Kill the Shogun (Samurai Mysteries)

by Dale Furutani

  Kaze now had a few seconds before the muskets could be reloaded. He jumped to his feet and took a quick look down. A man in an officer’s helmet was furiously reloading his musket. Holding his sword in one hand and the scabbard in the other, he summoned all his strength, took two quick steps, and jumped into space.

  The officer was sure he hit the figure on the roof, so he was surprised when his quarry jumped up before the echoes of the musket died down. He was even more surprised as the man jumped off the roof. Sword and scabbard in each hand, with one sleeve of his kimono flapping behind him, the man looked like a tengu, a quarrelsome creature that was half man and half bird, and able to fly.

  While reloading his musket, he followed the arc of the man’s jump as he sailed over his head toward the canal. The man made it to the canal water with no distance to spare, entering the black water with a tremendous splash that threw water high past the edge of the canal. The water caught the pale moonlight, transmuting it from black to silver as it sparkled in the air.

  The officer finished loading his gun and ran to the edge of the canal. He couldn’t see the man, but he fired into the center of the splash, hoping to hit him. In seconds, other musketeers had run up to the canal’s edge, and a ragged volley of shots pierced the blackness.

  Some of the men ran down the canal to a bridge, crossed over, and lined the opposite bank. All the men were observing the dark water, waiting to see a head pop up. The officer reloaded his musket and waited along with the rest, hopeful to get another shot at the ronin. Even against the darkness of the water, he was confident he would hit the man’s head as soon as it broke the surface.

  But it didn’t break the surface.

  After many long minutes, the officer wondered if his shots or one of the other shots had killed the man after he entered the water. He ordered torches brought, and he told his men to secure boats and long poles, so they could probe the murky waters of the canal to see if they could find the ronin’s body.

  CHAPTER 11

  A piece of bamboo,

  small finger holes, a soft breath,

  and divine music.

  This is a disaster,” Hanzo said.

  “Well, it was your idea to take the money the ronin gave us and get a business,” Goro said accusingly.

  “Baka! Fool! It was your desire to spend the money on a spree. Now we have a business!” Hanzo replied.

  “A failing business! Why didn’t you check this? How can you buy a business without knowing about it? No wonder the former owner sold it to us! He saw a fool coming.”

  “You agreed to it, too. That makes you just as big a fool!”

  “So you admit that you’re a fool!”

  “I admit nothing. It’s just that—”

  The knocking at the door of the theater sounded like blows on a taiko drum, reverberating in the empty theater and causing the two peasants’ eyes to grow round with surprise.

  “Who’s that?” Goro asked in a whisper.

  “I don’t know. Go see.”

  “I don’t want to see. Why don’t you see?”

  “Why should I see? Why don’t you—”

  The knocks were repeated, even more insistently.

  The two men looked at each other.

  “Why don’t we both see?” Hanzo suggested.

  Goro nodded and followed his partner to the theater door. Goro removed the stick that acted as a lock and slid the door open a few inches. He gasped and jumped away from the opening.

  “What is it?” Hanzo asked.

  Pointing a shaking finger, Goro said, “Look!”

  Tentatively, Hanzo peeked through the open slit of the door. There, in the pale light that spilled out through the slit, Hanzo saw an apparition. It was in the shape of a man, with its kimono dripping wet and hanging loosely on its body. A sword was stuck in its sash, and its face was obscured by wet hair. Two eyes glowed out, watching Hanzo like a hawk watches a mouse.

  “What’s the matter?” the apparition said.

  Hanzo started, but then recognized the voice. “It’s the samurai, Matsuyama-san!” he exclaimed. Goro put his head next to his partner’s, confirming the identification despite the figure’s appearance.

  “You look like a ghost!” Hanzo answered.

  The figure smiled.

  “Don’t smile!” Hanzo said hastily. “It looks even worse when you smile.”

  “Well, then, open the door and let me in, or I will be a ghost. If the authorities don’t see me, then the cold will kill me.”

