The Toyotomi Blades (Ken Tanaka Mysteries Book 2)

by Dale Furutani

  “Mind? I’d love it! But how did you get the money for the ticket?” As a struggling actress, Mariko did not have a lot of cash lying around.

  She sighed. “To tell you the truth I got the money by doing something I swore I’d never do again.”

  “You don’t mean …”

  “Yes.”

  “But you said it was too humiliating to do again.”

  “I know. But I didn’t see any other way to get some money quickly.” She sighed. “I asked my parents for a loan. That means at least a couple of years of flying back to Columbus to see them for major holidays, and it might even mean having them come to California for a visit. If I knew a loan shark that would lend me the money I’d have gone to him. I’d rather have broken kneecaps than my mother lecturing me about giving up acting, getting married again, and having nice, fat, little Japanese grandchildren for her.”

  “I know what a sacrifice it is, but I’m glad you did it. I can’t believe you’re here.”

  “Neither can I.”

  “I called Mrs. Kawashiri this morning and she acted cagey when I asked for you. I guess you were already in the air and she didn’t want to spoil the surprise.”

  “She was super about letting me take time off on short notice.”

  “You better buy her a nice gift.”

  “You’re pretty free with my money. Or rather my parent’s money.”

  I shook my finger at her in mock admonishment. “I know your parents raised you right. You may have been just about the only Japanese girl in Columbus, Ohio, but you still know what to do when someone has been as nice to you as Mrs. Kawashiri.”

  She raised her eyebrow. “Gee, I didn’t think that lecturing me would be what you’d do once you got over your surprise.”

  Well, I know a cue when I hear one. I took Mariko in my arms and tried to do my best to satisfy her expectations. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but so does abstinence. I know I’m over forty and I also know we were apart for only a few days, but there’s a great secret they don’t write about in detective novels: Successfully eluding crooks is an exhilarating shot to the libido. I had eluded my two friends two nights in a row and frankly I felt pretty frisky.

  When Mariko and I were back to a state where we could communicate in full sentences, I said, “I almost forgot. I’m leaving for Kyoto tomorrow morning.”

  “What? Why?”

  “For my health.”

  Mariko looked puzzled.

  “I called you this morning to tell you about another encounter I’ve had with the same two guys who chased me. The police say they’re Yakuza. I’ve decided it isn’t safe to be in Tokyo, so the television show is paying to get me out of town. While I’m in Kyoto, I’m also going to talk to a sword collector about that sword I bought in the garage sale.”

  “So you’re actually leaving tomorrow morning?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You won’t get away from me that easily. I’m going to Kyoto, too.”

  “Really?”

  “As long as my credit card holds out I might as well see Kyoto as well as Tokyo. If I can go to Japan on a moment’s notice, going to another city is a snap.”

  The phone rang. Mariko kissed me on the cheek and said, “Go ahead and answer it. It might be important. I want to jump into the shower anyway. Oh, and maybe you can call down and have my bags sent up to the room. I checked them with the bell captain.”

  I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Ken-san?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Junko. I’ve got your tickets and information about accommodations in Kyoto for you. I’ve also got some new information about the swords. I’m in the lobby. Can I come up?”

  I glanced at the bathroom door and said hastily, “I’ll come down and meet you. There’s a bar in the lobby. I’ll see you there.”

  I scrambled into some clothes and stuck my head into the bathroom where Mariko was just stepping out of the shower, a towel wrapped around her head. “There’s someone from the television show here. I’m going to meet her in the lobby. Want to come?”

  “Sure. Just give me a minute to get on my clothes and fix my hair.”

  Mariko was true to her word, and it only was a few minutes before we were going down in the elevator. In the lobby bar of the Imperial, Junko was sitting at a table sipping a drink. She saw us and she got a quizzical look on her face.

  “This is my girlfriend, Mariko Kosaka,” I told Junko as we sat down. “She flew in this evening from Los Angeles to surprise me. If it’s possible, she’d like to get tickets to go to Kyoto with me tomorrow.”

