Daughter of the Sword (6 page)

Not for the first time, she wished to hell Lieutenant Hashimoto hadn’t retired. Not that he’d had much choice. Like Mariko, the man had no idea how to do anything halfway. Twenty-six years of eighty-hour workweeks had taken their toll, until finally he’d passed out in his office and woken up to a doctor telling him he was a near case of
karōshi
. As the train clacked along, Mariko thought about how strange that word was.
Karōshi
: death from overwork. What did it mean about Japanese culture that they had a word for that? How could a society survive where so many people worked themselves to death that they had no choice but to come up with a name for it? The Americans had no equivalent—but, then, the existence of the term
drive-by shooting
was every bit as biting a commentary on their culture. Only in a place of unremitting violence could people invent vocabulary to separate
this
kind of shooting each other from
that
kind of shooting each other.

And Mariko had chosen the land of
karōshi
over the land of the drive-by. What did that say about her? There was something so classically Japanese about it, preferring suicide to a random shooting. The samurai once debated whether there was any honor in winning a battle by resorting to firearms. Unlike a sword or an arrow, a musket ball was random, and the true follower of Bushido was honor-bound to kill using only his own talent. Better to die by seppuku, some said, than to claim the empty victory of the gun. Of course, the ones who said that were the ones the musket balls had torn apart by the score.

Now and then people still talked about the samurai spirit. Mariko wondered if she had it, and if it had ever been anything more than sheer stubbornness. No—stubbornness plus a willingness to endure more than the other guy. Mariko was good at that part. It was the only way to beat guys like Ko: she’d outlast him. Even if it killed her, she’d outlast him.

She found she could not enjoy the sunshine, nor the cloudless
sky, nor Machida’s relative verdure compared to downtown. The pale blue folder in her left hand still smelled of cigarette smoke. She flipped through it for Yamada’s address and found the house easily.

Yamada Yasuo, aged eighty-seven, retired, sole resident. No criminal record. Whatever career he’d retired from was lucrative enough for him to afford his own home, a luxury Mariko could never aspire to. Presumably widowed, and an accomplished gardener, for when she reached the house, she found Yamada snipping a huge pink chrysanthemum from its bush beside his front stoop.

“Yamada-san?”

The old man turned around and smiled. His hair was as short as electric clippers could make it, and in the sun it shone like a million tiny points of silver light. He was kneeling—the flower he’d snipped was low on the bush—but even so she could tell his back had a slight but permanent hunch. He wore slacks and a sweater the color of milk tea, and his face was dotted with liver spots. The skin of his hands and face was as wrinkled as any Mariko had ever seen.

“Why, hello,” he said.

“I’m Detective Sergeant Oshiro, TMPD. I’m here to ask you some questions about your recent attempted theft. Have you got a minute?”

“Of course. Do come in.”

He beckoned her with a wave of the head, and with clippers and chrysanthemum blossom in one hand, he made his way toward his front door. Now that he was standing, she found him to be shorter than she’d expected, not ten centimeters taller than she was herself. His hunch had stolen some of his height. His feet found each step carefully, which surprised Mariko, for he’d stood up from kneeling quickly enough, and he seemed quite fit for his age. When he reached the front door, she discovered why he moved so slowly. He fished in his pocket for his house key, and, finding it, he bent down so that his face was no more than a finger’s length from the doorknob. Only then could he fit key to keyhole.

“You’re legally blind?” said Mariko.

“None too delicate, are you, Inspector?”

Mariko felt her cheeks warm. “No, sir. Beg your pardon. I’ve got a grandmother who’s almost blind too. She still does
sashiko
, but she has to plot the thread patterns by touch.”

“Ah. My doctor says I’d do better to let my fingers do some seeing for me, but I prefer to use my eyes while I still can. Please, come in. Let’s sit.”

