The Moving Blade

by Michael Pronko

  He stood watching her and then went to the living room. A couple blankets and throw pillows were tossed around on the sofa, where he’d slept more often than in his bed. The pizza boxes stacked on the coffee table and the “on” light of his stereo were the only other signs anyone lived there.

  He went to the kitchen, pulled open the refrigerator and quickly shut the door on the emptiness inside. He took one of the two chairs from the kitchen island counter and dragged it back to the bedroom with a blanket. He set the chair an arms length from Jamie, rolled himself in the blanket and sat down in the half light of the room to watch the alluring rhythms of her sleep.

  Jamie squirmed deliciously, snored lightly, rolled over, her chest in the air, her face flushed with the warmth of sleep. Her shoulders, sketched with black brushstrokes of thick hair, were as broad as a swimmer’s. Hiroshi’s eyes blinked open and shut, opened on her face, her body, her curves, her breathing, closed on the floating, fading images from the day, the documents and shunga prints, the chase and the thieves, the ramen, all of it blocking out thought, and dragging him to sleep.

  ***

  Hiroshi walked behind his college kendo team after a post-match meal in an old okonomiyaki restaurant near Kotoku-in and the Daibutsu in Kamakura. The others in the university kendo team headed towards Hase Station, but Hiroshi and Ayana dawdled, tired of carrying the kendo gear.

  When they got to the Enoshima Line station, Hiroshi and Ayana looked at each other. None of their classmates was anywhere in sight.

  “Where did everyone go?”

  “We were talking too much.”

  “I’m exhausted.”

  “Let’s sit for a while.”

  Duffle bags on their shoulders and still talking, they headed across the highway towards the beach. In the sand, they took off their shoes. They dropped their gear halfway to the shoreline and leaned back side by side, watching the sunset as the evening chill came on, neither of them saying a word about leaving. Hiroshi got up to buy onigiri rice balls and cans of tea from a rundown beach shack that was just closing.

  As Hiroshi and Ayana ate, the sunset turned to stars. After the last of the beachcombers finished their walks, they moved their stuff against a rack of windsurfing boards chained to the tide break wall, and snuggled under the awkward pile of keikogi uniforms and kendo gear, musky with sweat, warming each other.

  They kissed for a long, long time as the darkness blanketed them. Little by little, Hiroshi found a way inside her sweatpants and she a way inside his, until they were making love. They didn’t notice the sweat or the sand or the open air until they were spent and lying beside each other, sticky and satisfied, thrilled and confused. They curled up together, pulling the thick clothes over them for warmth.

  When the sun woke them, they walked down to the water barefoot and splashed water on their faces, shivering from the cold. After brushing as much sand as they could off themselves, they took the first local train to Kamakura and found a breakfast spot with a moningu setto of buttered toast, boiled egg, salad and coffee, embarrassed by their duffle bags of kendo gear and grungy clothes as all around them neatly dressed salarymen and OL office ladies ate their usual morning meal. Hiroshi and Ayana stared into each other’s eyes as they nibbled their breakfast and the workers left one-by-one for work.

  Two weeks later, Hiroshi left for America, unsure of himself, angry at having to leave, unable to even send Ayana the letter trying to explain what he was doing and asking her to visit him in Boston.

  ***

  The doorbell rang and Hiroshi rose up on one elbow. Hiroshi swung his legs around to sit up. He’d been so tired he couldn’t remember when he moved to the living room sofa. He listened to the shower, imagining Jamie under the flow of warm water. The doorbell rang again, sounding more insistent. He staggered towards the door as he turned his cellphone on. It rang right away. “Moshi moshi?”

  Akiko said, “Ueno is on his way to pick you up.”

  The front bell rang again. “I think he’s already here.”

  “Sakaguchi is going to the bookstore in Jinbocho,” Akiko continued. “He wants you to go with him. Everyone’s in a stir this morning.”

  Hiroshi clicked off and unlocked the door.

  Ueno looked around the edge of the door, set a thick paw on the heavy, rusting metal and pulled it open with a quizzical look on his face. “I hope she’s here,” he growled.

