Japantown

by Barry Lancet

  “This the place?” George asked.

  Noda nodded. “Other side of the mountain.”

  George glanced around pointedly. Rice fields carpeted the view in every direction. Fifty yards down the road was a solitary thatched-roof farmhouse with a small rice-planting combine parked out front. Neither the home nor the surrounding fields exhibited any signs of life.

  “I should think the place a bit backward,” George said. “Folksy and quaint, but hardly menacing. Unless you fear ambush by backhoe.”

  “The deal was, you sit with the car.”

  “And I submit gracefully—this time. To show you there’s no hard feelings, my offer stands. Take the Viper into town. You’ll look good.”

  Noda shrugged. “As long as you stay put.”

  “Why?”

  “After dark we’ll need you here, close to the river.”

  Two hundred yards below the road, between slender bands of cedar and pine, cool running water glittered in the orange-red rays of the setting sun. Road maps showed the river running through a steep gorge straight out of Soga Valley. Vehicles were forced to circle around to an access road over the mountain, but the river ran straight.

  “A deal. Are you expecting trouble?”

  “Nen ni wa nen o ireyo,” the chief detective replied, quoting an old Japanese expression that translated as Pile caution on caution.

  George’s eyes sparkled. “Will I see some action?”

  Noda frowned. “Only if our luck’s bad.”

  “Well, I’m ready.”

  “ ’Course,” said Noda dryly, “if our luck’s real bad, you’ll never see what hit you.”

  —

  Twenty minutes later, Noda and I crested the mountain approach to the village.

  From our elevated perch, we looked down on Soga-jujo—a forgotten town in a forgotten valley of a nearly forgotten prefecture. We saw a harmless-looking cluster of traditional wooden homes with enchanting blue-tiled roofs on one side of the road, and on the other lush green rice paddies stretching to the far end of a fertile basin.

  Pastoral tranquility à la japonais.

  As I shifted into low gear for our descent, pressure mounted in my chest. I thought about how an unseen force thousands of miles away had reached out and slaughtered an entire family in San Francisco. The same force had caused me to cleave my daughter from friends and school and all that she cherished. Four days ago, I was living in ignorance of such a force. Now, connecting the dots had brought me to this distant outpost. To make matters worse, I hadn’t talked to Jenny yet, as Renna hadn’t been able to set up a safe protocol with the FBI liaison.

  Road kill spotted the blacktop as we navigated the downhill switchbacks into the valley. After the third snake I said, “Think we’ll find the linguist?”

  Noda winced as if he’d taken a blow to the gut. I knew how he felt. Chances were the overeager boy wonder was dead. He’d disregarded Noda’s warning to stay away. We might never discover whether professional ambition or youthful curiosity led him to ignore the chief detective’s words of caution, but knowing could not disguise the fact that Noda, at my request, had started Ichiro Mori down a road of no return.

  The same one we traveled now.

  I said. “I just thought that maybe—”

  Noda bristled with anger. “Yeah, and maybe the world’s made of rice balls and mother’s miso.”

  We took the rest of the descent in silence. At the valley floor, we pulled up at a crossroad. Thirty yards on, the main avenue was barricaded with sawhorses and striped tents. Beyond the barricade, women wrapped in blue-and-white summer kimonos flitted by. Children sang and skipped and played jump rope. The next instant, strings of red and yellow festival lanterns flickered to life.

  The village was gearing up for Obon, the Festival of the Dead.

  CHAPTER 32

  IRASSHAIMASE,” the okami-san, mistress of the inn, sang out from the entrance as we stepped from the car. Welcome. “You must be Mr. Johnson, and you are Mr. Kuroda, the one who called?”

  She wore a powder-blue workaday kimono, her hair pinned up in elegant artlessness. From the entryway, she beckoned us with a delicate hand gesture to shed our street shoes for the comfort of the inn’s cushioned slippers.

  Doubt assailed me. The okami-san looked enchanting and perfectly harmless. Could someone like this live side by side with the kind of men capable of planning Japantown?

