Katanagatari Volume 1

“Huff, huff, huff, huff, ugh…huff, huff, huff, huff…ack.”

Togame had lost sight of Shichika and Meisai no sooner than their duel began,
but as her innately serious and scrupulous personality would not permit her to
leave her post as official witness and referee, she wandered the grounds, nearly
reduced to tears─until she found them.

By then, it was all over.

What she saw when she arrived in the vicinity of the teahouse was Shichika
Yasuri in a relaxed stance, staring at his left hand, freshly drenched in blood,
and Meisai Tsuruga lying on her back, clinging to Sento the Legion─the imprint
of a hand forced through her ribcage.

“Shi-Shichika.”

“Hey, Togame.” Hearing her voice, Shichika looked toward her with an
invigorated smile. “I won,” he reported his victory with pride. “No room for a
bad call, as you can see.”

Togame─gazed upon the body of Meisai Tsuruga.

By now, demonstrably a corpse.

Meisai Tsuruga─Mistress of Triad Shrine.

Former brigand.

Togame knew little of the woman’s early years─but enough to hazard a guess.
No, not just about her─the Schemer was certain that all thousand of the
Kuromiko serving the shrine had personal circumstances rivaling, even
surpassing her own reasons.

Parents murdered.

Families massacred.

Lineages eradicated.
Such tales─were common at this shrine.
And yet.
Togame had brushed it all aside, for the sake of her own reasons, her own
ambition, her own revenge.
“Shichika, did you really─” she began to ask.
Did you really need to kill her?
She almost asked─her katana.
In her thirteen years among the brigands, Meisai Tsuruga had slain countless
innocents─a crime that could never be forgiven no matter how she apologized
or atoned.
No matter how many of the girls at Triad Shrine she assisted by turning the
Legion’s poison into medicine─her efforts were hypocritical.
No, apology and atonement were in and of themselves hypocrisy.
Meisai Tsuruga bore the burden─of a crime that could never be forgiven.
And yet.
Togame had no right to judge.
She was only here─to take the sword.
To further her self-centered59 agenda.
“Huh? What’s wrong? Togame.”
The look on his face─was honest and undisturbed, not what you would expect
from someone who had just taken a life.

A sword that could kill─without due resolve─relinquishing nothing.
A katana did not choose who to kill.
But─it chose its owner.
In which case─she had killed Meisai Tsuruga.
And this road─Togame herself had chosen it.
She had walked too far along it to turn off or turn back.
If her resolve could be compromised by such trifling disturbances─she would
have given it up long ago.
“Shichika─”
Togame stifled the emotion in her voice.
Swallowing her cowardice,60 she spoke with bravado.61
“Well done.”

1 鞘尻 SAYAJIRI butt end of the sheath 尻 SHIRI buttocks
2 無地 MUJI “no ground” not patterned
3 暗号 ANGŌ “obscure numeral”
4 鎖刀 KUSARI GATANA “chain katana” (not a real word, unlike
kusarigama)
5 鎬造 SHINOGI ZUKURI sword having a long groove running near the
ridge
6 三ッ棟 MITSUMUNE when the edges of the ridge are planed to form
three longitudinal surfaces

7 小乱 KOMIDARE “minor riot”
8 二刀・十文字斬り NITŌ JŪMONJI GIRI slashing 十 JŪ, the two-stroke
character for “ten,” using two swords
9 奪刀術 DATTŌJUTSU “sword-robbing technique”
10 御託を並べて GOTAKU WO NARABETE spouting cant; 御託 GOTAKU
originally, oracular utterances
11 中段 CHŪDAN sword raised to stop a body blow
12 尋常に JINJŌ NI play fair
13 戦士 SENSHI warrior
14 機動力 KIDŌRYOKU mobility
15 地抜き JINUKI reverse display 地 JI (back)ground 抜き NUKI pulled
out/pulling away
16 駆け引き KAKEHIKI dealing, horse trading
17 一刀・一文字斬り ITTŌ ICHIMONJI GIRI slashing 一 ICHI, the one-
stroke character for “one,” using a single sword
18 二の太刀 NI NO TACHI “the second sword”
19 あふれている AFURETE IRU to be overflowing
20 ありふれている ARIFURETE IRU to be ubiquitous
21 圧殺 ASSATSU being crushed to death
22 地形効果・千刀巡り CHIKEI KŌKA SENTŌ MEGURI pun on 銭湯巡り
SENTŌ MEGURI public-baths touring

