by Barry Eisler
She shrugged. “Your friend from the Metropolitan Police Force.”
I was taken aback. “Tatsu contacted you?”
“I contacted him. Several times, in fact. He kept blowing me off. Last week I came back to Tokyo and went to his office. I told a receptionist that if Ishikura-san didn’t see me I would contact the press, I would do everything I could do to make a public scandal. And I would have, you know. I wasn’t going to give up.”
She’d been brave, almost a little reckless. Tatsu wouldn’t have harmed her, even in response to a threat, but she had no way of knowing that. Another indication of just how desperately angry she had been.
“He saw you?” I asked.
“Not right away. He called me this afternoon.”
This afternoon. Right after I’d refused him, then.
“And he told you that you could find me here?”
She nodded.
How had he managed to track me down again? Probably those damn cameras. You can see some of them. Not all, I remembered him saying. Sure, use the camera to get a general fix on my location, then send men to the likely hotels in the area, if necessary, with the same photo they had fed to the cameras and the facial recognition software, to narrow things down.
I’d been a fool to stay in Tokyo, although with the kind of warning I had to give Harry, an overseas phone call would have been less than optimal.
What was that wily bastard up to, though? “Any thoughts on why Tatsu would agree to see you after a year of stonewalling?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Probably my threat.”
I doubted it. Tatsu didn’t know her as well as I did. He would have mistakenly assumed she was bluffing.
“You really think that was all there was to it?” I asked.
“Maybe. Maybe he had some ulterior reason for wanting us to meet. But what was I going to do, spite him by refusing to see you?”
“I suppose not.” And Tatsu would have supposed it, too. I felt a momentary wave of annoyance, bordering on hostility, toward Tatsu and his ongoing machinations.
She sighed. “He said that telling me you were dead was his doing, not yours.”
This was supposed to get back to me. Did he think I was going to take out Murakami in gratitude, as a quid pro quo?
“What else did he tell you?” I asked.
“That you helped him get the disk expecting him to turn it over to the media for publication.”
“Did he tell you why he didn’t?”
She nodded. “Because its information was so explosive that it might have brought down the Liberal Democrats and paved the way for Yamaoto’s ascension.”
“Sounds like you’re pretty up-to-date, then.”
“I’m a long way from up-to-date.”
“What about Harry?” I asked after a moment. “Why didn’t you go to him?”
She looked away and said, “I did. I wrote him a letter. He said he’d heard you were dead, and didn’t know any more than that.”
The way she had looked away . . . there was something she wasn’t telling me.
“You believed him?”
“Should I not have?”
Good recovery. But there was something more there, I thought.
“Remember the last time I saw you?” she asked.
It had been here, at the Imperial Hotel. We’d spent the night together. The next morning I had left to intercept Holtzer’s limousine. I had spent a few days in police custody after that. Meanwhile, Tatsu had told Midori I was dead and had deep-sixed the disk. Game over.
“I remember,” I said.
“You said, ‘I’ll be back sometime in the evening. Will you wait for me?’ Well, I waited for two days before I heard from your friend Ishikura-san. I had no one to contact, no way to know.”
I saw her eyes move to the ceiling for a moment, maybe looking away from memories she didn’t want to see. Maybe willing back tears.
“I couldn’t believe you were gone,” she went on. “Then I started to wonder if you really were gone. And if you weren’t gone, what would that mean? And then I doubted myself. I doubted myself. I thought, ‘He can’t still be alive, he wouldn’t have done this to you.’ But I couldn’t get rid of the suspicions. I didn’t know whether to grieve for you, or to want to kill you.”
She turned and looked at me. “Do you understand what you put me through?” she asked, her voice dropping into a whisper. “You . . . you fucking tortured me!”
In my peripheral vision I saw her quickly flick her thumb across one cheek, then the other. I looked down into my glass. The last thing she would want would be for me to witness her tears.
After a moment I turned to her. “Midori,” I said. My voice was low and sounded strange to me. “I’m sorrier for all this than I can say. If I could change any of it, I would.”
We were silent for a moment. I thought of Rio and said, “For what it’s worth, I’ve been trying to get out.”
She looked at me. “How hard are you trying? Most people get along pretty well without killing someone. They don’t have to go out of their way to avoid it.”
“It’s a little more complicated than that with me.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “Right now the people who know me seem to be equally divided between wanting to kill me and wanting me to kill.”
“Ishikura-san?”
I nodded. “Tatsu has devoted his life to fighting corruption in Japan. He’s got assets, but the forces he’s up against are stronger than he is. He’s trying to even the odds.”
“It’s hard for me to picture him as one of the good guys.”
“I’m sure it is. But the world he inhabits isn’t as black and white as the one you do. Believe it or not, he was trying to help your father.”
And suddenly I understood why he had sent her here. Not because he hoped that I would assist him as a quid pro quo for a few exculpatory comments he’d made to Midori. Or at least not entirely that. No, his real hope was that, if Midori came to view Tatsu as in some way trying to continue the fight her father had begun, she might want me to help him. He hoped that my seeing her would tap into my regrets about her father, make me malleable to a request that I do what he wanted.
