The Miko - 02 (29 page)

A whisper of wind came from somewhere in the pearly atmosphere above Miss Yoshida’s bowed head. Off to the right rose a stand of willowy green bamboo, tall, youthful, filled with eternal suppleness, that ineffable quality the Japanese so treasure, whose aura can renew the tired spirit.

Miss Yoshida, dressed in a fashionable dark red suit, knelt by the side of the pool. Though she was Sato’s administrative assistant, the simple fact was that tradition dictated that she be known as an Office Lady. It was a tag she had been fighting for years without any sign of success. And indeed under other circumstances she would not have been here but would have fulfilled her traditional female duties of being a wife and mother, of keeping her home in perfect order.

But six years ago her husband had been struck by a careening truck as he stepped off a sidewalk jammed with the crush of midday pedestrian traffic. His skull had been crushed instantly. His death had left Miss Yoshida all alone to care for their one son, Kozo, who was then beginning high school, the one linked with prestigious Tōdai. Miss Yoshida and her husband had labored long and hard—she had even appealed to Sato to use his influence in this matter—to get Kozo in. And they had been dismayed at the boy’s appalling display of ungratefulness; he seemed totally oblivious to the great step upward to a successful future his parents had wrangled for him.

Miss Yoshida sighed now, her shoulders hunched as if beneath a great weight as she recalled these events.

At first she had tried accepting the invitation to come and live with her mother-in-law. But that had lasted only a few months for Miss Yoshida found that she had merely exchanged one form of hell for another. By living in her mother-in-law’s house she put herself under the direct control of the older woman. She was a
hera-mochi
of ferocious intensity, insisting on taking over the guidance of the money in her son’s life insurance and multiple bank accounts. And the servitude under which Miss Yoshida was forced to abide became too much for her.

She took Kozo and fled the baleful eye of the
hera-mochi,
returning to the same section of the city she had loved as a child, renting a small apartment there.

And because there was only Kozo left in her life now she became a
Kyoiku mama,
an education mother, constantly working with her son to improve his grades so that he could get into the elite
juku
, the private study groups that gathered on Sundays and on national holidays over and above the 240 days regular classes were in session. Miss Yoshida wanted Kozo to enroll in a
juku
because she knew the level of teaching in the classroom at his school. Because students were not allowed to repeat or skip grades, the level of teaching was geared to the slightly slower students in each class and these, Miss Yoshida had judged, were on a level far below her own son’s.

And through her own diligence and Kozo’s innate intelligence, he was soon asked to join a particularly prestigious
juku
which rented a classroom at Tōdai.

Miss Yoshida was particularly pleased because she remembered her own schooling. In junior college, where all of her classmates were women, Miss Yoshida was taught how to behave in society, how to treat her prospective mother-in-law, how to raise children, and how to prepare herself for all the myriad vicissitudes of married life. It was no more than a finishing-school education. She had been bitter about that and had vowed that when she had a female baby, that child would have an entirely different form of education.

But her
karma
had lain in another direction, and when her physician had told her that the one child was all she could ever have, she resigned herself to seeing that her son received the finest in Japanese education so that all the great doors to the business world would be open to him. For everyone knew that without an education at only a handful of universities a young man would be cast adrift on a lonely and unproductive sea.

Thus she ignored Kozo’s complaints that his teachers at school resented his enrollment in the
juku.
They felt, he told her, that the
juku
undermined their own teaching and they were jealous at the loss of control and thus made life more difficult for him in class.

“Nonsense,” Miss Yoshida told him. “That’s merely an excuse to shirk your studies. Do you have any idea how much the
juku
costs me each month?” Of course she would not tell him, but privately she was glad that her husband had been such a hoarder; he was a good provider even in death.

Two years ago—has it already been so long? she asked herself—Kozo was ready to graduate high school. All semester long, he had dedicated himself along with his class to studying for the Tōdai entrance examinations. White faced and tense he would leave the apartment every morning, not returning from the library until late in the evening.

