Read The Toyotomi Blades Online
Authors: Dale Furutani
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Suspense
My confidence was strained by having to leave Gary behind and by the obvious wealth and opulence behind the facade of a modest building. This office was designed to achieve an effect, and that effect was intimidation. Because of that, I did something I normally wouldn’t do, especially with a Japanese national I was meeting for the first time. I marched down the length of the office and flopped down into a chair without being invited.
That, of course, was rude, and rudeness is something usually avoided with strangers in Japanese culture. But rudeness is also sometimes used to establish relative social positions. To me, the layout of Sekiguchi’s office, including the long march to his desk, was designed to make you feel like a supplicant, inching your way towards the dais of a shogun. I was ticked off at this man, and my aching head and bruised hip reminded me why I was angry. I wasn’t going to let something like a clever layout of his office beat me down.
Sekiguchi stared at me impassively as I flopped down into the chair. As an American, I suppose he expected me to be too familiar and rude. I wanted him to know that I understood the proper protocol to follow in this meeting and I had chosen to ignore it, but there wasn’t a way to actually say it. The head looking back at me was almost bald, with wisps of silver hair still clinging to the sides. His pate was freckled with brown spots. The eyes were as hard as two black pearls. He was probably in his late sixties, but his bearing was still erect and as stiff as a weathered pine standing on top of a mountainside.
Without a preamble, Sekiguchi spoke. “Because this meeting was arranged on short notice, I can only give you fifteen minutes. Why do you want to speak to me?”
My apprehensions and fears dissolved. I fought to keep from giggling. Not because of nervousness, but because the man behind the desk, the head of the Sekiguchi-gummi crime family, talked like Marlon Brando in
The Godfather.
He didn’t have a Sicilian accent, but he tended to mumble his words in a low whisper. I don’t know if he always talked this way or if it was an affectation picked up after he saw the movie, but the effect on me was not sinister or menacing at all. It was comical.
I regained my composure and a bit of my cockiness with the unexpected comic relief. “Thank you for your time. I realize this is on short notice and I appreciate you seeing me.”
The man nodded.
“Do you know who I am?” I asked.
“I understand you’re from California and that you’re an American and that you’ve appeared on the Japanese television show
News Pop.”
“I was also responsible for getting your son arrested.”
Mr. Sekiguchi stared at me expressionless. I would hate to play poker with him. Trying to get a response from him, I pushed on. “I can see that my involvement with your son’s case could be upsetting. That’s why I wanted to meet with you to talk to you about why you’re trying to harm me.”
Once again he sat silent and motionless. I thought about the two thugs chasing me in Tokyo and my amusement over Mr. Sekiguchi’s Godfatherlike voice disappeared. I forced myself to relax. Showing anger would be showing weakness. I raised my eyebrows slightly and waited.
I had already used up a couple of my allotted fifteen minutes. If Mr. Sekiguchi wanted to sit there in silence for the remaining thirteen minutes, then I was quite content to sit there in silence, too. I wasn’t going to beg or plead with him. I’m not above begging or pleading, it’s just that I figured with this man those tactics wouldn’t work.
Finally, after a silence of several minutes, Mr. Sekiguchi sat back in his chair. Studying me carefully, he said, “What makes you think I want to harm you?”
“Several times now, two men identified by the police as members of the Yakuza have chased me. It’s been the same two men so I know it’s not an accident. Yesterday they caught me in Hibiya Park and roughed me up. Since the only connection I’ve ever had with the Yakuza is through your son, I think their interest in pursuing me is because of what happened between your son and me in California.”
Once again Sekiguchi remained impassive and almost immobile. I reacted by settling back in the chair, as if his silence was an invitation to make myself more at home. Finally, Sekiguchi broke the silence and said, “Toshi is my youngest son and one that I have indulged over the years. I’m afraid that does not make me a very good father. I sent him to school in the United States and helped set him up in business in California in the hope that the new climate and responsibility would help him to grow up.
