Author’s note: I am attempting to write a short novel (entitled The Seven Forms of Infiltration) that takes its inspiration from manga, Japanese comic books; the excerpt below is the first few pages of this novel. The heroine is a young woman who is training to be a ninja. For artistic effects, I use actual (translated) quotes from ancient historical ninja training manuals (set off in italics in the text and labeled) such as The Shinobi Hiden, The Koka Ryu Ninjitsu Densho and the Yoshimori Hyakushu. These training manuals have been collected in a book entitled The Secret Traditions of the Shinobi: Hattori Hanzen’s Shinobi Hiden and Other Ninja Scrolls (edited and translated by Antony Cummins and Yoshie Minami) (Berkely CA: Blue Snake Books, 2012).

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The Seven Forms of Infiltration (by Marianne Kimura)

Shinobi from the first have been utilized by generals since ancient times with a great emphasis. It is the case that one man and his strategy can destroy tens of thousands of enemies attain virtue and achievements, or make his way where there is no path. [~from The Shinobi Hiden, Vol. II]

What were the merchants talking about?
Hers was an assignment without any point.
And what if the fortune-tellers were wrong?

Dressed as a young monk, with a shaved head and a pointed flat straw hat, Sumi no longer really looked like a woman, though she thought, perhaps, that she still walked like a woman, with a faint swaying motion. It was frankly both impossible and exhausting for her to convincingly walk like a man. The sauntering splayed legs and large arm movements of men were beyond her skill.

The merchants, nicely dressed in dark and immaculate kimonos with crests, wandered away before she could ascertain what they were saying.

Feeling lost and disappointed she wandered down the dusty street.

The Seven Forms of Infiltration:
Through temples and shrines
As a medicine peddler
As a craftsman or merchant
As a sake merchant or farmer
Through exploiting the arts of performance [of all manners]
Through love
Through greed or desire
[~ from The Koka Ryu Ninjutsu Densho]

A woman was rarely selected to be a ninja. Lacking physical strength, women could not compete with male ninjas. Yet she had been chosen. Somehow, perhaps because her father and her elder brother were ninjas, she had also been recruited.

“Sometimes we have a job that needs a woman, you understand”, the local man organizing staff in an informal way for the warlords and generals and other military men had said to her. She had known all that. Growing up in a ninja family, it was clear that women sometimes, though quite rarely, became ninjas.

He wanted her to sign a paper and agree to undertake ninja training at his school, for a fee, to be paid by her family, of course.

Though she hadn’t asked, he continued to explain further. “You know a woman ninja is called a kunoichi”, he said, “but do you know why?”

He formed a hole with his thumb and forefinger.

She looked at him in puzzlement.

Then he calmly traced, with his pointer finger, some invisible yet familiar figures on the black lacquer table: くノ一 “ku, no, ichi” he said and then traced them on top of each other: 女, he wrote: “onna”.
“Well, of course I know that a female ninja is called a kunoichi, I’m not so stupid”, she said.
“Then maybe you are also clever enough to know that ku is nine?”
“Yes”
“And ichi is one”
“True”
“And nine plus one is?”
“Ten”.
“And, so you see, whereas men such as myself have only nine holes in our body, you, as a woman, are blessed with an additional one, a tenth one. That is what makes a kunoichi”, he said matter-of-factly.

She raised her eyebrows in comprehension mixed with surprise. It was new information to her.

“Use it as a weapon”, he advised with a nonchalant, careless air, unrolling the scroll and glancing at it. His fingers were elegant, long and slender, his movements economical yet graceful.

He must be a ninja too, she thought. Of course he wouldn’t reveal that secret to her until she was one too.

She remained silent, watching him hold the document open and flat so she could stamp it.

And she had stamped it. Her conscription was sealed.

When heading toward the sun or moon, you have no visible shadows ahead, but if you have light from behind, your shadow will project forward. [~ from The Yoshimori Hyakushu]

The sun was so hot. She couldn’t bear it. Monks robes were quite thick and the outer robe was black.

She was assigned to discover why, for years, fortune-tellers had singled out this little non-descript town.

When put into trances, various fortune-tellers, by which I mean practitioners of palmistry, card-reading, stone-casting, mind-reading and other such esoteric crafts, had often, too often for it to be random chance, muttered, in their theatrical croaking, halting, lisping or high-pitched voices, the name of this town. Why?

The local warlord and his administration had even become curious and had spent fortunes questioning the fortune-tellers more deeply and had even hired scholars to work on the mysterious project.

But no definitive answer was forthcoming, though there were rumors that there was almost certainly an unimaginable amount of gold secreted somewhere either in or near the town. Some lord, one scholar was certain the man hailed from Shinshu, had been attacked by mountain bandits and his treasure had been stolen is what generally had been concluded, though no official reports recording any theft had been heard.

Of course, everyone whispered that, “no one would discuss such an important secret officially even if they knew it, would they?”

People agreed that the lord himself would have been too embarrassed to admit that any of his gold had been stolen, though it was more likely that he had been killed during the attack.

Now, all because of this vague, ridiculous and unsubstantiated gossip, Sumi fumed, she was suffering in the hot sun in a town in the middle of nowhere.

[To be continued…..]

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To read of Marianne’s novel success, click here. To read of her thoughts on ninjas and goddesses, click here. For an extract from her novel, The Hamlet Paradigm, press here.