Cutting the bodies of executed criminals thrilled him too. A body could be essentially mutilated under the eyes of an appreciative audience, all in the name of gauging the edge and durability of a blade. The office suited him. He took supreme enjoyment in his work.
It was what had brought him here to the Fukuyama han prison on this chill morning, to test a sword for Lord Abe.
He watched the two eta corpse handlers set down the stretcher bearing the naked cadaver of a man. They removed the staring head from where it rested in the crook of its own arm. They lifted the body and lay it across the waiting sand mound, arranging it on its back between up thrust stalks of bamboo. This criminal had been beheaded early this morning by the prison’s executioner. Sadahiko regretted not having arrived soon enough to volunteer for the duty himself.
Lord Abe sat on the examiner’s mat in a handsome kimono bearing the oak leaf badges of his clan. He was flanked by the consultant inspector, the sword appraiser, and the young prison warden. The sandy execution ground was white with snow. Sadahiko stood out like a dark stain in his black clothes.
One of the assistants removed a bright sword from a long, lacquered box and presented it to him. It was of Kanenobu make. Very fine, though not so fine to him as his own blade, Tasogare.
He placed the cold steel to his forehead and snapped its naked tang into a plain wooden handle he kept for that purpose. Shrugging out of his haori jacket, he touched the back of the sword to the dead man’s chest, just under the breastbone (a suritsuke cut through the middle of the torso had been requested) and touched the sand and snow covered ground with his left hand, saluting Lord Abe.
Lord Abe nodded his assent to proceed.
Sadahiko rose to his feet. Grasping the sword in both hands, he planted his feet and drew it back behind his head, so that the flat nearly touched his posterior. He stared down at the headless body, focusing on the pale torso, already bisecting it with his eyes. Bodies retained fat in the winter, so the cut would not be easy. He contracted his hard muscles, and when all was in readiness, he dropped to a crouch, flinging the blade down before him with all the momentum of his body and a loud kiai yell.
The corpse collapsed inward at the torso like a broken board as the sword cut it in two. There was a satisfying ‘whack’ as the blade split the spine and buried itself a few inches into the sand below.
Sadahiko stifled a smile and withdrew the blade, wiping the blood from it and handing it to an assistant.
“A very fine sword,” he said. “My compliments.”
The corpse handlers each took a half of the body and hauled it to the litter where its head had waited impassively throughout the demonstration.
The officials moved forward and inspected the bloodstained mound while the assistant measured the depth of the cut.
“Very impressive, Kumada,” Lord Abe said. “It’s always a pleasure to see you work.”
Sadahiko bowed low.
“You do me honor, Lord.”
The assistant handed him a scroll and ink and he stooped to write his official report of the sword, which an engraver would later emblazon on its nakago.
“I should think that was a difficult stroke,” said the prison warden, obviously excited. “But you made it look easy.”
“It’s fairly easy,” said Sadahiko off handedly.
“What’s the most difficult cut to make? I’ve heard to sever the breastbone itself takes a lot of power.”
“Yes,” said Sadahiko, signing and dating his report and returning it to the assistant. “But to bisect a corpse at the waist is the most difficult.”
“Have you ever cut a man down in a fight, Kumada-sama?”
It was an impetuous question, and Lord Abe smirked. His expression said the warden was young and could be forgiven, but Sadahiko did not smile. The question stabbed him as surely as a spear point. For all his lauded skill, he had never cut a man standing in a life and death situation. The knowledge of it nagged him. There had never been an opportunity, he told himself. This was a peaceful time and except for the occasional drunken brawl or peasant uprising, there were no duels to be fought, no battles in which to test himself. He knew the whispers too—that his profession, for all its artistry, was not honorable. Some said the suemono-shi had only come about because the nobles themselves looked down on the practice of cutting corpses and hired men like him to do their testing as a rich man might hire the services of an eta butcher to slaughter an ox for his dinner.
