Prologue 6: a decision

Main Courtyard of the Osaka Military Base, Southern District

Settsu Province — Second Day After Leaving Wakayama, Early February of the Year 1700

There are journeys that end before the traveler is done arriving, and that morning, on the road east of Osaka, the journey of Seijuro Nakata had ended long before the gray silhouette of the city stood out against the low line of the horizon. What entered Osaka was not a soldier returning with a campaign report, nor a son returning to his father, nor even a widower returning to a child. What entered Osaka was, simply, a man with unfinished business and a decision already made. He had made the decision in Wakayama, on the road north, before a city still counting its dead, and he had carried it with him for two days across the eastern plain without disordering it once. It was a dry decision, mineral. Not the decision of a father raising a son. The decision of a soldier deciding what he fights for.

And a man who has decided what he fights for, Seijuro Nakata had learned, no longer needs to know many other things.

He crossed the southeast gate that morning, with the sun still low. The city was waking the way large cities wake in the middle of a quiet winter: without haste, the smoke from the braziers rising straight in the cold air, the market stalls opening calmly, the Yodo flowing slowly under the wooden bridges. No one in that February Osaka seemed to have heard yet of gray creatures or of bells in the small hours. Better so. Let that ignorance last as long as possible: when it came — and it would come — only a few would be able to stop it. Seijuro moved up the main avenue of the southern district at the pace, neither quick nor slow, of the officer returning to a base he knew. He recognized, in the order in which they appeared, the crossing with the basket-makers' lane, the façade of the honjin in whose inner courtyard, ten years before, he had first seen a girl of sixteen named Otsuru. He passed without stopping. He did not turn his head either.

That, too, was part of the decision.

The main gate of the military base of the southern district was flanked by two sentries he did not know. Both snapped to attention when they saw the uniform and the insignia at his collar.

"Officer."

"Commander Jirōbei Nakata," Seijuro answered. It was not a question. It was a minimal order.

The sentry on the left asked nothing more. He gestured to the one on the right, who crossed the courtyard toward the main building at a brisk pace, and opened the small wicket of the gate to let him pass.

Seijuro entered.

The main courtyard of the Osaka base was the same as ever: a wide rectangle of packed earth, a colonnade of black-lacquered wood on all four sides, the general staff building at the rear with its three floors and deep eaves, the troop building to the right, storerooms and powder magazine to the left, the message-pigeon loft in the southeast corner. In that courtyard he had stood at attention for the first time at sixteen, just arrived from Hiroshima, after the bout against Captain Fujibayashi. In that courtyard Raisuke had laid a hand on his shoulder and said, Welcome to Osaka, Officer Nakata; in that courtyard Jirōbei had broken the rule of the family, for the first and almost only time, to lay an open hand on the back of his neck. Now he was crossing it with ten more years on his back, an ill-closed scar on his left flank, and a woman buried on a hillside of cedars to the south.

And a newborn son somewhere in the building at the rear.

At the height of the third pillar of the colonnade, the fusuma of the commander's office slid open, and out of it stepped Jirōbei Nakata.

He wore his command uniform.

Freshly pressed.

As if he had spent days waiting for him at the foot of the balcony.

He probably had.

Father and son halted facing each other, three paces apart, in the middle of the courtyard, without anyone having to give an order. The soldiers passing along the colonnade stepped aside without looking at them. Jirōbei held the straight back of the veteran officer who has spent thirty of his years in the army, the short white beard, the hands of a man who still grips a katana every week. His eyes — pale gray, small — settled on his son's face, and for the time it takes for a heartbeat, it was no longer the eye of the commander of Osaka that looked, but the eye of the father who had spent ten days sleeping badly, wondering whether that son, the one he himself had sent into the army at the age of five, was ever going to appear at that gate.

What he saw told him two things at once.

One: that the son had arrived.

The other: that something, inside the son, had never arrived at all.

He said nothing. He raised his right hand. He laid it, open, on the back of his son's neck.

It was the family gesture.

Seijuro closed his eyes for a moment.

He opened them again.

"Father."

"You are home," the old man said.

And that, in their code, was the equivalent of any other embrace.

Ten paces behind the commander, a second figure crossed the fusuma and walked at a measured pace down the colonnade. It was Raisuke. A line commander, friend of Jirōbei for thirty years, a man who appeared in the lives of the Nakatas at the exact moments. He was forty-seven, a few more gray hairs than the last time Seijuro had seen him, and the same slow way of walking of the man who knows that no one in the courtyard is going to move before he does. He was carrying a cup of tea, still steaming, in one hand.

"You took your time," he said, holding it out.

"I'm here," Seijuro answered, taking it.

That, too, was all that needed saying.

