Kage (14 page)

use, and a book of matches. Two good-sized rocks served as

bookends, encompassing a series of leather-bound journals. I

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John Donohue

brought them down and carefully made a space on the battered

old table.

Westmann had a spidery, although legible hand. The vol-

umes appeared to go back a few years. I surveyed the pages

quickly, intending to go back in more detail later. Westmann’s

journal was a combination of personal diary and a record of

ongoing work. There were details of parties and people he met.

His love life. There were a few snapshots shoved in among some

particularly lurid pages. Young women in a hot tub smiled at the

camera. The desert sky was dark behind them, with only a faint

orange line across the horizon. The camera flash highlighted the

contrast between the tan lines on their naked torsos and the pale

skin of their breasts. There was another picture of Westmann in

the water with them, his face flushed with alcohol and his eyes

slightly crossed. He had an expression on his face that suggested

that the lights were on but no one was home.

“Ick,” I said out loud to no one in particular.

Westmann’s party life wasn’t what I was interested in. I was

looking for clues about how he thought and how he worked.

Eventually, I grew adept at filtering out the more personal

stuff and focusing on the entries dealing with writing. At first

glance, there wasn’t much here that related to his old books. His

recent journal notes suggested that he had developed a fascina-

tion with the indigenous peoples of the American Southwest,

their relation to the land and their expressions of spirituality.

The notes were a jumble of reflections on sand paintings, the

Kachina, vision quests, and anything else he could grab at.

There were copies of maps folded in the latest volumes.

By evening, I’d come away with the impression of a man

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Kage

who had long put aside his early interests and was in the throes

of a new intellectual passion. He didn’t seem worried about

a visit from Asian assassins bent on revenging a decades-old

betrayal of secret lore. He was interested in sweat lodges and

mystic chants and figuring out a way to tap into the American

fascination with the generically exotic.

In other words, he was still a shyster. A talented guy with

a keen eye and an ear well tuned to the pitch of popular cul-

ture, but a shyster nonetheless. This was not a revelation to

me. There was little in the journals to pique my interest. Until

the entries that began to mention the help Westmann received

from a guide in the ways of the desert: Xochi.

Was reading this stuff technically connected to what I was

getting paid to do? No. I hadn’t finished my research, but I was

coming to some conclusions. Westmann mostly seemed pretty

sad to me: a person always trying to work the angles, in search

of things not for the joy of discovery, but because the process

led him to other things: notoriety, women, a good buzz. But

that wasn’t what was holding my attention. I couldn’t let go of

the question about the attack in the desert, or why Lori West-

mann’s desert guide Xochi was taking an interest in me.

Xochi. Did he hide the existence of Westmann’s retreat

from Lori to protect her mental image of her father? Or was

he playing some other angle? Perhaps there was a value to the

journals that I didn’t understand.

Looking back, maybe I shouldn’t have read the journals.

But I had a sense that somewhere in these pages, there were

answers for me. And besides, part of me really hated the type of

shyster-scholar that Westmann had become. If I was going to

research him, I wanted to uncover the truth and not whatever

Lori Westmann was trying to peddle. Finally, I remembered

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John Donohue

Yamashita’s admonition: in the warrior’s life there are two

things: intention and results.

I spent some hours working the copy machine in the

library, placed the original journals back where I had found

them, then closed up and headed back to town. I had an order

from Yamashita to obey.

Hasegawa Sensei was probably in his early forties. He had a

bristly salt and pepper mustache and short dark hair with some

silver on the sides. His torso was thick and his handshake was

powerful.

“Hey, Dr. Burke,” he said. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Steve

Hasegawa. We got a call that you might drop by.”
Sansei
, I

thought: at least a third generation Japanese American.

I smiled at him. He had good presence; the body relaxed yet

fit looking, his face open and friendly. “My
sensei
doesn’t want

me getting rusty while I’m out here for a while on a consulting

job,” I explained. “He obviously thinks highly of your
dojo.
I

was wondering whether you might be willing to let me train…”

It was a decent looking training hall. The ceilings were high

enough for weapons use. The space was big and empty and

unadorned—always a positive sign in my experience. You go

into a place and see a Bruce Lee poster or a velvet painting of

the Buddha, it’s probably best to walk right out again. Hasega-

wa’s work space consisted of a battered metal desk. Behind him

on the wall were framed certificates of rank, a posted practice

schedule, and some black and white photos. A few showed a

much older Asian man in action, a still center amidst the blur-

ring motion of falling bodies. Another was of Steve Hasegawa

conducting a class. Another photo captured him as a younger,

cockier man wearing camouflage BDU’s with a Ranger tab on

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Kage

the shoulder and cradling a scoped sniper rifle.

“Interesting,” I said.

He waved a hand. “Ancient history. Let me show you

around.”

The room was dominated by the broad expanse of hard-

looking mats. The walls were white with worn wainscoting,

and fluorescent lights pulsed down without remorse. It was

a serious training hall. The only concession to fashion was a

small shrine along one wall with a scroll hanging there. The

calligraphy was bold and fluid. It translated as “Relentless as

Fire.” My kind of place.

