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drowned, he will have water inside him,” Ito answered. “But in order to know that, we must cut him open.”
    Sano stared at Ito, appalled. Dissection of a human body, as well as any other procedure even remotely associated with foreign science, was just as illegal as it had been at the time of Ito’s arrest. Perhaps the authorities no longer cared if Ito broke the law, but what about him? If the wrong people found out, he would not only lose his position, he would be banished, never to see his home or family again. He started to protest. But Dr. Ito’s gaze locked with his, freezing him into silence.
I risked everything to seek forbidden
truths
, the shrewd eyes seemed to say.
How far are you willing to go?
Sano’s mind recoiled from the unspoken challenge. He tried to conjure up images of his father, of Magistrate Ogyu. He reminded himself of his obligation to them. But instead he saw the
doshin
’s assistants beating a helpless beggar. He felt again the elation of the moment when he’d corrected an injustice and set an investigation back on the road to truth.
    â€œAll right,” he said.
    As soon as the words left his mouth, he realized that he had committed himself to this when he’d agreed to view the body. He’d taken the first step, and there had never been any choice about the second.
    At a nod from Ito, Mura went to the cabinet. From it he took a wooden tray of tools—steel saws, long razors, and a collection of knives and instruments such as Sano had never seen before. They must have been Dutch in origin. Mura set the tray on the table beside the body, then went to the cabinet again and brought out a white cloth. This he tied over the lower half of his face.
    His practiced movements told Sano that this was not the first dissection ever performed here. As did a bamboo pipe running from a hole in the table down to a drain in the floor. The room had been prepared for Dr. Ito’s experiments.
    Mura turned Noriyoshi’s body onto its back. He picked up a slender knife and held it over Noriyoshi’s chest. Apparently he, not Ito, would do the actual cutting. Despite his unconventional views, Ito followed the tradition of letting the
eta
handle the dead.
    Sano watched with horrified fascination as the blade sliced cleanly into Noriyoshi’s skin and moved down the center from the base of the collarbone to the navel.
    â€œNo blood?” he asked, relieved to be spared the sight of it. The raw, pink edges of the cut looked bad enough. His heart was racing; his hands went cold and clammy.
    â€œThe dead do not bleed,” Dr. Ito replied.
    Now Mura made several cuts perpendicular to the first. He inserted a flat-bladed instrument into one of them.
    Sano looked at the glistening red tissue that appeared as Mura folded the skin back from Noriyoshi’s rib cage, and at Mura’s slimy hands wielding the instrument to slice it away. He swallowed hard. Nausea spread through his stomach. Sweat trickled down his face despite the cold air coming through the window. His skin crawled. He fought the sickness by trying to concentrate on something else. He couldn’t have Noriyoshi’s corpse exposed to the public; signs of the dissection would show. When he returned to his office, he must issue a cremation order. But the distraction failed. Not wanting to see, yet unable to look away, he watched as Noriyoshi’s innards were revealed. The pale, gleaming ribs with twin pinkish-gray spongy lobes and a red, meaty object beneath. The coiled tubes of viscera showing at the lower edge of the cut. Like a flayed animal, he thought dizzily. And the smell rising from the open cavity was the same, too: sweet, strong, and rotten.
    Like other men his age, he’d never gone to war. He knew about its atrocities, of course: men decapitated with a single sword slash, or shot with guns bought from foreign barbarians. Limbs severed. Bodies hacked to bits. He’d read