23 場面回想 BAMEN KAISŌ to recollect scenes from the past
24 護神 GOSHIN guardians of the gods
25 護身術 GOSHIN JUTSU self-defense technique
26 護神術 GOSHIN JUTSU “god-guarding techniques” a pun on self-
defense
27 空前絶後 KŪZEN ZETSUGO never before or since
28 言語道断 GONGO DŌDAN not an option
29 放浪児 HŌRŌJI “wandering child”
30 戦災孤児 SENSAI KOJI a child whose parents fell victim to war
31 弱き女たち YOWAKI ON’NA TACHI “women, who are weak” or “women
in weak positions”
32 改心 KAISHIN “renewed heart”
33 根城 NEJIRO “root castle” base of operations
34 全否定 ZEN HITEI complete negation
35 行動原理 KŌDŌ GENRI behavioral principle
36 政治家 SEIJIKA politician; the JFK allusion that follows is the author’s
and not a localization
37 渡りに船 WATARI NI FUNE a boat at a river crossing
38 危ない橋 ABUNAI HASHI “dangerous bridge” common figure of speech
for a risky venture
39 伊達に DATE NI for show

40 根回し NEMAWASHI “spreading roots” often used to mean “getting
people on board beforehand”

41 無益な殺生 MUEKI NA SESSHŌ (set phrase) killing living things when
there is no benefit

42 武士道 BUSHIDŌ the samurai code
43 戦利品 SENRIHIN spoils of war
44 最後通牒 SAIGO TSŪCHŌ “final notification” translation of the
Western word used in int’l relations
45 共同合作 KYŌDŌ GASSAKU joint effort, collaborative work
46 愛用 AIYŌ “lovingly used”
47 瑕疵 KASHI flaw; blemish
48 あとの祭り ATO NO MATSURI “post-festival”
49 窮屈 KYŪKUTSU hemmed in
50 偽装 GISŌ “fake attire” disguise, camouflage
51 魑魅魍魎 CHIMI MŌRYŌ evil spirits of the hills and streams
52 矛盾 MUJUN “spear shield” (the word alludes to an imaginary contest
between a spear that pierces all shields and a shield that blocks all spears)
53 人斬り包丁 HITOKIRI BŌCHŌ “man cleaver”
54 虐げられる SHIITAGE RARERU to be oppressed overtone of 虐待
GYAKUTAI abuse
55 確信 KAKUSHIN “definite belief”

56 空中一刀・億文字斬り KŪCHŪ ITTŌ OKUMONJI GIRI (空中 KŪCHŪ
midair, in the sky) slashing 億 OKU, the many-stroked character for
“hundred million,” using one aerial sword

57 単純にして明快 TANJUN NI SHITE MEIKAI clear and simple; often just
単純明快 TANJUN MEIKAI

58 鏡花水月 KYŌKA SUIGETSU “Mirror Flower, Water Moon” i.e.
reflections, the mere image

59 自分勝手 JIBUN KATTE doing as one pleases

60 弱気 YOWAKI “weak ki” timid

61 強気 TSUYOKI “strong ki” bold



■　■

That evening, Shichika and Togame left Triad Shrine behind. The Kuromiko
responded to the death of Meisai far more calmly than Togame had
expected─you could even say coolly. Perhaps this should have come as no
surprise, but faced with the loss of the guiding force behind Triad Shrine as they
knew it, the girls appeared to have no interest in what might happen to them.
This was no different for the Kuromiko whom Meisai had tasked with the
aftermath─but for the single comment, a kind of a reflection, whereby she
hinted at her thoughts: “So it has finally come to this.” Togame had no way of
knowing what this was supposed to mean or why it had been voiced at all.

“Okay, what’s next?” Shichika asked Togame─walking beside her down the
thousand steps.

“…Next?”
“You know…on the Sword Hunt.”
“Ah─now that we have the Legion, along with the Leveler and the Razor, we
have three of the Twelve Possessed─I think it’s time we paid a visit to Owari.
Three swords should make for a good present.”
“Huh.”
“It will be necessary for me to explain you to my superior─to be honest, I
hired you without prior approval. But your track record speaks for itself. It’s a

done deal.”

“Track record, huh. Three swords in three months─guess it does speak for
itself. The hunt is going quicker than I thought─when I heard the Old Shogun
failed to collect the Twelve Possessed for all his might, I couldn’t imagine what
that meant for us, but since we only have nine more to go, I’d say it’s doable.”