  Hiroshi nodded.

  Ueno stepped in. “Sakaguchi sent me to drive you to Jinbocho.”

  Hiroshi waved him inside and led him away from the bedroom towards the kitchen. The sound of flowing water ceased with a knock of pipes and Ueno looked in the direction of the shower. The water pipes clanked, and Hiroshi imagined her toweling off. They could hear Jamie padding back to the bedroom.

  Hiroshi could tell from Ueno’s expression he was waiting for an explanation or an apology, but Ueno said nothing until he pulled his cellphone out. “He’s here. Yes, also.” He listened, nodded, staring at Hiroshi. When he hung up, Ueno said, “Sakaguchi spent the night monitoring the search we had out for her.”

  “Search? All night?” Hiroshi sighed and scratched the back of his head, nodded and went to the sink to rinse his face. He looked around for a towel and finally had to use paper towels from a roll on the counter. All he said to Ueno was, “I’m not Takamatsu.”

  Jamie came out in the same clothes as the day before, but her jeans, white sweatshirt and father’s wool jacket looked perfect. She had a big smile for both of the detectives, and didn’t seem at all curious why Ueno was there. She looked recharged and, as if nothing had happened the past couple days. “Shibata wants me to stop by his club in Shinjuku. And Setsuko wants to talk with you. You’ll come with me, won’t you? I don’t want to be alone.”

  Hiroshi thought of all the things he was supposed to do that day—writing up a real estate rip-off from London, going through Mattson’s materials, apologizing to Sakaguchi, visiting the sword dealer, who called again, and dealing with the unopened envelope from Sanae—but said, “I’ve got plenty of time. Ueno can drive us.”

  Jamie beamed at him.

  Chapter 20

  The call from the Endo brothers early that morning came as a surprise since Sakaguchi assumed they wanted nothing to do with the police. They asked him to come right away. Sakaguchi had Sugamo go with him since Hiroshi had infuriated him by not answering his calls and not letting him know where Jamie was. Hiroshi was getting as bad as Takamatsu.

  Sugamo pulled the car under the spreading ginkgo tree in front of the bookstore in Jinbocho. When Sakaguchi got out, he instantly understood why they’d called—the front window was a spider web of splintered glass.

  Sakaguchi pushed the door open and shards of glass tinkled to the sidewalk. The bookstore shelves, formerly overflowing from ceiling to floor, were emptied. Knee-high jumbles of ukiyoe prints, antique manuscripts and rare books made it impossible to enter without crunching something underfoot.

  The twin brothers Seiichi and Shinichi did not notice Sakaguchi come in. They were bent like rice farmers picking silently through the bedlam at their feet. Shinichi, in jeans, stood up to stretch. His long grey hair, loosened from his ponytail, fell down to his shoulders. Seiichi had sweated through a black T-shirt, his tweed jacket nowhere in sight.

  Sakaguchi stood by the front door, too shocked to even clear this throat.

  When the brothers finally noticed Sakaguchi, they stared at him blankly for a moment, their former businesslike manner turned to anguish, before setting the books in their hands on the closest shelves. The twins came to the front holding the empty shelves for balance. Shinichi brushed the glass splinters off a stack of woodblock prints. Seiichi picked up a leather-bound book and wiped it with his handkerchief.

  Seiichi said, “Who would think bookselling could be so dangerous?”

  Shinichi said, “It’s book publishing that’s dangerous.”

  Sakaguchi asked, “What do you have that’s expensive?”
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  The brothers spoke over each other: “Everything’s valuable.”

  “The really high-value stuff is kept where?”

  “Some is out here, or was,” Shinichi said. “The rest is in fireproof safes in the back.”

  “Let me take a look.” Sakaguchi nodded for Sugamo, who’d parked the car and hurried in, to watch the door.

  The twins and Sakaguchi picked their way over the mess to the back. Sakaguchi bent double under the low-hanging ceiling and stepped over the jumble of invoices, letters and receipts tossed out of the filing cabinets that were jimmied open. A half flight of steps dropped down to a narrow hallway running to the back of the building. A dozen in-wall safes with hand-size dials and large L-shaped handles were set into the brick wall at chest height.

