The Book of the Flame

by Carrie Asai

  I often wonder that myself. Takeda, for all his flaws, was my son. Is my son. I believe that he lives. I will not accept his death. But his short life has been a waste thus far, and now I keep asking myself what I could have done differently. His mother spoiled him, but she is not to blame. He was our only child. I should have put my foot down, been more strict, but he was the child of our old age and I loved him. He arrived long after we had given up hope of being able to have a child. And now he’s gone.

  Where are you now, my little Takeda? I will find you eventually. If not in this life, then in the next.

  Heaven Kogo is a brave girl. Much like her father. She would have been a perfect wife for Takeda, not one of these useless society mannequins but a woman who could think and reason and keep him in line. Nothing like that awful stepmother of hers—cold, caring only for the next season’s fashions, difficult to converse with. I always wondered why Konishi married that Mieko when he could have had his pick of any woman in Japan. The rumor was that he had a mistress who he continued to see after his marriage. I wouldn’t be surprised. Many of us did.

  But these are thoughts whose time has passed. The river of time has flowed on, and one never fishes in the same waters twice.

  I am too old to risk much more. Once I had courage and passion. Now I am afraid.

  I hope Heaven finds the answers she is looking for. But something tells me that this journey is coming to an end—for all of us.

  I’ll remain here until the morning light filters in through the trees. Only then will sleep come to me.

  Yoji

  7

  “Heaven,” Hiro said as soon as we got into the car, “I—”

  “No,” I snapped, glancing at the man I had thought I knew so well. “Shut up. I need to think for a second.” Hiro pressed his lips together and he blinked twice, then nodded, giving me my space. I slid into the passenger seat and leaned back against the headrest, covering my eyes with my hands. The last few days had caught up to me all at once and I felt empty inside. I wanted to curl into a ball and forget all I had seen and felt, starting with the attack in our hotel room in Tijuana. The web of emotions I was navigating, the confrontations with Shigeto, Karen, Yoji—it was all too much. And now this.

  “How could you have lied to me about this?” I blurted, uncovering my eyes and turning to face Hiro. Even with everything that had happened, I couldn’t help but admire the clean line of his profile as he navigated the car out of the lot. I doubted everything I had heard up in Yoji’s suite. It would have been so much easier not to believe it.

  “I can explain, Heaven,” Hiro said softly. “Let’s just go get some food and talk about it.”

  “Fine,” I said. I was starving anyway. I stared out the window and watched the streets go from chic to run-down and seedy as Hiro drove back toward Hollywood. The question that bothered me the most was this: If I was so good at reading people, then how was it that I’d never once suspected that Hiro himself was connected to the yakuza? And once that question was out there, a million more followed. What else was I missing? Why hadn’t he just told me? It would only have drawn us closer.

  I rubbed my eyes. Without some sleep, it wasn’t likely I’d come to any conclusions. I only hoped what Hiro had to say would make sense.

  Hiro pulled into the parking lot of ’Round the Clock, the same fifties-themed diner he’d taken me to way back when we’d first met. That day, I remembered, my crush on him had just been starting to blossom, and so slowly that I wasn’t entirely aware of it myself. Now we were a couple and we were going there to fight. It would have been almost typical if our situation hadn’t been so bizarre.

  I ignored Hiro while I read the menu and ordered a cheeseburger with cheese fries and a cherry Coke. I resisted ordering a slice of pie on the spot just to piss him off. Hiro got the veggie burger and I wanted to kick him. He wasn’t even a vegetarian. Couldn’t he give the whole healthy-living thing a rest? I’d seen him eat a cheeseburger before.

  Hiro cleared his throat. “What Yoji said was true,” he said, and reached for my hand. I pulled it away.

  “Do you have a quarter for the jukebox?” I asked. I wasn’t going to make it easy, no way. He’d have to fight for this one.

  Hiro sighed and pulled some change out of his pocket. “Can I continue?” he said, keeping his hands to himself this time.

  “Whatever you want,” I said, pretending to read through the song catalog on the minijukebox at our table but not really seeing anything at all. My heart was pounding so loud, I felt like Hiro must have been able to hear it.

  “I never explained to you fully why I decided to leave Japan. A large part of it was my father’s yakuza connection.”

  “And when you found out the Yukemuras had tried to kidnap me, you never thought it might be nice to let me know your father was on their side?” I snapped, punching random numbers into the jukebox.

  “Believe me when I tell you that I had no idea my father was a member of the yakuza.” Hiro paused. “He wasn’t when I left home,” he added softly.

  “I’m supposed to believe that?” I turned to look at him, and my cold facade almost crumbled. He looked so tired and defeated. I’d never seen Hiro with less life in him.

  “I hope you will.” Hiro clammed up as the waitress, wearing the diner’s signature little pink shift, set down our plates. I immediately drowned my cheese fries with ketchup and started shoving them in my mouth. I didn’t feel hungry anymore, but I didn’t want Hiro to know how upset I was. Better to be angry.

