Disciple of the Wind (25 page)

It was his own fault they hadn’t done much
kenjutsu
of late. Daigoro still did footwork drills on his own, but it was hard to accomplish much in the way of swordsmanship if he couldn’t hold a sword. Daigoro’s hands had been on the mend for the last month. And “what are you good for?” was an unfair question to ask of a man who had killed four men for him that very night.

Katsushima found a stone as large and flat as his palm, and skipped it seven times before the darkness swallowed it up. “I’ll tell you why it doesn’t matter what I think, Daigoro: because sometimes you are only what you can make yourself believe you are. No one else can do that for you.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Hm. Have I ever told you about the dog on my family farm?”

“I didn’t even know your family had a farm.”

“Oh, yes. My father was a lowly
jizamurai
. Not even forty
koku
to his name. But that doesn’t matter; what matters is the watchdog. His name was Kane, and he was a massive beast. I’d say he weighed as much as you do. Any time a neighbor would come by, he’d growl and bark like he’d lost his mind. But it was all bluster,
neh
? Kane was a friend to everyone. The only reason he was any good at chasing off rats or burglars was that they didn’t understand he was running them down to play with them.”

Daigoro collected a few more stones. “I don’t see your point.”

“Patience. One day a tiny brown tree squirrel came into the house. I suppose it must have smelled something good in the kitchen. I don’t know. It comes in, it looks around, it makes sure the coast is clear. Then it goes rooting through my grandmother’s vegetables, and it knocks a big, fat daikon to the floor. In comes Kane, barking like the world is ending. The squirrel bolts, but Kane cuts him off.”

He laughed and skipped another stone. Daigoro had never heard Katsushima talk about his childhood before, and he’d never seen him so excited. “So there’s the squirrel, cornered. Kane outweighs the poor
bastard two hundred to one. He tries to catch it in his mouth and—
pop!
—the little thing bites him right through the nose.”

Katsushima found this hilarious. He unleashed a laugh so loud that it echoed off the water. Daigoro looked over his shoulder, worried that Nene’s soldiers might come back if they heard voices behind them. Keeping his voice rather lower than Katsushima’s, he said, “I can’t imagine your grandmother was happy to find a dead squirrel on her kitchen floor.”

Katsushima laughed again. “Are you kidding? That dog ran for his life. He was a playmate, not a predator. No, it was the squirrel that showed the samurai spirit that day. Arrogance in the face of impossible odds. That’s the way to win a fight.”

Daigoro nodded and tried to smile. “So which am I? The watchdog or the squirrel?”

“That’s my point, Daigoro: you’re whichever one you believe you are.”

“Oh.”

Daigoro wasn’t sure what to make of that. He knew he had the squirrel’s spirit in him. Coming here was proof of that. But he felt the dog spirit in him too, and more than anything he wanted to indulge it. Spending his days in peace, protecting his home only when he had to,
that
was the life Daigoro wanted.

Was that cowardice? He opened his mouth to ask Katsushima’s opinion, but then he thought better of it. For one thing, Katsushima had deliberately turned his back on domestic life. For another, he’d spoken the truth: his opinion was irrelevant. This was Daigoro’s doubt. He alone could face it.

He crouched to pick up a stone when suddenly his knee buckled. Just like my hopes, he thought. At the last instant he stretched out his arm, avoiding an embarrassing face-first tumble into the surf.

“Daigoro, pick yourself up and tell me what you mean to do.”

He did as he was told. “Look at me, Katsushima. I still haven’t gotten used to the weight of this armor. Maybe I’m only cut out for the life of your friendly watchdog.”

“Self-pity does not become you.”

“All right.” Daigoro threw his stone, but it sank immediately. Another ill omen. “What do I mean to do? A good start would be to turn myself invisible. That way I could sneak into Shichio’s home and kill him in his sleep. After that, I’d like to make gold coins appear out of thin air. Let them appear directly over Kenbei’s head. With luck they’d bludgeon him to death.”

“More self-pity. Go cry to your wife; I have no ear for it.”

“Goemon, I cannot walk the path before me. Even the first step is hopeless. I must find Streaming Dawn, though no one knows where it is. Then I have to give it to Lord Sora, to keep him from backing Kenbei. At the same time I have to give it to Lady Nene, or else break my word and lose my bid for Shichio’s neck. Since I cannot give it to two people at once, I may as well give it to three people at once. If I give it to Lord Yasuda too, maybe its power will be enough to wake him, and then he can slap some sense into that greedy, shortsighted son of his.”

“At last you’re making sense. You said Sora claims to have seen this knife,
neh
?”

“Yes.”

“And your father saw it too?”

“Yes.”

“Then at least we know it exists. Finding it can’t be harder than turning invisible,
neh
? It’s surely easier than transmuting air into gold.”

“I suppose so.” One kind of impossible wasn’t any harder than another kind of impossible, Daigoro thought. And Katsushima had it right—or his squirrel had, anyway: the only way to do the impossible was first to believe he could do it. He would probably fail, but if he believed that from the outset, he would fail before he even began.

And there was one more factor to consider:
Bushido
asked the impossible of him every day. The way of the samurai was the way of honor, and if there was one thing Daigoro was sure of, it was that mortal men were
not
honorable creatures. By nature they were selfish, fearful, and petty, all of the vices
bushido
stood against. If Daigoro
could overcome his own human nature in living the warrior’s code, then perhaps doing the impossible was within his grasp after all.

“All right, it’s settled. We go to find Streaming Dawn.”

The real trouble was figuring out where to
begin.

BOOK FIVE

HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22

(2010
CE
)

21

M
ariko envisioned Captain Kusama standing in front of her. Then she brought Glorious Victory Unsought crashing down on his head, chopping him in half.

