Stephen Hunter - The 47th samurai

“You don’t have to sit here with me,” he said. “You must have better things to do.”

“I have lots better things to do. But for now, this is my job.”

“Okay.”

“I’m on the drunken idiot patrol. I have to make sure a certain guy doesn’t tie one on and end up in the hoosegow again. You get that.”

“I get that. No drinks ever. I get that. I only fell off the wagon once in years and years. I am a good boy. I thought I had the drinking beat.”

“How do you feel?”

“All right.”

“All kinds of people wanted to be here. The commanding general USMC Western Pacific wanted to be here. Evidently you know him.”

She gave a name.

“He was a battalion executive officer my first tour in Vietnam. ’Sixty-six. Good officer. I’m happy he did so well.”

“Well, he wanted to make sure you were well treated by everyone, that this went smoothly. I saw your records. I see why they think so highly of you.”

“All that was a long time ago.”

“We have a minute. Let me speak with you frankly.”

“Please do, Ms. Okada.”

“I am so frightened you will try to make something of this tragedy. Yeats said, ‘Men of action, when they lose all belief, believe only in action.’ Do you see what he was getting at?”

“I sound like a country-western hick, ma’am, and now and then I break a sentence like an egg, but it may surprise you that I am familiar with that quote, and I’ve read them other guys too, Sassoon, Owens, Graves, Manning, a whole mess of writers who thought they had something to say about war and warriors. I know who I am and where I fit in: I am the sort of man people like to have around when there’s shooting, but otherwise I make them very nervous. I am like a gun in the house.”

“Well, I don’t know about that. But you know where I’m going. You can’t let this become some kind of crusade. You can’t come back. You don’t know the rules here. The rules are very, very strange, and you could get yourself into a lot of trouble and make a lot of trouble for a lot of other people. You must make peace with what happened: it’s a domestic matter, the Japanese will handle it. There have been allegations of criminal behavior but no findings yet. You have to play by their rules. Do you see what I am saying? The Japanese have kicked you out and never want to see you again. If you come back, there won’t be a second chance. You could do hard time.”

“I hear you.”

“It may seem unjust to you, or unbearably slow, or corrupt, even. But that is the way they do things, and when you try to change their system, they get very, very angry. They are their system, do you see? And you can live here for years and not understand it. I don’t fully understand it.”

“Will you keep me informed?”

“No,” she said, looking him in the eye. “It’s not a good idea. Put it behind you, live your life, enjoy your retirement. You don’t need to know a thing about it.”

“Well, you tell the truth.”

“I’m not a bullshitter. I will not ‘keep an eye’ out on things. I want you to let it go. Let it go.”

“What about the girl?”

“She will be taken care of.”

“I have to-”

“She will be taken care of. That’s all you need to know.”

The flight was called.

“Okay,” he said. “It’s against my nature, but I will try. But since you don’t bullshit, I won’t bullshit. I feel obligated here.”

“What do you mean? You couldn’t have known-”

“It’s a war thing. I’m a war guy, he’s a war guy. His dad, my dad, war guys. Us war guys, we’re all connected. So I picked up an obligation. It’s something ancient and forgotten and not in existence no more. Lost and gone, a joke, something from those silly sword-fight movies. Something samurai.”

She looked at him hard.

“Swagger, what men in armor believed five hundred years ago is of no help or meaning anywhere in an American life. Forget samurai. They’re movie heroes, like James Bond, a fantasy of what never was. Don’t go samurai. The way of the warrior is death.”

What was samurai?

It wasn’t bushido, the way of the sword; he read books on that and found nothing that really helped. It wasn’t any of the other things-calligraphy, computers, automobiles, screen paintings, woodcuts, karate, Kabuki, sushi, tempura, and so forth, at which the Japanese had such eerie talents. And it didn’t just mean “warrior.” Or “soldier.” Or “fighter.” There was some additional layer of meaning in it, something to do with faith and will and destiny. No western word equivalent seemed to quite get it or express it.

Part of it was that kind of man, fascinating in himself, samurai. He wore a kimono. He wore wooden clogs. He had a ponytail. He carried a batch of blades. He would fight or die on a bet or a dime or a joke.

He was lithe and quick and dangerous. He was pure battle. He was USMC NCO material to the max, hard, practical, dedicated, if not exactly fearless then at least in control of his fear and able to make it work for him. If samurai was to be understood, it would be understood through him.

Bob watched movies over and over. He had a hundred of them, not just the ones the smart boys said were great like The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo and Throne of Blood and Ran, but movies nobody ever heard of in the West, like Sword Devil and The Sword That Saved Edo and Hanzo the Razor and The 47 Ronin and Samurai Assassin and Harakiri and Goyokin and Tale of a Female Yakuza and Lady Snowblood and Ganjiro Island.

He watched them on a DVD player in an apartment in Oakland, California, with bare wood floors, a thin mattress for a bed, and nothing else. Each morning he rose at five, ate a breakfast of tea and fish, then went for a six-mile run. He came back, watched a movie; then he read for an hour, on swords, on history, on culture, books he understood, books that seemed bullshit, books even on calligraphy. Then he ate lunch in one of a dozen Japanese restaurants nearby, because he wanted to be used to them, to their smell, their language, their movements, their faces; then he returned home at two, rested, watched another movie; then he went out to dinner, sushi usually, sometimes noodles, occasionally Kobe beef; after nightfall, another two hours of reading, then another movie.

There had to be answers in there somewhere.

Bob had never seen such grace. Their bodies were liquid, so malleable, so changeable, so flexible in subtle, athletic ways that defied belief. They could run and dodge and dip, pivot, feint, stop, change direction fast, all in wooden clogs. They carried the swords edge up in scabbards that weren’t even secured to the belt; in fact, indoors they took the long sword off and carried it around like an umbrella. Yet he noticed: no matter the movie, when they sat on the hard floor, they put the sword in the same place, to the left of the knee, blade outward, hilt just at the knee, grip angled at 45 degrees before them. They never deviated. That was the thing, the core of it: no deviation.

And they were fast. He’d never seen such speed. It was like they were oiled, and when they moved, they passed through air and time at a rate other mortals could barely comprehend. It began with some kind of draw, an uncoiling with blade, so that the sword came out and began to cut in an economy of movement. Sometimes you couldn’t even see the cut it was so fluid; sometimes it was a thrust, but more usually it was a cut, conceived from a dozen different angles, the cut hidden in a turn or a pivot, dancelike but never effeminate, always athletic. And always the conventions: the samurai usually fought against three or four at a time, and often when he would cut, the cut man, feeling himself mortally wounded, would simply freeze, as if to deny the end of life and stretch the final second out over minutes. The samurai would resheathe with some kind of graceful mojo, the sword disappearing with a piston’s certainty into the scabbard, then he’d turn and strut away, leaving behind a collection of statuary. Then they’d topple, one after another.