Where this comes from

I

The demon and the dragon

Long before anyone called it karate, on an island that still had its own king, there was a family of fishermen.

They fought unusually well for fishermen. The family said this was because an ancestor had learned to fight from an uni. In the Okinawan language the word means demon. Whether he was a demon, or a man frightening enough to be called one, was never settled. What was agreed on was the character of what he taught. It was ferocious. It was practical. Nothing in it was decorative.

Generations later the fighting came down to a young fisherman, an uminchu. He was known in his village for two things. He could fight, and he had judgment far beyond his years. When something was stolen, when a dispute turned dangerous, when a problem required strength and restraint together, the village came to him.

Then the pirates came into the bay.

They were Chinese, they were well organised, and they carried guns. They boarded the ships going in and out of the harbour, took what was worth taking, and left the crews alive. The restraint was noticed. So was their leader, who called himself Ryujin, the Dragon God of the Sea, and who was said to move faster and stronger than a man should.

The village could not fight them and could not buy them off. They went to the fisherman.

He hid himself and his brothers in the hold of a merchant ship and did not tell the owners, because a man who knows he is bait does not behave like bait. When the pirates came aboard, the brothers came out of the hold and took them. Ryujin stayed on his own deck and watched.

The fisherman called across the water. Leave the bay and never return, or these men die.

Ryujin laughed and said men were easily replaced.

The fisherman said he did not believe it. A man who takes cargo and leaves crews breathing does not spend his own people carelessly. He was right, and Ryujin knew he was right.

What came out then was that Ryujin was not in it for money. He was a revolutionary. He was strangling the trade in these waters to weaken the authorities who depended on it, in service of a rising at home. Piracy was a method. It was never the point.

Neither man would move. Ryujin proposed the only thing left: the two of them, and the village's fate on the outcome. The fisherman agreed and released the captured pirates, because he believed he could not lose.

They met at noon on the beach. The fleet lay at anchor and the pirates lined the shore.

They fought with fists and feet. When that settled nothing they grappled. When that settled nothing they gouged. It went on more than an hour, until both went down in the sand and stayed there.

Then they rose. Not one and then the other. Together.

Ryujin asked where a fisherman had learned to fight like that. The fisherman said his family had learned it from a demon, and asked where a pirate had learned to move like a dragon. Ryujin said his family descended from a survivor of the burning of a temple in the south of China, and that the dragon fighting had been carried in his line since. He gave the fisherman one of his family's scrolls, kept since the temple fell, and taught him the method. The fisherman taught him the island fighting he had from the demon.

Then Ryujin took his ships out of the bay, and no one saw him again.

The fisherman went home. In time the village made him their aji, their chieftain, which he was not born to and did not ask for. By then the two traditions had become one thing, and that one thing went down through his family for generations.

That is the legend. I hold it as the lineage's account of itself. Everything that follows I can trace to a living man.

II

The old man on the beach

By 1945 the family had come down to one man.

He had watched the kingdom end, the village life come apart, and then the war arrive. All of his sons were killed in it. So were his nephews. He came out of it as the last person alive who knew what his family knew, with no one left to give it to.

No one in my lineage knows his name. He was called Bushi, which means warrior. That is all that came down.

He was short and built like a block. Not muscular, and not stocky either. A lifetime of hard labour and harder training had made him something closer to living steel, and the sun had turned his skin to old leather. He was clean shaven. He wore ordinary Okinawan clothes, and he had no shyness at all about bright prints.

By the end of the war he was drinking and picking fights with American soldiers. Armed ones. It was not bravado. He had stopped minding how it ended.

One night two soldiers walked into one of those fights. Temur, born in Mongolia, and Patrick, who had boxed.

Temur was stocky, five foot six, built low and round. In his fighting years he was somewhere north of two hundred pounds and nearly impossible to move. Patrick was taller and lighter, pale, freckled, green-eyed, with dark brown hair. Temur said he had a steely look, and carried himself with the wounded pride of a kicked cat. He was quicker than he looked, and he had no answer at all to being wrestled.

Neither was looking for a teacher. They stepped in because an old man was about to be badly hurt by men half his age.

He turned on them instead.

Drunk, old and outnumbered, he was still dangerous, and putting him down took work. Patrick managed it. As far as Bushi was concerned it had never happened before. Still drunk, he challenged them both on the spot. Then honour required that he arrive sober the next day and go through with it.

Noon, on the beach outside the barracks. Either of them, or both together.

They came.

He beat them.

The men watching called it a draw, and everyone present understood what that meant. What Bushi had not expected was the difficulty. He had gone looking for a fight and found the first two men in years who had shown him something other than fear. They had tried to save his life the night before, and met him honestly the next day.

He had no heirs. He made a decision.

He taught them everything he had. There was no school, no ranks, and nothing softened. Temur said that for a long time at the beginning, he and Patrick together could not push the old man off balance. He could drop shockingly low to grapple and never lose his feet. Temur called him perfection in motion, and I have never known how much of that was accuracy and how much was forty years of memory.

It lasted at least a year, likely longer. When they were leaving Okinawa, Bushi acknowledged them as the men carrying it now. He was a calligrapher and a poet, so he made them each a document by hand. By every account they were beautiful. Temur's was lost somewhere on the way home. He never seemed to mind. I do.

Patrick returned to civilian life, settled in Manhattan, and opened a pizzeria. Whatever he knew appears to have stopped there.

Temur kept it. He lived on the move, went by more than one name, and said almost nothing about where he had been.

III

The old man on the sidewalk

I met him because I was losing a fight.

I was in high school. An old man waded in and threw a group of older boys around. He was somewhere in his eighties, five foot six, with a moustache sitting on his lip like two apostrophes, wearing a flower-print shirt.

I thanked him. He did not want thanks. He wanted to know why someone who knew how to fight had not been fighting. I told him I was afraid of hurting someone. He made me prove I could fight before he would agree to teach me anything.

He taught me for about ten years. The last two years of school, four years of university, then a few visits a year until it tapered off. He taught the way he had been taught, which was the way Bushi taught, and which belonged to that time and that place. I have chosen not to teach that way. What he gave me was the whole system, and he withheld nothing.

Near the end I asked whether he had anything left to teach me.

He said there was one more lesson.

Then he attacked me at full force. He was in his nineties and still sharp, and he had overseen every movement I knew, so he read my intentions before I finished forming them. But I knew him as well, and I was young.

I beat him, and it was not close.

He looked at me for a moment. Then he told me he had nothing left to teach, that I was the master now, and he left. I never saw or heard from him again.

Years later I learned, secondhand, that he had died.