Daughter of the Sword: A Novel of the Fated Blades

by Steve Bein

  58

  Keiji’s parents’ house was small, without a spare room, so he laid out Hayano’s futon at the foot of his own. He shuddered to think what the neighbors might say—it wasn’t as if he and Hayano were blood relatives—but as he saw it, impropriety had to give way to necessity.

  The next morning he woke an hour early to prevent a repeat of the day before. He was out the door in record time, Hayano in tow with a band of fresh white cloth about her eyes. They made their way down the road under a bright sky, orange clouds on the eastern horizon suggesting late morning rain.

  Hayano chattered as they walked, her discussion wandering as capriciously as a dog chasing squirrels. Keiji hoped he could steer the conversation toward Tiger on the Mountain, but when she latched her thoughts on to something, she was remarkably persistent about sticking to it until she latched on to something else.

  At last, outside the butcher shop and within sight of his duty station, he said, “Hayano, can you tell me what you see when you see the tiger on the mountain?”

  She smiled. “I told you already.”

  “Please?”

  Suddenly her face grew grim. “Uh-oh,” she said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Earthquake. Coming soon. We better hide.”

  Keiji looked around. No one in the street was panicked. Even the butcher’s caged chickens were calm. “Are you sure?”

  “Mm-hm.” She tugged on his hand, pulling him toward the butcher shop. “Come on! We have to hurry!”

  “Hayano, that shop is much too small. Little buildings like that fall down in earthquakes. Let’s go to the Intelligence building; it’s big and it’s made of—”

  Her hand slipped from his, and she dashed headlong into the butcher shop.

  Keiji ran after her, wincing as he saw her collide with the butcher’s counter. She bounced off as only children can, barely missing a step. Just as Keiji entered the shop, the ground rumbled.

  No matter how many earthquakes he lived through, he always found them disconcerting. They seemed both to drag on forever and to take no time at all. Ground was not supposed to make noise. Nor was it supposed to move. Nothing was as it should have been.

  Now chickens squawked and knives rattled on the counters and people in the street shrieked and sought cover. A huge shock wave told Keiji the quake would be getting worse. “Hayano!” he shouted over the din. “Come on! Climb on my back! I’m going to try to get you to the Intelligence building! It’s big and made of concrete. It’ll—”

  “This place is fine. Nothing bad will happen to us here.”

  “This place is hardly more than a shack! We need to get—”

  “No. The tiger is here. We’ll be okay.”

  A loud crack, and a light pole fell across the entryway to the Intelligence building. Roof tiles rained on the street, shattering. Then it was over.

  Across the road, water sloshed back and forth in the big tanks of the fishmonger. His aquarium still stood but his shop was a ruin all around it. Next door, the greengrocer’s building had fallen in on itself like a house of cards. Next door to that, a restaurant was on fire and people were already rushing to put it out.

  Apart from a few upset chickens, the butcher shop was unharmed.

  Keiji’s mouth fell open. His heart hammered at his ribs, while Hayano’s face was inexplicably serene. “How…?” It took him a moment to put together anything more articulate than that. “You knew we’d be safe,” he said at last. “How?”

  “I told you. The tiger is here. Nothing bad can happen where the tiger is.”

  “Hayano, look around. The entire neighborhood is a ruin.”

  That got a frown out of her. She crossed her arms with a petulant flourish; wrinkles creased her nose and her lips pursed to a hair-thin slit. “I can’t look around, Keiji-san. You’re mean.”

  Keiji looked stupidly at his own hand, which pointed a useless finger at the burning restaurant. His head sagged and he smacked his forehead with his palm. “I’m sorry. That was stupid of me to say. I wasn’t thinking. The earthquake has me all rattled up.”

  “Well, you should listen to me, then,” she said, still cross. “I told you we’d be safe.”

  Keiji’s head sagged again. “You’re right. You told me. Can you tell me how you knew this building wouldn’t fall? I’ll listen this time.”

  “No. Ask me later. Right now I don’t like you.”

