Higashi was not a man attuned to others. But even someone more sensitive would have been hard pressed to note the minute surge in awareness on the part of the old swordsman. His eyes were slitted with concentration, shielded by high cheekbones and brow. They flickered once toward Higashi as they registered the vibrations of acute interest coming from the nondescript man in the dark overcoat. Then the whirring arc of steel claimed the old master’s whole attention once more.
There were other demonstrations after this, and Higashi wandered the grounds of the temple, partly in an attempt to keep warm, but also hoping to catch a glimpse of his quarry once more. The afternoon sky began to fade to gray with the approach of evening. Higashi was increasingly alone as his shoes crunched along the gravel pathways, lost in thought about the old man, reviewing what he knew, rehearsing the presentation he would make to his superiors.
He looked up with a start at the harsh call of a crow. Alone on the hillside, he could hear the wind and the dry clacking of tree branches. He turned around quickly, sure that someone was on the path behind him. But he saw no one. He focused his attention back down the slope. Hidden by the curve of the land, karate students were exercising in the distant courtyard. He could hear the bark of their cadences bouncing along the hills. And when he looked down the curving path as it dipped into a hollow, the trees seemed to close ranks, crowding in on the trail and blurring its boundaries in the waning light.
He stuck his cold hands in his coat pockets, hurrying back the way he had come, his report forgotten. The brilliance of his investigative triumph seemed suddenly unreal and unimportant. He was now just a man, alone on a winter hillside, cold, and suddenly jumpy. He walked quickly toward the temple, activity masking a growing unease. A more experienced man would have heeded the visceral message his body was sending. A field agent would have known that fear, like cunning, springs from a primitive reflex for self-preservation. Higashi the analyst knew little of cunning. He was learning more about fear.
Lost in his reverie, he had gone far up the slopes. The hills were networked with paths that meandered by scenic overlooks and small clearings. In these spaces, tiny, ancient dolmens listed sadly off their uprights, like forgotten, exhausted travelers. Higashi, lost, walked faster, his head swiveling, eyes hungry for a familiar landmark. He was convinced that he heard footsteps in the woods behind him. But when he looked, there was nothing, just the looming trunks of trees, the wind, and the distant chorus of
kiai
from the karate students in the valley. He felt the hair on the back of his neck rise and he fled down the hill.
His face was slick with sweat. The path dipped down into a dark place. A small rocky streambed glinted with ice. He hurried across a small stone bridge, looking down to keep his footing. He slipped and fell anyway, righted himself and then hurried across the icy place, casting another terrified look behind him.
He ran headlong into the trap.
The old man emerged from the trees along the path, his robes one of many archaic shades living in the hollow of the hills. He stared at Higashi with a fire that halted the younger man in his tracks.
“Who are you?” the old voice hissed.
“Sumimasen,” Higashi apologized, ducking his head and spinning around to flee.
“Yame!” the old voice ordered. Higashi felt powerless to withstand the command. Like a man caught in a nightmare, Higashi turned to face the old master. He trembled in fear and cold.
“I must know,” the old one croaked, and removed a weapon from under his robes. It was a
suruchin
, a fine chain with a small weight at either end. He held the loops of the chain in his left hand and spun a short length in a tight circle with his right. The chain made a deep whirring sound in the cold air. Higashi was shocked into movement by the sound of the chain. He jerked forward in despair, hands held out like claws.
The chain whipped out, and the weight smashed into the ridge of bone where the nose met the brow. Higashi grunted and sunk to his knees, stunned and bleeding. The old man rewound the chain and watched Higashi impassively. Then the chain snicked out again, smashing into the younger man’s cheek. Higashi could taste the blood in his mouth. He spit out a fragment of tooth. In shock, all he could think was how cold and hard was the ground on which he knelt, as cold as the old eyes that bore into him.
