Year of the Demon fb-2

by Steve Bein

  “No, Mariko. I’m out of the game for a little while. But I guess there are traffic violations in the parking lot too. I don’t know how important they are, but someone’s got to crack down on them.”

  “Take the rest of the morning off,” Sakakibara said, as abrupt as ever. He stood up to leave. “Get your heads clear. Then put all this crap behind you. Get it out of your mind so you can do your damn jobs. Frodo, I’ll see you at noon. Han, I guess I’ll see you when I see you.”

  “Yes, sir,” Han said. He stood up and gave the lieutenant a deep bow. “Thank you, sir. You taught me everything worth knowing about being a cop.”

  “Don’t get weepy on me.”

  “Sorry.” Han gathered himself and bowed again. “It’s been an honor, Lieutenant.”

  Sakakibara gave him a curt nod and walked out.

  Mariko finished her coffee and set it on the table with a loud clack. “Let’s go to my place,” she said. “I have something I want to show you.”

  • • •

  Han prodded Glorious Victory’s pommel with a single cautious finger. “Whoa. Are you sure you should keep this thing hanging over your bed?”

  “What’s the big deal? You’ve been here before. You saw my sword rack.”

  “Yeah, but not with the sword in it. I mean, look at the size of that thing.”

  Mariko rolled her eyes at him. “That’s not really what I invited you over to see.”

  He craned his head under the rack like a plumber peeking under a kitchen sink. “You’re sure these screws can take the weight?”

  “What are you, a carpenter now? Just read this, okay?”

  She handed him one of Yamada-sensei’s notebooks, with her thumb marking a page referring to Joko Daishi’s iron mask. He reached for it blindly, his eyes still on Glorious Victory Unsought. “Aren’t you afraid it . . . I mean, earthquakes and all . . . seriously, Mariko, hang it somewhere else.”

  “Where? Look around this great big penthouse of an apartment and show me another wall long enough to mount that sword.”

  Han didn’t have to be a detective to see her point. “Well, I don’t know . . . prop it up in a closet or something.”

  “Just look at the notes, will you?”

  She explained who Yamada was—who he was to her, who he was to the study of history—and then explained about his notebooks. “See, none of this stuff ever makes it as far as the public eye,” she said, “but I’m telling you, that mask is important.”

  “Even though I won’t see a word about it in any history book?”

  “Especially because you won’t see it in any history book. I think Yamada-sensei’s Wind and Joko Daishi’s Divine Wind are the same thing, and if I’m right, then they’ve been around for a long, long time. We haven’t seen the last of them, and we haven’t seen the last of that mask.”

  Han leafed through the notebook. “Are you for real? A five-hundred-year-old ninja clan in Tokyo?”

  “Maybe, yeah.”

  Han’s face lit up. “That is so cool.”

  “Men,” she said, accidentally reverting to English. “It doesn’t matter how old you get; you’re all just eight-year-old boys.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind.” Exasperation clung to her like a wet cloth. At least he was studying the notebook a little more closely now. Not much progress, but it was progress. “Help me look through all these boxes,” she said. There was no need to point at them; they were stacked four and five high along the back wall of her bedroom, taking up a lot of valuable floor space. “I need another pair of eyes on this stuff.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you get it? I should have seen the connection to Glorious Victory. I should have remembered it the second I saw the mask. If my memory was a little better, maybe they never would have stolen my sword in the first place.”

  Han looked up from the notebook. “You can’t beat yourself up over this kind of thing. If your crackpot ninja theory is right, then there was nothing you could do to keep them from breaking in.”

  He stopped himself for a second—maybe to think of something more comforting to say. Mariko could have used it. But no. “I mean, can you imagine what kind of totally badass tools they must have invented over the last five hundred years? Relocking a door chain from the outside would be, like, the tenth coolest thing they could do.”

  Great. The eight-year-old boy was back.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, Han, I’m feeling pretty fallible right now. I can’t afford to overlook details like this anymore. We’ve got a cult running around our city with high explosives. If these notes can help us find them, then I need someone else reading them, someone to help me connect the dots—”

  “And now that I’m not working as a detective, my workweek is about to get a whole lot shorter, neh?”