  Our hostess said, “It’s always a pleasure to welcome foreigners, though I cannot speak a second language myself. Can you speak Japanese?”

  “A little,” I said, returning the expected reply.

  “What a wonderful accent you have. Very Tokyo.”

  Noda turned his attention to the wattle-and-daub walls with exaggerated interest, and the innkeeper took the hint. She smiled engagingly and showed us to our quarters, a ten-mat room with shoji screens at the window and a short-legged table in the center. With the shoji parted, the view gave out onto a bamboo thicket at the back of the lodge. The sound of water cascading over rock reached our ears.

  Tucking her cotton kimono under, the innkeeper knelt on one of the square throw cushions around the table and poured tea for both of us, then produced a pen and a registration card from the folds of her kimono. Noda and I set our bags in a corner and joined her.

  After filling in the registration form, I slid it across the table with the photograph of the linguist and his wife. “Would you mind taking a look at this?”

  “Koko ni tomatta no wa wakatterun da,” Noda said in his gruff drawl. He stayed here. We know that much.

  The matron glanced at the snapshot obliquely. “I remember him. Mr. Mori. Also from Tokyo.”

  “Did he say where he was going?” Noda asked.

  “No.”

  “Mention meeting anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Could you recommend someone to talk to?”

  “I am sorry, no.”

  “Can you tell us anything,” Noda said, “besides ‘no’?”

  I nudged the photo forward. “That’s his wife in the picture. Twenty-three years old.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Regret and resignation resonated in her voice as if she were apologizing for a continually wayward relative.

  Gently, I asked, “Did he return?”

  “No.”

  With each negative reply, her head dropped a notch and my hope dimmed further. We could no longer see her expression, but at the edge of her hair the skin was pale and the corners of her eyes had narrowed. She was hiding something.

  I said, “Has this ever happened before?”

  Eschewing eye contact, the okami-san cast a final glance at the photograph. “What I wonder is if the wife is as kind as she looks.”

  “More than kind,” I said. “That is the glow of a newlywed and a mother-to-be.”

  “I see.”

  The innkeeper reached for the pot of tea, a white-glazed vessel decorated with supple cobalt brushstrokes of bamboo alongside a thatched hut, and replenished our cups. She performed the ritual automatically, her thoughts elsewhere.

  “You are fortunate to be with us for Obon,” she said eventually, her voice subdued. “Why don’t you take a stroll?”

  “I would wager this is not the first disappearance,” I said.

  The okami-san set the teapot down, bowed, rose, and retreated to the door. As she slipped the registration card into the folds of her kimono, she eased the sliding door aside with a practiced hand, glided through, and bowed once more in a graceful motion while she shut us in.

  When her face grew to a sliver behind the paper-sheathed door, she said, “Join the festivities. Everyone will be there.”

  CHAPTER 33

  LIKE the rest of the land, Soga-jujo was preparing to welcome the dead.

  The Japanese believe that the departed souls of family and ancestors watch over the living, guiding them in unseen ways and returning to visit once a year in midsummer. For Obon, ancestral graves are cleanse
d and dressed with fresh flowers. When night falls, attention turns to entertaining the incoming spirits. Song and dance and ceremony follow, and throughout the land the chugging engines of music, mirth, and grog collide in a celebratory fashion.

  Tonight in Soga-jujo the engines were in full swing. A sea of sun-darkened faces bobbed before us as we entered a corridor of village shops. Everywhere we looked we saw the gentle, ruddy visages of country folks. But when wandering eyes inadvertently met ours, they grew guarded and swung away.

  A coldness bloomed in my chest. That was not the usual reaction. The Japanese are a shy people, but during public events like Obon their generous side emerges and they willingly play host. Yet in Soga we were clearly unwelcome. Customs vary by region, but at worst our reception should have been distant but polite, with the occasional embarrassed smile or nod. Here we were received like carriers of a contagious disease—the villagers’ expressions a mixture of worry, suspicion, and aversion.

  I looked at Noda. “You feel it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’re here.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Can you make anyone out?”

  “No. You?”