Raisuke turned and gestured with his chin toward the rear building, and without waiting for an answer, started walking toward it. Jirōbei withdrew his hand from his son's neck and followed. Seijuro went after them. In that base, in those years, things were done that way: someone started walking and the others fell in behind, and by the second corridor the reason for the walk explained itself. The reason, that morning, was waiting in the inner room on the second floor, in a wicker basket lined with white cotton, asleep and entirely unaware of anything.

Asleep and alive.

Asleep, alive, and bearing his father's name.

Seijuro Nakata stepped up to the basket and stood for a long time looking at a child of twelve days who, curled in on himself, was breathing with the calm with which newborns breathe when they do not yet know where they are.

He extended his left hand. He brushed the boy's cheek with the back of his fingers. Slowly.

The child did not stir.

Seijuro withdrew the hand, straightened, and looked at his father.

"He is well," Jirōbei said.

"I see that," Seijuro answered.

And that, too, was all.

---

Council Hall of Officers, Second Floor of the Osaka General Staff — That Same Afternoon

At two in the afternoon, eight men gathered in the council hall on the second floor. The room was long, with light walls, around a low table of cedar wood at which they sat in seiza: the commander, the second in command, the intelligence officer, the logistics officer, Commander Raisuke, two young officers recently promoted whom Seijuro did not know, and, at the head, just arrived from Tanabe, Seijuro Nakata. In the center of the table, a bronze brazier whose embers had already lost half their heat, and beside it, a map of Japan unfolded over a cloth.

Jirōbei opened the meeting with the usual formula.

"Officer Nakata. Report."

What followed lasted two long hours and is best summarized quickly, for the words exchanged in that room matter less than the silences that fell several times within it.

Seijuro spoke first.

He spoke with the dry discipline with which a combat report is drafted, without raising his voice, allowing himself no more adjective than was strictly necessary, letting the facts fall one after another like beads on an abacus. He began with the tsunami of January twenty-seventh in Tanabe. He continued with the Path Among the Cedars. He paused, briefly, on the silhouette that had been waiting for him under the trees — blonde, dressed in dark, two steel chains on the forearms, the thick voice of a foreigner; the map at the center of the table filled for a moment with eyes that traveled from Seijuro's face to the north of the country and back. He spoke of the first encounter in the summer of '97. He spoke of the second, by the cedar at Tanabe. He spoke of Otsuru's death. He spoke of the burial. He spoke of the road. He spoke of the first attack of gray creatures in a clearing of stones four days to the north. And he spoke, at last, of Wakayama: the bells in the small hours, the wave that broke into the square, the local detachment overwhelmed, the seventeen gray bodies fallen by daybreak, the four soldiers who had survived, the old woman dead in her own house with her arms stretched toward her granddaughter.

When he finished, he laid both hands on the table.

Silence.

The intelligence officer, a thin man of about fifty named Tarōzaemon, had his eyes closed. He opened them slowly.

"How many?" he asked.

"Seventeen in Wakayama. Four in the forest. Twenty-one," Seijuro answered. "The woman is separate."

"The woman is separate," Tarōzaemon repeated, nodding.

And then it happened — what Seijuro, since Wakayama, had feared without admitting it to himself: no one at that table was surprised.

That is.

They were surprised, yes, by the details. By the exact number, the exact color, the exact speed. They were surprised that the kōtei spoke with a foreign accent. They were surprised that Seijuro had survived the Path Among the Cedars. But they were not surprised by the phenomenon itself. And that, that afternoon, was the worst news of the day.

Tarōzaemon took up the matter.

"This is what I have," he said, opening a thin folder of reports. "January twenty-second, five days before the tsunami: a fishing village north of Edo. Three dead. Description: humanoid creatures, gray in color, no facial features, an enormous mouth full of teeth, a wave of about six or eight. Repelled between the militia and two officers passing through. January twenty-ninth, two days after the tsunami: a quarry west of Nagoya, on the inland road. Eleven dead. The description matches. February third: a farm south of Edo, eight dead, description matches. February fifth: a village east of Nagoya, five dead, description matches."

He laid his hand on the map, just between the points of Edo and Nagoya, and left it there.

"We knew something was happening," he said. "We did not know what to call it."

"They are called akuryō," Seijuro said.

"We know," Tarōzaemon answered.

And that, too, was true. The term had been used in the barracks for centuries, but until then it had been an almost mythic word, reserved for the very old reports — the yellowed reports of the sixteenth century, the archives of the fifteenth — that almost no one on the Osaka general staff bothered to read anymore. It was returning. Returning with five reports in fifteen days. Returning with a body in each report. And returning, moreover, with something new: something that resembled an akuryō and was not an akuryō. Something more. Something worse. Something that in the old archives of the barracks was called by a word no one had spoken aloud in two hundred years.

Tarōzaemon spoke it.

"Kōtei."

He said it low, almost between his teeth, like a man recognizing an old enemy in a forgotten portrait.

