Authors: John Donohue
sharp throb of shattered bone. The thing above him cal ing in tri-
umph to the other hunters. Arms that lifted high into the washed
out blue of a morning sky, as if pronouncing a benediction.
The jagged rock came down on Hector, again and again,
until he lay stil , slowly seeping moisture into the hard ground
of the borderlands. In time, flies would come to swarm over
the sticky pool of fluid until the sun rose, fierce and ful , and
baked the moisture of Hector’s life away, sucking it deep into
the desert’s heart.
15
2
Lessons
The things we remember best tend to come to us in special
ways—often linked to extremes of emotion like joy and fear. Or
pain. My teacher had been shaped in a tradition where both fear
and pain were constant companions because, the old masters
believed, an authentic life was one that didn’t deny these most
inevitable of experiences, it just learned to transcend them.
Yamashita is a
sensei,
or teacher, of the martial arts—the
bugei
—of old Japan. The
bugei
are many things—ways of
fighting, of physical training, aesthetic disciplines forged out
of the most horrific of practices. My teacher is a master of the
form and the essence of these systems, a lethal man whose spirit
is as keen and polished as the blade he teaches me to wield. He
is simultaneously demanding, exasperating and amazing. I’ve
been banging around the martial arts world for almost thirty
years now, and I’ve never seen anyone like him.
I use the word banging literally. Lots of people today think
they know something about the martial arts—black belts and
Zen,
ninja
in dark pajamas jumping across a movie screen
doing cartwheels that would make an astronaut toss his lunch.
The death touch. Wispy masters who never sweat and are never
defeated. But Grasshopper, this is all an illusion.
To train in the martial arts is like being apprenticed to frus-
tration, to the burn of effort, and the unattainable criteria of
perfection. There’s no glamour, no reward beyond the ones you
create in your own heart. You struggle along the path and your
16
Kage
teacher goads you or challenges you, always three steps ahead
and always waiting, his eyes betraying nothing but demanding
everything. And you try to give it.
In the process you take some lumps. I’ve broken my fingers
and toes more times than I can count. Some ribs. Until a few
years ago, my nose was intact, but that’s a thing of the past.
It’s probably not a huge tragedy—I have a relative in Ireland
who once said I have a face like a Dublin pig. When I do my
warm up stretches in the morning, I can feel the tug of years
of muscle damage all over me and the buzzing reminder of an
old dislocated shoulder. There are small white scars on both
my hands from a morning when I tore through jagged under-
growth, focused only on the fight to come. I have a long slash
of a scar down my back that I got in a sword fight on the night
when I began to truly understand what all this training had
turned me into. And there are other, less visible marks.
Late in the night images sometimes come unbidden, and
I’m pulled back into a whirl of adrenalin and heat and blood.
But you cope. You learn to breathe deeply and wait for the
sweat to dry. You wait for morning to come and with it the
light to remind you of the present. My scars suggest where I’ve
been, not where I am. Most days, I’m in Yamashita’s training
hall, honing my technique in closer imitation of him and put-
ting his lower ranked students through their paces.
The
dojo
—what Japanese martial artists call their training
hall—is a big space, with high ceilings and a polished floor of
tightly fitted hardwood strips. There’s a mirror on one wall that
we use to check ourselves for correct form. Sometimes I catch a
glimpse of my features while I prowl the room, and the face is
both familiar and strange. For at times it appears to me that my
eyes have become as hard and flat as my master’s.
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John Donohue
That day, I was grinding some swordsmen through a partic-
ularly tricky exercise. My teacher has started to hold seminars
lately for martial artists who aren’t his regular students, but who
study related arts and are looking to deepen their skills. We
get people who are trained in all sorts of systems. They enter
the training hall in uniforms that have been worn into supple
functionality. Some are in the karate or judo uniforms known
as
gi
and have tattered and faded black belts riding low on their
waists. Others wear the more formal pleated skirt known as
a
hakama
and tops of white or blue or black. They all stand
quietly, people who are centered, balanced, and coiled like
steel springs ready for release. They don’t impress Yamashita
too much, because just to be accepted as one of his regular
students you usually need black belts in a few different styles,
recommendations from some seriously advanced teachers, and
an almost infinite capacity to suffer. But I watch the seminar
students carefully and treat them like dangerous, barely domes-
ticated animals.
It’s not paranoia on my part. The presence of outsiders at
our
dojo
is new, and at first I was puzzled about why Yamashita
would allow this. My teacher doesn’t advertise anywhere and
just to find the converted warehouse where we train, you have
to know where you’re going and be willing to thread the obscure
backstreets of the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. But a small
stream of fanatics do make the journey along the hard cement
and past the harder eyes of Red Hook’s less desirable element.
It took a while, but ultimately Yamashita’s reasons for sponsor-
ing these seminars became clear: he wasn’t interested in letting
people in to see him; he was letting them in to see
me.
I’m his senior student, although when you say it like that
it doesn’t begin to get at the core of our relationship. He has
18
Kage
forged me into something, a version of himself, and we are tied
together with filament so fine and so strong that the link is as
invisible as it is undeniable. I struggled against it for a time, but
I’ve come to learn to accept it. I move just like him now, and
if my footsteps take me along slightly different routes, I know
that in essence we travel the same path.