Yamada’s home was a sliver of the past. His entryway, which still housed a shallow wooden shoe rack, had a lower floor than the rest of the house. The only furniture in his sitting room was a broad table not even knee-high, surrounded by four gray
zabuton
. The floor was tatami, the walls were lined with books, and the bowl-shaped ceiling light was the only electrical device to be seen. Even the light was a relatively recent addition to the house, if the ceiling plaster was any indication: a straight line, almost exactly the same texture as the rest of the ceiling and yet not quite, led from the lamp to the wall, trace evidence from where they’d run the new wire. There were dead bugs in the light’s glass bowl, but the bookshelves were dusted and the gray cushions free of stains. The room smelled of tatami and old paper. A clock ticked loudly on the other side of the room.

Mariko said she would stand, but Yamada insisted, so Mariko slipped out of her shoes, padded into the sitting room, and settled herself on a
zabuton
. Yamada spoke to her from the kitchen as he prepared a pot of tea. “He came for the sword last night,” the old man was saying. “In a car, if that’s relevant. A smaller one, by the sound of it.”

Mariko wrote all of this down, more out of a habit of thoroughness than anything. “What makes you think this person came to steal the sword?”

“I can’t think of anything else here worth taking,” said Yamada, entering the room now with both hands holding a tray. On the tray were two teacups—traditional, without handles—a steaming pot, and the big pink chrysanthemum. The tea and the blossom blended their perfumes beautifully.

Mariko didn’t make a habit of contradicting witnesses or victims as she questioned them, but she couldn’t help thinking that a sword was most definitely not worth stealing. What possible use could a person have for a sword in the twenty-first century?

But she voiced none of this aloud. Instead she said, “May I see the sword, sir?”

“Tea first,” said Yamada. His hands found cup and pot handle with ease—could he see them, or had he memorized where he’d set them?—and he poured two small cupfuls of pale green tea.

Mariko sipped hers. As they drank, she asked the usual questions: What time did this car come by the house? What happened next? Did this person actually enter the home, or was it only an attempted entry? Can you describe the person? Was he or she alone?

Yamada answered all of them, though Mariko sensed he was holding something back. She tried varying the questions, repeating them from different angles, but could not get past his reticence. She couldn’t decide whether he was deliberately concealing something or whether it was simply a difference in mannerisms between his generation and hers.

At last she concluded that Yamada was a traditionalist. The old-style tea table and cushions, the absence of any stereo system or CD player, the tatami mats in the first room of the house: all of these were reminiscent of an older time. Yamada volunteered nothing that he was not asked, and not everything that he
was
asked, but Mariko thought this had to do with growing up in the last generation that still believed in the sanctity of silence.

As Yamada led her upstairs to his bedroom, where he kept the sword, Mariko noticed there was no television in the house. It was not unusual for the blind to have televisions—her grandmother had one—but Mariko suspected this man hadn’t thrown out his TV when his vision faltered. More likely, she thought, that he’d never owned one. There was no obvious place in the house to put one, for one thing, no media cabinet or TV stand now used for some other purpose, and the
fact that he still wound that clock ticking so loudly in the sitting room told her he still kept things he couldn’t get much use of now that he was nearly blind. But more than this, Mariko thought it impossible that anyone could have read so many books if he spent any time at all in front of the tube.

Yamada didn’t even have a computer, which was less surprising—Mariko’s grandmother didn’t have one either—and yet more jarring, because Mariko couldn’t imagine her life without one. Just another generational gap, she supposed.

“Here it is,” Yamada said. The bedroom smelled like its tatami floors too. The bed was not, as she’d predicted, an old-style futon, but rather a Western-style mattress on a hip-high frame. Easier to get in and out of, she guessed. Above the bed, on a black lacquered rack on the wall, was the sword.

He went to it, took it down from the wall, and handed it to her. It was surprisingly heavy, and much bigger than she’d expected. But then, she’d never held a real sword before. She’d seen them in museums and castle tours as a girl, of course, and in truth she’d always wanted to open the glass cases and pick them up. It was strange to hold one now, sort of a girlhood fantasy brought to life. A tiny part of her wondered what that meant about her. Saori’s girlhood fantasy was to have a pony.

