Country of Origin

by Don Lee

  “I don’t,” Midori told Lisa. “But it won’t be a dohan if you’re no longer working for me.”

  HE WAS waiting for her outside, half a block from the club, on the way to the Ginza subway station. She saw him leaning against a telephone pole, but she didn’t stop, kept walking. He fell into step with her.

  “You went to see my wife,” he said.

  “I’m in love with you,” Lisa told him, but even as she said it, she knew she was being preposterous.

  “We barely know each other.”

  She looked at him. He was wearing another sleek dark blue suit. He really was a beautiful man. “Does anyone really know you? You seem to be very slippery, David—or should I say Vincent? You seem to change into whatever people want you to be.”

  “You met with Tomiko Higa, didn’t you? What happened?”

  “What do you do? Work for the CIA?”

  “Something like that. How did you find out?”

  “The private detective.”

  They walked past Matsuya department store, toward Harumi-dori, the streets bright with neon. “Was it a coincidence that we bumped into each other that day in the garden?” Lisa asked him.

  “I have to admit, no.”

  “You were only using me to get to Mojo.”

  “I don’t think I ever tried to conceal that from you. I might have, in fact, been a little obvious about it.”

  “When were you going to ask me to sleep with him?”

  “I wouldn’t have done that.”

  “You wouldn’t have minded if I had, though. Made Mojo happy.”

  “You needed something from me as well,” he said. “You know how this world operates. It’d be disingenuous to say you don’t.”

  He did have something of a point. Oddly, she had wanted to become dependent on Vincent, bound to him for his favors. Perhaps it was no accident that she had gotten a job as a hostess, that she had become infatuated with Vincent, a married man, and slept with Omar, a black sailor. She had wanted to put herself in her mother’s position—know what she might have felt. Yet Lisa wasn’t willing to concede anything to Vincent. “That’s your world, not mine,” she said. “I would find it very difficult to live in your world.”

  “It’s more reassuring than you might think. It’s much easier when you don’t have to decide whom to trust.”

  It sounded like something Lisa herself might have said, trying to appear world-weary and impervious, but under the circumstances, it made her pity him. “You seem like a very sad man, Vincent Kitamura.”

  They came upon the entrance to the subway station. “Are you going to be all right?” he asked her.

  “Of course. What are you imagining? That I might try to hurt myself?”

  “It crossed my mind.”

  She began walking down the stairs, then glanced back at him. “One thing,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “What you told me about your mother and father—was any of it true?”

  Vincent was about to answer her, but she stopped him.

  “I don’t want to know,” she said. She had already chosen what she wanted to believe.

  AT SEVEN, she was in Nirvana. She was the only customer in the tiny bar in Harajuku. There were no tables, only ten stools, but there were three bartenders on duty, each wearing identical paisley and silk vests, wing collars, and bow ties. When she entered, one bartender had handed Lisa a leather-bound menu of drinks, the second had laid down a coaster and an ashtray, and the third had dangled a steaming oshibori towel in front of her.

  She ordered a Stoli martini, and she had to say, this was a perfect martini—very dry. She was going to be late meeting Mojo. She still had to hike up the hill to Omotesando and catch the Ginza Line to Akasaka-Mitsuke, then walk to the Hotel New Otani. But she had to have one more martini, and she signaled Bartender No. 2 to make another for her.

  That afternoon, she had called Mojo on the private number Midori had given to her. He had been delighted to hear from her, but was agitated by the short notice. How could he arrange something comparable to the kaiseki dinner? She told him not to worry, a simple meal at any restaurant would be fine.

  Then she had tracked down Rebecca Silo, who was still working at Musky Club. She wanted some painkillers, Percodan or codeine. Ordinary aspirins were not relieving the pain in her ribs. On a whim, she bought a Quaalude from Rebecca. She thought she would need a dependable agent to get her through the evening. She didn’t know exactly why she was going through with the dohan. Maybe she felt bad, and she wanted to feel worse. Was it as basic as that? It wasn’t the cash, although she could have used it. She needed to reestablish her life in Berkeley—rent a new apartment, buy another car, pay her tuition—but she didn’t care about money anymore. She had resolved not to take any of Richard and Lenore’s estate. She would sign it all over to Susan, and never speak to her again.

  She missed them terribly—Richard and Lenore. She tried not to think of them too often, but she did, and the hurt had not dissipated one bit, despite everything she had done—the distance she had traveled—to displace her grief.

  Bartender No. 2 served Lisa her martini. “Hot date tonight?” he asked, wiping the counter.

  “Yeah,” Lisa scoffed.

  It was such a cozy bar. The copper countertop shimmered, and recessed lights made the rows of bottles against the wall glow blue. She didn’t want to leave.

  She would wait one more minute, she decided, count to sixty—one thousand one, one thousand two—and then she would go.

