But on this night the woman, a corpulent enough country girl from outside Pusan, had been stopped unaccountably by her boss. She had been quizzed about another girl, who was suspected of sleeping with westerners on her own (rare) spare time. All proceeds must be generously shared with management and a strict no-freelancing rule was enforced.

But this woman did not room with the suspect, so what was the point? It made no sense to her and cut into the five hours she had off, and she had now missed the 5:40 a.m. train and another wouldn’t depart until 6:10 a.m.

She hurried alone across the splotches of illumination, the dark shadows of Kabukicho, as dawn approached and another night of expensively purchased sin put itself to sleep. She headed east down Hanazono Dori, heading toward Shinjuku station. Her cheap wood-soled sandals clattered on the empty street as she rushed, the clubs now mostly deserted, the barkers gone, the sailors headed back to the harbor, the airmen to the air bases, the tourists to their giant hotels. It was the hour of the hare.

The street, which drew its name from a shrine a few blocks behind her, was featureless in the low light. She didn’t like this part of the walk; she focused on the brighter lights of a major cross street ahead.

And then she saw-hmmm, a blur, a move, some kind of disturbance-and, with it, heard a rustle, a shift, a clunk, some weird night noise that had but one characteristic, that it didn’t belong.

She turned, looked back into the blur of countless vertical signs, brightly lit from within, blazing into infinity. The rain spattered on her glasses. She drew her cheap raincoat more tightly against her, annoyed that it was useless against the sudden chill. It was probably nothing, but she felt that someone was waiting for her just ahead. You could never be sure, and she had so much responsibility, she could not afford to be robbed or injured. She hurried back along Hanazono Dori, hoping to get to a large avenue that would still be populated, like Yasukuni Dori.

And where were the cops? Normally, she hated the police cars, particularly the sullen young officers who looked at her as if she were a member of the herbivore kingdom, but now she wished she saw the red light of official presence. Nope, nothing. Not far off she saw the jagged skyline of East Shinjuku, lit with spangles of illumination, promising a new world order or something.

Her life was crap and would never be anything but crap. She worked for next to no money under tight supervision, giving hand jobs and blow jobs and greek the night long. She had absorbed enough Japanese sperm to float a battleship. On a good month, she scraped together a few thousand yen to send back to Korea, where her mother, her father, and her nine brothers and sisters depended upon her. She suspected that it was her father who had secretly sold her to the Japanese man, but family loyalty was nevertheless something she felt powerfully, a Confucian conceit that gave everything she did the faintest buzz of virtue. It meant that in the next life she would be something higher, better, easier.

She turned back, to check again. It was then that she saw the two men. They were in the shadows, moving stealthily, matching her movements, but when her eyes fastened on them, they froze, almost melting into nothingness like skilled Red guerrillas. She stared and in seconds lost their outline. Were they really there? Was she dreaming this?

“Hey,” she called in her heavily accented, grammatically fractured Japanese. “Who you? What want? You go away, you no hurt me.”

In the beautiful Korean of her consciousness, she was far more articulate: are you demons come to take me? Or drunken, fattened American fools who want a free greek fuck to brag about on the flight home? Or young, angry yaks, annoyed that the boss thinks so little of you and therefore look for someone upon which to express your rage?

But they were so still they seemed not to be there. In a second she had convinced herself that it was her imagination. It was punishment for thinking unkind thoughts about her father.

She turned and headed again down Hanaz-

She heard a sound. There were two men behind her. But she was not stupid or panic-prone. She did not scream and run hopelessly into the middle of the street. Instead she accelerated her pace just enough, tried hard to give no sign that she knew she was being stalked. She tried to think. The streets were dark and it was still half a mile to the bright lights of Shinjuku Dori. They could overtake her at any point.

She looked for a sudden detour. She could head for either the Lawson’s convenience store or the Aya Café, both of which were open twenty-four hours a day. She could maybe find an alleyway. The prospect of getting home had become meaningless. She cared only to survive the night and if she had to lie in garbage behind some horrid club, she would do that. A better plan was to find one of the all-night joints, where she could nurse a few cigarettes until seven. It would then be pointless to return home. She could spend a couple of hours in the club, then go back on. It would be hard, but she would get through it.

She came upon an unlit little promenade ahead, not far from a section of fifties bars called the Golden-gai. There was no overhead and she thought if she darted down it, the two men following wouldn’t see. By the time they’d gone beyond it and returned, she’d be out at the other end, on Yasukuni Dori.

It was called Shinjuku Yuhodo Koen, an anomaly in Kabukicho, a curved, flagstone walk set almost in a glade, two hundred yards behind Hanazono Shrine, lined with trees on either side, almost unknown to the general public and certain to be deserted at this hour. It was dark enough to hide or to not be seen. It was ideal. She darted into it, opened up her gait, and prayed that she had dumped her stalkers.

Since the promenade was narrow and the trees close, he would use kesagiri, a cut that began at the left shoulder and drove downward on the diagonal, splitting collarbone, the tip of the left ventricle, left lung, spine, lungs, right lung, liver. Well delivered, it sometimes flew through the curls of the intestine to exit at the right hip just above the pelvis. It was a good test for the blade, which in casual experimentation had proven astonishingly sharp. Old Norinaga knew his business, back there in his darkened hovel in 1550 or whatever, working in the light of the bright fire, as in an anteroom of hell, folding and refolding as his crew of young hammerers laid their strength and will into the glowing chunk of steel and iron.

It was an unusually heavy blade, signifying that it had not been polished often, which meant it had a certain structural integrity. Not much of it had been stoned off in the 450 years since its forging. No hairline vertical cracks, invisible to the eye, ran through the hamon. No niogiri and no breaks in the nioguchi. No ware, no bubbles, no acid damage. It was merely scratched dull by a half century in a scabbard and before that however many years of mundane military duty and before that, who knew? All that was known was what it had accomplished in 1702. He had remounted it, hating the esthetics of the junky army furniture of 1939. Now it wore a simple, pure shirasawa, a wooden sheathing and a wooden handle that assembled neatly into one curved airtight wooden object, almost like a piece of avant-garde sculpture. The shirasawa was called a blade’s pajamas. It was a storage mechanism, not a fighting or a ceremonial one and it meant no tsuba had been affixed, for the tsuba, the handguard that kept the fingers off the sharpness of the blade and caught opposing blades as they slid down toward the hands, was a fighting accouterment or-many were extraordinary works of art in their own right-an esthetic device. But he expected no fight tonight.