by Don Lee
Tom shook his head.
“What was she doing in Tokyo?”
“Nothing, from what I can tell,” he said.
“It doesn’t look like there was any foul play involved?” she asked.
“No, nothing like that,” he said. “I told you it wasn’t very interesting.”
The waitress brought her another coffee, and Julia dropped six sugar cubes into it. “I had a close friend who disappeared,” she said. “A girl I knew at Princeton, Vicky Crow. One night, she didn’t come back to the dorm. She just disappeared. There was an investigation, but they never found out what happened to her. No clues, no body, no witnesses. I don’t know if she was murdered or if she ran off on her own. To this day, I keep expecting her to show up somewhere. It’s not knowing that eats away at you.”
Julia drove him back to the Grew House. In the parking lot, as they were saying their goodbyes, she squeezed Tom’s hand, brushed a kiss across his cheek, and said, “Please let me know if anything turns up about the missing girl. It feels important for me to know.”
THAT SUMMER, no one could stop talking about the weather, for while a brutal heat wave had choked the US for much of June and July, killing over twelve hundred people, here in Japan the temperature had been well below normal—the coldest summer in seventy-five years—and the rainy season had extended well into August. Some forecasters surmised that volcanic ash from Mount St. Helens was to blame, and others attributed the unusual weather to a persistent high-pressure system over the Sea of Lkhotsk. Whatever the case, the collective mood in Tokyo was getting gloomier with each cool, dank day.
Tom was in a funk himself. He kept thinking about Julia Tinsley. After the coffeehouse, he had seen her only once more, when she had taken him to Akihabara, the shopping haven for electronic goods and appliances, to buy a portable cassette player. Otherwise she seemed content to confine their relationship to the telephone, calling him at random times, occasionally late into the night, shooting the breeze and asking, incidentally, if the Lisa Countryman case was going anywhere.
Tom began to understand that the query was a psychological vehicle for her—a justifiable excuse for talking to him, a way to traverse the guilt of attraction. Undeniably, he thought, she was attracted to him, for right away she seemed to attach a gloss of secrecy to their association, a need to be surreptitious. He sensed, for instance, that it wasn’t safe for him to call her in the evenings and on weekends, when her husband might answer, so he only tried to reach her during the workday or at her studio at the ISA, never leaving a message. Mostly, he waited for her to call him, and he tried not to sound overly grateful when she did.
He hung out with Jorge and Benny—more so now that Sara had left Japan. They went to movies at the Sanno Hotel, watched fireworks along the Sumida River, cruised Omotesando-dori, a wide, tree-lined boulevard that was often compared to the Champs-Élysées. And on his own, Tom embarked on a new project: architecture. In passing, he had told Julia he was a devotee of architecture, but when she’d asked about his favorite architects, he had been unable to name a single one, because, in truth, he knew nothing about architecture. He scoured bookstores in Jinbocho and set about memorizing a few bon mots like “articulated space” and “béton brut” and “neo-Aristotelian,” should the subject ever arise again.
Anyone who saw him would have assumed he had been a diligent student, that he was a motivated autodidact, and this might have been so, were it not for his extremely short attention span. Yet he was good at mimicking a certain level of superficial competence—a Cliffs Notes approach to self-improvement—acquiring just enough to impress people, as long as he didn’t take things too far, as long as he didn’t, as he was strangely wont to, profess expertise when he had absolutely none. It was a compulsion that baffled him. Always he felt like a fraud. Always he felt on the verge of being exposed and thrown out the door.
He didn’t really understand himself, his impulsiveness and coincident passivity. Occasionally he thought what had happened in São Paulo had changed him, had disrupted his development from the person he had wanted to be into the person he was now, but this seemed fallacious, or he would not have accepted the outcome that he had there.
Sixty percent of São Paulo’s population had been mired in poverty, living in the favelas, the slums, from which many residents were willing to do almost anything to escape. More than once at the consulate, Tom had had women slip photographs of themselves, nude, to him underneath their visa applications. There had been four of them on the Non-Immigrant Visa line, two FSOs and two JOs, Tom and Roberto Ramirez. They had to go through an average of five hundred NIV applicants a day, which meant they could spend no more than two minutes per interview. Awful, dispiriting work. Their job was to assess the likelihood that the person would return to Brazil when his or her visa expired, and they based their judgments on the person’s solvency and ties to the community—a good job, a family, property, money.
