Prologue 4: the way back part I

Path Among the Cedars, Northern Slope of the Tanabe Valley — January 29, 1700

There are paths walked with the feet and others walked with memory, and that afternoon, on the trail descending northward along the dark slope of the Tanabe valley, Seijuro Nakata was walking both at once and could not have said which weighed more. His boots sank into the wet earth at the slow rhythm imposed by the slope, and every twenty or thirty paces the centuries-old cedars closed a little tighter over the trail, forming a low vault through which the light of the setting sun filtered in thin, oblique strips that fell across the camouflage cloth of the military uniform and turned it into something that no longer looked like uniform or soldier, but simply shadow moving inside another shadow. Behind him, several slopes higher, Otsuru's mound was cooling under a layer of turned earth and fallen cedar leaves. Ahead, the valley widened by degrees toward cultivated lowlands and small scattered villages, and beyond that, far beyond, was Osaka, where his father waited for him with a child not yet old enough to keep his eyes open.

Seijuro did not stop once on that first descent. He had learned long ago that the body of a soldier, when it cannot find an order to obey, obeys the inertia of the step, and that this was the oldest and most efficient trick for not collapsing in the middle of a road one cannot afford to interrupt. He kept walking, then, without thinking about walking, letting his legs solve what his head was incapable of solving. And his head, meanwhile, did the only thing it knew how to do in such cases: it enumerated.

It enumerated problems.

It was the deepest disciplinary inheritance from Jirōbei: when a Nakata officer met a catastrophe too large to think whole, he broke it into manageable pieces and ordered them by priority, the way men were ordered into combat formation. Soldiers first. Wounded behind. Supplies behind that. And the dead, last of all, because the dead, his father always said, no longer demand anything of the man who is still alive, except that he remember why they died. Seijuro did not entirely share that last sentence, but that afternoon, descending the trail among the cedars, he understood for the first time with precision what his father had meant by it.

He ordered, then.

The first piece was Otsuru.

The second was the child.

The third was Klepsa.

The fourth was the portal.

The fifth, everything else.

To think about Otsuru, he decided, was not a problem but a wound; and a soldier's wounds heal by walking, not by stopping to look at them. So he left her behind. Not to forget her — one does not forget a wife dead less than a day — but so that this piece would not invade the other four. To think about the child was not exactly a problem either: the child was with Jirōbei, and Jirōbei was, after himself, the living man Seijuro trusted most deeply to keep a three-day-old infant alive. The second piece, then, could also be left in suspense for a few days.

Klepsa and the portal, on the other hand, were pieces that could not be left in suspense.

Klepsa had appeared in the forests of Tanabe.

That meant, with no margin for doubt, that the portal had opened again. Kōtei did not appear in the forests of Japan by chance or by tourism. They appeared when the portal was open, and the portal was open only when, on the other side, whatever it was that decided such things had decided that the time had come again. About what lay on the other side of the portal, the high-ranking officers of the Japanese army did not know much, and those who claimed to know a little more were, almost always, the ones who knew the least. They knew there was another world. They knew that from that world the akuryō came, in waves, every several generations. They knew that, for the past century or so, creatures with faces and with names had also been coming — kōtei, far more dangerous individually than the akuryō. And they knew that, once it all began, there was no known way to stop it from the real world. The rest — why, for what end, on whose orders — was the matter of barracks rumor and, above all, the matter of silence. The only thing that mattered that night was the only thing a Nakata officer needed to know: if Klepsa had appeared in the forests of Tanabe, the akuryō were already on the move. Perhaps that very night. Perhaps to the north, perhaps to the south, perhaps along the road he was walking.

That thought should have frightened him.

It did not.

Seijuro Nakata, at twenty-six years old, had long since forgotten the way other men feel fear. His fear, when it appeared, did not manifest as a tremor or a chill, but as a cold, almost geometrical clarity that ordered his priorities before asking his permission. And that night, descending the trail among the cedars, the cold clarity was telling him, with the impassive courtesy of a subordinate delivering a report, that he was no longer simply a soldier of the Japanese army and a one-day widower. He was also, perhaps, the only officer in Japan who knew with precision what was about to happen to the country.

And that, sooner or later, was going to be a problem.

But not that night. Not yet.

