Daughter of the Sword (54 page)

shamisen:
traditional Japanese lute

shinobi:
literally, “magic person” or “secret person”; a ninja

shinogi-ji:
the flat of a
katana
or
tachi

shinogi-zukuri:
a style of sword featuring a flat of the blade, so that the blade looks roughly bullet-shaped in cross section

shōchū:
rice liquor

shodan:
literally, “beginner’s rank”; first-degree black belt

shogun:
commander in chief; historically, the true ruler of Japan (the emperor being merely the shogun’s most important hostage)

shoji:
sliding divider with rice paper windows, usable as both door and wall

shomen:
an overhead strike

shoyu:
soy sauce

southern barbarian:
white person (considered “southern” because European sailors were first allowed to dock only in Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s major islands)

sugegasa:
broad-brimmed, umbrella-like hat

tachi:
a curved long sword worn with the blade facing downward

taiko:
a Japanese-style (and often enormous) drum; alternatively, the art of drumming with said drums

tsuba:
a hand protector, usually round or square, where the hilt of a sword meets its blade; the Japanese analogue to a crossguard

wakaru:
to understand

wakashū:
a low-ranking yakuza

wakizashi:
a curved short sword, typically paired with a
katana
, worn with the blade facing upward

washi:
traditional Japanese handmade paper

yakuza:
member of an organized crime syndicate

zabuton:
a broad cushion used for sitting on the floor

AUTHOR’S NOTE

There is a scene in the film adaptation of
The Fellowship of the Ring
that got the attention of some vociferous critics with a lot of time on their hands. The four hobbits sit around their campfire on Amon Sûl cooking a dinner of tomatoes, sausages, and nice, crispy bacon. The critics complained that tomatoes are a New World food, and that it is therefore unrealistic for hobbits to be eating them. This sort of complaint tickles me. Four hobbits travel in the company of a ranger still in the prime of life at eighty-seven years old, they search for a wizard on a hill with an Elvish name, they are soon to be attacked by deathless wraiths, and what’s unrealistic about this scene is that they’re
eating
tomatoes
.

Some readers may find errors in this book that are more substantial than hobbit tomatoes. My background is primarily in philosophy, not history, and so I take certain risks in writing historical fiction. I’ve never been a police officer either, so I take further risks in choosing Mariko as a protagonist. That’s all right with me; to crib from Socrates, the risk-free life is not worth living. If readers do find anachronisms and inaccuracies in this book, I expect I’ll be seeing some e-mail. Please send it. I look forward to learning from experts about police procedures and Japanese history, and if I build a collection of hobbit tomatoes in the process, so much the better. I promise to do something fun with them.

My editor tells me that the rest of my readers—those who aren’t police officers, Japanese historians, or the sort to go looking for hobbit tomatoes to sling—may be curious to know which parts of the book are historically accurate and which are my own invention. Master Inazuma himself is fictitious, but the other details regarding the forging of swords are as accurate as I know how to make them: Muramasa and Masamune are real historical figures; the sword smiths of Seki were (and are) Shinto priests, and Seki was (and is) the sword smithing capital of Japan; virtually identical swords were classified as
tachi
in one era and
katana
in another, and were classified differently based on how they were worn.

Perhaps most important for purposes of this book, it was not uncommon to give a sword a name, especially if something remarkable was accomplished with that weapon, and neither was it uncommon to describe a sword as having a certain personality. Japanese culture is at bottom a culture thoroughly infused by Shinto, and central to Shinto beliefs is the idea that
kami
—mistranslated as “gods,” poorly translated as “spirits,” and best left untranslated at all—reside in living and unliving things alike. Waterfalls have
kami
as surely as foxes do, and on this view there is no reason a sword should not be able to have its
kami
.