  Junko looked a bit flustered, but she assured me that there would be no problem getting an extra train ticket in the morning.

  “You said you had more information about the swords,” I reminded her.

  “Oh yes.” She took some papers out of her purse and handed them to me. They were two faxes. One looked like a page from an auction catalog. It showed a Japanese samurai sword, with the markings on the blade just barely visible. The other page looked like a museum brochure of some kind, but the writing was in Dutch or German. There was a small picture of a samurai sword on this page, along with a drawing of an old sailing ship of some sort. The sword was the bare blade, without the handle.

  “The auction catalog is the New York blade. It’s not a very good picture, but you can just make out the design on the blade. The other fax is from the Dutch Shipping Museum in Rotterdam. The sword picture on that one is pretty poor quality, but it was the best they were able to come up with. I thought these might help you,” Junko said.

  I looked at the two faxes closely, but the images were too muddled to really tell me anything. Still, it was better than nothing and I thanked Junko profusely for her efforts. The three of us sat in the bar for about half an hour discussing the arrangements in Kyoto. Mariko, who is a recovering alcoholic, sipped an orange juice and I did the same. I didn’t like meeting in the bar because it was unfair to Mariko, but I didn’t want Junko up in my room with the bed mussed up the way it was. Despite being a child of the swinging sixties, I’m modest.

  When we were done with our discussion, Junko said goodbye and Mariko and I went to the elevator to return to my room. When the doors of the elevator closed, Mariko said, “It’s just as well that I came to Japan.”

  “Why?”

  “I think Junko might be a little interested in you.”

  14

  The blue-and-white bullet train slid into the station like a slinking beast. Junko, Mariko, and I were standing on the platform. Mariko and I had baggage in hand. When the train stopped, the doors slid open and we walked into the car.

  The interior of the train was off-white and gray with polished aluminum strips framing the windows. The bench seats had a bright blue upholstery, and over the seats was a luggage rack of polished tubular aluminum. Mariko and I found a seat and slung our luggage on the overhead racks.

  “How long will the train stop?” I asked.

  “Only a few minutes,” Junko said. “I’d better say good-bye now. Have fun in Kyoto, and remember that a car and guide will meet you when you arrive. The dinner with Mr. Sonoda is all arranged. I’ll see you in two days for the program.” Junko shook my hand, then said to Mariko, “It was nice meeting you.” Then she left us to return to the platform.

  “She’s interested in you, all right,” Mariko said. “I’ve got frostbite from that send-off.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. I feigned indifference, but secretly I hoped Mariko was right. I was very happy with Mariko and had no intention of being unfaithful to her, but let’s face it, nothing is as great for the ego as someone finding you desirable.

  In under five minutes the train started moving. The doors closed and the car shuddered slightly as the train left the station. I marveled at how smooth and quiet the train was. Much smoother and quieter than any train in the U.S. I’ve ever been on.

  “How fast do you think we’ll be
going?” Mariko asked.

  “We’re on the Nozomi train, which is supposed to be the super express. The guidebooks say we’ll do a hundred eighty or ninety kilometers per hour. If it’s a clear day we should be able to see Mount Fuji on the trip.”

  Mariko was dressed in black slacks, a dark green turtleneck sweater, and a green jacket. The slim line of the slacks fitted her trim body and made her look much taller than she really was. I had jeans, a shirt, and a ski parka on.

  “How long will it take us?”

  “A little more than two hours.”

  As we passed through Tokyo, I could see the density of the buildings gradually thinning until houses started having small yards in the back. These houses had little vegetable gardens and weren’t as tightly packed as the buildings in the city, but they were still crowded by American standards. As we reached the outskirts of Tokyo, we could see Mount Fuji in the distant haze, looking like a painted white cone on pale gray silk. In the old days Mount Fuji could be seen from Tokyo almost every day, but smog and smoke now make Fuji a rare sight from the city.

