Lost me, Bob thought.

But he guessed Philip Yano was telling him the very shape of the end of the tang held clues to its origin.

“You sure know this stuff.”

“I know nothing,” said Yano. “There are many to whom this language is as supple and expressive as poetry. I struggle, doubt my knowledge, wish I knew more, curse myself for not knowing yet.”

“But do I get the bottom line? That this is a very old blade, and it could have some meaning beyond your family? Experts should examine it.”

“That’s right. It may be nothing. Not every old blade was used by Musashi Miyamoto, just as not every old Colt was carried by Wyatt Earp. So the odds are very small. But still…they exist. Remember, someone always wins a lottery. I will learn what I can before I make any consultations. It’ll take me longer than it should, and it is foolish, as many could know in a flash. That’s all right, though. It’s time spent with my father.”

“The paper,” said the girl.

“Yes, finally.”

“It looks like some kind of note,” Bob said.

“This is why I fear it. It is possibly a death poem. We do that, we Japanese. It is because death is so welcome to us, that we reach to embrace it and celebrate it with poetry.”

“Yet you hesitate, Father,” his daughter said.

“Suppose it says ‘Dear god, save me, I cannot stand this anymore.’”

“Then it proves your father was human,” said Bob. “I’ve been shot at a lot, and my thoughts have been ‘Dear god, save me, I cannot stand this anymore.’”

“Swagger-san speaks a truth, Father. You must face it. You must reach out to your father.”

“Do you want to be alone?”

“No, no,” said Yano. “Much better to be with one I love and one I respect.”

He took the paper off the nakago, shaking it so that an ancient fine powder of black oxidized steel fell away.

He read it, and began to weep.

His daughter read it, and began to weep.

Bob thought it best to say nothing, but the girl looked over at him, the tears running down her face.

“I think it’s for all the boys of Iwo Jima,” said Philip Yano, “no matter the color of their skin.”

He read:

Above the volcano a moon over hell lights the faces of the doomed and dying. Soldiers buried in black sand on the black island await their destiny. We are the broken jade of Sulfur Island.

11

On Tuesday night, the boy Raymond had a baseball game and got a single and a double. He played left field, appeared to have a sound arm and an instinct for the ball. On Wednesday, the daughter Tomoe had a recital; she played the cello, and to Bob at least, she was superb.

It wasn’t that the kids were so well behaved and such high performers that so thoroughly attracted him, or even that the darling little Miko reminded him of his own daughter, Nikki-Y2K4 she had christened herself when young. It was that in some way the family unit was like an idealized Marine Corps. Everyone knew his duties and did them; there were no rogue neuroses, no raw egos, no angry resentments; if there were, they were held so far inside that they were never seen and never blew. But the Yanos laughed a lot and seemed genuinely to enjoy each other’s presence, to the exclusion of the world. He really felt happy among them.

“No, I’ve enjoyed it so much, and you’ve been so hospitable. But I have to go; I have a life back in the States.”

“I had hoped to have news for you on the sword before you left,” said Mr. Yano. “I have exhausted all my books and have begun to make inquiries. There are many antique volumes from the nineteenth century, with much information. The Book of the Sword was published in many editions in the last one hundred years. The best collection is in Osaka at the university there. I had planned a trip; you would enjoy that part of Japan.”

“I’m sure I would; I have a wife and daughter, however, several businesses to look after, and remember that field I was cutting? I still want to finish that damned thing. Remember, I’m the Tin Man. Chop chop chop.”

“I understand.”

On the last night, he and Philip Yano sat up after the family had gone to bed. Yano drank sake from a ceramic bottle, in a little flat cup. Bob had tea. It was time to talk of that which united them and made them trust: war and wounds.

“How is the hip? Is it painful?”

“You get used to it. It’s always ten degrees colder than everything else, and as I said, getting through airport security is a mess. It’s not so funny now.”

“You have other wounds?”

“I seem not to be able to get out of the way of little pieces of flying steel. I have been shot and wounded a variety of times. That one was the worst. It took a friend from me, I am sorry to say, and he was a boy who would have given the world many gifts, so I mourn for him still. The other wounds sting sometimes, but it ain’t nothing I can’t live with.”

“My daughter says you sleep poorly.”

“Sorry, hope I didn’t scare nobody. My dreams aren’t the softest. I took many lives. I thought I was a big samurai. And for what? Nothing I can lay a hand on. Well, something called ‘duty.’ I ain’t smart enough to define it, but I felt it then, and goddammit, no matter what, I still feel it. They ain’t takin’ it away.”

“That is the burden of the samurai, that commitment to duty. That is why we are only happy among other samurai, who have taken lives, seen blood and ruin, tasted defeat and bitterness. No one else can truly know. They can guess; they cannot truly know.”

“I’d drink to that if I was still a drinking man. I have to ask you, Philip. Your eye. You don’t talk of it. But I recognize scar tissue when I see it.”

“Oh, that. Really nothing. Iraq.”

Bob thought he misheard. Had he been drinking? Did the guy say Iraq, where the marines were still fighting?

“I thought that was our little pile of bad news.”

“Japan, in a spirit of support, sent small numbers of noncombat support troops, nominally guarded by Dutch combat troops, assigned engineering duties in a town in the south called Samawah. But you know the thorough, boring Japanese. We didn’t quite trust the Dutch, and so secretly a small unit of paratroopers was sent as actual security. It was my honor to be selected as commanding officer. They even postponed my retirement. Normally, you must leave at fifty-five, but because they trusted me, they asked me to stay in uniform through the assignment.”

“You must have been a superb officer. That’s not a job they give to second-raters. But I already knew that.”

“I worked hard but of course have no genius for it as do you. You were a hero, I was an officer who tried his best. On the third of February, two thousand four, an IED went off next to a Japanese troop carrier, which was pitched over and started to burn. Some men had difficulty getting out. As commanding officer, it fell to me to make the effort. We did in fact get them all out, but not before one of those RPGs detonated nearby and my face was sliced open, my eye destroyed. That was it. Thirty-three years of service, ten seconds’ worth of action, and a career-ending wound. So it goes. I did what I could, I got my people out, and I trust that the men remember me with respect.”

“Getting blown up in somebody else’s war ain’t no picnic.”

“The funny thing was that since we didn’t officially have combat troops in the engagement, my eye wasn’t officially damaged. However, my eye disagrees with that assessment. In any event, it was enough to serve.”

“Well, your father would be proud of you. He would salute you, if nobody else did. And so would mine. They knew.”

“You are very kind. Now I have a gift for you.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, very Japanese. Perhaps it will mean nothing. But it’s a credo to live by, as in our ways, we both have, after the ways of our fathers, who were the better men.”