Then, in the three weeks after New Year’s, with all regular classes dissolved for the year, Kozo began the rigorous around-the-clock cramming that was known as
shaken jigoku,
examination hell. Miss Yoshida shuddered now when she thought of those words.

She arranged for Kozo to have one entire section of the apartment for his intensive studies. And then one morning…

Miss Yoshida’s shoulders shook as she sobbed out loud at the verge of the exquisite garden, the rustling of the leaves, the musical notes of the tiny waterfall which flowed over the smooth ochre stones lost on her.
No!
a voice within her cried.
Why torture yourself again? Why make yourself remember?

But all the while she knew why. Penance. Silent tears streamed down her rounded cheeks, staining her silk blouse, beading on her linen suit jacket.

Ah, Buddha! How can I ever forget the moment when I entered his rooms that morning and found him hanging, twisted in his bedsheet, the small stool kicked over on its side. Swinging back and forth like a monstrous metronome and, oh, when he was a child and sleeping peacefully, that small secret smile on his lips, he would twist his sheet around his legs—his legs, not his neck.

Oh, my poor Kozo!

Three months after she had buried him in a plot next to his father’s, she had read a newspaper article by Professor Soichi Watanabe of Tokyo’s Sophia University. In part, he lamented “the bitterness of educational servitude” young boys were forced to undergo, “a sentence from which no child can escape.” And she had wept all over again, appalled at her own lack of understanding or compassion.

From the moment of his birth she had molded Kozo into the conception of what she wanted him to be. She saw now that she had had no clear idea of him as an individual. Rather, he had always been an extension of her. A most important extension, to be sure. But only a part of her for all that.

Now, her head buried in her hands, she rocked softly back and forth on her haunches and wept bitter tears, drenched in longing and spiteful self-pity.

And that was how death found her, falling across her body in shadow, a rippling nightblack finger that seemed to appear out of nowhere, running across her bent back, ribboning along the folds of her linen jacket like a slice of the Void splitting her in two.

Miss Yoshida was aware of nothing but her own pain and sorrow, the more recent trauma of finding Kagami-san in his own blood in the steam room. And the indelible memory of Kozo. Even the foul stench emanating from Tomkin-san, a product, she supposed, of his meat-filled Western diet, was forgotten in the swelling blossom of her utter despair.

Then she felt a gentle hand on her shoulder and a soft woman’s voice crooning to her and slowly she unwound, her shoulders lifting, her spine unbending, and her head coming up to see the source of comfort.

She had just time enough to see the colorful kimono, the long gleaming sweep of blue-black hair, marked with the coarse bloody
Xi
, in the manner of the
geisha
, before she heard the odd high whistling and the great ruffled blade of the
gunsen
slashed through the bone and cartilage at the base of her nose, severing it.

Miss Yoshida screamed thickly as her raw nerves overcame the shock trauma and pain flashed through her. Blood gushed from the rent in her face, drenching her blouse and jacket. She fell backward with her feet bent under her buttocks. Her eyes opened wide, blinking rapidly in incomprehension, for now she recognized the figure for what it was and her heart contracted in terror.

“I am afraid this is way beyond my ken,” the doctor said. He was gray and wan, seeming ten years older than when he had come through the office door. “His only hope now is a hospital.” He sighed deeply, pushing his wire-framed glasses up on his glistening forehead, then massaging his eyes with his thumbs. “A thousand pardons. I am afflicted with an almost constant sinus headache these days.” He produced a small plastic bottle, detonated squeezes in each nostril. “My doctor says I must soon leave the city for good.” He pocketed the bottle. “The pollution, you know.”

He was a stooped Japanese of more than middle yeas, with shoulders so thin the blades could be seen beneath his rumpled jacket. He had kind, intelligent eyes. He sighed now as he put the bottle away. “But if you want my opinion, even that won’t do much good.” He peered around at the anxious faces in the room: Nicholas, Sato, Nangi, then at the form of Tomkin, sprawled on Sato’s sofa.

“It’s not his heart,” the doctor said. “I don’t know
what
it is.”

“I took his pulse while you were being summoned,” Nicholas said. “He didn’t have any.”

