Samurai Tales by Romulus Hillsborough

Author:Romulus Hillsborough
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781462900817
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Published: 2013-03-22T02:26:10+00:00

The condemned man’s arms were tightly bound to his torso with heavy rope. Another rope was tied around his neck. He was blindfolded with a piece of soft white paper cloth, folded in two and tied behind his head with a small cord. He wore only a thin loincloth of white cotton, despite the biting wind that blew in from the north on this cold, clear morning in late December. The prisoner had just been led by four outcasts into the official execution grounds in the Kodenma-cho district of Edo.

Yamada Asaemon VII stood near a sturdy wooden post, planted deeply into the rich, dark earth. Near the post were two bamboo poles tied together perpendicularly. One of the poles had been driven into the ground so that it was parallel to and some five feet away from the wooden post. The other pole was parallel to the ground, at a height just below Yamada’s shoulders.

The sword-tester studied the prisoner carefully, as a bullfighter might a bull in his pen, or a butcher a pig as he prepared for the slaughter, to evaluate the degree of difficulty of the cutting test he was about to perform. He rarely performed a cutting test on a live person, but the owner of the sword, which he now held in his right hand, was a high-ranking Bakufu official whose special request he could not readily refuse. His client believed that a test conducted on a living person yielded a more accurate assessment of the cutting capacity of a blade than could be had on a dead body.

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