The Nicholas Linnear Novels (140 page)

She also knew that both their fates were completely in her hands. In his own mind he had already conquered her, so he held none of the dominance-anxiety for her that he might male rivals of his here. He would simply do what his
sensei
asked of him: that is, defeat her as convincingly as possible. Humiliate her in public.

It was up to Akiko, therefore, to divine the twining of their
karma
—if there was to be any at all—and to use this moment to defuse the deep well of hatred that seethed like a volcano inside of him. He was very dangerous, and she never lost sight of that. He could very easily hurt her seriously if she allowed that well to come uncapped. She did not believe the
sensei
would be able to sense it soon enough and intervene in time. Saigō might easily kill her, gripped in the heat of his own energies, without even knowing it.

All this flashed through her mind as Saigō entered the inner circle where moments before Jin-san had gone down before her. Seeing his tense, hot face, she knew that he had vowed not to allow the same indignity to happen to him.

He took three minutes to defeat her, but in that time an eternity of knowledge seethed back and forth between them in microcosm. The employment of strategies revealed the layers of the spirit; there was nothing behind which to hide. They became more intimate than lovers, sharing more, even, than twins. The Void connected them in its wholeness as they maneuvered, as they stared down the dark tunnels of each other’s souls.

“Yes,” the pockmarked
sensei
said with no hint of the disappointment he felt at the defeat of even one of his pupils at her hand. “You’ll do here, Ofuda-san.”

Afterward, Saigō suggested that they go out to dinner. The slumbering young woman who he had brought home the night before had been transferred to his
futon.
Akiko had made no comment about that nor about the fact that she never ate and barely opened her eyes during the daylight hours. Drugged she had been and drugged she stayed.

Saigō said nothing at the restaurant, picking disinterestedly at his yellowfin
sashimi
and
daikon
salad for the longest time. Life went on around them in a dizzying explosion of drinking and forced gaiety, as if these people who worked so hard and long during the day at the giant factories just beyond the town felt compelled to cram a week’s worth of carousing into a single evening.

Akiko saw many women who were in the same profession that her mother had been in. These were of a different level, of course, but the end remained the same. Observing them made her feel odd, as if she were back in
Fuyajo,
peeking through gaps in bedroom walls during the endless nights.

Yet she felt as if she had changed, for it occurred to her that her mother’s utter refinement was but a facade, that in some unfathomable way she was no better than these women here who lacked status, dignity, and, ultimately, that most precious of all Japanese commodities, honor.

Ikan had had no family, no ancestors she wished to honor, no husband to protect her, through whom she could guide her own destiny and that of her progeny. She had only Akiko, and that responsibility had been too great for her.

For she, like these women now, lacked a future into which a child could grow, prosper, and find herself.

“Akiko-san.”

She shifted her attention back to him.
“Hai?”

“Why didn’t you do it?”

She knew what he was talking about but perhaps it would be good for him to say it. “I don’t know what you mean, Saigō-san.”

He thought about that for a moment. “You could have defeated me in our confrontation at the
dōjō.
Yet you chose not to.”

She shook her head. “Please believe me. I could not stand against you.”

“I felt it.”

Her dark eyes held his shadowed ones. “What you felt, perhaps, Saigō-san, was your intense anxiety not to be defeated in front of your peers. Honor rules you; it is your weapon and your fear. How could I possibly strip you of either?”

Now, three weeks later, trodding the snow strewn aisles between rows of dreaming orange trees awaiting next year’s sun, Akiko knew that she had taken the right path.

Michi.
It was the Japanese word for path; but it could also mean a journey, as well as duty, the unknown, a stranger.

Akiko abruptly felt that she must be the first person on earth to have come upon a situation in which all of the word’s meanings were in play simultaneously. For her life with Saigō was tinged with all these things, and it was impossible for her to say where one left off and the other began.

Silently they passed a stand of tall, whipthin bamboo. A branch of one older tree was heavily laden with ice-crusted snow. Surely at any moment it must break beneath its burden. But no. The gusting wind caused the branch to bob up and down and such was the resilient nature of the wood that at length the branch sprang upward and like the finest of bows loosed its charge. Snow in a fine spray dusted the cold air, powdering down upon them in bracing fashion. And in its wake they saw the branch of the bamboo now free of excess weight.