He made camp when the light withdrew completely from between the branches and the trunks lost their outline. He did so the way a man camps when he camps alone and does not wish to be found: far from the trail, leeward of a low ridge, between two fallen cedars that formed a natural V and left a small hollow sheltered from the wind. He gathered dry branches with the silent method he had practiced since the age of fourteen. He lit the fire with two flint sparks and a handful of shredded cedar leaves. The flames steadied quickly. When he had them, he sat down beside the fire, his back against one of the fallen trunks, both hands extended toward the heat.

He looked at his hands.

The right one, open, had four skinned knuckles from the night before. The left, closed, bore no marks.

His hands, he thought, were the only thing that afternoon that did not hurt.

He closed the left gently and rested it on his knee.

The fire crackled.

And for the first time since the sanba, since Otsuru's silence, since Klepsa's chain and the cedar against which he had thrown her, since the bowed head of the country doctor and the nameless old woman washing a body that no longer felt anything, for the first time in all that time, Seijuro allowed his head to remain still for a few seconds, in silence, watching a fire that burned for him alone and for no one else.

It was not rest.

It was something else.

Otsuru would have known how to name it; he did not.

By the third night the forest had changed.

Seijuro noticed it in mid-morning, while climbing the slope of a low hill where the cedars began to give way to more open ground of oaks and winter maples, leafless, their bare branches cut against a white sky that threatened snow without quite delivering it. It was not a change of landscape that alerted him. It was a change of sound. Those two previous days, descending from Tanabe along scattered paths, he had heard what one always hears in a Japanese forest in deep winter: the high wind, the distant crows, the small rustlings of the ground, the dry groan of some trunk contracting in the cold. That morning, no.

That morning, the crows had gone silent.

A soldier who cannot tell when a crow falls silent, Jirōbei had told him at nine years old, is a soldier who is already dead and does not know it. Seijuro had taken the line as a child for one of his father's many exaggerations, and only years later, in the first real combat against a kōtei in the northern forests, had he understood how literal it was. Crows were the oldest warning system in the world. When they fell silent, it was because something had silenced them. And if it was winter, and if the silence stretched on, and if the wind had not changed, what had silenced them was not human.

He stopped.

He pressed the thumb of his right hand against the back of the left, the way he always did before combat, and felt his own pulse beat under the skin. He was calm. Too calm, perhaps. The part of him that had buried Otsuru three mornings before, and on which he had imposed operational silence for three days, kept its silence still. The part of him that bore the surname Nakata, on the other hand, had slowly raised its head and was beginning to listen to the forest with an attention he had given to nothing since the cedar trail.

He walked another two hundred paces.

He found the first track at the edge of a stream.

It was not a man's track.

It was a wide print, with no defined toes, sunk too deep to belong to any animal of the forest. The stone of the streambed beside it was splintered inward, as if something had pressed down on it with more weight than the stone could bear. Seijuro crouched and passed his hand over it without touching. The track was not yet wholly frozen: it had been left less than six hours before. The creature, whatever it was, was not far.

He stood up.

He chose the next clearing, and chose it well.

It was a small circle of packed earth, opened among four large rocks that formed something like a horseshoe. The fifth side, the only one exposed, gave onto a downward slope: anything coming up that way would have to climb, and climbing uphill against a lit fire was a disadvantage that not even an akuryō knew how to compensate for. He built the fire higher than the night before, deliberately high, deliberately visible. He was not going to hide. He was going to wait.

He ate hard bread and a piece of dried fish that the sanba had slipped into his bag without saying anything. He chewed slowly, without hunger. As he chewed, he reset the stance in his mind: the left in high guard, the right open at the height of the sternum, weight on the back leg. He went over the distances of the clearing the way other men go over their prayers. Fourteen paces to the large rock on the left. Ten to the one ahead. Six to the young cedar that broke the line on the right. He did this twice. By the third time, he no longer needed to think.

And he waited.

The moon never quite rose.

They came without a sound.

He did not hear them breathe, did not hear them step; the only thing that arrived was, first, a silence even thicker than that of the crow, and then, at the edge of the circle of light the fire drew on the ground, a gray silhouette peeling itself from a trunk as though the trunk had been hiding it and had suddenly grown tired of doing so.

Behind it came two more.

And behind those two, a fourth, taller, with arms too long for its torso.

Seijuro did not rise quickly. He rose with the precise calm of a man who knows that haste, in that moment, was the first error possible.

He closed his left fist at the height of his cheek.

He opened his right in front of his chest.