“With his skill, you can be assured a man like Kumada has seen his fare share of fights, warden,” said Lord Abe, deflecting the warden’s query.
“Of course,” said the warden, sensing his mistake. He nodded to Sadahiko. “If I’ve offended you, I’m sorry.”
“There was no offense,” Sadahiko assured him tersely.
“Please, if you will, have tea with me at my residence,” the warden offered. “Have you eaten?”
“Thank you, but I have another client coming here tomorrow and the road from Fuchū has left me tired.”
Lord Abe cleared his throat.
“You’ll stay in the castle of course, Kumada.”
Sadahiko bowed.
“Ah!” said the warden. “Of couse, I can’t compete with Lord Abe’s hospitality, but you’re welcome to stay the night here.”
Sadahiko had no desire to tarry with this young buffoon, but a thought occurred to him that perhaps there would be more executions in the morning. He might convince the warden to allow him to stand in as decapitator as a further demonstration of his prowess. The thought of sating his obsession stayed his initial instinct.
“It would be more convenient …”
“By all means, Kumada,” Lord Abe said, perhaps too quickly. “Stay and rest up.”
For his part, Lord Abe had no great wish to have this corpse cutter staying in his castle. He had saved the young warden’s face, true, but the warden had done him a service unwittingly. Kumada Sadahiko made him uneasy, with his pale complexion and unblinking eyes. They only lived when they cut into dead flesh.
Let him stay at the prison tonight, in smelling distance of the killing ground. He would be more at home than in the castle.
* * * *
Red Dog knelt before the warden’s office, covered by three doshin guards and bound with chord. The cold numbed his bruised and trembling knees through his pale prison clothes. Blood stiffened invisible in his reddish hair.
The warden blew in his hands and rapped his gavel on the wood plank to the right of his tatami mat. He was a soft faced man, young, and new to the post. Dog had never seen him before.
“Prisoner,” he said. “You have violated the rules of this institution and murdered the latrine boss of your jail room.” He paused, then, and Dog glanced up from his mandatory obeisance (the snow was cold on the bridge of his nose) to regard the official.
Get it over with, already! he thought.
“I am curious, prisoner. You are a known bandit, but you have never killed anyone as far as the law is concerned. Yet scant hours after your arrest you strangle a fellow inmate to death. I would like to know your reason before I pronounce sentence.”
Dog stared at the younger man dully.
As far as the law was concerned he had never killed anyone? Well, that was because he had never been caught. It was a harsh world, and there were men in it who did not balk except to be killed. Dog had met a few men that way. He was one himself. He had necessarily spilled blood before, but no, not as far as the law was concerned. He had never killed anyone important.
How to explain his actions to this privileged youth? Had he any inkling of the goings on at his prison or in the world around his estate for that matter? After Dog was caught robbing a ferry at knifepoint on the shore of the Seto Sea (by old Jinza, the captain of the prison guard, of all people) he had undergone the usual treatment. First a sound drubbing around his middle in the drilling room with the arresting officer’s iron jitte, then a humiliatingly thorough strip search, a round o
f muchiuchi whipping that left his back singing, followed by the ishidaki torture when he’d refused to give any name other than Red Dog to the prison interrogator.
The torture had nearly done him in. He had knelt lashed to a stake all morning with six slabs of heavy stone on his lap while the interrogator demanded again and again to know his family name and han of origin. The sharp, dancing needles in his knees had melted into rivulets of liquid fire that coursed up and down his thighs, but he had borne it until the exasperated torturer gave in at last and grudgingly marked him down as ‘Bingo Inu’ in the ledger. ‘Bingo’ from the name of the neighboring province, and ‘Inu’—Dog. Funny how Jinza hadn’t recognized him … but he’d been little more than a boy the last time he was inside Fukuyama prison.