  Hanzo slid the door open and allowed Kaze into the theater. Then he slid the door shut and locked it.

  “What happened?” Goro asked the samurai.

  “I went for a moonlight swim,” Kaze said. He had swum underwater to the darkness under the bridge. That allowed him to surface and take a breath. “I did most of my swimming underwater tonight.” Seeing Goro’s puzzled face, Kaze added, “I had to stay underwater or I’d have been killed.”

  “Killed! By who?”

  “By you, if you don’t allow me to get out of these wet clothes.”

  Kaze was amused. Behind the curtain that hung across the theater’s stage was another world. In a corner, bamboo baskets held wigs and small props. In the center of the backstage area, tatami mats were laid, with small chests that held makeup of various sorts. Along the walls were bamboo poles hung with costumes of all varieties. Kaze had selected a samurai’s costume, but much gaudier than any he would have actually worn.

  Hanzo took a small kettle from a firebox and poured Kaze a cup of tea.

  Kaze took the cracked cup gratefully, sipping at the bitter liquid with relish. “Oishii! Good!” he said.

  “So why did you have to go swimming, Samurai-san?” Goro said.

  “If I tell you, it may be dangerous,” Kaze replied.

  “The first time we met you, you said it might be dangerous. Didn’t we do good with that danger?”

  “You did very good.”

  “So tell us.”

  Kaze considered for a moment. He didn’t know if he could trust these two, but he needed a base of operations in Edo. He decided that he should tell the two men about the reward, not as a test, but because undoubtedly notice boards would spring up all over the city by morning. Now there was no advantage in keeping the reward a secret. “If I tell you, I must also ask you to resist the temptation of a thousand ryo.”

  “A thousand!” Goro spluttered.

  “Now, now, let’s not get excited about money we don’t have,” Hanzo said to his partner. “This samurai was kind to us and treated us with honesty and respect. No other samurai has done that for us. I think we should help him.”

  “Yes, but a thousand ryo …” Goro muttered.

  Scratching his chin, Kaze said, “Actually, I think if you can kill me, you can earn ten thousand ryo.”

  “Ten thousand ryo!” Now it was Hanzo’s turn to splutter.

  “This man is a devil,” Goro said to Hanzo. “For ten thousand ryo a man would kill his own beloved obaasan! If a man would kill his own grandmother, how can he expect us not to do something with him?”

  Kaze smiled. “You might find me a little harder to kill than your beloved grandmother,” he suggested.

  “Now calm down,” Hanzo said. “The samurai is obviously teasing us. No one could offer ten thousand ryo as a reward. That’s impossible!”

  “But with our business failing, even a few ryo would help.”

  “Is your theater in trouble?” Kaze asked.

  Goro put his hands to his head. Hanzo looked at Kaze and said, “We were cheated when we bought this theater. We were told it was a big moneymaker, and it was, but only because the Kabuki allowed women to do lascivious dances onstage. The Tokugawas recently banned that, so now we have to depend on actors to bring in the crowds.” He sighed. “Now the actors do plays that are like Noh dramas, but they’re not really trained in Noh, and the audience doesn’t seem too interested in it anyway. I was told the audience was mostly men, but wit
hout the women dancing, we seem to get only a few family groups. We don’t know what to do. We thought we’d just buy the theater and collect the money, but now we’ll lose everything.”

  Kaze shook his head.

  Hanzo sighed. “Well, we can settle this in the morning. Don’t worry, Goro and I won’t do anything to turn you in. We have a room at a boardinghouse near here. We’d invite you there, but it’s a small room and—”

  “Don’t worry,” Kaze said. “I’ll be quite comfortable here. We’ll talk in the morning again.”

  “All right,” Hanzo said. “Come on, Goro, let’s let the samurai sleep, and we need rest ourselves. We have to figure out what we’re going to do to save this failing theater, and with it our money.”

