Sayonara Slam

by Naomi Hirahara

  “That’s all well and good that he’s trying hard, but that’s not enough. What’s going to happen when the honeymoon phase wears off? Yukikazu will be by himself. Destroyed.”

  “Akemi-san, I gotsu go,” Mas told her. “I tellsu Yukikazu that you called.”

  Mas didn’t bother taking a shower. He quickly dressed. In the bathroom, he patted a palmful of Three Flowers oil on top of his head and pushed his dentures into his mouth. He will be destroyed, Mas said to himself. Destroyed. He shoved the phone and Itai’s notebook into the back pockets of the jeans he’d been wearing this week.

  He got into the Impala, backed it out of the driveway in record time, and tore down the street. He didn’t know quite what he was going to say, but he had to at least try.

  He felt like he was driving for a lifetime. Parking was even worse than usual. He’d only gone to the room once before, but it was on the first floor and in the corner, so it was easy to find.

  He didn’t even wait at the door or bother to knock. He flung it open, finding Genessee at the front of a line of desks all pushed together in the center of the room. About seven seated students stared blankly at him.

  “Mas, what are you doing here?”

  He took a deep breath. “I’zu been a big bakatare.” He was indeed a huge fool. “I’zu just too scared. Scared I’zu be destroyed.”

  “Oh, Mas.” Genessee came right up to him, placing her arms around him. “Just open your heart to me. Even a little bit. Nothing bad is going to happen.”

  And in front of the Origins of Indigenous Music in the Pacific seminar at UCLA, Mas had his very first experience with a public display of affection.

  After the encounter with Genessee in her class, Mas felt like he could do anything. Or at least should do anything. Like find Tomo Itai’s killer.

  When he first encountered Itai, Mas didn’t care for him one bit. He was like those kuso-heads who parked their car in two spots or cut in line at the betting window at the track. No class and no thought for anyone else. Yes, Itai had been like that, but there’d been more to him. Whether it was the ianfu or mixed-race minorities, he’d been committed to the underdog. Itai had believed that he could save the world, a motive that was irritating to Mas, but at least in his writing, the journalist wasn’t just out for himself. In his effort to make himself out to be a savior, Itai seemed to have done some good along the way.

  Mas parked in the lot for the hospital and went to the reception desk to get a sticker with Mrs. Kim’s room number written on it.

  He was walking down the hallway toward her room when someone called out, “Arai-san.” Yuki was seated in the open waiting room with the two knuckleball-pitching cousins.

  “This is Mas Arai. She has helped me so much,” Yuki introduced Mas to both Neko and Jin-Won in English. Mas at first balked at being identified as “she,” but what could he say? He’d lived in America for fifty years himself and still wasn’t getting words right. He could ignore a wrong pronoun, especially since he was being paid a compliment.

  Mas shook Neko’s hand and then Jin-Won’s. He had to admit that it was a thrill to touch the hands of professional baseball pitchers. English had to be the language of record, linking the Japanese, Korean, and American together.

  “Howsu your grandma?” he asked both Neko and Jin-Won.

  Neko’s face flushed pink, and at first Mas thought he had said something wrong. Maybe to have identified that intimate relationship so clearly was a mistake.

  Neko fanned her hand in front of her face, signaling that she wasn’t offended. “No, it’s the first time for me to hear that. Grandma. It is so…so like family.”

  Jin-Won squeezed Neko’s shoulder. “Would you like to see?” he asked Mas.

  Mas didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t like he didn’t want to see Mrs. Kim, but he barely knew her. He was here for support, to be in the background. Not to be a participant.

  “Ojisan, go,” Yuki said. And then he added in Japanese, “I’ve told her about you.”

  Mas took a few steps into the hospital room. Mrs. Kim was lying down, a sheet and blanket up to her chin. She was wearing glasses and her eyes were expectant, ready to see what was around the corner.

  “Hallo,” Mas said.

  “Konnichiwa,” she replied, and they both laughed in recollection of their first meeting.

  He placed his hands in his jacket pockets. His right hand felt the hard outline of the baseball he’d found in Dodger Stadium. He drew it out.

  “You play?” she asked in Japanese.

