The 47th samurai

But not John Culpepper. He used his pull to get into battle, not out of it.

It couldn’t have been easy. A year on a battlewagon isn’t the best training for something like Iwo and when he got to the 28th the CO wouldn’t know him, the other officers wouldn’t know him, and the men wouldn’t know him. He’d go into the fight without much psychological support, not easy and made harder by far by the peculiar savagery of Iwo.

So John fought on Iwo for a week. On the third day, Earl Swagger came down from headquarters and got his men through the successful assault against the blockhouse on the northwestern flank of Suribachi as the 28th circled and cut off the five hundred-foot tall volcano. Then, a few days later, a shell landed close at hand; the young officer’s legs were shattered. He spent three nights in an aid station and was evacuated by hospital ship. He recuperated in Hawaii, where he married his fiancée, Tommy’s mother, Mildred, a plain girl also from the Boston area. By the time he was duty-ready, the A-bombs had been dropped, the war was over. He got to go home a hero, even if he’d probably never fired his carbine once.

It didn’t matter. He did what he was supposed to, even if he was scared shitless the whole time. That’s what won wars, the thousands of reluctant John Culpeppers, not the two or three Earl Swaggers.

But there was no sword.

Where could it be?

Maybe it got thrown out and off it went to the Kenilworth dump, to rust away to oblivion or be crushed to junk by a bulldozer.

Bob tried to think hard on the issue.

What is the quality of a sword?

Well, its sharpness, but that’s the sword as weapon. Think of the sword as object: the answer is, its awkwardness.

It’s long and thin and curved. You might display it, but it wouldn’t fit neatly into one of those standard cardboard boxes; no, you’d have to wedge it in.

Who’s packing these boxes? Probably some workingmen hired by the surviving son who has suddenly acquired a house he doesn’t particularly want and never remembers fondly, but he’s got to get it into shape, sell it before his wife files for divorce. So someone packs all this stuff, thinking not a bit about it, not engaged in the family’s life, having no special sense of the meaning of a sword taken in battle and-

Bob went to the first closet. No. But in the second one, he found three golf bags, and there, in the third one, amid the sixes and sevens and the drivers and the wedges and the putter was Captain Hideki Yano’s shin-gunto.

“Tom?”

“Oh, yeah, you found it,” said Tom Culpepper, rising from a desk in what had been his father’s study. He had his ever-present glass of Maker’s with him, apparently just recently freshened.

“I did, yes. It was in a golf bag. I thought you might want to have a look.”

“Yeah, I suppose I do. Yeah, that’s it,” he said, taking it, holding it to the light. “Here, let me point out something. See this peg or whatever it is?”

He pointed to a stub a few inches above the circular hilt of the old thing. It seemed clotted with some kind of black tar or something, smeary and gummy. But it also, in the right angle of light, threw up tiny puncture wounds.

“I remember the day I got cut. I’d snuck it out of Dad’s study and we were waving it around, playing pirate or something. ’Fifty-seven, ’fifty-eight, sometime around there. Then we got the bright idea to take it apart. Don’t ask me why. We examined it and it seemed to be held together by this little wooden pin through this hole. See, it runs from one side to the other. That secures the handle to the blade, I’m guessing.”

“I see,” said Bob, who already knew the correct terms from the Internet: the bamboo peg was mekugi, the hole into which it fit mekugiana.

“But it was stuck. We tried to drive it out with a hammer and nail and all we did was dent it. God, when I think of it now, I’m a little ashamed. We had no idea. It was just a big sword thing for killing pirates.”

“You were just kids. How could you know?”

“We never got it out. I hate to remember this thing on the floor and I’m whacking on it, the blade is getting all crudded up on the floor. It’s got some kind of gunk on it. Real thick black stuff. I don’t know if the Japanese officer put it there, or your father, or mine, or someone at the factory, or what. But it’s not coming out easily.”

“No, it’s not. Someone wanted to hold it together. Go on, pull it.”

John Culpepper’s son Tom drew the sword out. It buzzed against the tightness of the metal scabbard, then described an arc across the room as he brandished it.

“Wow,” he said. “This baby still wants to cut something. Here, it scares me a little.”

He handed it over to Bob, who in taking it felt some kind of charge-what? a thrill, a buzz, a vibration-as indeed the baby still wanted to cut something.

You could tell in a flash it was superbly designed for its purpose, a thin ridge ru

He held it up to the light. Indeed, the blade had seen hard use. The steel was dull upon close inspection, a haze of crosshatched nicks and cuts. Small black flecks attacked it randomly. On the edge-yakiba, he knew-almost microscopic chips were missing, whether from small boys whacking it against a tree or a Japanese officer drawing it against a marine’s neck. The handguard-tsuba-was a heavy circle of iron, like an ornate coaster almost. The grip was tacky: the sword was covered in gritty fish skin, then wrapped elaborately in a kind of flat cotton cording that was darkened with sweat or grime, worn in places and frayed.

If you waved it, the sword rattled ever so gently, because, he now saw, the guard wasn’t secured tightly by spacers.

“I remember as a kid you could slice paper with it, that’s how sharp it was,” said Tom Culpepper. “Here, let’s try it.”

He grabbed a heavy piece of stationery and Bob touched edge to paper and felt the sword pause, then slide through neatly. Tom dropped two pieces of paper to the ground.

“I can’t believe it’s that sharp,” he said. “Nothing should be that sharp!”

7

You can’t get mad.

You can’t get mad.

Yet it was all he could do to sit there.

It’s a test, he told himself. They’re testing the gaijin. They want to see if I have the maturity, the patience, the commitment to politeness and ceremony to be worth talking to in Japan.

Or maybe, he thought, they’re like cops everywhere: they just don’t give a fuck.

Whichever, the result was the same. He sat in the Narita International Airport police station, forty miles outside Tokyo. It was a stark, functional space with nothing like the swanky, shopping-mall flash of the public hallways on higher levels.

The process had all been set up. Having discovered the sword, he had called the retired Colonel Bridges of the Marine Historical Section, explained all, and Bridges had volunteered to run the paperwork, which was considerable. He had the D.C. contacts and knew someone who knew someone at the Japan External Trade Organization, or JETRO, on the West Coast, which had some mysterious, influential co