Yet the Consular Officers knew that the documents they were offered as proof were often forgeries, so they had to rely on their instincts and take whatever shortcuts were available to them, one of which was an informal five-page manual that the FSOs had devised with the Consul General. Most of it consisted of procedural tips and reminders, but there were also alerts about current fraud patterns, particularly about third-country nationals—Koreans, Chinese, Filipinos, Arabs, Nigerians—who were reportedly being smuggled through Brazil into the United States. The manual also advised them to use a series of two-letter codes in reviewing people: LR for “Looks Ratty,” TP for “Talks Poor,” SR for “Smells Rank,” BT for “Bad Teeth,” CH for “Coarse Hands.” None of the codes were explicitly associated with the applicants’ skin color or racial features, but it just so happened that the majority of applicants whose visas were denied were either black or Asian or Arab.
“Come on, you know it’s racist,” Ramirez told Tom. The Consul General and the FSOs were white. Ramirez, whose family had immigrated to the US from Santo Domingo when he was six, was black—a prieto. Ramirez kept complaining about the manual and its policies, refusing to follow them, and the Consul General gave him a highly unfavorable candidate evaluation report, which ensured that Ramirez would be bounced out of the Foreign Service. He appealed to the Grievance Board, which declared that such a manual, without question, would be unconstitutional, that they would absolutely not tolerate the systematic discrimination of visa applicants on the basis of race, color, class, socioeconomic status, national origin, or appearance. Only, how could they know for sure Ramirez wasn’t just a disgruntled employee, crazily making false accusations in an attempt to salvage his career? Where was his evidence? Copies of the supposed manual and a folder of visa applications with the Consular Officers’ alleged notes and codes had mysteriously disappeared, lost with his luggage when he left São Paulo. And there was also the suggestion—magnanimously omitted from his evaluations but implied during the inquest—that Ramirez might have succumbed to the stress and temptations of the job and traded visas for sexual favors.
Ramirez’s only hope was to obtain the corroboration of the people he had worked with in São Paulo. To a man, they denied the existence of the manual. When it came time for Tom to be deposed, the Consul General told him, “You do what you have to do, but you should know, we take care of our own in the Foreign Service,” and then had hinted he’d heard of an opening in Vienna, another in Madrid.
Under oath, Tom had said he knew nothing about a manual. He had never seen a manual.
AN AMERICAN—A nineteen-year-old coke addict—was being held for purse theft, and Tom went down to the Metropolitan Police Department’s new headquarters, an eighteen-story, ivory-white building across from the Imperial Palace, to interview him. The inspector who had arrested the boy told Tom that they’d discovered something in his locker at the youth hostel where he’d been staying. Two duffel bags, inside of which were dozens and dozens of wallets and passports. One of the passports belonged to Lisa Countryman.
> He called Julia, and they met in a little bar called Flashbacks in Iidabashi, a faux-hippie artists’ hangout where customers could go up to the record collection and pick out albums to play: Dylan, Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane. The entire place was made of varnished pine—walls, ceiling, floor, booths, and tables—a tiny tinderbox that was dimly lit, windowless, but homey. On the table of each booth was a candle, a ceramic ashtray shaped like a gnome, and a brass bell with a wooden handle. (“Whatever you do, don’t touch that,” Julia had told him when they sat down.)
“She couldn’t have left the country, not without her passport,” Tom said to Julia. “That’s probably why she had those two photos. She was going to apply for a replacement passport.”
“So she’s either alive and still in Japan,” she said, “or she’s dead. But either way, there’s been a cover-up. Someone tried to make it look like she left Japan.”
“Yes.”
“What happens now?”
“We’ve filed an official missing-persons report. Now the police have to actively investigate the case.”
