East is East

And that was it. That was why there were ten men (and now twelve and soon to be fifteen) gathered out front of the Arms place looking like the start of a coon hunt, and that was why Jason was acting so important and why Royal couldn’t hold anything on his stomach: they’d found the son of a bitch of a Japanese Chinaman that had gone and killed his uncle. The sheriff wanted the dogs and he was paying Jason twenty-five dollars for the use of them and himself as handler, but he’d warned Jason to keep it quiet. “I want to catch this malefactor and put him behind bars once and for all,” he’d told him, using one of his college words to drive the point home, “and I don’t want half the island out there gettin’ in my way, you follow me?” But Jason had to tell him and Rodney, what with the sheriff’s pickup backing out of the driveway and the Ramones on the TV crunching chords in their black pipestem jeans, and Rodney had gone home and told his mother and maybe his three brothers and six sisters and his grandpa and his daddy too, and now, when the sheriff pulled up at four for Jason and the dogs, there was going to be a crowd.

The voice was booming, thunderous, loosed from the clouds, and it sent him into a panic so absolute and immediate it made the fillings in his teeth ache and rendered Jōchō all but useless. “Hyro Tanayka, you come own outta there now, nice and easy, and y’all put your bands up own top your bead where Ah kin see ’em.” And behind that voice, the barking of the dogs—rabid, slavery; barking that choked on its own rage and saliva, the barking of killers and man-eaters. Strip the flesh from the bone.

The shorts were off the floor and girding his loins in a nanosecond, no time for the Nikes, and then he was clawing his way over Ruth’s desk to get at the back window. Up went the sash, one foot on the desk, the other on the sill, and then he froze. His hara dropped, his heart turned to ash. What he saw there was Negroes, Negroes with guns and dogs. And hakujin

too, with uniforms and badges and more guns and more dogs. He was surrounded. It was all up. It was over.

“Hyro Tanayka,” the voice boomed from the front of the house, “y’all have till a count of ten to come own outta there or Ah cannot hold myself accountable for the consequences! One. Two. Three …”

He knew them. They’d tried to run him down before he’d even set foot on their soil, they’d chased him out of Hog Hammock and Ambly Wooster’s house too. They were Americans. Killers. Individualists gone rampant. He hung his head and started for the door, defeated, crushed, expecting no mercy but the law of the jungle and of the mutt and half-breed. If he put his tail between his legs and his hands atop his head, then he could … could …

But all at once, magically, insidiously, the words of Jōchō whispered to him—The Way of the Samurai is a mania for death; sometimes ten men cannot topple a man with such conviction—and he was a Japanese all over again, not a mutt, not a happa, not half a hakujin,

but a Japanese, and the strength came back to him, settling in a fiery ball in his gut. He came through the door—“Don’t shoot!” he cried—with his hands atop his head, but with a gleam in his eye.

In that moment, all of them—the sheriff, the state troopers, the red-eyed Negroes, the gawk of a hakujin with the speckled face and the runt in fatigues Ruth had told him about—all of them relaxed their grip for the tiniest sliver of an instant. He was on the doorstep, he was on the porch, and they were all gaping at him as if they’d never seen a man with hara before. That was all it took, that sliver of an instant, the sheriff dropping the megaphone from his lips, the Negroes and troopers and poor white trash easing up on the trigger …

“Make my day!” Hiro suddenly shouted, diving for the floorboards as the astonished, outraged cannonade opened up all around him, shattering glass, splintering wood, ricocheting off Ruth’s Olivetti and slicing through the trove of bamboo shoots and fried dace in deadly syncopation. And then, in the next sliver of an instant, in the space between the first round and the second, he bounded over the railing and ran headlong into the first man he encountered, an old Negro with a smoking gun and a pipe jammed between his teeth. The old Negro was a carpet, a rug, a piece of lint. He was gone and there was another, and then a white man, and Hiro ran through them as if they were made of paper, silly astonished faces, black and white, sailing back on their buttocks, guns and cigarettes and spectacles flying up into the air as in some miraculous feat of levitation.