If that was not to be the case, the noble thing for the Bujin to do under the circumstances would be to offer Blaine a sword to fight with in combat against him. The Bujin would realize merely from the way Blaine moved that he had had some training. But since that training was pitifully inadequate next to that of such a master, Blaine would need to rely on subterfuge to survive. One opening and one quick lunge would be all it would take and likely all he could hope to get.
At last the Bujin’s body began to turn. Blaine tensed, thinking of his sword and how fast he could grab and draw it if it came to that.
But the Bujin was smiling. Then he was chuckling, soon laughing.
“You are too ugly a man to kill before breakfast, Fudo-san,” the black robed figure said as he slid himself forward across the tatami until the sun blazed on his face.
It was Yamagita Hiroshi.
“You’re the Bujin!” Blaine exclaimed in surprise.
“Yes, Fudo-san,” Hiroshi returned in perfect English. “Strange our paths should cross this way.”
“Even stranger since no one’s heard from you in over a decade now.”
“No one’s heard from Hiroshi because Hiroshi ceased to exist.”
“Care to tell me why?”
“In time, Fudo-san, in time. For now your appearance tells me you need sake and a warm bed. You should have felt it was I as soon as you saw me. Fatigue can do that to a man.”
Hiroshi rose and McCracken joined him on foot. The two men met in the center of the mat and shook hands warmly. The sensei regarded his former pupil with a knowing grin.
“You are still Fudo-san, as stubborn and unwilling to change as ever. And you have become stronger in the years since our parting. I can feel that strength.”
“I’m forty now, sensei. What you feel are my bones calcifying.”
Hiroshi laughed again. “Dangle a bit of yarn before an old sleeping cat and see how fast he remembers his lessons.”
“Do you know why I’ve come?” McCracken asked him.
“I have my suspicions. Let us discuss matters over that sake I promised you. Come.”
They walked side by side through another set of shoji doors. McCracken recalled that the original dojo where he had trained with Hiroshi had looked much the same, simple and plain, the way a training hall was meant to. Even then Hiroshi’s school had been closed to the public and only pull from officials within the Japanese government won Blaine an interview. Much to his surprise, Hiroshi could recount Blaine’s exploits in Vietnam more clearly than he remembered them himself.
“There is a great warrior God in Japanese folklore,” the master had told him that day. “He was named Fudo and he carried a sword in one hand and a rope in the other, the tools he used to first subdue evil and then bind it. He would only use his sword to kill when another’s had shed blood already and was about to again. He stood up for the weak and innocent and was feared by all who carried blackness in their hearts. I will call you Fudo-san because you are such a man. I will agree to teach you because you are such a man.”
McCracken’s views on his life and work jibed almost perfectly with the creed of the samurai, and Hiroshi sensed that Blaine was destined for life as a ronin, or masterless samurai. He would be a protector and lone avenger much as the god Fudo had been himself.
But the significance of “Fudo-san” extended to a more subtle level. The word fudo can also mean immovable, and this too was a quality Hiroshi sensed in McCracken from the start. He was not a man prone to change easily, nor would he ever be. The times would pass and McCracken would pass with them, though on his own terms.
They moved down a small narrow corridor into a smaller room lined with more formal tatami mats. Blaine’s nostrils caught the faintly medicinal smell of warming sake and saw the ceramic flasks sitting within a pot of steaming water suspended above an open flame. Hiroshi knelt before them and poured out a pair of cups, handing the first to McCracken.
“We will drink to old times, Fudo-san.”
“And speak of newer ones, Hiroshi. Why did you disappear? What happened? Why did you—”
“Become the Bujin?” Hiroshi completed for him. “The answer is rather long and complicated, tedious, too.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Tradition, Fudo-san, is the curse of our people. It binds us to the past in a way we do not always understand but must accept because it makes us what we are.” He paused long enough to take a healthy sip of his sake. “There was a man, a bully, who made it his business to take money from working people in exchange for not hurting them, their families, or their businesses. The man was backed by a gang, and the few times police were summoned there was no one but the complainant to back up the story, and the complainant conveniently vanished or changed his mind soon after. Such is not unusual in Japan. It wasn’t my business … until this man, this bully, staked a claim in the village where I had been raised. The elders came to me. I had no choice but to intercede.
“I tried to reason with the man. I went alone, with honor. He laughed in my face, chastised my old ways, and had his men show their guns. He told me I would die if I ever showed my face to him again. He dishonored me, Fudo-san. He left me with no choice, if I had ever really had one. I waited for him one morning in the rice paddy he walked through to reach his office. He walked without fear, for who would dare touch him?” Hiroshi paused again but did not sip any sake. “I touched him. I drew him down into the mud and held him under until he passed out. Then I left him there to drown in the muck like the sewer rat that he was.”
“No one saw you?”
“It didn’t matter. I was bound by the oath I had sworn as an officer in the service of Japan to report my crime. There was an uproar when I did, a public outcry in which some supported my actions and some condemned them. The dead man’s friends vowed vengeance. The government was helpless to support me. I had placed them in an impossible position. So I made the rest easy for all concerned. I disappeared. I became someone else.”
“A ronin, masterless in your own right. Hiring yourself out.”
“To gain money to support the kind of people the man I killed had bullied. It was my way of making up for the disgrace I had committed to maintain honor. Such a dichotomy, so difficult to resolve. I chose a means of escape by which I could live with myself. I began training warriors as they were trained in days lost. Four of them escorted you into my dojo.”
“Oh yeah. Tough hombres.”
“To be sure, Fudo-san. They and dozens of others have trained as men were trained in a time long past. They live and work here in the dojo as uchideshi. Their life is their training.”