“Don’t get comfortable. We live in a peaceful world. The current owners of
the swords are not to be compared to those who owned them back in the Old
Shogun’s days. As a ruler and sovereign, he was tyrannical. Schemes like mine
operate on the opposite end of the spectrum. Remember, we have the luxury of
profiting from his mistakes.”

“Makes sense.”

“Not another arrogant word out of your mouth, you understand? Doing
something someone else has failed to do is no excuse to brag.”

“I understand. I just got a little excited, okay? Don’t be so nagging. So what
happens at Owari? Will we meet the Shogun?”

“You idiot.” It was rare for Shichika to be so inquisitive, but Togame chopped
his question in two. “I doubt the two of us will enjoy an audience with His
Excellency until we have secured all twelve of the swords.”

“Oh.”

“Do you want to meet His Excellency?”

“No, I don’t care.”

I don’t care─with those words, Shichika stopped that conversation short.
Obviously all he had wanted to know was whether Togame was going to meet
the Shogun, but since she would not touch upon this, he felt it was not his place
to intrude.

Not yet.

“Anyway─what kind of place is Owari? Is it like Kyoto?”

“Similar in scale, but Owari is not as flowery1 as the capital. Kyoto is like a
carnival, all year round─and Owari is, well, a working city. More serious and
solemn.”

“Oh.”

“The way that things have been arranged, it looks like we’ll be reaching Owari
Castle before all thousand pieces of the Legion have been delivered─but we’ll
make do.”

“Yeah, but…” Shichika looked back over his shoulder─and, recalling the
shrine’s premises, brimming with a thousand swords, he asked, “Are you gonna
be okay?”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, that was kind of a rash thing to promise─safeguarding the futures of
a thousand women. Can you do that when this shrine is─”

“I was merely exercising my abilities,” Togame said. “If the Yanari Bakufu
cannot accommodate another thousand women, it has no right to its
reputation.”

“Okay…” muttered Shichika, not really getting it. But as a sword, this was
perhaps not something he needed to get─or profited from getting.

“Not such a bad deal for the bakufu, insofar as it would establish intimate
relations with Izumo, which is otherwise autonomous. Now that it’s lost the
Legion─Triad Shrine will likely abandon its status as a fortress, but this would
only mean returning to what it was before things changed.”

“Before things changed.”
“Before the katana─changed everything.”

“Then maybe Meisai should have tried that from the beginning. Instead of
being all greedy and trying to win the Leveler and the Razor.”

Being all greedy, she had perished─
“She was far from greedy─but since she was ultimately the owner, Meisai
could never free herself entirely from the venom of the Shikizaki blades. We
were forced to pry them from her cold, dead hands.”
“Yeah…but what would you have done?”





“Me?”

“If I had lost─would you have given her the Leveler and the Razor, like we
agreed?”

“Mumble mumble.”2
“Excuse me?!”
“I-I would have had to wait to see if─no, I was certain you would never lose!”

“…You really put your neck on the line, too─what’s the word? Fearless?
Fearsome?3 Like that thing with the first piece.”

“What about it?”
“Yeah…we’ll talk about that later─I’m still trying to sort things out…but let’s
just say I felt for myself what makes these Kiki Shikizaki swords different from
normal swords─totally apart from the venom or the medicine or whatever.
What I really wanna know is, what does that mean?”
“Don’t think too hard, Shichika. It didn’t exactly help you out this time, did it?
And of course, I wound up missing your Fatal Orchid, yet again. How am I
supposed to write my report? Such a headache.”

“First Komori Maniwa, then Ginkaku Uneri, and now Meisai Tsuruga…are you
just not meant to watch me in action?”

“M-Mrg…”
Togame was unable to respond.
In light of the facts, he certainly had a point. In order to write her report, and
to supervise Shichika, her katana─she needed to come up with a decent plan.

“Guess it’s time for us to say goodbye to these stairs,” Shichika noted. “Makes

me kinda sorry to be leaving.”
Vaguely aware of Togame’s trouble4 with the steps, he had kept apace with

her, maintaining a steady footing. They were halfway down the mountain,
having descended a great deal─around five hundred steps.

“You’re sorry about the staircase, but not the shrine? You weirdo.”