“Like every Japanese father, I’m very concerned about my children. But in the case of what happened in California, Toshi made several mistakes and he must pay for them. I don’t view the punishment he’ll receive as something which must be paid because he has done wrong. In my view he has not done wrong. But he made many mistakes and those mistakes can be serious. In the life we have chosen, if a man is to be a leader, he must be careful and he must be thoughtful. Perhaps because I have indulged him, Toshi is not very careful and sometimes he is not very thoughtful.
“The time he will spend in an American prison will allow him to grow more reflective and more serious about his life and about our business. Our California lawyers tell me that he’ll not be in prison for a very long time. Actually quite less than the five years he spent graduating from USC. I think the education he will get from getting caught because he was careless will be much more valuable than the time he spent in college.
“Because of these feelings I have no personal grudge against you and do not wish you harmed. In fact, until this interview, I did not know who you were or what your involvement was with my son. I don’t know why other Yakuza would want to chase you, but whatever the reason, it has nothing to do with the Sekiguchi-gummi.”
He sat back in his chair and his hand disappeared under the desktop. For a brief second I thought he had set me up so that he could reach under the desk for a gun or some other weapon, but when the secretary popped through the door behind me a few seconds later, I realized he had simply reached for some kind of hidden buzzer to summon her. I knew the interview was over and stood up.
“And you have no interest in the Toyotomi blades?” I asked as a parting shot.
He was used to hiding his thoughts and gave me no response, but I thought I detected a slight flash of puzzlement in his eyes. I felt like I had just driven to the Tokyo Match Company.
I
n the story about the tourist and the matchbook, the taxi driver ignored the hotel logo on the front of the matches and focused on the name of the match company. It was a plausible but wrong assumption. I had done the same thing.
Junichi Sekiguchi could be lying. I’m sure in his business he’s learned to lie rather well. But what he said rang true, and I was sure I saw surprise when I asked him about the Toyotomi blades.
When I identified the two men, the police said they were involved with right-wing politics and the Nippon Tokkotai. But because I saw no connection between me and Japanese politics, I ignored that association. Instead, I jumped on the Yakuza connection that the two men shared, and just focused on that, assuming the Sekiguchi-gummi was interested in me. I still couldn’t understand why a Japanese political group was interested in me, but the warning in the park provided me with the thing that linked us: the swords.
I met Gary in the lobby and we walked out of the Sekiguchi-gummi headquarters together.
“You weren’t up there long, bruddah,” Gary said.
“About fifteen minutes. It was long enough to learn that I’ve been barking up the wrong tree.”
“What you mean?”
“I mean I’m stumped about why those two guys have been chasing me all over Tokyo. I don’t think the connection is the Yakuza anymore. It involves some kind of radical Japanese political group, but I don’t understand why they’re interested in me, except that it involves the swords in some way.” I stopped and looked up at Gary. “You’re not Japanese, but you are from the islands. Do you know what
ongiri
is?”
“Sure, dat’s da kine obligation, right?”
“Yes. It means I’m in your debt now because of what you’ve just done for me. You didn’t have to go in there with me. It could have been dangerous and you’ve put yourself out for me.”
“Hey, it’s no big deal, bruddah. I wanted to see what dis place is like. I couldn’t even fit in da elevator. Ain’t no sweat ‘bout me helping you. Don’t get no pilikia wrinkles over it.”
It took me a second to translate pilikia to worry. In its way, Hawaiian Pidgin was sometimes as foreign to me as Japanese. “It wasn’t just nothing. Look, if there’s anyway I can help you in the future, you just call me.” I took a slip of paper from my pocket. “This is my phone number and address in Los Angeles. If there’s anything I can ever do to help you, just call. I owe you now, big time.”
“Naah,” Gary said, but he took the paper and put it in his pocket.
We went to the van we came in and Gary climbed into the back, pretty much filling up the space there. I climbed into the passenger seat next to the driver, and Gary said, “You want to go to the hotel?”
“If you could drop me off at the Nissan building in the Ginza that would be great. I have an appointment there this morning.”
