On the fourth floor of the library at half past six, the reading lamps over the carrels were on and the overhead fluorescents were off. Ryō was at the third carrel from the end of the religious-studies stacks. The Lankavatara Sūtra lay open on the desk before him, and his own notebook was open beside it. He had been there for two hours.

He wrote a line in the margin of the notebook in pencil. The hand was small and precise, and the line was in Japanese. He set the pencil down.

In the Sūtra, on the page he had been reading for thirty minutes, the passage named the relationship between the perceiver and the perceived as the same relationship — one continuous coupling, one act of mind. He had read it four times that night already. He read it a fifth.

The notebook beside it lay open to a page near the front. At the top, in his own English in fountain-pen ink: Provisional draft: Intention and Suffering in the Mahāyāna Tradition. Below the title, in pencil, was a paragraph he had been rewriting for nine months. He had not shown the paper to anyone.

He turned the Sūtra page. The next passage was on the cessation of suffering through the cessation of clinging. He read it once. He marked his place with a thin paper bookmark and closed the book.

His laptop, on the desk beside the Sūtra, chimed once. He looked at the screen. One message. The sender’s name in the bracket: Watanabe, Kenji.

Subject: Spring lecture series.

Ryō — the spring lecture series has an opening for the third week of April. Mahāyāna ethics, your work, two hours, Q&A after. The students would benefit. So would I. Let me know.

— K.

He read the email. He read it a second time. He closed the laptop, and he did not reply, and he did not delete it either.

He put the Sūtra and the notebook into his bag, alongside a smaller volume the bag had been carrying. He stood up. He returned the table-top books to their shelf two rows behind. The library at this hour was mostly empty — two undergraduates at the long tables on the other side of the floor, both with headphones in, neither of them registering him.

He nodded to the desk attendant on the way out, a graduate student in another department whose name Ryō did not know. The attendant nodded back without speaking.

The walk to his apartment was three blocks. The campus had emptied. A single shuttle passed him going the other way, and the air was cold enough to register at the back of his throat. He kept his hands in his coat pockets and did not slow until he reached his door.

---

He keyed the lock and stepped in, removing his shoes at the genkan and placing them parallel against the wall.

The apartment was small and ordered. One low desk against the wall. One chair. A futon laid out on a tatami pad against the far wall, made. A small kitchen with everything put away in cupboards. The bathroom door open onto a small bathroom. There were no books on the floor. The single shelf above the desk held eight books, spines aligned. The kitchen was empty of dishes.

In the corner of the main room was a small wooden shelf at knee-height. On it, three objects.

The first was a porcelain Buddha no larger than a child’s hand. The second was an incense holder with the stub of a stick from that morning, the ash arrested partway down. The third was a small wooden frame.

In the frame, behind glass, was a black-and-white photograph: Ayumi at a window. The light was coming from outside her, washing her face. The photograph was from the end of her last visit home before art school, a year and a half before the funeral. Hiroshi had taken it. Ryō had not changed which photograph sat on the altar.

Ryō knelt on the tatami in front of the shelf. His knees touched the mat. His hands rested on his thighs.

He looked at the photograph for a long moment. He did not cry. He had not cried in some time.

He bowed. The bow was the formal one, the forehead near the floor. He stayed there for several seconds.

He sat back up.

“Ayumi,” he said.

He did not say anything else.

He stood up and went to the chest of drawers against the wall opposite the futon. The drawers were folded with intention — each garment in its place, dark cottons and wools. He pulled out a dark cotton shirt, dark trousers, dark socks, and changed into them. The clothes he had been wearing went into a small woven basket by the door for laundry.

At the small low mirror beside the chest, he tied his hair back. The hair was medium-long, kept clean. The tie was the same plain black band he had used for two years.

He knelt again, this time on the tatami beside the futon. He pulled a long flat case out from underneath. The case was wood, lacquered black — the only object in the apartment that wasn’t utilitarian. He set it on the tatami before him and opened it.

Inside, on a bed of folded silk, was Shizuka (静) — stillness.

The hilt was wrapped in dark cord. The wood of the handle was dark, the cord was darker still, and the grip was worn at the right places. There was no blade. There hadn’t been one, in this case, in living memory.

The kanji 四苦協 (the four sufferings, met with unity) were visible on the tang, etched dark into the metal. He looked at them as he had looked at them many times. They were the inscription a Buddhist ancestor had added to the family blade five generations ago. They were the name he had taken for himself when he came back from the funeral.

