Wars are fought in all seasons, but the best time to win one is in the summer. On August 8, 1979 at 1:46 in the afternoon, Nishizawa Eiji led his force of warrior priests, the Ittoushin, up the steps of the Emperor's Palace in Tokyo, Japan and placed the true emperor back on his throne. The false emperor whose family had reigned for 100 years was thrown in prison where he died two days later of blood poisoning. Nishizawa's army was transformed into the Imperial Police Force tasked with protecting the capital city.

Among those spiritually-gifted soldiers was Onoe Satsuma, a 17-year-old boy bright-eyed with the cause of freedom and honor for the oppressed citizens of his nation. Onoe was a skilled swordsman. Everyone said so. Even the men much older than him. They also said he was sharp-witted and honorable and quick with a laugh. When he was 26, Onoe became Chief Superintendent of the IPF's 3rd unit.

When he was 34, Onoe went with two of his men to investigate a murder in District 26D. The deceased was Furusaki Okoto, who it was said owned at least 45% of all debt in Tokyo. He had people who were very good at collecting money, but it seemed that the amount owed to him only ever increased. He also had a daughter.

Furusaki Shiori was 23 years old. She wore midnight blue kimono and spent her days in the garden beneath the maple tree, where she wrote poems about the world she couldn't see outside her father's walls. She was engaged to her father's business partner who ate sushi with his hands, grunted at her when she offered to wash his feet, and was missing three fingers. Onoe Satsuma dressed in a sharp uniform, used formal speech with her, and had beautiful creases at the corners of his eyes when he smiled.

Fursaki Shiori became Onoe Shiori seven months after her father's death. On December 3, 1985, Onoe Katsumi was born. Two days later, Satsuma handed in his official resignation to Nishizawa Eiji and began working as the manager of a shoe factory instead. Shiori could never wash the shoe smell out of his work clothes and the workers were constantly complaining about the new machinery the emperor had brought from Europe, but he no longer worried about not making it home to his wife and daughter.

Katsumi liked to hear her Daddy's stories about the days when he was a soldier. She liked to watch the children's programs on television about the revolution. She listened when Satsuma complained of the inaccuracy in the cop dramas that came on late at night when she was supposed to be asleep. And she remembered because she remembered everything.

Shiori dressed her daughter in beautiful yukata that Katsumi tore into bandages for her “wounded comrades.” Satsuma told Shiori that it was a phase, that many little girls wanted to be more like boys for a while. Their daughter would grow out of it and become a beautiful young woman someday. Shiori believed him and let him teach Katsumi how to use a sword and how to fight even when there were no swords to be had. Most of all, Satsuma taught his daughter about honor, loyalty, courage, and the principles of the Ittoushin that Nishizawa Eiji had set forth and expected all of his men to live by.

Ittoushin. One sword and one heart. It meant that they would fight together for the same cause always. Katsumi loved the word. She loved her father's faded old captain's uniform. She loved to point to the officers in the street and shout “ITTOUSHIN!!” at the top of her lungs. She loved to tell Satsuma that she was going to become a captain of the IPF when she grew up and see his face crinkle into a smile.

One day when Katsumi was six, she came home from school in tears. Her teacher had told her that she could not join the IPF because she was a girl. It didn't matter that she was taller than all the other girls, ran faster than the boys, and could sing more songs from memory than the rest of the class put together. She had been born a girl, so she could not join the Ittoushin, and therefore would never be a member of the IPF.

“Sensei was lying, right Mommy?” Katsumi demanded.

Shiori pursed her lips and pulled her daughter into a hug.

“I think that someday you will be the best IPF captain ever,” she said.

Katsumi was unsure of this, so she double-checked with her father when he got home from work. He agreed.

“Your teacher's right. There are no girls in the Ittoushin. So you'll just have to be the first,” he told her.

From then on, Katsumi became more determined than ever. She practiced her martial arts constantly. She read more books than anyone else in her class, and discovered she had a talent.

“I can remember everything,” she announced to her father one day.

“What do you mean by that?” he said.

“I mean, everything I read, I remember. I don't even have to try. It's all just stored there in little files and I can remember it. I thought everyone did, and I always thought they were stupid for waiting until the day before the test to bother reading the text book. I never realized they were reviewing because they'd forgotten.”

