its two kanji, one for nori and the second for naga, thereby a yeoman called Norinaga, possibly of the Yamato school (the blade looked Yamato). But Norinaga-san, you’re one of thousands. This happens to be your sharpest blade; you should be proud.
But then he noticed another thing, a small indentation on the hilt, almost too small to see against the dapples of the black rust and the rise and fall of the rough unpolished old steel.
He got out a jeweler’s loupe and studied the mark carefully, turning it in the light.
It was a symbol, not a kanji, what is called a family crest, in Japanese a mon.
Taking up a pencil and a sheet of paper, he drew what he saw, and when he looked at it, it astounded him. It looked like a naval propeller, three-bladed, mounted on a hanging medal of some sort. It puzzled him, the contemporariness of it. It was some device an Imperial Navy torpedoman would have worn. It seemed to have nothing to do with the seventeenth century.
He went from there to his Mon: The Japanese Family Crest, assembled by one of the western pioneers in Asian arts, a strange California man named Willis M. Hawley, who dedicated his life to all things samurai. Hawley was one of the few westerners admired by the polishers and sword makers of the ’50s and ’60s and his specialty was the encyclopedic. He alone in the West would have the patience to collect and classify thousands of Japanese mon.
Yano sighed. It would take him hours to track through the pages and pages of symbols. He looked at his watch. It was so late. He should be in bed.
And then he thought: Well, start. Just start. Then tomorrow, do some more.
But it turned out the book was organized not alphabetically but by pattern. He slid through the pages, looking at the eighteen or so renditions of patterns in stark black-and-white, seeing such images as the ever-popular chrysanthemum, the persimmon, the melon, the arrowroot, the Chinese bellflower-but of course no torpedo propeller. But there was a maple, a chestnut, the hawk feathers, the roll of silk, the rabbit, the bat, the dragonfly, the arrow notch. Then-the torpedo propeller! No, no, it was the military fan. It was a fan!
He quickly turned to page fifty-nine, found eighteen variations on the fan, none of which matched, went back a little and found dozens of other fan shapes-the cypress fan, the feather fan, the folding fan, the hemp fan. He applied his tired eyes to each three-bladed symbol, until there it was. He compared the three images over and over again. The slightly fuzzy image in the loupe, brought out by the correct angle into the light, built of tiny chisel marks four hundred-odd years old; his own much larger but necessarily cruder rendition of it in pencil on the white sheet; and Hawley’s bold black-and-white variation, barely an inch by an inch, but nevertheless bone clear: three blades, mounted atop some kind of V device that he now saw represented the fan. Who knew what the three propeller blades meant? It didn’t really matter, now that he had found it. He tracked over to the kanji name of the family, then the romanized version…
It was the House of Asano in Ako.
He sat back, astonished. His heart began to pound.
It was from the house of the most famous samurai in history.
Yet elation was not what he felt.
A ghost returned. If the blade could be rooted in the Asano house and its bloody history, and if the name Norinaga could be likewise linked to Asano, then suddenly the blade was of inestimable worth, but to Yano what mattered was the glory: this would be the rare “cultural treasure,” worthy of careful restoration and display in the great museums of Japan. Its provenance associated it with a plot, a raid, a fight, a death, then the mass seppuku, belly splitting, that perfectly summed up the samurai ethos and represented at its purest and highest what the samurai meant to Japan and to the world.
He thought, How could-?
But it was more than possible. His mind ran through possibilities. The blade is stolen or lost somehow after it is confiscated from whichever of the ronin carried it on that bloodiest of all samurai nights, and no one, for a hundred years, realizes its meaning, as the story is devoured by other stories, just as violent, just as bloody. But then in 1748 comes the puppet play Kanadehon Chushingura, Treasury of Loyal Retainers, which popularizes the story and becomes the basis for many kabuki plays. But it is the woodblock artists who make the story immortal, among them Utamaro, Toyokuni, Hokusai, Kunisada, and Hiroshige. However, the most famous are those by Kuniyoshi, who produces eleven separate series on the subject, as well as twenty triptychs.
By that time the sword is lost: it floats from family to family, from sword shop to sword shop and somehow is turned in to the government in a spasm of great patriotic fever, along with a hundred thousand other blades, and it is hacked and shortened and ground and machine-polished-buffed, buffed!-and sent off to war, where it has its further adventures, ending up finally in his father’s hands and then in an American’s hands. And now it’s back.
Yano felt fear.
It wasn’t a fortune he had discovered but an immense responsibility. The sword wasn’t just worth millions but was an artifact of the nation. That made it worth killing for. It was leverage, it was status, it was fame, it was…
If anyone knew.
That was the key question: Did anyone know? Who would know?
Then he heard the glass break.
He waited, breathless. His heart began to pound again.
He heard a cry: “Hai!”
It was a war cry.
He reached for the only intact weapon close at hand: a shin-shinto katana from 1861.
Nii listened.
“Young men of Shinsengumi, this is your blooding. Is this for you? Have you the steel, the strength, the determination? Or are you one of them, one of the dissolute?”
Kondo-san spoke quickly and fiercely.
“Do you hang out in the malls and paint your hair blue and your nails black? Do you dance to barbarian rapture, and pierce yourself with gewgaws? Do you have sexual congress like a rabbit, without meaning, rutting in alleyways and gymnasiums? Do you fill your system with drugs and live your life in a blur of pleasure? Or are you hard and resolute, men of bushido, men of courage and commitment? Are you samurai?”
“We are samurai!” came the cry.
The four of them were in the back of a truck. It was 4 a.m., in the quiet suburbs of Tokyo. They were parked in front of the Yano house. They wore black hakama kendo trousers and jackets and black tabi over black tabi socks, which isolated the big toe so they could wear the zori sandals. Each carried sharp Chinese-made wakizashi and katana, the two swords, and each carried a silenced Glock 9 mm.
“Then, my children of the spirit, you must go!” said Kondo, and the four felt the excitement rise and crest.
Noguma was first, Muyamato second, he, Nii, third, and Natume fourth. They leapt from the truck and advanced in low, stealthy strides to the house.
The door was locked.
Noguma kicked it in, and as he kicked it, performed nukitsuke, the drawing cut, except there was no one to cut. Meanwhile, the others unlimbered their swords, possibly without the grace and beauty of Noguma, who had practiced this move a hundred thousand times. It was truly unfortunate that nobody was there to absorb his elegant energy.
He ran into the house, shouting, “Hai!” and looked for something to cut. There was nothing.
But downstairs he spied light.
“Hai!” he shouted again, and raced down the steps to the corridor, followed by Nii, while the other two went upstairs.
As Noguma ran along the corridor, he saw a man step out of a door with a sword and he raced toward him, full of lust for blood, full of energy, and executed a perfect kirioroshi, that is, downward cut, fully expecting to sunder the man from tip of crown to navel.
Alas, the man adroitly sidestepped and slipped with oily speed into ukenagashi, or “flowing block,” which enabled him to slide off into a horizontal attack and lay his blade’s edge at full force into Noguma’s guts through the navel, the side, almost to spine, cutting through to the core, slicing entrails and organs and everything else in the way, then withdrawing on the same plane so as not to ensnare the blade, and poor Noguma fell spurting, for the
