The River. Part One. Chapter Two

The school was not a building, but a rock garden.

Each student was a stone, which the teacher chipped and shaped with strikes of his pointer, sharp shouts, and a cold, evaluating gaze. The goal was not knowledge. The goal was form. The perfect, smooth form of a stone, devoid of all individuality that would become part of the flawless composition of the Great Japanese Empire.

Teacher Tanaka was a man of indeterminate age — he could have been thirty, or fifty. His face was a mask hewn from stone, and his voice was an instrument tuned to a single note: absolute submission.

“Bushido,” he would say, and in his mouth, the word sounded not like a path, but an order. “The way of the warrior. But what is a warrior without the Emperor? Nothing. Dust. Your life does not belong to you. It belongs to Japan. To the Emperor. To Heaven.”

He spoke, and outside the window the sakura bloomed — delicate, impossible in its beauty. The petals fell like snow, like ash, like the promise of an early death. There was poetry in this, perverted and beautiful all at once. Death as the highest manifestation of life. Falling as flight.

“The samurai of antiquity served his daimyo,” Tanaka continued, pacing between the rows. “But you — you serve the highest daimyo. The Emperor. God in the flesh. To doubt his will is to doubt the rising of the sun. A samurai does not cry. A samurai pities neither himself nor others.”

“A human life,” he enunciated, his words dropping into the silence of the classroom like iron filings, “is lighter than a feather. The life of a warrior is a feather flying into the furnace of our divine Emperor’s great glory. Duty — that is the only weight you must feel. Pity and fear are rust on the blade.”

Punishments were part of the curriculum. For being late — kneeling for an hour, holding a bucket of water over your head. For a wrong answer — a strike of a bamboo cane across the palms. For tears — double the punishment. Pain became the language the school spoke. But worse than the pain was the humiliation. They were forced to crawl on all fours, to bark like dogs. To eat off the floor. To clean the latrines with their bare hands.

“Pride is the enemy of the warrior,” Tanaka would say, watching a boy from a good family sobbing as he scrubbed the floor. “Break it. Trample it. Only in the mud is the true purity of spirit born.”

Ichiro endured all this with a cold, detached calm. His body had already grown accustomed to pain, and his soul had learned to hide in the furthest, darkest corner, leaving only a smooth, impenetrable shell on the surface.

It was in this rock garden that he first saw Daisuke. He arrived mid-semester, a quiet, gangly boy with eyes that seemed to reflect the sky of another, softer world. He was not a stone. He was a lump of raw, pliable clay, retaining the imprint of every rough touch. He did not know how to fight, his bows were clumsy, and during drill lessons, he constantly fell out of step. The other boys, already chipped into shape, already part of the collective gray mass, ignored him. He was a defect, an error in the flawless geometry of their formation. They skirted around him as one skirts a puddle on the road, with squeamish indifference. Ichiro ignored him, too. But sometimes, stealthily, he watched him. He saw how Daisuke, receiving another strike of the pointer across his hands, did not clench his teeth, but quietly, almost imperceptibly, winced, and for a moment, not anger, but bewilderment flared in his eyes. As if he simply could not grasp the rules of this cruel game. He was too alive for this rock garden. And Ichiro, who had almost become a stone himself, looked at him with a strange, cold mixture of contempt and an almost forgotten, painful curiosity. He was a reminder of what Ichiro was so diligently killing within himself.

Once, when the teacher was explaining how a samurai must know how to die, Daisuke raised his hand.

“And what if one does not want to die?” he asked quietly.

Silence hung in the classroom. The teacher looked at him like a speck of dirt on a white kimono.

“Then you have not yet become a samurai,” he said. “Then you have not yet understood what honor is.”

During the break, they surrounded him.

“Hey, new kid,” an older student, Yamada, poked him in the chest. “Show us what you can do.”

Daisuke backed away. There was neither grace nor strength in his movements. Only fear and a sort of almost comical clumsiness.

“I… I don’t know how to fight,” he muttered.

The laughter was cruel, cutting. Yamada raised his fist, and Daisuke did not even try to defend himself. He simply closed his eyes and waited for the blow.

The blow never came. Ichiro himself did not understand why he stepped between them. Perhaps because there was something unbearable in that submission. Perhaps because he saw himself in Daisuke — the self his father had killed on his fifth birthday.

“Leave him be,” he said quietly.

Yamada sneered.

“Found yourself a protector? Miyazaki wants to be a hero?”

The fight was brief. Yamada was older, stronger. But Ichiro fought with the cold fury of a man defending not another, but his own lost innocence. When the teachers pulled them apart, both had split lips.

The punishment — a week of cleaning the latrines. For both of them. For Ichiro and Daisuke.

They worked in silence, side by side. On the third day, Daisuke suddenly said:

“Thank you.”

Ichiro shrugged.

“Don’t mention it.”

“No, really. No one before…” he trailed off, then added: “You know, my father says that true Bushido isn’t about dying. It’s about how to live properly.”

Ichiro looked at him. In the gloom of the latrine, Daisuke’s face seemed almost ghostly.

“Your father is wrong,” he said.

Part One. Chapter Three →
← Foreword
← Paths
← A Road of a Thousand Years