The Moving Blade

by Michael Pronko

  After a few minutes of silence, the detectives staring at the screen, Sugamo burst out laughing, his huge body relieving its tension for the first time Hiroshi had ever seen.

  Takamatsu snickered. “It’s amazing what you can find at murder scenes.”

  Still chuckling, Sugamo said, “I’ll go check on the others and hurry up the new guys.”

  “So, what do the notes say?” Sakaguchi asked.

  Hiroshi leaned forward and squinted. “It’s just descriptions of what makes the print authentic, notes on the color, configuration. Stuff that a collector or curator would want to know.”

  “Nothing else?” Sakaguchi asked.

  Hiroshi shrugged. “It looks like notes on the quality of the print, the authenticity of the colors. There’s a few translations of dialogue. That’s it. You think it’s some kind of code?”

  Sakaguchi shrugged. “I don’t speak English.”

  “It’s got to be connected,” Takamatsu said. “It was inside him.”

  Osaki asked, “Want to see the others?” He clicked through a few more prints of entwined bodies, genitals and arms and legs and kimonos writhing in impossible positions.

  “What do you call this style of print?” Sakaguchi asked.

  “Shunga. Spring pictures,” Hiroshi answered.

  Sakaguchi’s cellphone buzzed. He squinted at the message on the screen and turned to Hiroshi. “Do you know the name Bernard Mattson?”

  Hiroshi did. Mattson was a well-known American diplomat and specialist on Japanese culture. He often appeared on discussion panels and history shows on the public TV station, NHK. From the frown on Sakaguchi’s face, Hiroshi could tell he wasn’t going back to the office anytime soon.

  Chapter 5

  At the door to the house in Asakusa, Hiroshi toed off his shoes in the large genkan entryway. He was in the last of three cars of detectives that traveled the half hour across the city from Shinjuku. Hiroshi came last in a car with two younger detectives whose silence gave him time to get over his irritation at being dragged to a second scene.

  Hiroshi stepped up onto the wood floor of the old house and looked at the row of ukiyoe woodblock prints along the wall. On an offset chigaidana shelf, a stand held three swords of different lengths. Next to the swords was a newly wrapped funeral urn.

  Wedged into the doorway of the living room was Sakaguchi, blocking the muffled voice of Ueno responding in lurching English to the rapid-fire patter of quick, angry English from a woman Hiroshi could hear but not see.

  Hiroshi tapped Sakaguchi. “Where’s the crew?”

  “The murder was several days ago,” Sakaguchi answered in a hushed voice.

  “Then why are we here?” Hiroshi whispered.

  “There was a break-in today during his funeral. Any crime that happens soon after a murder gets kicked back to homicide.” Sakaguchi stood aside like a door opening and gave Hiroshi a full-armed thrust into the living room.

  Seeing Hiroshi stumble in, Ueno slunk away to help Sugamo and Osaki. Sakaguchi retreated to the hallway to talk with the neighborhood policeman from the koban police box. Hiroshi walked to the middle of the living room and presented his meishi name card.

  “Another name card.” Jamie Mattson snatched it from him. “I don’t need to know who you are. I need to know what you’ll do about this.”

  Hiroshi raised his eyes to Bernard Mattson’s daughter, Jamie. Her black dress stretched and pulled as she gestured with the loose energy of Americans. She kept her hips steady like Japanese, and though her eyes were American-style direct, she closed and opened them slowly and gently as most Japanese women did. Hiroshi took a breath and refocused, thinking what to say.

  “I thought Japan was a low-crime country!” Jamie demanded.

  Hiroshi cleared his throat and managed, “It’s frightening to have your space violated.”

  “At least you can speak English,” she huffed.

  Hiroshi peeled his eyes from her and looked around the ransacked room. A glass case was cracked open. Antique ceramics and tea ceremony bowls lay strewn around. Sofas and chairs were upended. Wood shelves were broken apart and books tossed on the floor like broken butterflies. It must have taken decades to acquire what was now shattered, splintered glass, ceramic and wood.

  “Why is your English so good?” Jamie looked at Hiroshi, then at his name card.

