Tradition
...the first chapter
Prologue
The dawn of the revolution
Keiko was calm; she sat perfectly still, her hands rested on her knees and her eyes on her hands. The low, moody light from the two small desk lamps cast a warm glow to the side of her smooth, young face and reflected sharply off her white socks, while her body remained shrouded in sailor-fuku blue shadow. In this evocative lighting she could easily have been mistaken for a brooding and deadly antagonist. Or a vulnerable portrait of innocence.
The arrogant aggression in the man’s voice suggested a vulnerable portrait of innocence.
‘So what exactly do you think you’re doing?’
It was an angry voice that echoed around the small study, a voice used to giving orders and expecting immediate obedience. Keiko said nothing, her two short pigtails hanging like tears either side of her face, as she sat impassively bearing the brunt of the verbal assault.
‘You think you can run your life on a whim? Without thinking?...’
Keiko remained silent.
‘…doing whatever pleases you without any thought for the consequences?
Keiko spoke softly, without moving.
‘It’s not like that.’
‘Oh no? Then tell me; how is it – exactly.’
Keiko retreated back to silence. The man was warming to his righteous indignation.
‘You seem to think life is one big game. You seem to think the world owes you something. It owes you nothing. To think you can simply flaunt authority like this is…well…ridiculous.’
Keiko looked up at him, her face expressionless. The man took her silence as insolence, one of the many things he wouldn’t tolerate from his young students. He grew more forceful.
‘This, little girl, is ridiculous. This is…one step too far.’ His voice rose.
Keiko spoke again.
‘Why?’
‘Why?’ the man snapped, ‘Why? Are you stupid?’
‘Why?’ Keiko repeated.
‘You really are stupid,’ he said. ‘What world are you living in? There are rules, young lady. There are rules and codes and laws and…’
‘Why can’t we make new rules? And codes and laws?’ Keiko was staring at him.
‘Because you simply can’t.’ The voice of unreason. ‘We live in a society – a group –we all need to agree on a behavior that balances the good of everyone. Behaviours that give everyone what they want.’
‘Nobody asked me what I want.’
‘That’s because…’ The man broke off, suddenly reluctant to finish his thought.
‘Because I’m young?’
Keiko’s voice was low yet her words were loaded with challenge, with accusation; with the pain of betrayal.
The room fell silent, an ominous silence. The man tried again.
‘There’s a line in a song that goes “You’re still young/that’s your fault/there’s so much you have to go through”. Do you believe that?’
‘I don’t understand that.’ There was something unnerving in Keiko’s directness.
‘It simply means that young people need experience before they can make good decisions.’ There was a condescending arrogance to his tone. ‘And what you’re doing now is not good. It’s stupid.’
‘I’m young, you’ve made that very clear,’ said Keiko evenly. ‘We young people – we do stupid things.’
‘Well this goes beyond stupid,’ the man snapped. He softened. ‘But, as you say, you are young and so I understand. So I strongly suggest you stop all this nonsense and go back to your studies.’
‘I think it’s too late for that.’ Keiko’s voice was cold.
The man switched tactics, only to sound gratingly patronizing.
‘Look, I’m really on your side. I’m not your enemy. You’ve made a bad mistake. But if you give it up now I’m willing to forgive and forget.’
Keiko smiled in the darkness.
‘You want to kiss and make up?’
‘Forgive and forget,’ he said sharply.
‘And then what?’
The man was trying hard to sell an idea that Keiko, clearly, was not interested in.
‘You go back to your studies and we go on as if none of this ever happened.’
Keiko was back to studying her hands, rapidly boring of the argument.
‘You forget. I’ve been expelled.’
The man paused momentarily. He had forgotten that detail. He struggled to recover.
‘Well…I can fix that,’ he lied ‘I will get you reinstated. But it’s really very simple – if you fail at school you will fail in life.’
She looked up skeptically.
‘Look….’ He continued ‘School gives you the tools to succeed in life, and without those tools you fail. Those tools allow you to get what you want out of life.’
‘I’m too young to know what I want out of life.’
‘That’s what teachers are for – it’s our job.’
She gave a short laugh, bordering on a snort.
‘How would you know what I want in life? If I don’t know, how could you know?’
‘It’s our job to know,’ he said lamely.
