The Shinobi Parable

It was a rainy November morning when they brought Takeda-san's body home. The cadaver dragged through the courtyard was unrecognizable; a bloody pulp whose right arm and left leg contorted at impossible angles. My young and naive mind couldn't imagine how a routine mission to New York could go so drastically awry.

Takeda's surviving partner, Sakura, left the gurney carrying his corpse on the porch, and muttered to my father as she passed him by: “It was David.”

My father simply nodded in grim understanding.

The next day I worked up the audacity to sate my curiosity. “Who is David?” I asked my father.

He sighed as he set aside the work laid out on the desk of his study. He lingered a moment, then answered. “David is a policeman with the NYPD, and a member of their SWAT unit.”

The answer took me aback. Our clan was so much better trained than any of the world's most elite forces. Any one of us could stand to twenty armed men. “How could a mere policeman do this?”

“That is no ordinary policeman.”

“What then is he, father?”

“David is a being of unbridled determination. He is an amalgam of experiences that have forged a more perfect killer than any of my finest pupils.”

“Even me?” I smirked, but his weathered face returned deadly sternness. I was a foolish fourteen-year-old.

“I have invested a great deal in your skills, but there are many here who surpass you if only by experience. Even they I would hesitate to send if I knew David awaited them.”

“Then tell me more, that I may know our enemy.”

“I sincerely hope you never will. But as you are coming of age, such things I should not deny you, lest you lack understanding of what awaits beyond our walls.”

He stood from his desk and motioned for me to follow him. Father slid the translucent shoji doors open and led me out to the courtyard of our compound. The gravel crunched underfoot as we marched across the open outdoor space, the cloud-dimmed sun lighting our path. I looked aside, spotting the vibrant red Japanese maple growing out of an enclosed circle of dirt in our courtyard. Everything around it, however, was that hard grey gravel which went below us. A few of our clan stood out on one particular porch at that time, watching as we passed. I think they were waiting outside the apothecary's home, where Takeda's body was being examined and prepared for burial. But we were not bound for the apothecary. Father led me across the way to the compound's library. Among the many drawers he selected one, and pulled from it a scroll along with several other documents bound in manila folders, each more contemporary in appearance. Stolen records, I assumed. He laid them on a table and sat me across from him.

“David Thomas is an American, born at Everest Memorial Hospital in the rural town of Fairview, Texas. In an unfortunate twist of fate, Everest Memorial suffered a severe equipment malfunction on the night of his birth. By morning, the fire had burned the hospital to the ground.”

“How did he survive as an infant?”

“Young David had, at that time, the benefit of a loving family, as I've tried to give you. Both his parents died getting him to safety, yet still he sustained burns on his left arm and chest which scar him to this day. A permanent reminder of the strife into which he was born.”

“That's a scary way to enter this world.”

“And that's only the start. As one of Everest's few surviving newborns, they moved him to Revolution Orphan Home. The records indicate he was adopted after five years there, but two years after his departure the orphanage was closed for human rights violations.”

“What kind of violations?”

Father hid away a manila folder, full of news clippings. “It's best left to your imagination. The manner of death you've been trained in is swift and merciful. What they inflicted upon children is unspeakable. No doubt David experienced this system of cruelty during his stay, even if he never again spoke of it.”

“At least he was adopted out of there. He escaped.”

“Only insofar as a rabbit escapes a hawk by hiding in a den of wolves. Though he was free from the confines of the orphanage, the Thomas family provided no safer refuge. His parents were opioid addicts living on welfare in a trailer park. They were hardly twenty-one years of age and already had a son and daughter, who became David's younger siblings. They only adopted David as a means to increase their government benefits.”

“I thought the American systems prevented such people from adopting?”

“Under normal circumstances, yes. But an institution as corrupt as Revolution Orphan Home cared very little for regulations.” He flipped through some more files, then continued reading from the scroll. “The father was physically abusive. He beat his children when angered. The mother was not violent, but emotionally unstable and verbally assaulted the three. David had to mature fast in that home. He survived enough of his father's beatings to grow into a strong young man. As a teenager he became self-sufficient. He worked at a restaurant after school and took it upon himself to protect and provide for his brother and sister.

“One day he protected them from the wrong man. A neighbor with a grudge against their father arrived at their doorstep while their parents were out. The discourse turned hostile, and the neighbor attacked the youngest brother. David fought the neighbor away, but later that evening he gathered a gang of men from his family and caught David alone by the roadside. They beat him, stabbed him seven times, and dumped him in the local quarry. He played dead long enough to hear them drive away, then stopped his wounds as best he could and crawled for an hour to the nearest clinic.”

I don't know what face I made that caused my father to pause. He watched my reaction for some time, probably reading the stomach churning shock and pity I, in that moment, felt. Then he continued.

“Those were his teenage years.

“At age twenty he spent everything he'd earned to relocate his siblings to a safe place for a new start. Then, having nothing more to his name, he sought a new start of his own. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and served three tours in Afghanistan, carrying out the last as a Green Beret. He was awarded four Purple Hearts, and all his commanding officers spoke highly of him in their reports. Evidently he had a distinct gift for warfare, and found something of a twisted pleasure in it.”

“I wonder why then he ever left? It sounds like he found his calling.”

“According to the psych evaluations he retired out of boredom. War was a challenge he felt he'd mastered. So he returned to America in search of change, and followed some of his Army comrades to New York.”

“And that's when he became a cop?”

My father nodded, then closed the scroll. The rest was history.

I meditated on this tale as my father returned the documents to their drawer. I winced as my mind drifted to Takeda's broken body. The Kenzō clan prided itself with raising formidable operatives. Our skill had become myth in many regions, and we honed our physical fitness beyond what the greater world thought possible. We faced dangerous missions on a regular basis, yet rarely saw death.

“How could this be?” I pondered. “Even after enduring such hardship, how could a worldly man match one of our own?”

“Not one,” my father corrected, “but five. Every member we've lost in New York over the past decade has been at the hands of David Thomas. He is the bane of our clan.”

“When I am old enough to deploy, I shall put an end to his reign of terror.”

“No, you will not,” my father stated. The unremarkable manner by which he uttered it took me by complete surprise. “You can not. Because you lack what he has.”

“By adulthood I will have received the furthest extent of your training. What do I lack?”

“You misunderstand. It is not a matter of skill or ability. He is simply a creature of different substance to you or I. As harsh as our training may seem, you, in the comfort of this compound, will never know the fires in which he's been forged. You will never know living day by day for survival against fates beyond your control. You will never know what it is to care and protect as he has. You will never know what he's suffered, nor the sheer magnitude of his pain. He is no mere man. He is the essence of what we've sought to attain. He is shinobi no mono.”

This phrase was the namesake of our profession. An approximate English translation could mean: one who endures.

I remember little else from that conversation. I do recall walking away with much to consider, and my fear of the outside world refreshing anew. In the coming days, I contemplated a great deal on this scourge that had plagued our clan. I also thought on the red Japanese maple in our courtyard, standing alone in the midst of the gravel.

Until that day, I had no categories for an outsider who could be like one of us. Despite our apparent superiority, we could lay no exclusive claim on might. That this outsider surpassed our people at the merits we cherished most led me to question many things.

Ultimately my resolve remained unshaken. The Kenzō clan possessed the secrets of infallible technique, of that I had no reservations. But my curiosity was piqued. My father always said the clan raised us in seclusion to protect us from the world, that we may train in a vacuum to develop more refined jutsu than the generations that came before. And yet by another path a stranger arrived at our destination. Much to my father's dismay, I grew eager to one day meet this David Thomas. No doubt there would be much we could learn before one or the other met their end.