  Soon the houses gave way to farmland. The farms were densely cultivated plots in a patchwork quilt. All the plots of land were small and most were flooded with water. Rice paddies. I could see a cluster of houses that formed a small village tucked into the folds of a foothill. On the hill, near a grove of trees, were Buddhist and Shinto headstones that marked a cemetery. The farmland looked very picturesque, and except for the occasional TV antenna or pickup truck, I imagine you could find hundred-year-old woodblock prints that depicted a landscape similar to the one out the window.

  When we arrived in Kyoto there was a limo with an English-speaking driver waiting to take us to our hotel. I could get used to this television lifestyle.

  That afternoon the driver took us to the Kyoto Gosho, the old Imperial Palace from the days when Kyoto used to be the capital of Japan. Afterwards we were taken to a craft center where we looked at pottery and woodblock prints. I love Japanese woodblock prints, but the high prices kept us from buying, except for a rather nice vase that Mariko said was for Mrs. Kawashiri.

  The next day we were taken to a bewildering succession of temples and shrines. Kyoto has over sixteen hundred temples, and our driver seemed determined to show us all of them. He was an affable man in his late thirties. Despite his smile, the rest of his face had a strained look, as if we were always behind some unstated timetable. When he drove he hunched over the wheel like Mickey Rooney in the camp autoracing movie, The Big Wheel, but, despite his intense posture, he didn’t speed. Of the numerous temples we were shown, only Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion, was memorable, and most of the others sort of blurred into my memory until we got to Ryoanji.

  The garden at Ryoanji is a rectangular expanse of white sand fenced on two sides by an austere plaster wall. A verandah made of natural wood borders the other two sides of the garden. The wood of the verandah has been polished to a hard, gleaming brown by uncounted stocking feet gliding across its surface.

  In the center of the sand stand fifteen rocks protruding upward. The rocks were set so you couldn’t see all of them no matter what your viewing angle was. Small bits of moss clung to the base of most of the rocks. The sand between the rocks was carefully raked to form wavelike patterns that sinuously wound their way around the rocks and throughout the expanse of the garden.

  “Ryoanji was first made in the fifteenth century.” Mariko was reading from a brochure we got when we entered. “It’s famous because of its connection with Zen Buddhism.”

  As she spoke, a milling and noisy crowd passed us. Children were talking and running about. Japanese tourists stopped, looked, and having seen the famous site, moved on. More than a few were fulfilling the stereotype by furiously snapping photographs. I noticed that in the corner of the verandah an old Japanese couple was kneeling on their heels and staring at the garden. Despite the flow of tourists around them, the sound of voices and the movement, the old man and woman seemed focused on the garden. A marvelous tranquillity was washed across their faces as they sat absorbing each nuance of beauty found in the austerity of the sand, rocks, and moss.

  I was in stocking feet like the rest of the tourists. I walked to the edge of the verandah and sank down. I couldn’t sit on my heels like the old couple, so I sat cross-legged and stared out across the garden.

  The vista reminded me of aerial photographs I’ve seen of the South Pacific. To me, the rocks and moss seemed like islands set in a swirling white sea. That white sea washed away my anxieties and tension. It was wonderful. My family has been in Hawaii since 1896, and I wondered if the suggestion of islands in the garden was what I really found restful. For some reason this made me feel very disconnected. I wondered if Japan, Hawaii, or California was my spiritual home.

  Mariko stood shuffling from foot to foot, already bored and anxious to move on, but she remained silent as I contemplated the garden. After about ten minutes, I turned to her and smiled, then stood up. We left the old couple still seated on the edge of the verandah, looking across the garden in unmoving silence.

  When we got back to the car the driver already had the door open, ready to whisk us away to another temple. We got in and I asked Mariko for the brochure on Ryoanji she had picked up. The car swayed slightly as it made its way towards the next temple and it was very peaceful feeling the warmth of Mariko’s body next to mine as I read the brochure.