Keiko looked up at him, the derision clear on her face and in her voice.
‘Have you ever worked? Apart from teaching?’
He looked uncertain where Keiko was going with this.
‘Yes…’
‘Where? Doing what?’
‘I worked in the financial department of an insurance company.’
‘For how long?’
‘Over a year….almost two, really.’ He twisted uncomfortably.
Keiko unleashed her scorn on him.
‘You, an American man…two years’ experience in the world – how can you possibly know what a sixteen-year-old Japanese girl wants in life?’
‘I have more experience…’
It was a lame response, which he immediately recognized. He fell silent, one of the more sensible decisions of his this evening.
‘You have no fucking idea. I need choices in order to decide – which you cannot give me - then I will decide, not you.’
‘And what if you decide wrong?’ he challenged.
‘Then I will change. I will do something else,’ she shot back.
‘That’s not how life works,’ frustration was creeping into his voice ‘you chose a career and then you build it, on a day by day basis. You can’t flit from one thing to another.’
Keiko stared through the darkness at the man, her face set determinedly.
‘I refuse to do the same thing for thirty years.’
It was a statement, not open for discussion. The man fell silent.
Keiko stood up and walked to the man’s book shelves and started looking at the titles. She spoke over her shoulder.
‘I have experiences too. Why aren’t they as valuable as yours? And why can’t I just go on having experiences, try different things. Why do I need a career? A career is settling down – that’s your generation, not mine.’
‘You need money to try different things, and a career gives you money.’
Keiko turned and faced the man.
‘Why do you value money so much? Why not happiness?’
The man’s voice snapped angrily through the study.
‘This is typical of your generation – “why do you value money?”. We value it because we know how hard it is to come by. It takes this thing called ‘hard work’, something you kids know nothing about. It’s all too easy for you, yes? You have all the privileges; you flip through social media, lacking the concentration to stay on one thing for more than a few seconds….you yourself – you’ve been on social media all bloody night!’
Keiko turned and faced him.
‘We are on social media sharing our experiences with our generation. Believe it or not I rarely use social media – I despise it for the very reasons you give – yet tonight we have a purpose. But of course – for you to understand us ‘kids’ as individuals, to believe that maybe some of us aren’t addicted to our phones - well…that doesn’t fit with your little narrative, does it?’
For Keiko to so casually and decisively discard his logic – true though she might be – was too much for the man, and he reacted furiously.
‘You arrogant little tramp – you think the rules don’t apply to you? You don’t respect anything or anybody, do you?’
‘What is there to respect about you, or your authority?’ Keiko shot back, her challenge bristling with her own pent up fury. ‘You spend all your time earning money, you forget about earning respect. Even now, you think your authority alone gets my respect, and will save the day. It won’t. How much real authority have you got right now? None. And that’s exactly how much respect I have for you.’ She ran her fingers irritably along the book spines. ‘Let’s see how well your authority and your money serve you now.’
‘Well let’s see how well your quest for happiness serves you when you wake up tomorrow without money, without food, you little brat.’
The man’s ego was not willing to concede to a sixteen-year-old; it was clouding his logic.
‘You don’t get it, do you. Why should I work for a tomorrow? That’s your stupid game. I won’t sacrifice today’s happiness for your promise of tomorrow. You fuckers, you’ve stolen my tomorrow and substituted your own. So you can keep your thirty years of boredom, your pathetic fading away; I am going to have one great moment and one glorious passing. Today I will get things done.’
The man laughed, a harsh, cynical laugh.
‘Get things done for your lazy, temporary gratification; for the moment. That behavior comes back and bites you in the ass. It doesn’t last.’
‘It lasts long enough.’
‘Long enough for your entire life?’
‘Who knows how long is life?’ Keiko replied, ‘Only death lasts. What use is your career and your money when you’re dead?’
‘You believe in an after-life, yes?’ asked the man.
Keiko stared at him.
‘No.’
She leaned back against the bookshelves, her eyes closed, seemingly calm yet there was a tension within her, as if on the edge of motion. The silence of the study was oppressive, a very temporary respite at the centre of a very real storm. When Keiko spoke, her voice was soft, almost child-like, yet the words carried a world view far beyond her years.
