Kage (5 page)

sharp throb of shattered bone. The thing above him cal ing in tri-

umph to the other hunters. Arms that lifted high into the washed

out blue of a morning sky, as if pronouncing a benediction.

The jagged rock came down on Hector, again and again,

until he lay stil , slowly seeping moisture into the hard ground

of the borderlands. In time, flies would come to swarm over

the sticky pool of fluid until the sun rose, fierce and ful , and

baked the moisture of Hector’s life away, sucking it deep into

the desert’s heart.

15

2

Lessons

The things we remember best tend to come to us in special

ways—often linked to extremes of emotion like joy and fear. Or

pain. My teacher had been shaped in a tradition where both fear

and pain were constant companions because, the old masters

believed, an authentic life was one that didn’t deny these most

inevitable of experiences, it just learned to transcend them.

Yamashita is a
sensei,
or teacher, of the martial arts—the

bugei
—of old Japan. The
bugei
are many things—ways of

fighting, of physical training, aesthetic disciplines forged out

of the most horrific of practices. My teacher is a master of the

form and the essence of these systems, a lethal man whose spirit

is as keen and polished as the blade he teaches me to wield. He

is simultaneously demanding, exasperating and amazing. I’ve

been banging around the martial arts world for almost thirty

years now, and I’ve never seen anyone like him.

I use the word banging literally. Lots of people today think

they know something about the martial arts—black belts and

Zen,
ninja
in dark pajamas jumping across a movie screen

doing cartwheels that would make an astronaut toss his lunch.

The death touch. Wispy masters who never sweat and are never

defeated. But Grasshopper, this is all an illusion.

To train in the martial arts is like being apprenticed to frus-

tration, to the burn of effort, and the unattainable criteria of

perfection. There’s no glamour, no reward beyond the ones you

create in your own heart. You struggle along the path and your

16

Kage

teacher goads you or challenges you, always three steps ahead

and always waiting, his eyes betraying nothing but demanding

everything. And you try to give it.

In the process you take some lumps. I’ve broken my fingers

and toes more times than I can count. Some ribs. Until a few

years ago, my nose was intact, but that’s a thing of the past.

It’s probably not a huge tragedy—I have a relative in Ireland

who once said I have a face like a Dublin pig. When I do my

warm up stretches in the morning, I can feel the tug of years

of muscle damage all over me and the buzzing reminder of an

old dislocated shoulder. There are small white scars on both

my hands from a morning when I tore through jagged under-

growth, focused only on the fight to come. I have a long slash

of a scar down my back that I got in a sword fight on the night

when I began to truly understand what all this training had

turned me into. And there are other, less visible marks.

Late in the night images sometimes come unbidden, and

I’m pulled back into a whirl of adrenalin and heat and blood.

But you cope. You learn to breathe deeply and wait for the

sweat to dry. You wait for morning to come and with it the

light to remind you of the present. My scars suggest where I’ve

been, not where I am. Most days, I’m in Yamashita’s training

hall, honing my technique in closer imitation of him and put-

ting his lower ranked students through their paces.

The
dojo
—what Japanese martial artists call their training

hall—is a big space, with high ceilings and a polished floor of

tightly fitted hardwood strips. There’s a mirror on one wall that

we use to check ourselves for correct form. Sometimes I catch a

glimpse of my features while I prowl the room, and the face is

both familiar and strange. For at times it appears to me that my

eyes have become as hard and flat as my master’s.

17

John Donohue

That day, I was grinding some swordsmen through a partic-

ularly tricky exercise. My teacher has started to hold seminars

lately for martial artists who aren’t his regular students, but who

study related arts and are looking to deepen their skills. We

get people who are trained in all sorts of systems. They enter

the training hall in uniforms that have been worn into supple

functionality. Some are in the karate or judo uniforms known

as
gi
and have tattered and faded black belts riding low on their

waists. Others wear the more formal pleated skirt known as

a
hakama
and tops of white or blue or black. They all stand

quietly, people who are centered, balanced, and coiled like

steel springs ready for release. They don’t impress Yamashita

too much, because just to be accepted as one of his regular

students you usually need black belts in a few different styles,

recommendations from some seriously advanced teachers, and

an almost infinite capacity to suffer. But I watch the seminar

students carefully and treat them like dangerous, barely domes-

ticated animals.

It’s not paranoia on my part. The presence of outsiders at

our
dojo
is new, and at first I was puzzled about why Yamashita

would allow this. My teacher doesn’t advertise anywhere and

just to find the converted warehouse where we train, you have

to know where you’re going and be willing to thread the obscure

backstreets of the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. But a small

stream of fanatics do make the journey along the hard cement

and past the harder eyes of Red Hook’s less desirable element.

It took a while, but ultimately Yamashita’s reasons for sponsor-

ing these seminars became clear: he wasn’t interested in letting

people in to see him; he was letting them in to see
me.

I’m his senior student, although when you say it like that

it doesn’t begin to get at the core of our relationship. He has

18

Kage

forged me into something, a version of himself, and we are tied

together with filament so fine and so strong that the link is as

invisible as it is undeniable. I struggled against it for a time, but

I’ve come to learn to accept it. I move just like him now, and

if my footsteps take me along slightly different routes, I know

that in essence we travel the same path.