  “My father was a legitimate businessman for most of my childhood,” Hiro said. “Just as you never realized that your father was involved with the yakuza—that he was the oyabun, the boss, even—I had no idea at all when the switch occurred.” Hiro took a deep breath. “Now you know that the yakuza’s fingers extend to every section of business in Japan. My father owned several very profitable lumber companies. His father, my grandfather, profited greatly during the reconstruction after World War II. That’s where the Uyemoto fortune came from.” Hiro paused and toyed with his veggie burger.

  I stopped eating. It had never occurred to me to ask how Hiro’s family had made their money when I met him. That’s how naive I’d been when I’d first arrived here—

  I’d never questioned how my own father became rich—or how anyone else had. These were just the people I’d grown up around, and in that world, everyone had money.

  Hiro looked out at the parking lot, his eyes gazing far away somewhere, back to the Tokyo of his childhood. “What I didn’t know was that payouts to the yakuza were the norm. All my grandfather’s life, and my father’s life, they’d always given a generous cut to the local gangs. It wasn’t a choice—it was the cost of doing business.”

  “That’s horrible,” I whispered.

  “Yes, it’s awful, isn’t it? Even worse when you realize that the yakuza consider themselves modern-day samurai. That’s why Ohiko and I were raised with the kind of training we were—but I’m getting ahead of myself.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  Hiro took a sip of his iced tea. “After my grandfather died, my father decided he wanted to expand the business even more. When I was just starting secondary school, he made a bad decision that changed everything.” Hiro’s eyes met mine. “He took a loan from the Yukemuras’ saiko-komon.”

  “Who was that?” I asked, recognizing the term for senior adviser.

  “His name was Tetsuo Nakanishi, not that it matters. He’s dead now. Killed by another family, undoubtedly. I was never told which one. And I never asked.”

  I pushed my plate away.

  “The interest rates, of course, were brutally high. But my father thought he had a foolproof plan for getting the money back. It was hundreds of millions of yen, though, and things didn’t go as planned. Eventually my father had to admit he couldn’t pay. They threatened to kill him and to kill my mother and me if he didn’t agree to let the Yukemuras use his business as a cover for their operations.”<
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  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Gun running, drugs—pretty much anything illegal you can imagine. My family had been in business so long that they could import almost anything without much trouble.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “My father thought it was his only hope. So he said yes.”

  “But Yoji said that your father had ‘finally’ begun working for him,” I said, confused. “It sounds like you knew he was working for Yoji all along.”

  “In a sense, yes,” Hiro answered, motioning to the waitress for some more water, “but my father dealt mainly with this Nakanishi character—and with the man who took over as saiko-komon after he died. My father refused to become an official member of the family with an official title, and the Yukemuras didn’t care, as long as their shipments continued to make it in safely. It was only later that Yoji began to pester my father about becoming a shingiin or something like that.”

  “A counselor?” I said. “But why? Why would Yoji care?”

  “Because then my father would be bound to him by a blood oath.” Hiro stared down at his plate.

  “Please eat something,” I said, and touched his hand lightly. My anger had morphed into sadness. Hiro picked up his sandwich and took a bite. The waitress refilled our glasses with water and he drank his down in one go.

  “So when did you know that all this had happened?”

  “My father called me into his office one day when I was eighteen. He told me everything. Obviously I was the one who was going to take over the business, and he wanted me to know what I was in for. He explained that dealing with the yakuza was all about survival but that it was possible to keep on their good side without taking that blood oath.”

  “But you didn’t believe him?”

  “I was young,” Hiro said. “But I wasn’t stupid. I was starting to suspect certain things before that conversation with my father, and I had already learned to loathe the yakuza for the way they twisted the bushido to their own ends. The Way of the Warrior is a sacred tradition, and it seemed to me that my father’s reasoning was deeply flawed.”

  “So you ran away…,” I murmured.

  “Not just then. First I went to Kyoto to study in a dojo there and to meditate upon what I should do. The answer came to me that I should leave my family and start a new life here in the U.S., where I might be able to teach others, eventually, about the samurai way of life. To bring it back to its pure state, but in a way applicable to modern living.”

  “I can’t believe you never told me any of this.” I shook my head. “It just boggles my mind that you could keep such a huge chunk of your life hidden from me.”

  “Heaven, I am so sorry,” Hiro said, grabbing my hand. This time I let him. “You have to understand—I thought I’d left that part of my life behind forever, and I thought it had nothing to do with your situation. As far as I knew, my father was just someone who did occasional dirty work for the Yukemuras…. He’s rich, yes, but I thought there was noway he’d know anything about the politics of the family.”

  “But didn’t you think it would make me feel better? Do you know how guilty and…and…dirty I felt when I finally found out that my father was the Kogo oyabun?”

  “I can only say I’m sorry again and again until you believe me, Heaven,” Hiro pleaded, his voice husky as he squeezed my hand. “It was a stupid decision. I see that now. At the time I just—I thought that it might minimize what you were going through. Can you understand that? I didn’t want your problems to be clouded by my problems.”

  “But why couldn’t you have told me later?” I said, tears filling my eyes. “I loved you so much and you know I would have understood.” Hiro’s eyes glistened. I pulled my hand away and reached for a napkin.