  “No.”

  The crowd grew thicker, and the deep-throated rhythms of taiko drums erupted up ahead. Vendors in tented stalls along both sides of the road dished up grilled soba noodles or fried squid, or sold toys or chits for games.

  We were swept along in a stream of bodies. In the general merriment people bumped up against one another. Chatter and revelry filled the air, but I felt claustrophobic, vulnerable. Shouldering our way through the throng, we heard the whisper of a bamboo flute join the primal percussion. Gongs began to toll. A harvest song reared up.

  Noda and I walked on, our glances flashing across the crowd but spotting nothing. Three men in white summer shorts, happi coats, and front-knotted headbands gauged our approach behind narrowed eyes. Passing around a bottle of spiced saké, the trio squatted in the doorway of the village furniture maker.

  “Gaijin da,” one of them said, flicking ash from a cigarette into the road. Foreigner.

  “Big and strong.”

  “Handsome, too. Better hide your daughter.”

  “Wonder where he’s from.”

  “Met me some Russian crabbers once. Don’t look like them.”

  “Looks American or British.”

  “You eyeball his friend? Wouldn’t mess with him.”

  “The pug-faced one? He’s nothing.”

  The three farmers spoke in loud, exaggerated voices, as if they belonged to an exclusive club and nonmembers couldn’t hear them.

  “Meet him on a dark night in Osaka, you’d be saying different.”

  “Wouldn’t be no tougher than the one we rolled that night. What we get—five big ones?”

  “He was old. Those two’ll rattle your pachinko balls quick enough.”

  Noda and I exchanged a knowing glance and agreed to ignore them. In winter, with their fields fallow, farmers sometimes journeyed to the big cities for seasonal odd jobs. If these three were to be believed, they had deprived a weaker soul or two of their surplus cash. Whatever they were, or pretended to be, they weren’t the type of man we were hunting.

  Noda and I reached the center of town. Overhead, a crosshatch of red lanterns cast a crimson glow over the crowd. Faces floated by—grinning, openmouthed, and shouting across the sea of heads for a friend, a brother, a child.

  As we rounded a corner, an elevated platform decorated with bunting swung into view. Erected in an empty lot between a rice merchant and a tofu maker, the platform provided an impromptu stage for musicians and performers. On it, women danced in a tight circle under the flickering orange flames of torches tied to the corner posts of the stage, while men clad in loincloths and knotted headbands beat the darkened skins of the giant taiko drums with sticks as fat as sugarcane.

  In a low voice, Noda intruded on my thoughts. “Can you handle things here?”

  My heart ticked up a beat. Something was brewing, but the chief detective wasn’t dealing out any clues. “Yeah, sure.”

  “Good.” Then louder, so others could hear: “Johnson-san, I’m bored. Always the same damn dances, the same tinny tunes. You look around. Enjoy yourself. I’ll wait this out in our room.” Noda flashed me a questioning look, wondering if I could handle “the hunt” on my own, then he veered away into the crowd.

  —

  Normally, I enjoyed Obon. The ancient festival supplied a sense of continuity. It spoke of troubles endured and victories won. Of loved ones lost but remembered. It was humbling and exhilarating, and if you immersed yourself in the festivities, a palpable sense of connectivity larger than the self emerged.

  However, normal and Soga no longer presented a balanced equation.

  A new song began. A litany of drums, shamisen, and flutes pumped up the joviality. The music churned, and the villagers danced. The women trotted their circular path with a willowy grace, arms waving, smiles slight and dreamy. Step, step, back, wave, clap. Their movements were hypnotic, their rhythms infectious. The dance was one of serene confidence. The way of generations of mothers. It was the picture of restrained abandonment.

  Step, step, back, wave, clap.

  I had always found the dances spellbinding. I recalled the neighborhood festivals of my childhood in Tokyo when I danced with my mother and netted goldfish with my father. Great times before the divorce. When both my parents were alive and together . .

  Focus, Brodie. Old memories didn’t belong to the here and now. Tonight I was searching for what Noda’s friends had found in the dark.