The two young officers glanced at each other. One of them, about twenty-five, frowned and opened his mouth to ask something, but Raisuke raised a hand, and the young officer closed his mouth without saying anything.

"Kōtei," Raisuke explained, with the patience of the veteran who has had to give that same explanation a hundred times to a hundred different men, "is what we call, in the reports, the ones who are not simple akuryō. The individuals. The ones who have a face, a voice, and a will. A kōtei may be worth a company of a hundred men. There has been no record of one in Japan for two hundred years."

"Until today," Tarōzaemon said.

"Until three years ago," Seijuro corrected, the scar on his left flank reminding him, without his having to say it, that the first kōtei on Japanese soil this century had appeared in the northern forests in the summer of '97, had finished off eight of the twelve men he commanded in that scouting party, and was still breathing. "Until three years ago."

Jirōbei had both hands resting on the table. He had said nothing through the entire exposition. He pressed them together once, almost imperceptibly, and let them go.

"Go on," he said.

The meeting continued for another hour and a half.

The map was examined. The reports were cross-checked. The two possible hypotheses were debated — a localized wave that would die out in two months; a general wave that was going to grow; the two possible responses were debated — concentrate forces in the four major cities; disperse them along the roads; the two possible timelines were debated — weeks, months; the possibility of warning the shōgun was debated; the impossibility of warning the shōgun at this precise moment without driving half of Edo mad was debated. Three small agreements were reached, and no large decision.

That is: they did what every council of officers does in every war in the world when the war has just begun and no one yet knows what war it is. They brought one another up to date. They postponed the rest.

At four in the afternoon Jirōbei rose. The others rose. The meeting ended.

There are meetings that close with an order and meetings that close with a postponement, and old men know how to tell them apart. Jirōbei, moreover, knew something else: that his son — who had spoken for an hour and a quarter without a stumble — had not come to Osaka to wait for the council's decision. His son had come to Osaka to take his own.

And had kept it for later.

When the fusuma of the council hall slid shut, the officers descended the stairs toward the courtyard in silence. Raisuke stayed above, leaning on the second-floor railing, watching the others walk away. Beside him, Jirōbei adjusted the collar of his uniform.

"Tonight," Jirōbei said, without looking at him.

"Tonight," Raisuke answered.

They went down separately.

---

Private Office of Commander Jirōbei. Third Floor of the Osaka General Staff — That Same Night, After the Second Watch

Jirōbei's private office was a narrow, long room without a balcony, with a single window facing north through which, at that hour, a thin strip of moonlight came in. The brazier was lit. On the low table, a tray with two cups of dark ceramic and a small jar of warm sake. In the far corner, a sliding fusuma opened onto a small alcove. Inside the alcove, on an improvised futon, a wicker basket lined with white cotton lay sleeping. And inside the basket, sleeping, lay Seijuro Nakata, son, twelve days.

Father and son sat in seiza facing each other on one side of the low table. Jirōbei poured the sake. They drank, both of them, a first short sip.

What they said next, they said in low voices, so as not to wake the child.

"You are going."

It was not a question. Seijuro nodded.

"I am going."

"To Mount Fuji?"

"To Mount Fuji."

Jirōbei set the cup down on the table with care. He turned it half a turn without lifting it. It was a gesture he always made with his katana before sheathing it at night: aligning the edge. That night he made it to an empty cup.

"How much do you think it will cost?" he asked.

"I don't know."

"How long do you think it will take?"

"I don't know."

"Are you coming back?"

Seijuro took three breaths to answer.

"I don't know."

Jirōbei nodded. He filled both cups again.

There are conversations that look like enumerations of defeats and are, in truth, the opposite: they are the clean accounting of one man who has decided and another who recognizes the decision. That night, in the private office of Commander Jirōbei Nakata, father and son fulfilled, without knowing it, the only rule the men of their family had always kept: when one of the two has made a decision, the other does not ask him to change it. He asks him the costs. And he sits down to add them up.

"Speak," Jirōbei said.

Seijuro spoke.

He spoke of the portal — for in that room, that night, the word could indeed be spoken: in the high ranks of the Japanese army, for two centuries, the few commanders with access to the old archives had known that somewhere on the northern flank of Mount Fuji there stood a structure through which, from time to time, creatures that were not of the real world entered the real world, and that the blonde woman of the Path Among the Cedars, whatever she was, had come through it. He spoke of the arithmetic: if the wave was only beginning, every month it took to reach the portal would be more Wakayamas. He spoke of Tome. He spoke of Suzu. He spoke of the boy officer of nineteen, the local detachment, the circle of torches, the seven Wakayama soldiers and the four who had survived. He spoke of the weariness that had gathered in his left flank after that morning, and of how, throughout an entire battle, the drums had not stopped. He spoke of everything a son can say to a father when that father has spent his life raising him with the will not to need words.

