The 47th Samurai

10

“The rust,” said Tomoe Yano in English. “Look at the rust, Father.”

“Oh, what beautiful rust,” said Philip Yano.

Bob thought, Are they nuts?

“That’s koto rust. No rust is so black as koto rust.”

“Beautiful, beautiful black rust,” said Philip. “Oh, so beautiful.”

Wearing rubber surgeon’s gloves, the father disassembled the sword. He used a small hammer and a pin, perfectly sized, to drive the bamboo peg out of the grip. It popped out effortlessly. He tracked the little nub of bamboo down as it rolled on his bench, then stared at it.

“Shinto, at least. Maybe original, maybe koto.”

“Then why so easy? It just fell out.”

Bob remembered: the peg had been stuck. But he didn’t say anything; what did he know?

“I don’t know. Maybe it was disassembled recently. I can’t say. One of many questions. This is very interesting.”

Philip Yano slid the grip off, then carefully disassembled the guard-tsuba, Bob knew-and several spacers, seppa, and finally the collar, habaki, and laid out the parts symmetrically on the bench, blade at the bottom of the formation, grip above, hilt laid flat, and four spacers.

Then they saw a piece of paper folded tightly about the metal of the tang.

“The paper,” the young woman said gravely.

“Yes, I see it.”

“Father, pick it up. See what it is.”

“No, no, not yet. Pen ready?”

“Yes.”

He spoke in a swift blizzard of Japanese. Then he translated.

“The tsuba-that is, guard-is government issue, the model of ’thirty-nine also. So when it found its new scabbard, it was rehilted, this is what I tell Tomoe. Spacers-seppa-also military issue, as is habaki, nothing special. Two holes, indicating it has been cut down, but we already knew that.”

“The rust,” Tomoe said.

“What is it with the rust?” asked Bob. The tang itself was swallowed in black erosion, so much so a fine black dust had fallen on the bench beneath it.

“The blacker the rust,” said Philip Yano, “the older the blade. What it means, Swagger-san, is that this sword is at least four hundred years old. Somehow it ended up in the military furniture of nineteen thirty-four.”

“Is that uncommon?”

“It happened.”

“So it’s not a blade manufactured by machine in some factory in the forties. It’s much older. It’s a real samurai thing. That is why it’s so sharp?”

“Exactly. Think of some genius in a small shop in near-feudal times-before the year sixteen hundred-working at a forge, turning the orange metal in upon itself time after time, taking two or three different orange pieces and hammering them together after each had been folded over twenty times, beating them into a shape, then quenching them in cooling clay. Then he began filing, shaping, sharpening. It’s three kinds of steel, soft for the spine, which gives it weight and flexibility, a liquid feel; softer still in the core, more pure iron, more flexibility; and a sandwich of harder, tempered steel-yakiba-for the edge, sharp, to cut through armor, flesh, and bone and get deep into the body. Oh, it’s a war sword all right, and if my father carried it on Iwo Jima, he wasn’t the first soldier to sling this beauty about, not at all. It’s old, it’s venerable, it’s been to the dance many a time. Born in fire, cooled in earth, destined for blood. Maybe the inscriptions will tell the story.”

He indicated the line of Japanese characters deeply chiseled in the tang, as the maker of the blade those centuries ago accounted for himself and his creation, and explained for whom he had toiled.

“Can you read the inscriptions?” asked Bob.

“That’ll be the fun part. There were thousands of koto smiths, and we will have to track through the records and find who made this sword. We will be able to learn the smith, maybe even the lord. Then we’ll look at history and begin to assemble a biography of this blade. Where it went, what it did before it somehow came to my father, and then yours, and then their sons.”

“It all has meaning,” said the girl. “Father, read the nakago for Swagger-san.”

“Nakago is the rusted tang under the hilt. Even it is full of tantalizing communications from the past. It’s suriage nakago, or possibly an o-suriage nakago. That is, it’s right on the edge between ‘shortened’ and ‘greatly shortened,’ the determining factor being how much of the signature is left. Usually, the butt end, even when shortened, retains the shape of the original. It was as if the desecrator were paying homage to his superior. This style is called Iriyama-gata, which places it sometime in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The cutting-edge side of the tang is at an acute angle to the bottom end of the shinogi line; the other side runs either straight or at a slight upward angle to mune.”

Lost me, Bob thought.

But he guessed Philip Yano was telling him the very shape of the end of the tang held clues to its origin.

“You sure know this stuff.”

“I know nothing,” said Yano. “There are many to whom this language is as supple and expressive as poetry. I struggle, doubt my knowledge, wish I knew more, curse myself for not knowing yet.”

“But do I get the bottom line? That this is a very old blade, and it could have some meaning beyond your family? Experts should examine it.”

“That’s right. It may be nothing. Not every old blade was used by Musashi Miyamoto, just as not every old Colt was carried by Wyatt Earp. So the odds are very small. But still…they exist. Remember, someone always wins a lottery. I will learn what I can before I make any consultations. It’ll take me longer than it should, and it is foolish, as many could know in a flash. That’s all right, though. It’s time spent with my father.”

“The paper,” said the girl.

“Yes, finally.”

“It looks like some kind of note,” Bob said.

“This is why I fear it. It is possibly a death poem. We do that, we Japanese. It is because death is so welcome to us, that we reach to embrace it and celebrate it with poetry.”

“Yet you hesitate, Father,” his daughter said.

“Suppose it says ‘Dear god, save me, I cannot stand this anymore.’”

“Then it proves your father was human,” said Bob. “I’ve been shot at a lot, and my thoughts have been ‘Dear god, save me, I cannot stand this anymore.’”

“Swagger-san speaks a truth, Father. You must face it. You must reach out to your father.”

“Do you want to be alone?”

“No, no,” said Yano. “Much better to be with one I love and one I respect.”

He took the paper off the nakago, shaking it so that an ancient fine powder of black oxidized steel fell away.

He read it, and began to weep.

His daughter read it, and began to weep.

Bob thought it best to say nothing, but the girl looked over at him, the tears running down her face.

“I think it’s for all the boys of Iwo Jima,” said Philip Yano, “no matter the color of their skin.”

He read:

Above the volcano a moon over hell lights the faces of the doomed and dying. Soldiers buried in black sand on the black island await their destiny. We are the broken jade of Sulfur Island.