  “When I was a boy. A long, long time ago.”

  “May I?” She gestured toward the ball, and Mas was only too happy to present it to her. She gripped it in her right hand, blue veins extending from her knuckles, and then palmed it in her left. “I played, too. In school. I was pretty good.”

  Mochiron, Mas thought. No doubt. Her genes had been passed down to her grandchildren.

  She studied him for a moment through her glasses. “You are a hibakusha.”

  Mas nodded.

  “It must have been so sorrowful for you.”

  Mas felt blindsided by Mrs. Kim’s comment. “I try not to think about it.”

  “Me, too,” Mrs. Kim said. “All these years, me, too. All these years, I see women outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. Protesting what had happened during World War II. Fruitless, I think. Useless. But now I think that I was wrong. I need to tell my story. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have ever found my granddaughter, Neko. If I keep talking, who else will I find?”

  Mas wanted to warn her that there were people out there, people in the unknown, anonymous internet, who might want to hurt her. But perhaps it was like boxing with shadows. What was the use of always being afraid of a shadow?

  “I’m not like you,” Mas told her.

  Feeling like this meeting had come to an end, Mas bowed his good-bye.

  “Sayonara,” she said, returning the baseball to him.

  As soon as he stepped out of the room, he noticed that someone had been standing by the doorway. Sally Lee, without her camera. She’d most likely been eavesdropping, spying on him the whole time. Mas lowered his head, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible, but Sally called out to him, her voice stripped of its previous hard edges. “I have to apologize,” she said. “I was a bit harsh with you the other day. She’s been so hurt by Japanese men in the past. I want to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  Mas grunted in reply. He didn’t like to be stirred into the same pot as pieces of trash. Sally Lee didn’t know him, and he didn’t know her. But he was getting to know Mrs. Kim. And for her, he accepted the apology.

  Mas returned to the waiting room, the baseball in his hand.

  “What is that?” Jin-Won asked.

  “Oh, found dat in outfield.” He tossed it to Jin-Won. Probably would make more sense in the pitcher’s possession than in his. Neko looked on, but Yuki was nowhere to be seen.

  “Where’su Yuki?”

  “The police have him,” Neko said.

  Mas’s back stiffened.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. They’re here and they had some follow-up questions for him. I’m sure it’s just routine.”

  Mas breathed in and out. With police detectives, nothing was routine.

  Neko and Jin-Won took turns holding the ball. They held it as Smitty had shown Mas, with the thumb down and the index and third fingers stretched out like a claw.

  Neko kept shaking her head. “Okashii.” Strange? What was strange?

  She turned to Mas. “The grip. It feels off. Maybe this ball is defective in some way. Hit too many times.” Yet the outside skin was perfectly white.

  “Mista Mas, you have a knife?” Jin-Won asked.

  Did Mas look like some kind of bakatare to bring a knife into a hospital? And then he remembered that he did in fact have his pocketknife with him.

  Jin-Won took Mas’s pocketknife, opened it, and started to cut into the skin of the ball. Th
is would not do, Mas thought. Jin-Won’s hands were worth millions, while Mas’s garnered him a hundred dollars on a good day. “I’zu do it,” he said.

  He jiggled the short blade for a while, and finally the insides of the ball were released. Mas was surprised to see many skeins of white yarn wrapped around an orange rubber center. Stabbing into the center revealed a cork. He wasn’t sure how often professional players dissected their baseballs, but it seemed like Jin-Won had done it before.

  “This rubber,” Jin-Won fingered the solid core, “seems different. More compact.”

  “What are you saying?” Neko asked. “That it’s been tampered with?” She looked for the manufacturer of the ball on the loose leather skin. “That’s a famous company. They wouldn’t do illegal things.”

  “How about the name? The baseball commissioner?” Jin-Won traced the signature of the Japanese professional league’s leader.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know,” Neko murmured. “Maybe a prototype or something.”

  Mas then remembered the list of numbers in Itai’s notebook. He pulled out the notebook, flipping the cover over to reveal what Itai had written.

  “These numba and letters. Maybe how far ball was hit.”