And, at the end, he spoke of the child.

"I cannot raise him," he said.

Jirōbei looked at the fusuma at the back of the room.

"I know."

"If I stay to raise him," Seijuro said, his voice a notch lower than before, "in two months Wakayama will be called Osaka. In six, Edo. In a year, all of them. I do not know how many men can make this journey. I know that I can. And I know that if I do not go, no one will."

"I know."

"It is not a choice between the child and duty, Father. If I stayed with him… I would not be with him. I would be sitting, waiting."

He paused.

"That is no use to a Nakata."

Jirōbei nodded, his eyes still on the fusuma at the back.

He took a long while before speaking.

"There are fathers who raise and fathers who leave," he said. "Some men do not choose between the two: they choose first one and then the other. I raised you. I stayed. When your mother died I went to no portal. I sat with you, I gave you the first bowl of rice you ate with your left hand, I taught you to tie your left boot first, and I stayed. Some men can do that. Others cannot. You cannot."

"I cannot."

"You cannot," Jirōbei repeated, finally looking at him. "You are more like my father than like me. My father went. I never reproached him for going."

Seijuro lowered his head.

It was the first time in his life that his father had spoken to him of his grandfather — that Nakata officer of the previous century, killed in a scouting party to the north a year after Jirōbei's birth — and it was, also, the first time in his life that he understood that this conversation he was having with his father, his father had had before with his own in some form or another, and the father of the father with the father of the father. The Nakata blood, he had read once in the yellowed reports of the barracks, was a blood that passed in silence, without documents, without speeches, and when it passed it always passed with two hands: one open on the nape of the one who stayed, one clenched in a fist forward.

Seijuro raised his eyes.

"The child must be taken to Hiroshima," he said.

Jirōbei looked at him for a long while.

"Hiroshima?"

"Hiroshima. You and him. And me with you, until I leave them at home. Then I go on."

Jirōbei nodded, slowly. He did not ask why. He sensed it. But Seijuro, this time, said it aloud:

"The child cannot grow up here, in Osaka. This is going to be the front. This room told me so today. The kōtei knows I am here; sooner or later she will come for me, and if she finds me, she will find the child. Edo is worse. Nagoya is worse. Hiroshima is to the west, far from the central front, far from the northern front, and the reports have registered no appearances west of Kyoto so far this winter. The Hiroshima base is the Nakata base. I was born there. You were born there. You learned to wield the katana there. It is the oldest and soundest base in the west; the men who command it now are men who would stand at attention for you if you lost an arm."

"They are."

"And there," Seijuro added, his voice dropping another notch, "there is not a wall in that house that does not still know me. If the child has to grow up without his mother and without his father, let him grow up in the only house where, without us, he will not be entirely alone."

Jirōbei kept silent for a long time.

"And you?"

"I am going to Mount Fuji," Seijuro said. "But I am not going alone."

"No."

"I am going to call on Nagasuke," Seijuro said. "In Hiroshima. And then on Kojiro, in Nagoya."

That, for the first time in the whole conversation, drew from the old man the trace of a smile.

"The three of you," Jirōbei said.

"The three of us," Seijuro repeated. "If we have to cross Japan to Fuji with what is starting to come out of the roads, three is the number."

"Nagasuke will be at his house on the slope."

"He will. Aoi is due soon. The wife does not move."

"How much do you have to tell Nagasuke for him to say yes?"

Seijuro thought.

"Three words."

"Three is a lot for Nagasuke," Jirōbei answered.

And for the first time in that office, in that long watch, father and son allowed themselves, both of them, the trace of a very brief smile.

Then they grew serious again.

"The one in Nagoya," Jirōbei said, "will not answer the first time."

"He will. We'll send a pigeon from Hiroshima."

"That is not what I meant," the old man said. "I mean that Nagoya, according to Tarōzaemon's reports, has two bodies already. And it will soon have more."

Seijuro nodded.

"He will survive."

It was a word said low, simple, spoken in the neutral way officers speak of things they trust to keep. The narrator, that night, would have liked to dwell on that word. Would have liked to underline it with a comment of his own. But the narrator, that night, was not yet omniscient.

Jirōbei rose. He walked to the fusuma at the back, slid it open a hand's width, looked inside. The child was sleeping. He closed the fusuma with the care of a man closing a door behind a secret. He came back to the table.

"We leave the day after tomorrow," he said.

"The day after tomorrow."

They finished the jar.

Seijuro stood at last to withdraw to his quarters. Before crossing the fusuma, he stopped.

He turned.

"Father."

"Son."

"Thank you."

Jirōbei looked at him from the other side of the low table, still in seiza, both hands on his knees, the brazier light cutting his white beard. He did not answer with words. He raised his right hand to the back of his own neck and pressed it there for an instant.

It was the family gesture, given by an old man to himself and, in silence, to his son.