“No, it just makes me kind of sad to know I’ll never carry you like that again.
No matter where this Sword Hunt takes us, I’ll probably never have a chance to
hold you in my arms─”

“Ch-Cheerio!”

Hoping to teach him not to be so daft with women, Togame sent her fist
flying. The fact that they were halfway up a mountainside, and on cruelly steep
stairs, completely slipped her mind. They were descending them, too.

As expected, she lost her footing.

“Ah!”

“Whoop─”

Shichika reached out to catch Togame─and caught her wrist midair, but in the
process leaned perilously from the staircase. She was so sprightly that she
weighed nothing compared to him, but when she tugged at his outstretched
limb like that, he had no hope of staying balanced.

“─ps, oops, oops, uh oh.”

“Wh─ah!”

Thus, hopelessly entangled, they tumbled down the remaining five hundred
or so steps, rolling faster and faster.

■　■

They had yet to realize, as they fell.
That they would not be returning to Owari without further ado.
That on the road ahead, the Strongest Swordsman in Japan, the Fallen
Swordsman who had willingly fallen from his seat as the Strongest, who had
tamed Hakuto the Whisper, the most unwieldy masterpiece among Kiki
Shikizaki’s Twelve Possessed─for whom nomenclature like Sword Master and
Sword Saint5 were intended─that none other than Hakuhei Sabi awaited his
turn with them.

Sento the Legion: Check
End of Book Three
To Be Continued

1 華やか HANAYAKA showy echoes 花 HANA flower
2 ごにょごにょ GONYO GONYO onomatopoeia for mumbling
3 大胆…不敵 DAITAN…FUTEKI usually used together as 大胆不敵
audacious
4 懊悩 ŌNŌ anguish
5 剣豪剣聖 KENGŌ KENSEI terms applied to the best of them, e.g.
Musashi Miyamoto





AFTER(S)WORD

Well, regarding that, there are all kinds of ways of thinking about things, and
no blanket statement is possible, but when someone does something wrong for
instance, it’s not so easy to say what they could do to earn forgiveness. Not to
mention the problem of pinpointing what we mean by such a vague idea as
wrong, and defining where it starts and ends─but as a working definition, let’s
call wrongdoing any action with a victim. Unless you’re a perfect person,6 in the
normal course of everyday life, you’re going to wind up doing something wrong
to somebody, even if it never hits the level of a crime. So how should we make
up for these wrongdoings? There are going to be times where it isn’t good
enough to apologize, or to be remorseful, or to suffer the same fate, because at
the end of the day, asking for forgiveness is the epitome of arrogance. When
you have a perpetrator and a victim, it certainly doesn’t mean no wrongdoing
occurred just because the victim sees what happened with complete
indifference and doesn’t even feel victimized, and a wrong is still a wrong even
if the perpetrator is oblivious and shows no sign of compunction. Or rather,
crime or not, no matter how we may regret or even forget the things we’ve
done, they never go away, and if they get brought up for the rest of our lives,
that doesn’t seem so unfair. Atonement and punishment are done for the
victim’s sake, not our own, but we can’t seem to keep ourselves from mixing
this up, and it’s depressing to think how humans, as a species, are unable to
consider crime and punishment in anything but self-regarding terms. But that’s
enough slapdash philosophy for one sitting. If you do something wrong, go
ahead and apologize.

Thus ends the fourth of the twelve KATANAGATARI books. Yikes, I mean the
third. Sento the Legion, a thousand swords in a single bunch. The fact that it’s
only the end of one installment in a longer series makes all of these afterwords
surprisingly difficult to write, but sluggish as these words may be, the story
proper marches on. Sometimes I think thanking our illustrator, take, is the only
solid reason for these commentaries, but just as there are times when saying
sorry isn’t good enough, there are times when saying thank you isn’t good
enough. Demonstrating gratitude is never easy, but for what it’s worth, I’ve
tried.

Nine more books to go!

NISIOISIN

6 聖人君子 SEIJIN KUNSHI “saintly prince”

Palindromic NISIOISIN made his debut as a novelist when he
was twenty. Famously prolific, he is known to publish more than
a book per month at times and is a leading light among writers
who began their careers in the twenty-first century.

Beloved illustrator take is also known for adorning the
Zaregoto mystery cycle with striking visuals.

Sam Bett won Grand Prize in the 2016 JLPP International
Translation Competition. With David Boyd, he is cotranslating the
novels of Mieko Kawakami.