“999 Swords”

After the great war of the Taira and the Minamoto, after the betrayals, after the escape and the years in hiding, two men sit on either side of a fire.

This story gives me headaches over where to classify it among my short fiction. Should it go in the historical grouping? Should I class it with the folklore? It’s kind of both: Minamoto no Yoshitsune and Saitō Musashibō Benkei are real historical figures, but they’ve also got accreted layers of folklore built up over them, and this story weaves a path between those halves.

I’m significantly indebted to Roberta Strippoli’s article “Warrior/Monk, Demon/Saint: Humor and Parody in the Late Medieval Tale of Benkei,” published in Monumenta Nipponica 70/1, and also to fellow writer Stewart C. Baker for pointing me at that source. I freely admit that I borrowed heavily from the sixteenth-century Musashibō e-engi, as summarized by Strippoli, in crafting my tale.

And this story marks my first-ever sale to Interzone magazine, just over twenty-two years after I sent my first submission there! It came out in issue #296 in November 2023, and you can buy it (along with sixty thousand words of other wonderful fiction and non-fiction) right here.