Seijuro crossed the fusuma and slid it shut behind him.

And the child, in the basket, still knew nothing.

---

Western Road. From Osaka to Hiroshima

Three Days After the Night of the Office — Late February of the Year 1700

The convoy left Osaka at dawn on the second day after the conversation. Three figures on the western road and a small palanquin, drawn by an old horse and driven by a soldier of Raisuke's confidence. Inside the palanquin, on cushions, traveled the child. Beside the palanquin walked a wet nurse from the base whom the quartermaster, without being asked, had assigned to the convoy as far as Hiroshima. On foot, leading the way, walked Jirōbei Nakata with his katana sheathed at his belt and Seijuro Nakata with no weapon other than his two hands.

The western road, in those years, was a well-marked highway connecting the four great cities of the inland coast. In February, with winter still biting, the road was traveled at a pace of eight or nine ri a day — about twenty to twenty-five miles — on the level stretches, and five or six on the mountain passes. They left Osaka. They crossed Hyōgo. They crossed Akashi. They crossed Himeji. The old horse held up well, the wet nurse never once complained, the child slept most of the way and on the few stretches he was awake he cried little. Father and son barely spoke during the journey. When something had to be decided — a halt at an inn, a ford at a river, a detour around a hill — the older of the two made the decision in silence and the younger nodded. And the other way around. That was the Nakata way of traveling.

On the sixth day, in the middle of a bamboo field east of Saidaiji, Seijuro looked back for the first time on the entire journey.

Behind him lay Osaka. Farther back, Tanabe, a hillside of cedars, a mound with a woman inside. Farther still, Wakayama and bells in a small hour.

He did not stop.

He turned his head forward and kept walking.

On the eighth day they reached Hiroshima.

---

House Nakata, on the Slope of Mount Futaba Northeast of the City of Hiroshima

Aki Province — Dusk of the Eighth Day of March

There are houses that belong to a family, and houses to which the family belongs, and the house of the Nakatas, on the northern slope of Mount Futaba, was one of the latter. It had been there longer than any living Nakata could remember. According to the archive of the Hiroshima barracks, it had been built by the great-grandparents of Jirōbei's great-grandparents. It was a low, long house with a roof of dark tiles, with a back courtyard giving onto a small kitchen garden and, at the far end of the garden, a willow. Beside the willow was a stone well, and next to the well a flat slab of stone that in other times had been the place where the young Nakatas trained with the katana against a father who knew. When there was no father left to teach, the stone had remained. It still bore the marks of an edge when a child kept at it with patience.

Seijuro saw the stone before he saw the house.

Before he saw the willow.

Before he even saw the roof among the pines.

He saw it in his head, in the exact place where it would be — in the exact place where it had been since he had left for Osaka ten years before — and when, rounding the last bend of the path, the stone really did appear among the willow roots, exactly where his memory had placed it, Seijuro stopped.

He stood looking at the stone.

Not the house.

The stone.

It was there that, at the age of four, Jirōbei had first placed a wooden katana between his hands and told him, Never aim it at anyone with whom you are not prepared to share the journey. It was there that, at six, Seijuro had decided, without telling anyone, that he was not going to use the katana. It was there that he had learned the guard: the left clenched at the level of the cheek, the right open and forward. It was there that, at nine, he had broken his first brick with his left fist and given himself a wound in the knuckles whose echo he still felt some cold mornings. It was there, at the foot of the willow, that the Nakata children became officers before going off to become officers for real.

Behind the stone was the willow.

Behind the willow, the kitchen garden.

Behind the kitchen garden, the eaves.

Behind the eaves, the house.

And inside the house, without saying so, waited the mother who had died when he was four, waited the aunt, who had also died, waited the old steward, who had also died, and waited everything a man feels waiting for him in his own house when he has gone and returned and knows that this time he is going to leave again.

Seijuro crouched beside the stone.

He passed his right palm over its surface.

The stone was cold.

"I am here," he murmured, not knowing to whom.

Behind him, Jirōbei halted the palanquin. The wet nurse looked at the commander, who with a single motion of his chin signaled her to go on toward the house by the kitchen garden path. The soldier of Raisuke led the horse with care, avoiding the willow roots. When all of them had passed, Jirōbei stayed a few seconds longer behind his son.

"The stone has been waiting for you," he said.

"It has been waiting for me," Seijuro answered.

That was all.

He stood. He followed his father toward the house.

---

Back Courtyard of House Nakata. That Same Night

That night, Seijuro Nakata did not sleep in the room that had been his until he was sixteen.

He slept on the floor of the room next to the alcove where they had settled the child and the wet nurse, leaning against the wall, with his pack at his head and his eyes open for a long time. He saw the dark wood of the ceiling. He saw the beams that his father, when he was ten, had explained to him one by one because a man should know the house that would keep his head sheltered from the sky. He saw the two faint shadows at the back — the wicker basket, the sleeping wet nurse — outlined against the low lamp.

