Some Very Strange Reason

Rain drums on wooden eaves; a rhythm more comforting than my mother’s pulse. Spring rain falls differently in Kyoto than in Satsuma, I’ve noticed. Heavier somehow. More insistent on getting in. Like the fingers of impatient spirits demanding to be let in.

I sit in seiza, watching the petals fall outside the narrow slit window of this borrowed room. Three days since the last kill. Three days of nothing but rain, and boredom, and misery, and guilt, and waiting. A blade unused grows restless and seeks its owner, they say. When I’ve gone too long without satisfying the urge, it feels as though it’s just waiting to kill me.

“Magnificent, is it not?” Gensai-dono’s is as rhythmic, bright and precise as his swordwork. He kneels beside me, eyes following mine to the storm-battered cherry tree.

“The sakura fall just as they reach perfection,” he reminds me.

Unlike the men we kill, I think, but do not say.

Kawakami Gensai-dono has arrived from Edo only yesterday and his target (he says) is the Western-sympathizing scholar who no longer draws breath as of this morning. We rarely cross paths, we four. To see two hitokiri in one place invites attention we cannot afford, but I do feel less alone when someone who does what I do is with me. Not that we feel “together.”

“You leave for Osaka tomorrow?” he states. Not a question. Absolutely not a question.

“Hai.”

“The target is heavily guarded.”

I nod once, quickly and deliberately. Any man who needs many guards already knows he deserves death, or so I was taught. “Cherry trees will still be in bloom when you return,” Gensai-dono informs me. In his words I hear what he doesn’t say: If, you return.

I rise silently, retrieving my swords from the stand where I left them (never not carrying a knife). The wakizashi gets polish first even though its edge needed no attention. Just, for lack of something to do.

The smaller blade often sees more use in my work, sadly. In narrow corridors and close quarters any katana is worse than unwieldy. A throat opens just as easily to eighteen inches of steel as to twenty-nine.

Gensai-dono appears to study my hands. “Your technique has become modified since I saw you last?”

“As has yours?” I reply, noting the fresh callus on his thumb. He’s modified his grip. He has adapted to them adapting to us. Even the greatest are constant students. In fact, I suspect that might be what makes him so great.

Outside, the rain intensifies troublingly. A proper downpour, drowning blood from the streets, and carrying secrets better left unacknowledged into the gutters. Tomorrow I leave for Osaka, and I restrain the groan of misery that the ground will be soft. Good for silent footfalls, bad for quick escapes, and horrible for long treks.

“Have you heard from Izō-dono, by any chance?” I ask, not looking up from my blade.

Gensai-dono’s silence tells me everything. Rumors have reached even our ears over here that Okada Izō-dono is growing erratic. Too visible. Too violent. Far to easy to track, with a story following wherever he goes, and few of them complementary to our cause. The perfect blade knows restraint. Izō-dono’s blade drinks deeply and a bit too often.

“His path is his own,” Gensai-dono finally decides. The words of a man distancing himself from a falling star.

Our conversation ends there. Words, like traces, can become evidence.

-=-=-

Osaka Castle looms gigantic and imposing against the violet evening sky; white walls turned metallic by sunset. I have been in the city for only two days. Watching… Waiting… Learning the habits and routines of my target.

Matsudaira Shungaku. Once Lord of Echizen, now a voice calling for compromise with the barbarians. For the restoration of “Imperial power,” yes, but through negotiation with traitors rather than sacrifice and blood. Saigō-dono wants his voice to never be heard from again.

The castle itself is utterly impenetrable. However, even important men must eventually leave their fortresses.

Tonight, Matsudaira visits his favorite pleasure house in the Shinmachi district. His guard is twelve samurai strong. Six remain outside the establishment, eyes shifting side to side, while six accompany him inside on a closer retinue. The building has three exits, I have scouted them, and memorized my way out from any angle should the need arise.

I adjust the simple clothing of a merchant’s assistant I’m wearing, swords remaining hidden beneath a plain brown travelling cloak. In these turbulent times even merchants are travelling armed so no one looks twice me for such things anymore.

The cherry trees along the canal are dropping their petals into the water. Pale pink boats swirling in the burbling current and spin by the breeze. It’s only two and a half weeks into spring, and already they surrender. Birth and death, separated by the merest days, hours and minutes.

I move through the alleys with determination. Never furtive, furtive men draw eyes, with a confident step like a local in any town I just arrived in. The trick to invisibility is to never actively hide. Be so ordinary that not a single pair of eyes can help but slide over or past you.

The pleasure houses comes into view, windows casting warm yellow and orange lights onto the street exaggerating the shadows of the guards. All alert, but not one alarmed. They have no reason to expect death tonight, why would I give them a reason to expect the inevitable?

Circle to the rear entrance where deliveries happen during the day a single guard is standing at his post, hand a finger’s-length from his sword hilt. Young. Valient. Biologically talented towards vigilance.

He is the one that will die first.

A kitchen door opens and the serving girl struggles with a bucket of slops that nearly spills all over her. As the guard moves to assist her, the kindness of his act is his last. Bending to take the bucket my wakizashi slides between his ribs. In, out. Swift. Silent. He makes only a soft exhale as I lower his body to the ground by the collar.

The serving girl turns, sees his collapsed form, sees me… and her mouth opens to scream.

My hand is clamping down over her lips well before that, however.

“Silence,” I whisper, “Silence and you live.”

Terror exaggerates the shape of her pretty eyes but she nods so I release her, and she flees into the darkness. A witness… huh? Normally, I leave none? But tonight, I’m deciding speed matters more than perfection.

