by Barry Eisler
She shrugged. “Sometimes I nod off. It’s usually pretty quiet after three or four.”
“Well,” I said, screwing up my courage, “this makes three times.”
She looked at me, saying nothing.
“So…you know, the custom. I thought you’d tell me your name.”
“Doesn’t feel like three times to me. I’ve been up all night.”
“Hmm, I think that’s a technicality.”
“Just trying to respect your custom.”
Was she trying not to smile? I couldn’t tell. “You’re really not going to tell me your name?”
“How old are you?”
The question caught me off guard. “Why?”
“Are you sensitive about your age?”
“What? No. I’m twenty.” That was true. By about a week.
She raised her eyebrows. “Are you lying to me?”
“No, why would I lie?”
“Because you look like a kid.”
I felt myself blush, doubtless reinforcing the impression. “People have always said that about me. I think it’s because I have small ears.”
“What?”
“It’s true. Small ears make you look younger. Because your ears grow by about one one-hundredth of an inch per year. That’s why old people have big ears. I read it in a magazine.” I turned my head. The crew cut I’d worn in the military had grown out, but my hair was still short enough for her to see.
She took a long look, then laughed. “I think you might be right.”
It was the first time I’d heard her laugh. I liked the fact of it as much as the sound. Before I could think of some way to keep the conversational ball in the air, she said, “Actually, I can’t figure out how old you are. I was thinking pretty young. But with that drunken guy yesterday, you looked…”
She trailed off. I waited, wondering what she thinking. Finally, she said, “I don’t know. Serious, I guess. Even scary. Not like a kid.”
At that point in my life, girls were still a mystery, and trying to navigate the unfamiliar terrain of conversation with an attractive woman made me feel anxious and awkward. But violence…violence I knew. I supposed it stood to reason that I would come across as ungainly in romance, and confident, even imposing, in a confrontation. I could see where the contrast might have confused her. But it wasn’t something I wanted to explain. Instead, I said, “How about you?”
“What about me?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
“That’s a good age.”
She frowned. “Good for what?”
“I don’t know. Just sounds…good.” I imagined a fighter jet burning into the tarmac and exploding in flames.
She shook her head and laughed again. “Why aren’t you in school?”
“You mean college?”
“Assuming you graduated from high school.”
I hadn’t, in fact, having skipped out during my junior year to lie about my age and join the army. But I didn’t expect she would find any of that particularly impressive.
“I don’t know. I guess I haven’t gotten around to it.”
The truth was more complicated than that. At the time, life in Tokyo’s universities was dominated by various radical student factions, some complaining about Japan’s complicity in America’s war in Vietnam; others about how the American military was going to remain on Okinawa even after returning the island to Japan; and still others agitating for socialism, communism, real disarmament, discontinuation of construction at the new airport in Narita, and other such things. Several Tokyo universities had been paralyzed by student occupations and pitched battles with police—armed battles featuring tear gas, rocks, and staves. There had been rampages, bombings, arson, hundreds of arrests. I didn’t see any real difference between the students and the Japanese Red Army, which was busy hijacking airplanes and taking hostages in pursuit of paradise on earth. At best, they all struck me as pampered narcissists and dangerously misguided dreamers. Maybe they meant well, but to me it all felt like the same undifferentiated mob that had meant well during the riots that killed my father. I’d seen how the world really worked, and had paid for the privilege. I had nothing in common with any of them. I would make my own way.
“How about you?” I said. “Did you…are you in college?”
She frowned, but with a hint of amusement. “Don’t you have anything better to do than hang around here talking to me?”
“Not really. I mean, yes, but…”
She looked at me with an expression that could probably best be described as “charitable.”
“Do you like jazz?” I asked, flailing.
“What gave you that idea?”
“Well, you’re always listening to it on that tape recorder.”
“I was being sarcastic.”
I realized I should have quit while I was ahead. “Okay,” I said, “I guess I should go.”