They passed on, shoulders hunched, bunched hands in the pockets of their coats while the wind continued to whistle by overhead.

Within the shelter of a dense copse of pines Saigō stopped them. A river sang merrily to their left and below them. From this interior space it was impossible to see either the industrial sprawl beyond Kumamoto or even the looming presence of Mount Aso with its plume of pumice and hot ash. It was possible to believe for a moment that one could be divorced from such things, that the heavily layered structuralism of life had momentarily disappeared.

Turning his back to the gnarled trunk of one great grandfather tree, Saigō slid down until he was on his haunches. Akiko knelt beside him at right angles. He did not turn toward her but continued to stare straight ahead at the puzzle of crisscrossing branches, white with snow and ice.

Akiko stared at his proud profile. In many ways he was still an enigma to her. But then she suspected that he was even more of an enigma to himself. Though he was inordinately introspective for a young man, it was not self-examination that occupied him. The eternal flame of his hate had to be nurtured and, on occasion, fanned. Akiko suspected quite rightly that with the cessation of his hatred Saigō would perish. It was his primary nourishment; mother’s milk to his spirit.

Already she suspected that he was wholly evil. Yet she was drawn to him. Was it despite this knowledge or because of it? She felt frightened when she was near him, as if the blight eating away at his soul was contagious. But at the same time she felt a distinct lessening of the anomie which at times buffeted her spirit with the viciousness of a riptide.

With Saigō she felt that she belonged. Time and place coalesced into meaning, for he had the spirit of the outlaw not the outcast, which she had always assumed herself to be. An outcast had no status, no dignity, no honor. She recalled her feelings that night in the restaurant when she saw the
geisha
with their snapping black teeth and faces coated with white rice flour.

It occurred to her then that she thought about Ikan infrequently; and then it was with a painful lurch as if she were fighting to disengage herself from a particularly loathsome creature. Ikan had no status save that of
tayu oiran
, which, of course, was meaningless outside the
Yoshiwara.
Ever since Akiko had escaped from there, her contempt for courtesans was boundless.

Had not Ikan been sold into what was, effectively, slavery? Had not the very fact that she had worked in the happy field rendered her undesirable as a wife? Where was the dignity in this way of life? Where was the honor?

Akiko could not even summon up anger at her mother; her emotions had gone beyond the stage where she resented Ikan’s inability to accept her. She felt only contempt for what her mother had been, what she had done.

Ikan had been an outcast, and without even knowing it Akiko had cast herself in the same mold. But now Saigō had shown her that there was another path she could take. For an outlaw possessed status, dignity, and honor. Japan’s ancient tradition of the nobility of failure—the triumph of ideals over actions—proved this beyond any doubt.

Beside her, Saigō felt a spasm grip him. He felt as if something inside him were being pulled in opposite directions. Spite surged within him, and a fulminating desire to hurt her. “There must be an ending,” he said.

The wind snatched at his words, sent them hurtling among the snow laden pines. Still he did not turn toward her. There was a minute trembling to his head and she felt the tension in his frame.

“You may have wondered at the identity of the girl I brought home some weeks ago.” His head lowered until his chin almost touched his chest. “She is the one that I love.” Akiko felt the knife in her ribs, turning slowly, as he had wished. “Her name is Yukio and she has betrayed me. Betrayed me to my cousin; to a
gaijin
!
Iteki
!” The last two epithets were spat with such vehemence that Akiko was obliged to close her eyes against the force of the rage.

Saigō’s lips curled back in the semblance of a smile that was more a snarl. “You may well ask yourself how a
gaijin
came to be a cousin of mine. Well, my mother, Itami, had a brother, a fierce and loyal man of great
samurai
blood. His name was Tsūkō and in the winter of 1943, following the death of his superior, he was given command of the garrison at Singapore.

