He went to his wall display case, unlocked it, and took out a weapon.
“Katana. Sixteen fifty-one, used by a man called Nogami.”
Swagger took the thing.
“Go ahead, take it out of the saya. Don’t worry about etiquette now. Just pull it out and don’t cut a finger or a leg off.”
Swagger pulled it out. It was heavier than it looked. It had a strange electricity to it.
The blade wore a slight curve, was dappled along its edge, where the harder steel that cut met the softer steel that supported; a groove ran up one side, and the tip was a unique orchestration of ridges upturned to a chisel point. Why was it like that? Why wasn’t it just a point? There had to be a reason. These people studied cutting and stabbing, made art and science out of them; they knew the sword and no implement in history had been so engineered as a Japanese sword.
The handle was long enough for two hands and then some, but the whole thing could be used one-handed if necessary.
It wasn’t beautiful. No, it looked like a weapon, like, say, an M-14 rifle, perfectly, exactly functional, meant to do one thing very well and built by people who cared about nothing but that one thing.
In his hands, it seemed to come to life. What had Tommy Culpepper said? Oh, yeah: it wants to cut something. It did. It yearned for flesh. A gun was different; you grew used to it, and it became a tool. But the sword thrilled you each time you picked it up.
He stood and waved the blade artlessly through the air, feeling the slight thrum as it gathered speed and momentum. The grooves made it sing a bit as it sliced left and right.
“Let’s begin with snow, Mr. Swagger. Snow enters the Japanese imagination by chance on a cold night in what the old calendars call December seventeen-oh-two, but which is by ours January thirty-first, seventeen-oh-three. Think of a column of men, forty-seven of them, trudging through the dark city then called Edo, through the whirling blizzard. They are hunched against the cold, but the weather is not on their minds. Vengeance is.”
Bob saw snow. He saw men jogging through it, swords such as this one slung, heads down, breaths blowing steam into the dark night air. It could have been Russia, it could have been the Chosin Reservoir, or it could have been Valley Forge. It could have been anywhere men fought for what they believed.
“They look like Green Berets or Russian Spetsnaz or Brit SAS. They wear camouflage, jagged patterns on their kimonos. Each carries two murderously sharp swords, as well as, somewhere, a shorter tanto, just in case. Most carry yari, our word for spear. Each of them has been training his whole life for this. No commando team in history has had more talent, skill, will, and violence at its disposal.
“Who have they come to fight? The story goes back two years. The shogun-military dictator, the true power in Japan-required that his lords spend every other year in Edo servicing his court in elaborate ceremonial duties that were the court’s entire purpose. I know how foolish it sounds: think how brilliant it is. He wants them consumed with worry over the ceremony, far from advisors and sycophants, so that they won’t plot against him. It’s the time of seppuku. If a lord makes a mistake, if he violates a law, if he crosses his legs wrong or wears the wrong hat-”
He made a gesture, drawing his firm hand in a fist across his belly.
“In seventeen hundred a young lord from the House of Asano, in Ako, was called to Edo for his turn in the court. He was-well, opinions differ. A man of probity and strength, a great man who wouldn’t kowtow, who hated corruption, effeminacy, bureaucratic infighting, all the propensities of headquarters. Or was he a silly fool overmatched, outwitted, and ultimately destroyed? He may have been a mediocrity, a retardate, a crusader. Opinions vary. What’s important is that for some reason he will not play the court game, which is bribery. The most important figure at the court is the master of tea ceremonies-essentially the shogun’s social secretary, secretly controlling everything. His name is Kira. He has seven other names, but we call him Kira. He’s easy to get along with. Just give him a lot of money.”
“Asano won’t.” The circumstances were familiar. Bob had seen movies more or less covering them.