The bar’s ponytailed owner, Yoshi, who taught at the ISA with Julia, brought over two beers and a tin can with different colored felt pens.
“What are the pens for, Yoshi?” Tom asked him, trying to be friendly.
“Draw,” he barked, and walked away.
Tom raised his eyebrows. “He has a problem with gaijin?” he asked Julia.
“He has a problem with you—with any man I happen to be with. He’s always been in love with me.” She picked up the can and offered Tom a pen. “Here, draw something.”
The tables were covered with disposable sheets of paper. “I can’t draw,” he said.
“You must be able to draw something. A cartoon?”
“No, but I have a special talent. Sign your name here,” he said, pointing at the corner of the sheet. She did, and he reached over, tore off the corner, and turned it around. Then he took a pen in each hand and copied her signature, tracing a very good forgery with his right hand and simultaneously creating its mirror image with his left hand, the pens dancing apart in synchronicity.
“That’s a pretty neat trick,” Julia said. “Do you have any other special talents?”
The music in the bar abruptly stopped, and the twenty or so customers let out a chorus of groans and boos. Apparently a fuse or a tube in the amplifier had blown out. Yoshi frantically began dismantling the stereo. Without music, the whole rhythm of the place had been thrown off, as if in the relief of lights, and some people left. The remainder fidgeted. “What’s everyone supposed to do now? Talk?” Julia said. “Poor Yoshi.” Carole King’s Tapestry had been on the turntable before the amp had fritzed, and Julia hummed the melody to “Way Over Yonder.” Quietly she sang the first lines to Tom, then suddenly rose and belted it out, stepping from the booth to the head of the room. She had a terrible voice, hardly able to carry a tune, but she made up for it with verve, into it, swaying, eyes closed, arms outstretched, delivering a rousing, soulful performance.
She received an ecstatic ovation, and, amid the applause, Tom whistled and picked up the brass bell from the table and waved it in the air, clanging it in appreciation.
Everyone in the room turned to him. “Ahhhh!” they exclaimed, and laughed and clapped.
“What?” he asked Julia.
“I warned you not to touch that,” she said. “You just bought the house a round of drinks.”
Yoshi ran up to him with a Polaroid camera and snapped a picture, and then tacked the Polaroid on the wall next to the stereo, Tom’s face joining a hundred other befuddled philanthropists’, his mouth crooked with a reluctant smile as he looked at Julia, already half in love with her.
SIX
THERE WERE many possibilities, Kenzo thought. She was in an accident of some sort. She was hiking in the woods and fell into an abandoned well and died of exposure and starvation. She had amnesia. She tripped off a curb and smacked her head and couldn’t remember a thing about her life. She was a johatsu-sha, an evaporation. She had a married lover, and they had decided to run away together and absconded to Hokkaido with the help of yonige-ya, an overnight “furniture removal” company. She committed suicide. She took a train to the sea and sequestered herself in a cave underneath a bluff and swallowed cyanide. She was kidnapped. She was snatched off the street and injected with heroin until she turned into an addict and was now a sex slave. She was murdered. She owed a gangster money from gambling and was shot and thrown into Tokyo Bay.
Kenzo ran through some of these scenarios—minus the fanciful descriptions and elaborations—during the morning chorei, or daily meeting, at Criminal Investigations. With the discovery of Lisa Countryman’s passport, he was now convinced that her disappearance was not another dead-end nuisance case after all. He thought it could be something big, something that would impress his section chief, Inspector Kunichi, and allow Kenzo to reclaim his seat at a center desk, away from the window. But Iso Yamada, the slick new Assistant Inspector, undercut Kenzo immediately.
“Ota,” he said, “you’ve really got quite the imagination. Or maybe you’ve just been reading Fancy too much.” The other detectives at the meeting laughed.
Fancy was a weekly magazine that carried excoriating commentary on the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in the front, vitriolic reports on the Yomiuri Giants in the back, and titillating true crime stories in the middle, usually involving the rape, bondage, and strangulation of OLs and prepubescent schoolgirls—stories replete with glossy photographs, most of which were staged. The magazine had a circulation of two million.
