Daughter of the Sword: A Novel of the Fated Blades

by Steve Bein

  Mariko nodded. Ko sucked on his cigarette and the end glowed red. “I understand,” he said, “that my predecessor cut you a lot of slack. That will cease. I’d cut you from the detective squad if I could, but as you’ve undoubtedly figured out, I need cause for dismissal to do that. So far you haven’t provided it. So far you’ve been a good little girl.”

  Mariko felt like a lizard on a rock. Her eyes stung, her skin was so hot she thought it might crackle, and somewhere far overhead there circled a hawk that liked feeding on lizards.

  “I see here that you destroyed department property Wednesday night,” said Ko. “A stun gun.”

  “Destroyed and paid for, yes, sir. It’s not cause for dismissal.”

  “Indeed not.” Ko sucked on the cigarette and exhaled a thin jet of smoke. “Patrolman Toyoda reports that you were abusive with your power.”

  “Toyoda’s a whiner who doesn’t like being outrun by a girl. You saw my request that he be suspended and censured?”

  “I did. You’ll address me as ‘sir’ when you’re in my office.”

  Mariko balled two fists behind her back. “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re way off base on this ridiculous cocaine story,” he said. “The bōryokudan don’t sell cocaine. Nor do they stand for anyone else selling it on their turf. Period.”

  “Until now, sir.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I have reason to believe one of the yakuzas is looking to change the game. Sir.”

  Ko snorted. “Why would he do that? They keep the hard stuff out of the country, we go easy when they sling more pedestrian fare. That’s the truce. We don’t like it but we live with it. You think they want to change that?”

  “I’m a detective, sir. I go where the evidence leads me.”

  “Evidence?” Another snort, this one jetting two cones of smoke from his nostrils. They bloomed up as they hit his desk and made Mariko think of an anime dragon. “All you have is the word of some tweaked-out speed freak.”

  “With all due respect, sir, the dealers know a lot more about what’s happening on the street than we do.”

  “Hardly a ringing endorsement of your police work. Tell me, have you cultivated any yakuza contacts in all your long years of service?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “More than I have?”

  Mariko hated rhetorical questions. She hated people who asked them, and hated it even more when they sat and stared and waited for an answer. At last she rolled her eyes and said, “No, sir.”

  “And why not?”

  Again with the rhetorical questions. “Because you’ve been on the force a hell of a lot longer than me. Sir.”

  Ko gave her a sickening little grin. Despite all her years in the States, Mariko had never quite figured out exactly what they meant by shit-eating grin, but she wondered if this was it. In any case, it was the kind of patronizing little grin that made her want to shove Ko’s face in a pile of shit.

  “These bōryokudan contacts of yours,” he said, his tone even more belittling than the grin, “have they spoken of an impending expansion into the cocaine trade?”

  “Not yet, sir.”

  “Nor have mine. And, as you say, mine are rather more extensive than yours, neh? You’ll forgive me if I take their silence more seriously than the word of some desperate junkie you managed to drag in.”

  “Sir, if a lone yakuza were looking to build himself a bigger empire, the rest of the bōryokudan wouldn’t know about it—”

  Ko gave her a dismissive wave of the hand. “Forget it. The fact that you were even given the chance to apply to Narcotics is just asinine. You ought to know your place. Grow your hair out. You look like a dyke.”

  “Perps can grab long hair, sir.”

  He went on as if she didn’t have a mouth. “Isn’t it enough for you that you made sergeant already? Isn’t it enough that you’re the only woman detective in Tokyo? Come to that, you’re the only woman detective I ever heard of, and I’ve been wearing the badge twenty-two years. And you’re practically gaijin to boot. You’re lucky you can get a job waiting tables in this country. You’re an alien in your own land, Oshiro. You’d think you’d know to be happy with what you’ve got.” He snorted two more jets of smoke at his desk. “Sergeant and detective after only four years on! How you made it that far is beyond my reckoning.”

  “I’m a good cop, sir. That’s how I made it this far.”

