Kern’s laptop bleats, and in the moment of waking he is up, though it’s cold, and still dark, for to hesitate is to risk losing the day. He steps into the tiny space between his futon, the small sink and the wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and stretches as best he can, breathing in mildew, old paper and the ancient motor oil that seems to imbue the black-painted cinder-block walls, a relic of the days when his room was a supply closet and the forge a mechanic’s shop.
He runs his fingers over his books’ cracked spines; most are on the art and history of the Japanese sword, but his reading encompasses a miscellany of zen gardening, metallurgy, the manufacture of indigo, the weaving of bamboo. Such books, he has found, can be had for very little in the basement marts of Shinjuku; in any event, books from the nineteen hundreds are rarely available in digital form, and he likes the brittle tactility of their pages. On the top shelf, above the books, is an empty black sword sheath; its lacquer, garish by day, shines like muted nebulae in the laptop’s half-light.
Out on the street, the air suggests more snow. An orange moon has risen; according to the No Subarashi Hon Katanakaji, the great book of smiths, a blade should be heated to the color of the full moon in February, so he stands there, staring up at the sky, trying to take it in, hold onto it forever.
The old man lets him use his work car for pickups and deliveries. In the moonlight its corroded, snow-encrusted hull is the color of the street. The backseat, its upholstery long destroyed, is full of unidentifiable bits of metal, chunks of coal, filthy tarps. As he drives through the deserted streets of Sakai, the sky lightens.
The foundry’s parking lot is sheathed in dirty white ice, glass-slick except where coarse sand is spread before the high double doors. Its windows pulse with red light. As he steps inside the heat hits, and the snow on his shoes melts immediately. Sparks and flame gust out of the clay furnace in the center of the warehouse floor. Cone-shaped, the furnace looks like a crude, man-sized model of a volcano. Takane, the chief foundry man, squats by the furnace in his yellow hard hat and blue jumpsuit, sweating profusely, assessing the flame. The smelting has been going on for three days, and he’s been here for all of it; looking older than his fifty years, he clutches a huge cup of convenience-store coffee.
Kern is just in time for the finale. Uniformed workmen surround the furnace, grasp its lip with hooked poles, and, with an ichi ni san, pull hard; as the walls of the furnace fall away a wave of heat wells outward and sparks roar up to dissipate among the blackened rafters.
Where the furnace was there’s now a crumbling mass of incandescent charcoal, burning reeds, a glowing mass of livid metal. (Kern once asked Takane why he used reeds; Takane explained that commercial fuels alter the metal chemistry, that the reeds are traditional and, moreover, as they grow in a nearby vacant lot, they’re free.) Kern sits on an upturned plastic bucket watching workmen with long-handled rakes swipe away the flocculent white ash. He stifles a yawn—he could have come later to make his pickup, but he likes to see how things work. The rakes soon reveal an intricately porous metal boulder, like a meteorite, or a scholar’s rock in a Chinese garden. Takane circles it, peering close, his face dripping as he looks for the tamahagane, the pockets of high-carbon steel that are the raw material of sword blades. Kern wonders if he thinks of the hue of some dark winter moon.
When he leaves the foundry, the stars have faded and the sky is the color of the jagged ingots clinking in the wooden box beside him. He turns one between his fingers, imagining the blade it will be.
By the time he gets back to the forge, the boy from the restaurant has come and gone, leaving miso, pickled vegetables and broiled mackerel on the table. The old man is particular about not waking the neighbors, so he stokes the forge, lays out his tools with careful exactitude and sits there, drinking miso, awaiting the day.