Death at the Crossroads

CHAPTER 1

“Are you ready to die?”

The young samurai’s face was a mask of anger, and spittle flew from his mouth as he issued his challenge. Three of the other four passengers in the tiny boat hugged the gunwales, bent back by the young swordsman’s words. The fourth, the object of the samurai’s fury, sat calmly at the back of the boat, near the oarsman, who had stopped rowing as the confrontation started to escalate.

“Well? Why won’t you answer? I am a student of the Yagyu school of swordsmanship, and I have challenged you!”

The muscular man in the back of the boat took the time to wipe a bit of spit that had landed on the back of his hand with the sleeve of his kimono before answering. His other hand held a single katana, a samurai’s sword, in a plain black scabbard. He was clearly a samurai, but his head wasn’t shaved in samurai fashion, and he had the appearance of a ronin, a masterless samurai who wandered about looking for employment.

A few moments before, a group of five had gathered by the river-bank to be ferried across the stream: two samurai, two peasants, and a merchant, all thrown together by their common need to cross the river. Instead of politely introducing himself to the older samurai, the youth had immediately started talking about his training in the Yagyu style of fencing and his prowess with the sword. At first the peasants and merchant had found the talk entertaining, because skill with a sword was valued above all else in a warrior culture. But soon after embarking on the voyage across the river, the youth had become increasingly boastful of his swordsmanship, asking the other samurai to confirm that the Yagyu school of fencing was the greatest in the land. When the middle-aged samurai remained silent, the youth had become agitated, taking the older man’s silence as a judgment on both his school and his own skill as a swordsman. Standing in the bow of the flat-bottomed boat, the young samurai faced the older man, his hand on the hilt of one of the two swords stuck in his sash.

“Why don’t you answer? Are you ready to die?” the young man screamed.

The other warrior looked at the aggressive samurai thoughtfully, his thick black eyebrows furrowing together into a V. He said, “A true samurai is always ready to die. But I am from a quite different school of fencing. Like Tsukahara Bokuden, I am from the ‘No Sword’ school of fencing, and I am quite certain a man of your character can be defeated by it.”

“No Sword?” the young man repeated. “That’s ridiculous! How can a samurai fight with no sword? Now you have pushed me beyond tolerance! I demand that this impudent insult be cleansed with blood. I challenge you to a duel.”

“All right,” said the older man. He pointed to a small island in the middle of the stream. “Boatman, stop there. It’s a good place for a duel.”

Nodding, but with fear on his face, the boatman sculled the boat toward the island. He stood at the end of the boat, both propelling and steering it with a single, two-piece oar that trailed the boat like the tail on a fish. When the boat hit the shore, the young man leaped out of the boat and landed on the sandy shore of the island. He immediately drew his katana, ran a few feet onto the island, and took an aggressive stance, with both hands on the hilt and the blade in the “aimed at the eye” position.

“Come on!” he shouted to the samurai in the boat. “Let’s see if this ridiculous No Sword school of fencing can defeat one who has studied with the Yagyu!”

The other man calmly stood up and handed his sword to the boatman. “Here, hold this,” he said. “For this duel I truly need no sword.”

The boatman clumsily reached out for the sword, releasing his grip on the oar as he did so. Before the oar could clatter to the bottom of the boat, the samurai caught it, lifted it out of the guides in the back of the boat that held it in place when it was used for steering and propulsion, and used it to push the boat away from the island.

“What are you doing!” the youth screamed.

“I am defeating you with the No Sword school of fencing. If you had truly studied with the Yagyu, you would know that fencing is more than just killing people; it is developing all your faculties, including your mind. Now, because of your stupidity and without using my sword, I can continue my journey and also eliminate the impediment of a troublesome character.”

The boat was away from the island and moving with the current before the young samurai could get back to the shore. “I think a cold swim will be excellent training for you,” the older man shouted as the youth started running along the shore. “Just as a bucket of cold water will dampen the ardor of amorous dogs, a dose of cold water will also be good for a young man too full of himself for his own good and the good of others.”