  “It’s not proper. Administration, yes, I could see that. Even upper administration. It’s not unheard of; I’m sure you can type as well as anybody. But if I had my way, your only role in this station would be to serve the rest of us tea and coffee on demand. Believe me, as soon as you give me cause, I’ll have you doing just that.”

  Now Mariko’s face was sweating, not because of the office radiator but out of anger. “Go ahead,” Ko said, meeting her glare through a haze of smoke. “Say something. Give me cause to demote you. Or don’t. I can be patient. You look at me like I’m a cracked old man, but my ears are sharp. If there’s even a whisper that you’ve broken protocol, I’ll hear it. All I need is the allegation. In this department, that’s enough.”

  Mariko’s jaw was set, her lips pressed into a thin line. “Don’t expect to hear anything,” she said. “I’m going to keep on being a good little girl. Sir.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not. What’s certain is, you won’t be making Narcotics under my command. You’ll serve out the remainder of your Narc probation. Then, rest assured, you will be denied your transfer, and I’ll have you working low-end property crimes for the rest of your career. And because you could do with some practice with cases like that…” He pulled a pale blue folder out from the middle of a stack of papers and dropped it on the front of his desk. The wind it stirred up scattered white ashes from the ashtray. “You’ll take the Yamada case. Old guy out near Machida. Says someone tried to steal his sword.”

  “Sir, like it or not, I’ve got eight more weeks on Narcotics before you start handing me the shit cases. I’ve got a right to work legitimate drug busts until then.”

  There was that shit-eating grin again. “Special request from Machida PD. Entitles me to pick anyone I like. Lucky you.”

  Mariko said nothing. She picked up the folder and walked out.

  6

  Swords, Mariko thought. Bōryokudan violence is swelling, we’ve got a dead policewoman and no leads on who killed her, cocaine threatens to hit us like a typhoon, and my priority is supposed to be stolen swords.

  No, she thought. One sword. An almost-stolen sword. A purported attempt at stealing a sword. Not only was this not a narcotics case, but Ko didn’t even have her investigating a crime. This was an aborted crime, a past possibility of a crime.

  She took the train to Yamada’s place. She could have commandeered a ride in a squad, but even that might be seen as misappropriation of department resources, and Mariko didn’t want to risk it. She could be patient too. There were a lot of cops in the precinct; Ko would only get busier as time went on, and then she’d see if his ears were as sharp as he claimed.

  The ride to Machida took almost an hour, the buildings neighboring the train tracks becoming ever shorter, ever smaller as the distance grew between Mariko and the city center. Within the first fifteen minutes the train car had so few people that she could move her elbows away from her ribs, and soon after that she could see from one end of the car to the other. While waiting on the platform for a transfer, she’d had time to make a phone call, during which she learned that Machida’s department was tiny, that they’d recently lost their lone detective to retirement, and that as yet they’d found no one to replace him. Even better, Mariko thought. Now I’m playing spare tire to the investigation of an almost-crime.

  Not for the first time, she wished to hell Lieutenant Hashimoto hadn’t retired. Not that he’d had much choice. Like Mariko, the man had no idea how to do anything halfway. Twenty-six years of eighty-hour workweeks had taken their toll, until finally he’d passed o
ut in his office and woken up to a doctor telling him he was a near case of karōshi. As the train clacked along, Mariko thought about how strange that word was. Karōshi: death from overwork. What did it mean about Japanese culture that they had a word for that? How could a society survive where so many people worked themselves to death that they had no choice but to come up with a name for it? The Americans had no equivalent—but, then, the existence of the term drive-by shooting was every bit as biting a commentary on their culture. Only in a place of unremitting violence could people invent vocabulary to separate this kind of shooting each other from that kind of shooting each other.

