Sayonara Slam

by Naomi Hirahara

  “Suicide?” Now Yuki was interested in what Amika was saying. “Itai-san would be the last person who would commit suicide.”

  “I know that. You know that. But I think these American detectives have been watching Shogun or too many samurai movies. I’m surprised that they haven’t spoken to you yet.”

  “I did talk with them at Dodger Stadium. But I didn’t mention you. They wanted to know if Itai-san had enemies. Too many to name, I told them. Just read his past articles. But then, of course, they can’t. It’s all in Japanese.”

  “I thought they had an Asian task force or something. You know, from back in the days of the Miura incident.” Amika registered Yuki’s blank look. “You know about the Miura incident, right?”

  “Of course,” Yuki said, not so definitively.

  “Don’t lie. Oh my gosh.”

  Even Mas knew about the Miura incident. Anyone who had been around in L.A. in the 1980s did. A Japanese businessman, Miura, and his wife were shot in a robbery in a parking lot not far from the Bonaventure Hotel, and she died. Los Angeles was dangerous, full of unsavory minorities—that was the message that the anguished, wounded husband had told the newspapers, both here and in Japan. As it turned out, Miura had planned the whole thing to collect a handsome insurance settlement. He’d been able to evade American prosecution for decades, until recently.

  “He killed himself in jail here in L.A. last year,” Yuki spouted out, the gears in his brain finally working. “He wrote on his blog that he was going to Saipan from Japan, and the American authorities caught him there.” He exhaled as if he’d achieved a physical feat.

  “Not bad, not bad.” Amika pulled a piece of lint off of her skirt.

  “Why are you really here? It’s not only to test me about crimes committed before I was born.”

  “I want to know how Mrs. Kim is doing. Jin-Won won’t answer my calls.”

  “Probably because you’re on Neko’s blacklist.”

  Amika’s face fell slightly, but she quickly lifted her chin as if she was lifting her spirits. “Why? I haven’t done anything against her. And what does Neko have to do with Jin-Won, anyway?” she asked coyly.

  Don’t you know? Mas thought.

  Yuki hesitated, too. “Just that the word gets around to the players and coaches.”

  “You should talk. The media pool doesn’t think much of you, I can tell you that.”

  Yuki’s eyes flashed, and Mas felt bad for the boy.

  “I know that Nippon Series didn’t really send you here. That you bothered them for press credentials, but they refused to pay your expenses. This little trip is all self-financed on your credit card, and you’re almost maxed out.”

  Yuki lowered his head. Then it must be true. No wonder the boy had called on Mas to drive and translate. It wasn’t a matter of trust, but a matter of cash. Come to think of it, he’d yet to see a dime for his work.

  He had to give the boy credit, however. He continued to stand his ground. “Being a freelancer is legitimate,” he said.

  “Yeah, keep telling yourself that.” Amika recrossed her legs. “So, anyway, how is Mrs. Kim doing? I saw you two walking into the hospital.”

  “What, have you been following me? And after these insults, you think that I’ll even answer?”

  “Listen, grow up. We’re both adults. If you want to be a real reporter, act like one. You share some information with me, and I’ll give you a lead.”

  “What possible lead could I get from you?”

  “I’ll share if you do.”

  Don’t do it, Mas said to himself. But Amika was too powerful a force.

  “They found no sign of cyanide in her system, okay? She’s holding steady.”

  “Thank you.”

  Yuki crossed his arms. “Okay, so what’s your lead?”

  “Do you want to write this down?”

  Yuki tapped his head. “I can remember.”

  Amika shrugged her shoulders and began: “Before he left for Los Angeles, Itai met with the baseball commissioner in Tokyo. Had some secret meetings.”

  “About what?”

  “I’m not sure, but the commissioner was very upset. Knowing Itai, he probably came up with some dirt about the league.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Well, if I knew more, I would have reported it already.”

  “Hmmm. There was that lost Gurippu document,” Yuki murmured, more to himself than to anyone else.

  “What’s that?”

  “Ah, nothing.” Yuki picked up his phone from the desk. “Sorry, but we have a morning appointment.”

  Amika crinkled her nose. She didn’t seem to believe Yuki but reluctantly moved toward the door. She still wanted to have the last word. “Listen, we can help each other out, you know. Like this.”

