The Moving Blade

by Michael Pronko

  “Mattson would know everything.” Eto Sensei said, opening his eyes wide, humming about just how much he might know. “He might have access to documents others don’t.”

  “If he changed his views, would someone want to—” Hiroshi hesitated to finish his thought in words.

  “Do something to keep him quiet? They have in the past.” Eto Sensei sipped his tea. “As with everything related to the SOFA treaties, there’s a lot of money, and careers and contracts, tied up in the status quo.”

  “I don’t understand why he—”

  “Mattson was respected. That’s much more important in Japan than almost anywhere else in the world. The forces of change could use his support, and a scandal or two might help tip the balance.”

  “He’d been going to the archives almost every day for two years.”

  “He must have been looking into something more than SOFA.”

  “Like what?”

  Eto Sensei shrugged with a hearty chuckle. “The archives are vast. What’s your guess?”

  Hiroshi remembered how Eto Sensei would end class by leaving questions hanging in the air, forcing students to keep discussing inside themselves long after the bell had rung.

  Eto Sensei smiled. “But, you know, he probably got killed over money or valuables. Politics isn’t everything.”

  “That’s not what you used to say.”

  “I’ve learned there’s more to life than politics.” Eto smiled.

  They both turned their attention to the grey-blue ocean sky outside the picture windows. Hiroshi had not told his old teacher anything about himself, but he would come back.

  Hiroshi stood up. “I’ve got to go. Thank you for all this. It was so good to see you.”

  “Of course. I’m happy to help anytime. Time is one thing I have.” Eto Sensei called his wife, who hurried in with a copy of Eto Sensei’s latest book. He signed it in the inner flap and handed it to Hiroshi, who took it with two hands, bowing deeply.

  On the train back to Tokyo, Hiroshi looked out the window for a long time. When he finally opened the book, East Asian Politics in Perspective, he read the inscription above Eto Sensei’s signature on the inside front cover.

  It said, simply, “Welcome Home!”

  Chapter 16

  The icy wind overpowering the late winter sun helped wake Hiroshi from his fatigue. After talking with Eto Sensei the day before, he had dropped in at Jamie’s to make sure the detectives were rotating the guard but found her asleep. He returned to his office to work on two new cases that came in from London—real estate transactions gone wrong. After catching a few hours of sleep on the futon bed in his office, he hurried to the National Archives.

  Hiroshi waited in front of the archives staring across the six-lane road at the wide moat encircling the Imperial Palace grounds. The water in the moat was thick and green with algae. The white stones of the walls, hewn from massive rocks, were set tightly, precisely in place, ready against attack. On the other side of the moat, the surrounding wall sloped down to a bridge with an entrance to the inner palace. It was fortified with a modern defense of tire spikes, barrier gates and a guardhouse.

  Finally, Jamie arrived. She got out of the car and walked towards Hiroshi. Ueno stepped out from the driver’s seat and looked over the roof at Hiroshi, who told him to go get something to eat since it would take hours to look through Mattson’s research. Hiroshi would call him.

  “Feeling better?” Hiroshi asked Jamie as they went up the wide sidewalk to the National Archives.

  “Yes and no,” Jamie answered. “I kept waking up all night, even with a sleeping pill.”

  “We can pick up your father’s research materials, but then you should follow Shibata’s advice and get on a plane back home.”

  “Let’s first see what my father had in here.”

  “One of my old classmates from university works here,” Hiroshi said, as casually as he could.

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Her, actually. Not since I was twenty, but she knew your father when I called to tell her I—we were coming.”

  The archive’s large open first floor had a high ceiling with thick wood tables. Stacks of books lined shelves in a low-ceilinged area behind the counter and the black domes of security cameras attached to the ceiling eyed the room. As Hiroshi filled in a detailed registration form, his mind flooded with memories of Ayana and questions about her life over the years they’d been out of touch. He made a mistake on the form and had to ask for a blank one to start again.

