The 47th Samurai by Stephen Hunter
He woke sensing light.
I am ready, he thought. I will win.
He found a fresh jockstrap, pulled on gi trousers, covered them with hakama trousers, which he now knew how to tie, all the little bows and straps, all nice and neat. Attired, he stretched for twenty minutes, warming his muscles. Finally, all loosey-goosey, he put on his gi jacket, belting it tight, and walked to the dojo.
Doshu awaited, as did his opponent.
“You must win,” said Doshu. “No mercy, no hesitation, no doubt. Give all. Become void.”
“I—,” said Bob, then stopped when he saw the enemy.
It wasn’t merely that the enemy was about four feet tall and about ten. It was much worse. She was a girl.
25
THE FLOATING WORLD
Nick worked the clubs. Uptown, downtown, all around the town. He did the fancy glass-and-chrome joints in the Ginza, the most sophisticated of Tokyo’s nighttime districts. It cost him a fortune, because the Ginza is possibly the most expensive strip of real estate in the world, but he’d just moved two pounds of pure Moroccan White Girl to a minor yak offshoot and so he had a big wad of cash in his drawers and he didn’t mind spreading it around in search of a scoop that would put his rag on the map big-time.
And it would be a scoop too: Kondo Isami, the legendary yak killer, man of mystery and blood, working for a new big boss on a new big plan. That would make him in this burg. God, he loved this filthy town.
But he had no luck on the Ginza strip. He worked the gay part of the city, Shinjuku-2-Chome, on the principle that a few of the yaks were fairy or went to both coasts; they might sneak off here to relax, to get off, to forget the slicing that was so much a part of their lives, and might relax enough so that with a gallon or two of sake, they might spill something to a rent boy, he might spill something in turn. He worked Ace and Kinswomyn and Kinsmen and Advocate.
But no. The fags weren’t talking, or if they were, they weren’t talking to him, a straight guy with blondish hair and too much money to burn.
He had no luck either in Akasaka, another bright grid of streets loaded with bars, clubs, joints, particularly soaplands, those slippery palaces of hygiene and blow jobs, but not quite as sophisticated as Ginza. A lot of loose lips, in more ways than one, in the soaplands. Again, nothing. Nobody was talking.
He tried bouncers, barkeeps, hostesses, jazz musicians, rockers, cops, dealers, a few low-ranking yaks, people he knew or who knew of him. He spread a fortune around doing all the places: Cavern Club, Crocodile, Fukuriki Ichiza, Gaspanic Bar, Geronimo Shot Bar, Ichimon, Hobgoblin Tokyo, Shinjuku Pit Inn, Ruby Room, Nanbantei, Milk, Maniac Love, Warrior Celt, Xanadu, and Yellow. He got names and places from guys and moved on to other guys, other places, but generally he got the same warning, high town or low.
“Baby, you don’t want to ask about that guy. That guy’s serious. If he finds out, he’ll come to call in the night and you’ll end up cut to noodles.”
“I hear you. It’s just I heard a little something, I’d like to lay it out.”
“It’ll lay you out, Yamamoto-san. You’ll die for the glory of the Tokyo Flash. Is that what you want?”
“Thanks, bud.”
“Good luck, man.”
He tried Nishi Azabu, Roppongi, Harajuku, and Shibuya Center Gai, even Ebisu, popular with the expatriate set, though it was almost unthinkable that a gaijin would know something before a Nipponese would.
No, no, no, nothing. Instead, he came upon a yak scoop, having nothing to do with anything at all. Still, it was all the buzz, and he heard it in a dozen places. The yak talk was porn talk, almost the same thing. The boys at Imperial had made some big American connection and were cooking up a deal; it looked like they’d be getting western stars, blond girls, into their product line, and that looked promising if they could only get import licenses. Anyone who got American product into Japan stood to make a fortune, as the Japanese hunger for white women was well known. And if you could get white women to do the Japanese things—bukkake, subway groping, pig snout rings, bondage, urination fantasy, rape, teacher, airline hostess, office lady—the profits would be huge. But until now no one had been able to break the ban on foreign product; nobody had the juice to get it through customs. One man stood against it.
