Daughter of the Sword: A Novel of the Fated Blades

by Steve Bein

  Some aspects of Mariko’s life may strike non-Japanese readers as odd because police work is so different in Japan than elsewhere. Most noticeable is the fact that Japanese cops almost never use their guns. By this I don’t mean merely that they don’t fire their guns; most never even draw them. In the U.S., very few police officers ever fire at a human being, but even in rural areas many officers will find it hard to imagine getting through a summer without ever drawing and aiming at a suspect. (One officer I interviewed for this book told me he draws his service weapon weekly and has to take aim at a suspect at least once a month—and he serves a fairly sparse population.) By contrast, you can find cops in Japan who not only haven’t drawn their weapon in years but who don’t even know of anyone in their police station who has. Japanese cops pride themselves on their marksmanship, but the idea of using a pistol in the field is anathema.

  This is hardly the only discrepancy between the Japanese and American legal systems. Japanese medical examiners almost never perform autopsies. (Confucian taboos still prohibit tampering with corpses.) Defendants in criminal courts are almost never acquitted; by the time a case gets to trial, a conviction is all but secured. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department occupies an especially strange conceptual space, for Japan is without an equivalent of the American FBI. There is a National Police Agency, which is like an FBI with all of the bureaucrats but none of the agents or law enforcement power. The NPA commandeers local police officers as necessary, often from the TMPD, and the TMPD has the power to involve its own officers in crimes outside of its jurisdiction. Smaller police departments may also request personnel from the TMPD, which is how Mariko becomes involved in Dr. Yamada’s life.

  Organized crime syndicates go by many names in Japan. “The yakuza” is not one of them, despite the fact that in English “the yakuza” is almost invariably used to mean “the Japanese Mafia” rather than “the Japanese mafioso.” The terms I use most often here are bōryokudan (“violent crime organization”), which is used by police, and ninkyō dantai (literally “chivalrous group,” though it is not such a stretch to translate it as “Order of Knights”), used by yakuzas themselves. The difference between these two should tell you something about the difference between how police think of yakuzas and how yakuzas think of themselves. The word yakuza literally means “eight-nine-three,” but better translations would be “mafioso” or, oddly enough, “useless guy” or “good-for-nothing.” (The cards eight, nine, and three form an utterly worthless hand in a traditional card game that yakuzas used to run.) Yakuzas are yakuzas because they were deemed to be unfit for any other occupation. Revenge must have been sweet when society’s most useless members carved out a new and supremely influential place for themselves.

  The role of organized crime is misunderstood by virtually everyone, and in Japan that role is particularly bizarre. It is even difficult to apply the word “crime,” because in Japan such shadowy activities are often conducted in broad daylight with no legal reprisals. It is common knowledge, for example, that yakuzas own almost all the vending machines in the country, and the price of a bottle of soda is therefore defined by yakuzas. (Convenience stores dare not undercut it, for obvious reasons.) Yakuzas routinely carry business cards and maintain office buildings. The name of the criminal organization is displayed prominently above the front door, just like any ordinary business. When police raid such buildings, they phone in advance to make an appointment for the raid. I swear to you I am not making this up.

  There is no Kamaguchi-gumi, and neither Fuchida Shūzō, his father, nor Kamaguchi Ryusuke is based on any actual person. I repeat: no yakuza in this book is based on a real person. It may well be that the risk-free life is not worth living, but even so, I want to make it clear to all the gangsters out there that I am sure you are all perfectly nice fellows and you are just misunderstood. Please do not make me sleep with the fishes.

  —Steve Bein

  Undisclosed Location

  August 2011

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My heartfelt thanks go out to all of the people who assisted me in researching this book: to Alex Embry, my primary resource on all cop questions; to all the other police officers I interviewed but who preferred to remain nameless; to D. P. Lyle for all of his guidance on getting the medical and forensic details right; to the members of Codex for their collective resourcefulness in answering just about any question a writer can imagine; and to Luc Reid for getting Codex started in the first place.

  I am also indebted to all the people who helped to make this book a reality, especially Cameron McClure, my wonderful agent, and Kat Sherbo, my attentive and insightful editor. Cameron and Kat proved invaluable in polishing and tightening the manuscript. My thanks also go to Charlie Bee and Luc Reid, both of whom provided important insights on the structure of the story itself, and to my Mom, who also volunteers as my proofreader.

  Thanks as always to Michele, who puts up with me when I’m having trouble with my computer, and who doesn’t put up with me when my computer drives me beyond the brink of sanity. I am eternally grateful on both counts.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  STEVE BEIN teaches Asian philosophy and Asian history at the State University of New York at Geneseo. He holds a PhD in philosophy, and his graduate work took him to Nanzan University and Ōbirin University in Japan, where he translated a seminal work in the study of Japanese Buddhism. He holds a third-degree black belt and a first-degree black belt in two American forms of combative martial arts, and has trained in about two-dozen other martial arts over the past twenty years. His short fiction has been published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Interzone, and Writers of the Future, and has been anthologized for use in college courses alongside the works of such figures as Orson Scott Card, Larry Niven, Isaac Asimov, and H. G. Wells. Daughter of the Sword is his first novel. Visit him on the Web at www.philosofiction.com.