Now in the houses, the fires would start up; someone would heat the bath. But Vera did not go in. She stayed as the sun got lower and lower. Finally, she stood up. Hunger, and the fact that she had been alone all day, drove her out of her hiding place to Keiko’s house.
She did this for days. Every afternoon she moved a little closer to the landing spot for the boats. Soon, she was close enough to be seen. But the girls of the summer village walked past her with their faces blank, as if she were a stone.
‘Where do you go?’ Keiko asked.
‘Just around.’ Long silence, and then, because although Vera was angry she was not really angry with Keiko, she tried to explain. ‘It was windy on the other side.’
‘So, you come to know the island, that’s good,’ said Keiko. ‘And how the weather changes. If it is not good where you are then you go to the other side. If there is a big wind, now you are sheltered. If you were in shadow, now you are in sun.’
Vera tried to wake up before everyone else, and to slide out of the house at the first ray of sun, so that she could avoid the people. She ran across the marshy place, which now
had a stronger plank for a bridge. She continued down the beach past all the boats to the raised flat spot at the very end of the island she called the High Place. No one came here. It was the perfect place to see the sun rise. Alone there she watched every second of this quick breaching. By eight o’clock, the
ama
women would gather on the beach. By then usually a skin had developed on the water, a little wind out of the east, accompanied by sharp little wavelets. Vera stood and put her face into it.
From the High Place, Vera could believe this island was a ship, that it was sailing bravely on and the water was lying still around it. It was taking her home, across the Pacific, back to Vancouver. Or, if the wind was the other way, to India, or Italy. Vera didn’t mind where it was taking her, she just wanted to be going into the wind and leaving a wake behind.
One morning when she went to the High Place, the wind was already strong. It was blowing too hard for the
ama
to go out in their boats. They gathered on the beach, and spoke, and the men tied the boats firmly in place. The women turned and conferred. They tried to hold their hair from blowing across their faces, but she could not hear their voices. Vera thought for a moment they would not dive that day. But they only went to fetch some wide, flat baskets, which they hung on their arms. Then the women, without the men, set out to cross the island. It looked as if they went along the little lake: they disappeared into the low bushes and Vera could not see. She crept back along the outside of the island, over the steep and difficult rocks, through the scratchy bushes, and saw them emerge on the outside, midway along on the cliffs. They went into the little hut.
So it was the women’s house!
Vera watched from the rocks. Smoke began to rise from the centre of the rounded roof. The women had lit a fire in there, to warm themselves. Soon, one by one, they
emerged with their baskets and began to clamber down the rocks to the water. Once they reached the edge, without hesitating, they put goggles on their eyes and plunged in, and swam out, their tethered baskets floating behind them.
It appeared that in this wind the women were going to fish off the rocks. That meant Vera could watch them, and she did. They bobbed up and down from the surface, pulling up weed from the bottom, and placing it in their baskets. When their baskets were full, they swam back to shore, climbed out and, laughing together, disappeared into the hut.
Vera climbed down from the rocky point to the quiet, grassy spot beneath it. This place was out of sight of the sweep of tilty houses, and the harbour, and the outside fishing rocks, out of sight of everywhere and every one of these busy island people. She called it the Low Place.
Vera was startled, thinking she was alone, to see movement. She peered through the bushes. In the centre was a circle of grassy sand, quite hidden away. In it stood a man with a curved scabbard tied to his left hip. She recognised the shape of the weapon from the old prints she had memorised; the samurai carried two of them, sticking out behind them like a big X. This man had one and wore it casually, as if it were part of him. She stopped in fright, wondering if he was some sort of bandit, or perhaps a policeman who had come to the island to mete out old-fashioned justice.
He stood quite still. The wind was coming around the point at him. Grass grew up through the sand, waving around his feet. She could not tell if he was young or old. His hair was black, but a fierce white streak rode back on a thick wave from his widow’s peak. He held the scabbard in his left hand, pressing it against his left hip. It was black and curved down toward his heels.
