Samurai Summer Read online

  Text copyright © 2013 by Åke Edwardson

  Originally published by Rabén & Sjögren, a division of Norstedts Forlagsgrubb AB

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Request for permission should be addressed to:

  Amazon Children’s Publishing

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  www.amazon.com/amazonchildrenspublishing

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

  9781477816547 (hardcover)

  1477816542 (hardcover)

  9781477866542 (eBook)

  B00BHIFQ76 (eBook)

  Book design by Sammy Yuen

  First edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  1

  I wish this was a secret story. Sometimes I wish there wasn’t even a story to tell. Maybe it would have been better for everyone. But then I think the opposite. The best thing that could have happened did happen.

  It’s late evening now. Darkness is setting in, and the whole camp lies still. There’s a ceiling lamp giving off a blue glow that doesn’t quite reach the ground. I’m sitting on the dirt floor. The light way up there in the sky is the moon.

  I’ve been sitting here for a long time, and lying next to me is my long sword, my katana. It almost looks like a shadow on the floor in this light. My short sword, my wakizashi, is in my belt. I can feel its handle when I move, but I’m not going to move. I’m not going to do anything, not right now. I have a story to tell.

  There’s still some light outside because it’s summer. The end of what has been my last summer. I hope to be able to explain that eventually if I can. But I’m not sure you can explain anything. Things happen, sometimes because they have to, sometimes even though they don’t have to. And the most terrible things are the ones that are the most difficult to explain.

  There are almost no walls left around me where I’m sitting. I can hear sounds in the night. A bird screeches out over the lake. I’ve heard it before—I think it’s the same one. It seems to be as sleepless as I am. It’s the only bird that screeches as it flies around in the sky above the lake. Maybe it’s flying in its sleep. Maybe it screeches in its sleep and drives the other seabirds crazy. In the morning the grebes are so tired they almost drown when they dive beneath the surface for fish.

  This story is about the lake and the forest.

  I turned twelve last spring. Mama and Papa christened me Tommy, but my name is Kenny and nothing else. That’s the name I took when I baptized myself last summer. I stood in a stream and poured water onto the blade of my sword until the water turned to blood. Then I drew it across my forehead and became Kenny. The name comes from the Japanese word for sword: ken.

  I’m a samurai. In Japan you’re born a samurai, and when you’re five years old you’re given your samurai garb and a sword. I wasn’t so lucky.

  The sleepless bird lets out another screech in the darkness. It’s not as clear as before. I feel a little tired, but this is going to be a long night.

  2

  I get so angry sometimes, all of a sudden, and then I might call someone I don’t even know a bloody bastard! I can tell you I’ve cursed a lot in my life. I don’t really know why. Mama doesn’t swear. She’s told me not to a million times but it doesn’t help.

  I always used to get into fights at home in the front yard, just like that, without even thinking about it.

  But I’ve stopped that now. A samurai is always calm. I may not be a full-fledged samurai yet—someone who’s always as calm as a rock—but it’s just a question of practice. If I swear sometimes, it’s because my soul hasn’t yet evolved into the perfect state: satori. That’s when the soul and the sword become one. The sword is no longer a weapon but something you need in order to feel at peace. But then you also have to become a master swordsman.

  I tried to sneak off after breakfast every morning to practice not getting angry. It wasn’t easy. There were forty prisoners at the camp. It started in the morning when everyone had to go out to the toilets and then make their beds and put away their stuff. There were ten of us boys living in my dormitory. Across from us was another dormitory with ten boys, and below us were two girls’ dorms. Sometimes you could hear something from down there. Somebody crying, probably for their mother.

  One night I heard a howl through the floor. I thought about it the next day, but I never found out what it was. You hardly ever heard any laughter from the girls’ dorms. You would have heard it if there had been any. Laughter carried through anything. But at this camp we weren’t meant to laugh. If anyone did laugh they were just faking it. It hurt your throat.

  There was no way you could practice staying calm during breakfast either, not with forty spoons clattering against forty plates. There was sort of an echo, so it sounded like eighty spoons clattering away until the oatmeal was finished, and the quicker it was finished the better because it tasted like chicken poop.

  We washed ourselves in the lake twice a day. We could do that before breakfast if we wanted to. That was the one thing the counselors didn’t care about. I guess they were just waking up then. They were always up late at night.

  As for me, I always took my time washing myself because the samurai were careful about keeping themselves clean. But some were sloppy about washing themselves. Sausage, for example, from my dorm. But not even Sausage escaped when everyone had to get washed with hot water and soap in the bathtubs. It happened once in the middle of the summer in the evening before the mothers and fathers were supposed to come visit. I guess the idea was for everyone to smell good when it was visiting time. If they only knew what it smelled like otherwise.