All of the historical periods in this book are accurately named and dated, and though the names of the characters and their families are invented, the details surrounding their lives are again as historically accurate as I know how to make them. Samurai boys like Daigoro did come of age at sixteen (though some families chose other birthdays to celebrate coming-of-age). Women like Hisami were samurai, and they did have their own schools of weapon training, including training with hairpin blades. The transfer of Saito’s loyalty from Lord Kanayama to Lord Ashikaga was possible, and the alternatives—seppuku or becoming
rōnin
—were grim.

I also sought to make regional politics faithfully mirror historical fact. The Owari territory of Book Two was hotly contested throughout
the most turbulent parts of Japan’s history. The Izu peninsula in Books Four and Six had five dominant clans, the heads of which were called
Izu-no-kami
(Lord Protectors of Izu). I have renamed the Izu families, but a clan like House Okuma would have commanded the fealty of smaller clans like House Yasuda. Toyotomi Hideyoshi is a real historical figure, and his power was such that not even a regionally dominant clan like the Okumas could afford to ignore his wishes.

Incidentally, Okuma Ichirō’s neck wound is also true to life, as is Ashikaga Jinzaemon’s. Lord Ashikaga’s was inspired by an acquaintance of my grandfather’s who was shot in the throat; his gravelly voice stands out in my memory, as does his scar like a satellite view of a hurricane. Ichirō’s wound is borrowed from an account in the
Hagakure
, as is his treatment. Despite the seeming impossibility of surviving such a grievous wound given such limited knowledge of medicine, the victim in the
Hagakure
lived to fight another day. That someone in that era could survive being nearly beheaded was too tempting for me to pass up.

As soon as I discovered that part of the story of the Inazuma blades would have to take place in World War II, I scoured the histories looking for the ideal moment. Two events stood out to frame that moment. The first was the unexpected American surrender near Luzon on April 9, 1942. The second came just nine days later: the only American air raid to strike Japan in 1942, known today as the Doolittle Raid (named for the architect of the attack, not for the fact that the attack didn’t do much).

Colonel Iwasaki is fictitious, but the crimes I have him commit in the Rape of Nanjing and the Bataan Death March are all too real. Keiji Kiyama and General Matsumori are invented, but the events of World War II in which they are involved are actual events. Disease did cause seventy-five thousand Americans and Filipinos to surrender much earlier than anticipated; that the Japanese were caught unprepared almost certainly contributed to the atrocities that followed in Bataan. Japanese soldiers did take Tulagi, the Solomons, and
Guadalcanal, and after the American counterinvasion the fighting on Guadalcanal was as bloody and vicious as any you can imagine. Whether or not all the island-hopping was orchestrated from a single building in Tokyo, and whether or not any intelligence officers from that building were demoted and shipped off to fight in Guadalcanal, are questions I took liberties in answering.

Executive Order 9066 is not a fiction; Japanese Americans were rounded up and concentrated in internment camps, and if comparing those to the concentration camps of Hitler and Stalin seems unfair to you, I hope you will grant that it might not have seemed that way from the perspective of a young Japanese officer of that era. In the course of Tiger on the Mountain’s story I make brief mention of anti-American propaganda; this too was real and would no doubt fuel the fears of someone in Kiyama Keiji’s position.

Yamada Yasuo is based in part on my sensei and mentor, Dr. Yuasa Yasuo. Yuasa-sensei was a philosophical mentor for me, not a martial one, but like Yamada, he did fight in World War II. (Yuasa-sensei’s career in the war was worthy of Vonnegut and reminiscent of Heller: he was a combat engineer, and he told me that by the end of the war he was rebuilding the same bridge every night, which American bombers would blow up again the following day.) Like Yamada, Yuasa-sensei was nearly blind. Like Yamada, he published voluminously. On that note I will confess to stealing one of Yamada’s wisecracks directly from Yuasa-sensei, who once told me his publisher might at least have the good graces to wait until he was dead before calling his complete works
complete
. Like Yamada, he exhibited extraordinary generosity, always willing to share his wisdom. The one respect in which they are not at all alike is that, to the best of my knowledge, Yuasa-sensei was never a total badass with a sword.