  Shit, Keiji thought. He didn’t know her all that well, but even a perfect stranger could see she wouldn’t change her mind anytime soon. What do you know about parenting? he asked himself. It might have been smarter to just take her to the police and let them sort her out. Smarter, maybe, and certainly easier, but this little girl had just saved his life. He owed her better treatment than simply passing her off to some stranger to dump her off in an orphanage somewhere. Besides, if he let her go, the thousand questions he had for her would never find answers.

  “Listen,” he said, “I’m going to go to work, all right? But I’m going to come find you later, and I promise I’ll be nice. You stay here with the butcher and make sure he gets you something to eat. Tell him I said you two should have dessert after lunch.”

  “Now you’re just trying to bribe me,” Hayano said.

  I sure am, Keiji thought. Damned if I know what else to do. How do parents do this every day? “I’ll come back later,” he told her, squatting on his haunches so he could put his hands on her skinny shoulders. “We’ll have some dinner together, and maybe later you can tell me what you want to tell me. I promise I’ll listen.”

  “Maybe,” said Hayano.

  It was as big a chink in the armor as he could ask for. He trotted out of the shop, wondering whether he was quitting while he was ahead, or whether he was deep in a hole and had only stopped digging.

  59

  Not bad,” General Matsumori said as Keiji stepped over the fallen light pole. “Even with an earthquake you’re forty-five minutes early.”

  The general was in his shirtsleeves again, standing with his hands folded behind his back to survey the damage. “You’re early yourself, sir,” Keiji said.

  “I don’t sleep. Come. Let’s go to my office.”

  They climbed four flights of stairs in silence, Matsumori limping slightly as they walked. A whiff of dust lingered on the air, probably shaken loose from the rafters. The building was otherwise intact, though Keiji wondered how many thousands of pages had rattled loose from their shelves and scattered themselves over the floors. And even for being empty the building was strangely silent, a stunned, post-earthquake silence.

  “You all right, Kiyama? Not the type to let a quake rattle you, are you?”

  “No, sir. It’s something else. A little blind girl…well, she told me the earthquake was going to happen before it did. She pulled me into the only shop that survived the tremors.”

  “Ah. Good luck, that. Good thing she was blind too. Probably heard it coming. I hear they’ve got ears like a dog.”

  “Maybe, sir. It didn’t feel like that, though. It felt like she knew what was going to happen.”

  “Ha! Maybe we should conscript her into Intelligence.”

  They reached the general’s office, with smoke from nearby fires rising along the skyline his windows overlooked. Matsumori shut the door. “General Itō tells me you have the makings of a good strategist, Kiyama. He says you’re foresightful. Is that so?”

  “The general is most generous, sir. I—”

  “Prove it, then. What of the East Indies? If you were in my position, how would you proceed?”

  “Your position, sir?”

  “Yes. If you were charged with the logistics for the Pacific war, how would you handle the East Indies?”

  Keiji swallowed. He felts his cheeks flush. “Sir, I haven’t read your daily reports. Without those, I’m sure I couldn’t—”

  “Pah! Show some backbone, Lieutenant. Hazard a guess.”

  “Given what I know, sir, given only wha
t I’ve read in the newspapers…well, with due respect, sir, I would abandon the East Indies.”

  Matsumori sat behind his desk, a bemused smile on his face. It was a Western-style desk, a blocky maple thing in keeping with the rest of the room. “Would you now? May I ask why?”

  “Because the Dutch aren’t our problem. We should be more concerned about the British and the Americans.”

  “Anyone with a map could tell you as much. The Netherlands are no bigger than a grain of rice. So? What, then? If not the East Indies, where?”

  “Ceylon, sir. As soon as possible.”

  Matsumori’s smile broadened. “Attack British interests directly? Is that wise, Lieutenant?”

  “It is necessary, sir. That makes it wise.”

  “Very good, Kiyama. You do understand that nothing said here can ever leave this building, yes?”

  “Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

  “Good. The attack on Ceylon began yesterday morning. Where would you have me attack next?”

  Keiji’s tongue lay like a lump of lead behind his teeth. Three days earlier he had celebrated graduation from officers’ school with his classmates. Now a general was confiding battle strategies to him. Was Matsumori reckless? Or worse yet, desperate? All the newspapers and film reels suggested the war was going well. Was it? Did men of Matsumori’s stature need new officers so badly that they would share state secrets on the second day? Or was Matsumori simply indiscreet?