So these seminars were Yamashita’s way of letting people
know who I was and that I would one day assume leadership
of the
dojo
. We have both been scarred by our pasts and now,
imperceptible to most, my teacher’s movements tell of his
wounds. It’s something I try not to think about: it’s bad for my
head and my heart.
But I’m not just being sentimental. My teacher has taught
me better than that. I watch the trainees with slightly narrowed
eyes, judging them, measuring their skill, and trying to divine
their intent. They look back in much the same way. Bringing a
bunch of highly skilled fighters together, pointing someone out
and implying that he’s better than everyone else in the room, is
the martial arts equivalent of pouring chum into shark infested
waters.
These seminars have the feel of those old Westerns where a
bunch of new gunmen stalk into town looking to take on the
local prodigy. You can hold up your hands and protest you’re
not interested in a fight, but people just smirk in disbelief and
you know, deep down, that you’d better go get your weapon.
In the martial arts, we meditate and talk about the nature
of training as a
Do
, a path, to enlightenment. But there are
lots of ways to accomplish this end that don’t involve pound-
ing on people in the way we do. Ultimately, no matter how
hard we deny it, there’s part of us that
likes
that aspect of the
bugei
. The heat. The contact. The fury, trapped and funneled
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John Donohue
into something truly dangerous. No matter what the particular
martial art system is called or what the techniques look like,
there’s a basic pattern to advanced training: you get pounded
and you pound back. The easily bruised should not apply.
I’ve taken my lumps in the
dojo
and in places far more terri-
fying as wel . I prefer to approach training as a way to fine-tune
my technique. I save punching on the afterburners for the real
thing. But no matter how calmly I speak to people at these semi-
nars, no matter how much I stress that we’re here to learn from
each other, I can see that deep down they don’t buy it. They wait
and watch, hoping for an opportunity to prove to Yamashita
that there was a better choice for his top student than the guy
leading the exercises. I brace myself to prove them wrong.
And, I‘ve come to realize, this is also part of Yamashita’s plan.
Everything in my master’s world is a means of training. The fact
that someone at a seminar may take a run at me is not necessar-
ily a bad thing. From Yamashita’s perspective it’s more like icing
on the cake, or a pickled plum in the middle of a rice bal .
It’s not all tension, of course: a few participants at the semi-
nar weren’t strangers. Some of the
dojo
regulars were there to
help out. A while ago, Yamashita and I had met a woman named
Sarah Klein who practiced
kyudo,
the Japanese art of archery.
We had both been attracted to her, although for different rea-
sons. Yamashita had been intrigued by her focused energy, and
while I had been drawn to that spirit, I was intrigued by so
much more. What she saw in me was anyone’s guess, but I was
glad that she saw something. And I was glad she was at the
seminar today.
Sarah’s not a big person, but when watching her slight fig-
ure move, you got a sense of grace and strength rare in most
20
Kage
people. It may have been that suggestion of physical potential
that made Yamashita take her on as a student. She was dark-
haired with big eyes and a heart shaped face. Just seeing her
across a room usually made my stomach flip. Today, as I moved
around the seminar participants, she’d occasionally catch my
eye for a split second and I’d see a hint of the smile I knew she
was suppressing. Sarah has a great smile.
I kept my
sensei
face on, however, and resisted the impulse
to wink at her. For now, I had to keep the seminar partici-
pants in check. We were executing a series of moves that in the
beginning look a lot like the
mae
routine in your basic
iaido
kata. Iaido
students focus on practicing a series of connected
techniques known as
kata
that involve the art of drawing and
cutting with the Japanese sword. In the first
kata
that
they typi-
cally learn, students sit in the formal kneeling position, their
swords sheathed. As they sense an attack being launched from
the front, they rise on their knees, then draw the sword from
its sheath and cut in a wide lateral arc across their front, plant-
ing their right foot forward so that only the left knee remains
touching the ground.
In the sequence as traditionally practiced, the lateral swipe
is followed up with a vertical cut. The idea is that your attacker,
kneeling before you, starts to move. You swipe at him, but he
jerks back just out of range. You follow up by drawing yourself
forward with your right leg and then cutting down in what is
meant to be a decisive attack to the head.
As I say, it’s pretty standard. Except in Yamashita’s
dojo.
He
doesn’t think it’s particularly realistic that someone who has
dodged your first strike would remain seated and waiting for
your follow up. Much more likely, he says, that the attacker
would rear up and then back away, well out of range.
21
John Donohue
Which means you have to chase him.
It sounds simple enough, but Yamashita is always as inter-
ested in finesse as he is in functionality. In many ways, he doesn’t
even consider them two separate things. So in his
dojo,
after the
first cut, the swordsman has to lunge far forward while remain-
ing crouched. Your opponent is standing up by this point and
expects you to rise as well. So, my teacher explains, you do the
opposite and pursue him from the lower position, driving for-
ward while remaining alert to the possibility of counterattack.
It sounds easy, but is difficult to pull off. The crouching
position is awkward, and it takes time to get the knack of using
your muscles correctly. If you rely too much on the left foot to
propel you, you tend to topple forward, providing a dangerous
gap for your opponent to exploit. Too much right leg, and you