Deshi (26 page)
“Sakura’s last calligraphy,” I said.
“The death poem?” Art asked.
“It was more than a poem,” I said. “He was also identifying the killer.”
And I told them how.
In old Japanese farmhouses, they would set an arrow into the eaves where the rooflines met in the center. It was mystically charged with protective powers to ward off evil and it was pointed north to
kimon
, the devil’s direction. As my car pounded its way along the highway to the latest location for one of Kita’s franchised mountain temples, I noted that I was heading north as well.
“How freakin’ appropriate,” I muttered under my breath.
Micky and Art wanted to take one last look in New York for the Mongol—” Most of these guys are morons, Connor,” my brother had said. “We find them hiding at their girlfriends’.” But they admitted that he had disappeared. When I heard that, I threw my gear into the car and took off. I had a sensation of lines flowing together, of Sarah, Yamashita and Changpa, and the Mongol converging at a point of intense danger. Micky and Art were working two angles, doing a last-minute sweep for the Mongol locally and getting clearance from their Lieutenant that would free them up to follow.
I didn’t speak about my feelings to them. It didn’t take much guesswork to figure out where the different threads in this thing led. The Yamaji East, Kita’s newest training center, was sponsoring the seminar that Yamashita was attending. And he wasn’t alone. As I thought about Changpa and Sarah Klein, in the clutches of Kita and probably Han the Mongol, the needle on the speedometer began to climb.
But cars have never been a high-priority item in my life, and after a while the vibration of excessive speed began to rattle the frame alarmingly. I eased off the gas pedal a bit, but it didn’t make my stomach muscles relax any.
In summer, martial arts training camps known as
gasshuku
spring up all over the country. They’re usually opportunities for people to engage in some concentrated, extended practice, train with new instructors, and get some R and R. Most martial artists are the equivalent of weekend warriors, and the chance to push their limits a bit is attractive, especially for black belts.
It’s also not unusual to have different prominent sensei give seminars at these things. Martial artists have an insatiable hunger for new styles and techniques. The ninja I’d fought was the darker manifestation of that impulse. For most people, it’s not so sinister. It’s part enthusiasm and part American consumerism. Most people I know in the arts have trained in more than one system. For some of us, it’s an evolutionary process of development. For others, it’s an exercise in fickle delusion: when you hit the wall of hard training, you jump to another style. It’s the martial arts equivalent of the hunt for the Holy Grail. It’s not that the search isn’t sometimes sincere. Just pointless.
Yamashita weeds these types out pretty quickly. I thought of the most recent group that had come to him, hoping to be accepted into his dojo. He has some mysterious criteria he uses for letting people in. You need some pretty good prior training, of course, that goes without saying. But that’s not all.
A few days ago I had watched an applicant bow before him. Sensei sat and looked at the person. His eyes were dark slits and his face impassive. Sometimes you can feel the energy pulsing off him when he sits like that, and it’s always interesting to see whether the aspirants pick up on it or not. Sometimes, Yamashita asks questions. Other times, he lets silence wash over the room. And after a time, he makes a decision.
If the new student was looking for mysterious techniques and sudden revelations of hidden secrets, he was disappointed.
He stood expectantly, holding a wooden sword. My teacher glided toward him and simply said, “
Suburi
.” The new student looked puzzled, so Yamashita added,
“shomen-uchi
.” You hope that the new student is sharp, and he will begin the series of practice cuts to the head that Sensei just specified.
The new guy got the command to begin, but he hesitated. “How many times?” he asked the master.
Yamashita glared at him, and the look alone could pin you to a wall. “Until it is perfect,” my teacher growled, and walked away.
It tends to quickly weed out the faint of heart.
Up in the Berkshires, the day was just as hot as it had been in New York, but the sky was bluer and cleaner-looking. Along the state road leading out of North Adams, the trees looked somewhat droopy along the roadway, but there was a small, rocky stream running along the side of the road that hinted at coolness in shaded places. The charm was lost on me.