  The evening before visiting day, we received fresh sheets that also smelled good—almost like the forest out there during the day. The sheets were a little harder, too, and it was more difficult to make the beds with them the first morning. You had to make an effort if you wanted to win the bed-making contest.

  Once I said to one of the counselors that I wanted to take a bath more than once a summer. She just looked at me. She didn’t get it. I think it was last summer or the summer before that. Sometimes all the summers flow together like different streams flowing into the spring when the water’s high.

  I’ve been at the camp more summers than anyone. Only Matron has been here more summers than me, but that’s not so strange considering she’s the overseer and was already here back when I was still in Mama’s belly.

  Mama was here a few weeks ago on the big Visiting Day. As usual, she had walked from the turnoff by the main road where the bus stopped. She had trudged two miles through the woods, and as always, she smelled of sweat when she got here.

  She had brought a bag of Twist chocolates with her that the counselors stole. Unless it was Matron herself who took it.

  First I got to hold it, but then I had to hand it over to the counselors. That was how things were done here. The candy would then be distributed among all the kids, if you were lucky. When I didn’t get a piece of chocolate that night or the next,
I realized they had taken the bag.

  On visiting day, Mama carried the bag of Twist through the forest. Once she had caught her breath after her trek, she sat down on one of the chairs outside the woodshed. She wiped her face with this old handkerchief that was so sheer you could see right through it. It was like a window. I saw Mama’s face on the other side of it. I knew it was her, of course, but there was still something different about her. Like she wasn’t quite the same this time. Like the bag of Twist meant something. She had never brought along anything that special before.

  She stuffed the handkerchief into her handbag, which was round like a soccer ball.

  “Your hair’s getting long, Tommy,” Mama said.

  I didn’t answer. Mama pushed her own hair back, which was brown and curly and sort of uneven across her forehead. Maybe she had cut it herself. She had looked exactly the same for as long as I could remember.

  “Your hair has almost gone white from the sun,” she said.

  She looked out across the lake, which was gleaming so brightly that it hurt your eyes. It was white from the sun, and it seemed like I had turned the same color. She looked at me again.

  “It really is unusually hot this summer.”

  I still said nothing.

  “Tommy?”

  “You know what my name is,” I said.

  “Tommy,” she said again, but this time it wasn’t a question anymore. She looked out at the lake again, as though Tommy were out there somewhere. But all she could see was a boat far in the distance—a canoe perhaps. It was just like a piece of black construction paper against all that white.

  “How are things in town?” I asked. I had to change the focus because it hurt my eyes to keep looking at the lake like I was looking for that Tommy kid too.

  I wanted her to look at me again.

  “Same as ever,” she said and turned her head, “only warmer.” She picked up her handkerchief and mopped her brow. “Somehow, it seems to get hotter in town than in the countryside in the summer.”

  “Don’t ask me,” I said.

  “You do like being out here, don’t you, Tommy?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Ke-Kenny.” I saw that she had to make an effort to say my real name. “You do like it out here, don’t you?”

  “I don’t have anything to compare it to,” I said.

  “You can go swimming and diving every day,” she said. She made it sound like I was a fish or something.

  “There’s a swimming pool in town,” I said.

  “It’s always full there. You should see it.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  She looked around.

  “Of course, this is your last summer here.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Then you’ll have to get used to summers in the city.”

  “I guess you’ll find some other place to send me off to.”

  “That’s not fair, Tommy.”

  “Who’s Tommy?” I asked.

  “Kenny then.” It sounded like a sigh when she said it.

  She knew nothing about fairness, but I didn’t want to say that to her. She wouldn’t understand.

  “If Papa were around I wouldn’t have been stuck in this penitentiary,” I said.

  She probably thought that wasn’t fair either, but she didn’t say anything. Then I felt strange. Maybe I had said more than I ought to. And much more than a samurai would have said. It wasn’t her fault that Papa wasn’t home. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. He was just gone all of a sudden. That was three years ago. He’d said goodbye, and then he’d gone out and had never come back.

  At the funeral, his hair was long and it was bleached white by the sun. I went up and said goodbye to him. Mama bawled like a cow in the church. Her wails echoed against all the walls. I wanted her to be quiet. I don’t know why, but I wanted the church to be completely silent right then. Deathly silent.

  After that, they sent my mother off to some rest home. They wouldn’t let me live by myself at home so I had to stay with Grandma, but she could barely walk so that wasn’t much of a rest home for me.

