Kern exhales as he brings the hammer down onto the glowing blade, sending sparks arcing up like startled fireflies. In the darkened studio, the blade’s surface seethes with heat gradients, mottled patches of incandescent carbon, fibers of burning rice straw. In the old days, he’s read, the blade’s color had been the only way to gauge its temperature; now there are optical thermometers—the one hanging on the wall looks like a hand drill without a drill bit—but he’s been teaching himself to do it by eye. The old man teases him about his apparent determination to live in the seventeenth century, but leaves it at that, allowing him the darkened forge, the shadows dancing in the steel’s luminance.
His phone rings. He bought it a month ago, in a vending machine, mostly to find his way around the city.
Number blocked, which probably means it’s Akemi, though she calls less and less these days. He picks up, hears static, or perhaps breath, and then nothing. No sound but the hiss and sigh of cars passing out on the street. He carefully sets the hammer on the workbench as the blade cools.
He goes to the window, blinks as he lifts the blind onto bright winter light. The alley where the old man parks his good car is empty.
“Are you there?” he asks, and he’s on the verge of hanging up when he hears what might be distant laughter, and then her, unmistakably her, calling, “Thales!” and she sounds as happy as he’s ever heard her. He imagines green hills, sunlight, tries to remember what the time difference is. Maybe one day he’ll go to Los Angeles, find her among the beautiful houses in the hills, or maybe he’ll even see her in a movie. He holds his breath, listening.
* * *
Hiss of tires on gravel in the alley as Kern slides the blade into its bed of burning charcoal, folds coals over the steel like he’s tucking it in.
The old man said a smith’s concentration should be unbreakable, so Kern feigns total absorption in his work as the alley door opens. The old man comes in and sits beside him, then takes Kern’s tongs and pokes at the coals.
“I’m afraid I have bad news,” the old man says in his beautiful, careful, foreigner’s English—when he was a young man he’d studied materials science at Cambridge, which is in England.
Kern is determined to show nothing. There are so many good reasons to kick him out it’s pointless to wonder what tipped the scales. It occurs to him that he’s never seen anything like favelas in Japan, and he wonders where the homeless people go. There are bare-knuckle fighting circuits here, and they’re a bigger deal than they are back home; he’s not in serious shape, not these days, but he could get it back, see how that goes.
“Kioshi left today,” the old man says. The old man’s son, whom Kern makes it a point never to criticize.
Kern nods carefully, and then, as this seems insufficient, says, “Where did he go?”
“He has a girlfriend in Osaka. He is staying with her.” He’s met the girlfriend—plump, plain, morbidly shy, obsessed with manga—in fact, much like Kioshi.
“Will he be gone long?”
“A long time indeed. His girlfriend’s father owns a car-rental franchise at the airport. He is going to give Kioshi a job.”
“What about the forge?” asks Kern, shocked that even Kioshi would treat his inheritance so cavalierly.
“It must be admitted that this work did not suit him. He had little aptitude and less perseverance. The truth of this is obvious. Do not look so appalled. I am ninety-five years old, and a living national treasure of Japan, and if my son is no good as a smith I will say so.”
“Sorry, sensei,” says Kern, and bows.
The old man snorts. “I sometimes think you learned your manners from samurai movies. If I were killed by a ronin, if there were still such a thing as ronin, I have no doubt you would avenge me in blood.” Kern smiles politely, as though it’s a joke and not, if anything, an understatement. He’s never told the old man much about where he comes from, and the old man has never asked. “But you have a good heart, and I’ve never before discouraged an apprentice from working too hard and actually meant it, so never mind.”
Kern bows again, even deeper this time, embarrassed, murmuring something about gratitude.
The old man says, “I’ve told you before, you’re more serious than necessary. You are not Japanese, however much you admire the films of Kurosawa, and I am so entirely Japanese as to be a pillar of the idea, and, in my way, to have moved past it, so we, of all people, need not stand on ceremony.”
There’s an awkward silence in which Kern tries to stifle his hope and then the old man says, “All that to one side, now that Kioshi is gone, there will be more for you to do.”
“I still don’t see how he can just leave,” Kern says, and immediately regrets it, afraid he’s hurt the old man’s feelings.
The old man pokes at the charcoal and says, “I am the nineteenth Masamune in an unbroken line. The first smith of the name invented the samurai sword, and each of his successors has carried on that spirit. But did you know that my great-great-great-grandfather was adopted? His parents died during the first war with America—having no place to go, he wandered the ruined streets of Sakai until the forge took him in, as it took in many, then. He had a gift for the work, and, as the Masamune of the time had no suitable sons, he was adopted.”
“But that doesn’t seem the same,” says Kern.
The old man raises his eyebrows. “It is an inflexible rule that the forge is passed from father to son, but there is some flexibility in what those terms mean. What matters is continuity—of the name, of the forge, of Masamune as the one out before the others, finding the way.” He stands abruptly, suddenly distant, and slaps soot from the knees of his trousers. “Yes. Well. That’s it! Get back to work.”
He leaves. Kern waits until he can trust himself to move, then picks up the tongs and draws the glowing steel from the coals with the greatest possible care.