Kita’s Yamaji East was on the site of a failed recreation community—a few hundred acres perched on a hill studded with sugar maples and fir trees. At one time, this part of the North-east had been almost totally clear-cut for timber—the stony slopes weren’t good for much more. But you’d never guess it looking at the series of forested hills that stretched away into the distance as far as you could see, the green getting darker and bluer with distance. It made an ideal site for a summer training camp focusing on arts like aikido,
iaido,
and kyudo.
I thought about Kita: things I had heard, things I had learned recently. He was known as a maverick teacher, although supposedly quite a gifted martial artist. You’d see articles about him occasionally in some of the mass-market martial arts magazines, often appearing in action shots wielding a sword or spear, his long black hair flowing as the freeze-frame photography caught him in moments of posed ferocity. In interviews, he hinted at a personal history of esoteric training in various disciplines and seemed intent on creating a synthesis between the various Asian martial systems and meditation techniques. He spent a lot of time with Tibetan masters of one type or another. And his name had popped up in the notes of a dead journalism student.
They ate Kita up on the West Coast, where there was no shortage of martial arts freaks, celebrities looking for the cachet of a black belt, or lost souls seeking exotic salvation. That’s how Stark met him, I was sure. Some Hollywood celebrities had been attracted as well. And their money followed. As a result, in the last ten years or so, Kita had slowly been building a little martial arts empire. There was a national organization, chains of schools, and a Web site that offered tantalizing yet incomplete glimpses of the hidden techniques of his system, fluff pieces on the great man himself, and an extensive retail outlet.
The Yamaji East was the latest installment in his franchise operation. The Mountain Temple was in reality not one place, but a series of locations. There was one in the Sere Hills above L.A., another in thinner air near Boulder, and even one in Florida. How he found a mountain there was anyone’s guess. Maybe it was at Disneyworld. I thought that might be appropriate.
The latest acquisition was Yamaji East, here in Massachusetts. Kita was new to this part of the country and was hosting the summer seminar series as a way of establishing the Yamaji’s presence, getting some respectability, and marketing himself to the martial artists in the region. I had wondered initially why Yamashita was bothering to attend, but my questions had gotten burned up in more immediate things. Now I thought about it again.
Perhaps, for all my skepticism, the complexity of haragei was greater than I suspected. Greater than just the cool electric thrill of approaching danger. If, for Changpa, the flow of time was a great heaving sea of future peaks, distant and hard to make out, did Yamashita share something of the same ability? And did he in some way sense that here, at this point and at this time, he would be needed?
He was right. He hadn’t seen the inka, but even so, Yamashita’s instinct was good. The scroll was a fraud, an attempt at making Kita’s martial pedigree more respectable. It seemed that those who uncovered his secrets were killed. And Yamashita, a master of the deadly, close-quarters combat systems of the old warriors of Japan, knew that sometimes the best way to defeat an opponent was to get closer to danger, not to flee it.
I knew this as well. And more. But if it was initially an intellectual knowledge, it had an increasingly visceral feel to it. My stomach was in knots for the whole trip. I guided the car around the last few curves of the road and my tires made the bluestone that edged the roadway skitter off into the culverts on either side. I didn’t know how I felt about my impulse to come to the Yamaji. Part of me avoided thinking about meeting my sensei again. But I knew I had to go. It wasn’t just that I was worried about Changpa’s safety. Or even Sarah Klein’s. I was pulled along this path with the cords, invisible but strong as plaited silk, that had been woven over the years in the dojo. I thought ruefully about it: I could struggle against these things, but it was pointless. They were shackles I had helped weave myself.
A pupil, a deshi, follows in the footsteps of his master.
There was a pretty young woman at the compound’s reception center. She had her blonde hair pulled back into the New Age version of a samurai topknot and wore a black polo shirt with the Yamaji crest embroidered on it in red. She was bright-eyed and greeted me pertly when I came in the door. The reception area was pleasant compared to the blazing parking lot, where my car sat, the engine pinging randomly as it cooled down.