The swiftly flowing stream drew the boat away from the island at an increasing pace and, before the young man reached the final spit of land on the tiny island, the boat was much too far away to catch. Too angry to speak, the young man jumped about in rage in ankle-deep water, waving his sword and watching the boat draw away from him. He heard the sound that all samurai, caught up in their importance and honor, dreaded: The occupants of the boat were laughing at him.

Jiro the charcoal seller had many things on his mind, but death was not one of them. He was late, and his regular customers would scold him if they had to use branches and twigs in their hibachi instead of charcoal to heat water for their morning tea. Worse yet, if the Lord’s household needed charcoal, Jiro would be beaten if he wasn’t there to provide it. The Lord was neither patient nor understanding. Several villagers had felt the cudgels of the Lord’s men, and Jiro was not anxious to join their number.

Around him, mist clung tenaciously to the jagged folds that formed the ravines and valleys of the mountains. Through the low-lying white haze, the ragged black pines and reddish cryptomeria poked through the white curtain, looking like some enigmatic calligraphy of the gods, a message written with the slashing brush strokes of trunks and branches on a shifting silver paper.

The sun had been in the sky for half an hour, but its beams had not yet penetrated to the bottom of the steep-sided valley. In the blue gloom of this extended dawn, Jiro padded along a narrow trail, finding his way by habit and instinct as much as by sight.

Hung on his back was an enormous woven basket filled with charcoal. The basket was draped from his shoulders by twisted ropes made of summer grass and padded with torn-up rags. A line reached from the basket to a headband to help stabilize the load and to bear some of the weight. Jiro was naked except for a homespun loincloth, but despite the chill of the mountains and the morning, he was sweating from his steady run with a heavy load.

Pad, pad, pad … His naked feet, encrusted with an armor of horny calluses built over a fifty-year life span, slapped against the dirt of the trail, forming a gentle rhythm that complemented Jiro’s rolling gait. He used the oscillation of the weighty basket to help him down the path, shifting the weight first to one side, then the other, calling on his long years of experience to work with the pendulum forces of momentum instead of fighting them. This was a metaphor for how Jiro dealt with life. Every Japanese child was given the example of how the flexible bamboo could survive a storm that would snap a rigid tree, and they were admonished to follow this example.

He was making good time. Perhaps he wouldn’t be too late after all.

In his mind he started practicing a speech. By nature he was a taciturn man, but his part-time profession of selling charcoal in the small village of Suzaka forced him to communicate with his customers. That was sometimes the hardest part of having his small charcoal business, because words did not come easily to Jiro’s mind or tongue. When he wasn’t selling charcoal, he was farming, and he much preferred the life of the soil to the life of commerce.

With farming he could go for days without making a sound, save for the occasional grunt as he dug his hoe into an especially stubborn piece of earth. The tender green shoots only required a gentle touch, sunlight, and water to respond with their bounty, and oily words were not necessary for their growth. The birds and rabbits were startled by raucous human speech, and Jiro’s habitual silence allowed him to glide in and out of their world with little or no interruption. When a man talked, he couldn’t listen to the subtle rustle of tall grass bending in the quickening breeze or the frothing music of a nearby stream. With so much to listen to, Jiro had no problems being silent. It was communicating with humans that always challenged him.

Because he was such a quiet man, Jiro always marveled that he had managed to marry Yuko. In fact, however, his marriage had been arranged with almost no words spoken, at least on Jiro’s part.

Jiro’s mother died less than a year after his father, when Jiro was still a teenager, so the elder women of the village took it into their hands to arrange a wife for the young man. In an agrarian village, the men and women worked as a unit, and it was simply taken for granted that Jiro would need a wife, even if he was taking no action to get one. In a cultured family, the marriage would have been arranged through intermediaries, complete with subtle hints, a “chance” meeting, and formal matchmakers, but in the rough life of the village, it was handled more directly, while the elder women sat around weaving straw sandals.

