in any case Yamada was right: the tension caused by Saori’s disappearance had vanished, if only for the moment.

  Mariko went to the bench where her weapon’s scabbard was lying and sheathed the blade. Yamada joined her as she eased herself to a seated position. “The sword has a name,” she said. “Glorious Victory Unsought. Does it have a story too?”

  “Yes.”

  “I like the way you tell stories. And I could use a story to keep my mind off of everything else.”

  Yamada squinted and frowned. “It’s too early for you to look to swordsmanship for distraction. I want focus from you first. I promise to tell you its story, but only after the blade has broken you in.”

  “What I’m wondering is.…Oh, I can’t believe I’m going to even ask this. Sensei, do you believe this sword is cursed?”

  “Hm. Not an easy question to answer. What makes you ask it?”

  “Because it sure as hell looks to me like it behaves differently depending on who wields it.”

  Yamada’s white eyebrows arched at that. “Now, that’s an interesting observation. How on earth did you deduce that already?”

  “When I watched you fight with this sword, you held it as easily as I hold a TV tray. But when I pick it up, it’s everything I can do just to keep it pointed at your throat like you taught me. I’m not a weakling, Sensei. I keep myself in shape. And besides that, I’m sixty years younger than you.”

  “Ever the polite one, Sergeant Oshiro.”

  Mariko swallowed. “Sorry. But you see what I’m saying, neh? Why is this so hard for me and so easy for you?”

  “Because I’m sixty years older than you. Your body is stronger than mine, but my muscles know nothing but swordsmanship. It’s in my bones. But take heart. You show promise.”

  “Well, that makes one thing that’s going right.”

  Yamada clucked his tongue. “I take it you have not yet found Fuchida-san.”

  Mariko shrugged. The motion pushed fingers of pain through her shoulder muscles. “No address, no phone. A criminal record but no known associates. The guy lies low even by yakuza standards.”

  “I see. And what of your criminal friends? You’ve spoken with them?”

  “Yeah. They know the name Fuchida, but they’ve never heard of any Fuchida Shūzō. The thing is, to me that’s all the more reason to believe he’s a yakuza.”

  “Oh?”

  “Definitely. For one thing, it’s the kind of job that tends to run in the family. But more than that, it’s in the way these guys talk about him. They’d brag about knowing his every move if they could, but since they can’t, they brag about how they’re too big to pay him any notice. That tells me he’s one of them.”

  “So where does that leave you?”

  “With an idiot of a commanding officer. We know what Fuchida wants and where it is. The least we can do is put a stakeout on your house and wait for him. But if my LT had any brains at all, he’d launch a massive manhunt. This city has more security cameras than stoplights. We need eyes on every last one of them. And we need beat cops pounding the pavement, looking in all the dark corners where the cameras can’t see.”

  “And you think Fuchida-san would fall into your dragnet?”

  “We’re a lot more likely to nab him my way than by hoping he turns himself in.” Mariko punched her palm, causing stabbing pain to shoot through her ribs. It was just one more frustration in her life. Unable to keep the heat from her voice, she said, “I swear, Sensei, the last thing in the world I want to be is a paper pusher, but sometimes I wish I could make lieutenant just for a day so I could show everyone else how it’s done. I can catch this guy, you know? I just need my damn CO to get the hell out of my way.”

  Yamada pressed his wrinkled lips together, making the frown lines deepen in his cheeks. “There’s an old soldier’s saying: Commanders can always be relied upon to do the obvious, once all the alternatives have been exhausted.”

  Mariko laughed and laughed hard. Her ribs bit back at her with every chuckle—she really was going to have to get them X-rayed sometime soon—and even that made her giggle. Little grunts of pain accompanied each laugh, but the grunting was funny too. None of it was funny enough to warrant such a belly laugh, but she was exhausted and her sister was missing and the world was hopeless, and there wasn’t anything else to do but laugh.

  She was still chuckling, doubled at the waist with her hair brushing her knees, when she heard Yamada speak again. “You’ll make a fine swordswoman, Sergeant Oshiro. We’ll see what we can do about that commander of yours.”

  42

  Mariko was entering data into the Yamada case file when she got the call. “Oshiro,” Lieutenant Ko’s voice said through the speakerphone on her desk, “get in here.”