  Mariko sighed with relief. She felt the tension seep out of her shoulders. They were thinking along the same lines again, and that was a blessed thing. “I figured maybe a couple of nights a week?”

  Han flipped through Yamada’s notes again. “I don’t know,” he said. “Looks like pretty dry reading.”

  “Maybe over a few beers?”

  “Getting better.”

  “I’ll give you the play-by-play of my goaltending duties.”

  “Ow! Just kick me in the nuts and get it over with.” Han made a show of wincing. “First I get taken out of the game, and now you’re going to rub it in?”

  Mariko laughed. “Come on. You have to admit you’re interested, neh?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Me too.”

  GLOSSARY

  A-side: for SWAT operators, the front side of a building

  ama: traditional Japanese free divers, best known for diving for pearls

  ambo: ambulance

  Aum Shinrikyo: Supreme Truth Cult, responsible for the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995

  B-side: for SWAT operators, the side of a building to their left as they approach the A-side

  bizen: an unglazed style of Japanese pottery

  bokken: solid wooden training sword, usually of oak

  bushido: the way of the warrior

  C-side: for SWAT operators, the side of a building to their right as they approach the A-side

  CI: Covert Informant

  D-side: for SWAT operators, the backside of a building (or, for irregularly shaped buildings, the side opposite the A-side)

  daisho: katana and wakizashi together, the twin swords of the samurai; literally, “long-short”

  dono: an honorific expressing great humility on the part of the speaker, more respectful than -san or even -sama

  foxfire: magical lights said to be carried by foxes or fox-spirits

  Fudo: a Buddhist deity, typically depicted as an angry, red-skinned demon with sharp horns and fangs, often wielding a sword and a lariat

  gaijin: foreigner (literally “outsider”)

  geisha: a skilled artist paid to wait on, entertain, and in some cases provide sexual services for clientele

  gokudo: extreme, hard-core

  gumi: clan (as in Kamaguchi-gumi)

  haidate: broad armored plates to protect the thighs, usually of lamellar

  hakama: wide, pleated pants bound tightly around the waist and hanging to the ankle

  haori: a Japanese tabard (i.e., short, sleeveless jacket) characterized by wide, almost winglike shoulders, often worn over armor

  hazmat: Hazardous Materials Team; alternatively, hazardous materials and items

  Ikko Ikki: a peasant uprising, largely disorganized and only nominally Buddhist, whose political and economic influence endured for over a hundred years until the Three Unifiers quelled it in the late sixteenth century

  kaigane: a sharp, stiff tool with a blade like a spatula used by ama to pry shellfish from rocks and coral

  kaishaku: a samurai’s second, charged with virtually beheading him if he should cry out while committing seppuku

  Kansai: the ge
ographic region around Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka, and the locus of political power for nearly all of Japanese history

  kappa: a water-dwelling mythological being, humanoid with reptilian features, with a topless head and a water-filled bowl in place of a brain

  katana: a curved long sword worn with the cutting edge facing upward

  kenjutsu: the lethal art of the sword (as opposed to kendo, the sporting art of the sword)

  kiai: a loud shout practiced as a part of martial arts training, usually uttered upon delivering a strike

  kiri: a paulownia blossom, the emblem of Toyotomi Hideyoshi

  koku: the amount of rice required to feed one person for one year; also, a unit for measuring the size of a fiefdom or estate, corresponding to the amount of rice its land can produce

  MDA: methylenedioxyamphetamine, a hallucinogenic amphetamine

  Mount Hiei: a mountain overlooking the city of Kyoto, home to hundreds of monasteries and the traditional locus of political power for Buddhism in Japan

  odachi: a curved greatsword

  oyoroi: “great armor”; a full suit of yoroi armoring the wearer from head to toe; literally “great armor”

  Raijin: demonic god of lightning, thunder, and storms

  ri: a unit of measurement equal to about two and a half miles

  rikishi: sumo wrestler

  ronin: a masterless samurai (literally “wave-person”)

