After the Samurai
After the samurai were made redundant – fired from the employ of Emperor Meiji, forbidden to wear swords inside the city walls – some made their living posing for photographers. The pathetic remnants survive today – old daguerreotypes of once-proud warriors in mask and lacquered armor, brandishing swords in cloth-draped studios. Brought low by time and circumstance. But you were never samurai.
I don’t know what you were, exactly, let alone who. I don’t know how you came here or why, or why you stopped in this spot. But you did. You stopped and you stayed and someone turned you to stone or covered you with stone and here you are forever. Mine.
The rock that you stopped upon, which has become your foundation, is just the right height. The right shape. I can sit right here and lean against it. I can rest my hand around your ankle or my cheek against your shin. I can close my eyes and imagine the feather-light touch of your fingertips against my scalp. I can wait for your strong square hand to cup my skull gently, protectively, and at times I even feel it. Or at least I think I do.
Did this town sprout up around you or was it here when you arrived in the center of Illinois, where the roads are all straight lines, the corners all 90-degree angles? I try to ask but it’s like I’m speaking another language. No one hears what I say. The kids treat you like some good luck charm. They touch you lightly as they pass, the tip of your foot worn down through the years. They decorate you for holidays with a wreath around your neck. I guess it’s different for them, having first seen you from their strollers as mom wheeled them from the post office to the bakery, to the library and back. Maybe if they moved here at age fifteen, as I did, they’d wonder as I wonder.
If they’d come here as I did, with no friends, no family but a love-struck mother desperate to believe in second chances, they’d be curious, I think, about who you were and who you might be to them. And if their mother’s new lover turned out to be a drunk who shouted and cursed, who broke things, who touched them hard enough to leave marks, they’d see the strength in your shoulders and the refuge in your shadow.
After the samurai were made redundant some refused to stop being samurai. They’d been samurai for a thousand years. Longer than memory. Longer than time. Bushido was stronger than the declaration of any one emperor. They could no more cast it off than they could cast off their own skin, their own name. They would not stop being samurai so they fought the emperor’s conscript army, and they fought until they died.
Rivka
Is there really a statue of a knight or warrior somewhere in the middle of Illinois? I like the juxtaposition very much. The ideals of the noble warrior, frozen in stone. The ideals of the Samurai code, still alive, though the Samurai are all dead. That’s what I got from the story; that this girl finds comfort in the ideas and ideals of the knight-protector, almost wishing the real world was like a historical romance, or fairy-tale. I liked the story; I wish it were a little bit longer, though.
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Cyn
Hi Rivka!
No, there’s no such statue in central Illinois – at least not that I know of, although there’s so much weirdness there it would not surprise me.
Thanks for the nice note – you’re right that it needed to be longer. There’s a paragraph in there that should have been two or three.
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