important to visit family in troubling times, and in part because she wanted more time for kenjutsu practice than Hosokawa-sensei would allow her at the dojo. She couldn’t very well go to the nearest park; people tended to call the cops when they saw someone swinging a giant sword around in public. The penthouse studio in her mother’s building was the only other place she could find to get some after-hours practice.
She noticed a rectangle of pink light on the wall. Sunrise, announcing its arrival. Mariko was usually dead to the world at this hour, but these days she found herself staring at the ceiling at four thirty in the morning, unable to go back to sleep. She’d tried cutting back on caffeine. She’d tried some stupid full body relaxation thing she found online. She’d even tried one of her mom’s sleeping pills, all to no effect. Usually she could read herself to sleep, but the only reading materials she’d brought with her were Yamada-sensei’s notebooks, the ones Han had returned to her on the day she broke into the strip club. She’d learned some interesting details about Streaming Dawn—a wicked little thing—but still sleep would not come. Now here she was, doing kenjutsu and asking herself how things had gone so bad so quickly.
The latest attack from the Divine Wind had afflicted the whole city with post-traumatic stress disorder. Two days ago, at four o’clock in the afternoon, four drivers on four different roads suddenly jerked their cars across the centerline. The result was four head-on collisions with another vehicle. All four cars were white, the color of death, and four itself was the number of death. This was not lost on the general population. By coincidence, the crashes resulted in four fatalities. There were twenty serious injuries too, but the greater ripple effects were far more severe.
Yesterday’s vehicular traffic had been a third of its normal volume. Deliveries were delayed or canceled all over the city. Grocery stores were devoid of fruit, vegetables, and seafood. In spite of the sparse traffic, collisions were up sixty percent as drivers panicked at the sight of a white car in the oncoming lane. That might not have been so destructive in other countries, but in Japan white was by far the most popular car color. More than half of Tokyo’s cars were white.
The message was clear: you are not safe. It fit perfectly with Joko Daishi’s philosophy: take an ordinary thing and make it dangerous. In truth nothing had changed. Four fatalities and twenty injuries was a bad day, but in an urban area of thirty-five million people, there would never be a day with no traffic accidents. Joko Daishi had only reminded people of a simple fact: a little stripe of paint was no protection. It was the illusion of protection. The only thing preventing thousands of head-on collisions was the goodness of total strangers. Everyone placed a mindless faith in it, a faith that was as fragile as an eggshell. Now Joko Daishi had taken a hammer to it.
The terrible irony was that his teachings weren’t a foreign philosophy to Japan. Buddhism held that all existence was fleeting, and bushido embraced impermanence and condoned violence. Perhaps that was why Joko Daishi had such success in recruiting members for his cult. Maybe something about his teaching spoke directly to the Japanese spirit, if only in a perverse way.
Whatever the reason, the media were having a field day with his latest attacks. They needed something to trump the ricin story, which had already run its course. Fatalities had topped out at twenty-three; once the medical examiner’s office had identified ricin as the poisoning agent, hospitals worked swiftly to treat everyone who could have come into contact with the toxin. On the other hand, traffic accidents were the perfect fodder for fear-mongering websites and television talking heads. Now a simple hit-and-run could be read as a terrorist incident.
As the de facto mouthpiece for the TMPD, Captain Kusama had gone on record saying he hadn’t ruled out Jemaah Islamiyah. When reporters asked him why the extremist group hadn’t claimed responsibility for these attacks, he suddenly ran out of time and promised to answer more questions later. Mariko wished she could call him and tell him to stop saying stupid things that the department would burn for.
Out in the corridor, the elevator dinged, and as the doors slid apart there came a clucking of six or seven merry voices. The tai chi class. Mariko