Stephen Hunter - The 47th samurai

It was almost more than Bob could take. He found his muscles tensing, his jaw clenching, and his anger rising.

I don’t care what I said to Susan, he thought. The man who did this to her will feel fear too. Then I will cut him.

The woman and the child went inside and Bob tried to relax, but his mind was too buzzed. He wished he had a drink, but that would not solve anything. Instead, he climbed out, took a few drafts of fresh air, and tried to calm down. Pretty soon Susan arrived, and they drove off.

“Let me ask you something,” he said as she gunned through the busy avenues. “When this is over and let’s assume I’m still standing, I ain’t in no jail, and I’m headed back to the States-”

“No.”

“You don’t know where I’m going.”

“Sure I do. I know exactly where you’re going. You want to adopt her.”

“I am already a father. Some say I’m a good one.”

“I’m sure you’re a great one. Moreover, you could make her a wonderful home in the West, and sooner rather than later she’d heal, though never completely, and she’d come back to us and she’d become happy and productive and have a wonderful life. That doesn’t matter.”

“What matters?”

“Connections, which you don’t have.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s very hard for foreigners to adopt a child in Japan. First, few of them are available. I’m not sure if she qualifies. Then there’s the shape of your eyes. They’re round. The Japanese are disinclined to let a westerner adopt a Japanese child, unless there’s some prior connection. It’s not like China or Korea where cute girl babies are a cash crop for American yuppies.”

“There’s no hope?”

“Not a whisper. Not an eyelash.”

“Suppose your boss, Mr. Ambassador, used his influence.”

“He wouldn’t do it for me, why would he do it for you? I don’t have the juice, you don’t have the juice.”

“That sucks.”

“It does indeed. But the world is full of terrible injustices. Ninety-eight percent of them can’t be helped or fixed. This is one of them. Concentrate on the two percent that can. Ah, here we are.”

Nick Yamamoto lived in a quiet Tokyo residential neighborhood a few kilometers geographically and several universes culturally from Kabukicho. His was one of those nondescript wooden homes behind a fence that was attached to other homes on either side, all of them squashed together like french fries in a greasy bag. They had no trouble parking in the quiet neighborhood, slipped through the gate, and knocked.

Like many Japanese males he was slender, small, wore glasses, moved fluidly. Unlike most Japanese men, he had blond hair. It was thatchy, moussed in odd directions, and suggested some kind of rock star. If you only counted the hair, he looked eighteen; the rest of him was a man of forty-odd years.

“Do you like it?” he asked Susan.

“No. It’s stupid.”

He looked up at Bob.

“Is she a bitch or what?”

“She can be pretty tough,” Bob said. “You should get her started on me if you want to hear some ugliness. Anyhow, my name is Bob Lee Swagger. I like your hair.”

“See, he likes my hair.”

“What does he know? He’s a gaijin.”

Bob and Nick shook hands, bonding immediately on their mutual fear of the great and wonderful wizard Susan Okada. Nick took them into the place, all wood floors and luxurious western furniture. A seventy-two-inch TV hung on one wall broadcasting baseball, but everywhere else books were jammed into shelves and framed front pages hung on walls. The smell of grilled meat hung in the air; Nick had just finished dinner.

“A drink?” Nick asked.

“Can’t touch the stuff,” said Swagger. “If I do, I’m gone for a month. Please go ahead.”

“Okada-san?”

“No, I’m working. This isn’t social.”

“Tea, coffee, Coke, anything?”

“No thanks.”

“Well, I think I will, if you don’t mind.”

Nick went and got himself a jug and a cup and proceeded to lubricate himself with small sips of sake. He ushered them to the leather sofa and he slipped into a nice Barcelona chair.

“Nick used to be the Tokyo Times’ Washington bureau chief, which is where I met him. But then he was recalled and in a few months got himself fired. What was it, Nick? I don’t remember. Plagiarism or bribery?”

“Actually, it was both.”

“The cocaine made him do it. It wasn’t his fault.”

“The cocaine made me do it. It was my fault.”

“Anyhow, he says he’s clean now, and he’s still a one-man show. He publishes, writes and reports, and lays out the Tokyo Flash, a weekly of a disreputable sort. Tokyo has hundreds of them. His is one of the best. If you want to know about Brad and Angelina, or what porn star has just left which studio to go hard-core for two billion yen, Nick would know.”

“But I know some other stuff too.”

“He’s published seven books on the yakuza. And he knows a lot more than he’s published.”

“I’d be dead if I published what I know.”

“You sound like just the man I need,” said Bob.

“Well, I’ll try. I owe Susan for something in D.C. So try me.”

“Kondo Isami.”

“Ohhhh, I’m impressed. Which one? Kondo the original, or Kondo Two, the Sequel?”

“I guess the first to start.”

“You probably couldn’t understand the second without the first.”

“I’m all ears.”

Nick poured himself a little more sake. He turned off the TV, fished among his CDs and found one, and popped it into a player.

“Soundtracks from several samurai movies.”

“Swagger’s seen a lot of samurai movies. Too many. He has the Toshiro Mifune disease.”

“Well, Swagger-san, I’m a writer, so I believe in mood. This is the right music for this story.”

He took another swig on the sake.

“Westerners can’t really appreciate the dynamic between shogun and emperor that played, off and on in Japan for three hundred years. I won’t bore you with it in detail, but we had this weird system of a showy but powerless emperor-god on a throne in Kyoto and a guy in armor who’d fought in a hundred battles and outthought everybody else running the show in Edo. They never got along.

“It came to a head in the middle of the nineteenth century, when aggressive outsiders began pressuring Japan to open up and trade with the West. The shogun opposed the move, the emperor embraced it, more or less, and that set the clans a-warring. The emperor, as I say, lived in Kyoto, the shogun in Tokyo. I’ll call it Tokyo instead of Edo just to keep it simple.”

“I’m very simple,” said Bob, “but so far I’m with you.”

“A lot of pro-emperor ronin-masterless samurai, who despised the shogun-came to Kyoto and essentially turned it into Dodge City. It was violent, terrible, a city of anarchy. The year is roughly eighteen hundred sixty-two. In Tokyo, the shogun was embarrassed that he couldn’t keep control of the city where the emperor resided; it made him look foolish.

“So a lord sympathetic to him, and certainly with his permission, hired a militia. Or maybe you’d call them vigilantes, or regulators, something cowboy. A gang, a posse, an outfit, whatever. They called themselves the Specially Chosen Ones, which in Japanese is Shinsengumi. They were led-well, there was a lot of turmoil in their own leadership, as there always is in Japan, but eventually, with the help of a really good, bloody assassination-by a guy named Kondo Isami. Big guy, tough guy, ran a dojo out west, very ambitious. So Kondo and his Shinsengumi set out to tame Dodge. They did it by killing. It’s been in a thousand movies, but you probably remember either Band of Assassins or When the Last Sword Is Drawn.”