  She clicked SAVE and abandoned her work. A tension headache was already setting in and she hadn’t even set foot in Ko’s office yet. This was the second day in a row that she’d come down to the precinct to find that Fuchida had killed again. It was eerie being the only one who knew Fuchida’s handiwork for what it was. She felt like he was watching her, like he was killing just so she would find a new set of photos on her desk in the morning.

  “What were you doing?” Ko asked when she opened his door.

  “Reading up on another drug-related homicide, sir. Last night someone gutted a dealer behind Shinjuku station, and not with a knife. Looks like another sword killing.”

  “You’re in Forensics now, are you?”

  “No, sir. But the slash wound was a single cut, and it opened the vic’s belly like a piñata. ME says the cut came within a few millimeters of the spine. No way you cut a grown man nearly in half with something the size of a kitchen knife. Not in one slash you don’t.”

  Ko frowned, then lit a cigarette off the butt end of the one he was finishing. “And this is related to your Yamada case? How?”

  “How many sword killers can there be, sir, even in a city this size? I’ve got evidence that the Yamada case is linked to a murder two weeks ago in Yokohama, and—”

  “Enough.” Ko stabbed the cigarette to death in his ashtray. “This has gone too far. First you want me to put you on Narcotics, then you start tying your theft case to every murder within a hundred kilometers. And now—now a requisition comes across my desk for a province-wide manhunt? You want me to divert half the department’s manpower for a simple B and E?”

  “With all due respect,” Mariko said, “this case is hardly simple. Tokyo usually sees about a hundred and twenty murders a year, neh? Two or three a week? In the last two nights we’ve had three dealers killed by the same MO—the same MO you’ll find in the Kurihara murder, by the way—not to mention the three bodies we’ve got from the breakin at Dr. Yamada’s place. That’s six fatalities, sir, six in one case—”

  “If, Oshiro. One case, if this can’t all be chalked up to delusions of grandeur on your part. What’s the alleged link between the Yamada case and these drug dealers?”

  “I haven’t figured that out yet, sir. But if you bothered reading my reports, you’d see the Kurihara-Yamada connection. You sent me out to Yamada’s place to follow up on the attempted sword theft, neh? Well, Kurihara-san was the one who sold that sword to Yamada in the first place. And now she turns up dead, killed just like these dealers were killed, by a sword of all things. Come on, sir, you’ve got to see the connection.”

  “I see circumstantial evidence at best,” Ko said through a cloud of smoke. “Conspiracy theory at worst. And I have read your reports, by the way. Please tell me you’re not serious about this yakuza nonsense.”

  “Sir, I saw you talking to Fuchida’s soldi
er the night I brought the guy in. The big fat one? You want to tell me that guy wasn’t a yakuza?”

  Ko adjusted his overlarge glasses and took a pull from his cigarette. “I don’t know what he is. What I do know is that getting a few tattoos doesn’t make him a yakuza, and I also know he was sitting in custody during the murders of the three drug dealers you seem so concerned about. That means the fat man’s not a suspect.”

  “I never said he was, sir. It’s Fuchida—”

  “Oshiro, I’m ordering you to put a stop to all this conspiracy-theorist bullshit this instant. Is that clear?”

  Mariko’s eyes burned with cigarette smoke. She knew her jacket and blouse would stink of if later, and she hated the thought of carrying traces of Ko with her for the rest of the day.

  Ko’s frown lines deepened. “Well, Oshiro? Is that clear?”

  “Sir,” she said as calmly as she could manage, “am I to understand you’re giving me a direct order not to investigate possible bōryokudan activity?”

  Ko grinned. It was a ghoulish expression, but Mariko couldn’t decide whether it was his fat lips and beady eyes that made it so gruesome, or whether someone had to know his shriveled, black heart to get the same chills she did. “Why, Oshiro,” he said, his tone every bit as sweet and as ghoulish as his grin, “I think at last we understand each other.”

  “I’m not sure we do, sir. Isn’t it illegal to order me to overlook organized crime?”

  Ko crushed his cigarette like a bug. Still forcing a smile, he said, “You wouldn’t be questioning my orders, would you, Oshiro? That would be cause for disciplinary action.”

  Through clenched teeth Mariko said, “No, sir.”

  “Good. It would be a shame to douse any hopes of your transfer to Narcotics before you even finished your probationary period. That sort of thing doesn’t reflect well on an officer’s record. We do understand each other now, don’t we?”