The Miko - 02 (66 page)

Work at the
dōjō
was difficult in the extreme. All life there appeared to come to a stop when she approached. All were polite to her, but there was no harmony when she was about, and no one was more aware of this than she.

She felt that the
sensei
distrusted her and the students disliked her. There was no help they would give her if it were not a matter of face that they do so. She had never felt so alone, adrift, absolutely cut off from everything and everyone. It was as if she were an iceberg in the tropics that the sun refused to melt. If she existed at all for them it was as a wound which refused to heal.

They wished her gone and she knew it. Still she refused to knuckle under the force of their combined will. Men had never dictated the course of her life and she was not about to allow them to now. She had fought against that, perhaps, from the moment of her birth. Her will was cast in the terrible shades of steel—a thousandfold—that went into the creation of the
katana
, the sword of honor. Did they actually think that they could break her?

But, oh, how they tried! For a start, the
sensei
put her in with the slowest group of students, those young men who, Akiko judged, would be forced to leave the
ryu
within six months. Inside an hour she had made an astoundingly accurate assessment of their abilities. All were at a lower level than she was. It was a deliberate slap in the face, but rather than allow herself to feel humiliation she resolved to use this maneuver to her own advantage.

As any student new to a particular
ryu
will do, she sat silent and rapt during the
sensei
’s lessons, watching with concentration the exercises and, later, the strike-defense combinations being illustrated.

All of this was material that Sun Hsiung had taught her and which she had mastered years ago. Her mien was that of the learning student attempting to absorb the new and complicated. For the moment she was content to give them what they expected.

When it came her time to practice the moves, the
sensei
gave way to one of the students in the class. Another deliberate slap in the face, for all who had gone before her had worked directly with the
sensei.

She was given a polished wooden pole perhaps half the thickness of a
bokken
—the wooden
kendo
practice sword—and three times as long. She arranged herself on the polished wooden floorboards, encompassed by wood. She did not ignore this aspect of her surroundings, taking her cue from the qualities of hardwood that the Japanese most prized: flexibility and durability.

Went into
shinki kiitsu
and, lifting her pole at the last possible instant, she easily knocked the student off his feet as he attacked.

Within the silence surrounding the class, the
sensei
sent the next boy at her. The result was the same, though she varied her response to his attack.

Now the
sensei
sent two of his pupils at her at once. Akiko still knelt staring straight ahead. She did not have to turn her head in order to know where the second student was or what he was doing.
Shinki kiitsu
revealed his strategy to her. Both her fists gripped the wooden pole lightly yet firmly at its exact center; this was essential because she was employing the fulcrum concept and balance was crucial.

She kept her place, at a disadvantage because she did not have her feet. But there was a lot she could do with her upper torso.

Concentrating on the Void, she felt the advancement from behind her. She torqued her shoulders, dipping her right side and bringing it up to increase momentum and thus power. The pole whistled through the air, slammed into the student’s rib cage, sending him flying.

The opposite end of the pole—now the lower end—began its upward swing at just that moment, its rounded end jamming lightly into the oncoming second student’s throat. He sat down hard on his buttocks, a stunned look on his face.

It was only then, as her concentration broke its intense focus, that she became aware of the interest from other quarters of the
dōjō.
What she had thought to be an isolated incident had been observed by fully three-quarters of the
ryu.

But if she suspected that the
sensei
of her class would now accord her the honor of performing against him, she was mistaken. Again the school sought to subtly humiliate her. The
sensei
bade her rise. Taking the pole from her, he led her across the
dōjō
floor to where Saigō’s class was working. He left her in care of another
sensei
, a dour-faced individual with severe pockmarks across his cheeks and chin.

He bowed formally to her. “Welcome,” he said, though he did not for a moment mean it. It was as if she were a
gaijin
in her own country.

