Linnear 01 - The Ninja (20 page)

He went over to the window, gazed out at the forest of cryptomeria and pine.

‘Do you know,’ said Itami, ‘that hidden within that forest is an ancient Shinto shrine?’

‘Yes,’ Nicholas said, turning round. ‘My father told me.’

‘Have you seen it?’

‘Not yet.’

‘And did you know, Nicholas, that within that shrine is a park filled with mosses?’

‘Forty different varieties, I think, Aunt. Yes, I know of it but I am told that only the priests of the shrine may look upon it.’

‘Perhaps it is not so difficult as that, Nicholas. I cannot imagine you wanting to become a priest. It does not suit you.’ She rose, said unexpectedly, ‘How would you like to take me there? To the shrine and to the park?’

‘When? Now?’

‘Certainly.’

‘But I thought-‘

‘All things may be possible, one way or another, Nicholas.’ She smiled and called: ‘Cheong, Nicholas and I are going for a walk. We won’t be long.’ She turned back to him and reached out her hand. ‘Come,’ she said gently.

They walked silently until they came to the verge of the forest. There they turned right along the grass for perhaps two hundred metres, when she abruptly guided him inward. He found that they were on a narrow but well-worn track through the trees and underbrush.

‘Well, Nicholas, you must tell me how you like your training at the dojo,’ Itami said. She walked carefully in her wooden geta, using the point of her lacquered paper parasol as a walking stick to help balance her on the uneven ground.

‘It is very hard work, Aunt.’

‘Yes.’ She waved a hand as if dismissing this statement. ‘But this is not something that you had not anticipated.’

‘No.’

‘Do you enjoy all the hard work?’

He glanced up at her, wondering what she was getting at. He had absolutely no intention of telling her of the growing animosity between himself and Saigo. That would not do at all. He had not even told his parents. ‘At times,’ he said. ‘I would wish to move on.’ He shrugged. ‘I am impatient, I suppose.’

‘There are times when only the impatient are rewarded, Nicholas,’ she said, stepping over a tangled root. ‘Here, help me the last few feet, won’t you?’ She gave him her arm. ‘Ah, there we are.

They were in a clearing, and as they moved out from the shade of the pines, Itami lifted her parasol over her head and opened it. Her skin was as white as snow, her lips deep red, her eyes as dark as nuggets of coal.

The deep lacquered wall of the temple was awash in shimmering sunlight so that he was obliged to squint until his eyes accustomed themselves to the brightness. It was as if he were gazing at a sea of gold.

They began to walk along the crushed limestone gravel, a blue-white stippled path that completely encircled the temple; one could tread it forever, never getting closer to or farther away from one’s goal.

‘But you have survived,’ she said softly. ‘That is gratifying.’ They had reached the verge of the steep wooden steps up to the bronze and lacquered-wood doors which stood open, shadowed, silent, hunkered down comfortably as if waiting for something or someone to arrive. They paused there. She put a hand on his shoulder, so lightly that if he had not seen it, he might not even have felt its weight there. ‘I had grave doubts when your father came to me, requesting that I help gain entrance for you in a suitable ryu.’ She shook her head. ‘I had no choice but to acquiesce and honour dictated that I made no comment of my own, but I was concerned.” She sighed. ‘In a way I pity you. How strange your life will be. Westerners will never fully accept you because of your oriental blood and the Japanese will despise you because of your occidental features.’ Her hand lifted into the air like a butterfly and her forefinger gave him a fragile and fleeting touch on the point of one cheek. She stared at him. ‘Even your eyes are your father’s. Her hand dropped to her side; it was as if she had never made the gesture. ‘But I am not so easily fooled.’ She turned her implacable gaze away from him and said, ‘Let us go inside and pray.’

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ Itami said.

And he had to agree. They stood beside a slow meandering brook which tumbled down across moss-covered rocks from a height of perhaps two metres, certainly not more. Everywhere was green, even the water, even the pebbles. To Nicholas it looked as though there were four thousand species of moss here instead of the forty.

