went to shit, so did everything else in her head. Usually kenjutsu cleared her mind. Not tonight. Before she’d taken up the sword, forty or fifty kilometers on her bike would have done the trick. Not tonight. So she’d come here, to the only place that might make her feel at ease.
Yamada-sensei’s house was just as she remembered it. A high slat fence the color of milk tea surrounded the backyard. A wooden lattice arched behind it, densely embroidered with wisteria vines. The blossoms were gone, and with them their creamy scent, but the chrysanthemums in the front yard were in full bloom. The heavy door resonated deeply when she knocked on it. It was a relic of an earlier time, solid oak, not composite with a wood veneer.
She thought of the whole house as an island in time. There was no cable modem, no Wi-Fi connection. Yamada never even owned a microwave. He used to boil water for tea the old-fashioned way: in an iron tetsubin teapot heated on a gas range.
The door creaked open to reveal an old woman wearing big black Coco Chanel sunglasses. She wore a black Chanel jacket with fat white buttons, black Chanel slacks, and a white Chanel blouse. Her outfit cost more than Mariko’s dress uniform, which was by far the most expensive outfit Mariko had ever owned. Shoji Hayano had always enjoyed looking good.
“Mariko-chan!” Shoji said. “Come in, dear. Oh, how good it is to see a friendly face.”
It was a figure of speech; Shoji didn’t see her at all. She’d lost her sight during the war, when she was still a little girl. It was around that time that she’d first met Yamada-sensei, before his name was even Yamada. She had always called him Keiji-san, his given name before he was dishonorably discharged from Army Intelligence. He’d been forced to abandon the name Kiyama Keiji in order to escape his war record, adopting the alias Yamada Yasuo in graduate school and founding a storied career on it: a doctorate in medieval history, a professorship at Todai, thirty degrees of black belt spread across five or six different sword arts, and enough published books to bow the shelves in Shoji-san’s sitting room. The finishing touch was a star of the Supreme Order of the Chrysanthemum, bestowed posthumously by the Emperor himself—who, apart from Shoji and the Empress, was the only other person to refer to Yamada-sensei as Kiyama Keiji.
Yet Mariko was supposed to believe this man—her hero—was a criminal.
That was what that sun-blotched bastard Furukawa Ujio would have her believe. If Yamada was the Wind’s archivist, as Furukawa claimed, then her beloved sensei had been a member of a criminal organization. Mariko didn’t buy it for a second. Nevertheless, she couldn’t get Furukawa out of her head. She had a keen sense for when people were lying, one she’d first developed as the sister of a meth addict, then sharpened as a beat cop and honed to a razor edge as a detective and a narc. That sense had saved her ass many times over, and she’d learned to trust it without question—until today. Today it insisted that Furukawa was telling the truth.
Mariko hoped Shoji-san might help her solve the paradox. If anyone could do it, it was the blind woman who knew it was Mariko on her porch even before she opened the door.
Mariko took the old woman’s hand and placed a little box of cookies in it. “Bisuko,” she said, “your favorites.”
“You remembered,” said Shoji. “Aren’t you a dear?”
Something was wrong. Shoji’s voice was thick, as if she’d been crying. On a second look, Mariko noticed she had been crying; her nostrils were rimmed in red and her cheeks were flushed. “Shoji-san, are you all right?”
Shoji sniffled. She tried to force a smile, but it just made her seem sadder. “It’s this awful business about the . . . the airport, the hospital . . . just all of it. It’s all so horrible.”
Mariko took her by the arms and gave her an awkward hug. She wasn’t any good at this kind of thing. She’d never known Shoji to be the type to take such events so personally, either. Growing up with earthquakes, typhoons, and tsunamis, Japanese people tended to be fairly stoic about national calamities. But in the very moment she had the thought, Mariko realized that she herself was unwilling to include terrorism in the same category as all the natural disasters. This was different. There was someone