A slim Japanese woman in glasses and a business suit stared at him. She looked about thirty, which meant she was probably closer to forty, and sat across the room in a shabby, plain chair. She was reading Time magazine. She had beautiful legs.
He put his free hand on his forehead, felt its heat, then ran it down to his chin, which was sheathed in whiskers, two or three days’ worth. Yet he was clean. The Japanese had beat him unconscious, then in their thorough way cleaned him, sedated him, stitched him, and committed him.
“Oh, hell, where am I?” he said to no one, blinking at the brightness of the light, feeling deep pain behind his eyes.
He tried not to think of the loss, but the more he denied it, the more it hurt. An image of the perfect family came before his eyes, the little Yano unit, each committed totally to the other, the love that was duty that held them together.
It was all terrible, but the worst was Miko, the child.
Who could kill a child? he thought, and he felt killing anger rise and knew it would kill him before it would kill anyone else. The grief was like a weight on his chest, trying to squash all the oxygen from his lungs. He thought he might have a heart attack.
“Is there a nurse?” he said.
The woman looked at him.
“Sorry, do you speak English?”
“I was born in Kansas City,” she said. “I’m as American as you. My dad is an oncologist and a Republican and a two-handicap.”
“Oh, sorry, look, please get me a nurse or something. I need another shot. I can’t, it’s—it’s just, I don’t know.”
“Just relax, Mr. Swagger. You’ve been heavily medicated for three days now, I don’t think you need more medication. Let me call a doctor.”
She punched a button on a science-fiction control panel next to his bed, and indeed in a few seconds a staff doctor in a white coat with grave Asian seriousness came in. Pulse taken, eyes checked, head wound examined, Bob passed muster.
“I think you’ll be okay,” the doctor said to him in English. “You’re a pretty tough old bird. You have enough scars.”
“Really, doctor, I’m fine, it’s my—I need a sedative or something. I’m feeling very bad. I just can’t lie here. Can you get someone to release me?”
“The cops don’t want you free,” said the young woman. “The Japanese have very strict rules about certain things and you broke all of them and even invented some new ones.”
“I was a little out of my head. Come on, doctor, please?”
“Sorry, Mr. Swagger. You’re going to have to come to terms with it sooner or later. What you need is relaxation, peace and quiet, a good therapist, and your own country, your family, people you love and who love you.”
“I’d settle for an aspirin. Some kind of sleeping pill would be better.”
The doctor spoke in Japanese, then said, “I’ll give you aspirin for the pain.”
A nurse brought a tray with three white pills and a glass of water; Bob gulped them all.
Suddenly he was alone with the woman.
“You’re from Kansas City?”
“Yeah. I’m with the American embassy here in Tokyo. My name is Susan Okada. I’m head of the Bob Lee Swagger department. We specialize in deranged war heroes.”
“How’s business?”
“It was crappy for the longest time. Now it’s finally heated up.”
“Where am I?”
“The Tokyo Prison Hospital.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Yeah, it sounds so nineteenth century. You’ve been here for three days. Your wife has been notified.”
“She’s not coming, is she?”
“No, we didn’t see the need.”
“I just don’t—Ah, Christ, I don’t know what to say.”
“Well, we need a statement from you. Then we’ll get you to Narita and off you go. The Japanese won’t press charges.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“That’s not how they see it. They have you for assault, disrespect for a police officer, public drunkenness, disturbing the peace, and worst of all, for not being Japanese. They’ll put you away and forget about it. They’re not that interested in your version of things.”
“Oh, Christ. My head hurts. God, I feel so awful.”
“Have a drink of water. I could come back tomorrow, but I think you’d be better off to get this over with. The sooner you do, the sooner we get you out of here.”
“All right.”
She opened her briefcase, got out a digitized tape recorder, and moved close.
“All right, the whole story. Your involvement with the Yanos, start to finish. How you ended up punching cops at the scene of a fire.”
“At the scene of a murder. Okay…”
He told it, not enthusiastically or well, but doggedly, the whole thing, the visit, the sword, his drunkenness at the airport, his discovery the next morning, his arrival at the site, his recollections of the troubles there.
“I don’t recall hitting anybody. If I did, he hit me first.”
She put the tape recorder away.
“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “Anyway, I’ll have this typed up. Tomorrow, you sign it. I’ll have you on the one p.m. JAL to LAX and booked through to Boise. All right?”
“No, not all right.”
“Work with me on this, okay, Mr. Swagger?”
“You have to tell me. What is going on? What is happening?”