He faced the water, and seemed to be far away in his thoughts. Perhaps because the wind blew, he did not hear her approach. As Vera watched, he bent, brushing the split skirt from between his knees, and knelt. He placed the long,
curved scabbard, which had the handle of a sword protruding from it, on the ground before him. He placed first his right hand and then his left on the ground in front of his knees, forming a triangle between his fingers. He bowed reverently, for a long time, as Vera stood motionless.
It was not unusual to see a person on his knees in Japan, and even sometimes, like this man, bent so low that his face was to the ground, his two hands flat on the earth, forefingers and thumbs meeting at the tips. Before a person of great importance, or a shrine, one bowed this way. Although Vera saw nothing before him on the shore or in the water she knew he was acknowledging some power. What was he worshipping? Something private. She fell back, but not, she sensed, before he became aware that she was there. He gave no sign of this awareness, but she felt it.
He raised his head. Then he reached forward and lifted the sword, and, holding it above his head, bowed again. Then he turned the tip of the scabbard toward his belly, slid it under his belt, and, without looking away from the fixed point ahead of him, tied the scabbard to his waistband.
He sat back on his heels with his hands on his knees. Vera was waiting for him to draw the sword, but she missed it. He had instantly lunged forward; the blade had flown like a silver bird out of its sheath and divided the air in front of him, the edge flashing in the sun. It hovered at his right side and then again, without warning and from complete stillness, flew over his left ear and cut downward decisively.
The man kept his eyes on the imaginary beast he had slain; with the swift, sure flight of a bird, the sword took itself back into the black scabbard.
Stillness again. Vera held her breath. He watched intently a place beyond, a place from where, it seemed to her, all movement came, all threat. Although his eyes did not move, his watchfulness was such that there would be no surprising him, not from any angle.
She was afraid, childishly, that he would cut her down. The wise thing was to be still. She waited. And then, out of this stillness, he exploded upward from his heels, the sword braced above his head. He was fending off an opponent, but the opponent was not there. He was jousting with it and staying alive. There was a force, a pressure behind all his movements. He sliced, he braced, he thrust, he flicked his sword as if to remove the blood. Then he was back on his knees again.
It couldn’t be long before he turned and stared at her. Probably he would be angry at being seen. Vera crept away.
She asked Keiko, ‘Who is that man who dances with his sword when no one is looking?’
‘What do you mean no one? I think you were looking.’ Often Keiko spoke very solemnly and Vera didn’t understand that she was teasing until she saw the tiny smile at the corners of her lips and her eyes.
‘I was. But he didn’t know.’
‘Oh yes, he knew.’
‘Did he tell you?’
‘No, I just know he knew. That man is Ikkanshi Tadatsuna. The sword polisher.
Katanatogi.’
‘He was not polishing. He was cutting.’
‘Perhaps he was practising his cuts. Testing a blade to see if it is true. He must be very careful because a sword brings life and death to the ones who use it.’
Keiko explained that the Ikkanshi were an ancient family that had polished swords for over two hundred years. ‘He is a great artist. It is an important occupation; even emperors and samurai will polish swords, after battles.’
‘Will they use his swords in battle? In China?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Keiko smiled. ‘It is not for that he practises.’
‘Then for what?’
‘To test the sword,’ Keiko repeated. ‘And to test himself.’
‘Why does he come here?’ Vera asked. ‘The people don’t need swords here.’
‘He sharpens our knives and spears, and he makes fish hooks,’ said Keiko. But she sounded a little defensive, and Vera could see that this was not a true answer.
After that Vera saw the
katanatogi
often. She discovered that he had a little shop off the main street, the only street, a footpath really, that ran along the spine of the island and off which they all had their dwelling places. Merchants, those who distributed back to the people the products of the sea that they harvested, and the few utensils, ropes, fuel and fabrics they needed on the summer island, had their one-room establishments here.