‘And peaceful,’ she continued. ‘It’s so peaceful here. The outside world does not exist. Gone.’ She folded her parasol in the shade of the overhanging cryptomeria. She inhaled deeply, her small head thrown back. ‘It is as if time itself had dissolved, Nicholas. As if there had been no twentieth century, no expansion, no imperialism - no war.’ She closed her eyes. ‘No war.’ He watched her closely until her eyes flew open, staring. ‘But there was a war.’ She turned. ‘Shall we sit on this stone bench? Good. Perhaps the shogun - one of the Tokugawas, even - sat just here where we are. There. It gives one a sense of history, does it not? A continuity? A feeling of belonging?’ She turned to him. ‘But not you, I suspect. Not yet, anyway. We are alike in that respect. Oh, yes we are.’ She laughed. ‘I see by your expression that you are surprised. You shouldn’t be. We are both outsiders, you see, forever cut

off from that which we desire the most.’

‘But how can that be?’ Nicholas protested. ‘You are a Nobunaga, a member of one of Japan’s oldest and most noble houses.’

Itami smiled at him just the way a predator might and he saw her white even teeth, glistening with saliva. ‘Oh yes,’ she breathed, ‘a Nobunaga, indeed. But that, like a great deal else in Japan, is merely the exterior: the gorgeous lacquered coat which hides the rotting hulk underneath.’ Her face was no longer beautiful, squeezed as it was by the anguish she felt. ‘Listen well to me, Nicholas. Honour has fled us here; we have allowed ourselves to be corrupted by the Western barbarians. We are a despicable race now; we have done such hideous deeds. How our ancestors must shudder in their graves, how their kami must yearn for the final resting rather than the return to this - modern society.’

Her voice had risen somewhat and now Nicholas sat quite still beside her, allowing the air to cool. But she would not or perhaps could not rest now. It had been difficult, he suspected, for her to begin this. But, once she had overcome the initial inertia, nothing could stop her.

‘Do you know what the zaibatsu are, Nicholas?’

‘By name only,’ he said, once more uncertain of the ground she had put them on.

‘Ask your father to explain the zaibatsu to you one day, will you? The Colonel knows a great deal about them and you should know, too.’ Then, as if it explained it all, she said, ‘Satsugai works for one of the zaibatsu.’

‘Which one?’

‘I hate my husband, Nicholas. And, do you know’ - she laughed shortly - ‘only your father knows why. It is so ironic. But life is ironic. It’s a devil withholding from you what you desire the most.’ Her tiny hands were clenched like baby fists in her lap. ‘What good being a noble Nobunaga when I must forever carry with me the shame of my great-grandfather? My shame is as inescapable to me as your mixed blood is to you.

‘My great-grandfather left the service of the shogun when he was twenty-eight to become a ronin - do you know what that is?’

‘A masterless samurai.’

‘A warrior without honour, yes. A brigand, a thief. He turned mercenary, selling his strong capable arm to the highest bidder. Enraged by this unseemly and dishonorable behaviour, the shogun sent men out into the countryside to track him down, and when they finally did, they adhered to the order given by the shogun. No seppuku for my great-grandfather; the shogun would not grant him an honorable way to die. He was carrion now; no longer a bushi. They crucified him as they did the scum of the land.

‘In most of those cases, the offender’s entire family is destroyed - the women and all the children so that his family line, his most prized possession, would be stripped from him. Not this time, however.’

‘Why?’ Nicholas asked. ‘What happened?’

Itami shrugged and smiled wanly. ‘Karma. My karma which forms the backbone of my life. I rebel against it; it makes me ache, and at night I cry. I am ashamed to say that. I am a bushi, a samurai woman, even in this day and age. Some things time cannot alter. My blood seethes with ten thousand battles; my soul resonates to the sweep of the katana, its blade, its fearful shades of steel.’

She stood up, the parasol blossomed like an enormous flower. ‘One day you will understand this. And remember. It is difficult now at the ryu. Do not interrupt me. I know. But you must never give it up. Do you hear me? Never.’ She turned away from him, the soft pastels of the parasol blotting out the smouldering passion in her black eyes. ‘Come,’ he heard her say. ‘It is time we returned to the world.’

‘This is Ai Uchi,’ said Muromachi. He was holding a bokken in his hands. Seven students, Nicholas’s group, stood in a precise semicircle around him. ‘Here at the Itto ryu, it is the first teaching; the first of hundreds. At Uchi means cut the opponent just as he cuts you. It is the timing you will learn here, the one that is basic to kenjutsu. One which you will never forget. Ai Uchi is lack of anger. It means to treat an opponent as if he were an honoured guest. It means to abandon your life or to throw away fear. Ai Uchi is the first technique and it is the last. Remember that. It is the Zen circle.’