He had considered giving a false name to ease his suffering, but the pain of the pressing slabs had driven all creativity from his mind. He had nearly blurted out Kawaramono as a surname, but that would’ve cost him his head then and there. Kawaramono—‘dry riverbed people’—was the name they gave to the unclean ones who lived along the River Ashida. His people. The leatherworkers and the butchers and the corpse handlers whose undesirable professions spiritually defiled them, made them ‘eta’—the lowest of the low, not even allowed by law to cultivate rice in the fertile black riverbed dirt. Immediate decapitation was the only justice the untouchable son of an eta could expect.
So he’d held out.
But then, had it ended? No. Once put stumbling on dead feet among his fellow prisoners in the crowded lesser jail he’d found more of the same goddamned system. The prisoners themselves, led by the fat bastard of a dairyo and his eleven trustee officers had laid into him as soon as he arrived, shaking him down for money. They’d stretched him out and beat his ass black and blue with a hard plank bearing the prison rules when they’d found not so much as a brass mon tucked into his jaw or clenched between his buttocks.
He’d crawled off to one of the corners, every part of him tenderized by the rough morning’s treatment. All he’d wanted to do was curl up on the hard floor and sleep. He didn’t even care about finding himself a goddamned tatami mat.
Then, as shadows inched further along the floor, he’d begun to drift off, and he heard the latrine boss whisper to his assistant to ladle some piss into his miso and be sure the honyaku served it to him later on. He’d pretended not to hear, but he turned on his side and watched the man through slitted eyelids from then on.
Koda Moan, his name was, a lanky, wiry haired pickpocket with a foolish overbite, a brushy beard, and a sagging bag of a belly. He whispered too loud and laughed too long, and the droopy, fleshy wattle under his chin danced when he did either.
After hours of listening to the man’s grating laugh, Dog just hadn’t been able to stand it anymore. He’d surreptitiously unfastened his loincloth, limped up, and whipped it fast around Moan’s chicken neck from behind. He’d brought him face down onto the floor and driven both his shaky knees into the man’s back. Before anybody could raise the alarm or beat him away, he’d jerked Moan’s head back with a harsh crackle.
The other prisoners might’ve killed him if the doshin hadn’t heard the commotion, rushed in and pulled him out. Maybe it would’ve been better if they had.
Dog shrugged in answer to the young warden’s question. He breathed through his mouth. The fog of heat rose in the chilly air, backlit like a lightning cloud against the deepening shadows by the lantern light on the warden’s porch.
Just get it over with.
The warden frowned and sighed as though he had tried to help, as though any answer Dog might’ve given him would’ve made the slightest difference in his living or dying.
“Very well. Then you are sentenced to shizai. In the morning you will be beheaded, and your body will be used for o-tameshi.” Then, to the doshin guards, he said offhandedly, “Take him away.”
The policeman to Dog’s left cleared his throat.
“Pardon me, sir. Shall we place him in the death row cell, then?”
The warden looked aghast at being questioned.
“Of course! Where else?”
“Well sir, it’s just that … Minoru’s in there still, and he’s made a mess of the place.”
The warden seemed to recall something that vexed him.
“That damned monk … ! Well, we can’t put him back in the lesser jail with the other prisoners. They’d tear him to pieces. He’s only going to be there one night.”
The policeman bowed.
“Yes sir.”
Dog was hoisted to his feet as the warden rose, groaning and remarking about the cold, and retired to his warm office.
They led him shuffling across the twilight yard. He could hear someone chanting a Nembutsu over Moan’s body. Apparently he’d been popular with the other inmates, though Dog couldn’t see why. It sounded like it was coming from the lesser jail itself. The eta burial detail had probably left for the night.
Pray all you want over that scrawny son of a bitch, thought Dog. He knew how the eta disposed of prisoner corpses. Tossed them in the river, or by the side of the road as soon as they were out of sight of the prison. Let Great King Enma look for him in the muck. Dog’s only regret was that he hadn’t stuffed the fool headfirst down the latrine.
“Who is Minoru?” said one of Dog’s guards, when they were well on their way.
“That’s right, Gorobei’s been sick,” said another. “You’d better tell him, Kinpachi.”