  “Why do you have so many?” Sakaguchi asked.

  “We added them one by one over the years.” Seiichi said.

  “These two bigger ones?” Sakaguchi asked.

  “Rare books and prints,” the brothers answered together.

  “That small one above?”

  “Hard drives and publishing data.”

  “Nothing missing?”

  “Untouched.”

  “The Endo Brothers Bookstore and Publishers must be doing something right,” a familiar voice shouted from the front of the store.

  The three of them walked up the stairs. Standing next to Sugamo at the front of the store, was the writer Higa, with a bitter grin across his mottled, intense face, leaning on his cane surveying the mess. Standing next to him was a young, sallow-faced man with round, jutting cheekbones and long, stringy hair. The man dangled a laptop bag, and looked like what Higa must have before the sepia wrinkles set in from years of chain smoking.

  Sakaguchi touched Higa’s book, the one that Shinichi gave him the first time he came, still unread in his inner coat pocket.

  “Looks like publishing deadlines will be postponed,” Higa shouted.

  “Some permanently,” Shinichi shouted back.

  The twin brothers and Sakaguchi found a path to the front of the shop.

  When Sakaguchi got there, he looked at Higa. “You must have some idea what Mattson was going to say, an outline, a synopsis. You were editing, right?”

  Higa nodded and looked around at the quiet chaos of the store. “Because of his stature, I, we, trusted him. Mattson seemed like he was about to expose all the false promises with clear evidence. We didn’t want to scare him off.”

  “Scare him off? False promises? What—”

  “The treaty structure kept American bases in Japan as a staging ground for the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War too. Who knows where the next one will be? Japan has no say in how its own land is used.”

  Sakaguchi nodded for Higa to continue.

  “The ruling party in Japan has always let the Americans stay. The political left is weak and powerless, so we were waiting for someone like Mattson to make the case.”

  “Mattson seems an unlikely savior,” Sakaguchi said.

  “The Cold War diplomat had changed his mind. But someone must have found out about it. It’s no coincidence he was killed right before an important speech.” Higa shifted on the cane, looking for a place to sit down, but found none.

  Sakaguchi turned to the twin brothers. “As publishers, why wouldn’t you have him send you something, anything, about what he was writing? Why keep it a secret?”

  Seiichi nodded his head and looked at Shinichi. “We asked for an overview, but he wanted to do it his way, and we trusted him. We had to. He was the only one who would know where to find the archival documents to support his claims.”

  “But anyone could access the documents in the archive,” Sakaguchi said.

  “Mattson knew the details of the American bases, from Japan to Guam to the Philippines to South Korea,” Higa explained.

  “He was writing about all of Asia?” Sakaguchi asked.

  “From what he said, his focus was mostly Okinawa,” Shinichi said.

  “If it was going to be published before the speech, how could this have been edited so quickly?”

  Higa smiled. “I set aside everything else to do it. First, we’d finish a simplified version in time for his speech. The unabridged version would have been released two months later.”

  The twins spoke at the same time: “We were happy to stir things up, but not this much.”

  Higa said, “The right wing in Japan will stop at nothing.”

  “That’s who did this?” Sakaguchi asked.

  The young guy with Higa said, “The American bases take up a lot of land. Tens of thousands of American personnel are stationed in Okinawa alone. But no one outside the US military command has any idea what’s going on inside the bases. It’s all secret. A slice of America transplanted into Japanese soil.”

  “Who is this?” Sakaguchi asked Higa.

  Higa pointed at the young man with the handle of his cane. “This is Iino. He runs a blog about the bases—crimes, pollution, accidents, protests. Gets a lot of hits these days.”

  Iino moved his laptop to the crook of his arm, scrolling as he spoke. “The problems are not with the bases. The bases are the problem. Mattson was in touch with me about small details.”

  “What kind of details?” Sakaguchi asked, peeking at what Iino was scrolling through on his laptop.

  “Mattson seemed to already know the answers to the questions he asked,” Iino said, tipping the screen away from Sakaguchi. “It seemed like he was probing me to find out how much I knew.”