“Good afternoon,” she said. “Welcome to Yamaji. Are you here for the
gasshuku
?” She was already sliding a registration form across the desk toward me. “Things have been going on since the weekend, but I believe we have some room for late-comers.” She smiled to let me know that she was willing to overlook my poor timing. A poster for the seminar stood on the counter, highlighting the activities we could all look forward to. There were some tasteful reproductions of old Japanese art-work around the room. And a Visa/MasterCard sticker prominently displayed in the front window.
“Actually,” I told her, “I’m the assistant for one of the sensei at the seminar,”
She brightened a little at that. She’d been looking doubtfully at my car through the glass. Probably wondering whether my credit card would be rejected. I gave her Yamashita’s name and she fingered her way through a bunch of registration forms. She frowned at me.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Burke, but I don’t see a VIP registration for you.” She didn’t sound particularly sorry, but it didn’t bother me. The Burkes rarely get VIP treatment anywhere.
“No problem,” I told her. “Probably just a screwup. Let me register for the seminar and we’ll straighten it out later.”
She seemed happy at that, particularly after my credit card had passed muster. I got a packet of information with schedules, a map of the complex, and promotional material for many of the teachers running the seminar. She handed me my room key and gave me instructions on how to reach it. “Don’t forget to stop by the Yamaji Gift Shop,” she told me.
“I wouldn’t miss it,” I assured her.
She smiled artificially at me. Facetiousness is wasted on the young.
The complex sat on the crest of a wooded hill. The reception area was down on the lower end of the property. There was a good-sized parking lot filled with cars, many of them with martial arts bumper stickers and pretty embarrassing vanity plates like SAMUR-I. A five-foot-wide blacktop path led up the hill toward the meeting facilities and guest cabins. Cement stanchions at the beginning of the path served to prevent motor vehicles from using the path. The brochure noted that no cars were permitted beyond the reception area “to preserve the reflective aura of the Yamaji.
”
There were a few local kids in short pants and Yamaji polo shirts waiting to give the infirm a lift up in electric golf carts, but I waved them away.
My schedule indicated the location of various seminars throughout the week. I knew Yamashita would be busy and I was still hesitant to see him, so I took the time to walk the grounds and get oriented.
The main path snaked up the hill, and different offshoots led to small cul-de-sacs where guest cabins were clustered. The terrain was well wooded, but you could see that the trees had been thinned somewhat to enhance a park-like appearance. There were jumbled slabs of rock back in the deeper woods, covered in moss. Birds chirped and a faint breeze rustled the leaves of the decorative white birch trees that were planted in small clumps at the points where new paths split off from the main road. My room was functional, one of four attached units in a cabin structure. It was predictably rustic and you got the faint damp whiff of the woods when you opened the window.
There was a large meeting building at the hill’s crest. It also contained the restaurant. A built-in pool glinted in the sun, but there were few bathers. Off in various spots under the trees, open-air pavilions with wood-shingled roofs were scenes of intense practice by various groups of sweating, gi-clad people.
I consulted the guide that I had received when I registered. There was a great deal going on at the gasshuku—“Ten Days That Will Change Your Life,” according to the brochure—but it was hard to see. The grounds of the Yamaji were laid out so that different areas were well screened by the curve of the land and foliage. In addition, different styles and sessions seemed to rotate around different locations. The only exceptions were the systems like jujutsu and aikido that needed mats, and kyudo, which required a hundred-foot-long field of fire.
I went by the archery area. A line of women archers moved in unison in preparation for shooting. They tipped the long arc of their bows forward and, with a focus and gravity that was almost magical, slowly sank into the seated position. They were impervious to the wash of strong light and heat, deaf to the whirring of insects in the distance. They gazed at their arrows in rapt attention, their energy building for the draw, the release, the cry of focused energy as their shafts sped across space, hungry for the target’s heart.
From a distance, I saw Sarah among them, her white gi top almost blinding in the sun and her hair as dark as the shadows you glimpsed in the deep woods. I smiled at the sight of her and was relieved. My dream still haunted me, and I was glad to see that she was all right. I didn’t let her see me: it seemed to me that whoever had actually read the inka was in danger. That included me, and I didn’t want to drag her into it.