by Barry Eisler
“I’m almost afraid to drink it,” Midori said, smiling and raising the glass before her, watching the light turn the liquid to amber.
“Satoh-san always provides a brief lecture on what you’re about to experience. It’s one of the best things about this place. He’s a student of single malts.”
“Jaa, kanpai,” she said, and we touched glasses and drank. She paused for a moment afterward, then said, “Wow, that is good. Like a caress.”
“Like what your music sounds like.”
She smiled and gave me one of her shoulder checks. “I enjoyed our conversation the other day at Tsuta,” she said. “I’d like to hear more about your experiences growing up in two worlds.”
“I’m not sure how interesting a story that is.”
“Tell it to me, and I’ll tell you if it’s interesting.”
She was much more a listener than a talker, which would make my job of collecting operational intelligence more difficult. Let’s just see where this goes, I thought.
“Home for me was a little town in upstate New York. My mother took me there after my father died so she could be close to her parents,” I said.
“Did you spend any time in Japan after that?”
“Some. During my junior year in high school, my father’s parents wrote to me about a new U.S./Japan high-school exchange program that would allow me to spend a semester at a Japanese high school. I was actually pretty homesick at the time and enrolled right away. So ultimately, I got to spend a semester at Saitama Gakuen.”
“Just one semester? Your mother must have wanted you back.”
“Part of her did. I think another part of her was relieved to have some time to focus on her own career. I was pretty wild at that age.” This seemed an appropriate euphemism for constant fights and other discipline problems at school.
“How was the semester?”
I shrugged. Some of these memories were not particularly pleasant. “You know what it’s like for returnees. It’s bad enough if you’re just an ordinary Japanese kid with an accent that’s been Americanized by time abroad. If you’re half-American on top of it, you’re practically a freak.”
I saw a deep sympathy in her eyes that made me feel I was worsening a betrayal. “I know what it’s like to be a returnee child,” she said. “And you had envisioned the semester as a homecoming. You must have felt so alienated.”
I waved my hand as though it was nothing. “It’s all in the past.”
“Anyway, after high school?”
“After high school was Vietnam.”
“You were in Vietnam? You look young for that.”
I smiled. “I was a teenager when I joined the army, and when I got there the war was already well under way.” I was aware that I was sharing more personal details than I should have. I didn’t care.
“How long were you over there?”
“Three years.”
“I thought that back then getting drafted meant only one year.”
“It did. I wasn’t drafted.”
Her eyes widened. “You volunteered?”
It had been ages since I had talked about any of this, or even thought about it. “I know it sounds a little strange from this distance. But yes, I volunteered. I wanted to prove that I was American to the people who doubted it because of my eyes, my skin. And then, when I was over there, in a war against Asians, I had to prove it even more, so I stayed. I took dangerous assignments. I did some crazy things.”
We were quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Can I ask, are those the things that you said ‘haunt’ you?”
“Some of them,” I said evenly. But this would go no further. She may have had guidelines about inviting strangers to performances, but my rules regarding these matters are stricter still. We were getting close to places that even I can look at only obliquely.
Her fingers were resting lightly on the sides of her glass, and without thinking I reached out and took them into my hands, raised them before my face. “I bet I could tell from your hands that you play the piano,” I said. “Your fingers are slender, but they look strong.”
She twisted her hands around, so that now she was holding mine. “You can tell a lot from a person’s hands,” she said. “In mine you see the piano. In yours I see bushido. But on the joints, not the knuckles . . . what do you do, judo? Aikido?”
Bushido means the martial ways, the way of the warrior. She was talking about the calluses on the first and second joints of all my fingers, the result of years of gripping and twisting the heavy cotton judogi. She was holding my hands in a businesslike way, as though to examine them, but there was a gentleness in her touch and I felt electricity running all the way up my arms.
I withdrew my hands, afraid of what else she might read in them. “These days just judo. Grappling, throwing, strangles — it’s the most practical martial art. And the Kodokan is the best place in the world for judo.”
“I know the Kodokan. I studied aikido at a little dojo in Ochanomizu, one stop away on the Chuo line.”
“What’s a jazz pianist doing studying aikido?”
“It was before I got really serious about the piano, and I don’t practice anymore because it’s too hard on the hands. I did it because I got bullied in school for a while — my father once had a tour in the States. I told you I know what it’s like to be a returnee.”
“Did the aikido help?”
“Not at first. It took me awhile to get good. But the bullies gave me incentive to keep practicing. One day, one of them grabbed my arm, and I threw her with san-kyo. After that, they left me alone. Which was good, because san-kyo was actually the only throw I knew well enough to do.”
I looked at her, imagining what it would be like to be on the san-kyo receiving end of the determination that was taking her to increasing renown, maybe to fame, in jazz circles.
She lifted her glass with the fingers of both hands, and I noticed an economy of movement to the simple act. It was graceful, pleasant to watch.