  And Mariko had chosen the land of karōshi over the land of the drive-by. What did that say about her? There was something so classically Japanese about it, preferring suicide to a random shooting. The samurai once debated whether there was any honor in winning a battle by resorting to firearms. Unlike a sword or an arrow, a musket ball was random, and the true follower of Bushido was honor-bound to kill using only his own talent. Better to die by seppuku, some said, than to claim the empty victory of the gun. Of course, the ones who said that were the ones the musket balls had torn apart by the score.

  Now and then people still talked about the samurai spirit. Mariko wondered if she had it, and if it had ever been anything more than sheer stubbornness. No—stubbornness plus a willingness to endure more than the other guy. Mariko was good at that part. It was the only way to beat guys like Ko: she’d outlast him. Even if it killed her, she’d outlast him.

  She found she could not enjoy the sunshine, nor the cloudless sky, nor Machida’s relative verdure compared to downtown. The pale blue folder in her left hand still smelled of cigarette smoke. She flipped through it for Yamada’s address and found the house easily.

  Yamada Yasuo, aged eighty-seven, retired, sole resident. No criminal record. Whatever career he’d retired from was lucrative enough for him to afford his own home, a luxury Mariko could never aspire to. Presumably widowed, and an accomplished gardener, for when she reached the house, she found Yamada snipping a huge pink chrysanthemum from its bush beside his front stoop.

  “Yamada-san?”

  The old man turned around and smiled. His hair was as short as electric clippers could make it, and in the sun it shone like a million tiny points of silver light. He was kneeling—the flower he’d snipped was low on the bush—but even so she could tell his back had a slight but permanent hunch. He wore slacks and a sweater the color of milk tea, and his face was dotted with liver spots. The skin of his hands and face was as wrinkled as any Mariko had ever seen.

  “Why, hello,” he said.

  “I’m Detective Sergeant Oshiro, TMPD. I’m here to ask you some questions about your recent attempted theft. Have you got a minute?”

  “Of course. Do come in.”

  He beckoned her with a wave of the head, and with clippers and chrysanthemum blossom in one hand, he made his way toward his front door. Now that he was standing, she found him to be shorter than she’d expected, not ten centimeters taller than she was herself. His hunch had stolen some of his height. His feet found each step carefully, which surprised Mariko, for he’d stood up from kneeling quickly enough, and he seemed quite fit for his age. When he reached the front door, she discovered why he moved so slowly. He fished in his pocket for his house key, and, finding it, he bent down so that his face was no more than a finger’s length from the doorknob. Only then could he fit key to keyhole.

  “You’re legally blind?” said Mariko.

  “None too delicate, are you, Inspector?”

  Mariko felt her cheeks warm. “No, sir. Beg your pardon. I’ve got a grandmother who’s almost blind too. She still does sashiko, but she has to plot the thread patterns by touch.”

  “Ah. My doctor says I’d do better to let my fingers do some seeing for me, but I prefer to use my eyes while I still can. Please, come in. Let’s sit.”

  Yamada’s home was a sliver of the past. His entryway, which still housed a shallow wooden shoe rack, had a lower floor than the rest of the house. The only furniture in his sitting room was a broad table not even knee-high, surrounded by four gray zabuton. The floor was tatami, the walls were lined with books, and the bowl-shaped ceiling light was the only electrical device to be seen. Even the light was a relatively recent addition to the house, if the ceiling plaster was any indication: a straight line, almost exactly the same texture as the rest of the ceiling and yet not quite, led from the lamp to the wall, trace evidence from where they’d run the new wire. There were dead bugs in the light’s glass bowl, but the bookshelves were dusted and the gray cushions free of stains. The room smelled of tatami and old paper. A clock ticked loudly on the other side of the room.

  Mariko said she would stand, but Yamada insisted, so Mariko slipped out of her shoes, padded into the sitting room, and settled herself on a zabuton. Yamada spoke to her from the kitchen as he prepared a pot of tea. “He came for the sword last night,” the old man was saying. “In a car, if that’s relevant. A smaller one, by the sound of it.”

  Mariko wrote all of this down, more out of a habit of thoroughness than anything. “What makes you think this person came to steal the sword?”