And he thought, with a clarity he had not had since the cedar trail:

Good.

The first one leapt.

It leapt clumsily, the way akuryō leap when they have just woken, with arms thrown forward and head pulled back as if they had not yet finished assembling themselves. Seijuro's right found it before it landed. It was not a blow: it was a deflection. The open palm slipped beneath the akuryō's forearm, lifted it two fingers, threw it off-balance to its own left, left it open.

The left came in then.

It was a short blow.

Dry.

At the height of the chest, where a human would have his heart.

The akuryō flew backward as if a catapult had pushed it and slammed against the large rock at the back of the clearing. Crack. The rock held. The creature did not. It fell to the ground with its chest caved in, and for a couple of long seconds its legs went on twitching, because akuryō do not understand at once that they are dead and sometimes take a while to obey the order.

The second and the third arrived together.

Seijuro breathed.

And then it happened.

Not as completely as on the cedar trail, not as openly as that afternoon with Klepsa.

But it happened.

The heart, inside his chest, struck a different first beat.

And another.

And another.

Five quick, four slower.

The forest fell silent.

The second akuryō received the right palm flat in the center of its forehead, a palm that would have stunned a human and that on this creature served only to redirect its head a hand's-breadth, just enough for the left to reach the base of the skull from below on a rising trajectory that would have split an ox in two. The head turned ninety degrees on the neck before continuing on to one hundred and eighty.

Crack.

The body fell.

The third had already come within reach.

Seijuro did not bother to deflect it. He let it come. The creature opened the gray crack where its mouth should have been, showed the double row of disordered teeth, threw both arms forward to seize his neck.

Too slow.

Seijuro's right caught the akuryō's right wrist in the air, closed on it with the force of a vise, and pulled.

The arm came out of the shoulder with a wet crunch.

Seijuro tossed it into the fire.

And before the body, beheaded by pain — pain it did not feel, but the imbalance of which it did register — finished falling, the left came in again, this time at the temple.

Crack.

Three on the ground.

The fourth, the tall one, the one with arms too long, did not lunge.

It stood at the edge of the clearing, head tilted to one side in that posture of an animal weighing its chances, and for an instant Seijuro wondered whether the akuryō, any of them, ever, had something inside them that could be called hesitation. The question lasted only that long. The tall akuryō drew its shoulders back, opened the crack of its face until the silence of the clearing filled with the dry creak of that lipless jaw, and charged.

And then it stopped being a fight.

Seijuro took the charge head-on. He did not deflect it. The right, open, went against the creature's chest as if to stop it, and the weight of the akuryō — for it weighed, it weighed far more than a human of its size — drove Seijuro back three full paces before his left heel found the rear rock of the clearing and stopped him. The akuryō pinned him to the rock. The crack of its face was a hand's-breadth from his own. The enormous mouth opened until it touched his breath. And Seijuro, in that impossible position, pinned to a rock with an immortal creature on top of him, did the only thing that came into his head:

He remembered Otsuru in his arms.

Her dead weight.

How she had soaked the front of his tunic with blood during the descent.

The country doctor saying she's dead.

The handful of earth falling on the wood of the coffin.

And the heart, inside, redoubled.

Seijuro dropped his guard.

Both hands.

Closed.

And he began to strike.

He struck the akuryō's head with the left. With the right. With the left. With the right. No guard, no technique, no economy. Each fist landed where the previous one had opened a hole. The gray skin gave way at the fourth blow, the bone at the sixth, what was inside at the eighth. But Seijuro went on striking. The creature was no longer holding itself up. The creature no longer had a face. The creature, somewhere between the ninth blow and the twelfth, had stopped being alive in any sense the akuryō understood as life.

Seijuro went on striking.

The rage came out through his fists the way water comes out through an open sluice, and Seijuro, who had learned twenty years before to close every sluice he carried inside, that night, in that clearing, stopped closing the last one.

Otsuru. Otsuru. Otsuru.

When he stopped, the body of the fourth akuryō was beneath both his knees, with no recognizable form. His own arms trembled as they had never trembled before, not even at the first evaluation in Hiroshima, not even in the first combat in the north. He had both hands open. The left and the right. He looked at them. They were covered in something gray and dark that was neither blood nor mud, and he did not want to think what it was.

The fire of the clearing burned behind him, intact.

The forest around him was still silent.

The crows had not returned.

Seijuro stayed kneeling for a long while.