  When he finally got it right, he turned to see the tall figure of Ayana coming out of the elevator at the end of the room. Her ballet-dancer walk—tall upper body leaning gently forward, her long legs springy and strong—was just the same. As she came closer, her neat-cut hair, business suit and designer glasses made her seem a different person altogether. Was she still the college girl he had been so hesitant to talk with, but couldn’t stop talking with? He remembered hugging her in the shadows outside the train station near her apartment, deciding whether to spend the night, he knowing it would be the last chance before he left for America, she not knowing he was even leaving. How could he apologize for not even saying a word about leaving, for never writing, for shelving his feelings and never returning? Until now.

  Ayana pulled at the glasses dangling from a strap around her neck. “Is that you, Hiroshi?”

  “Ayana. It’s been—”

  “Let’s not do the math.”

  “Can we skip the accounting, too?”

  Ayana blushed, and then smiled. “Yes, we can skip that, too.”

  “I—”

  Ayana waited for him to finish his sentence and when he didn’t, she smiled and said, “Do you still do kendo?”

  “I haven’t touched a practice sword in years. I’m not even sure where my outfit is. You?”

  “I go once a week now, but I don’t remember it hurting so much.”

  “That’s all I remember,” Hiroshi said before switching to English to introduce Jamie Mattson, who stood beside him smiling at Ayana.

  Ayana handed Jamie her name card. “I’m Ayana, one of the archivists. I was so sorry to hear about your father. He was a regular here. Had all the staff charmed.”

  “He was good at that,” Jamie said with a bow. “Thank you for helping him.”

  “We didn’t have to do much. He knew where everything was. He requested manuscript boxes from areas we’d never heard of and files no one had looked at in fifty years. Let me take you to the room. He had a lot of notes.” Ayana held the elevator door open for them with the same lovely, long fingers Hiroshi remembered tapping on his notebooks as they talked after class. In the elevator, Ayana asked Jamie about herself, and Hiroshi stood quietly behind them.

  At Mattson’s study room, Ayana pulled a coiled bracelet key chain from the pocket of her tight-fitting pants and unlocked the soundproof door. Inside, a half dozen book carts crowded against a desk piled high with folders, notebooks and manuscript boxes.

  “Does everyone get space like this?” Jamie asked, looking around the small, glassed-in room.

  “Your father was here every day requesting so many things, it was easier to give him this room to save reshelving,” Ayana said.

  Jamie opened up a manuscript box to find it filled with loose sheets of crinkled documents. “There’s a lot of stuff here! It will take forever to get through it all.”

  “I’ll leave you to it,” Ayana said. She pulled the door shut softly. From outside, she looked in through the glass. Hiroshi met her eyes for a moment and it felt like an entire conversation, the kind they used to have on the train home together. Then she looked down and walked away.

  Jamie looked overwhelmed at the boxes stacked on the desk. “Could he have read all these? In both English and Japanese?” She ran her hands over the boxes one by one, picked up a folder from the closest stack and started reading. “Looks like these are all from 1959 and 1960. Was that the end of the occupation
?”

  Hiroshi was photographing the labels on the sides of the first stack of boxes. “No, that was 1952. These are probably related to the security treaty and SOFA.”

  “Translation, please.”

  “The treaties demilitarizing Japan and giving the US total control over their bases inside Japan.”

  Jamie put the top back on a box and opened another. “I hope there’s a draft of his speech in one of these.”

  “And his manuscript for the book.”

  They sat on opposite sides of the desk and slipped into the special quiet timelessness of libraries. Hiroshi sifted through a stack of folders from various ministries: the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Defense. Sandwiched in between the ministry files were other documents and proclamations from the American Occupation. He wondered how all of them connected to SOFA, and to Mattson’s death. He could hear Eto Sensei’s voice imploring him to think bigger.