His hard-calloused hand, as yellow as tallow, extended. “Please be kind enough to assume
kokyū suru.
”
Kokyū suru
was an attack stance but as with all Japanese words and phrases it had another meaning; it also meant, “breathe.”

“Jin-san.”

The student he had named stepped forward, bowing toward his
sensei. “Hai.”

“It seems that Ofuda-san has been inadvertently put in the wrong class through an administrative oversight. We do not wish for such an occurrence to happen again. Would you be so kind as to convince us that with us she has found her proper place.” So saying he retreated to the edge of the circle formed by the rest of the class.

Out of the corner of her eye Akiko could see Saigō standing relaxed and calm. Was he curious about how she would fare in his more advanced class? Was he wishing that it were he instead of Jin-san who had been chosen to test her?

There was no bowing done within this
dōjō
circle as there would be in any other form of martial discipline in Japan. They were ninja here; the code of
bushido
—the creed of the
samurai
—was meaningless to them. Though honor was not.

Jin-san stood facing her, his feet apart to about the width of his shoulders. His fisted hands were held before him at waist height, the left cupped over the right.

There was something disturbing in this stance that Akiko could not quite put her finger on. Then he moved and were it not for the fact that she could read his spirit, anticipating his physical strike, she would have been finished even before she had a chance to parry.

As it was, she barely made it. Her foreknowledge allowed her to both prepare her spirit and focus her attention on the unknown. Therefore she saw the glint of the
manrikigusari
—literally “the chain with the strength of ten thousand men”—consisting of two feet of hand-forged iron chain with three-and-one-half-inch blunt-ended weights attached to each end.

And now she knew what had disturbed her about Jin-san’s stance: it was
goho-no-kamae,
one of the openings or
kamae
in spike and chain fighting.

Jin-san was already halfway toward her, his arms spread so that the
manrikigusari
hung in a loose arc between his fists. He would seek
makiotoshi
, she knew, winding the chain about her neck, because not only was it essential that he defeat her but also that he do so quickly and decisively.

She did not make the mistake of trying to grab for the chain. She knew that she could expect only a weight in her eye for her trouble or, if she were foolish enough to manage a two-handed grasp, crushed knuckles.

Therefore she sought to ignore the
manrikigusari
entirely as a target. She bent her torso only slightly—and to the side, not, as he had expected, away from the attack. This allowed some of her own momentum to build up while she came inside the attack, using her left side as a wedge combined with his own forward momentum to strike at
ekika
, a vital spot just beneath the armpits. The
ate
broke both Jin-san’s rhythm and his concentration. Thus cut off from the Void, he was easy to take down.

The pockmarked
sensei
said nothing as Jin-san got shakily to his feet and returned to the sanctuary of the circle’s edge. But Akiko could feel a great leap in the onlookers’ tension.

In her memory there was something absolutely otherworldly in the next several minutes. How many times had she relived the
sensei
’s next movements, watching as if in slow motion as he turned toward the press of his students and uttered the word, “Saigō-san.”

There was no hesitation, no eye contact, nothing at all in Saigo’s demeanor to tell her what was in his mind. But she knew that in the next instant, as they came at each other, the fate of their relationship, present and future, would be spelled out.

She also knew that both their fates were completely in her hands. In his own mind he had already conquered her, so he held none of the dominance-anxiety for her that he might male rivals of his here. He would simply do what his
sensei
asked of him: that is, defeat her as convincingly as possible. Humiliate her in public.

It was up to Akiko, therefore, to divine the twining of their
karma
—if there was to be any at all—and to use this moment to defuse the deep well of hatred that seethed like a volcano inside of him. He was very dangerous, and she never lost sight of that. He could very easily hurt her seriously if she allowed that well to come uncapped. She did not believe the
sensei
would be able to sense it soon enough and intervene in time. Saigō might easily kill her, gripped in the heat of his own energies, without even knowing it.

All this flashed through her mind as Saigō entered the inner circle where moments before Jin-san had gone down before her. Seeing his tense, hot face, she knew that he had vowed not to allow the same indignity to happen to him.