When he was able to stand, he did so slowly, with the strange sense that he was lifting a body that had not been entirely his own these past few minutes. He looked at the four corpses in the clearing the way an officer looks at the field after battle: counting, identifying, certifying that each one was dead in the sense that the species was dead. They were. He walked to the fire. He knelt again, this time by choice, and plunged both hands into the dirty snow that had piled up at the edge of the hearth. He rubbed them. The snow turned gray. He rubbed again. The snow turned black. He repeated the operation three times, until the snow, simply, stopped changing color because there was nothing left on his hands that could tint it any further.

He sat down beside the fire.

He did not sleep that night.

Not from fear of another attack — the forest around the clearing was already, as far as the ear could reach, completely empty of akuryō presence; the crows, without yet having cawed again, had taken up the night-time cooing that belonged to them, and that was the second oldest warning system in the world, the one that said you may come back, there is nothing left. He did not sleep because the rage, in withdrawing, had left inside him an empty place that he did not know how to fill.

Rage, in those who know how to use it, is only another form of clarity. And the problem, that night, was not that Seijuro Nakata did not know how to use it. It was that he had used it too well. And a soldier who discovers he is too good at something discovers also, almost always, that this something will not be forgotten in him ever again.

He looked at the fire.

The fire did not answer.

He thought, for the first time in three days, of the child his father was carrying in his arms toward Osaka, and he wondered whether the child carried something in his blood that would, at some point, come out through his fists the way it had come out through his that night.

The question had no answer.

Seijuro threw another log on the fire.

He kept watch until dawn.

And at dawn he broke camp without looking back, without burying the akuryō, without anything, and walked toward Osaka.

---

Western Slope, Kii Province — Early February, 1700

He walked the next three days the way a soldier walks the days when everything has just died on him: in silence, with discipline, and without allowing himself to look at anything inside that was not the next stretch of road. The cedar forest fell behind and gave way to a succession of low hills and winter rice paddies, flooded, empty of people, that stretched northward in a monotonous, almost merciful repetition: it was hard to feel emotion looking at a rice paddy in February, and that, those days, was the closest thing to rest. When he met a traveler — a merchant pulling a mule, a wandering monk in a damp kesa, two woodcutters returning from the hills — they exchanged the minimum greeting and went on their way without asking each other's names. Seijuro preferred it that way. To speak meant to answer, and to answer meant to remember, and to remember, those days, was the one thing he could not yet afford.

He thought a great deal about the child.

Not so much about the actual child, whom he barely knew, as about the idea that the child was somewhere to the north, in his father's arms, traveling toward Osaka along a road parallel to his own, and that sooner or later the two roads would cross in a barracks courtyard and he would have to take the child for the first time as a father and not as a soldier on watch. That, he discovered, frightened him more than any akuryō in the forest. An akuryō you deflected with the right and killed with the left; a son, you did not.

He thought also about his hands.

He looked at them at the end of each day's march, when the cold of the camp began to numb them and he had to flex and close his fingers to bring back the blood. He looked at them with a new attention, almost clinical, the way one looks at a tool one has used for years believing one knew it and that suddenly, one night, has done something one did not ask of it. The right, open, was the one of always: the hand of the officer who deflected, who ordered, who calmed a subordinate with a gesture. The left, closed, was no longer the one of always. The left had learned, in the clearing of the four rocks, that it could go on striking a body when the body had ceased to resist, and that was a kind of knowledge that, once learned, was not unlearned.

That was also the kind of knowledge that, in Jirōbei's generation, had turned more than one man of the army into something other than a man.

Seijuro did not want to be something other than a man. He did not want to be a monster.

Not that week, at least.

That week he wanted to reach Osaka, see the child, sit down before his father, and let his father, for the first time in many years, tell him what to do.

On the fourth day, the fields began to be peopled. Small villages, half-rebuilt houses, woodcutters working on the slopes again. Seijuro understood, from the courtesy questions the travelers asked him as they passed — questions about Tanabe, about the water, about the dead — that the tsunami of January 27 had reached farther than he had suspected, but also that it had lost force as it left the peninsula behind. The farther north he went, the lighter the water's mark became. The villages spoke of the tsunami the way those who have only heard it told speak of it: with respect, with a touch of terror, but without the open wound of one who has lived through it. Only in Tanabe, two pilgrims had told him as they crossed his path, only in Tanabe are they still gathering bodies.