  Hanzo and Goro left, leaving Kaze alone in the dark theater with a single lantern to pierce the murky gloom. Kaze found a robe in one of the costume baskets, and he used it to cover himself as he stretched out on the floor. He blew out the candle and lay in the dark, thinking about his next moves and what he would have to do.

  As long as the Tokugawas thought he was the assassin, he would never be able to rescue the girl. If he stood on the street observing the Little Flower brothel, eventually someone would become suspicious and report him to the authorities. He didn’t have money or proper clothes, so he couldn’t walk into the brothel, pretending to be a customer, to look for the daughter of his Lady. In its way, the Little Flower Whorehouse was as tough a fortress to crack as mighty Osaka Castle itself.

  As Kaze lay in the darkness, he became aware of a tiny patch of starlight high on the wall. It came from a vent on the back wall of the theater that allowed smoke from lanterns and hibachis to escape. A bamboo lattice covered the vent, keeping out birds and bats, but between the bars, Kaze’s sharp eyes were able to make out individual stars in the sky. Without a pattern to guide him, Kaze wasn’t sure what stars he was looking at, but it comforted him to know that, through those tiny holes in the bamboo lattice, the stars that had accompanied him on all his journeys were once more looking down at him.

  From the lattice grill, Kaze also heard the faint, plaintive sounds of a bamboo flute, the shakuhachi. The high-pitched, breathy notes of the flute floated above the crude roofs of Edo and wove themselves through the starlight. Kaze didn’t know the tune being played, but he did know it was a song of loss and sadness. He closed his eyes and allowed himself the luxury of dropping his guard for just one moment, immersing his being in the slow rhythm of the music.

  Kaze thought of the story in Uji shui monogatari, which told of Fujiwara Yasumasa, who was walking across a desolate marsh one moonlit night. To while away the time, he started playing his flute. Unknown to him, a dangerous bandit was hiding in the underbrush, waiting to kill and rob him. Through the mastery of his flute playing, Yasumasa mesmerized and overwhelmed the robber, charming him into submission as he fell under the flute’s spell.

  Kaze snapped himself to attention. He did so not because he had heard a sound but because he realized he was in a state of reverie where he would miss a small sound, if there was one to hear. Not hearing such a sound could cost him his life. He was not afraid to die, but he wanted his death to have meaning, and being killed because you dropped your guard while listening to flute music was not a meaningful death. Kaze drew his sword closer to him and thought of the death of Takeda Shingen.

  While besieging Noda Castle, owned by Ieyasu’s clan, Shingen heard that a flute player played each night from the castle walls. While he played, both sides stopped fighting and listened to the plaintive melodies. Shingen decided to hear this music and had a place set up for him near the castle walls, behind a reed screen. A musketeer saw the preparations and made preparations of his own.

  The musketeer set up his gun so he could shoot at the reed enclosure, even in the dark of night. He waited until the flute player was in the midst of his concert and fired one bullet into the enclosure. By luck, he struck Shingen himself, although at the time the musketeer didn’t know it. Mortally wounded, the wily Shingen gave orders to keep news of his death hidden for three years.

  Now Kaze was accused of trying to kill Ieyasu in a similar manner, with a musket. Kaze was almost insulted that they thought he used a musket. Any peasant could be trained to point a musket in the direction of the enemy and fire.

  The muskets were the “gift” of the hairy barbarians from Europe, and Kaze wished they were banned from warfare in Japan. A peasant armed with a musket could kill a superbly trained samurai, turning the value of years of samurai training and swordwork upside down. Kaze’s own training had been intense, especially during the formative years when he studied under the Sensei, his teacher.

  Almost all Japanese art was taught by a master to a pupil, from painting to dancing to fencing. Over and over again, Kaze was drilled in the physical actions that somehow turned into mental and spiritual lessons. Over and over again.