This was the lesson Nicholas had first been taught upon arriving at the ryu seven years ago. He did not fully understand it yet he never forgot it. And in the time that followed, as he practised with a cold fury the thousand cuts of the katana under Muromachi’s tutelage; as he learned the moral teaching of kenjutsu; as the knowledge piled itself upon him with dizzying rapidity, he was ever to think of that first lesson and, in pondering it, feel a calmness, stepping into the eye of the storm each time that storm threatened to overwhelm him.

And he repeated the thousand cuts over and over, feeling as if his arms and his legs were wearing grooves into the air until, at last, his reward manifested itself, when his sword became no sword, his intention became no intention and he knew that that first lesson given to him by Muromachi so long ago was in fact, the highest knowledge.

Still, he was not satisfied. He was thinking of this late one afternoon after practice when he felt a presence in the room. He looked up but saw no one. The room was deserted and yet he could hot get it out of his mind that someone was there. He stood up and was about to call out when he thought it might again be several of the boys lying in wait for him and he kept quiet, not wanting to give them any degree of satisfaction.

He began to move around the room in the dusk. The far side of the empty dojo was streaked with dusty sunlight as red as blood, washed in the industrial haze lying low, its tendrils creeping up Fuji’s majestic slopes. Rapidly, his assessment changed. While he was quite certain now that someone was there with him, it also came to him that this person meant him no harm. How he had come to this conclusion he could not, have said; it was, rather, a purely automatic response.

Light spilled into the corner of the dojo, touching the edge of the clear-lacquered wooden railing, a fat slice of the raised platform behind it, leaving in dense shadow the corner beam. He was watching this pattern of light and shade when a voice said, ‘Good evening, Nicholas.’

The corner shadow had come to life, a figure stepping out of its concealing pocket, into the light. It was Kansatsu.

He was a thin, slight man, his stiff bristly hair already white. He had eyes that never appeared to move yet took in everything at once.

He made absolutely no sound as he came down off the platform to stand in front of Nicholas who, bare to the waist, felt totally tongue-tied. Kansatsu had barely said three words to him since he had come to the ryu. Now they were here together, and Nicholas understood enough to know that the meeting was not accidental.

He saw Kansatsu eyeing him, then the man stepped forward, his outstretched forefinger touching the purple and blue bruise just beneath Nicholas’s sternum on the left side.

‘These are very bad times for Japan,’ Kansatsu said. ‘Very sad times.’ He looked up. ‘The war was joined because of economics and our imperialism dictated that we expand beyond our islands.’ He sighed. ‘But the war was ill advised for all that, for it stemmed from greed, not honour. The new Japanese adds the gloss of bushido to his actions, I am afraid, rather than allowing his actions to evolve from it.’ His eyes were sad. ‘And now we pay the price. We are overrun by Americans, our new Constitution is American and the entire thrust of the new Japan is to serve the American interests. So strange, so strange for Japan to serve such a master.’ He shrugged. ‘But, you see, no matter what happens to Japan, bushido will never completely perish. We begin to wear Western business suits, our women wear their hair in the American manner; we adopt the Western ways. These things do not matter. The Japanese is like the willow, bending in the wind so that it should not break. These are merely outward manifestations of our desire now for parity in the world. So, too, do the Americans unwittingly serve our purpose, for, with their money, we shall rise more powerful than ever. Yet we must ever look to our tradition, for only bushido makes us strong.

‘You wish to become one of us,’ he said abruptly. ‘But this’ - he pointed to the bruise that had been inflicted by Saigo -‘tells me that you have not been entirely successful.’

‘Success will come in time,’ Nicholas said. ‘I am learning not to be impatient.’

Kansatsu nodded. ‘Good. Very good. Yet one must take the necessary steps.’ He put his fingertips together in front of him, began to walk slowly across the dojo with Nicholas beside him. ‘I think it is time that you began to work with other sensei. I do not want you to give up your very valuable work with Muromachi; rather I want to add to your current schedule.

‘Tomorrow you will begin to work with me,’ he said, leading Nicholas across the darkened room, ‘in haragei.’

Nicholas would always separate his relationship with Satsugai into two distinct sections. The specific point of demarcation was the zaibatsu party he attended with his parents. It was, of course, quite possible that this changing perception was strictly a function of his own growing up. On the other hand, he had tended to believe that it was just as much a matter of what transpired there that night.