‘Why?’ Asato asked.
‘Because you will not share your artistry with me.’
‘You haven’t given me a chance,’ Asato said.
The assassin paused. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Show me the full extent of your artistry.’
‘How would I do that?’ Asato replied.
The assassin turned his eyes to the butterfly. ‘Take your sword and slice a wing off this flying white butterfly.’
‘That’s impossible,’ Asato said.
‘So is your blade,’ the assassin said.
Asato took a deep breath then exhaled slowly. He retrieved his impossible sword from a small locked room off the workshop’s furnace area and returned to stand before the butterfly and the assassin. He gripped the sword’s handle tight and raised the perfect blade high as the butterfly hovered, as if by will, as if by command, before his eyes. The betrayed sword-maker drew a short breath, tensed his shoulders, fixed his feet to the floor and began to swing his blade – but he immediately pulled out of the swing, and presented the sword to the assassin, handle end first. ‘I can’t,’ he said, shaking his head.
The assassin raised his eyebrows.
‘The butterfly’s life is already too short,’ Asato said.
The assassin lifted the sword to his eyes, laid his forefinger gently on the blade. He turned to face Asato and swung the blade three times. The sound of steel slicing through air was the only evidence of his actions, the blade moving too fast to be visible. Asato heaved a long sigh of relief on realising that he was still breathing.
The White Tiger rested the sword in his open palms then handed it back to its creator. ‘You are right, knife-maker,’ he said, before turning and exiting the workshop through its rusty-hinged wooden front door.
Asato stood in silence, then rushed to the door, just in time to see the assassin disappearing into the bustling port-village crowd, the pure white butterfly hovering peacefully above his right shoulder.
*
‘Well?’ Yukio asked.
‘Well what?’ Oshiro replied.
‘What are you trying to tell me, father?’ Yukio asked.
‘The lost are not lost,’ Oshiro Miki said in the silence of the Sakai workshop.
Yukio nodded his head in understanding. ‘There is something I must tell you about sad love stories, father,’ he said. ‘They are not as enjoyable when they are true.’
Oshiro was silent. Then he nodded sincerely and said, ‘The lost are not lost. Sometimes they transform. Sometimes they stay with us.’
And it was with two open palms that Oshiro Miki handed the old fire-forged shortsword to his first-born son, Yukio, before he set off to war.
Yukio received the sword in silence. He walked to the front door of the workshop, then turned to speak to the father he loved.
‘And sometimes they wait for us,’ he said. Yukio left his father in the workshop and walked out the door in the direction of war.
*
Nara smiling at him now in a winged weapon. Now the deep-hell machinery sound of Yukio and his airborne brothers, who do and do not fear their death, spread across an attack wave of 183 battle planes in arrow formations: 89 Nakajima B5N bombers carrying 800-kilogram torpedoes and 250-kilogram bombs; 51 Aichi D3A dive bombers, each with a 250-kilogram bomb slung under its fuselage and two 30-kilogram bombs nestled on racks under its wings; and 43 agile Zero fighters flying above it all, closer to the blue sky ceiling, closer to heaven. The vicious snarl of that sound, the growl of it. The wasp of it. The tiger of it. A violent symphony of three-blade propellers slicing air and overworked engines spitting smoke. Red spots on battle wings. All those red rising suns in a morning sky formation.
Yukio’s cockpit canopy has a 360-degree view of sky, water and land. A high green mountain range on Yukio’s right side, cloud on his left. It’s 7.48 a.m. and he’s been flying for one hour and forty minutes. The air fleet banks west and along a turquoise coastline and Yukio reaches quickly for his binoculars. Two glass lenses magnifying the beauty and terror of eight majestic battleships lining the port of Pearl Harbor, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. There are smaller grey warships anchored around them like mice sleeping beside greyhounds.
Yukio drops his binoculars and his naked eyes find the ‘black dragon’, an electrifying dark blue flare that’s now rising into the light blue sky. They don’t know we’re coming, Yukio tells himself. The fleet’s leader, Captain Mitsuo Fuchida, is speaking loudly and clearly to Yukio and his brothers with that dark blue flare. Speaking without speaking. He’s saying only one word. Screaming it through a burning and soaring dragon-flare streak. Demanding it. Just one word. Attack.
Yukio’s left hand reaches for the gunsight fixed between his two 7.7-millimetre machine guns. His right hand reaches for the photograph fixed above his fuel gauge. He folds the top half of the photograph down over the bottom half. He doesn’t want her to see this. ‘I’m coming, Nara,’ he whispers, as his fighter swoops down towards a horizon lit by fire.
THE WAYS IN AND OUT OF THE MAZE
Here lies Lisbeth Fleming. Dead at seventy-three, influenza. Buried 1884. Here stands Molly Hook, aged twelve years and nine months, four feet deep in Lisbeth’s grave, Bert’s blade biting through old dirt that’s meeting the sun for the first time in fifty-seven years.
‘Water?’ Molly asks.
‘Break at five feet,’ says her father, Horace. ‘These old gravediggers always took shortcuts. They usually called it quits at five and a half.’
A gravestone. A hole in the ground. The girl in the hole, and her father and her uncle, Aubrey, leaning on their shovels above ground, each taking a side of the grave. Around the grave are mountains of dirt and a single pile of rocks beside the rusting mattock that was used to dig them all up.
Molly digs. Molly digs. Molly digs. She wears old brown leather boots,