And he heard, very faintly, the breathing of the child.

He listened to that breathing until dawn.

To that breathing, that night, he put no words.

---

Back Courtyard of House Nakata, Morning of the Second Day

Aki Province — Late February of the Year 1700

He went out to the courtyard before anyone else. The willow was swaying slowly. The stone was frosted. Seijuro went to the well, drew up a bucket of cold water, washed his face, washed the back of his neck, and went back toward the house.

A few minutes later, Jirōbei came out with the child in his arms.

Father and grandfather sat down on the step of the back engawa, side by side, with the child wrapped in a length of white cotton between them.

Jirōbei held out the bundle.

"Take him."

Seijuro took him.

He held him with his right hand under the head and his left under the back. Both hands open. The baby's head was tucked into the crook of his elbow, and the child's breathing entered his chest through the tunic like a small tide. He looked at him for a long time.

He looked at his hair. A lot of hair, unruly, silver and fine, nothing like the mother's had been.

He looked at his eyelashes. Already long.

He looked at his left hand, which the child held clenched in a tiny fist pressed against his father's collar.

The left hand clenched.

The Nakata gesture.

At twelve days.

With no one having taught it to him.

Seijuro swallowed.

For a very long time.

Then he leaned over the child and, the way Otsuru had done to him in dreams a thousand times he had never seen, he gave him a very small kiss on the forehead.

"Your name is Seijuro Nakata," he said in a very low voice. "Like mine. As your grandfather will explain. I will not be there, but your grandfather knows what needs to be known. If you ever do not understand something, ask the stone by the willow. I asked it many things. Some it answered."

The child did not stir.

Seijuro pressed him for a moment against his chest, with care.

He laid his open hand — the right, in this case, because the left was supporting the head — on the small nape.

It was the family gesture.

For the first time, given to the next generation.

"I will come back," he said low. "If I can, I will come back."

The child opened one eye. He looked at him for an instant with the vague, unfocused gaze of newborns who do not yet know how to look. Then he closed it.

Seijuro returned him to his father's arms.

Jirōbei received him.

Father and son did not look at each other.

"Father."

"Son."

"Take care of him."

And here Jirōbei Nakata, the commander, said one single sentence to his son:

"Come back. If you come back well, well; if you come back broken, that too. But come back."

Seijuro nodded without answering.

And there, on the step of the back engawa of the house on the northern slope of Mount Futaba, on a morning that was still morning because the sun had not yet fully risen, a man parted from a father and a son at the same time, and that, that morning, was the way a Nakata learned, for the second time in twelve days, what it costs to choose duty when you have someone to look after.

He shouldered his pack.

He stepped down from the engawa.

He crossed the kitchen garden.

He passed beside the stone — he did not stop.

He passed beside the willow — he did not stop.

And he set off down the western path of Mount Futaba without turning his head.

There are ways of leaving and ways of leaving, and old officers know how to tell them apart. That one, that morning, was the way of the man who leaves what he wants behind to do what he must.

---

House of Nagasuke Asano, High Clearing on the Northern Face of Mount Futaba — Mid-Morning of the Same Day

The Asano house was not in the city. It stood in a high clearing, two ri north of the Nakata house, on a ledge of Mount Futaba where only the deer, the woodcutters, and men like Nagasuke Asano went up. The structure was small, low-roofed, with a square courtyard of packed earth in which, almost always, at almost any hour, there was a man of about thirty, barefoot, with a katana in his hands. Sometimes the man used it against wooden posts. Sometimes against bamboo stalks. Sometimes against himself: against his shadow at dawn, against his shadow at dusk, against his shadow when the willows at the edge cast twin shadows and he cut both in the same motion. The Asanos had been good with the katana for seven generations. Nagasuke Asano — the one of that house, the one of those years — was better than the seven previous generations put together.

Nagasuke Asano had been Seijuro Nakata's friend since childhood.

There were four years between them, but they had been boys together at the Hiroshima base. They had done their elementary military training together. Their paths had diverged when Nagasuke turned sixteen — Seijuro to the full barracks of Hiroshima, Nagasuke to a sword temple in Kyūshū — and when they came together again at the Hiroshima base at Nagasuke's nineteen, the officers had made the only observation that two friends in the army need to hear from their superiors in a lifetime: you still know each other. That was enough. Nagasuke left Hiroshima city for that high clearing on Mount Futaba a few years later, when he married a woman of high birth from inland and decided, without giving it more thought, that his place was no longer the barracks but the precise spot where the forest begins to fall silent. There he trained. There he waited for the war to need him, if it should need him.

