Was that, somehow, samurai?
In one movie, a guy fought three hundred men and beat them all. It was funny and yet somehow just barely believable. Was that samurai?
In another, seven men stood against a hundred. It was like a Green Beret A-team in Indian country in a war he knew too much about, and these guys were as good as special forces. They stood, they died, they never cried. Was that samurai?
In another, an evil swordsman became possessed of the sword; he couldn’t stop killing, until finally he perished in a blazing brothel as his enemies closed in, but not before he cut down fifty of them. Was that samurai?
In still another, a father avenged himself upon a noble house that had urged his son-in-law to commit suicide with a bamboo sword. The father was swift and sure and without fear; he welcomed death and greeted it like an old friend. Was that samurai?
In still another, a brother, mired in guilt, returned home to face his sister’s husband, who had advised him in aiding the clan and ultimately massacring a peasant village. The hero paid out in justice, finally. Was that samurai?
In another, a man said, “Sire, I beg you. Execute us at once!”
Was that samurai?
In still another, a man said, “I am so lucky it was you that killed me!” and died with a smile on his face.
Was that samurai?
In most of them, the brave young men were drawn to death; they would die for anything, at the drop of a hat.
How the Japanese loved death! They feared shame, they loved death. They yearned to die; they dreamed of dying, possibly they masturbated to the idea of their own death. What a race of men they were, so different, so opaque, so unknowable…yet so human. Samurai?
Sometimes the westerner in him got it. At the end of The Seven Samurai, the three survivors head out of town, the battle over; they turn and look back to a hill and on the hill are four swords, points down, thrust in the ground, next to four rough burial mounds. A wind whistles and blows the dust across the hill.
He got that one: he’d seen enough M-16s bayonet-down in the dirt, as the squad moved on, and the weight of melancholy of young men lost forever, of heroes unremembered, of comrades who died for the whole, was an ache that never went away.
But some of the stuff was so strange.
In one, the hero, a dour samurai who wanders the landscape with his kid in a baby carriage, kills a guy and the dying man says happily, “At last I got to see the Soruya Horse-Slaying Technique.”
He had really wanted to see the hero’s sword-fighting skill; it was worth his life to see it, and he felt privileged even as he bled out!
One day there was a knock on the door. He answered it and discovered a beautiful young woman, serene, poised, possibly a little annoyed. It was his daughter.
“Hi, sweetie. What are you doing here?”
“The question is, what are you doing here?” Nikki said.
“I guess Mommy gave you the address. How is she?”
“She’s fine, she contends. That’s her talent.”
“Right.”
Nikki walked in as if she owned the place. She was wearing jeans and a ponytail and cowboy boots. She was twenty-three and in graduate school in New York to be a writer.
“You were going to come visit, remember?”
“Yeah, well, you know Pop, sometimes the old goat forgets.”
“You never forgot a thing in your life. Daddy, what on earth? I mean, really? This Japanese thing? What on earth?”
She looked around: the kanji composition that he had received from Philip Yano hung on one wall and on the other was a brush painting of a bird called a shrike sitting on a twisted piece of limb. There were piles of books, a huge TV and DVD player, and a hundred-odd DVDs, most with kanji lettering and pictures of lurid men in ponytails on them.
“Do you want a Coke or anything?”
“How about some sake? Wouldn’t that be the beverage of choice?”
“I’m not drinking again.”
“Well then, you’ve apparently managed to go insane without the booze.”
“Opinions vary on that issue.”
She sat down next to the wall.
He sat down across from her.
“What’s with the bird?”
“It was painted in the year sixteen forty by a man named Miyamoto Musashi.”
“And who was he?”
“A samurai. The greatest, many say. He fought sixty times and won them all. I like to look at it and think about it. I like to try to understand the flow of the strokes. He also wrote the kanji over there. Do you see it?”
“What does it mean?”
“It means ‘Steel cuts flesh / steel cuts bone / steel does not cut steel.’ It was given to me by Mr. Yano the night he and his family died.”
“God. Do you understand how nuts you sound? Do you understand how upset Mommy is?”
“There’s plenty of money for her. She shouldn’t have any problems.”
“She has one huge problem. A husband who’s gone crazy.”
“I’m not crazy.”
“Tell me. Tell me as if it makes any sense at all. What is going on here?”
“Sure, okay. You’ll see, it’s not so nuts. It’s all about swords.”
“Swords.”
“Japanese swords. ‘The soul of the samurai,’ or so they say.”
“It sounds like you’ve started to believe all those screwball movies you have lying around.”
“Just listen, all right? Hear me out.”
He narrated, as plainly as possible, the events of the last few months, beginning with the arrival of the letter from the superintendent of the Marine Historical Division and ending, essentially, the minute before she knocked on the door.
“And so you never returned to Idaho? You came here instead, and took up this life.”
“I have principles for a hard job. One, start now. Two, work every day. Three, finish. That’s the only way you get it done and any other way is a lie. So when I got off that plane, I thought, Start now. Now. So I started.”
“What on earth are you planning next?”
“Well, there’ll come a time when I feel I’m ready. When I’ve learned enough to go back. Then, somehow, I’ve got to look into things, I have to make sure that some kind of justice is done.”
“But-correct me if I’m wrong-you have no evidence whatsoever there was some foul play in the case of these poor people. I mean, fires do happen, families do die in them. It happens every week.”
“I understand that. However, Philip Yano had an idea that the blade I brought him had some historical significance. Now, reading about this stuff, seeing how important swords still are to the Japanese, how they still dream about the damned things, how they study and practice with them, it gets damned interesting.”
“How much are they worth? Top end?”
“It’s not money. There would be a lot of money, yes. But to the Japanese the sword ain’t about money.”
“Don’t say ain’t.”
“I’m trying. It keeps creeping in. Okay, the sword isn’t about money. It’s more important than money. They have some peculiar beliefs that you would find very strange. I found them strange too. But as I learn about them, they begin to make a kind of sense. You can’t think about this as an American would. It’s a Japanese thing. It has to do with the meaning and the value of the sword, and the prestige a certain sword would have.”
“Now here’s what someone else would say. A clinical psychologist, for example. He’d say, There was a man who was vigorous, heroic, and extraordinary, but also stubborn, obsessive, and somewhat self-indulgent. Even narcissistic. He loved the warrior reflection he saw in the mirror. He never talked about it, but he loved it. He loved the silent respect he got everywhere in life, and the way his presence could quiet the crowd with a single harsh glance. But then he got old, like all men. Suddenly, he’s facing retirement. He secretly doesn’t want to sit on that porch. And watch the seasons change and count his money. He wants a mission. He wants something to define his warrior life. He’s not the sort to go fishing. So something comes along, and using his considerable cunning and intelligence, he insists on seeing reasons, patterns, clues, hints, all kinds of things that he fancies only he, in all the world, not the professional investigators, not the fire department arson squad, none of them, can see. And it adds up to conspiracy, plots, murder, exactly the sort of thing that demands forceful action from a forceful man, a warrior. And he happens to be that forceful man. He happens to be that warrior. Do you see where this is going?”