  “I went to school in America.” Hiroshi tried not to stare at her. “Boston. Undergrad and grad. Worked a couple years.”

  “I went to school near Boston, before I moved to New York,” she said.

  “But you’re from here?”

  “Sort of,” Jamie said. “Sort of not.”

  Hiroshi let that go. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “Let me first tell you my name. I’m Jamie.”

  “Bernard Mattson’s daughter. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “I almost dropped my father’s ashes when I saw this.”

  “To have this happen on this day.”

  “You know, you look like Toshiro Mifune, only taller,” she said, waving the name card.

  “Well, he’s the most famous Japanese actor, I guess,” Hiroshi said.

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “I didn’t either. Any idea what they were looking for?”

  “I haven’t been here since I was thirteen. Now…” Jamie gestured at the mess.

  “You were estranged?”

  “Not exactly. We were just…I was coming back to hear him give a talk, about Asian politics. Next week.”

  “At the global conference on Asian security?”

  “He was giving a talk about his new view of things, I guess.”

  “Will you be giving the speech in his place?”

  “No way. I don’t even know what he was going to say.”

  It might be good to find out, Hiroshi thought, nodding at the glass case across the living room. “Are those photos of you?”

  Jamie walked over to a set of framed photos lined up in order: a baby swaddled in blankets, a girl swinging in a park, a teenager playing tennis, a new graduate in college robes, a twenty-something club-goer with a pearl necklace on the party-bra curve of her breasts. Hiroshi closed his eyes. Her breasts were American full and Japanese firm—in perfect proportion.

  “I didn’t know he had these.” She blinked back tears.

  “What happened today?” Hiroshi asked.

  Jamie took a big breath and shuddered at the thought of the funeral. When the oven doors finally opened at the crematorium, a long, wide tray slid out. Amidst the ashes was a long sharp splinter of bone, a curved hollow of skull and a white knot of spine. Jamie and her mother worked hard to transfer the bones from the tray to the urn with the long funeral chopsticks. Jamie worked so diligently to perform the funeral ritual perfectly her arms started to shake. The attendant helped them, plucking up the remaining bones and poking them into the urn with a crunch. He brushed the ashes into a scoop and slid them inside. After tying the cover on with a silk ribbon, he placed the urn inside a wooden box and tied the wood top with rice straw rope. After a long quiet pause, she looked up at Hiroshi. “I had to carry his remains all the way through Tokyo on the train. I should call my mother.”

  “Where is she?” Hiroshi asked, looking around.

  “On a plane to Hawaii.”

  Hiroshi opened and closed his mouth, frowning. “They weren’t close?”

  “Divorced. A long time ago. When I was thirteen.”

  “When did you get to the house after the funeral?”

  “About two hours ago. I kept dialing 911, but the number’s different here, I finally realized. 110?”

  “Yes, 110.”

  “I finally got someone on the line who could understand my childish Japanese. The local policemen bicycled over right away.” Jamie fought back tears. “Oh, look at this mess.”

  The bureau chief bustled in, peeling off his dress coat, Borsalino hat and long silk scarf. None of the younger detectives offered
to help him and he had to drape his coat and scarf on the banister of the stairs himself. He looked for a place for his hat and set it by the swords on the offset shelf. He was followed in by Saito. “What’s the deal here, Sakaguchi?” the chief shouted.

  “Owner stabbed to death four days ago,” Sakaguchi said. “Burglary today. Kicked back to homicide.”

  “Saito, you were on this,” the chief demanded. “Remind me what you concluded.”

  Saito—the yes-man who chauffeured the chief, echoed his orders and irritated everyone else—smoothed his wispy mustache. “Guy just came home at the wrong time.”

  The chief frowned. “This is that diplomat, right?”

  “The American embassy wanted it resolved,” Saito reminded him. “Before the SOFA meetings next week.”

  Hiroshi swallowed his dislike of the chief and spoke up. “Mattson was giving the main address at the meetings.”

  “Was he? I don’t watch TV.” The chief surveyed the mess. “Saito, when you talked to the embassy staff last week, it was all resolved, right?”

  Saito frowned and took a step back. “They trusted what we told them. I had a translator.”