  “Yes, yes.” Yuki pushed his glasses atop his head as if he didn’t want to see her anymore.

  Once the heavy hotel door had closed, Mas held out his hands. “Well?”

  “It’s hard to know if I can trust her.”

  “Why youzu tell her about Missus Kim?”

  “So she’d leave her alone. And stop following us. As long as she doesn’t think there’s a story, we’ll be okay.”

  “Why youzu enemies, anyhowsu?”

  “I wouldn’t say enemies, per se.” Yuki hesitated for a moment. “Well, to be perfectly honest, Itai-san probably did wrong her.”

  “What youzu mean?”

  “Based on what Neko has said, Amika was the one who found out that Mrs. Kim was an ianfu. But for some reason, she hasn’t reported it. Her employer is more conservative. They don’t typically cover stories like that.”

  “Thatsu not Itai’s problem.”

  “True, but I think he did steal the story from her. He’s drinking buddies with one of the cameramen who works on her show. I was actually with them at a bar back in Tokyo, and the cameraman mentioned that he’d finished a shoot with Amika and Neko’s parents in Yokohama. He probably told Itai what happened. And from there, Itai must have appropriated the information as his own.”

  Mas knew what it was like to have your customers stolen right from under your nose. No wonder Amika had an axe to grind against Itai and Nippon Series.

  Mas wanted to cleanse himself of the dirtiness that he’d just heard. “I take shower,” he announced.

  Yuki gestured toward a bag from their shopping expedition in Little Tokyo the other day. “Go ahead. Feel free to wear what you need.”

  Inside was a package with white Jockey underwear and a couple of T-shirts. One shirt had a heart over a skeleton, while the other was a Dodgers one with the latest Japanese import, Kuroda, on the back. Mas chose Kuroda, who’d been a former player with the Hiroshima Carp.

  Once under the spray of the showerhead, Mas thought about baseball in America, with its string of scandals and controversies. Mas had been among those who swore off baseball for a season in 1995 after the millionaire players returned from going on strike. Wasn’t baseball about the fans? Didn’t these senshu realize that without the fans, there’d be no outlandish salaries in the first place?

  And the steroid use. Those stories nearly destroyed the enthusiasm of Tug and his son, who religiously followed the stats. With the effects of these performance-enhancing drugs, did records mean anything anymore? But baseball in that sense were like the hibakusha. They rose from the ashes and survived, just like Mas. Were such scandals present in Japanese baseball as well?

  When he finally emerged from the steamy bathroom wearing the Dodgers T-shirt, Yuki was back at the desk and the computer. “I wasn’t able to recover any files on the laptop,” he said without averting his gaze from the screen. “But remember the thumb drive Sunny gave me? There was a file there, too. Not ‘Gurippu’ but ‘Gurippusuhomu.’”

  Mas repeated the word a couple of times. It was obviously in katakana, an alphabet used mainly to phoneticize non-Japanese words.

  “It’s Gripsholm, I think,” Yuki said. “There’s a castle in Swed
en named Gripsholm. I can’t open the file—it’s been deleted.”

  Mas had heard of Gripsholm before. Someone in his circle had mentioned it. Someone at Tanaka’s Lawnmower Shop, back before it had been turned into a beauty shop and now exclusively a nail salon. Mas imagined Tanaka’s interior. The plain wood shelves full of bags of fertilizer and pesticides. The metal revolving stand of seeds. The one who’d mentioned Gripsholm hadn’t been the proprietor, Wishbone Tanaka, but someone close to him: Stinky Yoshimoto, a fellow gardener in Pasadena who’d unfortunately been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s last year. Before the diagnosis, Stinky often didn’t make much sense, so this new development probably made communication even more difficult. Mas had yet to visit him in the nursing home in Lincoln Heights, but the reports had not been good.

  “I may know someone who knows about this Gripsholm,” Mas said in Japanese to Yuki. “But he’s not hundred percent.”

