Kage: The Shadow

by John Donohue

  As I say, it’s pretty standard. Except in Yamashita’s dojo. He doesn’t think it’s particularly realistic that someone who has dodged your first strike would remain seated and waiting for your follow up. Much more likely, he says, that the attacker would rear up and then back away, well out of range.

  Which means you have to chase him.

  It sounds simple enough, but Yamashita is always as interested in finesse as he is in functionality. In many ways, he doesn’t even consider them two separate things. So in his dojo, after the first cut, the swordsman has to lunge far forward while remaining crouched. Your opponent is standing up by this point and expects you to rise as well. So, my teacher explains, you do the opposite and pursue him from the lower position, driving forward while remaining alert to the possibility of counterattack.

  It sounds easy, but is difficult to pull off. The crouching position is awkward, and it takes time to get the knack of using your muscles correctly. If you rely too much on the left foot to propel you, you tend to topple forward, providing a dangerous gap for your opponent to exploit. Too much right leg, and you drag yourself forward and can’t move fast enough or far enough to be effective. In years past, when Yamashita demonstrated the technique, it looked as if he was being jerked across the floor by an invisible wire: a feral gnome bent on your destruction. His posture was impeccable, and his hips drove him forward while his legs worked smoothly together to close the gap between him and his opponent, his eyes intent and his sword boring in for the kill.

  The visual memory of that attack burns in my brain like the afterimage of a lighting flash. I work every day to replicate it. That day, I had demonstrated the basic idea and a less terrifying version of the move itself to the men and women at the seminar. They watched me coldly, nodding as I shot across the floor. I could see the thought flash across their eyes: if he can do it, I can. Then I began what for those people was probably one of the most unpleasant hours of their lives. Because the only way to begin to learn something like this is through repetition.

  I had them lurch back and forth across the dojo floor. The line of trainees completed the awkward trip. “Good,” I commented flatly. “Again.” They churned across the floor once more. When they got back, more than a few began to stand to take some of the strain off their legs. I shook my head but didn’t say a word, just swept my arm back in the direction that they had come. Off they went.

  After thirty minutes or so, their faces were flushed with effort, their palms sweaty on the handle of their wooden training swords. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sarah blow a strand of her fine brown hair away from her eyes, draw a focusing breath, and stoically continue. She needed no prodding.

  Breath control was second nature to most of these people, but even so I heard some gasps. I knew that their leg muscles felt as if they were on fire. But I kept them at it. It wasn’t just that as long as they did this exercise I didn’t have to worry about what else they might try to pull on me. It was because my teacher and his teachers before him and now, I suppose, even I, believed that the best learning takes place at the white hot juncture where the body and mind are thoroughly fatigued. And as I looked at the trainees, I sensed that some of them were starting to make the move their own.

  That’s what training in the martial arts is about.

  After a few more tortuous minutes, I called a break. I wanted to burn these people, not break them. They stood up gladly and walked around the room, blotting their foreheads with their sleeves, waiting for the muscle cramps to ebb a bit. I edged over to Sarah.

  “How’s it going?” I asked quietly.

  “I don’t know what you had planned for later tonight, Burke, but dancing is definitely out of the question.” She smiled.

  “The Irish don’t dance,” I informed her.

  “Come on,” she protested, “I’ve seen those girls in those fancy little dresses jumping around. What’s it called?” I had recently taken Sarah to a feis, a festival that featured Irish step dancing, bagpipes, and other forms of Celtic torture.

  “Step dancing,” I told her. She nodded silently at my answer, as if her point were made. “But did you ever notice,” I continued, “that when they dance, they keep their arms pinned to their sides?”

  “So?”

  “That’s because in the old days, when the English lords would make the peasants dance, the Irish knew that they had to do it, but they decided that they would refuse to enjoy it.”

  Sarah looked me up and down, quietly pensive. “It explains so much about you, Burke,” she concluded. Then I saw the laughter in her eye and knew I was being teased.

  The seminar wound its way through the morning. We worked hard with bokken, the oak swords that are the basic training weapon here. We also did some empty-hand techniques, stressing joint locks and pressure point techniques that made the nerves jangle. It wasn’t totally new stuff to most people in the room—trainees in arts like iaido or aikido or kendo can see some faint hint of their styles in what Yamashita does. But there’s a difference: a harder edge, a more concise motion—it’s difficult to explain in words. To see it revealed clearly, you have to experience it. Which can be a problem. In the Yamashita-ha Itto Ryu, my master’s system, a full-bore demonstration usually leaves someone moaning on the ground.

  The demo had to come eventually, of course. It was what they were all really here for. They’d heard about Yamashita; they wanted to see the real deal. But so far, all they got was me. I could tell it was bugging them. Yamashita Sensei was there, of course. He drifted along the edges of the room, silent and contained, but you could feel him and sense his energy. Martial artists at a certain level of training can pick up the psycho-kinetic energy called ki . We all emit ki, but it viscerally pulses off someone like my teacher. You can suppress it somewhat or, if you’re really good (and Yamashita is) you can ramp up the energy projection until even the dimmest pupil can feel it.

  He was doing it on purpose.