“Okay.”
“Maybe I’ll see you later.”
“Maybe.”
“Bye.”
She gave me a tiny wave, half friendly, half dismissal, from behind the glass.
I headed south on Thanatos for a while, going nowhere in particular, nursing my wounded dignity. Then I shrugged it off and started to focus. I stopped at a payphone and called my answering service, hoping I’d have some word from McGraw. Instead, the woman on the morning shift told me, “You have a message from a Miyamoto-san. He asks that you call him back.”
Miyamoto? I wondered why he was contacting me. We’d had coffee together a few times—Miyamoto was talkative for a courier, and though I recognized social contact would at best be frowned upon by the people we worked for, I was too green to know I should rebuff him. He was friendly and inquisitive, unabashed about asking questions that were uncharacteristically direct for a Japanese: how was it to grow up in both countries, what was life like in the American army, had it been uncomfortable for me to fight in a western war against Asians, things like that. I liked that he took an interest, and that his questions were tinged with sympathy rather than judgment. He himself had fought with the Imperial Army in the Philippines, and though he claimed not to have distinguished himself, I sensed he was being modest. All soldiers are liars: either they exaggerate, or they downplay. I’d asked him what the hell he was doing carrying a bag at his age. He’d laughed and told me that as a younger man he’d foolishly made an enemy, and that this enemy, as chance would have it, had risen to prominence among the people with whom Miyamoto worked. The menial job was supposed to be an ongoing humiliation, but Miyamoto professed not to care. He loved Tokyo, he said, loved watching it change, the seasons along with the skyline. And the walking was good for him. Life was strange, and if it was his karma to be a courier for someone else’s cash, why should he complain?
I considered. The call might have been routine—a cancellation, change of venue, some logistical thing like that. Or maybe he just felt like exchanging pleasantries over coffee again with his fellow bagman. But given everything else going on, I couldn’t help feeling suspicious.
I made my way to another payphone and dialed. “Hai, Miyamoto desu,” the voice on the other end said. Yes, this is Miyamoto.
“It’s Rain,” I said in Japanese.
“Ah. Thank you for getting back to me so quickly.”
“What’s going on?”
There was a pause. “I would prefer if we could speak in person. Perhaps…coffee?”
A few days earlier, I would have met him without another thought. But now, I wasn’t sure. Playing for time, I said, “Where? When?”
“Wherever you would like. Now, if that’s convenient.”
That he was willing to leave the location to me was mildly reassuring. Still, what did I really know about this guy? He might be yakuza himself, and maybe he was contacting me for this “meeting” on behalf of Fukumoto & Sons, Inc.
But I realized also that I had no good way to avoid him. Not if I wanted to keep my job. On
ce a week or so, he and I had to meet to exchange our bags. Which meant that, if Miyamoto were part of a setup, they could ambush me pretty much anytime I went to see him.
Which was itself mildly reassuring. Why go to the trouble of calling a meeting now, when there would be one in due course soon enough? Why take a chance on alerting me with something out of the ordinary?
Besides, he might have useful information. Maybe I was rationalizing, but on balance I thought the risks were worth it.
“I can meet now,” I said, trying to think of the safest place possible just in case. “Where are you?”
“Shinjuku.”
“I can probably be there in twenty minutes. Let me call you again and I’ll tell you where.”
“All right. That’s fine. Thank you.”
He sounded uncertain. Maybe he was bewildered by why I wouldn’t name the place until later. That was also mildly reassuring—if he’d been too smooth about my reticence, I would have assumed he had reason to expect I might be nervous. As it was, so far he just seemed oblivious.
Still, I wasn’t going to take any chances.
I rode Thanatos to Shinbashi, a business district in the southeast of the city. I called Miyamoto again from a payphone just outside the JR station. “Sorry,” I told him. “I don’t think I can make it to Shinjuku. How soon can you meet me in Shinbashi?”
“Shinbashi? Well, I could be there in a half hour.”