Satsuma and Shiori did not take this seriously until one day Katsumi recited twenty-nine pages of Prince Genji to prove it. She was eight years old.

Katsumi did not have any friends. She did her best to be kind to everyone because that was what her father taught her, but the other children thought she was too intense.

On the first day of middle school, Katsumi met Mizuki Rika. The other was quiet, timid, and had rich parents. Katsumi didn't notice her much until she was walking home from school. Three of the other girls from their class had cornered Rika behind the school building.

Katsumi was suspended from school for two days because of fighting. Her mother frowned and made her scrub the entire house during her suspension. Satsuma listened to her story.

“While you're in school, your classmates are your comrades, Katsumi,” he told her. “Don't allow strife to enter between yourself and your comrades.”

When Katsumi returned to school, Rika was waiting for her. She came with Katsumi to speak to the other girls. This was Katsumi's first experience with just how difficult people could be. The girls did not want to talk to her.

It took two weeks before Katsumi finally opened up conversation with one of them over a bunson burner in home ec. Within a few days, the ice was melted between all of them and Katsumi's life returned to its balance with one difference: she had a best friend now.

Shortly before their middle school graduation, tragedy struck in the form of a 16-wheeler. The autopsy showed the truck driver died of a heart attack while at the wheel. His rogue truck then ran straight over the tiny car that Satsuma and Shiori were driving home from the theater.

There were no relatives to send Katsumi to, so she was to live on the savings her parents had left for her. These were not much, but enough to get her through high school if she was careful. The problem was that Katsumi was not careful. It is nearly impossible for a fifteen-year-old girl to be careful with her spending when there is no adult to guide her. She began to rack up some debts that would have shocked even her yakuza grandfather.

By the time she reached high school graduation, there was no money left and the only valuable things Katsumi had not sold were her father's sword and her parents' house. Rika was going to medical school to become a doctor like her parents, but Katsumi sold the house and found a job.

Three years later, and she was working as a dojo instructor in the daytime and a convenience store attendant at night. In between times, she ran from debt collectors, mostly employed by her mother's once-fiance. She had learned to live within her means by then, but there was no hope of paying off the debts she had earned herself in high school at the rate she was going.

She lived in a one-room apartment with tatami mats that smelled of rice wine when the weather was bad. Contrary to her father's early predictions, she had not become what anyone other than her parents and those who knew her well would call a beautiful young woman.

A year ago, someone had broken her nose in a sparring match and she hadn't been able to pay to have it fixed properly. Her thick black hair was usually unbrushed or just pulled back into a ponytail. She never wore makeup, and her clothes consisted of her martial arts attire, large t-shirts, holey sweaters, baggy jeans, and stained sweats. The only thing that could be said for her was that she bathed and brushed her teeth regularly. Because she couldn't pay to get treatment if she got sick from poor hygiene, she said.

The owner of the dojo was Yamada-sensei. He was a member of Onoe Satsuma's unit in the IPF at one point, but now he was too arthritic to lift a sword. He liked the sound of the students' feet on the dojo floor and the smell of persimmons.

Yamada-sensei's son Daisuke was the main instructor. He had asked Katsumi to marry him no less than fifteen times and she had refused him every time. She didn't fancy having Yamada as a last name, she told him. Yamada Daisuke liked the way Katsumi chewed holes in the cuffs of her sweaters to put her thumbs through, but he didn't mind that she refused his proposals.

At the convenience store there was Fusako-san. She ran the ledgers and was often working late in the back office at the same time as Katsumi. She had four children and never enough time to make lunches for all of them, so she took pre-packaged meals as part of her wages.

The other part timers were Moriguchi and Sakurai. Moriguchi worked the afternoon shift. He studied for college entrance exams during his breaks. Sakurai worked the graveyard shift. He chewed gum and read the magazines to stay awake. There was a mysterious girl called Orihara Nanase who worked the morning shift. Katsumi had never met her.

Once a week, Katsumi saw Niijima-san, the owner, for payday. He wore a very old suit and smoked sour cigars that gave him a cough. They helped him not to drink, he said.

It was on July 22, 2006 that Katsumi's life changed. Sometimes, she would go to stay over at Rika's apartment, and this was one of those days.