“There he served his Emperor long and well until September of 1945 when, outnumbered, he tried to hold the city against the advancing British forces. His men were surrounded. They died defending the honor of Japan as befits true
samurai.
Tsūkō was the last to perish, shot many times by
iteki
while he slashed their limbs and heads with his
katana.
The British, like all barbarians, have no concept of honor.

“At the time of his death my uncle was married to a woman who was quite beautiful but of dubious parentage. That is to say it was suspected that she was at least part Chinese. She must have bewitched Tsūkō, for he apparently ignored these rumors.

“I know that she could not have been Japanese. No
samurai
blood runs in the veins of a woman who will not avenge the murder of her husband. This Cheong, instead, married the man who commanded the enemy’s attack on Singapore. Perhaps he himself fired one of the bullets that fatally wounded my uncle. She did not care.”

Saigō’s head lifted. “The offspring of Cheong and this barbarian Colonel is Nicholas Linnear.” With that one last foreign word Akiko felt a prescient thrill shoot up her spine. Could it be so, she asked herself. Could the wheel of life have brought her to the one person on earth who could truly help her. For it had been this same Colonel Linnear, this
iteki
, as Saigō called him, who had pressed for public disclosure of Akiko’s father’s so-called indiscretions, thereby murdering him. She concentrated further, anxious now to absorb it all.

“It was he who came to the precincts of our
ryu
, hand and hand with his lover, Yukio,” Saigō continued. “She and I were lovers before he met her. Like his halfbreed mother did to Tsūkō, Nicholas has somehow seduced Yukio’s spirit. Now I must drug her or she would seek to escape and fly to him. Now only I have her.”

“You make love to her…still?”

Saigō’s head whipped around and his dead eyes glared at her, challenging her. “I take her whenever I choose to do so.” He turned again to stare out at the Crosshatch of branches. “She betrayed me; she deserves no less.”

Akiko remembered his words from before,
There must be an ending.
“Now you wish to kill her.”

Saigō said nothing for a time. Then, “I wish for revenge. For myself; for my mother. Most of all, for Tsūkō.”

And she thought,
K’ai ho. I see a
gap; I must enter swiftly. But softly she said, “Two weeks ago you left abruptly. I did not see you at home or in the
dōjō
for four days.”

“In Tokyo,” he said, “I attended the funeral of my father.” He closed his eyes. “I wished to take you but I could not.”

She bowed to him. “I am honored.”

“He was a great man.” Again tension gripped him. “But eventually he was destroyed by the invading barbarians…by Colonel Linnear. The
iteki
garroted him. Now I have begun my revenge. I have administered a poison to the Colonel. It is absorbed through the pores of the skin and is untraceable. It is slow acting, creating a deadly accretion day by day.”

“And then?”

He nodded his head. “You are right. Yukio must die. But this fact must not reach my cousin, Nicholas. He must wonder…and wait until the time is right. Then I will confront him and just before I deliver the death blow I will tell him of his beloved’s fate. Thus will all the unquiet
kami
who hover about me, demanding retribution and rest, be assuaged.”

Death, death, and more death. It surrounded them as if they were adrift in a sea of skulls. The
giri
Saigō bore seemed a burden of unconscionable weight to Akiko. No wonder his spirit was being trampled into dust. How well she saw now the twining of their
karma.

Without thinking she reached out, her fingers sliding up his arm. His head whipped around, that red challenge back in his eyes, and she said, “Let me banish your
kami
…if just for a moment.”

Something seemed to melt inside him, a barrier swinging down, and the proud warrior collapsed into her embrace, a child at its mother’s comforting breast.

The cold was no deterrent to their fire, and for the first time in his life Saigō felt the hot surge of blood into his penis at a woman’s touch. Always, before, there had been a certain violence to his coupling with Yukio—and more often than not he would take her from behind as he did with his young men lovers, so that there was nothing about it that could be termed lovemaking.

But with Akiko it was different. Perhaps it was because he had allowed Akiko to melt him, to take the lead. It was he who now acquiesced to her lovemaking, responding as she led, using hard-calloused hands given to inflicting pain and death in long legato caresses across the snowy contours of her steaming body.