Seijuro nodded and walked on.

On the sixth day he began to smell Wakayama.

It smelled, above all, of cooking smoke and dried fish, and over the two of those, faint but persistent, of wet wood drying too quickly under the winter sun. It was the smell of a city that had taken a blow but had already decided not to die of the blow. Seijuro was grateful for it without knowing he was. He had spent six days walking inside the smell of a forest and his own camp, and the smell of a city — any city — was, that afternoon, almost a promise.

---

Wakayama, South Gate. Kii Province — Sunset of the Sixth Day

Wakayama was not a large city but neither was it a village. There was a low wall, there was a gate, there were drowsy guards at the gate who did not even raise their eyes from the brazier as Seijuro passed in front of them: they saw the military uniform under the dust of the road, they saw the badly sewn insignia on the collar, and that was that. An officer of the army did not need to justify himself at the gate of a provincial town.

Inside, the tsunami had left its mark. Not as much as in Tanabe, but enough to recognize at first glance: the main street, which ran parallel to a canal half-clogged with mud, had every other house bearing the dark stain of the first meter of wood up to waist height, the mark of the dirty water that had risen and fallen six days before. Some boards had already been pulled away and replaced by new wood, lighter, that did not quite match the rest in color and gave the façades the look of a badly healed scar. In the doorways, household goods now dry in the sun were piled up — rolled tatami, broken folding screens, empty baskets — that the families had not yet decided whether were still of use or whether ought to be thrown away. A woman swept the entrance of her house with her face fixed precisely on the tile she was sweeping, not looking to either side. A small boy, sitting on a step, held with both hands a clay bowl missing a piece of its rim, and held it as if mending it depended on not letting go.

A wounded city, Seijuro thought, is a city that distracts itself with small things so as not to have to look at the large ones.

He walked down the main street without haste.

He stopped at the first stall still open — a dried-fish merchant gathering up his pieces from the counter into a wooden crate — and put to him, without much hope, the question he had spent six days both wanting and dreading to ask.

"Excuse me," he said, and the merchant raised his head with the tired courtesy of a man who has already mentally closed up for the day. "Have you seen anything strange around here these past few days? Animals that should not be here? Creatures?"

The man looked at him for a second in surprise.

"Creatures?" he repeated.

"Something that... does not fit."

The merchant raised both eyebrows, amused in spite of himself.

"Around here, officer, the only thing that does not fit is half my shop." He pointed at the watermark on the wall with his thumb, almost proudly. "The water came, took two baskets, brought them back broken, and left. That is all the strangeness we have had this year."

Seijuro nodded and went on.

He tried twice more. A woman washing clothes by the canal looked at him for a moment, laughed softly, and told him that the only strange thing she had ever seen in Wakayama was her own husband, and that she had been getting used to him for twenty-two years. An old man sitting in the doorway of an apothecary's listened to the question with greater attention than the others, sat thinking for a long while, and finally shook his head and said only: no new birds, soldier. The same crows as ever.

Seijuro thanked him.

Those three answers should have reassured him.

They did not.

What he knew of akuryō, he knew well: they never announced their coming, and when a town said it had seen nothing strange, that was precisely the kind of town in which something strange was about to happen. Seijuro cast a look at the side alleys, at the rooftops, at the low line of the hills that surrounded Wakayama on the eastern side. Nothing. Nothing yet.

The sun was beginning to touch the crest of the western hill.

He thought of sleeping at an inn and discarded the idea almost at once: an inn meant a keeper, a guest book, questions, conversation, other voices, noise. He did not have that in him tonight. He looked instead for what a trained soldier always looks for when he comes tired into a town: a house at the edge, set apart, modest, with a small kitchen garden and an easy way out toward the fields. He found it on the last street of the town, almost at the limit of the low wall, where the buildings spread thin and the winter barley fields began.

The house was of dark wood, single-storied, with a low roof of pressed thatch and an eave that jutted out a hand's-breadth more than was reasonable. There was a small engawa beside the door, and on the engawa a broom was leaning, and a pair of straw sandals drying in the late-afternoon sun. The watermark on the outer wall came barely to the height of a knee, far lower than in the center of town. One of the front fusuma had warped and would not close: barely a finger of space remained between the two panels, and through that gap, that afternoon, the smell of fresh-made miso broth came drifting out and reached the path before it reached the yard.

Seijuro stopped before the door.