  Or whatever found them.

  To wash away the country dust collecting at the edge of my throat, I bought a beer, then settled in to study faces and postures of the celebrants.

  I took in the sun-burnished forearms and leathery necks of men who worked the fields. Their skin was a dark, woody brown. They wore hardy, resigned expressions. On the women, I noted a placid but fixed look of endurance, of long hours toiling in the home, then beside their husbands among rows of rice stalks and cabbage. I could easily imagine them shielded by scarves and straw hats as they moved steadily across a field weeding, prodding, trimming.

  Among the villagers, some faces were better fed and pale in a way the farmers’ were not. They, I concluded, were the merchants. The shopkeepers and tavern owners. Sometimes plump, sometimes slim, but always eager to serve.

  Eventually, I noticed a third type. Not hardy or servile but predatory, with the rigid, calcified brows of hunters. They were few, but as I learned to divide the villagers by occupation, their number grew.

  A bead of sweat skittered down the back of my neck. I’d found them. By my calculations, five or six hundred people milled about. More moved in and out of shops and taverns. The hunters mingled with the celebrants but they could not disguise what they were. Not from me.

  I stumbled across a tall monument of black granite at the foot of a large oak. Strings of ancient kanji carved into its dark face eulogized one General Kotaro Ogi, samurai to the shogun and a rescuer of the village from a famine in the 1700s. Though erected in 1898, thirty years after the shogun system fell to a modernizing Japan, the carved stone memorial was spotless, clearly someone’s pride and joy. I scanned the inscription twice but the Japantown character was not to be found. At the foot of the marker, more than a dozen bouquets of chrysanthemums, gladiolas, and valerians had been left for the hometown hero.

  Three hundred years on, the general remained a popular figure.

  Roaming the streets for another thirty minutes, I bought a plate of grilled noodles and more beer. I played tourist to the hilt, gazing in delight and curiosity at everything traditional while watching them obliquely.

  Their gait was silky and they held their shoulders in a way that allowed them to glide through the crowd without wasted motion. There was a smooth floating quality to their movement. I counted ten certainties and three contenders. Most were youn
g and two were female.

  Only once did I detect a sign of their attention. When a schoolgirl giddy with excitement plowed into me from behind, I turned abruptly to steady her small body and caught a glance shifting hurriedly away. In that brief moment I locked onto eyes so cold and unyielding in their appraisal, a tremor slithered through me.

  With that look, the illusion of Soga-jujo as a quaint country hamlet evaporated forever, along with the possibility of an unchallenged retreat.

  Our stalkers were merely waiting for their chance.

  CHAPTER 34

  WE were back in our room. Noda swallowed two pills, then thrust the meds at me. “Nonde.” Take these.

  “What are they?”

  “Keep you from sleeping.”

  Drowsiness and jet lag could slow my reaction time. I tossed down two tablets with water and blind trust. “Think they’ll come?”

  With fear and disbelief tugging me in opposite directions, I was having second thoughts.

  “If we seem a threat,” Noda said.

  “Or they might ignore us.”

  “Might.”

  “You worried?”

  “About the how, yeah.”

  That, indeed, was the question. We could only watch and wait. With the medication, we removed surprise from their arsenal, but they still had the night. How would they use it?

  During our absence, the low coffee table had been conveyed to a far corner of the room, and two sets of Japanese futon bedding had been laid out. Starched and folded, a crisp blue-and-white yukata lay on top of each futon. Noda and I bathed and changed into the kimono-like sleeping garments, wrapping indigo belts around our waists.

  Before extinguishing the lights, Noda extracted a 9mm gun from his bag, jacked a cartridge into the chamber, then screwed on an eight-inch suppressor. He set the weapon by his right leg, within easy reach.

  “That’s some silencer,” I said.

  “Need to be very quiet.”

  “Preparation is all.”

  “It helps,” he said. “Sometimes.”

  —

  Ten minutes later, Noda extinguished the overhead light, steeping our room in a deep-country darkness. Soon I was drifting in and out of a light sleep.