  Hiroshi pulled out a copy of one sheaf labeled, Agreement under Article VI of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between Japan and the United States of America, Regarding Facilities and Areas and the Status of United States Armed Forces in Japan. He wondered if this was the complete, official name of the US-Japan SOFA. If so, Mattson seemed to be reviewing his past work, work that had molded Japan’s post-war history. He wished Eto Sensei was here to explain what these meant, so he started making a list of questions for him. Hiroshi moved to the next manuscript box, trying to keep them in order by photographing the labels to remember what he’d finished.

  “This is interesting,” Jamie said, holding up a declassified embassy cablegram. The paper was crinkle-edged and the typewritten ink blurred. “My father’s name is on it, but the other name’s blacked out.”

  Hiroshi set the cablegram on the desk and took a photo of it. “Your father would have known whose name was there.”

  “I feel like the important things are gone. All these documents from his life, I had no idea what he did.”

  “It was before you were born—”

  “He never said a word about any of this.”

  “Weren’t you too young to—”

  “To listen? Maybe. All I can do now is read.”

  Hiroshi opened another box. It was full of legal documents about land use law in Japanese. Most were from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, though the ministries had all been renamed in 2001. It was the third or fourth box of such documents. But what did land use law and the environment have to do with the SOFA agreements? Mattson had written notes on the copies of almost every one, notes to himself.

  The sound of Ayana pushing open the door to the room startled Hiroshi and made Jamie drop the paper she was puzzling over.

  “Find anything interesting?” Ayana asked.

  Jamie bent to pick up the paper she dropped but smiled up at Ayana. “I wish I knew what it all meant. I’d like to take his notebooks. And these copies of documents?”

  “Any copies he made have already been approved, and of course, his notes are yours now. Just leave the originals here,” Ayana said. “What will you do with all his work?”

  “I’m going to publish his memoirs.” Jamie straightened the copies in front of her into a neat stack. “But the police need to look at it first.”

  “I’ll go get a few bags from my office, but it’s no problem to leave things here for now.” Ayana hurried off and came back with four big shopping bags. The three of them worked together to fit the notebooks and copies in neatly and securely.

  “You might want to take these with you too,” Ayana said, handing Jamie two thick albums with a bemused smile. “He used to work on these when he got bored with the other documents.”

  Jamie pulled back the cover of the album to see handwritten notes surrounding a photocopy of an erotic shunga woodblock print of two lovers flowing into one another, the thick outlines of their curving bodies joining in the exact center of the page. Mattson’s arrows, sketches and comments filled the margins of the photocopied paper.

  “Oh my!” Jamie said, leafing through the erotic prints, each one a fresh variation on sexual desire. “No permutation left out.”

  Hiroshi peered down from the side. The prints were similar to the ones on the flash drive of the dead man. Hiroshi looked again to be sure he was remembering clearly. He couldn’t concentrate with Jamie and Ayana so close, both giggling at the shunga images, turning them and pointing. He took a step back from the table, ignoring the stirrings inside himself. He peeked over and looked away, breathing in the closeness of the two women in the small confines of the research room.

  “Amazing, aren’t they?” Ayana helped fit the erotic notebooks in the paper shopping bag with the other files and folders of Mattson’s copies and notes.

  “Amazing and heavy!” Jamie hoisted two of the four bags, then added a third in her right hand. The string handle cut into her palm, but Jamie picked them up, readjusting the bags and setting her shoulders.

  “You sure you want to take all these today?” Ayana asked.

  “We’ll take them straight to the station by car,” Hiroshi said. “It’ll be fine.”

  Ayana locked the room and Hiroshi took the fourth bag. Jamie walked ahead at a brisk pace, looking excited.

  Ayana pulled out her cellphone and exchanged numbers with Hiroshi. “Will you call me?” she asked.

  “I’d like to hear—”

  “About the last two decades?”

  “And about now too.”

  Would she have come visit him in America if he had sent that letter instead of throwing it out? Hiroshi felt weighed down by the bags, by his past, by how much there was to untangle. Ayana walked beside Hiroshi towards the exit, quietly in step the rest of the way.

  Chapter 17

  On the wide steps outside the archives, Jamie slumped under the weight of the bags. “Would you mind if we sat down for a few?”