It was the sixtieth time she’d done this. Her forearms and shoulders burned, but she had forty more to go.

This was her second
kenjutsu
drill of the morning. For the first hundred strikes, she’d imagined Joko Daishi instead, leering at her from behind his demon mask. Those had been
kesagiri
strikes, slashing him open from his left shoulder to his right hip. Just like the
shomenuchi
she was using to bisect Kusama, the hardest part was stopping the enormous blade before it chopped the hardwood floor to bits.

She practiced on the top floor of her mother’s apartment building, in a large studio with wheeled, folding Ping-Pong tables arrayed against one wall. On weekday afternoons, Mariko’s mother came up here to beat the pants off of anyone who dared to face her in table tennis. Other residents used this space for morning tai chi classes and other group activities. A few days ago Mariko had invited herself over, in part because it was important to visit family in troubling times, and in part because she wanted more time for
kenjutsu
practice than Hosokawa-sensei would allow her at the dojo. She couldn’t very well go to the nearest park; people tended to call the cops when they saw someone swinging a giant sword around in public. The penthouse
studio in her mother’s building was the only other place she could find to get some after-hours practice.

She noticed a rectangle of pink light on the wall. Sunrise, announcing its arrival. Mariko was usually dead to the world at this hour, but these days she found herself staring at the ceiling at four thirty in the morning, unable to go back to sleep. She’d tried cutting back on caffeine. She’d tried some stupid full body relaxation thing she found online. She’d even tried one of her mom’s sleeping pills, all to no effect. Usually she could read herself to sleep, but the only reading materials she’d brought with her were Yamada-sensei’s notebooks, the ones Han had returned to her on the day she broke into the strip club. She’d learned some interesting details about Streaming Dawn—a wicked little thing—but still sleep would not come. Now here she was, doing
kenjutsu
and asking herself how things had gone so bad so quickly.

The latest attack from the Divine Wind had afflicted the whole city with post-traumatic stress disorder. Two days ago, at four o’clock in the afternoon, four drivers on four different roads suddenly jerked their cars across the centerline. The result was four head-on collisions with another vehicle. All four cars were white, the color of death, and four itself was the number of death. This was not lost on the general population. By coincidence, the crashes resulted in four fatalities. There were twenty serious injuries too, but the greater ripple effects were far more severe.

Yesterday’s vehicular traffic had been a third of its normal volume. Deliveries were delayed or canceled all over the city. Grocery stores were devoid of fruit, vegetables, and seafood. In spite of the sparse traffic, collisions were up sixty percent as drivers panicked at the sight of a white car in the oncoming lane. That might not have been so destructive in other countries, but in Japan white was by far the most popular car color. More than half of Tokyo’s cars were white.

The message was clear:
you are not safe
. It fit perfectly with Joko Daishi’s philosophy: take an ordinary thing and make it dangerous. In truth nothing had changed. Four fatalities and twenty injuries was
a bad day, but in an urban area of thirty-five million people, there would never be a day with
no
traffic accidents. Joko Daishi had only reminded people of a simple fact: a little stripe of paint was no protection. It was the illusion of protection. The only thing preventing thousands of head-on collisions was the goodness of total strangers. Everyone placed a mindless faith in it, a faith that was as fragile as an eggshell. Now Joko Daishi had taken a hammer to it.

The terrible irony was that his teachings weren’t a foreign philosophy to Japan. Buddhism held that all existence was fleeting, and
bushido
embraced impermanence and condoned violence. Perhaps that was why Joko Daishi had such success in recruiting members for his cult. Maybe something about his teaching spoke directly to the Japanese spirit, if only in a perverse way.

Whatever the reason, the media were having a field day with his latest attacks. They needed something to trump the ricin story, which had already run its course. Fatalities had topped out at twenty-three; once the medical examiner’s office had identified ricin as the poisoning agent, hospitals worked swiftly to treat everyone who could have come into contact with the toxin. On the other hand, traffic accidents were the perfect fodder for fear-mongering websites and television talking heads. Now a simple hit-and-run could be read as a terrorist incident.

As the de facto mouthpiece for the TMPD, Captain Kusama had gone on record saying he hadn’t ruled out Jemaah Islamiyah. When reporters asked him why the extremist group hadn’t claimed responsibility for these attacks, he suddenly ran out of time and promised to answer more questions later. Mariko wished she could call him and tell him to stop saying stupid things that the department would burn for.

Out in the corridor, the elevator dinged, and as the doors slid apart there came a clucking of six or seven merry voices. The tai chi class. Mariko sheathed her Inazuma blade and quickly collected her things. As she did so, she saw she’d received a voice mail from an unknown caller.

She listened to the message as she rode the elevator back down to her mother’s apartment. “Detective Oshiro, this is Captain Kusama,” the little speaker said. “I want you at headquarters right this minute.”

She checked the time stamp on the message. Twenty right-this-minutes ago.

Great, she thought. Yet another wonderful day in the life of Oshiro Mariko.

*   *   *

By the time she rolled in to post, Mariko’s eyelids felt like they were made of sandpaper. Her most optimistic estimate said she’d logged three hours of sleep. She paused before her reflection in the door and tried to make something of her hair. That was when she noticed the tank.

She turned around and blinked hard, but the tank was still there. It rested on its massive treads in front of the entrance to the Imperial Palace, which stood just across from TMPD HQ. The tank’s cannon pointed not straight ahead but angled benignly upward, as if to suggest that nothing was amiss, that perhaps the tank was parked there as a sort of curiosity, to give camera-happy tourists something other than the palace to shoot. But the truth was clear. There would be other tanks, one at each entrance to the palace, and maybe the National Diet Building too, or city hall, or the governor’s mansion. Paranoia had gripped the highest halls of power.