“Unsheathe it,” Yamada said.

She obliged him, laying the polished, cord-bound scabbard on the mattress. The sword’s naked steel reflected everything in the room, distorting and stretching the images. Mariko could hardly imagine fighting with it, but as soon as that thought entered her mind, she immediately sensed how easy it would be to cut through bone and muscle with a blade this big. And of course the samurai that fought with such weapons were assuredly larger than Mariko’s fifty kilos and 165 centimeters. The sword might not have been all that big to them.

“Impressive,” she said, hefting it.

“It ought to be. It guides the forces of destiny.”

A moment passed before that sunk in. “The forces of destiny?”

“That’s right.”

“Sir, are you suggesting that this sword is magical?”

“That’s one word for it.”

Mariko returned it to its sheath. “And that’s why the thief came to steal your sword?”

“Why, of course.”

“Right.” She didn’t bother setting the sword back on the wall rack; she just left it on the bed. “And you said you didn’t actually see the thief enter the premises?”

“I don’t see much anymore, Inspector.”

Mariko turned for the stairs. “I think we’re all through here, sir. I’ll let you know if we turn up anything.”

“Oh, Inspector,” he called after her, “if it matters to your investigation, the sword is worth a lot of money.”

“Because it controls destiny?”

“No. Because it’s almost nine hundred years old.”

“Uh-huh. We’ll get back to you, sir.”

She left the old man’s apartment clenching and unclenching her fists, reminding herself there was only one way to beat Ko. She’d outlast him. He’d heap shit like this on her, and she’d keep taking it until he had no more shit to shovel.

She sure as hell hoped he’d run out soon.

BOOK TWO

KAMAKURA ERA, THE YEAR 124

(1308 CE)

7

Silence fell on the hillside. Orange and gold leaves of autumn drifted lazily to the ground, more of them below than still in the branches. One fell on the face of Lord Kanayama Osamu, his pallor contrasting sharply with the rich redness of the leaf. Most of his blood had already dyed the leaves on the ground in a uniform river of dark crimson. His body was gashed open across the spine, a deep cut from left shoulder to right hip, and his face still bore the crazed snarl he had worn in combat.

“I’ve never seen anything like it.” Saito Toshiro stared down at his fallen commander, lungs still heaving, blood pounding an adrenaline-charged rhythm against his eardrums.

“Neither have I,” said Nakadai Minoru, sheathing his
tachi
at his hip. “Not at Kamakura, not at Higashiyama, never.” The two men were in many ways the opposite of each other. While Saito was lean and towering in his armor, Nakadai was fully a head shorter and almost as broad as he was tall. Saito had a face of leather, bronzed by the sun and hardened by years of combat. Nakadai had cheeks like red apples and deep, narrow, glinting slits for eyes, like two black marbles pressed into a ball of dough. Both wore the armor and topknot that marked them as samurai, as well as the twin swords, but standing next to each other, Nakadai looked almost like a bull, Saito a weathered tree.

“He fought like a madman,” Saito said. “No—like a rabid dog. I don’t understand it.”

“Yes. By all rights we should be the ones lying here, not him. It’s too bad; he deserved a better death than this.”

Lord Kanayama had been, among other things, one of the most renowned swordsmen in the Owari territory. He had also been samurai, lord of the castle at Gifu, daimyo of the surrounding fief, and an ally and confidant to Lord Ashikaga Owari-no-kami Jinzaemon, overlord of Owari. Up until a few days ago, Kanayama was one of Lord Ashikaga’s generals, and the commanding officer of both Saito and Nakadai. In times of war, Lord Kanayama’s counsel was always esteemed, and with a blade in his hands he was unrivaled within a hundred
ri
. But yesterday morning he was to have committed seppuku, his punishment ordered by Lord Ashikaga on charges of treason. And, that morning at dawn, Kanayama had instead taken his swords and his two fastest horses, and fled across the Owari plains.