  “Come on, Kiyama, I haven’t got all day. We’ve been charged with planning the strategy and logistics of the Pacific theater. It is our duty to see the Empire to victory. Don’t fall mute on me. Tell me what you would do to secure His Majesty’s interests in the Pacific.”

  “Guadalcanal.”

  “Speak up, son. You’re not in grammar school.”

  “Guadalcanal,” Keiji repeated, willing his voice to sound stronger than his last reedy spluttering. “And Tulagi, and Florida. All the Solomons, in fact. If I were you, sir, I would be forming plans to take them.”

  General Matsumori shifted forward in his chair, rested his elbows on his knees. “Why there?”

  “Supply lines, sir. After Hawai‘i, Guadalcanal is the biggest island between California and Australia. What the Americans need is a port. We cannot let them have it, sir. If we take the Solomons—”

  “We cut off the Brits in Australia as well,” said Matsumori. “Hell, if we had an airstrip down there, we could harass every shipping lane in the south Pacific.”

  He stood and leaned back, hands at his waist, stretching his hips and back. Keiji wondered if the general had sustained a pelvic injury. Then Matsumori gave a sudden snort. “It’s not bad, Lieutenant. Not bad at all. Give us a chance to show the gaijin what for.” He rolled his shoulders and stretched his hips and back again. “Come on, then. Let’s get cracking on it.”

  60

  Keiji spent the rest of the day drawing up fallback plans for supply chains to the Philippines in the event of bad weather. General Matsumori knew his history; if a typhoon sunk all their rations, even the armies of Genghis Khan would have no choice but to watch victory turn to defeat.

  After nine hours of poring over the deployments, patterns started to form in Keiji’s mind. The Americans were damnably tenacious in their mountains on the Bataan peninsula. Estimates put their numbers in the neighborhood of sixty thousand, with another ten or twelve thousand Filipinos fighting beside them. Given the favorable terrain, their defenses would hold indefinitely against a direct assault.

  What would defeat them in the end, Keiji realized, was hunger or disease. They were cut off. No friendly ship could reach them with food or medicine. And against disease their tens of thousands were only a liability; any contagion would spread like wildfire.

  The connections in Keiji’s mind were forming ever faster. If the American defense should collapse sooner than expected, then Japan’s supply chains would need to deliver not only rations but additional personnel to manage POWs. There would be no long battle of attrition; those tens of thousands would give up all at once. Japanese troops could be expected to sell their lives to the last man, but the Americans were not reported to have that sort of discipline. They had no warrior code underpinning their culture. As soon as they perceived their predicament—as soon as beriberi set in, or something worse—they would capitulate.

  Keiji wrote a memo specifying the particular need for additional officers and secretarial staff, and had it sent to General Matsumori. He found it satisfying to be stationed under a commanding officer who took his input seriously. Command school had led him to believe this would not happen often, but Keiji thought this was a station where the general might actually read a recommendation from a subordinate.

  Walking home, he enjoyed the smell of rain not more than an hour old. He noted the milky rivulets running in the gutters, offspring from the union of raindrops and the plaster dust shaken free by the earthquake. Birds were singing cheerily, unusually audible because the quake had silenced so much of the evening’s normal human activity. As he walked, Keiji caught a whiff of slaughtered yearling pigs hanging by their hocks in the butcher shop.

  The thought of the butcher sent his mind racing back to the girl. His day had been so busy that he’d forgotten about Hayano completely. But there she was, sitting in the only building still standing within fifty meters, chattering to no one and everyone.

  The two of them walked the three kilometers back to the house, learning as they went that they must have been at the very epicenter of the quake when it struck. Any number of obstacles forced Keiji to lift Hayano over them, but their frequency decreased as Keiji and Hayano increased their distance from the butcher’s.

  Keiji’s father had done yeoman’s work making the house presentable after the quake. The structure itself was undamaged, but every shelf and cabinet had vomited its contents, and tiny black-rimmed holes in the kitchen tatami suggested sparks from a fire only barely reined in.

  “Isn’t Keiji-san’s mom going to eat with us tonight?” Hayano asked between mouthfuls of rice.

  “No, she’s still sick,” Keiji’s father said.