A bundle of straw was taken and twisted into a skein. Then the skein was plaited with others, forming a rough base for a sandal. Then cord or strips of rag were used to form ties for the sandal. Despite its rough appearance, the resulting footwear was surprisingly durable and comfortable. This was done as a community project by the older women of the village. It had a utilitarian product as its output in the form of the sandals, but a more important function was the chance for an informal council among the women who wielded considerable influence in the village.

“Who shall we get for Jiro?” one of the elder women of the village asked bluntly, grabbing a fist full of straw.

“There aren’t too many choices,” said another, repeating what they all knew anyway.

“What about the daughter of the barrel maker?” another mused, throwing out a trial candidate.

“She is a tart,” Elder Grandma, the oldest matriarch in the village, said bluntly. “Jiro will have a hard enough time without his mother there. Any wife who doesn’t have a strong mother-in-law can be trouble, and that girl will be a handful even with a strong woman to guide her.”

“How about my daughter?” Yuko’s mother said quietly. As a suggestion for a match, it was explosive. The other women were flabbergasted. Gnarled hands stopped the plaiting of straw into sandals. Faces creased and weathered brown from years of working in the sun took on expressions of surprise and even shock.

Jiro was not handsome, and his family’s plot of land was far from the biggest, so it was astounding that Yuko’s mother had let it be known that her daughter was available. Yuko was one of the prettiest girls in the small village, although at age fifteen she was a bit past the average age when girls got married. The natural assumption was that Yuko’s mother was waiting for an exceptional match for her daughter, perhaps even hoping that the pretty girl would catch the eye of a lord or samurai so she could become a rich man’s concubine.

The other village women considered Yuko far too clever and far too pretty for Jiro, and said so. But Yuko’s mother had seen kindness and a good heart and a hard worker in the young man, and she knew it would be a match where Yuko would not be abused and, most likely, would be in charge. She wanted that, because of all of her eight children, Yuko was the favorite.

Jiro was presented with the proposition of Yuko as a wife by a small delegation of village women showing up at his hut one morning before he went to his rice paddy to work. The bewildered teen, still smarting from the death of his parents, simply accepted the collective wisdom of the elder women of the village and nodded his agreement. Within a few days, there was a small wedding feast, where the people of the village were fed sake, tofu, and some fish. Yuko served the feast and made sure each of the guests went home with a bit of food wrapped in a broad leaf. After cleaning up, Yuko moved into Jiro’s hut, and they were tentatively considered married, pending the birth of their first child.

Although smart, Yuko wasn’t talkative herself, and she and Jiro made an excellent match. Through the shared communion of their silence, they went through the stages of awkward adjustment, awakening sexual enthusiasm, then love and friendship. The elder women of the village soon looked upon the bond developed by the couple with proprietary pride, a symbol of their matchmaking abilities, forgetting their initial skepticism over the union of the pretty girl and the awkward farmer.

Starting the charcoal-selling business as a sideline to farming was Yuko’s idea. Yuko was always a thinker, and prior to Jiro’s going into business, the people of Suzaka village would have to make the long journey into the mountains to seek out charcoal sellers themselves. It was a constant source of complaint among the women, and in this complaint Yuko saw opportunity. She decided that by charging a small amount, a neat profit could be made without the others in the village feeling that she and Jiro had become like greedy merchants.

At first, Jiro thought he was incapable of operating this small sideline. He was strong enough and hardy enough to go into the mountains to get the charcoal, but selling it was something else. Charcoal selling, like all village selling, involved a whole symphony of speech. First was the shouting: walking through the village with the basket and singing out, “Charcoal! Fine charcoal!” Jiro actually didn’t mind this part because it wasn’t directed to anyone in particular. But next he was expected to make real conversation. When a woman heard his call and emerged from a hut with a basket or pot for the charcoal, she expected entertainment, not just goods.

A housewife expected a polite ritual of greetings and small talk from any village vendor. It was often the high point of her day, and a purchase usually involved a chance to catch up with news and gossip. In this, Jiro felt hopeless and awkward, even though his customers were lifelong neighbors. With Yuko’s patient support and tutoring in the fine art of gossip, Jiro was able to make a modest success of their small business, and Jiro’s periodic trips into the mountains became a natural adjunct to the rhythm of life, like the spring rains and the planting and the harvest and the winter snows.

