Holmes had traded his white shirt for the dark blue tunic, and was now buttoning on his own tabi. “Holmes, what does a fight to the death have to do with retrieving an old book?”
“I shouldn’t think anyone will die,” he said.
“No, just blood loss and brisk amputations.”
“Some of the armour may fit you.”
I was tempted by the massive leather breastplate with the raised neck, but I imagined it might be difficult to move in it.
“What about you?” I asked.
He bent over a metal hoop set into the wall and started pawing through the sticks it contained, like a restaurant-goer in search of his umbrella. When he found one he liked, he drew it out, practising its weight with a few jabs and swishes. His preferred weapon was a singlestick; lacking that, a riding crop. My own favourite weapon was strapped to my ankle.
I looked at him. “Holmes, are we honestly about to go up against two trained assassins in a dark building?”
“Just think of it as an examination for your practicum.”
“A comforting thought when I lie on the floor with a broken leg.”
“Remember: they do not know us. To them we are merely outsiders, with few skills and little experience.”
“So, you propose that we take them by surprise.” It didn’t seem to me much of a plan, but when he looked over his shoulder at me, he was grinning.
“My dear Russell, whyever not?”
I laughed. “All right, but you may need to summon a cup of English tea to bring me out of my concussion.”
We chose a few bits from the cabinets, then crept from the armoury and across the mossy earth to the dojo’s veranda. Like all such, it was sturdy and made not a creak as we eased our weight onto its boards. The sun was on the other side, so our shadows were not a concern. We took up positions on both sides of the dark opening.
I closed my eyes, so as to let my pupils expand as much as possible, and strained my ears as if I might hear the waning dribble of grains of sand through the bamboo timer. As we waited, I sought to reach that state of relaxed tension that prepares a body for sudden demands. I listened to my breath, I felt the cold spring air against my face …
The device gave an almost imperceptible pause of sound, then a hollow clok. Before the echoes died, we dove through the door, flinging aside the noisy clacking sticks we had brought as distraction and sprinting across the tatami towards the opposite corner.
We might have made it, had the building been as we had seen it. In the interim, the open space had gained a pair of shoji half-walls, effectively converting a clear room into an arena designed to confuse strangers and conceal defenders. The space was further cluttered by some odd tangle of machinery hanging from the beams and a large trunk. I dodged to my right, loath to dive through a paper wall into some unseen threat—and from behind the wall burst Haruki-san, sword raised.
She was incredibly fast; the sword slashed down while she was still mid-air. Had it been steel, I would have lost a hand—even a solid wood practise sword might have cracked bones. But it was a bamboo, and merely left me with numb fingers.
I jabbed her with my own weapon, a stick much like Holmes’. My superior reach forced her back a few steps, while I tried to think as fast as she moved.
For all the Satos had known, Holmes and I would enter the arena bristling with razor-sharp steel. That they had chosen bamboo for defence meant—
My attempt at reasoning was cut off by her instantaneous recovery and advance. Armed only with a flexible stick, her reach a foot shorter than mine, she nonetheless managed to deliver two brutal blows to my torso before I fought her off. There followed a blur of attack and counterattack that seemed to last far longer than the few seconds of actual clock-time. I was relieved to see, when we both backed off a step, that she was panting as hard as I.
Inevitably, Holmes had been too much of a gentleman to abandon me to a sword-wielding woman. Instead of making his dash for the far corner, he had turned to do battle—which allowed the father to pounce from his position just inside the entrance.
I was aware of the two men thwacking away at each other off to my left, but my attention was locked on the small woman crouching before me. She edged sideways, watching for an opening, and I knew that her own mind was whirring as rapidly as my own. The first moments of our engagement had taught her a lot about me—if nothing else, she now knew that I was not without skills—but perhaps it did not teach her everything.
And perhaps it did not teach her about herself.
The sounds from across the room indicated that her father, too, was armed only with light bamboo. The exchange of grunts and gasps showed that the men were also gauging each other’s skills, and—
Haruki-san’s bamboo came at my face. I retreated: one step, two. She followed, her sword arm adjusting to my left-handed style; I continued to fall back. Three steps, five, she was driving me with the skill of a sheepdog. Seven steps—and a flash of triumph on her face when the floor disappeared from beneath my feet.
The innocent tatami that had been laid across the room’s fire-pit (cold, fortunately) collapsed the instant my weight hit it. I flung out my arms, the wooden sword flying away, and she leapt for the kill.
But as I went down, even as her feet were digging into the woven mats for her final attack, my body tucked and my feet stretched upwards, amplifying the speed of the fall. An instant later, my outstretched fingers dug into the fire-pit sand, and my every muscle thrust in an explosive movement: finger to toe, up, over—and to my astonishment, instead of a bone-cracking landing, my feet slapped onto the mats with barely a stagger.
A reverse somersault was the last thing Haruki-san anticipated. Her body was already committed to air, and although her face began to change when she saw my hand coming up from my ankle with a knife, there was little she could do about the laws of physics. She smashed into me. We tumbled hard across the tatami, my whole being focussed on the razor-sharp steel in my hand. When we came to a halt, I stared desperately at the place where steel met flesh, and saw—blood.