“You do sado,” I said, almost thinking out loud. Sado is the Japanese tea ceremony. Its practitioners strive through the practice of refined, ritualized movements in the preparation and serving of tea to achieve wabi and sabi: a sort of effortless elegance in thought and movement, a paring down to the essentials to more elegantly represent a larger, more important concept that would otherwise be obscured.
“Not since I was a teenager,” she answered, “and even then never well. I’m surprised that you can see it. Maybe if I have another drink it will disappear.”
“No, I wouldn’t want that,” I said, fighting the feeling of being drawn into those dark eyes. “I like the sado.”
She smiled. “What else do you like?”
Where is she going? “I don’t know. Lots of things. I like watching you play.”
“Tell me.”
I sipped the Ardbeg, peat and smoke meandering across my tongue and throat. “I like the way you start calm, and build on it. I like the way you start playing the music, and then how, when you get going, it’s as though the music is playing you. How you get caught up in it. Because when I feel that happening to you, I get caught up in it also. It pulls me outside myself. I can tell how alive it makes you feel, and it makes me feel that way, too.”
“What else?”
I laughed. “What else? That’s not enough?”
“Not if there’s more.”
I rolled the glass back and forth between my hands, watching the reflections of light inside.
“I always feel like you’re looking for something while you’re playing but that you can’t find it. So you look harder, but it still eludes you, and the melody starts to get really edgy, but then you hit this point where it’s as though you realize that you’re not going to find it, you just can’t, and then the edginess is gone and the music turns sad, but it’s a beautiful sadness, a wise, accepting sadness.”
I realized again that there was something about her that made me open up too much, reveal too muc
h. I needed to control it.
“It means a lot to me that you recognize that in my music,” she said after a moment. “Because it’s something that I’m trying to express. Do you know mono no aware?”
“I think so. ‘The pathos of things,’ right?”
“That’s the usual translation. I like ‘the sadness of being human.’ ”
I was surprised to find myself moved by the idea. “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” I said quietly.
“I remember once, when I was living in Chiba, I took a walk on a winter night. It was warm for winter, and I took off my jacket and sat in the playground of the school where I had gone as a little girl, all by myself, and watched the silhouettes of the tree branches against the sky. I had such a strong awareness that one day, I was going to be gone, but the trees would still be here, the moon would still be above them, shining down, and it made me cry, but a good kind of crying, because I knew it had to be that way. I had to accept it because that’s the way things are. Things end. That’s mono no aware.”
Things end. “Yes, it is,” I said, thinking of her father.
We were quiet for a moment. Then I asked, “What did Ken mean when he said that you were a radical?”
She took a sip of her Ardbeg. “He’s a romantic. I was hardly a radical. Just rebellious.”
“Rebellious how?”
“Look around you, John. Japan is incredibly screwed up. The LDP, the bureaucrats, they’re bleeding the country dry.”
“There are problems,” I allowed.
“Problems? The economy’s going to hell, families can’t pay their property taxes, there’s no confidence in the banking system, and all the government can think to do to solve the problem is deficit spending and public works. And you know why? Payoffs to the construction industry. The whole country is covered in concrete, there’s nowhere else to build, so the politicians vote for office parks that no one uses, bridges and roads that no one drives on, rivers lined with concrete. You know those ugly concrete ‘tetrapods’ that line the Japanese coast, supposedly protecting it from erosion? All the studies show those monstrosities speed erosion; they don’t forestall it. So we’re destroying our own ecosystem to keep the politicians fat and the construction industry rich. Is that what you call just ‘problems’?”
“Hey, maybe Ken was right,” I said, smiling. “You are pretty radical.”
She shook her head. “This is just common sense. Tell me the truth, really. Don’t you sometimes feel like you’re being screwed by the status quo and all the people who profit from it? And doesn’t that piss you off?”
“Sometimes, yes,” I said, carefully.
“Well, it pisses me off a lot. That’s all Ken meant.”
“Forgive me for saying so, but wasn’t your father a part of that status quo?”
A long pause. “We had our differences.”
“That must have been hard.”
“It was, sometimes. For a long time we were pretty alienated.”
I nodded. “Were you ever able to mend fences?”
She laughed softly, but without mirth. “My father found out he had lung cancer just a few months before he died. The diagnosis made him reassess his life, but that didn’t give us long to work things out.”
The information caught me by surprise. “He had lung cancer? But . . . Mama mentioned a heart attack.”
“He had a heart condition, but always smoked anyway. All his government cronies did, and he felt he needed to do it to fit in. He was so much a part of the system, in a way, he gave his life for it.”
I took a sip of the smoky liquid and swallowed. “Lung cancer is a terrible way to go,” I said. “At least, the way he died, he didn’t suffer.” The sentiment was weirdly heartfelt.
“That’s true, and I’m grateful for it.”
“Forgive me if I’m prying, but what do you mean when you say the diagnosis made him reassess his life?”
