Then she brought Glorious Victory Unsought crashing down on his head, chopping him in half.It was the sixtieth time she’d done this. Her forearms and shoulders burned, but she had forty more to go.This was her second kenjutsu drill of the morning. For the first hundred strikes, she’d imagined Joko Daishi instead, leering at her from behind his demon mask. Those had been kesagiri strikes, slashing him open from his left shoulder to his right hip. Just like the shomenuchi she was using to bisect Kusama, the hardest part was stopping the enormous blade before it chopped the hardwood floor to bits.She practiced on the top floor of her mother’s apartment building, in a large studio with wheeled, folding Ping-Pong tables arrayed against one wall. On weekday afternoons, Mariko’s mother came up here to beat the pants off of anyone who dared to face her in table tennis. Other residents used this space for morning tai chi classes and other group activities. A few days ago Mariko had invited herself over, in part because it was important to visit family in troubling times, and in part because she wanted more time for kenjutsu practice than Hosokawa-sensei would allow her at the dojo.