  “Could be.” Neko furrowed her brow. “T, Tanji. S, Sawada.” She went down the line, naming all the Japanese players. “So many home runs. Zahed is not mentioned, so maybe he was pitching?”

  Mas remembered how Tanji had berated him for his performance at practice. Maybe it wasn’t Zahed’s fault. Maybe it was the ball’s.

  “I haven’t played with a Japanese ball in long time,” said Neko. “Maybe it’s just my imagination?”

  Their attention to the dissected ball was interrupted by Yuki’s return to the waiting room.

  He fell into one of their uncomfortable chairs, his skinny legs stretched out on the linoleum. “They believe that Itai-san killed himself. And I think I just confirmed it.”

  “Honto?” Mas could not believe it.

  For Jin-Won’s benefit, Yuki attempted a few sentences in English. “He met a yakuza who owns a sushi bar in Rosu Angelesu on Monday night. Somewhere called San Fernando.” He continued in Japanese. “The police asked me if I had heard of him. I had. He’d been a source for one of Itai’s stories five years ago.

  “Apparently this yakuza has sold a bunch of drugs, in addition to being involved in some other illegal activities. I told the police that Itai-san wasn’t into that. Then they tell me that they’ve been looking into Itai-san’s finances. Hardly anything in his bank account. He’d taken out a sizable amount before he left for Los Angeles.”

  “So?” Mas said.

  “The police think that Itai-san was preparing to die here.”

  “Was he?” Neko asked. “I didn’t know him very well.”

  “No, no, no. And that’s what I told the detectives.”

  “Did the yakuza kill him?” Jin-Won interjected, unaware of what had just been communicated in Japanese.

  “I do not think so,” Yuki replied in English, and then in Japanese. “But Itai-san was indeed at a sushi bar in the San Fernando Valley on Monday night. They found video footage.”

  The police were doing their due diligence, Mas thought. And here he’d thought that Detective Williams and his disagreeable partner were just playing around.

  “The yakuza told the police that Itai-san was just paying a social call. But why would he go over there right after arriving in Los Angeles?” Yuki sat forward, cupping his chin with his hands. “And that’s not even the worst of it. Some college kid was in there around the same time. Took a selfie of himself and his girlfriend and posted it on Facebook. Itai-san was in the background. They blew up the photo and yes, he was receiving some sort of envelope from the yakuza. The police think that’s how Itai-san got the cyanide.”

  “Maybe weezu go ova there,” Mas chimed in. This information was confusing. Might as well as get it from the horse’s mouth.

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking, Ojisan.”

  Mas was in a sense a Valley man, but his valley was the San Gabriel one, the valley held in by purple-tipped mountains. Old money—grand estates and libraries—had first attracted Japanese gardeners, domestics, and laundries to this valley, but now the area was a magnet for new Asian immigrants, not from Japan but from China, Taiwan, and Korea.

  The more famous valley in Los Angeles was the San Fernando Valley, a sprawl that didn’t seem to have a clear beginning or end. Northwest of San Gabriel, the San Fernando Valley was like a thoroughbred horse that galloped across the dust of Southern California. In places like Pacoima, Roscoe, and Tropico, Japanese farmers had once tended flower fields of ranunculus and anemone and rows of lettuces and carrots. That was all gone now, of course, long cleared to make way for housing developments and shopping malls.

  Mas had been to a ramen house in North Hollywood, but in general he tried to limit his time in the Valley. It was strange and unknown to him, filled with impatient, speeding motorists who were quick on their horns. One was currently on his bumper as he traveled west on the 101. And he was in the slow lane.

  He and Yuki were on their way to see a yakuza, and Mas didn’t know quite what to make of it. He had come across his share of chimpira, low-level gangsters in post-atomic Hiroshima. They specialized in the black market as well as drugs, most specifically hiropon, heroin. They lassoed young, aimless hibakusha who were uncertain about their futures in the rubble of Hiroshima. Once these men and women were caught, it was hard to leave the embrace of money, drugs, and/or pseudo family. The cost of escape was high.

  Now they were voluntarily going to enter the den of a gangster. Maybe this was the appropriate way to close their investigation into the death of Tomo Itai. To discover that the demon that had ended the journalist’s life was the journalist himself.