  As the men and women here today trained, they felt the pulse of Yamashita’s ki, his energy, washing over them. Yet he stayed in the background, content to let me run the class. And what did they sense from me? I’m not sure. Most of them were probably too caught up in trying to master what I was showing them, in trying to look good in front of Yamashita. That kind of thing tends to dim peripheral awareness. In any event, they were glancing occasionally between the two of us as if comparing. Average looking white guy versus Asian master whose energy field was pinging off them like sonar. Who would you watch?

  Eventually, Yamashita looked at me and nodded. It used to be that he gave me a great deal of verbal direction. He said he was compensating for the damage done to me by all that studying for my Ph.D. in Asian History. He didn’t need to say much to me anymore.

  I called the class to order. They sunk attentively to the left knee, which permits everyone to see the instructor and hear his words. “OK,” I said. “You’re looking good.” Many of them looked like they had been soaked with a garden hose, but they were all hanging in there. I liked that. “Relax for a minute.” They settled in a rough circle around me and sat with crossed legs on the hard floor.

  “We’ve been working this morning on various things—movement, sword work, some nerve points. In lots of ways, it’s a sampling of a continuum of aspects in the system we train in here.” I winced inwardly at the word continuum. Over the years, I’ve tried to lose some of my pointy-headedness, but I guess Yamashita is right—I have been damaged. I saw one guy smirk slightly at my choice of words. I didn’t respond to it, but an idea was forming in the back of my mind.

  “Most modern martial arts forms tend to focus their training on a limited range of techniques,” I told them. It was nothing new to them. I could see that in their eyes. “At the higher level—where many of you are—you’ve got to expand your practice to include the integration of other techniques, other perspectives.” I held up my hands, fingers splayed, and then joined my hands together. “Meld them.” I began to walk arou
nd the circle a bit, making some eye contact with individuals.

  “The exercise we practiced this morning that was based on mae,” I continued, “is a case in point. Depending on how you play it, it’s got elements of sword-drawing and weapons use, of aikido-like entering techniques, and then the potential for an almost limitless series of applications using strikes or locks or throws.” I watched them carefully as I spoke. There’s a well-honored dictum in the martial arts world that people who talk about technique can rarely do technique. First, I had used an egghead word like continuum. Now I was going on and on, making some points that had to be patently obvious to people with their experience. So I watched their eyes. Some were expressionless, but I saw one guy—the same person who had smirked—looking at me with just the type of aggressive skepticism that I needed.

  “Now let’s take a look at the application, OK?” I saw a few satisfied nods around the circle and got the message—it’s about time. When I gestured to my smirking friend, he rose eagerly to his feet in a smooth, powerful motion. His look told me that he had been waiting for something like this all day.

  I made the rest of them back up and widen the circle. There was no telling how this would go. My opponent and I sat about one and a half meters apart from each other, just out of attack distance. As we settled down into the formal sitting position known as seiza, I held up my hand. “You want to wear kote?” I asked my opponent. They’re the padded mitts that protect the hands and wrist in arts like kendo. They come in handy sometimes.

  He looked at me pointedly. “I don’t see you wearing any.”

  I nodded.

  He smiled tightly. “I’m fine, then.” He was probably in his late twenties. His hair was cut short and you could see powerful cords of muscle anchoring his head to his neck. This guy was built. He was also taller than I was—not a surprise, since most men are. He thought that when I offered the kote that I was asking him a question. Maybe he thought I was being overly conscientious. Or perhaps I was trying to needle him. There was probably some aspect of all these things at work. Mostly, however, I was just playing for time, getting a good look at him, registering the length of his arms and legs, and figuring out my options. It wasn’t a particularly fair tactic. It’s what Yamashita calls heiho—strategy.

  We took our places and prepared. Usually, the senior person serves as attacker, but since I was demonstrating the full application of the technique, my partner would start. We sat for a moment, breathing quietly, wooden swords at our left sides. The man sitting across from me on the floor seemed calm. Confident. Contained.

  His sword began to move. I had been watching him and the others all morning. They were all pretty good. So I knew that if I lost the initiative here, his sword would have swept across me. At his first twitch, I had already begun to move.

  My bokken swept in an arc across his face, forcing him to pull back. I scrambled forward in the crouch we had practiced and he shot up and backwards to avoid the pressure I was bringing to bear. This much was standard, almost scripted, and everyone in that room expected it. But now the interesting stuff was going to happen.

  Because once my opponent stood up and got slightly out of range of my sword tip, he had a variety of options. His attack could come in many forms. The trick in doing something like this wasn’t just in mastering the awkward series of scrambling motions we had practiced, it was in being able to cope with what would happen once your moves brought you into the radius of your opponent’s weapon. Like now.

  I tried not to give him the option to think too much by continuing to jerk myself forward in that low crouch, my sword seeking a target. He parried and backpedaled, and I could see the awareness in his eyes, his realization that whatever he was going to do would have to be lightning quick, because I was moving in, and if he didn’t do something I was going to churn right through him.

  He moved slightly to his right as I came forward and he snapped his sword down at my left shoulder in a quick, hard motion. I whirled in toward his blade, simultaneously moving my left shoulder out of range and bringing my own sword around to beat down his weapon. The wood shafts barked on contact. But he was pretty good: he held on and kept trying.