  “I would have told you, Heaven. I know that’s probably hard for you to believe right now, but it’s the truth. You have to admit, there hasn’t been much time for sharing confidences since things…changed between us.”

  “I guess,” I said doubtfully, trying to staunch the tears that kept welling up and sliding down my nose. Why did I have to be such a baby?

  “Can you please forgive me, Heaven?” Hiro begged, touching my knee softly under the table. Part of me wanted to just say, Okay, forget it, let’s move on. To get back the cozy feeling I was experiencing for the first time, the feeling of having someone around who cared about me the most. But another, deeper, more tentative voice inside me warned: You can forgive him now, but it will never be the same. How can you trust someone who doesn’t tell you the truth? Who has so many secrets?

  I moved my knee away. “I don’t know,” I whispered.

  “Please,” he said, his voice strained with emotion. It didn’t take any extra perception to feel the tension in the air between us. You could have cut it with my katana. I stared blearily at my cheese fries through the fog of my tears.

  “Heaven? Oh my God! Is that really you?” A cheery voice rang out, shocking me out of the moment and back into the booth in the crowded diner. I looked up.

  Cheryl—she was alive!

  8

  “Cheryl!” I shrieked, jumping out of the booth. Cheryl style, she had yelled out to me from across the diner, and now she shimmied between the tables toward us, waving her hands and ignoring the irritated grumbles of the customers whose heads she was bashing with her oversized handbag.

  “Heaven Kogo, you crazy girl!” Cheryl pushed between the last set of tables and threw herself into my arms. We did a little dance right there in the middle of the diner. Tears were streaming down my cheeks—one part runoff from my conversation with Hiro, one part relief—I hadn’t known whether Cheryl had made it out of the fire alive, and the thought that she might not have had been too much to confront. I’d been in total denial about what had happened. Only when I saw her did I realize what I’d been repressing since I’d fled L.A. for Vegas.

  “Look at you,” I said, holding her away from me. “I just—I can’t believe you’re okay!”

  “I’m fine,” Cheryl said. “Wait a minute—” She grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around.

  “What?” I said, wiping my eyes.

  “I love your hair! I can’t believe you finally cut it!”

  “Hiro did it,” I said, laughing. Cheryl looked over at Hiro, who had been standing next to the booth, waiting for us to finish our hellos.

  “Hiro!” Cheryl squealed. “You’re a blond!” She grabbed his hands and pulled him toward her for a peck on each cheek. Hiro smiled at me over her shoulder, and I mustered a weak grin back. Cheryl showing up when she did had certainly diffused our confrontation.

  “Sit down,” Hiro said. “Tell us everything that happened.”

  “Scrootch,” Cheryl commanded, pushing into the booth next to me. She grabbed a waitress by the apron and, ignoring her dirty look, ordered her favorite, French toast. It had been less than a week since I’d seen her, but she’d changed her hair. Instead of being pink-streaked, it was now a bright, Manic Panic red. Her face looked a little skinny, as if she hadn’t been eating enough, but she certainly had the same old energy as ever. The only thing different about her was her clothes—they were still funky, but they covered a lot more than usual, which was weird, because it had been so hot lately.

  “How’s your ankle?” Hiro asked. She had hurt it during the attack in the subway right before the fire.

  “It’s totally fine,” Cheryl chirped. “It was just a mild sprain. A few days in bed and it was back to normal. Still a little swollen, but it doesn’t hurt.”

  “But what happened?” I asked, drinking in her presence. “Were you already in the house when the fire started?”

  Cheryl’s smile wobbled for a second, but soon she was grinning again. “I was there. The taxi dropped me off and I went inside. I crashed out on the couch, like, immediately. That whole Marcus thing just threw me for a loop, you know?”

  I nodded sympathetically. Marcus was a guy Cheryl had started dating at Vibe, and we’d all found out
that night that he’d been using her just to get to me. He and his henchmen had almost killed us both.

  “I don’t think it was that much later—I woke up and the whole living room was filled with smoke. I tried to get out the front door, but the flames blocked me. So I ran into the bathroom. Well, hopped.”

  “Oh, Cheryl,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “You should be,” she snapped, surprising me. Then, “Just kidding,” she added, giggling.

  “Cheryl, don’t do that!” I squealed. “You totally freaked me out.”

  Cheryl squeezed my hand. “Come on, Heaven—if it hadn’t been for you and Hiro, Marcus and his bangers would have thrown me in front of the Metro train. You’re so gullible.”

  “But if it hadn’t been for me—” I started.

  “Whatever,” Cheryl said, waving my apologies away. “Listen to my story. It’s just getting good!”

  “Okay,” I said, and glanced at Hiro, who was still smiling a little bit. His sense of humor is developing nicely, at least, I thought. He seemed to get a kick out of Cheryl’s colorful, nonstop storytelling.

  “So all the time I was hopping toward the bathroom,” Cheryl continued, the bangles on her wrist jangling with each gesture, “all I could think was ‘stop, drop, and roll.’ You know, like they used to teach in school? But that didn’t seem to make any sense—then I remembered I wasn’t on fire yet, so it wouldn’t really help. So I finally got into the can, grabbed my bathrobe, and soaked it with water.”