He lifted Shizuka from the case. The hilt was balanced as he was used to its being balanced. He pulled a leather belt from the back of the case — broad, dark, plain. There was no sheath. The saya had stayed at his father’s house after Ayumi’s funeral, and a sheath without a blade to sheathe was a thing without purpose. He put the belt on. Threaded it through the loops of his trousers. Passed Shizuka through the belt at his left hip, handle up. The tsuba — wider than the grip — seated against the leather, and the hilt held. The grip stood above the belt where his right hand could cross to it inside the jacket’s open front. The carry was what his father’s father had worn in the photograph above the dining-room hutch, less the saya.

Kyō put on the work jacket over the belt. He checked the seat at his left hip with two fingers. He picked up the bag with the Sūtra and the smaller volume. He locked the apartment behind him.

The walk to the bus stop was six blocks. He passed no one he registered.

The bus ran south. He paid the fare in cash, took a window seat near the back, opened his bag, and took out the Sūtra. The bus was half-empty.

He read. The passage that night was on action and consequence — the way an act, once made, altered the field of possibility for the actor and for those around the actor; the way the actor could not stand outside what they had done. He had read it before. He read it again.

He marked one line with his fingernail along the margin. He did not write in the Sūtra. He only marked.

The bus reached his stop. He closed the book, returned it to the bag, and stood up.

---

The side street was dark. The restaurant on the ground floor had been closed since nine. The fire escape on the back of the building was bolted to the brick of the alley wall. Kyō stood beneath it for a moment, listening.

The kitchen window of the second-floor apartment was open a crack. There was a faint sound from inside — a television playing what he could almost identify as a sports broadcast, Spanish-language. A man’s voice occasionally responding to it.

Kyō climbed the fire escape silently. The metal was cold under his hands. He stopped at the second-floor landing.

Through the kitchen window: the dealer alone at a small table, his back partly to the window, eating from a bowl. A phone was face-up on the table beside the bowl. The TV was in the next room, the volume low. The dealer was in his thirties, stocky, in a t-shirt and sweatpants. There was a handgun on the counter behind him, two arms’ length from where he was sitting.

Kyō slid the window the rest of the way open, slowly, soundless. He climbed through. He lowered himself onto the linoleum without making the floor creak.

The dealer had registered something. The cold air, perhaps. The small change in the room’s acoustic. He started to turn. He started to reach for the handgun on the counter.

Kyō drew Shizuka in one motion. His right hand crossed his body to the hilt at his left hip, and he lifted it free of the belt with the soft friction of cord on leather. As the hilt cleared, a faint edge manifested along the geometric line where a blade would be — pale, present, the air visibly different along that line. By the time the dealer had turned his head, the edge was at his neck.

The dealer froze.

“Wait,” he said.

Kyō did not speak. With his free hand, he lifted the handgun off the counter. He slid out the magazine. He put the magazine in his coat pocket. He set the unloaded gun back on the counter. He stepped back from the dealer one step. The faint edge stayed out, the hilt held at center.

He directed the dealer with the hilt — not with words — to stand and turn. The dealer stood. The dealer turned. Kyō produced from his coat pocket a length of cord, prepared for the purpose. He bound the dealer’s hands behind his back. He sat the dealer down at the table. The dealer did not resist. The dealer’s eyes had not left the line where Shizuka’s edge was.

Kyō circled behind the chair. The carotid pressure was the technique he had been taught for this. He applied it. The dealer’s body began to slacken at four seconds, and he slumped at eight. Kyō released at ten. He supported the dealer’s body to keep it from striking the table. He lowered the head onto the bound forearms.

The dealer breathed. There was a pulse at the neck where Kyō checked with two fingers.

He opened the second drawer on the counter side. The folder was where he had been told it would be — three nights of preparation in the alley below, watching through the window with binoculars. He took the folder. Inside: a single sheet of paper. Six names. Three crossed out in heavy ink. Three current. One of the three circled.

He closed the folder and put it inside his work jacket, against his chest.

He passed Shizuka back through the belt at his hip. The faint edge dimmed into nothing as the tsuba seated against the leather.

He climbed back out the kitchen window and pulled the window most of the way closed behind him.

Down the fire escape. Into the alley.

Under the streetlight at the corner of the alley and the side street, he stopped. He opened the folder. He read the circled name. He had not had it before. He memorized it. Closed the folder. Slipped it back inside the jacket.

He walked toward the bus stop.

The bus going north was emptier than the southbound had been. Three other passengers, none of them looking up. Kyō took a window seat near the back. He took the Sūtra from his bag and opened it to the place his fingernail had marked.

He read until the bus reached his stop.