But there was a chapter of the friendship between the two men that was not told in the barracks, and that weighed in every greeting between them without either of them ever naming it. In the summer of the year ninety-seven, a scouting party of twelve men had gone into the northern forests on the trail of something that, for them, did not yet have a name: a kōtei. Of the twelve, four had returned. Seijuro Nakata had returned with a long scar on his left flank and the decision to move to Tanabe; a sergeant from Kyūshū had returned with an arm he never used again; Nagasuke Asano had returned with the blade of his katana so notched that it did not survive the first stroke of the next training; and a fourth man, a veteran officer from the Nagoya base, named Kojiro, had returned with more white in his beard than he had when he set out, and with fewer words than he used to spend. Only four. Of that summer no one spoke too much, and the four of them spoke even less. But the friends a man makes carrying a body between two of them down a path of birches are a kind of friend that does not come undone afterward. When Seijuro climbed the goat track of Mount Futaba that morning of February in the year seventeen hundred, he was not climbing only to find a comrade from the barracks. He was climbing to find one of the three men with whom he had come back alive from the forest of the year ninety-seven.

No one at the base had forgotten it.

Seijuro climbed the goat track. When he entered the clearing, the first thing he saw was not the man.

It was the boy.

In the square courtyard of packed earth, a child of about seven, with a bokken roughly the length of his arm, was trying, with utmost seriousness, to land two cuts in succession on a wooden post as tall as he was. He had black hair, blue eyes, and a concentration unbecoming of his age. He gave the first cut, stepped back, gave the second, and on the second his balance gave way. When his balance gave way, he frowned. When he frowned, he started over.

Nagasuke. Son. Seven years old.

Seijuro stood watching him from the entrance of the clearing for a moment.

He has spent the day at it, he thought.

Beside the eaves of the house, a young woman of about twenty-six, sitting on the engawa in a posture that still allowed seiza though her belly, considerably swollen under the kimono, was beginning not to allow it for much longer, raised her eyes when she saw the visitor. Nagasuke's wife. Pregnant — Seijuro made the calculation quickly — by about six months, perhaps a little more. A girl, Nagasuke had said in his last letter. It would be a girl. The woman recognized the uniform, then recognized the man inside the uniform, and without saying a word she looked toward the side of the house where there was a wooden door with a crossbar. She opened it, leaned inside, and said in a calm, steady voice:

"He's here."

She did not say the name.

She did not need to.

Out of the wooden door came Nagasuke Asano.

He was wearing a light gray kimono, no weapons, his sleeves rolled up, his hands dry. His hair was tied in a short tail with a cord. He was nearly as tall as Seijuro, somewhat thinner, with a sharp face and the same blue eyes as his son. He saw him. He stepped out into the courtyard. He took four steps in a straight line toward the visitor and stopped two paces from him.

He looked at him.

He looked at the uniform.

He looked at the scar that showed under the half-open collar.

He looked — briefly, almost without seeing it — at the left hand. Clenched.

Nothing he saw surprised him.

"When?" he asked.

"Now."

"How far?"

"Fuji."

"Who else?"

"You. And Kojiro."

Nagasuke stood still for a moment.

He nodded once.

"I'm in."

That was all.

Three words Seijuro had said to Nagasuke, he had promised in his father's office. Three had been the father's count. Three they had been. You. And. Kojiro. The fourth — Fuji — had already been said, and the decision, in men like Nagasuke Asano, needed no more.

The woman, from the engawa, said nothing. She had been married to that man for years. She had known, from the first day, that there would come a morning when a friend from the barracks would come up to the courtyard on Mount Futaba and say four words to her husband and her husband would leave without arguing about it. It was the unwritten contract of their marriage. That morning, the contract had come due. The woman laid her hand on her belly, without realizing it, and stroked the swell very slowly.

Nagasuke, without looking at her yet, felt it at his back.

He turned.

He climbed the three steps of the engawa and crouched in front of his wife. He took her face in both hands — he always had warm hands, he had always had warm hands, and the woman of Mount Futaba knew it better than anyone — and rested his forehead against hers. They stayed like that for a moment. She closed her eyes. She brought her own hands up — small, the palm still dusted with the flour of breakfast — and laid them on her husband's wrists. She drew one of them down, slowly, until she rested it on the swell of her belly. Nagasuke opened his palm. He left it there.

"Give us three months," he said, in a very low voice.

"As long as it takes," she answered. "But she'll be born before. Without you."

"Without me. Put her in my arms when I come back."

"And the name?"

Nagasuke did not answer right away. He looked at her. He passed his thumb across her cheek.

"Like yours," he said at last.

She smiled. It was a smile that did not quite make it out, because the smile of a woman six months pregnant when her husband is saying goodbye is a smile that weighs too much to come out whole, but enough of it came out.

"She'll be called like me, then."

"If I do not come back," he added, this time even lower, "the Nakatas."

"The Nakatas," she repeated.