  The chief shook his head. “So, now I’ll have to spend the whole day—again—with the American embassy and whatever ministry people.”

  The detectives fell into a patient silence. Hiroshi looked at Jamie, wondering if she understood Japanese. She was listening as if she did, but he couldn’t tell.

  “I’m putting you on it now, Sakaguchi. We’ve got no one else to spare. And you too,” the chief jabbed a finger towards Hiroshi. “You speak English, so you’re our firewall. I don’t like these international things. Americans get pushy.”

  The detectives stood in silence, their eyes cast down, waiting.

  “I want this all done before those SOFA global whatever meetings. We all have to be there once they start. Saito, you’re in charge of conference security at the International Forum, so pull someone from there and set up a rotation to watch this house.” The chief turned towards the entry hall but noticed Jamie. He looked at Sakaguchi to see if this was the relative of the victim. Sakaguchi nodded.

  The chief spoke to Hiroshi in Japanese, “Please give her my condolences and assure her we will handle this with our best efforts.” Hiroshi translated from the formal Japanese.

  Jamie looked into Hiroshi’s face and said, “Please tell him I want the murder and break-in investigated thoroughly.”

  Hiroshi cleared his throat. “It’s best if you threaten him.”

  “With what?” Jamie whispered.

  “Just say it in an angry way,” Hiroshi said in a low voice.

  “I demand you get this sorted out or I’ll file a complaint with the embassy,” Jamie brought her voice to a shout.

  Hiroshi translated, embellishing her words with forceful Japanese phrases.

  The chief growled, his view of Americans reconfirmed. “Tell her our investigation will be concluded successfully. In the meantime, it’s best if she returns home to America. Get a contact address from her.”

  Hiroshi translated from Japanese to English for her and added, “Tell him you’re staying until it’s solved.”

  Jamie did as Hiroshi advised, and cranked her voice up loud enough to open the chief’s eyes wide.

  “American women are different,” the chief said to Hiroshi.

  “She’s half Japanese.” Hiroshi said.

  “Saito, give her…no, Sakaguchi you’re on this, give her your number.”

  Sakaguchi handed Jamie his meishi name card with a slight bow. The chief walked out to the hallway, reset his Borsalino hat, scarf and coat and waltzed out with Saito behind.

  “Is he going to do it?” Jamie asked.

  “What?” Hiroshi said.

  “Look into my father’s case more deeply?”

  “He won’t, but we will. The bureau chief just administrates.”

  The detectives set to work finding evidence. Sakaguchi walked upstairs, his weight on the staircase making the entire house creak with each step.

  Jamie looked at the tatami room with hardly anything in it.

  “It was here?” Hiroshi asked.

  “I guess.” Jamie walked into the small Japanese style room, hesitantly rubbing her sock on the tatami. “What does the scroll say?”

  “The big two characters say mujo. And the four smaller ones say shogyo mujo. All things must pass and nothing stays the same.”

  “It’s like he knew.”

  “Those kinds of sayings are traditional.”

  “Not in New York. What’s that statue?”

  Hiroshi walked over to a small statue of the Fudo Myo-o, a sword upright in one hand and rope in the other, a circular carving of flames framing the god’s angry visage. “I’m not sure how to translate exactly, but he’s a protective deity.”

  “Didn’t work.”

  “I’m sorry,” Hiroshi bowed. “He’s a wrathful god, of Unmoving Wisdom.”

  “Unmoving sounds opposite to nothing staying the same.”

  “Buddhism’s complicated.”

  Jamie smiled.

  Hiroshi gestured with his hands, American style. “You can place his ashes in the tokonoma, right there on the shelf beside the vase.”

  “Oh, I forgot all about him. His ashes, I mean.” Jamie went to get the urn from the hallway. She untied the rice straw rope from around the wooden box, took out the urn with both hands and placed it on the shelf.

  They looked at the urn quietly until Sakaguchi came back down the stairs, each step a small earthquake through the old wood-frame house. He came over and whispered to Hiroshi.

  Hiroshi translated for Jamie. “My boss…”

  “He looks like a sumo wrestler,” Jamie said.

  “He was, actually. He wants to know if it’s OK if we borrow one of your father’s books?” Sugamo held the book out. “It might help us with the investigation.”