But not much. And, a brief throb from my finger told me, not even hers.
I let out a huge breath of relief. However, I kept my hand where it was until she gave an infinitesimal nod, then I got to my feet. I watched her rise, waiting until I was certain that she had capitulated, before looking to see how far Holmes had got.
Holmes’ age and relative lack of expertise were balanced by his longer arms and his general fitness; Sato-san’s greater skill was hindered by his body’s infirmities. The innkeeper would have won in the end, but Holmes was making him work for it.
Until I intervened. At the thwack of steel in bamboo, both men stopped moving. Their eyes rose to the sliver of steel protruding from the end of Sato-san’s bamboo weapon. He drew it back, pulled out the knife, and swivelled on his heel, eyes sparkling. Haruki-san climbed out of the pit, brushing sand from her clothing. Holmes lowered one end of his stick to the tatami and leant on it.
And Sato-san, his face alive with mischief, brought his other heel around, to bend his upper body into a deep and lasting bow.
Clear light twinkles from
A warrior’s cedar torso.
Star from the teacher.
“You were too confident,” I told Haruki-san.
Two hours after we had walked out of the dojo, when the sweat had been washed away and the sharp aches soaked in the baths, the four of us were sitting around another fire-pit, this one sending fragrant wisps of charcoal smoke into the rafters. Our host had asked how I had come to beat his daughter, although I was certain that he knew.
“I gave you no quarter,” she objected.
“You told me you thought us weak, the moment you came out with bamboo shinai.”
“We couldn’t attack with actual katana,” she exclaimed.
“Probably not, without knowing more about us. But you did not say that we shouldn’t use the real thing. You had no reason to think that Holmes and I would not st
ep into the dojo with steel. You weren’t even carrying wood. Either of you,” I pointed out.
Sato-san grimaced—although I thought it as much from his body’s protest at the violent exercise as it was chagrin. He was on his second flask of sake.
“It is foolish to underestimate the enemy,” Holmes said.
“You are not the enemy.”
Until that moment, I had not thought of Haruki Sato as particularly young—not since our first conversation on the Thomas Carlyle at any rate. I gave Holmes a brief glance before frowning into my cup of tea. “Haruki-san, I believe that your experience with enemies may be largely … theoretical.”
She stiffened, but before she could shape a retort—no one enjoys being accused of naiveté, not least a member of the Samurai class—her father deftly undermined her outrage. “My daughter is trained, but not tested.”
“Well,” I said, “testing comes soon enough.”
She wrestled with the lesson, but had to admit defeat. “Next time, I will use the wooden sword.”
“Next time you should bring a gun.”
They thought it was a joke. I watched father and daughter relax into laughter, and hesitated, but decided to let it go. Suspicion was a theory for her, a lesson learned, but not yet hammered home. Her innate trust for the world testified to a surprisingly gentle upbringing—like mine, until I was fourteen. There’s nothing like losing one’s family, or being shot by a friend, to bring wariness into a person’s life.
Still, today would not be young Haruki-san’s last opportunity to learn.
We stayed in the village for three days. We came to know the area quite well, wandering up into the hills with Haruki-san or one of the village children, to gather wood or stones or the long streamers of bamboo. This being a farming community, we lent hands to a number of activities, from wading in sticky mud to plant tiny shoots of rice to scooping buckets of night soil onto the rows of tea plants. Helping the fire-scarred gardener, who was Sato-san’s tall and austere cousin, to pluck weeds from the courtyard garden was pleasant relaxation, after the fields.
But mostly, we collected bruises on the dojo floor. Each night, we soaked out the stink of the day’s work and the aches of the day’s workout in the mineral baths, then groaned under the hands of the ryokan’s masseur. Our host’s good humour increased and took on an element of respect, until one afternoon he requested to be taught a technique Holmes had for turning a walking stick into a lethal spear. Haruki-san was much taken with my left-handed skill with the throwing knife. In return, she went to the armoury and retrieved three of the vicious little metal stars, then whirled and, faster than the eye could follow, sent them—one, two, three—into the chest of the nearest dummy. I had to pull hard to get them out of the wood, nicking my forefinger in the process.
“Shuriken are toys,” she said, “but very useful. It can be most distracting to get hit with one. Try them.”
As blades, they were ambidextrous, equally hazardous to either hand. Under her guidance, I rehearsed the motions of throwing several times before committing my flesh to the effort, and was pleased when the star flew from my hand without pulling streamers of blood in its wake. That it bounced off the target hardly mattered.
It took seven tries (and two more blood-lettings) before the star’s point sank a fraction into the wood, but having got the technique, I improved. By the time we broke off for bath and dinner, I was sinking it in nine times out of ten, the depth increasing as my throw grew more assured.
Those days in Mojiro-joku were a gift. If our arduous trip to the village had prepared us to meet our illustrious client, the days under Sato-san’s roof and in his village wrapped the case around our hearts. Before our stay, as Holmes had said, our chief interest was in thwarting a wrongdoer; after it, the case was personal.
