Without looking back, he knew they were rushing to their old monk. He’d probably been the pride of the village. There was always a patriarch. But he’d be replaced soon enough by anyone with the proper load of years and wrinkles to hide his confusion. The Ronin grunted as he remembered the little man holding out his hand and saying, “Give me your sword.” How painfully sad to behold a man who is both brave and weak!
He had just reached the crossroad a few ri from the village when he heard the running feet. It was a young boy. He stopped a safe distance away and held out a piece of white paper folded in the shape of an L. The Ronin made him bring it within reaching distance and stand close as he unfolded the paper. The boy stared at the sword-handle. The big man smiled, “Oho, I can see you want to grow up to be a samurai, too, huh?”
The boy looked up at him in grave disapproval and said, “Oh, no.” Then he turned and walked back down the road into the infinity from which he’d come.
The calligraphy was expert: “ The writer of this note wishes to deliver an urgent message to you. It is of the greatest importance that you be at this crossroad at the Hour of the Ram . . . one year from today.”
He read the words a second time and then a third. Giving up, he crumpled the page angrily in a big fist and tossed it away from him. Looking back down the road, he shouted, “Your whole damned village is bewitched! First, I’m called a coward by a shopkeeper, then an old monk tries to arrest me. Now a boy says no to the glory of steel, and someone invites me to come back here for a meeting so urgent it can wait a year! Bewitched, bewitched!”
He started on his way then stopped again and shouted back: “ This place is cursed! Nothing in all Heaven or Hell could make me come back here again!” The young Ronin whirled and strode quickly out onto the silent plain.
Watching from the shadows….
The next village north called itself Hachiman’s Hunger in much the same way that, eight centuries later, another country would remember the places where its first president rested for the night. In turn, its neighbor on the north was named Tenth Verse Ox or, to stretch it for the wide screen, The Ox of the Tenth Verse, a name of fabulous meaning.
Because the third neighbor north was unusually distant and few had ever been there, the Ox people often had to take a breath before recalling its name. For this reason, it came to be known as The Place of the Forgotten Name even to those who lived there. It was in this third village that there lived three strong young boys who spent all the hours of their days dashing headlong toward manhood as if it really existed. They were the closest of friends, and all shared the same dream. At the age of eleven, they decided to become samurai, or professional swordsmen, in the train of some mighty daimyo.However childish the ambition, it was the correct age to start learning.
Of course, they never once considered the possibility that they might all three live out their brief lives as mere ronin or unemployed samurai wanderers of which there were thousands rejected by both Gen and Hei. Nor did it occur to them that their parents might begrudge this time stolen from the never-finished work in the fields, nor that the local master swordsman (retired) might refuse to accept them as students. He was a proud man and a genius by implication: few swordsmen of that time retired in the usual sense, and almost none reached his advanced age of fifty.
He did refuse to accept them and he refused repeatedly. The three knelt before him regularly once a week, and once a week he passed on by with his eyes on the horizon. So, adding strategy to respect, they took to kneeling directly in his path. After the loss of much dignity picking his way among young backs, the Master Swordsman was forced to notice them in self-defense. His first words seemed to end the matter before it began: “Have your parents consented? When they do, I shall listen to your applications.”
But boys of eleven, like girls of any age, are infinitely seductive. The tragic air of their complaints reminded the six parents that these were babies still, and that childhood imperatives are far briefer than childhood. They met in a Congress on Boys and mulled the question. Why not end the clamor with a few bruises from the Master himself? A dozen adept whacks over the head would certainly end the dream more abruptly than increased work in the field. The six agreed, men in the front room, women in the kitchen, and all fell to talking about the Rout of the Minamoto over a sip of rice wine.
Yet the Old Swordsman, like many bachelors, knew more of the hearts of boys than their ever despairing parents who know only their young behinds. He knew this was neither a childhood fancy nor brief. He saw the solemnity in their eyes as they beheld his sword, their consummate respect of his own person, and he knew that when they were alone on the mountain that they repeated old tales of Bushido to one another in soft voices.
He watched their religiously male young lives, saw their tremendous beauty, ripe bodies and shocking energy. And his heart cried out that such explosive life can prove joyous indifference to death only by courting it. With a passion that would have astonished their parents, he wanted to ruthlessly blot out the boys’ worship of cold steel, to see them disillusioned in him and their magnificent fire drowned in farming.
Toward this end and this end only, the Old Swordsman accepted them as students. There followed a four-cornered love affair that was all sadism, all masochism. He defeated them with a dainty flick of his wooden practice sword, methodically bruised and bloodied them, scorned the least hint of skill, taunted their mistakes, spat on their respect of him, and told them countless stories of stupid heroes who slashed to shreds other stupid heroes, and in turn were themselves opened wide to soak the indifferent earth.
The boys listened with wide eyes, and each determined to become a much wiser stupid hero. Eleven became twelve. Twelve became thirteen.
The Old Swordsman stretched tight his endurance attempting to utterly weary and discourage these infinitely energetic young boys. He flung deadly sarcasm into their faces as each stood embarrassed before his fellows, and gave them tasks that could not be done except at the expense of all else. He gave over all waking thought to his plot for destruction, and, helpless, saw himself devoured by this silent fury. Yet none broke and ran. They rose, wiped off the mud and looked up at him with trusting eyes that asked, “And now ?”
In despair, he ordered them out of his practice hall as hopeless. They had just become fourteen.
The three returned each day and sat on the Old Swordsman’s porch waiting for him to relent. One morning, unaware that he was home, the least talkative said, “He loves us and our blundering can only show him that none of us would live past that first real duel with steel. And he very kindly thinks that that would be a waste—as if all this has been just preparation and not living life itself. Now, when he takes us back, we must cease our childish play and finally begin to study, listen, work. None of us has yet really tried. If we had, we’d wear top-knots now and not be sitting on his porch. I intend to make him proud of me one day—even if I have to run away and learn by testing my skill with strangers on the road!”
Dropouts have always horrified teachers who feel their own institutions the best available—adding with preposterous modesty “at this time.” The Old Swordsman instantly fled to the mountain for nine days, and examined his own wisdom carefully. Finally deciding that he himself had been the youngest of the four, he returned with grim determination putting heel-thuds in every step. If he couldn’t save these boy-men from glorious vivisection, he would at least postpone it by making them the most superbly adept fools in the dress of samurai. He would set to work in dead earnest to divide all he knew, the whole of his life and the sum of his experience, into three.
Without expression, the boys knelt before him. There was no reason to be delighted at the sight of him; they’d known that he would return. They rose and began to study in young fury. Without superfluity in word or gesture, the Old Swordsman taught them in that same cold fury. They practiced unremittingly like the