It’s always morning, that flight, since they’re flying west, and fast, and it feels like everything is suspended, like they’re going to float there forever in one frozen, shining hour, but then, impossibly, gravity lessens as they start their descent. Through the crust of ice crystals on the window Kern sees a distant formation of black drone fighters, like birds rising over the water, or a swirling column of smoke, and then, at some signal, they abruptly disperse in all directions, taking g-force that would kill a pilot, the sonic booms reaching him as a succession of muffled basso thumps, rippling the surface of his plastic cup of water.
Now the plane is over land—snow-dusted farmland rushes by, rises toward him. The shock of touchdown, the shriek of air brakes, and then he’s walking off the plane onto another continent and blinking in the airport’s hard fluorescent light.
There’s a screen showing departures and arrivals, just like in SFO. Only fifteen minutes have elapsed on the clock, which seems at first like it must be a mistake, but then he remembers about time zones. He’d once read the memoir of Tesshu, a great swordsman of Japan, who said that when he was a boy an hour had passed like a year, but when he was an old man a year had passed like an hour, so the journey here was like youth, and if he ever goes back to California he’ll have to pay the price, so the only solution is to keep on heading west.
The other passengers hurry toward customs, but he sits and stares out the window at the blustering snow, the planes rising ponderously into the sky, and some of them must still have pilots because they have windows on the front that look like eyes squinting in the wind.
And if he can’t find Akemi, what then? The money she got him will sustain him for a while but he has no way of getting more, and the problem is so profound, so entirely unapproachable that his mind goes empty, and he sits there listening vacantly to announcements in Chinese. He wants to explore the airport, and orient himself, but his hand finds the phone is his pocket and he reminds himself he has a job to do.
When he gets to the front of the customs line he remembers the bloodstains on his pants, some from the man he fought and probably killed, the rest from the assassin who is dead beyond question. The customs agent waves him up; he’s middle-aged and Chinese with a drinker’s nose and lacks the brittle arrogance Kern expects in officials—in fact, he hardly seems to care at all, and after scrutinizing Kern’s passport for half a second, hands it back and sends him on his way. Automatic doors of opaque glass open and then he’s truly in a new country.
He uses his laptop to look up Final Sword and finds that today’s event is starting soon on the outskirts of the city.
A bank of yellow lockers by the wall. You’d never have that in the U.S.—someone would practically be obligated to put a bomb in one. He wakes the touch screen, feeds it a bill, agrees to a long contract in what’s probably Japanese. A locker pops open—he stashes his carryall, gets a tiny magnetic key.
Out the door into cold wind, filthy snow crunching underfoot—he’s never touched snow before, had expected it to be purer, somehow celestial.
There’s a line of green drone taxis. The dry heat of the taxi’s interior, the definitive slam of its door. The car says something, and then the same thing again, and he finally figures out it wants him to give it money.
* * *
The taxi moves noiselessly over the icy road past low boxy buildings that all look the same. Some seem to be stores, but he can’t tell what they’re selling. Trucks roar by, spraying the cab’s windows with black slush. He thinks of the Asia of media, the serenity of the temples, the neon ideography of Shinjuku at night.
He tries to make a mental map of the cab’s turns, in case he has to walk back, but loses track and ends up just watching the streets go by.
Finally the cab glides to a stop in an alley of loading docks and dumpsters. The cab says something in a pleasant baritone and the charges appear on a screen in yen, yuan and dollars; a panel slides back to reveal his change.
The door opens onto bitter cold and the faint reek of rotting garbage, and he intends just to go for a quick reconnoiter but as he steps out the cab says something that he realizes is “goodbye” as it closes its door and drives off. He bangs on its trunk, uselessly, watches its red taillights recede through swarming particles of snow.
A man in a black parka is watching him from a loading dock, standing in front of wide double doors. He’s Asian, his beard salted with ice, and his parka has the Final Sword logo, but even before these details have registered Kern somehow knows he’s in the life, and remembers that the Yakuza are running the show. Not even gangsters have guns in the Japanese territories, he recalls, which seems to dilute the risk, like violence is just a game here. Kern’s face aches with the cold, and his jacket lets in the wind, but he can’t help smiling at finding himself on this street, in this snow, this winter.
The doorman cocks an eyebrow and in almost impenetrably accented English asks, “Are you here for the fights?” His hair is an elaborate pile, stiff with ice and product, and underneath the parka he’s wearing an oversized checked suit. It seems to be a very specific look, though Kern has no idea what it means except that it boils down to cheap muscle.
“Yeah,” says Kern, somewhat deflated, having been looking forward to talking in code. “Can you sell me a ticket?” He’d looked up the prices, has enough in his hand for the cheapest seat.