“You know that row of banks—Taiyō and the Bank of Tokyo and Fuji? On Sotobori-dōri, with the view of the Kasumigaseki Building?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll meet you in the lobby of the Taiyō Bank in thirty minutes.”
He hung up without objecting to my unusual suggestion of a meeting place. Maybe he thought I had something to take care of at the bank and was killing two birds with one stone. I didn’t really think he was trying to set me up, and being so cautious felt a bit unreal to me. In the jungle, it had become second nature, but just as it had been at my apartment, here all the environmental cues were different. This was the city. Glass and concrete and lights; suits and cars and restaurants. Not the jungle. Not a war.
And then I thought of Pig Eyes at the Kodokan. The way his face had twisted into a smile as he tightened that strangle.
Tokyo was a jungle. Hell, the world was a jungle. And I damn well needed to remember it before someone else decided to remind me.
I walked the short distance to Taiyō Bank, these days known as Sumitomo Mitsui. There were six lanes of traffic across Sotobori-dōri and the area was bustling, but the uninterrupted clusters of buildings on either side of the street were all still low, no more than ten stories each and usually fewer, the sky wide overhead, the overall feel that of a medium-sized older city rather than a modern metropolis. But the Kasumigaseki Building, dominating the skyline to the west, made it impossible to miss that Tokyo was growing now, and growing almost impossibly fast. At thirty stories, the otherwise unremarkable structure had been Japan’s tallest building when it was completed four years earlier, but it had held that title for only two years, the Tokyo World Trade Center surpassing it in 1970. Then the World Trade Center itself had quickly been eclipsed, by the Keio Plaza Hotel in 1971. Two more skyscrapers—the Shinjuku Sumitomo Building and the Shinjuku Mitsui Building—were already under way, each set to take its brief turn as the new titleholder upon completion, and on and on and on. And for every one of these record breakers, there were scores of other monoliths sprouting freakishly skyward all over the city. At that moment, Tokyo felt to me like a city still clinging to the vestiges of its childhood, and inexorably losing its grip. The city I remembered was receding rapidly, driven off by forces it couldn’t understand, heading to oblivion, to be replaced by what I didn’t know.
I had selected the bank for our meeting because I figured the street’s heavy financial presence, with its concomitant guards and related security measures, would dissuade anyone who might have been planning anything untoward. But I decided not to wait inside. That’s where I was expected, and I thought I’d do better to watch the entrance from a discreet distance, to make sure Miyamoto came alone. So I browsed among the storefronts at the opposite side of the street, lurking under the shadows of awnings to make myself less visible and to evade the murderous midmorning sun.
Miyamoto showed right on time, strolling down Sotobori-dōri from the direction of the station. Probably he’d taken the Yamanote from Shinjuku. I watched him enter the bank, then spent a few moments scanning the sidewalk in his wake. He seemed to be alone, but I couldn’t be sure.
I strolled over and reached the entrance just as he emerged. “Ah,” he said. “I thought you would have beaten me here.”
“No, I just arrived. Do you mind if we take a cab somewhere? And then maybe just walk?”
“A cab? But I thought…but all right, if you prefer.”
He seemed disconcerted and possibly a little nervous, but not unduly so. If this was a setup, I figured he’d be more on edge. Still, no sense taking chances.
We took a cab to Hamarikyu Teien, a centuries-old garden a mile or so to the southeast that was once the property of shoguns and emperors but that more recently had been opened to the public. Between the cab and a walk in the garden, I was confident anyone tagging along with Miyamoto would have to reveal himself.
The grounds were nearly empty, and we strolled along one of the paths in silence for a few minutes, clinging to the shadows of the trees to one side, avoiding the monotonous, leaden heat of the sun, the only sounds those of our feet crunching the gravel and the raucous cries of crows in the trees. Today, the garden is surrounded almost entirely by modern high-rises and has something of a fishbowl feel, but back then it was an unsullied oasis of green knolls and clusters of trees dense as broccoli stalks and ponds graced by gently sloping wooden bridges, with no hint of the metropolis around it beyond the occasional distant rumble of a train. As we moved along, I had several opportunities to glance behind us. No one had followed us in.
