The 47th Samurai

11

On Tuesday night, the boy Raymond had a baseball game and got a single and a double. He played left field, appeared to have a sound arm and an instinct for the ball. On Wednesday, the daughter Tomoe had a recital; she played the cello, and to Bob at least, she was superb.

It wasn’t that the kids were so well behaved and such high performers that so thoroughly attracted him, or even that the darling little Miko reminded him of his own daughter, Nikki-Y2K4 she had christened herself when young. It was that in some way the family unit was like an idealized Marine Corps. Everyone knew his duties and did them; there were no rogue neuroses, no raw egos, no angry resentments; if there were, they were held so far inside that they were never seen and never blew. But the Yanos laughed a lot and seemed genuinely to enjoy each other’s presence, to the exclusion of the world. He really felt happy among them.

“No, I’ve enjoyed it so much, and you’ve been so hospitable. But I have to go; I have a life back in the States.”

“I had hoped to have news for you on the sword before you left,” said Mr. Yano. “I have exhausted all my books and have begun to make inquiries. There are many antique volumes from the nineteenth century, with much information. The Book of the Sword was published in many editions in the last one hundred years. The best collection is in Osaka at the university there. I had planned a trip; you would enjoy that part of Japan.”

“I’m sure I would; I have a wife and daughter, however, several businesses to look after, and remember that field I was cutting? I still want to finish that damned thing. Remember, I’m the Tin Man. Chop chop chop.”

“I understand.”

On the last night, he and Philip Yano sat up after the family had gone to bed. Yano drank sake from a ceramic bottle, in a little flat cup. Bob had tea. It was time to talk of that which united them and made them trust: war and wounds.

“How is the hip? Is it painful?”

“You get used to it. It’s always ten degrees colder than everything else, and as I said, getting through airport security is a mess. It’s not so funny now.”

“You have other wounds?”

“I seem not to be able to get out of the way of little pieces of flying steel. I have been shot and wounded a variety of times. That one was the worst. It took a friend from me, I am sorry to say, and he was a boy who would have given the world many gifts, so I mourn for him still. The other wounds sting sometimes, but it ain’t nothing I can’t live with.”

“My daughter says you sleep poorly.”

“Sorry, hope I didn’t scare nobody. My dreams aren’t the softest. I took many lives. I thought I was a big samurai. And for what? Nothing I can lay a hand on. Well, something called ‘duty.’ I ain’t smart enough to define it, but I felt it then, and goddammit, no matter what, I still feel it. They ain’t takin’ it away.”

“That is the burden of the samurai, that commitment to duty. That is why we are only happy among other samurai, who have taken lives, seen blood and ruin, tasted defeat and bitterness. No one else can truly know. They can guess; they cannot truly know.”

“I’d drink to that if I was still a drinking man. I have to ask you, Philip. Your eye. You don’t talk of it. But I recognize scar tissue when I see it.”

“Oh, that. Really nothing. Iraq.”

Bob thought he misheard. Had he been drinking? Did the guy say Iraq, where the marines were still fighting?

“I thought that was our little pile of bad news.”

“Japan, in a spirit of support, sent small numbers of noncombat support troops, nominally guarded by Dutch combat troops, assigned engineering duties in a town in the south called Samawah. But you know the thorough, boring Japanese. We didn’t quite trust the Dutch, and so secretly a small unit of paratroopers was sent as actual security. It was my honor to be selected as commanding officer. They even postponed my retirement. Normally, you must leave at fifty-five, but because they trusted me, they asked me to stay in uniform through the assignment.”

“You must have been a superb officer. That’s not a job they give to second-raters. But I already knew that.”

“I worked hard but of course have no genius for it as do you. You were a hero, I was an officer who tried his best. On the third of February, two thousand four, an IED went off next to a Japanese troop carrier, which was pitched over and started to burn. Some men had difficulty getting out. As commanding officer, it fell to me to make the effort. We did in fact get them all out, but not before one of those RPGs detonated nearby and my face was sliced open, my eye destroyed. That was it. Thirty-three years of service, ten seconds’ worth of action, and a career-ending wound. So it goes. I did what I could, I got my people out, and I trust that the men remember me with respect.”

“Getting blown up in somebody else’s war ain’t no picnic.”

“The funny thing was that since we didn’t officially have combat troops in the engagement, my eye wasn’t officially damaged. However, my eye disagrees with that assessment. In any event, it was enough to serve.”

“Well, your father would be proud of you. He would salute you, if nobody else did. And so would mine. They knew.”

“You are very kind. Now I have a gift for you.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, very Japanese. Perhaps it will mean nothing. But it’s a credo to live by, as in our ways, we both have, after the ways of our fathers, who were the better men.”

“Yes, by far.”

Yano left and came back with a carefully wrapped package, which looked like a book or something book-size.

“Should I open it now?” Bob asked.

“Yes, as I must explain.”

The paper had been so perfectly folded that Bob again felt like a desecrator. Inside the ruptured nest of paper was an oblong frame in some ancient wood. Turning it over, he came across a series of Japanese characters in beautiful calligraphy, running down the center of a piece of yellowed rice paper. Looking at it, he felt something in the brushstrokes: lightness, deftness, precision, artistry, like falling water or the color of leaves.

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

“The calligraphy belongs to the man called Miyamoto Musashi. He is regarded as Japan’s greatest swordsman. He fought over sixty duels and won them all. He is revered though for his wisdom; he retreated from the world and wrote The Book of Five Rings, his guide to the sword and to life. To him, the sword was life.”

“I see,” said Bob. “A professional.”

“Yes. Samurai. Warrior. My father, your father, the same. So I give this to you. No, it’s not original, for that would be priceless, but the calligraphy was done by hand by a superb local after Musashi.”

“Please tell me what it says.”

“He wrote this in sixteen forty-five. The old one knew. He says, ‘Steel cuts flesh / steel cuts bone / steel does not cut steel.’ Do you see?”

Bob saw.

“The rest of them: they are flesh and bone. They will be cut. The regular people. The sleepers, the dreamers. The soft. We are the hard. We are the warriors. We cannot be cut. That’s our job. And that’s why they need us in ways they can’t even imagine,” said Philip Yano.