  Ryujin: dragon-god of the sea

  sama: an honorific expressing humility on the part of the speaker, more respectful than -san but not as humbling as -dono

  sarin: a potent neurotoxin

  seiza: a kneeling position on the floor; as a verb, “to sit seiza” means “to meditate” (literally “proper sitting”)

  sensei: teacher, professor, or doctor, depending on the context (literally “born-before”)

  seppuku: ritual suicide by disembowelment, also known as hara-kiri

  shakuhachi: traditional Japanese flute

  shamisen: traditional Japanese lute

  shinobi: ninja

  shoji: sliding divider with rice-paper windows, usable as both door and wall

  sode: broad, panel-like shoulder armor, usually of lamellar

  SOP: Standard Operating Procedure

  southern barbarian: white person (considered “southern” because European sailors were only allowed to dock in Nagasaki, which lies far to the south)

  sugegasa: broad-brimmed, umbrella-like hat

  Sword Hunt: an edict restricting the ownership of weapons to the samurai caste; there were two such edicts, each one carrying additional provisions on arms control and other political decrees

  tachi: a curved long sword worn with the blade facing downward

  taiko: an enormous drum; alternatively, the art of drumming with taiko

  temari: embroidered silk thread balls; alternatively, the craft of making temari

  tengu: a goblin with birdlike features

  Tokaido: the “East Sea Road” connecting modern-day Tokyo to modern-day Kyoto

  tsuba: a hand protector, usually round or square, where the hilt of a sword meets its blade; the Japanese analogue to a cross guard

  wakizashi: a curved short sword, typically paired with a katana, worn with the blade facing upward

  washi: traditional Japanese handmade paper

  yakuza: member of an organized crime syndicate; “good-for-nothing”

  yoroi: armor

  yukata: a light robe

  yuki-onna: a predatory winter-spirit that hunts on snowy nights, taking the form of a pale (usually naked) and very beautiful woman

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book required a lot more research than the last one, for many reasons. For one thing, it’s longer. For another, Mariko isn’t working on her own; as soon as I reassigned her to Narcotics, I signed myself up for more cop research. And of course there’s the obvious: I’m not a historian by training, and between Daigoro and Kaida, more than half of this book is historical fiction. Compounding that, Daigoro spends his time interacting with Toyotomi Hideyoshi, one of the most influential figures in Japanese history. When you put people like that in your story, you’ve got a certain obligation to get them right.

  The first thing to know about Hideyoshi is that Hideyoshi isn’t his real name. He doesn’t have a real name; he changed it many times over, as did many of the great figures of his day. This habit of theirs is enough to drive historians to apoplexy, and so even the most esteemed scholars of Japanese history resort to using just one name, usually the name the figure is best known by.

  But a Hideyoshi by any other name would still be a badass. He had so much working against him—he was born of peasant stock, he was so ugly that his nicknames were “the Bald Rat” and “the Monkey King,” and he showed no promise whatsoever as a fighter—yet he made himself the most powerful man in the empire. Through sheer force of personality, he earned his seat as one of the Three Unifiers, the three warlords who created the nation we now know as Japan.

  The other two Unifiers are Oda Nobunaga, who raised Hideyoshi from lowly manservant to one of his top generals, and Tokugawa Ieyasu, who was first a rival, then an ally, then a usurper. All three were brilliant strategists, each in his own way. Nobunaga is best known for his ruthlessness, Hideyoshi for his honeyed tongue, and Ieyasu for his patience. In brief, their stories run as follows: Nobunaga, who was so merciless that he could scarcely retain even the loyalty of his own family, saw great promise in Hideyoshi and elevated him to the rank of general. With him and a coterie of other now-legendary commanders, Nobunaga conquered a third of Japan.