  “I can’t think of anything else here worth taking,” said Yamada, entering the room now with both hands holding a tray. On the tray were two teacups—traditional, without handles—a steaming pot, and the big pink chrysanthemum. The tea and the blossom blended their perfumes beautifully.

  Mariko didn’t make a habit of contradicting witnesses or victims as she questioned them, but she couldn’t help thinking that a sword was most definitely not worth stealing. What possible use could a person have for a sword in the twenty-first century?

  But she voiced none of this aloud. Instead she said, “May I see the sword, sir?”

  “Tea first,” said Yamada. His hands found cup and pot handle with ease—could he see them, or had he memorized where he’d set them?—and he poured two small cupfuls of pale green tea.

  Mariko sipped hers. As they drank, she asked the usual questions: What time did this car come by the house? What happened next? Did this person actually enter the home, or was it only an attempted entry? Can you describe the person? Was he or she alone?

  Yamada answered all of them, though Mariko sensed he was holding something back. She tried varying the questions, repeating them from different angles, but could not get past his reticence. She couldn’t decide whether he was deliberately concealing something or whether it was simply a difference in mannerisms between his generation and hers.

  At last she concluded that Yamada was a traditionalist. The old-style tea table and cushions, the absence of any stereo system or CD player, the tatami mats in the first room of the house: all of these were reminiscent of an older time. Yamada volunteered nothing that he was not asked, and not everything that he was asked, but Mariko thought this had to do with growing up in the last generation that still believed in the sanctity of silence.

  As Yamada led her upstairs to his bedroom, where he kept the sword, Mariko noticed there was no television in the house. It was not unusual for the blind to have televisions—her grandmother had one—but Mariko suspected this man hadn’t thrown out his TV when his vision faltered. More likely, she thought, that he’d never owned one. There was no obvious place in the house to put one, for one thing, no media cabinet or TV stand now used for some other purpose, and the fact that he still wound that clock ticking so loudly in the sitting room told her he still kept things he couldn’t get much use of now that he was nearly blind. But more than this, Mariko thought it impossible that anyone could have read so many books if he spent any time at all in front of the tube.

  Yamada didn’t even have a computer, which was less surprising—Mariko’s grandmother didn’t have one either—and yet more jarring, because Mariko couldn’t imagine her life without one. Just another generational gap, she supposed.

  “Here it is,” Yamada said. The bedroom smelled like its tata
mi floors too. The bed was not, as she’d predicted, an old-style futon, but rather a Western-style mattress on a hip-high frame. Easier to get in and out of, she guessed. Above the bed, on a black lacquered rack on the wall, was the sword.

  He went to it, took it down from the wall, and handed it to her. It was surprisingly heavy, and much bigger than she’d expected. But then, she’d never held a real sword before. She’d seen them in museums and castle tours as a girl, of course, and in truth she’d always wanted to open the glass cases and pick them up. It was strange to hold one now, sort of a girlhood fantasy brought to life. A tiny part of her wondered what that meant about her. Saori’s girlhood fantasy was to have a pony.

  “Unsheathe it,” Yamada said.

  She obliged him, laying the polished, cord-bound scabbard on the mattress. The sword’s naked steel reflected everything in the room, distorting and stretching the images. Mariko could hardly imagine fighting with it, but as soon as that thought entered her mind, she immediately sensed how easy it would be to cut through bone and muscle with a blade this big. And of course the samurai that fought with such weapons were assuredly larger than Mariko’s fifty kilos and 165 centimeters. The sword might not have been all that big to them.

  “Impressive,” she said, hefting it.

  “It ought to be. It guides the forces of destiny.”

  A moment passed before that sunk in. “The forces of destiny?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sir, are you suggesting that this sword is magical?”

  “That’s one word for it.”

  Mariko returned it to its sheath. “And that’s why the thief came to steal your sword?”

  “Why, of course.”

  “Right.” She didn’t bother setting the sword back on the wall rack; she just left it on the bed. “And you said you didn’t actually see the thief enter the premises?”