  “Oh,” said Hayano. “But what if she’s hungry now?”

  “What a thoughtful little girl,” his father said. “Perhaps we should bring her dinner right away. Would you like to help me?”

  Ryoichi carried a platter with the food, Keiji brought the teapot, and Hayano was entrusted with a teacup and a pair of chopsticks. They walked down a narrow corridor, floorboards creaking underfoot, and Keiji slid aside the door to his mother’s dark, antiseptic room.

  His mother, Yasu, looked up from beneath her thick quilt, and Keiji’s first thought was that she must have been getting worse if she was shivering in a room this warm. Her hair hung in limp strands and her face was flushed. “Hello, Keiji,” she said. “Who’s your friend?”

  “This is Shoji Hayano,” Keiji said. “Hayano, this is my mother.”

  “Hello,” Hayano said, her high voice sweet as a bird’s in the dark room. “Your tummy is sick, huh?”

  “Yes it is,” Yasu said, nodding and smiling to her husband as he walked gingerly across the tatami floor and set the tray of food beside her. “I suppose my son told you that.”

  “I didn’t,” said Keiji. “Dad and I mentioned the surgery, but not…Hayano, how did you know about Mom’s stomach?”

  “I can see it,” said Hayano. She pointed at the quilts. “There’s something big in her tummy that’s not supposed to be there. It looks like it hurts.”

  Ryoichi looked at his son. “What’s going on here?”

  “I don’t know, Dad. I swear to you, I didn’t say a thing about the cancer. Mom, I’m sorry.”

  He took Hayano by the shoulders and turned her to escort her from the room. Behind him, a word from his mother turned into a wet, hacking cough. Keiji had captured the word, though. It was “Wait.”

  “Mom? Are you all right?”

  “No,” she said between coughs. “I’m
sick, son. And this little girl can see that. Are you a goze, dear?”

  “No. I’m Hayano.”

  “You are, neh? You’re a modern-day goze. Who would have thought?”

  Keiji knelt on the floor between his mother and Hayano. “Mom, what are you talking about?”

  “You should know,” Ryoichi said, kneeling beside him. “Have you forgotten your bedtime stories? Ah, but you always preferred your samurai stories, didn’t you? Hayano-chan, have you ever heard of a goze?”

  “No.”

  “The goze were blind women,” Keiji’s mother said, “from a long, long time ago. They played instruments and they walked the old highways, begging for alms.”

  “What’s alms?”

  “Money, sweetheart. Like monks ask for when they stand outside of temples with bowls.”

  “Oh.”

  “The goze were not beautiful women, and of course everyone thought them crippled, but they played the shamisen and the shakuhachi marvelously, and they saw what no one else could see.”

  “What was it?” Hayano hunched forward in anticipation.

  “The future, little one.”

  From the way Hayano’s hair shifted on her head, Keiji could tell her eyebrows must have risen halfway up her forehead. Her mouth made the shape of an egg, a black hole in her bright face in the dark room.

  “Hayano-chan,” Yasu said, “you should finish your dinner and have a bath. Your cheeks are dirty.”

  The moon was up, a caterwauling cat was crying out to it, and the Kiyamas had managed to get little Hayano cleaned up. Her bandages were fresh, and Keiji’s father had taken a shot at trimming her hair. He’d done this for Yasu some weeks ago, and the effect on Hayano was more or less the same: not a bad job, all things considered, but since the only hairstyle Ryoichi knew how to cut was his wife’s, Hayano wound up looking like an elegant dwarf. If only they’d had a fifty-year-old’s clothes in nine-year-old sizes, she might have passed for a large and lifelike doll, albeit a sinister one given the white linen wrapped around her eyes.

  The scars there were terrible. Keiji suspected an explosion, though he couldn’t imagine where it might have happened. The war was in the Pacific and on Chinese soil, nowhere near the homeland. But then he chided himself. That’s boot camp talking, he thought; explosions happened in civilian life too. In his mind he started to list the things that might explode, engines and boilers and the like, and soon found himself thinking about how quickly he’d shifted his frame of reference. He was a soldier now, no longer in the same category as his parents or this little girl. Civilian life was so far away from him it was like another country, one he could book passage to visit only after the war was over.