Some aspects of Mariko’s life may strike non-Japanese readers as odd because police work is so different in Japan than elsewhere. Most noticeable is the fact that Japanese cops almost never use their guns. By this I don’t mean merely that they don’t fire their guns; most never
even draw them. In the U.S., very few police officers ever fire at a human being, but even in rural areas many officers will find it hard to imagine getting through a summer without ever drawing and aiming at a suspect. (One officer I interviewed for this book told me he draws his service weapon weekly and has to take aim at a suspect at least once a month—and he serves a fairly sparse population.) By contrast, you can find cops in Japan who not only haven’t drawn their weapon in years but who don’t even know of anyone in their police station who has. Japanese cops pride themselves on their marksmanship, but the idea of using a pistol in the field is anathema.

This is hardly the only discrepancy between the Japanese and American legal systems. Japanese medical examiners almost never perform autopsies. (Confucian taboos still prohibit tampering with corpses.) Defendants in criminal courts are almost never acquitted; by the time a case gets to trial, a conviction is all but secured. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department occupies an especially strange conceptual space, for Japan is without an equivalent of the American FBI. There is a National Police Agency, which is like an FBI with all of the bureaucrats but none of the agents or law enforcement power. The NPA commandeers local police officers as necessary, often from the TMPD, and the TMPD has the power to involve its own officers in crimes outside of its jurisdiction. Smaller police departments may also request personnel from the TMPD, which is how Mariko becomes involved in Dr. Yamada’s life.

Organized crime syndicates go by many names in Japan. “The yakuza” is not one of them, despite the fact that in English “the yakuza” is almost invariably used to mean “the Japanese Mafia” rather than “the Japanese mafioso.” The terms I use most often here are
bōryokudan
(“violent crime organization”), which is used by police, and
ninkyō dantai
(literally “chivalrous group,” though it is not such a stretch to translate it as “Order of Knights”), used by yakuzas themselves. The difference between these two should tell you something about the difference between how police think of yakuzas and how
yakuzas think of themselves. The word yakuza literally means “eight-nine-three,” but better translations would be “mafioso” or, oddly enough, “useless guy” or “good-for-nothing.” (The cards eight, nine, and three form an utterly worthless hand in a traditional card game that yakuzas used to run.) Yakuzas are yakuzas because they were deemed to be unfit for any other occupation. Revenge must have been sweet when society’s most useless members carved out a new and supremely influential place for themselves.

The role of organized crime is misunderstood by virtually everyone, and in Japan that role is particularly bizarre. It is even difficult to apply the word “crime,” because in Japan such shadowy activities are often conducted in broad daylight with no legal reprisals. It is common knowledge, for example, that yakuzas own almost all the vending machines in the country, and the price of a bottle of soda is therefore defined by yakuzas. (Convenience stores dare not undercut it, for obvious reasons.) Yakuzas routinely carry business cards and maintain office buildings. The name of the criminal organization is displayed prominently above the front door, just like any ordinary business. When police raid such buildings, they phone in advance to make an appointment for the raid. I swear to you I am not making this up.

There is no Kamaguchi-gumi, and neither Fuchida Shūzō, his father, nor Kamaguchi Ryusuke is based on any actual person. I repeat:
no yakuza in this book is based on a real person
. It may well be that the risk-free life is not worth living, but even so, I want to make it clear to all the gangsters out there that I am sure you are all perfectly nice fellows and you are just misunderstood. Please do not make me sleep with the fishes.

—Steve Bein
Undisclosed Location
August 2011

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My heartfelt thanks go out to all of the people who assisted me in researching this book: to Alex Embry, my primary resource on all cop questions; to all the other police officers I interviewed but who preferred to remain nameless; to D. P. Lyle for all of his guidance on getting the medical and forensic details right; to the members of Codex for their collective resourcefulness in answering just about any question a writer can imagine; and to Luc Reid for getting Codex started in the first place.