Our last morning in the village, my breakfast tray of tea-pot, chopsticks, and small bowls of rice, pickles, and stinky dried fish included a flat leather pouch. I pulled the string to look inside, then eased onto the low table a trio of throwing stars, old but freshly sharpened. Unlike the others I had seen, these bore delicate swirls of engraving. Shuriken were meant to be abandoned after use, not retrieved—but I supposed that a present from one’s sensei was designed to be treasured.
I thanked Haruki-san and managed to get the things tucked safely away without shedding blood on the tatami. Holmes and I donned our pilgrim garb and slung our bags over our shoulders. Then we set off on the long road to Tokyo.
Escaping my death
In a cloud-girt mountain place,
To be crushed by trams?
We stayed that night in a pleasant ryokan in one of the old post-towns of the Kisokaido. In the morning, we resumed the Western clothing we had put aside in Arima. My legs felt strangely exposed in the skirt, and Holmes kept easing his collar with a finger as we made our way through the town to the train station. It was a train with only two classes, Second and Third. As we elbowed our way into our seats, in the luxurious quarters this time, I felt as if I’d stepped into another world—one without undressing passengers, nursing babies, and spittoons on the floor.
I wasn’t sure I felt entirely comfortable.
One advantage, however: Holmes and I could carry on a conversation without people pushing their astonished faces in closer to hear our gibberish.
I stretched out my legs and looked at the landscape rushing past, the dip-and-rise of the telegraph lines, the bright splash of the cherry blossoms. There was the place I had paused to bind up a blister. And that peculiarly-shaped tree—that was where we had tried to shelter from a particularly vigorous cloudburst. Several times, passing through more urban areas, I spotted large gatherings in parks, families having picnics under the glorious white cherry blossoms.
After a while, I dug Haruki-san’s booklet of poems from my pack, and searched out a page—changing the last word in my mind to “springtime”:
Good-byes are given
And received, as I set off
Through Kiso’s autumn.
Bashō, too, travelled light. Although Bashō, too, weighed down the practical necessities with sentimental gifts from friends.
“Do you suppose Bashō could truly have been a ninja?” I asked my companion. He had his long legs stretched out, his shoes reaching past the centre of the narrow carriage, and he did not open his eyes to reply.
“The man seems to have had friends all over. No doubt some of them were high-ranking government officials happy to get news of the provinces.”
There are times when a person craves the road, taking up one’s raincoat … Holmes and I had been on the road since the new year, with many miles yet to come. So why did I feel as if our journey was coming to an end?
“What did you make of Sato-san?” I asked.
At that, Holmes drew in his feet and sat up, fishing out the cigarette case he had not used since donning pilgrim garb. “I should like to have spent more time with him,” he answered eventually.
“It all feels a bit … fairy tale,” I said.
“The whole country has an other-worldly flavour to it.”
I looked at him in surprise. In our partnership, the airy-fairy remarks were generally left up to me. “We should be thankful it’s not the full moon. We might have stepped into the garden at night and walked into the realm of Titania and Puck.” No, not Midsummer’s Night. There was another play—“Henry!”
Holmes’ eyebrow rose. “Russell, perhaps you should brush up on your—”
“Haruki-san was reading the Henry plays on the ship, and we got to talking about Falstaff. How Shakespeare seems more interested in that fat old knight than in the King himself. And she said something remarkable, about how Sir John offers up his honour, just so young Harry can refuse him, and grow into kingship. I think she was talking about her father.”
“The Samurai who offers the Emperor his most valuable possession: his pride.”
The rôle of a Fool was not only to entertain, but to speak the truth. Particular
ly dangerous truths, words that the King does not want to hear. If the angry voice that night had in fact belonged to the Prince Regent, perhaps truth-speaking was a Fool’s job here, too.
Which would make Sato-san more King Lear’s companion than Prince Harry’s buffoon.
I smiled to myself, and resumed my reading of that poet-Fool, and possibly spy, Matsuo Bashō.
If boarding the train had felt like stepping into another world, coming to Tokyo felt like entering a whirlwind.
A universal characteristic of the Japanese people, I had discovered, was their energy. This industrious nation seemed never to pause—whether small child or ancient crone, every citizen had some task at hand, at every moment.
Multiply that devotion to labour times a million, for the population of Tokyo. In a city that had been half-levelled by quake and fire seven months before, the pitch of activity was feverish. Signs of the disaster lay on all sides, but on our ridiculously brief taxi drive from the central train station to the Imperial Hotel, every other building appeared to be either freshly repaired or currently a-boil with activity. Every pedestrian trotted, every rickshaw-puller ran, every bicycle, car, and lorry dodged and sped.
There were picnics beneath the cherries here, too, but far from languid perusal of blossoms, those were hives of activity, with children running about and every adult either eating, drinking, or carrying on a vehement conversation.
“Many people are in the park,” I said to the driver in Japanese.
“Hai,” he agreed. “Hanami. You know hanami? Pickanick, hai? Under sakura—cherry. Every year, big parties. Much sake!” He laughed.
A picnic with a few thousand intimate friends under the flowering trees. After days spent among the bamboo-covered hills, the cacophony was dizzying. No less, the hotel.