“So now you’re ‘trying to get out,” ’ she said.
I nodded, thinking this would be what she wanted to hear.
But she laughed. “Is that your atonement after all you’ve done? I didn’t know it was that easy to get into heaven.”
Maybe I didn’t have a right, but I was starting to get irritated. “Look, I made a mistake with your father. I told you I’m sorry for it, I told you I would change it if I could. What else can I do? You want me to pour gasoline on myself and light a match? Feed the hungry? What?”
She dropped her eyes. “I don’t know.”
“Well, I don’t know, either. But I’m trying.”
That fucking Tatsu, I thought. He’d seen all of this. He knew she would rattle me.
I finished my Bunnahabhain. I set the empty glass down on the table and looked at it.
“I want something from you,” I heard her say after a moment.
“I know,” I answered, not looking at her.
“I don’t know what it is.”
I closed my eyes. “I know you don’t.”
“I can’t believe I’m even sitting here talking to you.”
To that I only nodded.
There was another long silence while I ran through my mind all the things I wished I could say to her, things I wished could make a difference.
“We’re not through,” I heard her say.
I looked at her, not knowing what she meant, and she went on.
“When I know what I want from you, I’m going to tell you.”
“I appreciate it,” I said dryly. “That way I’ll at least see it coming.”
She didn’t laugh. “You’re the killer, not me.”
“Right.”
She looked at me for a moment longer, then said, “I can fin
d you here?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Where, then?”
“It’s better if I find you.”
“No!” she said with a sudden vehemence that surprised me. “No more of that bullshit. If you want to see me again, tell me where you’ll be.”
I picked up my empty glass and gripped it tightly.
Walk away, I told myself. You don’t even need to say anything. Just put a few bills on the table and go. You’ll never see her again.
Except I’d always be seeing her. I couldn’t get away from it.
I’ve gotten used to hoping for so little that I seem to have lost any natural immunity to the emotion’s infection. My hopes for Midori had gotten a foothold, and as ridiculous as they’d become, I couldn’t seem to beat them back.
“Look,” I said, already knowing it was futile. “I’ve lived this way for a long time. This is the reason I’ve lived for a long time.”
“Forget it, then,” she said. She stood up.
“All right,” I said. “You can find me here.”
She looked at me and nodded. “Okay.”
I paused. “Am I going to hear from you?” I asked.
“Do you care?”
“I’m afraid I do.”
“Good,” she said, nodding. “Let’s see how you like the uncertainty.”
She turned and walked away.
I paid the bill and waited for a minute, then left, using one of the basement exits.
I couldn’t stay there any longer. I might be able to live with Midori herself knowing my whereabouts, but she had no security consciousness and I couldn’t live with the possibility that she might inadvertently lead someone to me. I wanted to make things harder for Tatsu, too. It might not have mattered all that much at this point if he had a way to find me, but I didn’t like the notion.
I would stay at the most anonymous business hotels, a different one every night. Doing so would protect me from anyone who might be following Midori and would keep Tatsu scrambling to try to keep up.
I’d keep the room at the Imperial, of course. That might help throw Tatsu off. Also, I’d be able to check the room voice mail remotely, in case Midori tried to reach me there. I could stop in from time to time, using extra care, just to maintain appearances.
I kept my head low and did everything I could to try to avoid presenting a pretty picture for the cameras, but there was no way to be sure. I felt boxed in, claustrophobic.
Maybe I would just bolt. First thing in the morning, Osaka, Rio, finito.
But I hated the thought that Midori might try to contact me again, only to find, again, that I was gone.
You’re already lying to her, I thought. Took you all of a half-hour.
Then maybe I would stay for another day, two at the most. Yeah, maybe. And after that, the next time Midori or Tatsu or anyone else heard from me it would be via postcard, par avion.
I made some aggressive moves to ensure that I wasn’t being followed. Then I slowed down and drifted through night Tokyo, not knowing where I was going, not caring.
I saw two young furita—“freeters”—slackers who had responded to Japan’s decade-long recession by eschewing positions that were no longer available to them anyway, dropping instead into odd jobs like the late shift in convenience stores, where they would service the needs of other Tokyo night denizens: hollow-eyed parents in search of cleaning supplies for the household chores their long commutes and crying babies left no time to accomplish during daylight hours; lonely men still dressed in the interchangeable shirtsleeves of their day jobs, suffering in the midst of the vast city from solitude so acute that not even the narcotic of late-night television talk shows could distract them from occasional nocturnal forays in search of signs of other life; even other furita, on their way back to their parents’ houses, which, to make their meager ends meet, they still inhabited, who might share a tired cigarette and an unfunny joke before sleeping off the morning, then rising to do it all over again later that day.
I passed sanitation workers, construction crews laboring under halogen lamps on the potholes of night-quiet streets, insomniac truck drivers silently unloading their wares onto deserted sidewalks and silent stoops.
I found myself near Nogizaka station, and realized that I had been unconsciously moving northwest. I stopped. Aoyama Bochi was just across from me, silent and brooding, drawing me like a gaping black hole whose gravity was even greater than that of surrounding Tokyo.