‘You know my father always talked about the samurai. The ways of bushido. He was obsessed with them. He recognised it as a great era, a great place where everything was great and everyone was strong and everyone understood respect. Where everyone understood honour.’
‘What's so wrong with that? Bushido was - is - an admirable way of life,’ the man interjected. ‘An honorable set of codes to guide your path in life.’
‘Oh I agree.’
It took the man by surprise. Then Keiko seemed to drift away as if she were alone in the room.
‘My father got very drunk every Friday night on his way home from work. One Friday he was so drunk he fell off the railway platform in front of a train. He was 34 years old. And then he was dead.’
There was a brief, uncomfortable silence.
‘I was six years old.’
‘I’m sorry.’ It was all the man could think to say. Keiko was quick to reject his apology.
‘I don’t believe you,’ she snapped dismissively.
The man tried to recover. ‘What do you expect me to say?’ he said petulantly.
Keiko ignored him.
‘His drunken way of bushido got in the way of the train.’ She laughed. ‘Train – one; fake bushido – nil.’ Keiko was silent for a moment.
‘The reality, of course, is he neither understood bushido nor practiced it. Like most of you today. He was not man enough for bushido, and neither are you.’
The man cut in. ‘This has nothing to do with your current situation.’
Keiko looked at him and smiled. It was not a pleasant smile.
‘Your situation. My situation is on the rise; yours is almost over. It’s all about power and choice, something you of all people should understand. One of the few things we learned from you. With power comes choice. You believe in the power of authority; we believe in the power of respect.’
‘And so am I supposed to respect you?’ The man laughed derisively.
Keiko paused to look at him, long and hard.
‘It was your mistake not to respect me – to respect us.’
Something in her words turned the room cold. She walked back to her chair and stood for a moment with her back to the man. Then she leaned down behind the chair and pulled out a long black plastic tube, similar to the tubes architects used to carry their drawings in. Only this tube didn’t carry drawings. She flipped the top and, almost reverently, withdrew a long, deadly katana, the legendary Japanese long sword. As she turned, the light caught the edge of the sword in a brief and prophetic flash of the future. She looked at the man emotionlessly.
‘Let us be honest, you weren’t really listening,’ she said evenly, ‘You teach us to talk, only to demand our silence. Listening is just too much effort for you.’
‘That…that isn’t true…’ there was a tremor of fear in the man’s voice.
Keiko held the katana off to her side, away from her body in an elegant yet menacing fashion. In a way that suggested she was at one with the weapon.
‘You use your power to put us down when you should use it to lift us up…you use your power to take away my choices.’
She moved to the side of the man, to the desk, and turned the lamp to better illuminate the man. The light flooded across his side; it illuminated the fear now shaping his face, the sweat that had suddenly appeared on his brow and on his lip. Most of all it illuminated the ropes that so tightly bound him to the chair, ropes that deprived him of his power, and gave that power to Keiko. Tonight, Keiko had the power and the choices. And Keiko had the katana.
‘You use your power to take away my choices; and all you offer in return is “sit, learn, get a job, get a house, a husband…get a car get a kid get old…get dead.”’
Keiko positioned herself in front of the man.
‘Where, in all that, is life?’
The man was now very much alive to the terror of the moment.
‘Do you remember, you taught us Abraham Lincoln?’ she continued ‘”It’s not the years in your life but the life in your years”’
‘Listen, please….’ he now was clearly terrified ‘It doesn’t need to be….there are other choices…’
‘You already denied me my choices.’
‘No…you can have choices…of course you can…’
‘This I know.’ Keiko was hideously calm. ‘You see, I now have the power…’ Her two hands gripped the sword and, in a graceful, practiced fashion, she raised the katana above her head.
‘Wait…wait…’ the man was blubbering in fear.
‘You had your moment, you made your choices.’ Keiko stood like a tense, tight spring. ‘…now the choices are mine…’
The man felt the bile of fear rise in his stomach and a scream rise in his throat.
‘I choose the moment…I choose the way…’
Before his scream could escape, the sword came down with blinding speed, slicing through the darkness, through the arc of the desk lamp, and, with a sickening thud, through the neck, the arteries, and the spine of the man.
As the severed head rolled off his shoulder and hit the floor with a jarring thump, in the macabre light of the study Keiko could easily have been mistaken for a brooding and deadly antagonist.