At first, of course, he had to find out whether she belonged to any of the men. The last thing he needed was to draw down the wrath of one of these devils.
Masa sat in Little Cat’s kitchen for an hour, praised her rice balls and found out everything he needed to know. There was a fiancé, his name was Ryuzo, a very nice boy, but he had been studying abroad for a year already.
So let him carry on studying.
Now Masa could get down to work.
He spent a couple of days getting friendly with the object. No languorous glances, no hints – Buddha forbid! She was pining without her fiancé, and he was far from home, among strangers, they were about the same age, so surely they had things to talk about?
He told her a lot of things about the wonders of Yokohama (fortunately, Etsuko had never been to the gaijin city). He lied a bit, of course, but only to make it more interesting. Gradually he worked his way round to the exotic bedroom habits of the gaijins. The girl’s eyes glinted and her little mouth opened halfway. Aha! She might be a shinobi, but she had real blood in her veins!
That finally convinced him that he would be successful and he moved on to the last stage but one – he started asking whether it was true that kunoichi women really had the right to do as they wished with their own bodies and the idea of being unfaithful to a husband or a fiancé did not even exist for them.
‘How can some little hole in your body be unfaithful? Only the soul can be unfaithful, and our souls are true,’ Etsuko answered proudly – the clever girl.
Masa had no interest at all in her soul. The little hole was quite enough for him. He whined a bit about never having hugged a girl – he was so very shy and unsure of himself.
‘All right, then, come to the crevice at midnight,’ Etsuko whispered. ‘And I’ll give you a hug.’
‘That would be very charitable of you,’ he said meekly, and start blinking very, very fast – he was so touched.
The place chosen for the rendezvous was absolutely perfect, all credit to the girl for that. At night there wasn’t a soul here, and it was a good hundred paces to the nearest house. They didn’t post sentries in Kakusimura – what for? On the other side of the crevices there were ‘singing boards’ under the earth: if anyone stepped on one, it started hooting like an eagle owl and it could be heard from very far away. That time when he and the master had climbed across the rope they’d had no idea that the village was ready to receive visitors.
With Etsuko everything happened quickly, even too quickly. There was no need to act like an inexperienced boy in order to inflame her passions more strongly – she came dashing out of the bushes so fast she knocked him off his feet, and a minute later she was already gasping, panting and screeching as she bounced up and down on Masa, like a cat scraping at a dog with its claws.
There wasn’t anything special about the kunoichi, she was just a girl like any other. Except that her thighs were as hard as stone – she squeezed him so hard, he would probably have bruises left on his hips. But she wasn’t inventive at all. Even Natsuko was more interesting.
Etsuko babbled something in a happy voice, stroked Masa’s stiff, short-trimmed hair and made sweet talk, but he couldn’t hide his disappointment.
‘Didn’t you like it?’ she asked in a crestfallen voice. ‘I know I never studied it… The jonin told me: “You don’t need to”. Ah, but do you know how good I am at climbing trees? Like a real monkey. Shall I show you?’
‘Go on, then,’ Masa agreed feebly.
Etsuko jumped up, ran across to the dead pine tree and clambered up the charred trunk, moving her hands and feet with incredible speed.
Masa was struck by a poetic idea: living white on dead black. He even wondered whether he ought to compose a haiku about a naked girl on a charred pine. He had the first two lines all ready – five syllables and seven:
The old black pine tree,
Trembling like a butterfly…
What next? ‘With a girl on it?’ Too blunt and direct. ‘See love soaring upwards’? That was six syllables, but it should be five.
In search of inspiration he rolled closer to the pine tree – he couldn’t be bothered to get up.
Suddenly Masa heard a strange champing sound above him. Etsuko dropped out of the tree with a groan and fell on to the ground two steps away from him. He froze in horror at the sight of a thick, feathered arrow-shaft sticking out of her white back below her left shoulder-blade.
He wanted to go dashing to her, to see whether she was alive.
Etsuko was alive. Without turning over or moving her head, she kicked Masa, so that he went rolling away.
‘Run…’ he heard her say in a muffled whisper.
But Masa didn’t run – his legs were trembling so badly, they probably wouldn’t have held up the weight of his body.
The night was suddenly full of rustling sounds. Dark spots appeared at the edge of the crevice – one, two, three. Black men climbed up on to the edge of the cliff at the point where the shinobi had their secret hoist. There were many of them, very many. Masa lay in the tall grass, looking at them, horror-struck, and he couldn’t move.
One of the black men walked over to where Etsuko was lying face down and turned her over on to her back with his foot. He leaned down, and a blade glinted in his hand.
Suddenly the girl sat up, there was a wheeze, and he was lying, but Etsuko was standing with a sword in her hand, surrounded on all sides by the mysterious newcomers. White among the black, Masa thought fleetingly.
The clash of metal, howls, and then the white figure disappeared, and the men in black were furiously hacking at something lying on the ground that crunched as they hit it.
Masa clearly heard a girl’s voice shout out:
‘Kongojyo!’
One of the killers came very close. He tore up a bunch of grass and started cleaning off his sword. Masa heard loud, sporadic breathing.
The pale light of the moon seeped through a thin cloud for a moment and Masa saw a hood with holes instead of eyes, a cartridge belt over a shoulder, a black jacket.
Don Tsurumaki’s men, that was who they were! They’d followed the shinobi’s example and covered their faces so that they wouldn’t show white in the darkness!
How had they managed to get past the ‘singing boards’? Surely they couldn’t have come through the underground passage? Who could have showed it to them?
Masa crawled on all fours into the undergrowth, jumped to his feet and ran.
The Black Jackets didn’t waste any time. He heard a muffled command behind him, and fallen pine needles started crunching under rapid footsteps.
He had to get to the houses quickly, to raise the alarm! The Don’s men wouldn’t bother to find out who was a shinobi and who wasn’t, they’d finish off everybody regardless.
When he had only twenty paces left to go to the first hut, Masa was unlucky – in the darkness he ran into a branch, tore his cheek and – worst of all – he couldn’t stop himself crying out.
The men behind him heard and realised they had been discovered.
‘TSUME-E-E!’ roared a commanding bass voice.
The response was a roar from many voices.
‘An attack! An attack!’ Masa roared as well, but shut his mouth almost immediately, realising that he was only exposing himself to unnecessary danger.
The attackers were roaring and tramping so loudly that the inhabitants of Kakusimura couldn’t help but hear them.
Now, if he wanted to live, he had to think very quickly. So Masa didn’t run towards the houses, he hid behind a tree.
Less than half a minute later a crowd of Black Jackets went rushing past, spreading out and forming into a half-moon in order to take in the whole width of the island.