  As I was standing there next to my dad lying in his casket, I started to think about death, which wasn’t so strange, of course. And when I learned more about how it is to be a samurai, I came to understand what death is. It’s nothing. You should expect to die every day. That way you’re prepared for it, and when that day comes you’ll be calm. It’s nothing to fear.

  Every morning the samurai looks for a peaceful place to clear his head of all the things that aren’t peaceful thoughts. Then he tries to imagine himself at the exact moment, the very second, that he’s pierced by an arrow or a rifle bullet or a lance or a sword. Thrown into a fire. Struck by lightning. Crushed in an earthquake. Hurled from a cliff. Overcome by disease. Or run over by a train.

  Maybe all of them at once.

  The samurai say: “Die each day in your mind. Then you will not fear death. Think of death every morning and every night.”

  “Kenny?” I heard Mama’s voice. It sounded far away, as if she were sitting in another world.

  “What?” I said after a while.

  “You went so quiet.”

  “Wasn’t I the last one who spoke?”

  “You looked like you were thinking about something,” she said.

  “It’d be strange if I weren’t thinking about something, wouldn’t it? Aren’t you always thinking about something?”

  “What were you thinking about then?” she asked with a smile.

  “Nothing,” I answered.

  I didn’t tell Mama about what happened to my bag of Twist. I wanted to clear that up myself.

  The sun was still up when Mama left, but it was evening. We were alone again, all forty of us. A few of the girls cried, but they did it silently. One of them was sitting by herself on the thick branch that reached out over the cove where we washed ourselves every morning and evening.

  I don’t know why I went there. Maybe I had seen something ripple on the surface of the water. A big pike. I don’t think anyone saw me as I walked across the grass.

  A couple of the smaller kids were spinning slowly on the merry-go-round without yelling or talking. Everyone seemed to be thinking about their mothers and fathers.

  The girl sitting on the branch was Kerstin. I didn’t know her but I knew the name of pretty much everyone here.

  Kerstin wiped her eyes. She had long hair that was light and almost yellow in the sun. It hung down into her face a little.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She nodded and brushed the hair away from her forehead. I turned around to see if anyone could see us, but the courtyard was almost deserted. The two little kids on the merry-go-round had disappeared.

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  “Okay.” she answered. That was it. It was probably the first time I’d heard her say anything.

  Just then, a fish thrashed its tail among the reeds on the other side of the creek. It sounded like the shot from a cannon.

  “That was probably Old Pike,” I said.

  “You think so?”

  “Do you fish?” I asked.

  “I don’t have a pole,” she said.

  “You can whittle one. I’ve got a good knife.”

  I meant my hunting knife, not my short sword, my wakizashi.

  “You need a line and hook, don’t you?” she asked.

  “I’ve got those. And floats too.”

  “Guess you’ve got everything then,” she said as she jumped down from the branch.

  “I’m saving up for a casting rod,” I said. “I don’t have one of those. And no reel either. I’m planning on buying an Ambassador Gold.”

  “Sounds expensive.”

  “It’s the best.”

  Kerstin nodded. I think she understood. She was standing next to me now just a few feet away. She was about the same age as me but a little taller. She looked strong. Maybe she would make a good girl samurai. Maybe she’d have a high rank. />
  The wife of a samurai was put in command of the regular soldiers when the samurai were away. Some samurai wives were good at fighting and self-defense. Once in the1500s, a samurai’s wife climbed up onto the roof of her castle to spy on the enemy soldiers below. When she was done spying, she drew a map of their encampment with her lipstick.

  Kerstin didn’t wear any lipstick like Mama did, for example. I could always smell lipstick whenever Mama tried to hug me. It smelled awful.

  “Want me to make you a fishing pole?” I don’t know why I asked. I really hadn’t planned on saying that.

  “When?”

  “Well… tomorrow?”

  “Out in the forest?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  She looked as though she thought the forest was dangerous. She probably didn’t know that the forest was a place where you could always be at peace. That’s how I felt anyway.

  But I was wrong.

  “You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to,” I said.

  “Do you have some special place in the forest?” she asked.

  She pointed toward the woods beyond the creek as if I didn’t know what a forest looked like.

  There was no fence or barbed wire or anything around the camp. They were smarter than that. They knew we had nowhere to go—at least not for long. It was even scarier this way.

  “We’ve got a castle,” I said.

  And with that, I had given it away. It was a secret we weren’t allowed to tell anybody. Especially not a girl. The words just came out; I didn’t have a chance to think about it.

  “What sort of castle?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Are there others who have this castle?”

  I nodded. I didn’t want to say anything more.

  “What sort of a castle is it?”

  “I… can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s a secret.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have told me, should you?”

  She looked at me and smiled. This girl was smart. I had to watch myself.

  “Sometimes I talk too much,” I said.