by Barry Eisler
His body convulsed, then went slack. I dragged him into one of the empty stalls, sat him on the toilet, and adjusted his position so the body would stay put. With the door closed, anyone coming in to use the bathroom would see his legs and just think the stall was occupied. With luck, the body wouldn’t be discovered until closing time, long after we were gone.
I eased the door shut with my right hip and used my knee to close the latch. Then, gripping the upper edge of the stall divider, I pulled myself up and slid over to the stall on the other side. I pulled a length of toilet paper from the dispenser and used it to wipe the two spots I had touched. I jammed the toilet paper in a pants pocket, took a deep breath, and walked back out into the bar.
“All set?” I asked, walking up to the table, controlling my breathing.
“Let’s go,” Midori said. The three of them stood and we headed toward the cashier and the exit.
Tom was holding the bill, but I took it from him gently and insisted they all let me pay, that it was my privilege after the pleasure of their performance. I didn’t want to take a chance on anyone trying to use a credit card and leaving a record of our presence here tonight.
As I was paying, Tom said, “I’ll be right back,” and headed toward the restroom.
“Me too,” Ken added, and followed him.
I imagined vaguely that the body could slide off the toilet while they were in there. Or that Murphy’s Law would make an appearance in some other way. The thoughts weren’t unduly troubling. There was nothing to do but relax and wait until they had returned.
“You want a walk home?” I asked Midori. She had mentioned during the evening that she lived in Harajuku, though of course I already knew that.
She smiled. “That would be nice.”
Three minutes later, Tom and Ken returned. I saw them laughing as they approached, and knew Mr. Bland had gone undiscovered.
We stepped outside and walked up the steps into the cool Omotesando evening.
“My car’s at the Blue Note,” Ken said when we were outside. He looked at Midori. “Anyone need a ride?”
Midori shook her head. “No, I’m fine. Thanks.”
“I’ll take the subway,” I told him. “But thanks.”
“I’ll go with you,” Tom said, diffusing the slight tension I could feel brewing as Ken did the math. “John, it was nice meeting you tonight. Thank you again for coming, and for the dinner and drinks.”
I bowed. “My pleasure, really. I hope I’ll have another opportunity.”
Ken nodded. “Sure,” he said, with demonstrable lack of enthusiasm. Tom took a step back, his cue to Ken, I knew, and we said good night.
Midori and I strolled slowly in the direction of Omotesando-dori. “Was that okay?” she asked when Tom and Ken were out of earshot.
“I had a good time,” I told her. “They’re interesting people.”
“Ken can be difficult.”
I shrugged. “He was a little jealous you had invited someone else to tag along, that’s all.”
“He’s just young. Thanks for handling him gently tonight.”
“No problem.”
“You know, I don’t usually invite people I’ve only just met to come to a performance, or to go out afterward.”
“Well, we’d met once before, so your guideline should be intact.”
She laughed. “You feel like another single malt?”
I looked at her, trying to read her. “Always,” I said. “And I’ve got a place I think you’ll like.”
I took her to Bar Satoh, a tiny second-story establishment nestled in a series of alleys that extend like a spider’s web within the right angle formed by Omotesando-dori and Meiji-dori. The route we took gave me several opportunities to check behind us, and I saw we were clean. Mr. Bland had been alone.
We took the elevator to the second floor of the building, then stepped through a door surrounded by a riot of gardenias and other flowers that Satoh-san’s wife tends with reverence. A right turn, a step up, and there was Satoh-san, presiding over the solid cherry bar in the low light, dressed immaculately as always in a bow tie and vest.
“Ah, Fujiwara-san,” he said in his soft baritone, smiling a broad smile and bowing. “Irrashaimase.” Welcome.
“Satoh-san, it’s good to see you,” I said in Japanese. I looked around, noting his small establishment was almost full. “Is there a possibility we could be seated?”
“Ei, mochiron,” he replied. Yes, of course. Apologizing in formal Japanese, he had the six patrons at the bar all shift to their right, freeing up an additional seat at the far end and creating room for Midori and me.
Thanking Satoh-san and apologizing to the other patrons, we made our way to our seats. Midori’s head was moving back and forth as she took in the décor: bottle after bottle of different whiskies, many obscure and ancient, not just behind the bar but adorning shelves and furniture, as well. Eclectic Americana like an old Schwinn bicycle suspended from the back wall, an ancient black rotary telephone that must have weighed ten pounds, a framed photograph of President Kennedy. As a complement to his whisky-only policy, Satoh-san plays nothing but jazz, and the sounds of singer/poet Kurt Elling issued warm and wry from the Marantz vacuum-tube stereo, accompanied by a low murmur of conversation and muffled laughter.
“I… love this place!” Midori whispered to me in English as we sat.
“It’s great, isn’t it?” I said, pleased she appreciated it. “Satoh-san is a former sarariiman who got out of the rat race. He loves whisky and jazz, and saved every yen he could until he was able to open this place ten years ago. I think it’s the best bar in Japan.”
Satoh-san strolled over and I introduced Midori. “Ah, of course!” he exclaimed in Japanese. He reached under the bar, shuffling things until he found what he was looking for: a copy of Midori’s CD. Midori had to beg him not to play it.
“What do you recommend tonight?” I asked him. Satoh-san makes four pilgrimages a year to Scotland and has introduced me to bottlings available almost nowhere else in Japan.
“How many drinks?” he asked. If the answer were several, he would conduct a tasting, starting with something light from the Lowlands and progressing to the iodine tang of the islands.
“Just one, I think,” I responded. I glanced at Midori, who nodded her head.
“Subtle? Strong?”
I glanced at Midori again, who said, “Strong.”
Satoh-san smiled—“strong” was clearly the answer that he was hoping for, and I knew he had something special in mind. He turned and took a clear glass bottle from in front of the bar mirror, then held it before us. “This is a forty-year-old Ardbeg,” he explained. “From the south shore of Islay. Very rare. I keep it in a plain bottle because anyone who recognized it might try to steal it.”
He took out two immaculate tumblers and placed them before us. “Straight?” he asked, not knowing Midori’s preferences.
“Hai,” she answered, to Satoh-san’s relieved nod of approval. He carefully poured two measures of the bronze liquid and recorked the bottle.
“What makes this malt special is the balance of flavors—flavors that would ordinarily compete with or override one another,” he told us, his voice low and slightly grave. “There is peat, smoke, perfume, sherry, and the salt smell of the sea. It took forty years for this malt to realize the potential of its own character—just like a person. Please, enjoy.” He bowed and moved to the other end of the bar.
“I’m almost afraid to drink it,” Midori said, smiling and raising the glass before her, watching as the light turned 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.
“In America I lived in 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 in Saitama. I was still homesick for Japan, so I enrolled right away.”
“Your mother must have been reluctant to let you go.”
“Part of her was. 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 I was sharing more personal details than I should have. I didn’t care.
“How long were you over there?”
“Three years.”
“I thought 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 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 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 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 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 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 a 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 a while 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 sankyo. After that, they left me alone. Which was good, because sankyo 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 sankyo 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 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 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 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 there was something about her that made me open up too much, reveal too much. 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 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 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 no one uses, bridges and roads no one drives on, rivers lined with concrete. You know those ugly concrete ‘tetrapods’ lining 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?”