  “He wanted confirmation?” Sakaguchi asked.

  “He wanted to know if he was the only one outside the military who knew about how the bases were really run.”

  “What questions did he ask?”

  Iino shook his head. “I thought back over it after I heard the news. But it was never really anything that specific. He did ask several times how porous I thought the bases were. He used that word many times.”

  “What did he mean, porous?” Sakaguchi looked back and forth from Higa to Iino for the answer.

  Higa leaned on his cane and put an elbow on an unbroken section of the front glass case. “In the past, the American bases in Japan were like open ports. Everything snuck through. Guns and drugs mostly, anything prohibited in Japan. Now, there’s more oversight, but take the American military budget, add in complicit Japanese politicians, and you get corruption.”

  Sakaguchi felt irritated Hiroshi was not with him to remember all these details, but he continued asking questions. “Why would Mattson’s book be so shocking if you know all the details already?”

  “We don’t. That’s the thing. Whatever we say has no footnotes, no annotations. He had facts, dates, people, amounts. He was an insider. He understood the details,” Higa said.

  Iino nodded in agreement. “And he had the voice of authority.”

  Shinichi said, “He always explained things clearly. People trusted his word. If he said the system was out of control, which is what I think he was going to say, people would listen.”

  Sakaguchi frowned. “And you didn’t have so much as a description of what he was working on?”

  Higa leaned on his cane and rocked forward. “Mattson was trying to finalize the work by painting the eye of the dragon.”

  “What does that mean?” Sakaguchi asked.

  “In the old Chinese story, an artist painted such skillful, realistic paintings that when he painted in the last dot—the dragon’s eye—the dragon came alive, peeled itself off the wall and flew away,” Higa said.

  “The eye of Mattson’s painting,” Sakaguchi asked. “What was it?”

  “We don’t know, but we’re sure he found it,” Shinichi said.

  “He definitely found it,” Seiichi said.

  “How do you know?” Sakaguchi insisted.

  “If he hadn’t found it, we’d be talking with him instead of with you,” Higa said.

  Chapter 21

  After navigating the neighborhood maze, H
iroshi and Jamie were surprised to find the door to Shibata’s bar open a crack. Hiroshi pushed Jamie back with his hand, wondering if he had forgotten it was open, or he was in there airing the place out. They both looked at the flowers set on the curb where the thief, Sato, was killed.

  Hiroshi stepped forward cautiously and pulled the door open the rest of the way, rusty hinges creaking. A sliver of midday sun found its way through the tangle of overhead wires and fell into the hazy interior onto the bar stools set upside down along the counter.

  Hiroshi heard nothing as he took a step inside.

  Before he could take another step, Shibata came shuffling out from the little kitchen area, holding his hand over his eyes to block the sun. “I hate hate hate morning. I got something for you, Jamie.”

  “It’s afternoon.” Jamie squeezed around Hiroshi and went to give Shibata a hug.

  Ken emerged from under the curtain looking even taller and more muscled in daylight. He nodded politely without a word, and ducked back into the kitchen. Shibata batted the curtain aside with a wave of his hand and brought out a shoebox in both hands.

  “Looking everywhere and find with tax stuff. I forgot these thing, and other thing, too.” Shibata pulled off the top and rummaged through a disordered batch of old photos.

  Shibata handed Jamie a black and white photo of her father in a khaki uniform standing in front of the Great Buddha in Kamakura. Her father stood arms akimbo smiling straight into the camera, looking a bit like Hemingway with a bushy mustache.

  Jamie smiled back like a wide-eyed child.

  “That’s when he married Setsuko. She nice, calm, smart, not wild.” Shibata dug for more photos.

  “My mom was wild?”

  “Depends on thinking. But, yes, very. Look at this one. Taken before Setsuko.”

  Shibata pulled out another photo of her father in uniform with his arms around two Japanese women in flower-print dresses, their hair in elaborate swirls and their faces in lipstick and rouge. They posed formally, but it looked like they had just been dancing, sweat beading on their foreheads.