So these seminars were Yamashita’s way of letting people

know who I was and that I would one day assume leadership

of the
dojo
. We have both been scarred by our pasts and now,

imperceptible to most, my teacher’s movements tell of his

wounds. It’s something I try not to think about: it’s bad for my

head and my heart.

But I’m not just being sentimental. My teacher has taught

me better than that. I watch the trainees with slightly narrowed

eyes, judging them, measuring their skill, and trying to divine

their intent. They look back in much the same way. Bringing a

bunch of highly skilled fighters together, pointing someone out

and implying that he’s better than everyone else in the room, is

the martial arts equivalent of pouring chum into shark infested

waters.

These seminars have the feel of those old Westerns where a

bunch of new gunmen stalk into town looking to take on the

local prodigy. You can hold up your hands and protest you’re

not interested in a fight, but people just smirk in disbelief and

you know, deep down, that you’d better go get your weapon.

In the martial arts, we meditate and talk about the nature

of training as a
Do
, a path, to enlightenment. But there are

lots of ways to accomplish this end that don’t involve pound-

ing on people in the way we do. Ultimately, no matter how

hard we deny it, there’s part of us that
likes
that aspect of the

bugei
. The heat. The contact. The fury, trapped and funneled

19

John Donohue

into something truly dangerous. No matter what the particular

martial art system is called or what the techniques look like,

there’s a basic pattern to advanced training: you get pounded

and you pound back. The easily bruised should not apply.

I’ve taken my lumps in the
dojo
and in places far more terri-

fying as wel . I prefer to approach training as a way to fine-tune

my technique. I save punching on the afterburners for the real

thing. But no matter how calmly I speak to people at these semi-

nars, no matter how much I stress that we’re here to learn from

each other, I can see that deep down they don’t buy it. They wait

and watch, hoping for an opportunity to prove to Yamashita

that there was a better choice for his top student than the guy

leading the exercises. I brace myself to prove them wrong.

And, I‘ve come to realize, this is also part of Yamashita’s plan.

Everything in my master’s world is a means of training. The fact

that someone at a seminar may take a run at me is not necessar-

ily a bad thing. From Yamashita’s perspective it’s more like icing

on the cake, or a pickled plum in the middle of a rice bal .

It’s not all tension, of course: a few participants at the semi-

nar weren’t strangers. Some of the
dojo
regulars were there to

help out. A while ago, Yamashita and I had met a woman named

Sarah Klein who practiced
kyudo,
the Japanese art of archery.

We had both been attracted to her, although for different rea-

sons. Yamashita had been intrigued by her focused energy, and

while I had been drawn to that spirit, I was intrigued by so

much more. What she saw in me was anyone’s guess, but I was

glad that she saw something. And I was glad she was at the

seminar today.

Sarah’s not a big person, but when watching her slight fig-

ure move, you got a sense of grace and strength rare in most

20

Kage

people. It may have been that suggestion of physical potential

that made Yamashita take her on as a student. She was dark-

haired with big eyes and a heart shaped face. Just seeing her

across a room usually made my stomach flip. Today, as I moved

around the seminar participants, she’d occasionally catch my

eye for a split second and I’d see a hint of the smile I knew she

was suppressing. Sarah has a great smile.

I kept my
sensei
face on, however, and resisted the impulse

to wink at her. For now, I had to keep the seminar partici-

pants in check. We were executing a series of moves that in the

beginning look a lot like the
mae
routine in your basic
iaido

kata. Iaido
students focus on practicing a series of connected

techniques known as
kata
that involve the art of drawing and

cutting with the Japanese sword. In the first
kata
that
they typi-

cally learn, students sit in the formal kneeling position, their

swords sheathed. As they sense an attack being launched from

the front, they rise on their knees, then draw the sword from

its sheath and cut in a wide lateral arc across their front, plant-

ing their right foot forward so that only the left knee remains

touching the ground.

In the sequence as traditionally practiced, the lateral swipe

is followed up with a vertical cut. The idea is that your attacker,

kneeling before you, starts to move. You swipe at him, but he

jerks back just out of range. You follow up by drawing yourself

forward with your right leg and then cutting down in what is

meant to be a decisive attack to the head.

As I say, it’s pretty standard. Except in Yamashita’s
dojo.
He

doesn’t think it’s particularly realistic that someone who has

dodged your first strike would remain seated and waiting for

your follow up. Much more likely, he says, that the attacker

would rear up and then back away, well out of range.

21

John Donohue

Which means you have to chase him.

It sounds simple enough, but Yamashita is always as inter-

ested in finesse as he is in functionality. In many ways, he doesn’t

even consider them two separate things. So in his
dojo,
after the

first cut, the swordsman has to lunge far forward while remain-

ing crouched. Your opponent is standing up by this point and

expects you to rise as well. So, my teacher explains, you do the

opposite and pursue him from the lower position, driving for-

ward while remaining alert to the possibility of counterattack.

It sounds easy, but is difficult to pull off. The crouching

position is awkward, and it takes time to get the knack of using

your muscles correctly. If you rely too much on the left foot to

propel you, you tend to topple forward, providing a dangerous

gap for your opponent to exploit. Too much right leg, and you