Stephen Hunter - The 47th samurai

“Tameshigiri.”

“Okay,” said Bob.

“You watch, then do.”

The old fellow took the sword, bowed to it, withdrew it from its saya. Then he turned, faced the array of five carpet rolls on five spikes.

“Ai!” he shouted, and with a speed that Swagger almost could not follow he flashed through the formation, coiling and uncoiling, the blade whispering at warptime, just a sliver of light, a flash of shadow, a sense of willed disturbance in the cosmos, and in what had to be less than one second, he had precisely cut each carpet roll at about a 47.5-degree angle, talk about your “smooth,” and stood still.

“You do. Tameshigiri. Test cutting. Must cut real. Pretend all bullshit. Do it. Do it now.”

Bob bowed to the little god in his sword, not because he believed there was a little god in there but because not bowing would be one thing more to be yelled at for, unsheathed, and approached the closest rolled carpet.

“Jodan-kamae,” yelled the man, meaning on high, and being right-handed, Bob found that position, one leg slightly ahead of the other, almost a batting stance but not quite as his hands were far apart on the hilt of the weapon and he was thinking of killing.

“Ai!” he shouted, and brought the sword down hard at 45 degrees against the bundled material. With a vibratory clatter, the sword twisted in his hand and seemed stuck about a half inch in the bundle.

“No, no, no,” screamed the little man. “Angle all wrong, much stupidity. Angle of edge be same as angle of blade or you get bullshit like that. I told you. Do what I say.”

Bob readdressed his carpeted opponent, tried to shake his brain free of thought and not feel like an idiot in a bathrobe with a long knife cutting up carpets, but instead like a ferocious samurai warrior about to dispatch an enemy.

The sword seemed to move on its own; his mind was blank to results and he thought for a second he’d missed completely it was so smooth, but then with the lazy grace of the totally dead, the top half of the carpet roll fell off to hit the ground.

“Again!”

And again, and again, and again.

Somewhere in there, he progressed to two-cut sequences, cutting one way, reversing smoothly by the gyroscopic guidance in his elbows from the center of his shoulders, then coming back through it. He seemed to be getting it, feeling the power in his hands, making subtle corrections in the stroke, cutting not with arms but with the “center of his body,” that is, with the whole weight of the body behind it; there was weird satisfaction in watching the carpeting fall helpless before his blade.

“Not good,” said Doshu. “Is maybe okay. But no time to make good. Now you can cut a little, so tomorrow we teach you to fight.”

“Floating feeling in thumb and forefinger, with the middle finger neither tight nor slack and the last two fingers tight. When you take up sword, you must feel intent on cutting the enemy. No fixedness. Hand alive. I no like fixedness in swords and hands. Fixedness means a dead hand. Pliability is a living hand.”

Yeah, sure, easy for you to say, thought Bob, and Doshu raised his own sword smoothly and with elegant grace and rhythm, a snake coiling to strike, a swan rising, his muscles in perfect syncopation.

Bob tried to model on him, feeling his body fight him, feeling ridiculous, a barefoot Fred Astaire with a pretend sword in a gymnasium.

“No! No, again, no thought. No thought. Too much thought.”

What does that mean?

He tried to concentrate but thought, See, it would be easier if he broke it down, one, two, three, then four, five, six, and I could practice each one and-

He pinched off the spurt of frustration and tried to feel the move, the slow rotation of hips, the uprising of the arms, that goddamned “floating feeling in thumb and forefinger,” and somehow it was just a little better.

“In one timing, Swagger,” said Doshu, whatever that meant.

“I-”

“No talk! One timing. One timing!”

What did one timing mean?

“Make shield of fists.”

“I-”

“Place body sideways.”

“Okay, but-”

“Keep shoulders level with opponent’s fists.”

“I’ll try if-”

“Keep rear leg open, Swagger.”

“Like this?”

“Keep stance same as opponent’s.”

He tried to do it all, and of course could do none of it. There was no end, no progress, no start, no finish, no lesson plan. Doshu gave him opaque orders, shouted commands to “Approach no-think!” as though he were ordering a trainee to drop and give him fifty. It went on, pointlessly, forever. Fourth day? Fifth? Afternoon of first? Who knew? He realized at a certain point the only way to deal with this wasn’t to think about it being “over.” Don’t think about it “ending.” It is not a thing of beginning and ending. Concentrate only on exactly what is before you. Do exactly what is stated. Do it, don’t think about it, analyze it, try to “learn” it. Just do the fucking thing, and do not place it in time or cause-effect, or this, then that. See it-this seemed to help-as shooting. You simply have to teach your body the way. The body knows the way, so that you don’t have to instruct it; it is on subconscious autopilot, there’s no particular sense of having “mastered” a thing, it’s just that all the work is connecting and the body is learning things without telling its owner.

Maybe he was getting it, sort of.

Swagger cleans the floor of the dojo on his hands and knees. With a soft wet cloth and a pail of warm water, he scrubs each and every square inch. He goes over the woodwork and reaches spots that have not been reached before. He gives himself to this work, taking pride in the perfection of it.

And in cleaning he came across a little corner where a few treasures of ego were on display: it was in what he knew to be the deity alcove, the spiritual heart of the dojo, where the truly supplicant went to worship.

What Swagger saw, beyond an indecipherable kanji banner and a few photos of elders who must have founded this particular style or school or way or whatever, were pictures from a past full of men and boys and, lately, girls. All were sweaty, all in triumph, all in gi and hakama, and Bob always recognized Doshu, and in some of the earlier ones he recognized his sponsor in this madness, Dr. Otowa, supremely cool and intelligent. In one Otowa and Doshu stood with a boy, who by the cast of his eyes and the wit in his mouth and the sternness in his forehead had to be a little Otowa, a son, with some silly trophy or something, all of them sweaty, all of them exhilarated. It was like a Little League photo from the ’70s, so far distant in time and place as to be all but unrecognizable, all of it however speaking of some unbroken line, father to son, going back through the generations.

You saw these photos all over Arkansas, though usually a dead deer or a baseball bat or a football was part of it, instead of a kendo shinai; it was the same, the father passing on what he knew, the boy, though distant, hungry for it.

“Swagger! Sword, now. Now!”

Doshu is a drill sergeant. He’s a yeller, a pressure cooker, a demander. But it’s so hard because it’s not progressive in a western sense; there’s no feeling of going from here to there. The edges of things are blended. Somewhere-the start is indistinct-he’d moved into kata, which was a series of moves with the sword, a kind of offensive syncopation so that the blade came out, flowed around the shoulders to a certain perfect position, then was cut with, the cut riding a rhythm, never just a brute expression of force. It seemed to have something to do with wave dynamics, a sense of harnessing a blast of energy that would rise from one hip, course through the body to the opposite shoulder, flow downward into the fists, which would then surge in opposing directions, bringing the blade through with an amazement of unwilled speed and force, all without trying. Doshu would swing lazily at him with his bokken and Bob would block it, feel it sliding off his own wooden blade, and see how to ride it down and open up a way to the man’s innards, then turn back and slip into another kata.