She was looking past me, her eyes unfocused. “In the end, he realized that he had spent his life being part of the problem, as Ken would say. He decided he wanted to be part of the solution.”
“Did he have time to do that?”
“I don’t think so. But he told me he wanted to do something, wanted to do something right, before he died. The main thing was that he felt that way.”
“How do you know he didn’t have time?”
“What do you mean?” she asked, her eyes coming back to me.
“Your father — he’s diagnosed, suddenly face-to-face with his own mortality. He wants to do something to atone for the past. Could he have? In such a short time?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said, and instantly I knew I had bumped up against that defensive wall again.
“I’m thinking about what we talked about the other day. About regret. If there’s something you regret, but you’ve only got a short time to do something about it, what do you do?”
“I imagine that would be different for everyone, depending on the nature of your regrets.”
C’mon, Midori. Work with me. “What would your father have done? Was there anything that could have reversed the things he came to regret?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
But you do know, I thought. A reporter he was meeting with contacted you. You know, but you’re not telling me.
“What I mean is, maybe he was trying to do something to be part of the solution, even if you couldn’t see it. Maybe he talked to his colleagues, told them about his change of heart, tried to get them to change theirs. Who knows?”
She was quiet, and I thought, That’s it, that’s as far as you can possibly push it, she’s going to get suspicious and clam up on you now for sure.
But after a moment she said, “Are you asking because of a regret of your own?”
I looked at her, simultaneously disturbed by the truth of her question and relieved at the cover it afforded me. “I’m not sure,” I said.
“Why don’t you just tell me?”
I felt like I’d been hit with an aikido throw. “No,” I said, my voice low.
“Am I that hard to talk to?” she asked, her voice gentle.
“No,” I said, smiling into her dark eyes. “You’re easy. That’s the problem.”
She sighed. “You’re a strange man, John. You’re so obviously uncomfortable talking about yourself.”
“I’m more interested in you.”
“In my father.”
“I thought there’d be a lesson there for me. That’s all.”
“Some lessons you have to learn for yourself.”
“Probably true. But I try to learn them from others when I can. I’m sorry for pressing.”
She gave me a small smile. “That’s okay. This is all still a little recent.”
“Of course it is,” I said, recognizing the dead end. I looked at my watch. “I should get you home.”
This was apt to be tricky. On the one hand, we had undeniable chemistry, and it wasn’t inconceivable that she would invite me up for a drink or something. If she did, I’d get a chance to make sure her apartment was secure, although I would have to be careful once we were inside. I couldn’t let anything stupid happen — more stupid than the time I had already spent with her and the things I had already said.
On the other hand, if she wanted to go home alone, it would be hard for me to escort her without seeming like I was angling for a way to get into her bed. It would be awkward. But I couldn’t just turn her loose alone. They knew where she lived.
We thanked Satoh-san for his hospitality and for the delicious introduction to the rare Ardbeg. I paid the bill, and we took the stairs down into the now slightly chilly Omotesando night air. The streets were quiet.
“Which way are you heading?” Midori asked me. “From around here, I usually walk.”
“I’ll go with you. I’d like to see you all the way home.”
“You don’t have to.”
I looked down for a moment, then back at her. “I’d like t
o,” I said again, thinking of Benny’s write-up on the bulletin board.
She smiled. “Okay.”
It was a fifteen-minute walk to her building. I didn’t observe anyone behind us. Not a surprise, given Mr. Bland’s departure from the scene.
When we reached the entranceway of her building, she took her keys out and turned to me. “Jaa . . .” Well, then . . .
It was a polite good night. But I had to see her inside. “You’ll be okay from here?”
She looked at me knowingly, although she didn’t really know. “I live here. I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
“Okay. Have you got a phone number?” I already knew it, of course, but I had to keep up appearances.
“No, I don’t have a phone.”
Wow. That bad. “Yeah, I’m a bit of a Luddite myself. If something comes up, send me a smoke signal, okay?”
She giggled. “Five, two, seven, five-six, four, five, six. I was only teasing.”
“Right. Can I call you sometime?” In about five minutes, for example, to make sure there’s no one waiting for you in your apartment.
“I hope you will.”
I took out a pen and wrote the number down on my hand.
She was looking at me, half smiling. The kiss was there, if I wanted it.
I turned and walked back up the path toward the street.
She called out after me. “John?”
I turned.
“I think there’s a radical in you trying to get out.”
Several ripostes came quickly to mind. Instead: “Good night, Midori.”
I turned and walked away, pausing at the sidewalk to look back. But she had already gone inside, and the glass doors were closing behind her.
11
I SLIPPED INTO a parking area that faced the entrance. Hanging back beyond the perimeter of light cast from inside, I saw her waiting for an elevator to her right. From where I was standing I could see the doors open when it arrived but couldn’t see inside it. I watched her step inside, and then the doors closed.