He cried out involuntarily as the old man swarmed toward him, but his cry was mixed in with the echo of the
kiai
, the shouts of the karate trainees in the courtyard. Higashi held up his hands defensively. They were beaten away. He tried to rise, but was slammed into the ground and had the wind knocked out of him. He lay stunned and disbelieving, his eyes wide, retreating into innocence. He regretted coming. He yearned for the safety of his cubicle, the ordered ranks of files under his control. He closed his eyes in the hope that, when he opened them, the old man would be gone. Like a bad dream.
When the fine chain looped around Higashi’s neck, his eyes jerked open. He was dragged into the woods. He kicked feebly and tried to choke out a protest against the relentless and irresistible force. But no one heard.
Higashi recognized this man in an elemental way. He had the same hard eyes as those judoka from so long ago, the sheer physical presence of his father. It sparked a brief flare of resentment and resistance. Higashi knew what the old one was up to: his contacts abroad and the skills he was selling.
By the time he was finished with the interrogation, the old one knew what he wanted. He worked the nerve points with a casual brutality, his short, hard fingers jabbing, grinding, bringing fire to the last moments of Higashi’s life. The analyst gasped and burned, largely powerless to resist the heat of questioning. But even then, Higashi’s mind whirred with a fading spurt of dispassionate analysis. His last coherent thought was that he was glad he had made a complete copy of the file and mailed it to his father. As if to say, here, this is what I’ve done, finally.
It was the one secret he was able to keep from his murderer. One final triumph on the rocky slope that Higashi’s failing senses confused with a judo mat.
In the end, the old one simply snapped Higashi’s neck, backing away with an odd fastidiousness as Higashi’s muscles spasmed and then relaxed, a stain of urine spreading under the corpse.
The old man melted into the trees, his compact form moving silently through the gloom. In the distance, the
karateka
called together. Their voices echoed in the twilight, bouncing in cadence around the hills, strong, united, and purposeful. Alone in the forest, Higashi’s body steamed slightly in the cold air, his eyes open to the sky. The trees creaked in the wind, branches rubbing together and making small noises like hurt animals. Far away, a crow called in distant protest of the coming dark.
Rain whipped against the high windows of the training hall—hard pellets cast by an angry hand. Inside, students knelt along the hardwood floor of the
dojo
. The room was silent except for the distant noise of wind and weather and the dry rasp of Yamashita’s feet as he moved to the place of honor at the head of the room.
He moved with a fluid certainty, settling down into the formal sitting posture known as
seiza
with the soft inevitability of snowfall. Yamashita Rinsuke had been my
sensei
, my teacher, for twelve years, and I had seen him do remarkable things, but the simple spectacle of everyday actions was enough to show me that I was in the presence of a master.
In the martial arts, the really good teachers cultivate in their students an acute sensitivity to various stimuli. Your nerve endings are teased and jolted, your reflex actions made more subtle, and, for some of us, the result is a change in the ways we see the world and exist within it. The true masters are both brutal and refined, compassionate torturers, and guides who lead you to places where you will stand alone, confronting age-old fears that snarl in the abyss.
Once you’ve gone into that void and come through to the other side, it changes you. You glimpse it sometimes in people who’ve had a similar experience. I see it in my teacher’s face in his rare unguarded moments. And I see it in the mirror. It doesn’t make us better than other people, just different.
This day for a fleeting second, as he knelt, I saw something else in Yamashita’s expression. It puzzled me. I knew he was displeased with the progress of the afternoon’s class, but I didn’t think that was what I had detected. My teacher wore a mask during class time—his shaved head swiveled on a thick neck and his eyes were dark holes in a face that regarded his students with silent comment. I’ve come to be the same way. This afternoon I thought I saw something unusual behind his eyes. It lasted a micro-second, almost like a gap in concentration—what they call
tsuki
in the martial arts—an elusive scent wafted away on a breeze, forever out of reach. Maybe I was imagining things; I know from experience that Yamashita’s focus is impeccable. I let the thought go and settled myself, ready for whatever came next.