  TWENTY

  OVER TWENTY years later, Tom ran into Vincent Kitamura at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki. Tom had just finished dinner with his wife and his kids and his mother, who was visiting from the Mainland, and he was strolling through the lobby when he saw Kitamura, who was as youthful and dapper as ever. It was Tom who had changed. Kitamura didn’t recognize him. His hair had turned completely gray and was shorn to a buzz cut, his skin was blackened in a deep tan, and he was—no getting around it—fat. He had let himself go. Too many plate lunches, not enough exercise.

  He asked Kitamura to have a quick drink with him while his family went for ice cream, and at the Mai Tai Bar, after they had ordered their drinks—Dewar’s neat for Kitamura, a Bud Light for Tom—Kitamura said, “I heard you left the Foreign Service after Tokyo.”

  “I did,” Tom said.

  “Ah,” Kitamura said, and Tom wondered what he knew.

  Masahiro Yamada himself had forced the issue. His brother had been right: he was a truly stupid man. He had been busted less than two weeks upon his arrival in the States. The INS had been cracking down on undocumented workers in Camden, New Jersey, and he had been caught in a sweep at the sushi restaurant. The matter should have ended right there with a simple deportation, but Masahiro, without any prompting whatsoever, confessed to the INS agents that his brother had arranged for someone in the US Embassy to doctor his records and produce a tourist visa for him. In Tokyo, the Consul General had pulled out the files and seen the visa refusal had been overturned with Benny’s signature, and he had accused him of fraud.

  In the conference room, Tom had insisted Benny had not been involved. Benny wouldn’t overturn the refusal, Tom said, so he had taken it upon himself to forge the documents. “How?” the Consul General had asked, and Tom had said, “Give me two pens.”

  They remained skeptical. It seemed implausible. It seemed that Tom was trying to take the fall for his friend. It seemed he and Benny were both culpable. But then Mrs. Fujiwara, who had been translating for Inspector Yamada and his supervisor Kunichi, ratted Tom out and rescued him. The night Tom had been working late in the office, Mrs. Fujiwara had, for once, thought of doing something nice for him. She came back to the embassy with a bento dinner that she had bought for Tom, and had witnessed him opening the file cabinets in the visa section.

  Tom claimed he had simply hoped to curry favors in the Lisa Countryman case, and Inspector Yamada backed him up. Kunichi, Reeves, and the Cons
ul General tried to get them to admit to a more ignoble motive—money, sex—but Tom and Yamada would not budge. The additional wrinkle about the hit-and-run would have helped neither of them. All in all, it had been an extraordinarily bad day for Tom.

  He tendered his resignation and received, as it were, an honorable discharge. He flew home to Washington, DC, where he processed out of the Foreign Service and picked up some belongings from storage. He had no clue what he would do next. To bide time, he substitute-taught a few French classes at a high school in Fairfax, Virginia. He was offered a full-time job, accepted, and stayed there for a couple of years, after which he lived in Europe, teaching first at the International School of Luxembourg, and then at the American School of Valencia, and then he moved to Oahu.

  He had been in Hawaii for the past decade and a half, “Mr. Hurley-Burly” to the students at Kailua High School, home of the Surfriders. He taught French and Spanish and coached swimming. He lived nearby in Waimanalo and was married to a fellow teacher, a local Filipina-Portuguese-Korean-Scottish woman. They had three boys, aged twelve, ten, and seven.

  “It sounds like you found your calling as a teacher,” Kitamura said.

  “I love it,” Tom said.

  Kitamura had remained in Tokyo throughout the 1980s. Julia left him in 1982, went to New York, and continued exhibiting and teaching photography. The last he’d heard, she had opened an art gallery in SoHo. With no children to share, there was no reason for them to stay in touch, and they hadn’t.

  Tom asked him what really happened to Lisa Countryman. He had always been curious; he’d never believed that Kitamura had harmed her. Unfazed that Tom knew of his involvement, Kitamura matter-of-factly told him that she had died of an overdose at the home of the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications. Whether the overdose had been accidental or a suicide, they would never know. The minister had called Kitamura and said there had been an accident, what should he do? He had begged Kitamura for help. Kitamura told him to phone the police. The minister, however, did not phone the police, terrified by the prospect of scandal. A young gaijin girl found dead in his bed. He needed to get rid of the body. Panicked, he began dismembering her in his bathtub, hacking at her leg with a saw, but he couldn’t go through with it. He fainted, he awoke, he tried again, vomited. He had to find someone to do this for him, and the only person he could think of was the Takahashi-gumi boss from the club Rendezvous. The yakuza boss was very accommodating. The next day, the minister ordered his driver to go to Lisa Countryman’s apartment and pick up her things, and then the minister paid Harper Boyd to call Lisa’s landlord and the tencho at Rendezvous, saying she—Lisa—was going to Hong Kong.