  Detecting was the furthest thing from my mind when I turned over the brochure and noticed that it had a stylized map showing where Ryoanji temple was in relationship to other famous places in Kyoto. Mount Uryu-yama and Mount Kazan were shown to the west of the city as stylized icons, and the downtown was marked by an icon of the Kyoto Gosho palace. The Kamogawa river cut its way through Kyoto, and it was shown as a blue ribbon. The Golden Pavilion got its own icon, and Ryoanji was shown as a simple rectangle with tiny rocks in the middle. The folds of the brochure cut the map into neat sections. As I looked at the map I had a kind of Zen epiphany. My mind was clear and not consciously working, but an answer came to me as if in a dream.

  “It’s not a message. It’s a map,” I told Mariko.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When I talked to that professor, Hirota, he told me that he thought the patterns on the blades were some kind of message. He writes in pictographs, so it’s natural for him to think of icons as words. But the patterns are really stylized representations of temples and mountains. There’s something else that’s like a long line that I haven’t figured out, but the rest is now very clear to me. They’re all landmarks that would be used in a map. The blades fit together in sections, just like the sections formed by the folds of this brochure.”

  “But why would you put a map on different sword blades and what is it a map to?”

  “I don’t know yet. Maybe we should turn around and return to Ryoanji temple and it will come to me.”

  I was only half joking.

  15

  The dinner with Mr. Sonoda had been arranged by Junko, so I didn’t know too much when Mariko asked me about where we were going. The driver, our frenetic tour guide of the day, told us that we going to the Kori-Mizu restaurant. When I asked him about the restaurant, all he was able to tell me was they served traditional Japanese food and that the name of the restaurant meant ice water, which I thought was a strange name.

  The Kori-Mizu was nestled in the hills above Kyoto and the driver took a winding road to get us to it. The car pulled up to a Torii-style gate and let us out. Stone steps led up a mountainside, and at the top of a steep stairway we could see the restaurant. Tall trees lined the pathway so it was hard to get a good view of what the restaurant looked like, but it appeared to be very much like a traditional Japanese temple, built of wood and up on pilings, with thick pillars and a gently curved roof line.

  The path was illuminated by old-fashioned paper lanterns with candles in them. The flickering candles gave a soft warm yellow glow. The light was furt
her diffused as it bled its way through the thin paper of the lanterns. Despite the steep climb ahead of us, it was actually a very inviting sight to look up the mountainside and see the contrast of the lighted paper lanterns, the illuminated stone stairway, and the dark trees.

  Mariko and I made our way up to the restaurant door, where we were greeted by a young lady in traditional Japanese kimono. The kimono was a thick brocade of white blending into green, with embroidered gold leaves forming a pattern that looked like maple leaves being scattered in a fall wind. We gave our name and the woman bowed deeply. She pointed out cushions where we could sit and remove our shoes. Once we had done so, she provided us with slippers. They were thin plastic slippers that had terry cloth for soles.

  I saw that the floor was a light polished wood done in a semigloss finish and absolutely flawless in the way it was put together. All the wooden joinery was done with hard crisp lines and there seemed to be no filler used to cover up the inevitable cracks between boards that you’d find in a Western hardwood floor. In its own way it was a work of art and it almost seemed a shame to walk across it, even in terry-soled slippers.

  The woman took us down a central corridor. Off to the right and left were individual rooms with shoji screen walls. A few screens were open and we could see small rooms with tatami mats covering the floor and low-set tables. In every room there seemed to be an ikebana flower arrangement, pottery, or some painted scroll hanging on the wall. In its austerity, simplicity, and beauty, it was traditionally Japanese.

  We came to a place where the building simply divided in two. The wooden hall ended in a platform and was picked up about four feet away. Between the two sections of the building was a tiny wooden bridge. The woman took us across the bridge and I looked down and noticed that a swiftly flowing mountain stream was cutting through the middle of the restaurant. The water from the stream lapped the rocks just a few inches from the edge of the floor. I looked over at Mariko to see if she noticed this unusual architectural feature and I could see that she was both surprised and entranced by it.