But it’s always dicey to show up and ask to be let in on

practice. It’s not unusual in the martial arts world for complete

strangers to wander in off the street, imply they’re advanced

students, and ask to train for a while. They’ve got the gear in

a battered bag and know the lingo, but they’re almost always a

royal pain. Inevitably, they’re either not as trained as they think,

which puts them at risk, or they’ve got something to prove,

which puts others at risk

Hasegawa’s smile didn’t fade when I made the request to

train, although his eyes shifted a bit. “Well,” he said, “we’re

always interested in new students, but I don’t know what ben-

efit there would be in a short-term membership.”

“Did my teacher speak with you?” I asked. “Sort of describe

what I’m looking for?”

“Uh, no,” he replied. “Actually the contact was through my

father. It’s his school, but I’ve been sort of running it lately…”

He trailed off as if there was explanation there but he was

unwilling to supply it. Then Hasegawa moved over to a desk

and pulled out a form. He looked up at me, still skeptical, but

obviously thinking about whatever his father had told him.

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John Donohue

“Maybe you could fill this membership form out, give me some

indication of your training background…”

They gave me a rental
gi
to wear. It was soft with repeated

washings and had the number “4” written on the collar in

magic marker. The standard uniform you see in judo and other

grappling arts, the
gi
was an off-white color. I had worn some-

thing very similar years ago when I first started studying the

martial arts. In Yamashita’s
dojo
,
we wear the deep indigo train-

ing tops of the traditional sword arts with a matching
hakama.

They’re links to an older, formal age in Japan. In some training

halls, appearing in just a
gi
without a
hakama
over it is con-

sidered the equivalent of appearing in your underwear. But in

other styles, like Hasegawa’s,
hakama
are only worn by people

with black belt rank.

They gave me a white belt to tie around my uniform. When

the class was called to order, I made sure I sat at the end with

the beginners. Everything in a traditional Japanese training hall

is related to issues of rank: it conditions whom you bow to and

how, the roles of people in paired exercises, and how you’re

supposed to behave in general. Even the room is divided into

spheres of higher and lower status. Higher ranks line up closest

to the place of honor where the scroll hung. As
sensei
, Hasegawa

would sit at that end. The line would stretch away from him,

across the room, and as individual rank decreased, so your place

in the line grew farther and farther away from the teacher.

I sat near the door, with the kids. As the class sat down in

the formal position for the ritual bow, the front door opened

and an elderly woman pushed a man in a wheelchair into the

room. All activity stopped. Steve Hasegawa leapt up from his

position, kissed the woman, and gently took control of the

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Kage

wheelchair. He moved the old man onto the mats, placed him

with care in the spot of honor, and then knelt down in front

of him, facing the wheelchair-bound man with the rest of the

class.His voice was strong as he called “
Sensei ni… Rei!
” and

we bowed in silent unison toward the figure in the chair. He

sat immobile, slightly slumped over, but his eyes glittered in

acknowledgment of the salutation.

This was probably the Hasegawa Sensei that Yamashita was

thinking about when he sent me here. As I watched Steve care

for the old man, placing him with care in a spot where he could

watch the training, I realized that my first impressions were

right: this would be a good place to learn things.

It didn’t mean that it would be an easy place, however.

The Hasegawa school was rooted in the traditions of judo and

aikido. The advanced students worked with wooden swords

and the short staff known as a
jo.
They handed me one of the

staffs, which were made from white oak.

We moved through some basics, practicing movement and

strikes in isolation. Then we progressed to paired techniques.

The old man watched me, his body almost totally motionless,

but his head and eyes moving slightly to track me, to measure

me, to weigh my skill. His son was doing the same, moving

around the room, correcting and encouraging, but always com-

ing back to evaluate me.

At one point we took a rest and at some signal I couldn’t

decipher, the old man called his son over. Steve bent over the

chair and his father whispered something to him. The younger

man nodded and straightened up.

“
Kata
,” he called.
Kata
are the formal practice routines of

the old arts, choreographed actions developed from traditions

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John Donohue

where the slightest error with a weapon could maim your oppo-

nent. Some martial artists disdain
kata.
When done right, true

kata
practice can make the sweat stream off you and your hair

stand on end.

In the paired exercises focusing on
jo,
the attacker uses a

wooden sword and the defender wields a
jo.
There are twelve

kata
for
jo,
and they grow subtly more complex as you progress

through them. As a junior ranked person in this school, I got

to defend with the
jo.
I was looking about for a partner, when

Steve Hasegawa slipped into place in front of me carrying a

wooden sword. He grinned slightly as we bowed.

But when we came together, he was all business—focused,

smooth, and lethal. We started with the
kata
called
tsukizue.

Hasegawa was holding back a bit, getting a feel for my skill

level. As we advanced through each form, his movements grew

crisper, harder, and faster. His eyes tightened in concentration

as my response kept pace with the increasing intensity of his

actions.

By the time we had finished the final
kata
called
Ranai
, we

were both sweaty. We brought our weapons down and bowed

formally to each other. The smile was back on his face. I glanced

around me and noticed that the rest of the class had sat down

to watch. Thinking back, I remember the fleeting impression

that most other activity had stopped some time ago.