The AC was what tempted her over. July was especially hot that year, and Katsumi could not afford to purchase an air-conditioning unit for her own apartment. When she went to the dojo for morning training, Daisuke told her he had heard it would be up to 100 degrees that day, which meant it would be in the high 80s still that night.

After the dojo, Katsumi returned to her apartment and collected her toothbrush and a clean pair of underwear, the only things she needed to stay the night away from home. Then she went to her shift at the convenience store.

Moriguchi was reading about the Bakumatsu War, when the Tokugawa family removed Emperor Meiji from the throne to prevent him from opening trade with the Occidental Nations, an act which they felt would destroy Japanese tradition for all future generations. Katsumi listened to Moriguchi recite these facts to her as she clocked in and put on her work apron. She corrected him on several points (the head of the Tokugawa clan had taken Meiji's third consort for his wife, not the Empress herself), and sent him on his way.

The first half of the life-changing event was when a tall, middle-aged man with a long scar on the side of his face came into the shop at 9:04 PM and purchased a bottle of milk with serial number 44916-85. Which just goes to show that you never know what kinds of things are going to prove important. Katsumi remembered the event well because the man seemed like he was trying to hide his face from the security camera. She thought she might have to take him down, but he just bought his milk and left in the end.

The next half was thirty minutes later when Katsumi finished her shift and began her walk to the bus stop. She was two blocks away from the convenience store when she heard raised voices and the sound of breaking glass from an alley. The normal reaction would have been to continue walking, perhaps a bit more quickly. Katsumi had never been normal.

In the light of the miniature flashlight she kept clipped to her key ring, she found a smashed milk bottle lying on the alley floor. The neck was mostly in tact as bottle necks tend to be long after the rest of the bottle has returned to the sands of time. She could still read the serial number printed down near the place where the neck bulged out into the rest of the bottle: 44916-85. There was something dark on part of the broken edge.

Katsumi picked up the bottle neck and settled it in her backpack, wrapped carefully in her shirt for Kendo practice. Then she caught the subway to Rika's place.

“So, you think the man with the scar left your shop, drank his milk, and then got in a fight with someone a few blocks away?” Rika said, pouring her friend a cup of tea.

“It makes sense,” Katsumi insisted. “Look: this bit right here on the edge. That's totally blood! And he was definitely acting shifty in the store.”

“Well, why don't you take it to the police tomorrow. It might prove vital evidence for an otherwise impossible murder case,” Rika said, half-heartedly. “What do you think of this top I got today?”

She twirled so that Katsumi could admire the floaty, lacy tank top.

“It's nice,” Katsumi said. “It makes your boobs look huge.”

Rika frowned. “It wasn't supposed to. I just thought it would be comfortable in this heat.”

“Everything makes your boobs look huge, Rika.”

This was an opinion Katsumi had held since tenth grade when it became clear that she was never going to catch up to her friend in this area. Rika had grown up surprisingly curvy with long, thin white limbs. Someone mistook Katsumi for Rika's boyfriend at least once a month, which Katsumi suspected was the reason Rika never invited her to come when she went clubbing with her college friends. Though that also could have been because Katsumi didn't drink and had no interest in sex at the moment.

“You should fall in love again already,” Katsumi told her friend through a mouthful of rice crackers. “You always seem like you're wilting when you're not in love.”

“It's not like you can just go to supermarket and say, 'Hey, that one looks good. Give me him.' It takes a lot of effort to find someone worth falling in love with,” Rika said with another frown.

“Really? You sure seem to be good at it.”

“I've only been in love with. . . ,” she counted on her fingers, “six guys since we became friends.”

“You're lucky, though,” Katsumi sighed. “I can't fall in love or my father's spirit will return to haunt the poor boy for the rest of his life.”

“Is that your new excuse, then?”

“I wonder, if I help them solve the mystery murder case, do you think that maybe I could join the IPF?”

“I have no idea. I think they'll still want you to get your criminology degree.”

“My father never did.”

“Those were different times. You can't just enter the professional scene without a degree anymore. My father says so.”

“Hmm,” Katsumi said.

That night, Katsumi lay on Rika's extra futon and dreamed her mother was tending a herd of cows with glass teeth while her father cut bamboo into paper thin slices with his sword.