“The Tokyo police and the arson squad are investigating. We don’t know much, we don’t have good sources with the cops. And it’s not what is diplomatically classified Official American Interest, so they’re under no obligation to answer our queries.”
“Ms. Okada, six people, a family of decent, normal, distinguished, happy people, were wiped out. Were murdered. There’s such a thing as justice.”
“The Japanese haven’t confirmed anything about murders. The official line has to do with an unfortunate fire, a tragedy, a terrible, terrible—”
“Philip Yano was an extremely capable professional soldier. He was a paratrooper, for god’s sake, the elite. He’d been under fire. He’d commanded men under fire. He was one of the best in his country. He was trained to handle emergency situations. If his house caught fire, he would have gotten his family out. If he didn’t, something is very, very wrong. That, coupled with my presentation of a sword that he believed might have been of some value, adds up to a very complex situation, requiring the best of law enforcement efforts and—”
“Mr. Swagger, I am aware you are a man of some experience in the world and that you have been around the block more than once. But I have to say that in Japan we are not going to instruct Japanese official entities how to do their job and what conclusions to reach. They will do what they will do and that is it.”
“I cannot leave six people dead in—”
“Well, there is one thing you don’t know. There is some very good news. The child, Miko Yano. She is still alive, Mr. Swagger. She was at a neighbor child’s that night. Praise be to Buddha or Jesus H. Christ for small miracles, but Miko made it through the night.”
Narita Terminal 2 again.
The embassy van, driven by a uniformed marine lance corporal, scooted through the traffic, carefully found the lane to international departures, turned into a gate where a magnetized card reader permitted swift VIP access.
A police car, with two grumpy Japanese detectives, followed but did not interfere.
“They really want you gone,” said Susan Okada, sitting in the back with Bob, who was now rested, shaved and showered, and dressed in clean clothes.
“That’s fine,” said Bob. “I’m going.”
The van pulled up, and Bob and his new pal Susan got out, took an escalator up, and went through the vast gray room where the ticketing desks were. All the paperwork had been taken care of; he was waved through security, so there was no comic scene about the steel hip. And soon enough he was in the departure lounge at the gate. Through the windo
w, he could see the vast, blunt nose of the 747. The plane would board in a few minutes.
“You don’t have to sit here with me,” he said. “You must have better things to do.”
“I have lots better things to do. But for now, this is my job.”
“Okay.”
“I’m on the drunken idiot patrol. I have to make sure a certain guy doesn’t tie one on and end up in the hoosegow again. You get that.”
“I get that. No drinks ever. I get that. I only fell off the wagon once in years and years. I am a good boy. I thought I had the drinking beat.”
“How do you feel?”
“All right.”
“All kinds of people wanted to be here. The commanding general USMC Western Pacific wanted to be here. Evidently you know him.”
She gave a name.
“He was a battalion executive officer my first tour in Vietnam. ’Sixty-six. Good officer. I’m happy he did so well.”
“Well, he wanted to make sure you were well treated by everyone, that this went smoothly. I saw your records. I see why they think so highly of you.”
“All that was a long time ago.”
“We have a minute. Let me speak with you frankly.”
“Please do, Ms. Okada.”
“I am so frightened you will try to make something of this tragedy. Yeats said, ‘Men of action, when they lose all belief, believe only in action.’ Do you see what he was getting at?”
“I sound like a country-western hick, ma’am, and now and then I break a sentence like an egg, but it may surprise you that I am familiar with that quote, and I’ve read them other guys too, Sassoon, Owens, Graves, Manning, a whole mess of writers who thought they had something to say about war and warriors. I know who I am and where I fit in: I am the sort of man people like to have around when there’s shooting, but otherwise I make them very nervous. I am like a gun in the house.”
“Well, I don’t know about that. But you know where I’m going. You can’t let this become some kind of crusade. You can’t come back. You don’t know the rules here. The rules are very, very strange, and you could get yourself into a lot of trouble and make a lot of trouble for a lot of other people. You must make peace with what happened: it’s a domestic matter, the Japanese will handle it. There have been allegations of criminal behavior but no findings yet. You have to play by their rules. Do you see what I am saying? The Japanese have kicked you out and never want to see you again. If you come back, there won’t be a second chance. You could do hard time.”
“I hear you.”
“It may seem unjust to you, or unbearably slow, or corrupt, even. But that is the way they do things, and when you try to change their system, they get very, very angry. They are their system, do you see? And you can live here for years and not understand it. I don’t fully understand it.”
“Will you keep me informed?”