  His impulse was to get the sword’s blade back up for another try at me. He went with the force of my parry, sweeping his bokken down and then up in a counterclockwise sweep that was designed to bring his weapon into the high position, ready for a strike.

  As his arms came up, I shot beside him in what the aikido people call an irimi, or “entering” movement. Now we were both facing in the same direction. I used my left hand to grab his neck from behind. I squeezed hard. It’s not that I was going to make much headway against those muscles; it’s that people hate to have their head or neck held in any threatening way.

  He jerked his head to his left as if trying to look over his shoulder—it’s a reflexive action—but he also moved to try to break my hold at the same time. As movements go, it was OK, and perfectly understandable. But for that one split second he had lost focus on his sword. I was still beside him and his right arm was stretched out, gripping the haft of the wooden sword.

  I lifted my bokken, the point straight toward heaven, and then brought it down vertically, slamming the butt into the cluster of nerves on the inner edge of his right forearm.

  It’s a funny feeling. Sort of. I heard him gasp and then the bokken fell out of his hands. I dumped him on the ground and put the tip of my own sword about an inch from his nose. He wasn’t stunned by the fall and his eyes crossed slightly as he focused on the tip of my weapon.

  I moved away carefully, taking three steps backward to bring me out of range, and bowed formally to him.

  Yamashita strode forward. He picked up my opponent’s sword and looked around the room. “So…” he commented to the watchful trainees. “Application is always more interesting than rehearsal, neh?” I saw some heads nod ruefully. In more than one face, I saw a dawning gratitude that someone else had been selected to serve as a training partner. Yamashita moved toward the man I had put on the floor. He got up, but I knew that he wasn’t going to be able to use his right arm for a while. His eyes bore into mine. For the first time that day, I let my own eyes bore back into a trainee’s eyes. Shoulda used the kote, bud.

  Yamashita watched the silent exchange. “What we have seen here is a lesson with two aspects. Like a sword blade, there are two sides, omote and ura, the front and the back, the obvious and the hidden.” He canted the wooden sword in his hand to show one side of the blade, now the other. I saw some frowns from the group as they failed to follow his logic.

  Yamashita saw it, too. He sighed. “Omote. Burke Sensei has clearly demonstrated how the technique you began to train this morning can be finished in a match. It is not the only application, perhaps,” he said and paused to give me a subtly arch look, “perhaps not even the most elegant. But certainly effective.”

  Heads nodded, and Yamashita stood there for a minute, saying nothing. The lights of the dojo made the wooden floor gleam and, if they seemed to make his eyes deeper and darker, they also made his shaven head shine in imitation of the hard surfaces of his world.

  Finally, someone raised a hand. “Yamashita Sensei,” the question came. “What was the second lesson?”

  My teacher looked up and regarded the expectant circle of trainees. He smiled slightly. “Ah. The hidden lesson?” He looked around. “You spent all your time waiting for me. Doing what Burke Sensei said, but waiting for me. The wise warrior keeps himself hidden, in the shadows. Kage. You know the word?” Heads nodded.

  “Just so,” my master finished. “My pupil keeps himself in shadow. Like most people, there is more to him than meets the eye.”

  The lesson was over.

  3 Tales

  I was talking to a bunch of mystery writers about the realities of fighting: how it works and the toll it takes. And how long it takes to recover. The overfed guy was incredulous.

  “A week!” he protested, his eyes blinki
ng in outrage. The conference room was a soothing beige and the hotel’s mammoth air conditioning units kept the desert heat from seeping into the building, but I felt a bit warm anyway. The fluorescent ceiling lights played on the lenses of the man’s round steel-rimmed glasses. He had a big mustache that helped balance out his jowls and he held a hardcover book to his breast, front cover out, so everyone could see. Look. This is mine. I wrote it.

  I nodded and held my hands up to calm him. “A week to ten days,” I repeated. The rest of the audience murmured in displeasure as well.

  “But I can’t have my main character laid up for that long,” the writer continued. “It would destroy the pacing of the novel!”

  I nodded in sympathy. “Sure.” But it seemed that they wanted something more from me. I looked around the conference room at the fifty or so people whose eyes were sharpened in concern. I began again. “I’m not telling you how to write your books,” I pointed out. “But the fact is, when you a take a good beating, you can figure that you’re going to be like the walking wounded for at least a week. Trust me, in the real world, people don’t take punishment like that and bounce back right away.”

  They were all deeply disturbed. They had been raised on Hollywood’s version of combat. Most had never been in a real fight. You could probably stun three quarters of the people in the room into immobility with nothing more lethal than a good hard slap to the face. These folks were mystery writers. Their fictional activity dragged them over just a little into my world but its rules didn’t mesh well with theirs.

  I could see that the other panelists for this little talk were eyeing me uncomfortably. When the conference organizers invited me to come to Arizona’s premier mystery and thriller writers’ conference to speak about the reality of unarmed fighting, I think they had something else in mind. Tales of derring do. Nifty tricks. Lethal uses of toothpaste.