  Jamie shrugged. “If it helps.”

  “We’ll return it.”

  Sugamo took the large art book, a book of erotic shunga prints, under his arm.

  Jamie sighed and snuffled. “Statues, jet lag, incense, bones, break-in, what’s next?”

  “Sleep,” Hiroshi suggested.

  Jamie smiled in weary agreement. She walked to the stairs.

  The three detectives, Osaki and Ueno and Sugamo, stood together in the entryway. Without a word, they pumped their thick arms in the air three times and then flipped their fists into fingers. Osaki and Sugamo made scissors and Ueno kept his hand flat like a sheet of paper. Ueno sighed in aggravation at having lost the janken scissors-paper-stone contest, and pulled off his tie.

  Ueno righted the sofa with one hand, set the cushions back and flopped down for the night. His feet hung over the end and his shoulders over the side. He raked a pillow under his head and Sugamo tossed him a throw blanket. The sofa looked small beneath him.

  Hiroshi stood at the bottom of the stairs and said to Jamie, “I’ll stop back tomorrow. About noon? We can talk more after you’ve rested.”

  Jamie climbed the stairs, her steps a whisper after the rumble of Sakaguchi’s heavy footfalls. At the top, she turned and said in Japanese, “Oyasumi-nasai.”

  In soft voices, the detectives, impressed at her knowing the Japanese for good night, chorused back, “Oyasumi-nasai.”

  Chapter 6

  After Mattson’s house, Sakaguchi and Hiroshi met Takamatsu at the koban police box near Yushima Station. He was chatting with the uniformed officers leaning on their chest-high keijo poles. He had them laughing, their faces amused under the only light on the dark street.

  “I was telling them I got the photo!” Takamatsu said when Hiroshi and Sakaguchi came up. Sakaguchi bowed to the police inside, who turned back to their nightly routine.

  “What photo?” Hiroshi asked, sighing.

  “The guy I’ve been following. Cheating on his wife.”

  Hiroshi had to call London at six in the morning. He wanted to sleep
before then, but he couldn’t sleep on an empty stomach. Sakaguchi said Takamatsu wanted to take them to one of the best sushi places in Tokyo. He decided to eat quickly and head back to the office for a few hours on the futon chair.

  “Photographing these cheats is an art form.” Takamatsu chuckled as he led Sakaguchi and Hiroshi down a quiet, dark street to what looked like a two-story house with wooden slats across the front. There was no sign and not even a noren curtain to indicate the slat-covered panel—too small to be a door—opened into a restaurant of any kind.

  Takamatsu ducked in and Hiroshi followed, leaning forward under the low doorjamb. Sakaguchi curved in sideways stooping low.

  “Irrashaimase! Welcome!” the master shouted from behind the counter.

  Instead of the expected solitude, though, two young couples sat along the counter chatting and laughing, their faces red from drinking. The boys’ spike-cropped hair and the girls’ sparkle makeup clashed with the soft wood and indigo cotton interior of the shop. The usual aroma of fresh fish and cooked rice was overwhelmed by cologne, perfume and tobacco smoke.

  Takamatsu made a face and the master shot him a “sorry” look. He gestured at seats along the counter and politely asked the four youngsters to move over. The four quieted and reluctantly scooted closer to the wall.

  Then, all four fell back to giggling and joking. One girl slapped one of the guys on his shoulder, and the other kept saying, “Uso, uso, I don’t think so,” tugging her tight one-piece dress from riding up her thighs.

  Hiroshi wanted to tell them to shut up, but since Sakaguchi and Takamatsu ignored them, he did too. Hiroshi eyed the array of fresh fish beneath the curved glass case. The choice was so select he did not recognize all of them. The master handed the detectives steaming oshibori. They buried their faces in the delicious cleansing warmth.

  The master set out a small dish of black, tangled konbu with small white fish, another with a neat slice of tofu bathed in wasabi nori, and three white cups with blue circles in the bottom. He poured out cloudy, unfiltered nigori sake from a large green bottle to the exact lip of the cups, where surface tension held it quivering.

  The three detectives leaned over to keep from spilling.