“No,” she said, looking him in the eye. “It’s not a good idea. Put it behind you, live your life, enjoy your retirement. You don’t need to know a thing about it.”
“Well, you tell the truth.”
“I’m not a bullshitter. I will not ‘keep an eye’ out on things. I want you to let it go. Let it go.”
“What about the girl?”
“She will be taken care of.”
“I have to—”
“She will be taken care of. That’s all you need to know.”
The flight was called.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s against my nature, but I will try. But since you don’t bullshit, I won’t bullshit. I feel obligated here.”
“What do you mean? You couldn’t have known—”
“It’s a war thing. I’m a war guy, he’s a war guy. His dad, my dad, war guys. Us war guys, we’re all connected. So I picked up an obligation. It’s something ancient and forgotten and not in existence no more. Lost and gone, a joke, something from those silly sword-fight movies. Something samurai.”
She looked at him hard.
“Swagger, what men in armor believed five hundred years ago is of no help or meaning anywhere in an American life. Forget samurai. They’re movie heroes, like James Bond, a fantasy of what never was. Don’t go samurai. The way of the warrior is death.”
15
TOSHIRO
What was samurai?
It wasn’t bushido, the way of the sword; he read books on that and found nothing that really helped. It wasn’t any of the other things—calligraphy, computers, automobiles, screen paintings, woodcuts, karate, Kabuki, sushi, tempura, and so forth, at which the Japanese had such eerie talents. And it didn’t just mean “warrior.” Or “soldier.” Or “fighter.” There was some additional layer of meaning in it, something to do with faith and will and destiny. No western word equivalent seemed to quite get it or express it.
Part of it was that kind of man, fascinating in himself, samurai. He wore a kimono. He wore wooden clogs. He had a ponytail. He carried a batch of blades. He would fight or die on a bet or a dime or a joke.
He was lithe and quick and dangerous. He was pure battle. He was USMC NCO material to the max, hard, practical, dedicated, if not exactly fearless then at least in control of his fear and able to make it work for him. If samurai was to be understood, it would be understood through him.
Bob watched movies over and over. He had a hundred of them, not just the ones the smart boys said were great like The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo and Throne of Blood and Ran, but movies nobody ever heard of in the West, like Sword Devil and The Sword That Saved Edo and Hanzo the Razor and The 47 Ronin and Samurai Assassin and Harakiri and Goyokin and Tale of a Female Yakuza and Lady Snowblood and Ganjiro Island.
He watched them on a DVD player in an apartment in Oakland, California, with bare wood floors, a thin mattress for a bed, and nothing else. Each morning he rose at five, ate a breakfast of tea and fish, then went for a six-mile run. He came back, watched a movie; then he read for an hour, on swords, on history, on culture, books he understood, books that seemed bullshit, books even on calligraphy. Then he ate lunch in one of a dozen Japanese restaurants nearby, because he wanted to be used to them, to their smell, their language, their movements, their faces; then he returned home at two, rested, watched another movie; then he went out to dinner, sushi usually, sometimes noodles, occasionally Kobe beef; after nightfall, another two hours of reading, then another movie.
There had to be answers in there somewhere.
Bob had never seen such grace. Their bodies were liquid, so malleable, so changeable, so flexible in subtle, athletic ways that defied belief. They could run and dodge and dip, pivot, feint, stop, change direction fast, all in wooden clogs. They carried the swords edge up in scabbards that weren’t even secured to the belt; in fact, indoors they took the long sword off and carried it around like an umbrella. Yet he noticed: no matter the movie, when they sat on the hard floor, they put the sword in the same place, to the left of the knee, blade outward, hilt just at the knee, grip angled at 45 degrees before them. They never deviated. That was the thing, the core of it: no deviation.
And they were fast. He’d never seen such speed. It was like they were oiled, and when they moved, they passed through air and time at a rate other mortals could barely comprehend. It began with some kind of draw, an uncoiling with blade, so that the sword came out and began to cut in an economy of movement. Sometimes you couldn’t even see the cut it was so fluid; sometimes it was a thrust, but more usually it was a cut, conceived from a dozen different angles, the cut hidden in a turn or a pivot, dancelike but never effeminate, always athletic. And always the conventions: the samurai usually fought against three or four at a time, and often when he would cut, the cut man, feeling himself mortally wounded, would simply freeze, as if to deny the end of life and stretch the final second out over minutes. The samurai would resheathe with some kind of graceful mojo, the sword disappearing with a piston’s certainty into the scabbard, then he’d turn and strut away, leaving behind a collection of statuary. Then they’
d topple, one after another.
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.