Stephen Hunter - The 47th samurai

“Now you have given me the ultimate moment in my life. The studying I’ve done the past year now has formal application not merely to the nation and the culture but to the family. Really, my friend, I can’t thank you enough or honor your generosity more highly. I am eternally obligated.”

“It’s one soldier reaching out to another soldier to honor two other soldiers, who happen to be their fathers. We put in enough time in shit-holes to have earned this little moment. Let’s enjoy it.”

“And we shall.”

He opened the bundle and the object lay before him, battered, worn thin in places, drawn through history.

He spoke to his daughter, who recorded assiduously; then Yano translated for Bob.

“I see shin-gunto furniture of the ’thirty-four issue, absent tassel, but the scabbard is metal, meaning the ’thirty-nine variant, and so not original to the furnishings. Hmmm, wear on the wrappings, some grime, possibly my father’s sweat and a bit of his blood. Or someone else’s blood. Looking carefully at the peg, I see traces of some black, gummy substance, tar perhaps, perhaps ink. I see marks of recent pressure, and the seal of the gummy material has been broken. The gum or ink just under the rupture of the broken seal is of a darker texture, suggesting that it was shielded from the light until quite recently.”

“What’s that mean?” Bob asked.

“I don’t know. I have no idea. I suppose someone tried to hammer out the pin.”

“Tommy Culpepper told me that when he was a kid, he and his buddies did try to get that out; they wanted to take it apart. But they didn’t have any luck.”

Mr. Yano said nothing.

Finally, he said, “All right. The blade.”

Almost gingerly, he reached down and removed the sword from its scabbard and laid the weapon on the bench.

“Koto?” his daughter said.

“Possibly a shinto imitation of koto,” he said.

“It looks koto to me,” she said in English.

“Yes. Yes, it does. Maybe-” and he paused.

In the little room the silence grew as the man studied the sword, clearly perplexed, perhaps even disturbed. His face became mute to expression, his eyelids seemed suddenly to acquire weight and density, and his breathing became almost imperceptible.

Finally, he said, “Most provocative. Unlikely, but most provocative.”

Then he turned to Bob.

“What is it you say: the plot thickens?”

“Yes, sir. Meaning things just got more complicated.”

“Indeed. In the war, Japan needed blades. Two companies were set up to manufacture blades, in the hundreds of thousands. Those would be the blades called shin-gunto, judged today to be of no consequence except as souvenirs. I had always assumed that my father would have had such a weapon. Most did, or at least many did. He probably himself believed that.

“But at the same time, other likelihoods existed. Many older blades were turned into the military out of patriotic commitment by enthusiastic families, and they were rather cavalierly desecrated by the sword manufacturers, who after all were not artists but humble factory workers. Their exquisite koshirae-that is, their fittings, the handle, the hilt, the tsuba, and on and on-were simply dumped. It would make certain men weep to think of all that artwork, that craft and skill consigned to the dump pile. The swords were shortened from the rear to bring them to the prescribed length-that is, the tang was cut off and with it was lost much of the inscribed information from the original smith, information as to the date of smelting, the lord for whom the work was done, how the blade cut, perhaps even giving the sword a name or offering a prayer to a god of war. Part of the original lower blade was ground off to lengthen the tang, a new hole was drilled in the grip, and the military mounts were put on. The whole thing was shoved into a metal scabbard and sent to-well, wherever the Sphere was operating, be it China or Burma or the Philippines. And thus a masterpiece was effectively hidden in a wartime disguise.”

“Is that what happened here?”

“I don’t know. It’s not impossible. Clearly this is an ancestral blade, shortened for wartime use. By shape and grace, as my daughter has noted, it appears to be koto-old. Koto blades were generally thinner and more graceful and sharper, meaning livelier in the hand than shinto blades. Koto means ‘old’ as in-well, it differs, but roughly ‘old’ as in before sixteen hundred. Of course there are complexities. Possibly a shinto smith-that is, someone after sixteen hundred-merely duplicated the shape of the koto blade. It happened frequently; the swordsmiths, after all, were merchants, they did custom orders, they responded to market forces, they tried different things.”

“So you’re telling me this sword might be some kind of antique, a historical artifact. Would it be valuable?”

“Very possibly, not that we could ever sell such a piece. It is ours, it is of our blood. It is my father’s. What I’m telling you is that it might be, ah, interesting. Meaning of interest to more than just our humble Yano clan. Interesting to scholars, interesting to historians, interesting to the nation and the culture. What is far more provocative is the sword’s heritage, what we can learn of it from what’s left of its tang. If that looks promising, we might have the sword polished. I’m not good enough to attempt it. It’s a time-consuming discipline only practiced by a few at the highest level, but if the sword has secrets, a polishing will liberate them. We’ll see its soul if we polish it.”

Nii of Shinsengumi was an obedient samurai. He obeyed his great lord Kondo-san in all things. He would die for Kondo-san. Kondo-san, after all, had seen talent in the wild street-boy, aggression, perhaps even a future. Many hoped for such a thing, but it had actually happened to Nii. Nii was taken from nothingness into Shinsengumi. He finally belonged to somebody, to something; he was no longer an orphan, dirty, laughed at by other children. His fluffy body hardened under discipline. He learned things that astonished him, and his faith in himself grew appropriately to his love for his great lord.

He was still young, but in Shinsengumi, all things were possible. The group was comprised of the best men, and though its discipline was severe, the pleasure and the privileges attendant upon joining such chosen ones were omnipotent.

He learned the katana, the long cutting sword, its intricate economy of force and power, its strength and its grace. Applied correctly, with judgment and experience, katana could cut through anything including bodies, fully, one side to the other. He imagined unleashing it: the swing, the thunder of the cut, the spewing, jetting blood, the scream of the stricken, his stillness.

He learned wakizashi, the shorter, personal defense sword. It was an indoor sword. It would not catch on ceilings or doorjambs, and yet it too had almost the same power as katana. No one could stop it if a determined Shinsengumi applied it; he saw short, harder cuts, the slack stunned look of the cut, dissolving into pain, a cough that issued blood, the collapse to the floor like a sack of grain.

He learned tanto. Tanto was short, and without nearly the curve of katana and wakizashi, for it was not made for cutting but for thrusting. If he put his strength behind it, Nii could shove it deeper into a body than anyone in Shinsengumi. He could easily reach the blood-bearing organ and he knew exactly where to pierce: down, through the shoulder on a slight angle, into the pumping heart. Or up from the back, next to the spine, seven vertebrae from the neck up, again piercing the heart. Pierced, the heart would yield its treasure in seconds; the body it sustained would go instantly soft as if its knees had melted, its eyes would roll up into its skull and it would fall without discipline to the floor, frequently shattering teeth when it landed. The blood would pool like an ocean.