  The pattern of attack and defense was repeated endlessly. The purpose was to teach Kaze proper kata, or form, and Kaze’s Sensei seemed to have an inexhaustible fund of patience as he persistently practiced the same moves. First Kaze attacked the Sensei using the same precise sequence of moves; then Kaze was in turn attacked by the Sensei, repeating the exact moves Kaze made. As Kaze increased his mastery of the sequence of attack and defense, the Sensei drastically increased the speed, dancing their repetitive ballet at ever higher levels.

  Once, when he was ten, Kaze was frustrated by the endless practice, and he dared to swing his sword with anger. Another would not have detected the emotions behind Kaze’s sword cuts, but the Sensei immediately stopped the practice. He glared at Kaze and said, “Baka! Fool!”

  The Sensei never swore, but he made the word “fool” sound as scornful and withering as any torrent from a drunken samurai. Kaze’s face burned red, and he hung his head in shame. It was the Japanese way for the novice to learn from the master, but it was also the Japanese way for the novice to accept the pace of teaching set by the master, and never show frustration.

  “I’ll teach you the most important thing you can learn in a fight,” the Sensei said. “Until you defeat yourself, you cannot defeat others. If you fight from anger, frustration, or pride, you cannot win. You must fight from nothingness, letting the sword seek its own path. If you let your emotions rule you in a fight, even if you overcome your enemy, you have not won. Can you understand that?”

  “I think so, Sensei.”

  “As you get older, you’ll have more cause for rage. It’s a sad part of life that the passage of time is the accumulation of pain. When that happens, you’ll not only understand this lesson better, you’ll have more need of it.”

  Kaze had taken that lesson to heart, and had never again vented his emotions through his sword.

  This particular practice was an especially long and tedious one. Finally, convinced that Kaze had learned as much as he was going to that day, the Sensei stopped. Gratefully, Kaze sat on a log at the edge of the meadow they were practicing in and he reached for a jug of water. “Mizu, Sensei?” Kaze asked.

  The old man, who seemed hardly winded, gave a negative nod of his head. Kaze uncorked the jug and poured the water down his throat. The water was cold and sweet, as refreshing as water taken directly from a mountain stream. The Sensei was six times older than Kaze, but Kaze had stopped being embarrassed that the old man seemed to have resources of stamina that far exceeded his own. The wellspring of the Sensei’s strength was his spirit, not his body, and Kaze knew he had a considerable amount of growth before his spirit could even approach his teacher’s.

  “Can you tell me something, Sensei?” Kaze asked after he had caught his breath.

  The Sensei nodded his head slightly. Kaze knew this was his signal to continue.

  “I practice each pattern until I learn it precisely. If I meet someone in a duel who recognizes what pattern I’m using, won’t it give them an advantage to know my next move?”

  “Yes.”

  After a silence,
Kaze dared ask for more elucidation. “Then why do I practice the patterns so precisely?”

  “So you can learn to be creative in your fencing.”

  Kaze pondered that, and at the risk of being called stupid by the Sensei, he asked, “But won’t the precise repetition of patterns kill any creativity I have?”

  “Then whatever creativity is inside you deserves to die. You practice patterns to learn technique. That technique is necessary to allow the freedom to create. You cannot project power without a sound base, and you cannot show creativity without a mastery of basic technique. When you have mastered that technique, you can transcend it and combine the basic moves of sword fighting into marvelous new combinations. But first you have to be so grounded in basic technique that you no longer have to think of it. That is what makes a master fencer.”

  “When do you think I’ll master technique?”

  “Never.”

  Kaze sighed. Dealing with the Sensei was sometimes like talking to a Zen priest. Seeing the frustrated look on the boy’s face, the Sensei said, “Why do you think I say that?”

  Kaze thought for several minutes, then finally said, “Because you are constantly practicing, despite your years with the sword. When you spar with me, you are not only teaching me, you are also reviewing all the basic subtleties of the patterns. You are correcting me, and at the same time reminding yourself. You always say that no man can achieve perfection, he can only strive for it. If that’s true, then the striving must continue forever, because our goal is to achieve perfection of mind, spirit, body, and sword.”