“Quite so.” The doctor’s eyes blinked owllike behind his thick lenses. “And that is what is so remarkable. He should be dead, you know.” He looked over in the direction of the stricken man. “Was he on any special medication, do you know, Linnear-san?”

Nicholas remembered idly picking up the small plastic bottle in Tomkin’s hotel suite. “He’s been taking Prednisone.”

The doctor seemed to stagger backward a pace and Nicholas reached out for him. His face had gone pale but he made no exclamation, only said so low Nicholas had to lean toward him, “Prednisone? Are you absolutely certain it was Prednisone?”

“Yes.”

The doctor took off his glasses. “I fear the ambulance will be useless now,” he said softly. Carefully he replaced his spectacles and looked at them. Now his face had altered just as if he were a quick-change artist. His eyes were black, a professional veneer like a curtain hanging between him and everything else about him. Nicholas had seen that look many times before in doctors, and in soldiers returning from a war. It was a kind of defense mechanism, a deliberate hardening of the heart to protect it from sorrow’s bitter arrows. There was, indeed, nothing the doctor could do, and he hated defeat so much.

“I am afraid Tomkin-san is suffering from the end phase of Takayasu’s arterisis, a uniformly malignant and fatal disease. It is also known as pulseless disease. The reason for that is, I think, obvious to all of you.”

Miss Yoshida was confident that she was dying. This did not seem to be a terrible occurrence for it would bring an end to her suffering and would hide her shame at being too cowardly to take up her husband’s
wakizashi
and, drawing the steel from its scabbard, plunge it into her lower belly.

But the manner in which she was dying—that was another matter entirely. She was dying like a dog, a poor, broken animal in the street, kicked and pummeled, the life escaping from her in short arrhythmic gasps.

Surely this was no way for a
samurai
woman to die, she told herself, her mind already half numb from the painful contact of the needle-sharp ripple blade of the steel fan.

But the sight of the figure looming over her—that painted demon’s face, dead white, with bright orange paint in the manner the
kabuki
represented demons in its plays—transfixed her.

It was as if she had been spun down the awful tunnel of legend, as if quotidian Tokyo with its hordes of rushing people, thick pollution, and bright neon lights had disappeared entirely. And in its place were the wood and paper houses, the green, trembling bamboo groves of the Japan of long ago, mist shrouded and mysterious, filled with magic and the feats of heroes.

This was the essence of the visage which was bent over her now, administering a terrible punishment.

But I am
samurai! a voice in the back of Miss Yoshida’s dazzled mind cried.
If I am to die, at least grant me the nobility of falling in battle.

And so Miss Yoshida reached up with clawlike talons, shredding first her nails and then her fingertips on the deadly
gunsen
that whistled down at her again and again. She began to inch away from the blows, uncurling herself awkwardly, using forearms and elbows now, the blood running hot and free down her arms and into the drenched sockets of her armpits.

But now her lips were drawn back from her clenched teeth in a cross between a grin and a snarl and adrenaline pumped through her and her heart arose from its gray slumber and sang again at the spirits of her
samurai
ancestors who moved her now to her glorious end.

“Confirmed diagnosis has been relatively recent. Early 1979 at the Mayo clinic, I believe.”

“There is nothing you can do, Taki-san?” Sato said.

The doctor shrugged his meager shoulders. “I can sedate him; take away the pain. There’s nothing else.”

“But surely the hospital has facilities that can—”

But Taki was already shaking his head. “It is almost over, Sato-san. He will feel far more pain if we move him. And the hospital…well, personally, I would not want to die there had I the choice.”

Sato nodded, also admitting defeat.

Nicholas left them, a modern cabal, ineffectual against the primitive, ultimate forces of nature. He knelt beside Tomkin and looked into the pale, pinched face. Once he had seen the power in that face, the lines the burden of command had etched into it, giving it character and substance.

Now it was those lines that had begun to take over, deepening, widening, extending their networks. Time seemed to have closed in on him, aging him ten years in as many minutes. But unlike Taki, he would never bounce back. The regenerative process in him had been destroyed by disease.