“Jinza brought him in,” said Kinpachi. “He’s a kumoso monk. The eta villagers down on the river complained that their brats were disappearing. Three of ’em in all. Well, they started going missing around the same time Minoru started staying in a hut out in the woods. Turns out he’d been luring ’em in with his flute playing and snatching ’em.”
“What for?” said Gorobei.
“He was eating them.”
“What!” exclaimed Gorobei.
“Yeah. He’s completely crazy. He says he was a samurai but he died and came back as a jikininki and now he has to eat people.”
“Then why does he eat eta?” quipped one of the other guards.
They all thought this was worth a laugh.
The guard holding Dog’s rope gave his bonds a tug.
“That’s some cellmate you’ve got, Red Dog. Ready to meet him?”
“That’s not the worst of it,” said Kinpachi. “I kinda feel sorry for this one. That Minoru’s really made a mess of the cell.”
“How?” said Gorobei.
“He sits there all day playing his flute and sculpting little Jizō figures out of his own shit.”
Gorobei made a disgusted sound.
“Why the hell is he still here?”
“The warden doesn’t know what to do with him. He’s a monk, so he can’t be condemned to shizai, and his victims are all eta, so they might have to ship him off to Danzaemon for judgment. He’s waiting for word back from the bakufu in Edo.”
As they walked, they began to take note of the low, trilling sound of a flute.
“What in hell’s that?”
“That’s him! Minoru, playing his shakuhachi.”
“He’s allowed to keep it?”
“Take it from him if you want, Gorobei. It’s as filthy as he is.”
They turned a bend and came to the eastern corner of the compound, looking out on the white sand execution grounds and the low mound that had been used in the day’s o-tameshi demonstration. The ground seemed to glow eerily in the fading light, as though it had soaked up the blood of ghosts.
They drew up before the dark cell adjoining the grounds, and the flute cut off in the midst of its playing. The effect was like the cessation of a chorus of crickets in a foreboding wood.
Gorobei’s breath hissed.
“Creepy bastard,” he muttered.
As Gorobei stepped forward to let Dog in, the doshin’s face grimaced. Dog could smell it too. Rank and overpowering as an open trench, the heavy smell of excrement em
anated from within.
As Gorobei swung the door open, a dark, hunched shadow shuffled and stirred inside.
“Look!” said Kinpachi, giggling and reaching up toward the lamp to shine it inside.
“No, no,” Gorobei insisted, but too late, his grinning partner cast a spot of light into the cell, briefly illuminating a yellow skinned, bug-eyed figure with a bald pate and dark, shabby robes. The monk held up one thin arm against the sudden intrusion of light. That hand and arm were splotched with dried, muddy stains that matched the finger marks smeared on the walls in the corner in which the monk sat. Dark little figurines, half a dozen in all, were neatly ordered against one wall.
Gorobei pushed aside Kinpachi’s lantern and the scene was doused again in shadow.
“Gah!” exclaimed Gorobei, retching. “I feel for the poor eta that has to scrub that out.”
The others laughed at Gorobei’s reaction. Kinpachi roughly undid Dog’s ropes and shoved him inside.
“Enjoy your last night on earth, Red Dog!” he offered.
Gorobei slammed the cell door with a clatter, and the doshin shambled off across the yard, talking of sake and women as their voices faded away.
Dog limped to the far side of the cell and put his back in the opposite corner, pulling his sleeve across his face to hamper the stench.
The only sound for some time was the unhurried breathing of the two men. The cell would have been black but for the white ground visible through the crossed cell bars and a single shaft of moonlight that slid through the tiny window high up on the back wall and pooled on the floor between the two men. As it was, Dog could just make out the thin form seated in the filthy corner, pop eyes shining like the unblinking gaze of an old koi fish. Each man’s breath hung like fog and intermingled high in the moonlit space between them.
He did not know how long they sat in silence before the monk produced his shakuhachi and began to play again, a meandering tune that seemed to wend in and out between the wood bars of their cell.
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