  “What about the bench over there under the cherry trees? We can get a taxi at the corner if Ueno can’t drive back to get us.”

  Jamie and Hiroshi walked over and set the four bags of her father’s work on the bench. Jamie flopped down. Hiroshi stepped away to call Akiko to get ready, they’d be there right away with Mattson’s work. What had gotten Mattson killed was in there somewhere and he wanted to lay it all out so he could find the connections between the materials and the murder. He called Ueno. He didn’t answer, so Hiroshi tried again, staring absently at the gnarled bark of a cherry tree.

  Just as Ueno answered, Hiroshi heard Jamie scream and the roar of a motorcycle.

  Hiroshi spun around.

  Jamie was lying in a heap in the dirt and a man in a black track suit, high leather boots and smoked glass helmet was hustling all four bags towards a motorcycle where the driver clutched the handlebars and revved the engine. The robber threw his leg over the back of the bike as the driver let out the clutch and zipped away.

  Hiroshi shouted into his cellphone to Ueno, “Someone’s taken Mattson’s stuff. Call Sakaguchi. Get over here. Going south from the National Archives.”

  Already running, Hiroshi fumbled his cellphone into his pocket and tried to keep an eye on the motorbike swerving through the afternoon traffic. He tripped over the outgrown root of a cherry tree jutting up from the sidewalk. His arms windmilling to stay upright, he recaptured his balance and kept running. He stayed along the side of the street, running up on the curb to avoid cars slowing or braking. When traffic lightened, he cut over to the middle of the street for a clear path forward.

  Ahead, the motorcycle slowed for traffic pooled at the cross street, weaving back and forth trying to find a way through, the bags hanging from the rider’s hands over both sides of the cycle.

  Hiroshi gained ground but felt his legs turning to jelly. He wasn’t sure if they had seen him yet or not, but he barreled forward as they approached the turn which would se
t them on a wide westbound express road. He dropped to a steady pace. He realized Jamie was all alone, but he couldn’t turn back now. Mattson’s work could disappear forever, and with it the reason he was killed.

  Hiroshi pushed forward, catching a glimpse of the driver up ahead twisting the handlebars to walk the cycle into an opening in traffic before taking off down the center line, the second thief balancing expertly behind with both bags.

  At the corner, two riot police at a guardhouse by the moat in front of the Imperial Grounds noticed the motorcycle’s odd swerving. They stepped out to look and Hiroshi saw one of them speak into his headset. Several more guards instantly appeared from inside the guardhouse.

  Picking up their long wooden keijo staffs, two of them took off after Hiroshi and the cycle. Still running in the gutter of the street, Hiroshi felt the guards gaining on him.

  Hiroshi vaulted over a hedge onto the empty sidewalk, picking up speed. He could hear the palace guards shouting to him, but his ears were ringing so he couldn’t hear what they said. He lost sight of the motorcycle, but picked up his pace past the British and Indian Embassies.

  If the motorcycle reached the intersection, they could head west onto the expressway and everything of Mattson’s would be gone. Hiroshi heard the guards closer behind him and pulled out his badge over his head, gasping for air, shouting, “Motorcycle.”

  The two guards, surprised by the badge, jogged beside Hiroshi. “You’re police?” one asked.

  “Homicide,” Hiroshi managed to say, pointing ahead. “Stop…motorcycle…thieves.” The two guards pulled past him without a word. They were in much better physical shape and Hiroshi could see them, through his blurring vision, giving chase. He tried to keep up.

  At the next corner, Hiroshi watched a square gray bus with wire mesh over the windows pull out from the right, martial music blasting from loudspeakers affixed to the roof. It was driven by one of the many rightist groups that constantly circled the sacred area around the Imperial Palace and Yasukuni Jinja memorial shrine. Hinomaru Japanese flags fluttered from roof poles and a “Support the Emperor” banner hung along the side. Unlike most typical right-wing protest buses that scrupulously followed traffic laws while spewing propaganda at top volume, this bus pulled across the intersection against the light.