“No, possibly out of idealism, possibly out of stupidity, possibly out of naivete. Kira is furious. Kira, by the way, is ambiguous. Some see him as a decadent libertine, a partaker in the pleasures of the Floating World, a seducer of young maids. Others see him simply as a man guarding the traditions he had inherited, under no obligation to reform. He did as he was taught. In his way, he was obedient to the dictates of his lord too. Thus, angered and insulted by Asano’s refusal to bribe him, he declares war on Asano, but not with blades. He shames the younger man, he gossips about him to destroy his reputation, and remember, to the Japanese, reputation is everything. The pressure on Asano is incredible. If he makes a mistake-” He made a sound like a belly slitting. “And Asano one day breaks down. In a fit of rage at some insult or other, he pulls his wakizashi-short sword-and lurches after the much older man in a part of the shogun’s castle called the Pine Corridor. He manages to cut Kira twice, once on the forehead, once on the shoulder.”
Bob looked at the weapon.
“Asano has violated court etiquette; he has pulled his blade in the shogun’s palace. It’s an instant death sentence. Say what you will for Asano, he died with far more dignity than he lived. He wrote a poem in the seconds before: ‘I wish I had seen / the end of spring / but I do not miss / the falling of the cherry blossoms.’ Then he cut his own guts out.
“The shogunate confiscates his property, his mansion, and it drives all his retainers out. Now they are shamed, they are unemployed, they have nothing.”
“You know, I think I saw some movies about this. I never quite understood them, I now realize, but I know what happens. The Forty-seven Ronin. They visit Kira two years later. The government has abolished the clan, confiscated its property, and driven them out to the countryside, but they weren’t quite done. One night, they came to call.”
“When it was snowing. Correct. Come look at this and bring the sword. I want the sword in your hand when you see this.”
The two men rose, and Dr. Otowa took Bob over to a woodcut on the wall.
“The greatest Japanese warrior artist was Utagawa Kuniyoshi. He portrayed that night and the men who took part dozens of times, and from him come all our images of the event, even if he was working in the nineteenth century, one hundred sixty years after the fight. This is his triptych entitled ‘Attack of the forty-seven Ronin on Kira’s Mansion.’”
Bob looked. He saw war, familiar enough. A melee, a whirl, a crazed mess, no rules, no coherence, men in desperate postures, faces grim, driving forward with the long spears and swords, just like the one he held.
“See that one there,” said Dr. Otowa, pointing to a dominant armored figure in the center of the battle, with the longest spear, urging his men on with some sort of horsetail switch. “That’s Oishi, the senior retainer of the House of Asano. He is the hero of the story. He is the man who planned and led the attack, who held the Ronin together, who coordinated intelligence reports, who laid out the final strategy. He knew he was being watched by the shogun’s secret informers so he went so far as to leave his wife and go live in a brothel, pretending dissolution to mislead the spies. Or that is what is said. Maybe he just needed an excuse to leave the woman and live it up with the geishas until the day came.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” said Bob.
“Not at all. Oishi divides his men into two groups, assaults through the snow. One man is assigned to cut the bowstrings of Kira’s bodyguards, so there’s no way they can get their big weapons into play. Then it’s man on man, sword on sword. A fellow named Horibe Yosube was the best swordsman; he was accompanied by his father-in- law, Horibe Yahei, who was seventy-seven. Many of the men were old. The youngest was Oishi’s son, who was seventeen. But it is Oishi we are interested in.”
“He killed Kira.”
“Yes. After all the killing was over, they found the vile Kira hiding in the charcoal shed. Oishi knew him because of his age and the scar on his forehead. He ripped the old man’s jacket off and found the second scar on the shoulder. Oishi offered him the tanto. Kira was no samurai. He declined. Oishi beheaded him with a single stroke from his wakizashi, which was the blade that Asano had used to disembowel himself. Now that sword, Seppuku of Asano, then Beheader of Kira, that is a sword Japan would love to have. What happened to it? We don’t know. We only know that it was made a hundred years or so earlier by a smith named Norinaga in Yamato.”
“I see.”
“No, no, you don’t, because I haven’t finished the story. The world would understand the story I’ve told you.