  Yuki had downloaded directions to the restaurant onto Itai’s laptop. Mas had to rely on Yuki to guide him. The off-ramp and main streets were all unfamiliar to him. If, somehow, they became separated from the power of the laptop, Mas would be trapped and hopelessly lost in this valley, which was as mysterious to him as the moon.

  From the outside, the sushi bar more closely resembled a bar than a restaurant. Inside, it was the more of the same. The walls were covered in dark wood; the carpet was a blood red. The expansive sushi bar must have originally been built to accommodate more mixed drinks than tuna rolls, and the bar was adorned with plenty of both. It was three-thirty, in between lunch and dinner, a time when the typical Japanese restaurant was closed. But this place was obviously not typical.

  Yuki pointed to the itamae-san at the end of the bar. “That’s him,” he whispered in Mas’s ear. Mas wanted to tell the boy not to point, but it was too late now.

  A hakujin couple—a woman in a low-cut top and leather pants and a man dressed all in black—sat in front of the yakuza chef. Mas was surprised to see that he was tattoo-less and slight. He probably weighed the same as Mas, give or take a few pounds. But he was at least half a foot taller, with wispy, shaggy hair and a faint afternoon shadow above his lip and on his chin.

  Like all traditional sushi chefs, he wore all white, including a white apron that was tied high on his waist, but instead of the typical white skull hat, he wore a bandana that had an image of the rising sun.

  After the diners finally left, Yuki and Mas took their places. The yakuza chef seemed surprised that they didn’t wait to sit until the dirty plates were removed from the bar.

  “Irrashaimase,” the chef said to welcome them, as a waitress hurriedly cleared the dirty dishes. “What will you have?”

  “I am a friend of Tomo Itai,” Yuki said, skipping the small talk.

  The chef scrunched up his long nose as if he smelled something rotten. “Get out,” he said. “The cops have already wasted enough of my time. You can speak to my lawyer if you want.”

  “I worked as a reporter with Itai-san. On the same stories. I know you were a source for his series about yakuza in Ame
rica five years ago. I’m sure your colleagues back in Japan wouldn’t be too happy to hear about your cooperation.”

  The chef picked up one of his knives. It looked freshly sharpened and glinted from the lights above the bar. “Follow me.” He headed toward the kitchen in back but then stopped, gesturing to Mas. “Not him.”

  “I go where he goes,” Mas said in Japanese.

  The chef’s mouth curved into an ugly smile. “I was just trying to spare you, Ojisan. You want to play? C’mon.”

  Mas swallowed and followed the chef into the kitchen, with Yuki pulling up the rear. The top of Mas’s head barely touched the indigo blue noren, the rectangular fabric hanging from the kitchen’s entryway. Inside were mostly Latinos, like in any restaurant in Southern California, busy cutting cabbage and washing dishes.

  The chef led them into a back room. This was not good, Mas knew. Sure, there were workers just a few feet away, but they were the yakuza’s employees, and they were probably used to ignoring illegal activities going on behind closed doors. Sure enough, as soon as Mas stepped inside, the chef pushed him against the bare wall, his sashimi knife grazing the stubble on Mas’s chin.

  “I’ll slice this old man’s throat,” the chef said, as if he were boasting. Although the light was faint in the room, Mas noticed a scar by the chef’s nose. He must have been cut some time ago. Violence was nothing new to this man. “I want you out of my place, and you will never bother me again. You say anything to the police or my friends in Japan, and I’ll hunt this old man down.” He nodded toward the back door, an iron security gate, clearly expecting Yuki to immediately take the opportunity to leave.

  Yuki didn’t budge. Mas didn’t know whether to be impressed or incensed. It was literally his neck on the line here.

  “The police have already spoken to me, too,” Yuki said. “Detective Williams, right? I told him that Itai-san wouldn’t have bought any drugs from you. Especially something like cyanide.”

  Mas felt the chef’s grip loosen a little. He was listening.

  “I asked them for proof. Solid proof. They had a photo taken by a customer who’d posted it on Facebook. Of you giving Itai something in an envelope. What was in that envelope?”