Stephen Hunter - The 47th samurai

But tanto held another possibility. Disgraced or surrounded, in tanto lay a hope for dignity. Nii of Shinsengumi knew what he must do to spare himself the shame and sustain Kondo-san’s affection forever. He knew he could do it too; he didn’t need a second.

He’d ram the blade fiercely into the left side of the pit of his own stomach, a minimum of three inches, more likely four to five. Better yet, six, though not many could force themselves to push for that long. Then one would smartly draw it across his belly, just under the navel. Tanto was always kept sharp for that purpose. His guts would slip out wetly amid a flood of blood, shit, urine, and other substances. It was said that one had eight seconds of consciousness after the blade reached its point of arrival. They would be an interesting eight seconds. Would one scream? Would one beg for the pain to stop? Would one be unmanned?

Not Nii of Shinsengumi. He could not disgrace himself before his lord. He would be silent, for in his pain would be the sheer rapture of a warrior’s pure death. That was the way of the warrior. Death was the way-

The music on his iPod stopped.

Damn, the battery was running down. Again! He had the worst iPod! It always let him down.

He’d been listening to Arctic Monkeys live in concert at the Brixton United football stadium, the great song “Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not.” The beat had him really pumped up. He’d felt it to his bones.

Aghhhh. It would be a long night without Arctic Monkeys. He reached for and lit a Marlboro. He sat in a sleek Nissan Maxima, jet black, five on the floor, half a block down from the Yanos’ house.

His job was the American; he would stay with the American, and he would call in and report to Kondo-san any movement or change in plans. He’d stay the night if he had to.

He had a Chinese-made wakizashi in saya wedged into his belt diagonally up his back; he had a Smith & Wesson Model 10.38 Special. He wore a black Italian shirt, a black Italian suit, a black Italian hat, and a pair of extremely expensive Michael Jordan Nikes. He wore Louis Vuitton sunglasses, which had cost him more than 40,000 yen. They were really cool. He wore his hair in a glistening crew, held taut and bristly by Yamada Wax. It was perfectly trimmed. He was twenty-three, strong as a bull, and ready for anything. He had chosen death.

Nii of Shinsengumi was a very good samurai.

“The rust,” said Tomoe Yano in English. “Look at the rust, Father.”

“Oh, what beautiful rust,” said Philip Yano.

Bob thought, Are they nuts?

“That’s koto rust. No rust is so black as koto rust.”

“Beautiful, beautiful black rust,” said Philip. “Oh, so beautiful.”

Wearing rubber surgeon’s gloves, the father disassembled the sword. He used a small hammer and a pin, perfectly sized, to drive the bamboo peg out of the grip. It popped out effortlessly. He tracked the little nub of bamboo down as it rolled on his bench, then stared at it.

“Shinto, at least. Maybe original, maybe koto.”

“Then why so easy? It just fell out.”

Bob remembered: the peg had been stuck. But he didn’t say anything; what did he know?

“I don’t know. Maybe it was disassembled recently. I can’t say. One of many questions. This is very interesting.”

Philip Yano slid the grip off, then carefully disassembled the guard-tsuba, Bob knew-and several spacers, seppa, and finally the collar, habaki, and laid out the parts symmetrically on the bench, blade at the bottom of the formation, grip above, hilt laid flat, and four spacers.

Then they saw a piece of paper folded tightly about the metal of the tang.

“The paper,” the young woman said gravely.

“Yes, I see it.”

“Father, pick it up. See what it is.”

“No, no, not yet. Pen ready?”

“Yes.”

He spoke in a swift blizzard of Japanese. Then he translated.

“The tsuba-that is, guard-is government issue, the model of ’thirty-nine also. So when it found its new scabbard, it was rehilted, this is what I tell Tomoe. Spacers-seppa-also military issue, as is habaki, nothing special. Two holes, indicating it has been cut down, but we already knew that.”

“The rust,” Tomoe said.

“What is it with the rust?” asked Bob. The tang itself was swallowed in black erosion, so much so a fine black dust had fallen on the bench beneath it.

“The blacker the rust,” said Philip Yano, “the older the blade. What it means, Swagger-san, is that this sword is at least four hundred years old. Somehow it ended up in the military furniture of nineteen thirty-four.”

“Is that uncommon?”

“It happened.”

“So it’s not a blade manufactured by machine in some factory in the forties. It’s much older. It’s a real samurai thing. That is why it’s so sharp?”

“Exactly. Think of some genius in a small shop in near-feudal times-before the year sixteen hundred-working at a forge, turning the orange metal in upon itself time after time, taking two or three different orange pieces and hammering them together after each had been folded over twenty times, beating them into a shape, then quenching them in cooling clay. Then he began filing, shaping, sharpening. It’s three kinds of steel, soft for the spine, which gives it weight and flexibility, a liquid feel; softer still in the core, more pure iron, more flexibility; and a sandwich of harder, tempered steel-yakiba-for the edge, sharp, to cut through armor, flesh, and bone and get deep into the body. Oh, it’s a war sword all right, and if my father carried it on Iwo Jima, he wasn’t the first soldier to sling this beauty about, not at all. It’s old, it’s venerable, it’s been to the dance many a time. Born in fire, cooled in earth, destined for blood. Maybe the inscriptions will tell the story.”

He indicated the line of Japanese characters deeply chiseled in the tang, as the maker of the blade those centuries ago accounted for himself and his creation, and explained for whom he had toiled.

“Can you read the inscriptions?” asked Bob.

“That’ll be the fun part. There were thousands of koto smiths, and we will have to track through the records and find who made this sword. We will be able to learn the smith, maybe even the lord. Then we’ll look at history and begin to assemble a biography of this blade. Where it went, what it did before it somehow came to my father, and then yours, and then their sons.”

“It all has meaning,” said the girl. “Father, read the nakago for Swagger-san.”

“Nakago is the rusted tang under the hilt. Even it is full of tantalizing communications from the past. It’s suriage nakago, or possibly an o-suriage nakago. That is, it’s right on the edge between ‘shortened’ and ‘greatly shortened,’ the determining factor being how much of the signature is left. Usually, the butt end, even when shortened, retains the shape of the original. It was as if the desecrator were paying homage to his superior. This style is called Iriyama-gata, which places it sometime in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The cutting-edge side of the tang is at an acute angle to the bottom end of the shinogi line; the other side runs either straight or at a slight upward angle to mune.”

Lost me, Bob thought.

But he guessed Philip Yano was telling him the very shape of the end of the tang held clues to its origin.

“You sure know this stuff.”

“I know nothing,” said Yano. “There are many to whom this language is as supple and expressive as poetry. I struggle, doubt my knowledge, wish I knew more, curse myself for not knowing yet.”

“But do I get the bottom line? That this is a very old blade, and it could have some meaning beyond your family? Experts should examine it.”