Kaze brought his blade down in an overhead cut with all his strength. The young man raised his own sword to parry the blow, just as Kaze had done at the fight’s beginning.
When the two swords met, Kaze felt the force of the blow in his wrists, arms, shoulders, and throughout the rest of his body. But in the vibrations of this violent clash of steel, something felt unusual and false. Kaze heard a brittle metallic snapping sound and noted a peculiar feel, one he had never experienced before. He immediately knew that not only was something wrong, but that something was drastically wrong. The unthinkable happened.
To his utter amazement, Kaze’s sword broke in two. The end of the sword flew off and went spinning through the air, hitting the dirt a few feet away from the combatants. The bandit gave a shout of triumph and took a cut at Kaze’s shoulder and neck.
Kaze caught the blow in the fork of his tsuba, his sword guard, and the broken piece of his sword blade. After absorbing the brunt of the blow, Kaze took one hand off the handle of his sword and twisted forward. He grabbed the handle of the wakizashi, the short sword, carried by his opponent in his sash and drew it out of the scabbard. He thrust it back into the man’s stomach, all in one smooth, reciprocating motion.
The man gave a grunt of surprise and then of pain. He drew his own sword back to take another cut at Kaze. Kaze then yanked the short sword, cutting the muscles of his opponent’s abdomen. The man groaned and fell back on the ground in a sitting position. He looked up at Kaze with an expression that changed from pain to anger to sorrow. With a soft hiss of air, he crumpled the remaining distance to the earth and fell back dead.
Kaze stood with his opponent’s sword in one hand and the broken stub of his own sword in the other. He was panting for breath from exertion, stunned by what had happened.
“Superb!” Kaze heard the merchant shouting. “Brilliant, absolutely brilliant!”
Kaze glanced over at the man. He was still standing on the cart, one foot on the chest bound to the cart. He was wearing a brown kimono with a white peony pattern. He looked to be in his mid-forties, with gray streaks at the temples. He had leathery brown skin, probably from spending many days on the road as he did his trading. He had a large fleshy nose, somewhat unusual for a Japanese. The cloth of his kimono was of fine quality.
The merchant jumped off the cart and walked over to the body of Kaze’s most recent opponent. He spit on the corpse, and then he hiked up his kimono, moving aside his loincloth and making a stream of water on the face of the corpse in a gesture of utter contempt.
The merchant’s act offended Kaze, but it was already in process, so Kaze saw no point in objecting. Instead, when the merchant was done Kaze walked over to where his opponent had dropped his sword and picked it up to look at it.
In almost every respect it was a standard Japanese katana. The sword did not seem remarkable in any way. There seemed to be no reason this sword could break Kaze’s.
Kaze looked at the remainder of his own broken sword and shook his head in disbelief. The sword had been a faithful companion for years, seeing Kaze through numerous battles, both during the short and violent civil war and the years since as Kaze wandered Japan. That it should break was unthinkable. Yet the remnant of the sword in Kaze’s hand showed that in fact this had happened.
“It was lucky you were so quick.” The merchant had come up to Kaze after finishing his business with the corpse. “Grabbing a man’s own wakizashi and using it to kill him! That’s unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything like it!”
Kaze raised an eyebrow at the merchant but said nothing.
“Excuse me,” the merchant said, bowing. “I am Hishigawa Satoyasu, the merchant.”
Kaze noted that the merchant affected a double name, but said nothing. Instead, he pointed to the dead corpses littering the ground around the cart. “And who were all these?”
“Three of them were my yojimbo,” the merchant said. “The rest were members of his gang.” The merchant jerked his chin toward Kaze’s last opponent.
“And who is he?” Kaze asked.
“He’s Ishibashi, the chief of the bandits who attacked me. One of the most disgusting men you’d ever want to meet.”
“And what was this fight all about?”
“A robbery, of course.”
“You exchanged words. This is more than a robbery.”
“Well, yes. There’s that. It was also about a woman.”
“What woman?”
“My wife, Yuchan,” the merchant said simply.
“What?” Kaze asked.
“My wife. That man wanted my wife, and nothing was going to stop him from having her. He was obsessed with her. He decided the best way to have her was to kill me.”
Kaze looked at the merchant again, taking in the roll of flesh around his belly and his bandy legs.
“I know what you’re thinking,” the merchant said. “How could someone that looks like me have a wife that’s worth desiring? But my wife is much younger than I. A real beauty. I have businesses in Kamakura, Kyoto, and Edo. In Kamakura I’ve created a special environment just for her. I call it the Jade Palace. In it, I’ve crafted a separate world dedicated to the comfort and pleasure of my wife. Before I knew he was a bandit, I made the mistake of letting Ishibashi meet my wife, and he became obsessed with her beauty. He actually tried to buy her from me! But of course I refused to part with her. She’s mine, and mine alone!” The merchant said the last words savagely. He shook with emotion.
It was a few seconds before the merchant could compose himself and continue. “He’s been waiting his turn, he and his entire gang. He intended to kill me and then to take my wife as his own. But thanks to you, Ishibashi is the one that’s dead now, and so is a good part of his gang. You were superb!”
Kaze said nothing.
Kaze took his opponent’s sword and walked to the side of the road where a tree was growing. Seeing a likely limb, he took two cuts at it, trimming it to a piece roughly the length of the span of his hand.
“What are you doing?” the merchant asked, greatly puzzled.
Kaze made no answer. He walked up to the top of the hill and retrieved his scabbard. Taking the ko-gatana from its place in the scabbard, Kaze started carving as he walked back toward the merchant.
The merchant waited for Kaze’s return. His lidded eyes were heavy with curiosity. Kaze continued carving the piece with a practiced hand.
“What are you doing?” the merchant asked again.
“Easing some souls.”
The merchant opened his mouth to say more but couldn’t think of another question to ask in the face of such a cryptic remark. Instead, he watched as Kaze transformed the piece of tree limb into the figure of a woman, deftly creating the shoulders, neck, and head of the figure by making rapid cuts to the soft wood with the sharp knife.
As the image emerged from the limb, the merchant exclaimed, “It’s a Kannon!”
Kaze nodded and continued his carving. Under his skilled hands the image of the Goddess of Mercy emerged. Looking around, he realized he wouldn’t be able to bury all the bodies about him. He took the image of the goddess and placed her in the crook of the tree that he had cut the limb from, positioning her so she could survey the scene of the battle and the dead bodies that littered it.
“Do you have water?” Kaze asked, suddenly thirsty.
“Yes,” the merchant responded, scampering off to retrieve a water jug from the cart. Kaze looked up at the sky and reflected that he could soon get a drink of water just by opening his mouth and tilting his head back, but he gratefully accepted the water jug from the merchant and took a long swallow.
Returning the jug, Kaze examined the dead bandit’s sword once again. Its sword guard was made of iron, with a cherry blossom pattern. Highlights of a cherry branch formed the outer edge of the guard, the edges of the branch picked out in gold. The individual cherry blossoms were tiny sweeps of silver, so it looked like the blossoms were catching the last rays of the setting sun as they fluttered to the ground. To Kaze and most samurai, life was symbolized by the falling cherry blossom, fragile and ephemeral.