Yuko died in childbirth, trying to give life to their first son, who also died. By village custom, Yuko wasn’t really considered Jiro’s wife until she had borne him a child, but this didn’t make his grief any less. Uncharacteristically, Jiro rebelled against all efforts of the village women to get him a second wife. He would not bend like the bamboo to the collective wisdom of the village. He could never articulate the reason for rebuffing the matchmaking efforts of the elder women, even to himself, but in his heart he loved and cherished the memory of Yuko and couldn’t conceive of replacing her.

So for over thirty years he had remained alone. And although he was never as articulate as when he was under the tutelage of Yuko, he kept the charcoal-selling business in addition to his modest farm. The extra income, usually in the form of rice instead of money, was useful because it allowed him to buy things which would otherwise require the help of a wife and family to make. If it weren’t for the fact that he remained the only charcoal seller in the village, Jiro knew his business would surely suffer because of his lack of conversational skills, but no one else seemed inclined to take on the hard and sometimes dangerous task.

On this morning he was fretting because to every customer he had to make a speech and they would shower him with abuse and anger. He was raising prices.

The day before he had gone into the mountains to buy charcoal from one of the solitary charcoal burners. For once, Jiro wished he had the gift of conversation when he was told that the price of charcoal was being doubled because of the danger from Boss Kuemon’s bandits.

Instead of coherent protest, all Jiro could do was scowl and stare at the charcoal maker in mute rebuke. Finally, he was able to splutter, “That’s too much. I’ll buy from someone else.”

“There is no one else,” the charcoal burner said blandly. “Kintaro was killed last week, and I’m the only one burning charcoal in these parts.”

Jiro took this news with surprise. “Killed?”

“The bandits wanted salt and miso, and I guess Kintaro put up a fuss. He said he was running low on salt the last time I saw him, and I guess he thought if he gave the bandits all he had, he wouldn’t be able to make the offerings of salt and sake to the Stove God when he made the charcoal. Baka! Fool! When they come and tell me to give them things, I just give them. You can always get more salt or miso or sake. There is only one life.” The burner held out his hands in the universal gesture of helplessness. “It’s stupid to fight them.”

“This place is going to the dogs.”

“Yes, and we know why,” the burner said, leaving a long pause as an invitation to Jiro to amplify.

Jiro ignored it. He wouldn’t make idle small talk unless required to by a customer, and he also knew better than to criticize the administration of the District by the new Lord. After thinking of alternate courses of action and finding none, he thrust out a container of homemade sake and said, “Here.”

The burner was not surprised by the lack of transition between business talk and a gift. In the complicated ballet of Japanese commerce, one usually accompanied the other, although Jiro was not the most skilled practitioner of the art of moving from one to the other.

“Thanks!” the burner said with a grin. “I know you probably didn’t bring enough money for the new, higher price. I’ll give you credit for it, and you can pay me the next time you come out for charcoal. Come! Warm yourself by the fire. You must be cold after your walk out from the village.”

Jiro accepted the hospitality and spent the night drinking with the burner. The sake was rich and sweet, with plenty of grains of fermented rice still floating around in the liquid. The burner, after weeks alone in the mountains cutting down trees to make charcoal, was garrulous. Jiro responded with grunts and short phrases, but the burner didn’t mind. The Japanese believe communication involves the whole being, not just words, and Jiro’s grunts and gestures, after a few drinks, seemed as eloquent as the spoken remarks of any companion the burner could want.

Because of the drink, Jiro woke up later than planned. It was still before the dawn, but he was tardy returning to the village. The sky was still black, and familiar stars made their stately procession across the heavens. Peeking over the top of Mount Fukuto, Jiro could see the stars of the Two Lovers very close to each other. They had already come together for their annual kiss that marked the fall, yet the weather was still teetering on the last edge of summer.