“No sweat.” Gary gave some instructions in halting Japanese to the driver and we quickly made our way from the Tsujiki district to the nearby Ginza.
As soon as I got to the Nissan building I knew there was going to be good news. There was a camera crew from
News Pop,
as well as Junko, waiting for me. Junko informed me that Nissan had asked the crew to come down and videotape the meeting we were about to have. No one calls in a camera crew to admit defeat.
In the lobby I not only met Kiyohara, but Kiyohara’s boss. Another good sign. Now that the work was successful, the big boss wanted to show up for a little airtime. He made a flowery speech in the lobby to me, all in Japanese. I smiled and nodded appreciatively, even though I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was saying. Junko’s terse translation was that he was saying he was glad that Nissan could apply its technical prowess to help solve this mystery. I was glad, too, but frankly I was more interested in seeing what the results were. Even I could figure out that the ten-minute speech in the lobby would be reduced to a five-second clip of us shaking hands if it made it to the show.
They took us up to the seventh floor of the building and into a beautiful conference room, complete with wood paneling and artwork on the walls. The other conference rooms we had met in were austere and crowded hovels, but there’s nothing like the remorseless little glass eye of the television camera to cause people to show their best. The TV crew set up in a few minutes and we were soon rolling tape again. Around the wood conference table were the members of Kiyohara’s team, all polished and dressed up in their best clothes. They seemed to have happy expressions on their faces, and I was dying to see if my reaction to their results matched their obvious pleasure.
But first the big boss gave another five-minute speech in front of the assembled team and the newly set up camera. At last Junko told me that he was turning it over to Kiyohara to explain the results. “Finally,” I muttered under my breath while still keeping a smile on my face. Both Junko and Kiyohara, who were close enough to hear me, smiled.
“You must be anxious to see the results of our efforts to match the patterns on the blades with our computerized map of Japan,” Kiyohara said. He reached over and an assistant handed him four large sheets of paper. “These are maps with the results of our search. We had four areas that had a match of over sixty percent. With only five of the six blades available, the best match we could theoretically come up with was eighty-three percent, so we considered anything over sixty percent to be a very good match.
“We did further research and we discovered that two of the maps matched against temples that were built after 1650.” He grabbed two of the papers and moved them to one side. “Since the treasure must have been hidden before the final defeat of the Toyotomi in the early 1600s, we reasoned that they couldn’t be the temples shown on the blades. We know from the dates on the handles the blades were forged in 1614. That leaves us with these two possible locations.” He shoved the remaining two pieces of paper over to me. They were computer maps drawn on a plotter. Modern roads and mountains were drawn in color on the maps, along with the location of major buildings and temples. Superimposed on each map was a red pattern of temples, mountains, and streams, which represented the patterns found on the blades. The match between the red blade patterns and the map features was not exact, but they were both remarkably close.
“This map is a location to the east of Osaka. This second map is to the north of Osaka, near Lake Biwa. Lake Biwa is now a resort area, but it’s also an ancient part of Japan. Hideyoshi Toyotomi built or repaired bridges and temples there, including Enryaku-ji temple, which is one of the temples we matched on the map.
“Both areas seem very good prospects. One is close to the Toyotomi’s main castle in Osaka and the other is near an ancient place in Japan with ties to the Toyotomis.”
“This is great,” I said, and I continued with effusive praise for Nissan, Kiyohara, Kiyohara’s team, and even Kiyohara’s boss. What the hell, I thought, I’d include the old windbag along with the deserving. Kiyohara returned the compliment, praising my ideas on how to match the blade patterns with one blade missing and how to try all the possible different sequences that the blades could fit together. All this mutual praise was part Japanese custom, but it was also heartfelt, at least on my part. I was so much further ahead of where I thought I’d be when I accepted the challenge and I wouldn’t look like an idiot on the upcoming show. My ass was on the line and now it was saved. Or, in Japanese terms, I had saved face. I don’t know which anatomical part is correct, but I was pretty happy from top to bottom.