Lately, Yamashita let me guide the classes. Senior students often do this in the martial arts, but this was a new development for my teacher. His
dojo
was an exclusive one—you didn’t get past the door without already having earned a few different black belts and carrying some strong recommendations from people Yamashita knew and trusted. He demanded a great deal from his pupils and they asked for a great deal back, so having his senior student lead the training had not been the practice in the past.
But things change. Some time ago, I had knelt before my teacher and received the ceremonial tokens of my status as
menkyo-
kaiden
. It’s the highest level of rank Yamashita awards and I’m the only one of his students who has lasted long enough to get it. And it was not just that I had endured the training. I had been tested. I had faced the fear of a fight to the death and had survived. I mean that literally. As I had bent to bow to him during the ceremony, an old wound burned down my back, the reminder of a slashing sword cut and an experience that had taught me that true commitment—to the art, to life—came with a price. Sometimes I wonder whether it was a challenge I could meet again.
Now as I teach, he watches the students as they move through their exercises. He watches me, as well. His gaze is hard and he misses nothing. I watch too, working to correct and guide, but my ability pales besides that of my
sensei
. It’s not that I’m not good, just that he is so much better.
I was working with a new group of students, trying to get them to grasp the subtle difference between what we do in Yamashita’s
dojo
and what they had been used to in other schools. They were only half listening, and I thought I knew why. I don’t look the part of a
sensei
. For one thing, students seem much more willing to believe in an Asian instructor. There’s a type of reverse discrimination going on here. Deep down, many martial artists got started in their disciplines because of a fascination with the Mystic Arts of the Far East, and they’re still expecting their teachers to be little Asian men with wispy beards in flowing robes. I’m a bit of a disappointment to them. Not only am I not Japanese, I’m not even physically imposing. Average height. Dark hair. Blue eyes. My nose has been broken a few times. Years ago a distant relative from the Old Country told me that I had “a face like a Dublin pig,” and things haven’t changed much since then. And I was not Yamashita.
But Yamashita’s
dojo
is a place where you get what you need, not what you want. He himself is a bit of a surprise. Asian, but not wispy. He’s a dense howitzer shell of a human being. He prowls the practice floor like the burly predator that he is. He speaks in an elegant, curt manner with a precise pronunciation that many of his more senior students unconsciously begin to mimic. His hands are broad and the fingers thick, his forearms corded with the strange muscles of the swordsman. So I didn’t feel bad that the novices thought I was decidedly second-string. Standing next to my teacher, most people are.
These new students were from various aikido schools and, while it’s a nice art, like most systems of fighting it conditions you to do some things extremely well and to do other things not at all. They were all
yudansha
—black belts—and were skilled at the techniques of their system. Some came from the mainline aikido schools that were still connected to the founder’s family. A few were from the harder variants promulgated by disciples who founded their own styles of the art. They all had the fluid movement and propensity for direction shifts and other disorienting moves that would let them dominate an opponent. Executed well, these techniques are effective. But the process of learning them, of repeating the same pattern over and over, of dealing with a choreographed response and a looked for result, creates a type of mind-set that Yamashita detests.
People, as my master has taught me and my experience has proven, are unpredictable. Our techniques are grounded in the commonalities of movement and possibility inherent in the human form, but there are always surprises out there. No matter what you expect to happen, you need to stay open to the possibility that things may not turn out exactly as you planned. It’s a commonplace insight, but one that needs to be absorbed deep into your muscles, because to overlook it is to court disaster.
I had worked with the students on some variants of a very basic technique they knew as
ikkyo
. It’s a defense to an attack that can come in different forms—a grab or a strike—but that ends with the attacker immobilized through an evasive maneuver that unbalances and distracts the opponent, leading him to a point where the joints are manipulated into an angle that violates normal human kinesiology and he’s subdued. With students at this level of proficiency, the action is smooth and fast. Partners flow in a blur, swirling into the inevitable success of the technique. It’s great, as long as the attacker cooperates.