He took three minutes to defeat her, but in that time an eternity of knowledge seethed back and forth between them in microcosm. The employment of strategies revealed the layers of the spirit; there was nothing behind which to hide. They became more intimate than lovers, sharing more, even, than twins. The Void connected them in its wholeness as they maneuvered, as they stared down the dark tunnels of each other’s souls.

“Yes,” the pockmarked
sensei
said with no hint of the disappointment he felt at the defeat of even one of his pupils at her hand. “You’ll do here, Ofuda-san.”

Afterward, Saigō suggested that they go out to dinner. The slumbering young woman who he had brought home the night before had been transferred to his
futon.
Akiko had made no comment about that nor about the fact that she never ate and barely opened her eyes during the daylight hours. Drugged she had been and drugged she stayed.

Saigō said nothing at the restaurant, picking disinterestedly at his yellowfin
sashimi
and
daikon
salad for the longest time. Life went on around them in a dizzying explosion of drinking and forced gaiety, as if these people who worked so hard and long during the day at the giant factories just beyond the town felt compelled to cram a week’s worth of carousing into a single evening.

Akiko saw many women who were in the same profession that her mother had been in. These were of a different level, of course, but the end remained the same. Observing them made her feel odd, as if she were back in
Fuyajo,
peeking through gaps in bedroom walls during the endless nights.

Yet she felt as if she had changed, for it occurred to her that her mother’s utter refinement was but a facade, that in some unfathomable way she was no better than these women here who lacked status, dignity, and, ultimately, that most precious of all Japanese commodities, honor.

Ikan had had no family, no ancestors she wished to honor, no husband to protect her, through whom she could guide her own destiny and that of her progeny. She had only Akiko, and that responsibility had been too great for her.

For she, like these women now, lacked a future into which a child could grow, prosper, and find herself.

“Akiko-san.”

She shifted her attention back to him.
“Hai?”

“Why didn’t you do it?”

She knew what he was talking about but perhaps it would be good for him to say it. “I don’t know what you mean, Saigō-san.”

He thought about that for a moment. “You could have defeated me in our confrontation at the
dōjō.
Yet you chose not to.”

She shook her head. “Please believe me. I could not stand against you.”

“I felt it.”

Her dark eyes held his shadowed ones. “What you felt, perhaps, Saigō-san, was your intense anxiety not to be defeated in front of your peers. Honor rules you; it is your weapon and your fear. How could I possibly strip you of either?”

Now, three weeks later, trodding the snow strewn aisles between rows of dreaming orange trees awaiting next year’s sun, Akiko knew that she had taken the right path.

Michi.
It was the Japanese word for path; but it could also mean a journey, as well as duty, the unknown, a stranger.

Akiko abruptly felt that she must be the first person on earth to have come upon a situation in which all of the word’s meanings were in play simultaneously. For her life with Saigō was tinged with all these things, and it was impossible for her to say where one left off and the other began.

Silently they passed a stand of tall, whipthin bamboo. A branch of one older tree was heavily laden with ice-crusted snow. Surely at any moment it must break beneath its burden. But no. The gusting wind caused the branch to bob up and down and such was the resilient nature of the wood that at length the branch sprang upward and like the finest of bows loosed its charge. Snow in a fine spray dusted the cold air, powdering down upon them in bracing fashion. And in its wake they saw the branch of the bamboo now free of excess weight.

They passed on, shoulders hunched, bunched hands in the pockets of their coats while the wind continued to whistle by overhead.

Within the shelter of a dense copse of pines Saigō stopped them. A river sang merrily to their left and below them. From this interior space it was impossible to see either the industrial sprawl beyond Kumamoto or even the looming presence of Mount Aso with its plume of pumice and hot ash. It was possible to believe for a moment that one could be divorced from such things, that the heavily layered structuralism of life had momentarily disappeared.