He took a moment longer than strictly necessary to raise his hand to the wood, because between the moment of stopping before another's house and the moment of knocking on it there was, that afternoon, a distance that a six-day widower had to walk slowly.

He knocked.

The door opened.

And on the other side stood an old woman with her whole face set on his, looking at him with a calm attention, not curious, almost professional, as though she had spent fifty years opening doors to men with the dust of the road on the collar of their uniform and knew in advance what to do with each one of them.

"Good evening," Seijuro said.

The woman did not answer at once. She finished looking at him: the dust on his boots, the knuckles of his right hand, the left sleeve stained with something dark that he had scrubbed with snow three nights earlier and that the snow had not quite removed. When she had finished, she nodded once, the way one certifies a report.

"Good evening, officer."

"I am not here on any official matter," Seijuro said. "I am passing through. I was looking for somewhere to sleep, and I would rather not at an inn. If you have a dry corner, I can work for whatever needs doing in exchange. The back wall, the eave. Anything."

The old woman looked at him for another second. And then, without saying anything yet, she stepped aside.

"Come in."

Behind her, leaning out half a head over the engawa, was a girl.

She must have been six, perhaps seven. She wore a gray cotton kimono with a faded red obi and a small wooden pin in her hair holding a lock above her ear. She had a round face, eyes too large for it, and was looking at Seijuro with the absolute, completely uninhibited fixity with which only six-year-old girls look at adults.

"Suzu," the old woman said without turning. "Step aside."

The girl did not step aside.

"Is he a soldier?"

"Yes."

"One of ours?"

"Yes, little one. Step aside."

Suzu finally stepped aside, but not before looking him up and down again, with that kind of brazen inspection that in a fifty-year-old woman would have been rude and in a six-year-old was simply a census. Seijuro, who had forgotten for a week how it was done, felt a ridiculous twitch at one corner of his mouth. It did not become a smile. But it came close.

He went in.

"My name is Tome," the old woman said when she closed the door behind him. "My granddaughter is Suzu. If you stay, you will sleep in the back room, on the old tatami. Before that, you will wash. And before that, you will eat. In that order."

Seijuro inclined his head one degree.

"Agreed."

"And before all of that," Tome added, without barely raising her voice, "you will help me with the kitchen beam. It has been down four days, and my son-in-law cannot get here until tomorrow. If I leave it another night like that, the roof will come down on us."

Seijuro looked at the lintel at the back. A cedar beam, thick as an arm, had given way at one end and was leaning against the wall at an absurd angle. Tome had not even turned to point at it: she took it as understood.

The beam took him half an hour. He had to remove two wall panels, fit the fallen end onto a new improvised support of two wooden wedges he carved himself with his knife, and fasten the whole assembly with two iron nails that Tome pulled from a box without anyone telling her where it was. He worked in silence. The old woman sat on the step to watch, her hands joined on her lap, not giving him instructions, not getting in his way, simply accompanying the work with her presence the way widows have accompanied the work of others for centuries in any village of any province. Suzu, on the other hand, did not sit: she circled Seijuro three times during the operation, handed him a nail when he asked for a nail, picked up a splinter from the floor when he pointed at the splinter, and at the end, when the beam was already in place and he was stepping down from the stool, gave him two pats on the elbow with a gesture of entirely formal approval, as if she were a foreman passing inspection.

Seijuro looked at her.

Suzu looked at him.

"It's good," the girl pronounced.

"Thank you," he answered, gravely.

Tome, on the step, raised an eyebrow half a millimeter.

They ate shortly afterward. The kitchen was small and smelled good. Tome had set three bowls on a low table: miso broth, a little leftover rice from the day before reheated, and a piece of pickled daikon cut into three uneven portions — the largest, Seijuro noted without anyone saying so, was his. They ate on the floor, on cushions worn through by several generations of guests. Suzu sat across from Seijuro. Tome sat beside the girl.

"What is your name?" Suzu asked without lifting her eyes from her bowl, attacking a grain of rice with the concentration of a samurai counting enemies.

"Seijuro."

"Seijuro what."

"Seijuro Nakata."

The girl chewed the grain. She chewed it long. Then she lifted her face.

"My father was a soldier," she announced, in the tone of a person announcing an important administrative fact. "He died. Three years ago. But he was in the army."

Seijuro did not answer at once.

Three years ago.

