‘No more stories, father,’ Yukio pleaded. He had grown tired of his father’s stories. As a boy, Yukio had lived for his father’s tales. Tales of how the Miki family had been making blades for six hundred years. Tales of samurai swords forged for great warriors. Tales of how the flames of feudal war were finally extinguished and the need for samurai swords was blown away with the ashes of the dead, and how the Miki family elders then turned their sword-making skills to creating the sharpest fishermen’s filleting knives in all of Sakai. Knives forged for cutting the heads off tuna that could still carve through the neck bones of any fisherman foolish enough to doubt the integrity of Miki family steel.
Yukio would sit for hours behind the workshop counter on an upturned wooden wash bucket, polishing and sharpening filleting blades as he watched his father dazzle fishermen with increasingly elaborate tales of each sold knife’s mythic creation. Fishermen from the Black Sea and from the Mediterranean and the Pacific and the Atlantic, and from seas as high and cold as the world went, and as wide and warm. They would come to Sakai port to hear Oshiro Miki tell his knife-maker tales. And, every single week, young Yukio was surprised to find that his father had miraculously acquired a new sacred and old blade that he had promised never to part with but might consider selling to one lucky foreign fisherman if he deemed him worthy of the knife’s ownership.
‘You carry yourself with honour,’ Oshiro would say to that week’s particularly fortunate customer. ‘You have treated my family and me with respect, and for this kindness I will repay you by showing you a most uncommon blade. I will now tell you the story of this blade, but you must never repeat it and you must never speak of where you found this blade.’
What followed was usually a tale of adventure, courage, sacrifice, tragedy and, always, true love. The blade Yukio’s father held in his hands was invariably the sacred object with which the tragic hero of each story managed to overcome a malevolent force – deceitful loved one, old wizard, seductive witch, many-limbed sea monster – standing in the way of true love’s triumph. Oshiro would complete these lucrative counter transactions and then turn to his son and whisper about the wonders and importance of story. ‘The finest blades are forged not with steel, son,’ he would say. ‘But with story.’ Oshiro Miki knew full well that his customers would speak freely of where they found their precious new blades. He knew his strict requests to keep his hallowed workshop and its treasured stories secret was the very reason Miki family blades were spoken about over tuna nets and chopping boards across the globe.
As Yukio grew into his teens behind the workshop counter, his father taught him how to tell these knife stories to foreign travellers in broken English and broken French and broken Spanish. The stories, he said, could sound even more mystical and significant when told in a few carefully selected English words.
‘Love!’ Oshiro hollered in perfect English to a wealthy American couple sailing the seven seas, oil money spilling from their pockets. He waved his hands excitedly at the long-married husband and wife. ‘I see . . . love!’ he declared. And then he explained in broken English that the word ‘love’ was his favourite word in the entire English language because it was the first word of English he ever learned. How perfect, Oshiro recognised, and how fortunate was he that the first word of English he ever learned was also the language’s most profound and sacred and joyous. ‘True . . . love,’ he said with a smile.
And Yukio watched as the Americans smiled with the newfound knowledge that their shared love, despite whatever feelings they may have harboured to the contrary, was clear and strong enough to cross even the divides of sea and language. Then Yukio’s father spoke of how that couple’s true love reminded him of a true-love story behind a sacred and expensive wakizashi that he just knew would make the perfect souvenir to show their many friends back home in Pennsylvania.
‘Was “love” the first word of English my father learned?’ Yukio asked his grandfather Saburo Miki, who was an old and quiet and thoughtful man, as they washed dishes that night.
‘Ha!’ Saburo laughed. ‘The first word of English your father learned was “dog”. The second word he learned was “fish”.’
‘Then my father is a liar,’ Yukio said.
‘Your father is a storyteller,’ Saburo said, washing thick brown fish sauce off a dinner plate. ‘He tells those stories to fill this plate for you each night. There is a difference between liars and storytellers, Yukio.’ The grandfather passed the clean dinner plate to his grandson. ‘Some storytellers still make it to heaven.’
*
‘Just one more story,’ Oshiro Miki said, holding the wakizashi in two hands before his son. He prefaced this story as he’d done every other time he told it, by acknowledging its more questionable narrative turns. ‘For this story to reach your heart, son, you may need to swallow it down with a sprinkling of salt from the shores of the inland sea,’ Oshiro said. ‘You should write the facts of this story only on tissue paper. But you should carve its meaning in stone.’
Yukio patiently and respectfully listened, again, as his father spoke of how the shortsword was made in the 1700s by a quietly spoken and diligent knife-maker named Asato Miki, who had discovered that the love of his life, Rina, had left Sakai in the arms of his younger brother, Uno. All but swallowed up by the dark shadow of grief and betrayal, Asato Miki willed himself to forge the perfect wakizashi blade, with which he was determined to cut out his own beating