That, in the language of those two houses, was a sealed pact. If Nagasuke did not come back, the Nakatas would take charge. If the Nakatas — the ones who remained — could not, the Asanos who survived would carry the rest. The friendship of one soldier with another, in the Japan of those years, was a friendship that came to draw up testaments without a notary.

Nagasuke kissed her on the forehead.

Then on the mouth, once, slowly.

Then again, on the forehead.

He stood up.

The boy, at the back of the courtyard, had stopped striking the post and was watching the two men in silence.

Nagasuke stepped down from the engawa and walked to the center of the courtyard. The child lowered the bokken to the level of his hip. He returned his father's gaze with the seriousness of a small officer that only children have when they have grown up watching one of the best swordsmen in western Japan train every day, every morning, and every afternoon.

Nagasuke crouched in front of him.

He laid his left hand on the boy's shoulder.

He spoke low, so that only the boy would hear; but Seijuro, from the entrance of the clearing, caught a word here and there, because the things said in a square courtyard of packed earth on a windless day are heard whether one wants to or not.

"I'll be away for a month."

"…"

"You train every day. Don't skip any. The days it rains, indoors."

"…"

"You take care of your mother. And when your sister is born, of her too."

"…"

"Now listen to me carefully."

Pause.

"While I'm not here, you guard this house. If anything were to happen — anything: someone you don't know, a shadow in the courtyard that shouldn't be there, a sound in the forest you can't put a name to — you go to the back room. You open the cabinet. You take the sword that is inside. You draw it with both hands, not one. You hold it carefully."

Pause.

"Do you understand?"

The boy nodded once, very slowly.

"That sword is not like this one," Nagasuke added, gesturing with his chin at the boy's bokken. "Nor like mine. It is from the army. It's going to feel heavy at first. It's going to do things you don't expect. Don't be afraid. You hold it and don't let go. It will know. Until I come back, that sword helps you. When I come back, you keep it anyway: for me it is already done. I have already had mine."

He laid his hand on the boy's shoulder again.

He squeezed it once.

"Anything else?"

The boy shook his head.

But, just as the father was straightening up, the child raised his chin and, in the thin, steady voice he had only sometimes — the one he had probably inherited from his mother — said:

"Father."

Nagasuke stopped half-risen.

"Come back."

Nagasuke looked at him for a very long instant.

He ruffled the boy's hair slowly.

"I'll come back."

He stood. He gave two sharp slaps to the wooden post with the flat of his palm — it was the Asano way of blessing an object that would be working alone for a few weeks — and walked back toward the house.

He went inside for a moment. He came out with a pack already prepared — for years, probably, prepared — and with a katana of long blade, black sheath, no ornament. He fastened the katana to his belt. He shouldered the pack.

On the engawa, the woman had sat down again.

Her hand was on her belly.

She was watching him.

Nagasuke held her gaze a moment longer. Then he stepped out of the courtyard.

Seijuro, who throughout the farewell had kept his eyes on the ground with the courtesy of old officers — for he had learned in twenty years of barracks that what a man and his wife say to each other on the morning he leaves is not to be looked at — raised his eyes only when his friend came up beside him. They said nothing to each other. They began walking toward the path together.

Already on the path, Nagasuke stopped just once, looked back over his shoulder at the courtyard of packed earth, at the boy who had gone back to striking the post, at the woman seated again on the engawa with her hand on her belly, and said nothing.

He nodded.

He resumed the march.

Beside him, Seijuro Nakata walked at his pace, without looking at him, with the left hand once again loaded like a cocked projectile at the level of the cheek and the right hand open and forward.

The guard.

Back again.

---

Eastern Path of Mount Futaba, Toward the Central Road — Noon of the Same Day

They went down together by the eastern path.

Halfway down, the sun rose above the ridge and struck them in the face. Neither of them closed his eyes. Halfway down, also, Seijuro allowed himself, for the last time in many months, to look back. Up there, in the high clearing of Mount Futaba, the house was no longer visible. Farther south, on another slope, neither was the Nakata house. Not the engawa of the back courtyard. Not the stone beside the willow. Not a wicker basket lined with white cotton with a child of twelve days inside.

But all of that was there.

It would be there tomorrow.

It would still be there when men like them finished their business at the foot of Mount Fuji and came back for it.

Or when they did not come back.

Seijuro Nakata turned his head forward again. Beside him, Nagasuke Asano walked without having turned his head once.

Ahead, the road widened toward the lowlands and, far beyond, toward the city, and farther still to the east, toward Kyoto, toward Nagoya. Toward a friend they were going to find to make three on the road to Fuji and whom, without knowing it, they were going to reach too late.

They did not know.

They walked.

And at the entrance of the eastern road, where the path of Mount Futaba spilled onto the main highway, Hiroshima was left behind their backs and the noon sun struck them full on the shoulders.

Two men.

Two shadows.

A decision already made.