Without thinking, I cut across the road, hopping over the metal divider at its center. I paused at the stone steps before me, then surrendered and walked up to the graves within.
Immediately the sounds of the street below grew detached, distant, the meaningless echoes of urban voices whose urgent notes reached but held no sway over the parklike necropolis within. From where I stood, the cemetery seemed to have no end. It stretched out before me, a city in its own right, its myriad markers windowless tenements in miniature, laid out in still symmetry, long boulevards of the dead.
I moved deeper into the comforting gloom, along a stone walkway covered in cherry blossoms that lay like tenebrous snow in the glow of lamplights to either side. Just days earlier, these same blossoms had been celebrated by living Tokyoites, who came here in their drunken thousands to see reflected in the blossom’s brief and vital beauty the inherent pathos of their own lives. But now the blossoms were fallen, the revelers departed, even the garbage disgorged by their parties efficiently removed and discarded, and the area was once again given over only to the dead.
I thought of how Midori had once articulated the idea of mono no aware, a sensibility that, although frequently obscured during cherry blossom viewing by the cacophony of drunken doggerel and generator-powered television sets, remains steadfast in one of the two cultures from which I come. She had called it “the sadness of being human.” A wise, accepting sadness, she had said. I admired her for the depths of character such a description indicated. For me, sad has always been a synonym for bitter, and I suspect this will always be so.
I walked on, my footfalls melancholy, respectful of the thick silence around me. Unlike the surrounding city, Aoyama Bochi is changeless, and I had no difficulty finding what drew me despite the decades that had passed since I had last come here.
The marker was stark and simple, distinguished only by a brief declaration that Fujiwara Shuichi had lived from 1912 to 1960 and that all that remained of him was interred here. Fujiwara Shuichi, my father, killed in the street riots that rocked Tokyo one awful summer while I was a boy.
I stood before the grave and maintained a long bow, my palms pressed together before my face in the Buddhist attitude of respect for the dead. My mother would have wanted me to say a prayer, crossing myself at its conclusion, and had this been her grave, I would have done so. But such a western ritual would have been an insult to my father in his life, and why would I do something to offend him now?
I smiled. It was hard to avoid that kind of thinking. My father was dead.
Still, I offered no prayer.
I waited a moment, then lowered myself, cross-legged, to the earth. Some of the graves were adorned with flowers, in various stages of freshness and decay. As though the dead could smell the bouquets.
A breeze sighed among the markers. I put my forehead in my palms and stared at the ground before me.
People have rituals for communing with the dead, rituals that depend more on the idiosyncrasies of the individual than on the influence of culture. Some visit gravesites. Some talk to portraits, or mantelpiece urns. Some go to spots favored by the deceased during life, or mouth silent prayers in houses of worship, or have trees planted in memory in some far-off land.
The common denominator, of course, is a sense beyond logic that the dead are aware of all this, that they can hear the prayers and witness the deeds and feel the ongoing love and longing. People seem to find that sense comforting.
I don’t believe any of it. I’ve never seen a soul d
epart from a body. I’ve never been haunted by a ghost, angry or loving. I’ve never been rewarded or punished or touched by some traveler from the undiscovered country. I know as well as I know anything that the dead are simply dead.
I sat silently for several minutes, resisting the urge to speak, knowing it was stupid. There was nothing left of my father. Even if there were, it was ridiculous to believe that it would be here, hovering around ashes and dust, jostling for position among the souls of the hundreds of thousands of others buried in this place.
People lay the flowers and say the prayers, they believe these things, because doing so avoids the discomfort of acknowledging that the person you loved is gone. It’s easier to believe that maybe the person can still see and hear and care.
I looked at my father’s marker. It was young by the standards of the cemetery, just over four decades, but already it was darkened by pollution. Moss grew thin and insensate up its left side. Without thinking, I reached out and ran my fingers over the raised lettering of my father’s name.
“Hisashiburi, papa,” I whispered, addressing him like the young boy I had been when he had died. It’s been a long time, papa.
Forgive me father. It has been thirty years since my last confession.
Stop that shit.
“I’m sorry I don’t come to visit you more often,” I said in Japanese, my voice low. “Or even think of you. There are so many things I keep at a distance because they’re painful. Your memory is one of those things. The first of them, in fact.”
I paused for a moment and considered the silence around me. “But you’re not listening, anyway.”
I looked around. “This is stupid,” I said. “You’re dead. You’re not here.”
Then I dropped my head into my hands again. “I wish I could make her understand,” I said. “I wish you could help me.”
Damn, she’d been hard on me. Called me a whore.
Maybe it wasn’t unfair. After all, killing is the ultimate expression of hatred and fear, as sex is the ultimate expression of love and desire. And, as with sex, killing a stranger who has otherwise provoked no emotion is inherently unnatural. I suppose you could say that a man who kills a stranger is not unlike a woman who has sex under analogous circumstances. That a man who is paid to kill is like a woman who is paid to fuck. Certainly the man is subject to the same reluctance, the same numbing, the same regrets. The same damage to the soul.