Miwa, called “the Shogun” because he was the genius at Shogunate AV, was known for his ferocious interest in keeping Japanese porn Japanese; the Shogun worked hard to keep the laws really tight so that any American outfit trying to set up business in Japan would find itself ensnared in legal troubles and police harassment. It was almost certain he was a nationalist crackpot, as were many yaks with business connections and many businessmen with yak connections.
The Shogun was head of AJVS, the All Japan Video Society, the professional group that represented Big Porn’s interests and worked with the Administrative Commission of Motion Picture Codes and Ethics, which theoretically regulated the porn industry, though it was more frequently thought to be a subsidiary of AJVS by virtue of collateral interest or out-and-out bribery. The key to the Shogun’s power was his presidency of AJVS, which in turn made him the most influential figure of the Administrative Commission; it made him the boss, really, of porn. If he lost that, he lost everything. And his term at AJVS was up. Word had it that for the first time in years, bribe money was being spread around to the other porn studio execs—there were hundreds of studios—to deny the Shogun reelection; if Imperial took over AJVS, they took over the Administrative Commission as well; they’d open up trade with the Americans. As rich and powerful as Miwa was, how could he stand against a huge tsunami of American capital, ravenous for the incredibly flexible gymnastics of the classic Japanese pussy? He hated the Americans. It was more than anything rational, it was cultural: their product was uninteresting, it had no ideas, it reflected a society of decadence and softness. “Keep Japanese pornography Japanese!” the Shogun said.
That’s all the boys were talking about. It was like a war was going to break out, and maybe it was, as both Imperial and Shogunate AV had their powerful sponsors in the business. Maybe the streets would run red with blood as the two porn giants tried to dominate and set the future.
“Nah. The porn people may have yak money in them, and yak influence, but they don’t like to go to the blades. They’d rather sue or try to ruin each other with unsubstantiated rumors. They’d never kill. They get too much pussy. If you get a lot of pussy, you don’t see the point in cutting someone’s head off, especially when it might get you your head cut off.”
“Maybe Kondo is signing up with one of those outfits just as a threat, a hint of future difficulties,” Nick said to this source, a detective on the Organized Crime Squad, who knew.
“He’s above that crap. His thing is the elegant, perfect hit. He’s not going into alleys with hoods and start madly hacking off heads. It’s too common. He picks his jobs, that’s all. He’d never get involved with porn. He’s old school. He’s like all the stiffs who hate Miwa for making millions off pussy.”
“Sure,” said Nick. He slid over ten 10,000-yen notes.
“Wow,” said the cop, “that’s a nice tip. You won’t tell anybody I talked to you?”
“You bet I won’t,” said Nick, “and you won’t tell anybody I talked to you?”
“You think I want to spend my last eight seconds bleeding out in an alley?”
Finally, only Kabukicho was left. He was well known there, and it made him feel a little vulnerable. But he had no choice. He knew this was dangerous and Kabukicho was Otani’s and clearly Kondo had an Otani connection. The wires in Kabukicho would be direct; any questions he asked would get to the wrong people fast.
He knew he ought to hire somebody to do the asking for him, somebody from out of town so it wouldn’t get back that it was Nick Yamamoto, the Tokyo Flash, the Clark Kent of the Tokyo tabloid scene, on the trail.
But he couldn’t resist. He had that reporter gene. He wasn’t an elegant writer, he wasn’t ambitiou
He began casually, with people he knew were so minor they were probably unconnected to anything big.
“Anything going on? I’m thinking some kind of realignment. A certain guy who’s worked with Otani on some delicate matters now working with someone else, someone big, someone from a little outside? Hear anything?”
“I think I know who you’re talking about, but I don’t ever discuss him. It’s not healthy. He’d cut off my arm and make me eat my tattoos.”
He went everywhere, Queen Bee, the S-M Club, Mysteria Purity, Le Grand Bleu, MoMo Iro, everywhere, talking to anyone, whores, image club performers, trannies, enforcers, bouncers, cutters, the odd Chinaman, the odd Korean, the odd African, impersonators, pickpockets, and everywhere it was the same.
