closely now. Not much progress, but it was progress. “Help me look through all these boxes,” she said. There was no need to point at them; they were stacked four and five high along the back wall of her bedroom, taking up a lot of valuable floor space. “I need another pair of eyes on this stuff.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you get it? I should have seen the connection to Glorious Victory. I should have remembered it the second I saw the mask. If my memory was a little better, maybe they never would have stolen my sword in the first place.”
Han looked up from the notebook. “You can’t beat yourself up over this kind of thing. If your crackpot ninja theory is right, then there was nothing you could do to keep them from breaking in.”
He stopped himself for a second—maybe to think of something more comforting to say. Mariko could have used it. But no. “I mean, can you imagine what kind of totally badass tools they must have invented over the last five hundred years? Relocking a door chain from the outside would be, like, the tenth coolest thing they could do.”
Great. The eight-year-old boy was back.
“In case you haven’t noticed, Han, I’m feeling pretty fallible right now. I can’t afford to overlook details like this anymore. We’ve got a cult running around our city with high explosives. If these notes can help us find them, then I need someone else reading them, someone to help me connect the dots—”
“And now that I’m not working as a detective, my workweek is about to get a whole lot shorter,
Mariko sighed with relief. She felt the tension seep out of her shoulders. They were thinking along the same lines again, and that was a blessed thing. “I figured maybe a couple of nights a week?”
Han flipped through Yamada’s notes again. “I don’t know,” he said. “Looks like pretty dry reading.”
“Maybe over a few beers?”
“Getting better.”
“I’ll give you the play-by-play of my goaltending duties.”
“Ow! Just kick me in the nuts and get it over with.” Han made a show of wincing. “First I get taken out of the game, and now you’re going to rub it in?”
Mariko laughed. “Come on. You have to admit you’re interested,
“Oh yeah.”
“Me too.”
GLOSSARY
A-side: for SWAT operators, the front side of a building
ama: traditional Japanese free divers, best known for diving for pearls
ambo: ambulance
Aum Shinrikyo: Supreme Truth Cult, responsible for the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995
B-side: for SWAT operators, the side of a building to their left as they approach the A- side
bizen: an unglazed style of Japanese pottery
bokken: solid wooden training sword, usually of oak
bushido: the way of the warrior
C-side: for SWAT operators, the side of a building to their right as they approach the A-side
CI: Covert Informant
D-side: for SWAT operators, the backside of a building (or, for irregularly shaped buildings, the side opposite the A-side)
daisho: katana and wakizashi together, the twin swords of the samurai; literally, “long- short”
dono: an honorific expressing great humility on the part of the speaker, more respectful than -san or even -sama
foxfire: magical lights said to be carried by foxes or fox-spirits
Fudo: a Buddhist deity, typically depicted as an angry, red-skinned demon with sharp horns and fangs, often wielding a sword and a lariat
gaijin: foreigner (literally “outsider”)
geisha: a skilled artist paid to wait on, entertain, and in some cases provide sexual services for clientele
gokudo: extreme, hard-core
gumi: clan (as in Kamaguchi-gumi)
haidate: broad armored plates to protect the thighs, usually of lamellar
hakama: wide, pleated pants bound tightly around the waist and hanging to the ankle
haori: a Japanese tabard (i.e., short, sleeveless jacket) characterized by wide, almost winglike shoulders, often worn over armor
hazmat: Hazardous Materials Team; alternatively, hazardous materials and items
Ikko Ikki: a peasant uprising, largely disorganized and only nominally Buddhist, whose political and economic influence endured for over a hundred years until the Three Unifiers quelled it in the late sixteenth century
kaigane: a sharp, stiff tool with a blade like a spatula used by ama to pry shellfish from rocks and coral
kaishaku: a samurai’s second, charged with virtually beheading him if he should cry out while committing seppuku
Kansai: the geographic region around Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka, and the locus of political power for nearly all of Japanese history
kappa: a water-dwelling mythological being, humanoid with reptilian features, with a topless head and a water-filled bowl in place of a brain
katana: a curved long sword worn with the cutting edge facing upward
kenjutsu: the lethal art of the sword (as opposed to kendo, the sporting art of the sword)
kiai: a loud shout practiced as a part of martial arts training, usually uttered upon delivering a strike
kiri: a paulownia blossom, the emblem of Toyotomi Hideyoshi
koku: the amount of rice required to feed one person for one year; also, a unit for measuring the size of a fiefdom or estate, corresponding to the amount of rice its land can produce
MDA: methylenedioxyamphetamine, a hallucinogenic amphetamine
Mount Hiei: a mountain overlooking the city of Kyoto, home to hundreds of monasteries and the traditional locus of political power for Buddhism in Japan
odachi: a curved greatsword
oyoroi: “great armor”; a full suit of yoroi armoring the wearer from head to toe; literally “great armor”
Raijin: demonic god of lightning, thunder, and storms
ri: a unit of measurement equal to about two and a half miles
rikishi: sumo wrestler
ronin: a masterless samurai (literally “wave-person”)
Ryujin: dragon-god of the sea