The figure went into his ear the way data goes into the head of an officer: directly, in order, without permission. Three years ago was the summer of 1697. Three years ago was the forest of the north, the advance party against Klepsa, the twelve men who had set out with Seijuro and the four who had come back with him. Three years ago was the scar he carried on his left side, which that night, without his knowing why, had pulled a little under his belt as he sat down at the table. He went over the names of the advance party in his mind. Suzu's father had not been there, almost certainly.

Almost.

Best not to mention it, he thought.

That house had received enough army officers over forty years to have no need, that night, of one more arriving to open boxes that were already closed. If Tome wanted to open them, she would open them herself. If not, there was no reason for a six-day widower, with his left hand still gray under the nails, to start stirring up the dead of others to discomfit his own conscience.

He glanced for a second at Tome.

Tome did not lift her eyes from her bowl.

"I am sorry," Seijuro said to the girl.

"It's okay. I was very small."

Seijuro did not answer.

"Are you coming from Tanabe?" the old woman asked.

"Yes."

"A great deal of water."

"A great deal."

"And before Tanabe?"

Seijuro swallowed the broth slowly.

"Osaka. Before Tanabe I lived in Osaka."

"Ah." Tome nodded, without pressing further.

There was a silence. Suzu came back at it, this time with a new question.

"Do you have a wife?"

Seijuro went to answer and did not.

Tome lifted her spoon half a centimeter and held it in the air a moment.

"Suzu."

"What?"

"Some things are not asked."

"But how am I to know which ones if I do not ask them?"

"By learning to look."

The girl frowned again. She looked at Seijuro. She looked at him with a new attention, this time not of census but of an apprentice appraiser: she was six years old, and she had just been told that the face of a man could contain information that was not asked for in words. She tried. She pressed her lips together. Then she relaxed her brow.

"All right," she said, defeated.

And went back to the rice.

Tome ran her hand over the back of the girl's neck for a second. Another second. A third second. And drew it back.

Seijuro looked at the broth in his bowl.

That hand on the back of the girl's neck was exactly the hand he had felt on the back of his own neck ten years before, in the courtyard of the Osaka base, once in five years, the only time, when his father Jirōbei had laid it on him after the victory over Fujibayashi. A hand on the back of the neck was, in that family, the smallest unit of affection, the smallest coin in circulation, the gesture that said you are here when all other words came too late. To see it repeated that night, in another kitchen, between another grandmother and another girl, without either of them knowing what he was seeing, produced in him a sensation that had no operational name and that he preferred not to name.

They finished what was left in silence.

When they were done, Tome gathered the bowls without haste and stacked them by the brazier. Suzu got up on her own, went to the wall, pulled from a basket a cloth doll — a rough little bear without a face, plainly stitched by Tome herself years before — and went back to her cushion with it. She pressed it against her chest. Ten minutes later, before the water of the brazier had finished cooling, she was sleeping deeply with her head resting against her grandmother's side.

Tome looked at her for a while without moving.

She straightened a fold of the kimono.

Then, without raising her voice, without even raising her eyes from the girl's hair, she spoke.

"My husband was an officer of the army for thirty-one years," she said. "He died of an unknown disease eleven years ago. My son, Suzu's father, was also of the army. He died three years ago. Suzu's mother died of fevers two winters later. She was not of the army, but she died just the same. I tell you because, if you are going to sleep under my roof, it is well that you should know what roof you have knocked on."

Seijuro looked at her.

"I am sorry," he said.

"Do not be sorry." Tome drew another stray lock back from the girl, with the same gentleness as before. "I tell it as a service report. Not for pity."

There was a pause.

Then Tome at last raised her eyes to him.

"I have seen officers of the army sit at this same table for forty years, soldier. Comrades of my husband, comrades of my son, and now you. Some came from far away, others from nearby. Some had recently lost someone. Others, though they did not yet know it, would lose someone soon. The ones who had lost someone, you could always tell by the same thing."

"By the same thing?"

"By the left hand."

Seijuro looked at his own left hand.

It was resting on his knee, closed in a fist. It had been so the entire meal. He had not noticed.

He opened it, slowly.

Tome waited until he had opened it fully before going on.

"It is no reproach, officer. It is only the observation of an old woman. Men of your trade, when they have lost someone, close the hand tight without knowing it. They close it because, if they did not, they would not know what to do with it. To carry a dead body, you need both hands open. I learned that late. But I learned it."

