The Rabbit Began Playing Samurai

In Rabbit Village, a bell rings. When it rings the village goes silent and families drop into holes in the ground. Usazo's family had grown used to living that way. One night, at the bottom of the hole, his son asks: are we going to stay down here forever? Usazo has no answer.

Selling out a whole cart of radishes at market leaves him two days' money. At that same market a fox, Yahei of Kitsunoya, keeps a stall — "Empty Houses of Dog Village." A dojo is the name you show the dogs; what you actually collect is bed money from rabbits. Yahei works his abacus and sells the whole arrangement, identity included. Back home, over the handbill, Usazo's daughter says: father, you are not a samurai. He cannot answer her. Instead his eye settles on the small line in the corner of the page — *like* a samurai. That is where the question quietly changes.

The honest road closes fast. One old suit of armour costs five million kan, with helmet, repairs, signboard, bedding and paperwork all counted separately. No one will lend to them. In the end the shell of a samurai is not something they buy: fleeing snakes in the forest, his wife falls into an old pit and climbs out carrying what lay beside a corpse — rusted armour, a broken sword, and gold.

It was the daughter who noticed the blade was broken. Usazo pushed it back into the scabbard and made himself a rule: I simply won't draw it. At the smith's he cannot lift even the display sword, cuts his hand on it, and settles for a black-lacquered wooden one with no edge at all. A month later Yahei delivers the papers, the travel permit, and the key to a house in Dog Village. The son throws down his carved toy samurai and starts calling his father a hero. The family sells the burrow and the field for whatever they will fetch — and with them, any way back.

At the checkpoint out of the village there are snakes: vertical pupils under the straw hats, forked tongues. What they read is not documents but the smell of money. Everything goes onto the inspection table — the armour, the scabbard with its broken sword, the black wooden blade, the papers. And still, that morning, the family crosses. On the slope beyond, in armour that does not fit him, Usazo announces: from today, I am the Rabbit Samurai. No one corrects him. Behind the four figures walking away, a great shadow begins to follow their footprints.