The
katanatogi’s
room was nearly empty. When he worked, he sat in the centre of it on a low stool in front of a stone altar. This stone was like a little bench with legs, and it was on this that he polished, oiled, dusted and sharpened the knife blades and tools that the people brought him. He was never dirty, as a blacksmith would have been at home. Sometimes while he worked he wore nothing on his upper body and Vera saw the way the pattern of the firm, braided muscles of his upper arms was repeated under his ribs. His chest hair was spiked with grey. He never acknowledged her presence. He was almost always fixed in deep concentration on a blade. When she passed him on the path, Vera imitated the deep bows made to him by others on the island, even by the Headman of the Fisherman’s Union.
At first Vera had been proud to be alone and stubbornly revelled in it. But now she was lonely. The girls acted as if she was invisible. She sat at the rim of the High Place when the wind blew, crawled in and out of the pitted rocks. Keiko joked that she was becoming like the wild cats that lived off the mice.
One day she came again upon Ikkanshi-san at the Low Place. As soon as she saw him, she crouched and hid,
although it was no use. He knew she was there. But he gave no sign. The
katanatogi
never looked at her. For long moments he kneeled as before in front of a long, flat, gleaming blade. Vera wondered as she watched if, coming from the ancient family of sword polishers, he had any choice when he became a
katanatogi.
How did he come to live on the summer island? Or was he under some compulsion, a prisoner here, like herself?
He knew she was there. He sensed her presence although she made not a sound.
He closed his eyes and strove for the mind like water. But on its surface he saw her reflected. Only the blind would have missed seeing her, the pale white skin and yellow hair. Also, she was sad and her sadness reached out for him.
There was a story in her life, a story that touched his.
He remembered her grandfather, James Lowinger. He was a big, bearded Englishman, who came to the summer island not so many years ago. They said he was a friend of Mikimoto Taisho and that he had visited these islands many times over his long life. This last time he brought his son-in-law: that was Hamilton Drew, the girl’s father. The younger one came to him when he discovered the
katanatogi
had been to England and spoke his language. He wanted to see swords. He was a collector – of gems, of art, of anything other people valued. Of women, the sword polisher supposed, although perhaps he left that to the old man. He did not show any swords to Hamilton Drew. They are not made for one such as him. There was nothing else of value here, he told the collector: we are simple people and those treasures we have we do not bring to the summer island.
And Hamilton Drew said to him, ‘But you are not one of them.’
He was perceptive, that was one thing.
‘Perhaps I am not one of them, but I know them better than you do. I know that what you came for is not here,’ he said.
What the old man had come for was not quite as obvious.
Ikkanshi can still see James Lowinger getting off the ferry with his great, waxed barbs of hair curling out from under his nose, like the Greek sea god who he had seen in the British Museum. He went directly down to the shore to meet the
ama
diving girls. That was his mistake: he did not present himself to the Headman. The sword polisher thought to himself: no one of his kind ever comes here. This is a poor island and foreign visitors visit the sophisticated centres.
He saw the Englishman walking by the harbour, back and forth, in the long coat that buttoned over his chest. The divers were far out from shore and he shielded his eyes to see them. He returned to the village and spoke to this man and that, found himself a place to sleep at the temple, and remained. He was clever. He made no requests, at first. In this way he could not be turned down.
He knew how to wait. Still that mistake cost him much time. Since he had been ignored, the Headman would not see him for many days. Lowinger would walk on the beach and meet the women when they came in from diving. But of course they would not talk to him. They had been told not to. They presented him with the face of
shiran kao,
he who knows nothing. If it was pearls he was after he would not be lucky. They were only diving for shellfish.
The day was hot. James Lowinger removed his long coat and met the returning boats in an open-necked shirt. The diving girls giggled into their hands as they came in, standing in the little boats, one of them wielding the handle of the single fixed oar that also served as rudder. They jumped out in thigh-high water as they always did and pulled the boats up. Keiko, he remembers, stood boldly beside him as she tied on her
yakata.
The old
man looked older than ever beside her, older than her father would have been had he been alive. Keiko’s father had been a fine, strong man who died too young.