Nothing. Nothing.
It was the nothing that had him tantalized. There was usually something, but the talk about the upcoming election for presidency of AJVS and its implications on the issue Imperial versus Shogunate AV had become so loud that nothing else was being talked about. It was as if an anvil had been laid across Kabukicho gossip lines. But then finally…oh, it was so small. It was so nothing. It was a wisp, a leaf in the wind.
He was in a small club closed to strangers, so late it was early. Scotch was the drink of choice, blues the music and the lighting scheme, smoke the preferred atmosphere. You could hardly see across the room. Nick threw down another Scotch and water, turned to the barkeep, and said, “Another for me, another for Dad here.”
Dad was a bouncer at Prin Prin, an image club that catered to the fantasy life of the Japanese male, including student-teacher, airline hostess, office lady, kimono. It even had a whole set built to resemble a subway car for those who just had to grope. But even in such a kingdom of the dream cum true, trouble sometimes broke out and thus a fast big man with good hands was needed. His specialty was the “soft punch” by which he deflated the overly amorous with a thunder blow to the midriff, yet left no scars, no bruises, nothing but a powerful sense of ill-being.
“You didn’t hear this from me,” the thunder-puncher said.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
“Swear to god, not from me.”
“Swear to god twice.”
“I have a bitch. She’s half Korean, supervises a shift at one of the hand-job joints. Tough little gal. Pretty, but tough.”
“Yeah.”
“She says all the Korean sex workers are nervous because one of their own got disappeared a few months ago.”
“I didn’t hear a thing.”
“That’s just it: you weren’t supposed to. Just here one day, gone the next. But here’s what my girlfriend knows that nobody else knows and she didn’t even figure it out till she thought about it. The next morning on the way to work, she saw a guy named Nii, some minor hood who somehow got into a good crew and is now off the street—”
“Nii.”
“Nii. She saw him stagger out of a bar where he’d clearly been for hours, go into an alley, and puke his guts out. Just puke. She swears that when he bent over, his jacket fell open and the bottom half of his white shirt was drenched in red.”
“Lord.”
“Like he’d been at some brutal hacking. So who had Nii hacked? The woman? Why would he hack some nothing Korean whore and then make it go away?”
“Maybe he’s screwy that way. Jack the Ripper, that sort of thing. Or maybe it’s just Kabukicho. The odd whore gets disappeared once in a while. Life goes on. Boo fucking hoo.”
“Sure. But there’s something weird here. What was weird, this Korean whore thing, it was somehow set up, all the Korean girls were talking about it for weeks. Her boss kept the gal late so she didn’t go to Shinjuku station with the others. She went later, by herself, and somewhere along the walk to the station, real early in the morning, she met up with somebody and just vanished. The Nii thing suggests she was cut.”
“Hmmm. Doesn’t have to be Eight-Nine-Three Brotherhood.”
“Yeah, it does. Because the thing was planned. Somebody with juice got it set up so that this gal could be, you know, cut from the herd, held for a certain time, then released to go off and be chopped, diced, spindled, mutilated in private. No cops, no witnesses; it was all planned out. And poor Nii had the cleanup job. He wouldn’t have the juice to set it up. He’s nothing, a servant, a cleanup kid. But he’s working for somebody with juice and somebody who likes to cut.”
Nick saw it then: sure, it fit.
Nii would have to work for Kondo. Kondo wanted to cut something. It was all arranged via Boss Otani. But why?
“Do you remember the date?”
“Only that it was just after that soldier-hero and his family got burned up. Remember that? God, that was sad.”
“It was sad,” said Nick.
But his mind was already racing. Kondo had cut the shit out of someone and Nii had helped. Nii was Kondo’s boy. So if he wanted to find out what Kondo was up to, he had to find out what Nii was up to.