A wildly popular series last winter had featured the case of a Hokkaido divorcée who had had an affair with her daughter’s junior high school teacher, who was married. The girl discovered them in bed one afternoon, and they bound and gagged and blindfolded her after making her swallow sleeping pills, trying to stall and figure out what to do. (Here, Fancy took some liberties, suggesting with color reenactments that the couple had fondled the girl and inserted ben-wa balls and other implements into her vagina and anus, when there had been absolutely no evidence of molestation of any kind.) But they had gagged the girl too tightly, and she suffocated to death, whereupon the couple panicked and dismembered her—dismemberment was almost a criminal tradition in Japan—and made numerous trips to the countryside to bury the body parts. A farmer’s dog sniffed out the right arm, and other dogs, special earthquake-rescue canines, found the torso, thighs, and feet as the search area was widened. The couple, knowing they would soon be arrested, tried to commit shinju, double suicide, another revered tradition. First they went to a seaside cave and had sex repeatedly and tried to drink poison at the exact moment of simultaneous orgasm, but they failed to die. Then they fed a hose from the exhaust pipe of his car through the rear passenger-side window and tried to inhale the carbon monoxide fumes at the exact moment of simultaneous orgasm, but they failed to die. And then they decided to crash his car and tried to ram into a concrete support column underneath a highway bridge at the exact moment of simultaneous orgasm, but they failed to die. They were captured that way, naked, bloody, barely alive with massive internal injuries, the woman straddling the man in the driver’s seat, in flagrante delicto, which was depicted by Fancy in extensive color reenactments.
“I’m afraid I agree with Yamada,” Inspector Kunichi said to Kenzo at the meeting. “There are probably more reasonable, mundane explanations for the girl’s disappearance, the most likely of which is that her visa was expiring, and she went underground to evade the immigration authorities.”
“What do they always say?” Yamada interjected. “Follow the money. If Ota can find out what she was doing for money, where she worked after the eikaiwa school, he might be able to locate her.”
“Yes, yes, that’s very logical,” Kunichi said. “What do you think, Ota?”
Kenzo wanted to tell him, You presume I’m an idiot? You’re actually commending Yamada for stating something so obvious?, but ins
tead he said, “Yes, that sounds logical.” He looked at Yamada, so cocky in his Armani suit—what color was that? Mauve? How was it, anyway, that he could afford an Armani suit? And his car, a gleaming, piss-yellow, souped-up, custom-bodied Datsun 280Z. Who did he think he was with such a car? Bosozoku? Yakuza?—and he looked at Kunichi, who beamed at Yamada as if he were in love with him, and Kenzo vowed to keep his mouth shut from now on. He wouldn’t utter a word, not a peep, until he was close to cracking the case and proving that something amiss had indeed happened to Lisa Countryman.
THE PROBLEM was, he had no one to ask the usual questions that would have been asked in a missing-persons case. Basic questions, like: Exactly when did Lisa Countryman disappear? Where was she last seen? With whom? What was her behavioral, professional, personal, emotional, financial, and medical situation at the time? Had she ever disappeared before? Was she depressed or ill? Did she have cause to run away? Did someone wish her harm? An abusive relationship? A stalker?
Kenzo couldn’t ask her friends or colleagues or lovers—and subsequently compile a list of suspects—because he didn’t know who they were. All he had was her sister, Susan Countryman, who was calling him twice a week now, badgering him for information, implying he wasn’t doing his job.
“Did she ever break bone?” Kenzo asked during their most recent phone conversation.
“What? What’s that got to do with the price of eggs?” Susan Countryman asked.
“Maybe important.”
“She broke her arm a couple of Christmases ago. She tripped off the front stoop. I can’t tell you how klutzy she is.”
“Please have hospital send X-ray and type blood. Also dentist with teeth X-ray.”
“Why?” she asked, then said, “Oh. I understand. In case you need to identify her body. Wait. Have you found a body?”
“No,” Kenzo said. He had checked every hospital and morgue in the vicinity and had come up with nothing—no unidentified bodies, or body parts—but he felt it prudent to ask for these things now, in case something emerged.