Work Text:
“We need the wind turbine to fall exactly here,” says Lupin, pointing at the diorama spread out over the kitchen table.
“On the ketchup packet,” says Jigen.
“I’ve explained the ketchup packet already. The ketchup packet is key to the whole plan.”
“Right, I’m just saying how come it’s a ketchup packet? You 3D-printed the butler but the key to the whole damn heist is a ketchup packet?”
“I made her tits bigger in the model, which is an end in and of itself.” He throws his arms out dramatically. “Maybe this also took some time from other parts of the diorama, but are we not all human? Do we not all slave under the yoke of a finite time on this world, with our infinite needs? Goemon, back me up here.”
“About the butler’s tits?” asks Jigen.
“About this finite world! And time like an ever-flowing stream &c! And maybe also the tits, yeah.”
“A hawk that watches the sunset allows the mouse to escape,” says Goemon, and leaves in a dignified sweep of fabric that's more than the conversation deserves.
“Sometimes I don’t get that guy at all,” Jigen says.
“What’s to not get?” says Lupin. “He’s our Goemon.”
—
Here is one beginning:
The ninja village does not live in the past. It lives in the same present that ought to be elsewhere, and it is the rest of the world that is wrong.
This deep into the mountains, the sun sets early and rises late. They gather the grasshoppers from the fields and cook them in sweet wine and shoyu. Grandmother has a remedy for every ill. They do not always work so well as what they have out in the world, so maybe there are a few small refrigerators of vials and baskets with little bottles, but besides that Grandmother’s remedies are the best.
And the children, when they are not training, because they start early in the ninja village, play in the streams and the fields and the forest. As childhood begins to fade, as legs lengthen and chubby cheeks thin down, the play goes away but the training does not.
Here they train. And they are the best. And one of their number is the very best of them all.
He picks up a sword and enters the world.
—
Here is another beginning:
He sits in his dark room and watches movies. Mostly samurai movies. Sometimes his niece visits (how old is he?) and threatens to throw his movies into a fire. There is no one else.
The samurai were noble. They followed an honorable code and exemplified the Japanese spirit. The samurai were horrors. They were drunkards and bullies and feudal lords who killed for sport. Was this also the Japanese spirit? There was no bushido until it was written into the public imagination, after the samurai were already dead or old. He learns this, in books. He prefers his movies.
He watches The Human Condition, all ten hours. He watches Rashomon. He watches pre-Code gangster movies from the United States, and he watches Les Aventures d'Arsène Lupin. He watches Seven Samurai, over and over again.
Why would you sit there and want something and do nothing to bring it about. Why does it matter if something was never real when you could make it real?
He picks up a sword and enters the world.
—
“I’ve marked everything under tension in red,” says Lupin, placing more ketchup packets to hold down the curling edges of the diagram. “And noted all the weights and materials. But I can’t tell you how fast the wind will be and I can’t stop it turning, not with Zenigata around. He’d spot that. So it’s up to you to make sure the blades are in exactly the right position when it hits the ground.”
“And you will be…at the ketchup packet?”
Lupin smiles. “I’ve got to be, for this to work. You’re the best in the whole world, Goemon.”
—
Ishikawa Goemon was boiled alive for his crimes. That much did happen.
He flew on a kite to steal the golden scales from Nagoya Castle. Unless he didn’t, and that is only a story. Unless he did, because the story of it has lasted so long, and what can any mere lack of historical record say against something as real as that.
Ishikawa Goemon has been more story than man for over four hundred years.
The name is there for the taking, if you are brave enough.
—
Is Goemon a samurai? Is that a noble thing to be?
Does it matter?
He holds his sword at his side and closes his eyes. He knows the flesh of the turbine, its churning offal, its metal skin, its humming spinal cord.
There is a flash.
And the giant falls.