Seijuro took a long moment before speaking.

"And how does one learn that?"

"Badly," said Tome, without smiling. "One learns it badly. There is no other way. People who tell you it is learned quickly, or well, or with dignity, are either lying to you or have not learned it themselves yet." She paused briefly, watching Suzu sleep. "I learned it when I understood that letting go and carrying are not the same. Letting go is forgetting; and forgetting, sometimes, is another form of betrayal. Carrying, on the other hand, is accepting that what you lost is part of who you are now. It does not weigh less. It weighs differently. The trick, if there is one, is in learning to walk with that weight without bending. Some men manage it. Others stay bent over for the rest of their lives."

Seijuro did not answer.

Not because he had nothing to say.

Because he had too much.

Tome let him be silent.

A while passed like that. The brazier crackled twice. Suzu shifted in her sleep without waking and pressed the doll a little tighter against her chest. Tome arranged her again.

"May I ask a question of you, officer?" she said then.

"Speak."

"Why do you fight?"

Seijuro looked at her.

It was a short question. A question he had answered dozens of times in the course of his life, at the first evaluation in Hiroshima, at officers' dinners, in the formal letters that the army required new commanders to draft. He had always answered it with the same naturalness with which one answers one's own name: I fight for my country, I fight for my unit, I fight to keep the akuryō far from the houses of others. They were the right answers. They were the answers a Nakata officer gave without thinking. And that night, before the brazier of an old woman who had buried an officer husband and an officer son, and who kept a steady hand for drawing a stray lock back from her sleeping granddaughter, Seijuro discovered, with a cold and disorderly sort of surprise, that none of those answers served him.

He opened his mouth.

He closed it.

He thought of Otsuru.

He thought of the trail among the cedars, of the weight of his wife on his shoulder, of the country doctor saying she's dead.

He thought of the clearing of the four rocks and his two fists falling on an akuryō that had stopped moving at the eighth blow and that he had gone on striking until the twelfth.

He thought of Klepsa.

He thought of the child his father was carrying in his arms toward Osaka.

And he found, in the order in which they appeared, that none of the answers he had been giving for thirty years was the right answer that night, and that the right answer that night, if it existed, he did not know.

Six days ago he had been fighting for Otsuru.

Three nights ago he had been fighting to survive.

Five minutes ago he would have said he was fighting for the child.

But Tome's question was prior to all those answers. Tome's question was why do you fight, not for whom. And an officer who had been trained for twenty-six years not to ask it of himself discovered that night, in a kitchen that was not his own, that he had spent his whole adult life mistaking the for whom for the why, and that the why, now that he found himself without a for whom, was suddenly a hole whose bottom he could not see.

He took a long time to speak.

"I do not know," he said at last.

Tome nodded, slowly, as one who receives a piece of news already expected.

"You are young still. You have time to discover it."

Seijuro nodded.

Tome looked at him a while longer. Then, with the serene slowness of one who is no longer in any hurry, she stood up. From a low chest she took a thick blanket, folded, smelling of camphor and dried lavender, and laid it beside the cushion that would be his for the night.

"Sleep, officer. Osaka will not move from where it is for one more night."

She bent toward Suzu, lifted her with an effort that Seijuro intuited without the woman letting it show, and carried her into the next room in her arms. The girl did not even wake. She held the doll against her chest with the fidelity of six years old, the same fidelity with which six-year-old girls, in any province of any century, hold the only thing in the world that still belongs to them whole.

The fusuma at the back closed behind them with a whisper.

Seijuro was left alone before the brazier.

He looked at his left hand.

He opened it.

He closed it again.

He opened it again.

He thought, for the first time in six days, not about how to carry a life that was no longer there, but about how to carry it without bending.

He had no answer.

But the weight, that night, shifted within his chest.

He threw a last log on the brazier, lay down on the cushion, drew the blanket of camphor and dried lavender over himself, and before closing his eyes he thought of Otsuru. He thought of her for an instant shorter than the previous nights. Not much shorter. Only an instant. But enough that sleep arrived, this time, not as a surrender of the body, but as a permission someone, that night, had given him for the first time.

In the back room, Tome laid Suzu down on the futon, gently took the doll from her so as to set it again in her other arm, and sat down beside her on the floor.

She remained that way for a long time, watching her sleep.

She was not thinking of anything in particular.

She was only watching.

That night, in Wakayama, no bell rang.

Not yet.