  A line formed at the bridge of Yuki’s nose. Not a ringing endorsement of a reliable source, that’s for sure. He shook away talk about the Gripsholm and went onto a more definite matter. He clicked the keyboard to reveal a website all in Japanese. “Those two good-for-nothings that threatened you in East L.A.—they aren’t strangers to Tanji. They’re distant relatives named Tanji, too.” Scrolling down the page, he stopped on a photo of the men posing with Kii Tanji at Dodger Stadium. “I found them on a blog based in Kagoshima. It has their whole itinerary. And they haven’t left Los Angeles yet. This afternoon they’ll be at a luncheon organized by a Kagoshima prefectural organization. In a place called Quiet Cannon in Montebello. Have you heard of it?”

  Mas nodded. Practically every gardeners’ event was held at Quiet Cannon, next to the Montebello Golf Course. If those Tanjis were out to make trouble, they’d chosen the wrong place.

  “Letsu go,” Mas said.

  Chapter Eleven

  Montebello used to be a flower town; it even had a generic flower featured on banners drooping from light poles on its main streets. Haruo’s second wife, Spoon, had lived there for some time, and when the two aging lovebirds got hitched, Haruo abandoned his postage-stamp apartment in the Crenshaw district in central L.A. to move in with her and her adult daughter, Dee. It had been rough going at first, but now they’d become a finely tuned household. The three of them had a special-event floral business, and they’d turned the garage into a makeshift shed with long tables for young mothers and high school students to thread leis and braid ti leaves for graduations and parties.

  Quiet Cannon was on the far north side of town, butted up against the 60 Freeway. Mas had no idea why it was called Quiet Cannon, as the drone of the freeway was anything but quiet, and there was nothing remotely military about the place. But as you turned the corner into the event center, past an agua store, a tattoo parlor, and mom-and-pop eateries, the neighboring eighteen-hole city golf course and the towering line of pine and eucalyptus did deafen the urban din. The facility was the go-to place for many a Japanese American event, especially shinnenkai, New Year’s installation luncheons, as well as weddings and quinceañeras serving the locally dominant Latino community.

  In fact, this afternoon, as Mas drove the Impala up the wide bend toward the parking lot, he spotted a team of dark-haired fifteen-year-old girls, teetering in high heels and holding up their long, poofy dresses as they walked past old Japanese couples in dark clothing and sensible shoes.

  He and Yuki did not have formal invitations to the Kagoshima prefectural party, which could prove to be a problem. At every event here, the uketsuke, or receptionists, sat at a long table at the front doorway, their eagle eyes fixated on a pile of RSVP cards or a typed guest list. A large box on the side held boutonnieres, usually carnations, for the male VIPs and corsages, usually orchids, for the women. Every guest received an adhesive nametag as well a drink ticket and table assignment. Neither Mas nor Yuki would have any of these. Their clothing also wouldn’t help them blend in. Mas was in the Dodgers Kuroda T-shirt, while Yuki wore the skeleton one with a heart and the message, “Love Kills.”

  “Ready?” Yuki asked Mas, after the Impala was parked.

  Mas grunted. He hoped he wouldn’t run into anyone he knew, but, of course, after they climbed up the stairs to the second-floor banquet room, he saw a familiar face.

  “Arai-san, long time no see.” It was one of the leaders of the gardeners’ federation, Kengo Toda, dressed in the customary ill-fitted suit and old-fashioned tie. He was about twenty years younger than Mas, but his wavy hair and mustache already had plenty of gray. Luckily, Toda was speaking mostly in English; the Kagoshima dialect of Japanese sometimes seemed like another language to Mas.

  “But you Hiroshima, desho?” Toda remarked. “Not Kagoshima.”

  “Dis my friend,” Mas said. “Yukikazu Kimura. Reporter with Nippon Series. Heezu visitin’ from Kagoshima.”

  Yuki’s mouth dropped open to hear Mas identify him as a Kagoshiman rather than a Hiroshima boy. Some called Kagoshima the Hawaii of Japan. Yuki knew little of either Kagoshima or Hawaii. He quickly recovered and bowed respectfully toward Toda. “Dozo yoroshiku.”

  “Weezu don’t have tickets to dis thing,” Mas informed his friend.

  “No shinpai. I got you covered. A couple called in sick at our table.”

  And just like that, the doors of hospitality magically opened for Mas and Yuki, all due to the gardeners’ connection.

  As Toda went to the receptionist’s table to get some handwritten nametags and tickets, Yuki saddled up to Mas. “What if they start asking me things about Kagoshima?”