  When Nobunaga was assassinated by one of his inner circle, Hideyoshi swept in to kill the traitor. He then pressured the emperor into making him samurai and appointing him as imperial regent and chief minister. Hideyoshi was no swordsman, but he was a cunning strategist and a negotiator nonpareil, and he crushed every warlord he could not recruit as an ally. Enter Ieyasu, whose preferred method was to sit back and allow Nobunaga and Hideyoshi to do all the heavy lifting. Then he ousted Hideyoshi’s heirs, appointed himself shogun, and established the greatest dynasty in Japanese history. Hence the mnemonic, recited in one variant or another in classrooms throughout Japan: Nobunaga mixed the dough, Hideyoshi baked the cake, and Ieyasu got to eat it.

  Because Daigoro and Shichio are my two lenses for viewing Hideyoshi, I have chosen to characterize him rather differently than you might see him elsewhere. In Kurosawa’s Kagemusha, for example, Hideyoshi is portrayed as a deadly serious samurai warrior. This is by no means unfair, for Hideyoshi desperately wanted to be thought of as noble and refined. He was fascinated by the tea ceremony, he performed kabuki, and fancied himself an accomplished singer. His palace, the Jurakudai, was real, and if there can be such a thing as an excess of elegance, this was it. But if Hideyoshi was pretending at nobility, he certainly was not pretending at being charismatic. By all accounts he was positively magnetic, but because Shichio is effete and Daigoro is highborn, they see my Hideyoshi’s charms as being quite coarse.

  Shichio himself is purely fictional, but homosexual relationships were common among men of Hideyoshi’s station and era. These ritualized relationships, known as shudo, usually coupled adults with young boys; grown men were not supposed to be penetrated (hence the tension in Shichio’s relationship with Hideyoshi). Mio Yasumasa is also fictional, but Hideyoshi certainly had high-ranking samurai advisers like Mio. I’m sorry to say that Mio’s death is based in truth; the method is called lingchi, and it is the origin of the proverbial “death of a thousand cuts.” We don’t know for a fact that Hideyoshi employed it, but we do know that he developed a penchant for cruel and elaborate executions.

  On that note, I should mention that including Mio’s torture was a considered choice. My agent and my editor found the scene quite disturbing—so much so that my agent was only willing to read it once, and my editor suggested that perhaps I ought to take it out. Obviously I didn’t.

  I chose to
keep the scene because of what the story arc demands, not because I think torture is cool. Quite the opposite: I joined the Campaign to Ban Torture years ago, and I remain a member of the Center for the Victims of Torture today. Milan Kundera suggested that the true measure of our morality lies in how we treat those who are at our mercy, and I happen to think he’s right. Regardless of whether or not you agree with me, I hope you will grant that I have not glorified torture here.

  Shifting from philosophy back to history, all of the military conquests I attribute to Hideyoshi in this book are true to life. Oda Nobunaga’s Sword Hunt was real, as was Hideyoshi’s, though on that count I must confess that I got extremely lucky. I don’t recall why I picked 1587 as the setting for Daigoro’s story in Daughter of the Sword, but it certainly wasn’t because I anticipated writing a second book, or that I planned to make the Sword Hunt a plot element in Daigoro’s continuing story. This was just one of those cases where you do your research and it gives you better ideas than you could have come up with on your own.

  The Wind is a fictional clan, but ninja clans did exist, and they were more active in the Kansai than in any other region. Despite what you may have seen in pop culture, samurai were not “the good guys” and ninja were not “the bad guys.” Shinobi (or shinobi no mono, the period terms for what we now call ninja) were the original secret agents, routinely hired by the great houses as spies, forward observers, assassins, saboteurs, and the like. Their clans trained them in a wide range of skills, by no means limited to martial arts; they also learned a wide range of professional skills, the better to blend in and take on any disguise as necessary.

  Incidentally, such disguises did not involve the trademark black bodysuit and face mask that we all know and love today. These would have been about as subtle as James Bond wearing a ghillie suit. The black garb that has become their emblem actually dates back to the theater; stagehands would wear all black, the better to go unnoticed as they moved certain props. (Stagehands do this in modern theater even today.) Somewhere along the line, a clever playwright needed to figure out how a ninja could sneak up on his protagonist, catching even the audience unawares. The answer was—like the ninja themselves—hiding in plain sight: just make one of the stagehands the assassin. The audience was delighted and a new tradition was born.