Inside the pleasure house, honeyed light osmoses through and across painted screens. Heavy air hangs with incense, sake and other smells. Music drifts from an upper room where Matsudaira is being entertained by a shamisen.

I move from shadows and corner to shadow and corner like quicksilver finding its course. Two guards at the bottom of the stairs… three more outside the room where the shamisen is. A sixth likely inside the room with my target.

I make my knife finds the first guard’s throat before he fully turns his head all the way. The second reaches for his sword but never even clears his scabbard before my blade is entering beneath his chin, angled upward to skewer his brain.

Their deaths make so little sound in comparison to the plucked notes.

Three guards outside the room, more difficult. They stand facing different directions. No approach without being seen, no chance.

I draw both my blades now. The longer katana in my right hand, the wakizashi in my left, loosening my arms up. Time slows as I step into their sight and they all respond to me.

The first shouts. His warning dies with him though, as my katana opens his chest like a sack of grain. Second manages to partially draw a weapon before the wakizashi takes his eye and more. Third lands a blow on my shoulder before I can pivot and pain flares so horribly I can barely see.

Sharp and immediate. His blade has found my flesh… but not bone, and my katana answers in kind, separating his head from his shoulders entirely with a single vengeful stroke. Blood sprays across every wall and surface imaginable, painted screens looking like a madman’s calligraphy all of a sudden.

A door slides open and the sixth guard stands, framed in orange, sword already drawn, held in two hands while behind him I glimpse Matsudaira rising from cushions, a woman cowering in the light beside him.

The final guard is skilled. His blade meets mine with precision, strength and fortitude, knowing his life is on the line with every swing. He commits and his steel rings against mine — a sound that tears through any illusion I might have had that this mission could be performed with my typical stealth.

We exchange three blows in the space of a breath. On the fourth, I feint with the katana and drive the wakizashi into his throat far too quickly for him to react to.

He falls, and I step over his body with disgust. Matsudaira faces me with impressive dignity, hands clasped, staring at the body of his guard. No pleading. No running. He knows why I have come.

“Which one are you?” he asks. “Izō? Or perhaps are you Gensai?”

I say nothing. All the women have fled but many other guards will be upon me soon.

“I suppose it does not matter,” he goes on. “Your cause is lost before it begins… Japan cannot remain closed in your small-minded view of the world forever.”

My blades answer his philosophy with my own brand. The first strike disarms him, sending his sword clattering ridiculously, and the second opens his chest from left shoulder to right hip.

He falls, having reached perfection. There is nowhere to go but down.

I do not linger to watch his final moments as shouts and footfalls are growing louder below already. An alarm has been raised and my exit will not be as simple as my entrance. Wet warm… something, runs down my arm from the wound in my shoulder. My own — an uncommon sight… I tear a strip from Matsudaira’s silk to bind it.

A near window is overlooking a small garden and two stories is not so far to fall.

Wakizashi sheathed, I keep the katana drawn and the door behind me slides open again but I’m already leaping out the window and, like a petal, momentarily drifting into the void.

The impact severely shocks my shins, pain rising through my legs, then numbness. I roll, rise, and after assessing a lack of breakage, begin to run at the top of my speed, seeing figures appear at the window when I glance over my shoulder and not looking back again after an arrow hisses past my head.

Not toward the main gate where guards will be gathering, rear wall. Rear wall. Lower there. Possible to scale, run run run, even with one good arm, I can get over it.

My breathing’s starting to burn, it’s hard to feel strong now. Blood drenches the makeshift bandage. Each heartbeat pushes more life out of me and into the night air it seems.

The wall appears, finally, before me. Ten feet of solid stone so I sheathe the katana mid-stride and leap, fingers finding purchase on some brick in the rough surface. My wounded shoulder screams in protest but I can make it work.

Voices are getting louder, torchlight flickering at the edge of my vision, brightening the wall, making it shine, making me stand out. I pull myself upward, handhold by agonizing handhold as the top of the wall seems to recede. An arrow strikes the stone beside my head and splinters slice up my cheek. Oh no. Great. Oh no. Great.

One final effort, come on Shinbei, you’re not gonna die like this?! You’re not gonna die like this!!

I heave with a final horrible yanking pain, myself, over the top, and fall rolling off the other side. The impact drives the air from my lungs. Why’d I do that? Seriously, why did I just do that? That was the stupidest possible way to get down from there. I can’t even breathe now.

I lie still for one heartbeat. Two. Then force myself to my feet, hammering on my chest to cough.

The streets of Osaka spread out, a labyrinthine illumination ahead of me, shadows and light. Houses and angles. I merge into whatever disreputable traffic is shuffling down the street, becoming, once more, completely unremarkable. A cloaked figure in the night.

That was too close. Way too close. This wound will need serious attention, but not in Osaka. Not here or now. I’ll have to wait. Shit, why am I limping?

As I make my way toward the safe house, cherry blossoms reveals the eddies of wind around my feet. Beautiful in their dying and perfect in their impermanence and impatience. Always ready to go. Always ready to bleed.

Like the men we kill; Like the men we are.

This is nothing more than a veil that separates life from death. Four of us live within that veil, but tonight, I carried it, alone. I do not know if I will sneeze tomorrow. Hopefully not. Perhaps someone will put it together, when they find Matsudaira’s body. I wonder if they will ever know exactly which of the four hitokiri has visited them this day.

The best kills, like the best poems, never carry their author’s name, and I doubt they’ll ever know it was me.

Now, why does that make me smile? I do not know, but it must be for some very strange reason.