  “Do what you do best,” Mas hissed back in Japanese. “Lie.”

  Yuki inhaled and let out air from his puffed cheeks. We’ll see what the boy is truly made of, Mas thought.

  They received their table assignment, No. 5, and found themselves seated between Toda and his wife. Offering to fetch their complimentary drinks at the bar, Toda collected their red tickets and asked for their orders.

  “Hai-boru,” Yuki said, catching Mas off guard. A highball in the afternoon?

  “Coke,” Mas said. At least one of them needed to stay sober.

  Yuki scanned the room after Toda left. “I don’t see Tanji.”

  Mas grunted. He also hadn’t spotted the baseball senshu and his bootlickers.

  Mas leafed through a glossy bilingual pamphlet left on each seat. It described the history of the Southern California Kagoshima Kenjinkai, a prefectural group started in Los Angeles in 1905. Every Japanese was familiar with Kagoshima’s stature as the home of the Satsuma samurai, macho men who held onto their fighting swords until the bitter end.

  Servers distributed salads made with iceberg lettuce and grated carrots. Mas was in the middle of passing a salad dressing boat when he noticed that the room of a hundred people had grown hushed. Tanji had entered the banquet hall, the two mini-Tanjis following closely behind. Tanji wore the Japanese formal uniform of a black suit and black tie. He definitely looked the part of a politician.

  A man at table 2 stood up and started madly clapping, and one by one, like weeds, they rose, welcoming the celebrity Kagoshiman to their humble event. Tanji was obviously lapping up the attention like fresh milk to an alley cat and began to circle the room. He smiled, revealing his mess of teeth—that is, until he saw Mas and Yuki at table 5. Then he abruptly stopped, causing the entourage behind him to crash into each other.

  “Tanji-san, banzai!” Again, the man at table 2 expressed his exuberance for the Yomiuri Giants veteran.

  Soon, everyone in the room was holding up their wet glasses and toasting Tanji. A few called out the more appropriate and less warlike cheer of kanpai, but banzai seemed to rule the day.

  The Tanjis finally took their places at table 1, allowing the room to settle down and concentrate on the rolls and salad. Toda introduced his wife, an attractive Japanese woman with short chestnut hair who was seated next to Yuki.

  “So where in Kagoshima are you from?” she asked in Japanese. Her accent was th
ankfully not as strong as her husband’s.

  “Ah, Kagoshima City,” Yuki offered up, almost like a question.

  Quick thinking, Mas thought disparagingly.

  “Oh, I’m from Kagoshima City, too. What part?”

  “Ah, well…the east,” Yuki said.

  “I’m from the east, too. Taniyama. How about you?”

  “Further east.”

  “Further east? Then you’d be in the ocean.”

  “Well, my family moved to Hiroshima when I was just a baby.”

  “Oh.” The whole table of Kagoshimans seemed disappointed, as if Yuki was a fraud. Which was appropriate, because he was.

  Toda, who was at Mas’s left, stayed quiet as he buttered his roll. His spirits seemed to rebound after his second gin and soda. “You know that I fought in the Vietnam War, Masao-san?”

  Mas shook his head.

  “My dad came over as a nanmin. You know what a nanmin, is?” Toda directed his question to Yuki.

  “Refugee?”

  “There was a refugee act here in America in the 1950s. Japanese barely qualified; we’d suffered through a lot of typhoons, and some Nisei leaders fought to have natural disasters included. My dad got in, just under the gun. Worked on a grape farm. He met my mother in California, they had me and my brothers, and then we went back to Japan.”

  Mas nodded. It was not an exact echo of his own early life, but similar enough.

  “Then when I returned to America—boom, I got drafted. Went from the US back to Asia, only with a machine gun and hand grenades. Half the time I had to avoid getting shot by my own platoon. Needed a sign: I am not the enemy.”

  Yuki’s eyes got as big as quarters, and Mas was reminded how naïve the boy really was. Mas knew that Tug, the American with the Japanese face, fought in high mountain ranges in France, risking his life to save a battalion of soldiers from Texas, while his family and then-girlfriend, Lil, were kicked out of their homes and forced to live in a camp thousands of miles away. If that wasn’t irony, Mas didn’t know what was.