“Prelims over,” the doorman says. “Tickets officially no longer for sale.” Kern is immediately trying to think where else he could look for Akemi, and how he’ll stay warm while he does it, but the yakuza says, “Just main event now. Want to see? Lot of seats in VIP area. Why not? You pay me now. Cash, okay?”
The doorman pockets Kern’s money without counting it, hands him a ticket embossed with a silvery holographic samurai, sends him in.
A narrow, dimly lit concrete stairway leads down into a welcome heat and the muted pulse of Russian heavy metal. At the bottom a door opens onto a black abyss full of roaring music, but as his eyes adjust he sees the steep slope of tiered seats, lit only by the fairy light of countless phones, and now a glow from the massive screens mounted over the steel cage at the nadir of the arena.
The music stops and a fierce old Japanese man appears on the screens in what even Kern can see is a good suit, but under the tailoring he, like the doorman, is a plain old crim. He’s sitting behind a big desk in what looks like a lawyer’s office; Kern is too busy picking his way down the stairs to read many of the subtitles but the gist is that Final Sword embodies the traditional values of Japan.
His seat is on the aisle four rows from the bottom and even for just one fight it seems like good value for money. The bloodstains on the cage floor remind him of his pants. Almost everyone is Asian and looks rich and they’re all absorbed in their phones; in the seat in front of him is a white man with cropped salt-and-pepper hair, so close that Kern can smell his boozy cologne and can’t help seeing that he’s looking at a betting website offering odds on the winning technique, things like head cut, wrist cut, throat shot, disarm and, worryingly, messy.
The arena goes dark and silent, and then string music swells as the screens show Tadao, bare to the waist, holding a katana and glowering at the camera. His stats come up: twenty-nine years old, fourth dan in kendo, a lieutenant in the Tokyo municipal police. Children in a kendo dojo, chanting metronomically as their bamboo swords rise and fall, then still images of Tokyo University, Tadao in a Self-Defense Force uniform shaking hands with an epauletted officer, a young woman in a tiny room kneeling beside a vase with a single peony.
The second fighter is Sanzo Vola, foil fencer, thirty-two, Italian, an Olympic silver medalist. A montage shows him in a fencing club lunging acrobatically at a frantically backpedaling opponent, then images of ancient churches, of a walled town on a dusty hill, of fencing tournaments in huge conference halls.
Neither fighter is very lean, which surprises him at first, but it’s probably because the fights rarely last a whole minute, so there’s no need for deep cardio.
Vendors cry their beer and sake and spotlights roam the crowd as two men in white robes with tall black hats—maybe priests, certainly officials—walk into the ring, both reverently carrying a sword. They present the blades to the crowd, white cloths protecting the steel from the moisture of their hands. The crowd applauds, and both swords get little biographical clips, as though they, too, were celebrities. The Italian’s is from a Solingen forge, a straight blade with a triangular cross-section like a long spike, with a strangely windswept aluminum handle, shaped to fit the hand. Tadao’s sword is a katana, gently curved, single-edged, its point like a chisel, from the forge of Masamune, and even from the fourth row Kern can see the waver of the blade’s watermark, and how it seems to be lit with an interior fire—the cold lines of its beauty hold his eyes as a spotlight passes over him, blinding him, and the blade seems to embody the purity he’s always yearned for, and for a moment he desires it over all other things, though of course such weapons are expensive beyond reckoning, and far beyond the reach of the likes of him. As the light passes and his eyes clear he sees Akemi, in the front row, not fifteen feet away, glancing back at him.
He tries to signal to her but it’s dark again and now the screens show a glitteringly antiseptic operating theater where Japanese doctors and nurses in blue surgical gowns bow together and belt out that thing they say when you go into this noodle place out toward Market Street, “hello” or “thank you” or whatever, and the guy who is clearly the boss proudly announces something that the subtitles render as “We are one hundred percent committed to saving the combatants’ lives, with a success rate in excess of forty percent!” and the screens’ light shines on Akemi’s hair.
The two fighters huddle with their trainers in opposite corners of the cage. The trainers embrace them—the Italian gets a kiss on both cheeks—and then file out, ignoring each other, leaving their fighters alone with naked blades under the hard white light. They’re both in just shoes, shorts and gloves, and already sweating. They shift their feet, loosen their shoulders, make minute adjustments to their grips. One of them is probably about to die. Kern knows what it’s like to feel that alone.
The loudspeakers say “Hajime!” and the word hangs in the air as the two come together as though magnetically drawn and Kern is on his feet as the crowd is on its feet because it’s already over, and they echo the Italian’s raw, open-throated cry as Tadao, seemingly weary, falls to his side, and Kern sees the bright thin spike of blade protruding from his back. The blood pools around him as the doctors from the video rush in with hypodermics and defibrillators and the Italian sits down with his back to the cage, emptied, done.