In haste, Jiro gathered up his basket of charcoal and paid what money he had brought with him to the burner. Now, as he ran along the path back to the crossroads and the village, he racked his brain to figure out the best way to explain the higher prices to his customers in the village. As usual, his lack of skill in using words failed him, and he couldn’t come up with a satisfactory speech that would soften the blow. As the sun rose in the sky, burning off some of the mist loitering at the bottom of the mountain valley and revealing the low-lying hagi, or bush clover, Jiro still wrestled with the problem.

Jiro was so involved in composing what he was going to say about the higher prices that when he got to the crossroads he almost didn’t see the body exposed by the thinning silver mist until he ran into it.

The body was lying on its side in the center of the crossroads. The crossroads marked the meeting of four paths. One went east to the village of Suzaka, where Jiro lived. One led north out of the area and into the prefecture of Uzen and the rivers beyond. Another led south to the village of Higashi and the prefecture of Rikuzen, and the last path, the one that Jiro was on, went west, deeper into the mountains toward Mount Fukuto.

The body was that of a man, perhaps in his early thirties. He was dressed in a brown kimono with gray hakama, or pants. It was the dress of a man intent on traveling. The legs were splayed and one of the man’s sandals was missing. The remaining sandal, precariously clinging to the other foot, was the coarse-rope sandal of a traveler or pilgrim.

His hair was bound up in the style favored by merchants. The expression on his face was one of pain, and his eyes were squeezed shut, as if he could avoid the darkness of death by eclipsing it with a darkness of his own making.

In his back was an arrow. A bloodstain spread from the point where the arrow penetrated, running parallel to the ground and up toward the man’s head. The arrow was well made, with a straight shaft of clear, dark wood, and gray feathers, finely trimmed.

Jiro had seen death many times before. Some of the deaths were violent. It was hard not to see violent death when you lived in a land where over three hundred years of lethal clan warfare had left its legacy. Yet coming across the body so suddenly and unexpectedly unnerved him.

He skidded to an abrupt halt, the heavy basket of charcoal pushing against his back and shoulders. He dipped backward with a familiar move that simultaneously placed the charcoal basket on the ground and released the shoulder and head lines. He advanced toward the body tentatively, double-checking to make sure the man was not breathing. Jiro squatted next to the body, poked him, and said, “Oi! You!” No movement. He touched the face of the man. The man’s cheek was cold and lifeless.

Jiro was annoyed. On a morning when mundane problems like being late or explaining a price increase loomed so large, the discovery of this body caused a new level of anxiety. With the increasing breakdown of safety in the District, it wouldn’t surprise him to find bodies in the middle of the village next.

He had to decide what he would do about his discovery. He could avoid the most trouble if he just ignored the body and continued into the village, but the next people through the crossroads would report it, and Jiro might somehow be implicated in the murder.

Of course, when he did report it, he would have to deal with Magistrate Nagato, and that would involve more disruption and unpleasantness. It might even involve a beating if the bullying Magistrate took it into his head to administer one, just on general principle. Jiro sighed. What an annoyance!

Suddenly, behind him, Jiro heard a sound on the path leading to Uzen. He looked around and saw a man rounding a bend in the path, walking toward him. Like the dead man, he was also dressed in the kimono and hakama of a man traveling. Unlike the dead man, this new stranger was clearly a samurai. Over one shoulder, he negligently had a katana in its scabbard, one hand holding the hilt. The black lacquer of the plain scabbard caught the intense morning sun, and Jiro was mesmerized by the glint of the weapon’s sheath.

As soon as the man saw Jiro, his thick eyebrows crashed together into a frowning V. “Nani? What?” the man asked, quickening his steps.

Jiro thought of grabbing his charcoal basket for a brief second, then abandoned the idea. He sprang to his feet and nimbly hopped over the body. Then he ran down the path to the village as fast as his legs could carry him, not once looking behind him.

The samurai approached the corpse and stopped next to it. He looked at the body for several minutes, then he thoughtfully looked down the path where Jiro had neatly disappeared.