The police records were easy enough to obtain. Nii, Takashi “Joe.” The photo showed a squat face under long Beatle-style hair, the eyes gleamless with a lack of intelligence or purpose. The photo was taken when he was eighteen, old enough to be arrested the first time. Rap sheet: impressive but hardly incredible. Breaking-entering, time in juvie, assault, robbery, carrying a wakizashi, a footloose punk hunting thrills and his own death in the alleyways of Kabukicho. He ran with a street gang called the Diamondbacks. That meant, among other things, he probably had tattoos of diamonds on his back. With his pals, he raised minor hell. Eventually, he did two years hard time for beating a shop owner half to death. He clearly was a guy trying to attract yak attention, and failing. Yet two years ago…he disappeared.
Has Mr. Nii turned a corner and become a model citizen? Is he now selling life insurance, Popeye’s chicken, Nikes, porn? It doesn’t seem likely. Far more likely: he’s made that dream contact, he’s been taken in by somebody, cleaned up, spiffed up, given a haircut, he’s put on a suit and a pair of expensive Italian pointed-toe black shoes, he’s learned how to tie a tie and cut his nails, and now he moves discreetly and invisibly through the world of yak crime, violent when necessary but not spastically violent, pointlessly violent, the violence of sudden rage. No, now it’s controlled and deployed by a much wiser boss.
Nii? You see Nii? Any word of Nii? Where’s Nii hang? Remember Nii? That kid, Nii, always gets in trouble, ran with the Diamondbacks. Funny you should mention the Diamondbacks as I think the new bouncer at the Milk was a Diamondback for a while.
Nii? Oh, yeah, Nii. Okay guy, I guess, don’t know what happened to him. Not that you’d notice him. He was what you call your averagelooking guy, nothing about him stood out. Oh, one thing I remember, yeah, he used to like to go to a bar called Celtic Warrior. He always had a samurai thing. He saw himself as the last of the Toshiro Mifunes. Yeah, Celtic Warrior, it’s in Nishi Azabu.
Which is how come Nick found himself sitting in Celtic Warrior in Nishi Azabu on a Thursday night, alone at the bar, nursing a bourbon and water and a headache, trying to maintain his sanity as a bad multiracial goth band played heavily Japanese-influenced Celtic war melodies, an assault on the ears almost too intense to be described, much less endured. The joint was typical plastic shit, with shields and those ridiculous western knight swords like the old kings used hanging crosswise all over the place, and big mock-metallic triangles everywhere, crap out of Black Shield of Falworth, all Hollywood phony, all plastic. Some mooseheads and deer hung on the walls too, and there was even a stained-glass window behind the bar. It was so Camelot, or a Japanese
And that’s when he saw Nii.
It would have been so easy to miss him. It was only the sullenness in the eyes, their lack of dynamism that clued Nick in. The guy had bulked up considerably, and cleaned up; he now wore a neat crew cut moussed to an inch and a half of vertical, a white shirt, a dark suit, a tie. He could have been any salaryman unless you looked carefully at the fastidious way in which the collar of the jacket fitted the broad neck so perfectly, the way the suit hung with just the faintest dapple to it, picking up a sheen, the razor-vivid line of the trousers crease, their wondrous drape and flow that only the finest silks achieved, and the black shoes that seemed so standard but were actually extremely expensive British oxfords, worn generally by CEOs, ambassadors, and power lawyers. He was $6,000 in wardrobe trying to pass as $400 in wardrobe.
His whole manner was refined, poised, amused, confident. Say, hadn’t he come up in the world? And he wore his kingliness well, as Nick observed how extravagantly he was treated by the waitstaff and how generously—but quietly—he responded. He was a happy man, Nick realized; good job, plenty of dough to spend, the future looking brighter and brighter.
Nick watched the play of the evening. Occasionally a band member would come over and pay homage to Nii, occasionally the staff. Others came and paid honor and were rewarded with a smile or a touch; girls too, he seemed to be catnip to girls, that gangster thing just drives them wild.
And after a time luxuriating in the pride of having Made Good, Nii spoke to a young woman—the most childish woman there, Nick noted—and she trotted off to get her coat and tell her friends she wouldn’t be going home with them. The two walked out, holding hands, and Nick let a long minute pass before leaving a generous mound of yen on the bar and following.