“I had forgotten how lovely Hamarikyu can be,” Miyamoto said, dabbing at his perspiring brow with a handkerchief as we walked. “Why have we not been using it for our exchanges?”
His ordinarily earthy Japanese diction was markedly formal today. I wondered why. “Well, it’s not too late.”
He chuckled. “That is true.”
I waited for him to go on, thinking of the way McGraw seemed to use silence to elicit information. But nothing came of it.
We came to the wisteria-covered trellis at the end of the Otsutai Bridge. A discreet wooden sign announced that waiting at the other end, on stilts at the center of the large pond, was the Nakajima Teahouse, serving potent green matcha and offering enviable views of the surrounding garden since 1707. I said, “Maybe a cup of tea?”
“By all means, yes. It would be good to sit. And to get out of this sun.”
I couldn’t disagree with any of that. And it would be good to have near panoramic views of the garden, too, in case I had missed anyone behind us when we first entered. I wondered if my caution was excessive. I decided I didn’t care. There seemed little to be lost from it, and much that might be gained. And besides, it was only temporary.
We crossed the wooden bridge, the slight breeze over the water a godsend, and came to a tiny island of rock and thick shrubs, occupied almost in its entirety by the single-story, green-roofed teahouse. We removed our shoes at the entrance and followed a kimonoed hostess to a corner overlooking the pond, where we sat on the tatami and ordered the matcha Nakajima was known for. We were the only patrons, and the still space, redolent of cedar and old tatami, felt solemn to me, imbued with the ghostly presence of generations of previous patrons who had sat and chatted here as we did now, all of them long since dead. The waitress brought our tea on a small lacquer tray, set it before us, bowed, and left us to talk.
I picked up the earthen cup and went to take a sip. “Not like that,” Miyamoto said. “Let it cool a little. Give yourself a moment to app
reciate the aroma, the feel of the bowl in your hands.”
I was a little surprised and didn’t respond, though nor did I drink any tea. Miyamoto flushed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is why my children prefer to avoid me. Only…it seems a shame, not to pause to appreciate the small things. So often they’re more important than what we think are the big ones.”
Somehow, being corrected by Miyamoto didn’t sting. “It’s fine,” I said. “Do you know a lot about tea?”
He shook his head quickly as though embarrassed. “Very little.”
I sensed he was being modest. “You’ve done sadō, I think,” I said, referring to the Japanese tea ceremony—literally, “the way of tea.”
“Perhaps I was exposed to it somewhat, when I was younger. But still it’s really not right for me to suggest to others how they should comport themselves.”
“No, I don’t mind,” I said, setting my bowl down. “Show me the way you would do it.”
He beamed. “All right, since you ask. What’s important is not much more than what I said. The purpose is to appreciate, to pay careful attention…to be mindful. Not to overlook what seems small but that is in fact significant. The rest is commentary, no?”
The word he used for “mindful” was nen, which typically means “sense” or “feeling.” If he hadn’t offered the additional context, I wouldn’t have quite understood his meaning. I nodded and followed his lead, holding the bowl, appreciating the aroma, savoring the taste. At first I was just being polite, but after a few moments, I started to wonder if he might have a point. I knew there were tradecraft things I’d been missing. Why wouldn’t there be everyday things, as well? What would it cost to become more heedful of those things…and would the practice of becoming more heedful of one naturally cause me to become more heedful of the other? I thought this nen was an attitude worth cultivating. Not just to appreciate the things that make life worth living. But to be attuned to the things that can keep you alive.
When we were halfway through the tea, and he still hadn’t mentioned why he had contacted me, I thought it was time to nudge him. “So,” I said, “what’s on your mind?”