  “After that,” Kitamura said to Tom, “he had me squeezing him on one side and the yakuza boss on the other. The Takahashi-gumi were bleeding him dry.”

  “For money?”

  “Of course.”

  “What were you blackmailing him for?” Tom asked. “Not money.”

  “No, not money. Not his, anyway. Do you remember the NTT accord?”

  At the time, the biggest trade issue between the US and Japan had been over the procurement policies of the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation. The giant monopoly bought $3.3 billion worth of telecommunications equipment and supplies a year—everything from electronic switching units to poles—and American manufacturers had wanted access to that market.

  “It was about telephone poles?” Tom asked, feeling terribly sorry for Lisa Countryman, almost wishing there had been a deeper conspiracy to justify her death.

  “It was about a lot of things,” Kitamura said. “None of them very good.”

  Kitamura had never planned anything as crass as extortion. Lisa had been, really, incidental to his strategy, which had simply been to befriend the minister and his cronies at the NTT, wine and dine them, talk to them, do small favors for them, a soft sell to influence their decision.

  Tom was surprised he was being so candid, but he supposed it had all happened so long ago. After 1980, everything had changed—decades of solipsism and greed that seemed without end. A malaise. The Cold War was over. The Japanese economic bubble had burst. Countries and civilizations rose and fell. But the great divisions of ethnicity and class and religion raged on, and everything was still, in the end, about money. The world was a much meaner place now, more superficial, more corruptible. There were scandals, but nothing was really scandalous, because the worst things imaginable happened every day and were immediately packaged into entertainment. No one seemed to have any innocence left to lose. Yet, underneath it all, people still lived out a million heartrending dramas of no consequence, searching for love and kinship, finding joy and betrayal. Hostage to their hearts.

  Had Kitamura been sleeping with Lisa Countryman? Did his wife leave him for Congrieves? Did he know that Tom had been having an affair with Julia? He must have, but Kitamura was too discreet to say, and Tom was too chastened to ask. They shook hands and said goodbye, and then Tom called his wife on her cell phone, and she told him they were all on the beach, past the Halekulani.

  This end of Waikiki, the ewa end in front of Fort DeRussy, was always empty, and, following their voices, he easily found his wife and mother in the dark, sitting on the sand.

  “Where are the boys?” he asked.

  “Swimming,” his wife said.

  Tom turned and saw his three sons in the water. They were skinny-dipping.

  “Hey, Dad,” his eldest said, “come on in.”

  “Okay,” he said, and stripped to his underwear.

  As he waded into the water, his boys quietly began chanting, “Boom-boom, boom-boom,” mimicking the seismic concussions of the big man—the leviathan—lumbering into the sea.

  Tom laughed. The water was lovely and warm.

  THERE WAS an earthquake in Saitama Prefecture, 5.4 on the Richter scale. Not a big quake by anyone’s definition, but large enough to crack open a retaining wall underneath an overpass on the Tohoku Expressway, near Kawaguchi, outside of Tokyo.

  An inspector checking the structural integrity of the concrete support columns noticed the crack. The columns had been retrofitted, but not the thick wall, which was non-load-bearing. The crack drew his attention, and then something else. He didn’t know what it was at first. He walked closer, and saw fingers.

  Kenzo heard about it on the news. A skeleton had been found in the concrete. More than that, the skeleton was in pieces. The body had been dismembered before being entombed in the wall.

  He had one of his Assistant Inspectors confirm what he already knew. The retaining wall had been built in June 1980 by KMT Construction, the executives of which had long ago been convicted for cutting corners on various expressway projects, jeopardizing public safety. The investigation had revealed the company’s ties to the Takahashi-gumi and implicated dozens of government officials, exposing years of misappropriations, kickbacks, and bribes.

  As far as they could piece together, the skeleton was of a woman, young, around 165 or 170 centimeters. Kenzo asked a Patrolman to drive him to MPD headquarters, and he went to the records archive and had them pull out the box that contained everything he had compiled about Lisa Countryman when he had been at Azabu Police Station.

  He was the head of Criminal Investigations at Ikebukuro Police Station now. He had gotten back his center desk in Azabu after he had acceded to Kunichi and his superiors and declared that Minister Shiokawa had not jumped and committed suicide, but had slipped off the wet subway platform—a terrible, unfortunate accident. Yes, the minister had probably killed the girl, Kunichi had said, and maybe he had even drugged and raped her, crazed by her involvement with David Saito, whom they were never able to locate, but what was the point of disclosing this information to the public, of creating a scandal? The minister was dead.

  By agreeing, Kenzo had been assigned better cases, and he had gotten better at his job, becoming a fairly competent investigator, and he had been promoted to Inspector. Then he single-handedly so
lved a kidnap-murder case that had gripped the nation for weeks, and he was given his own section in Ikebukuro. During all these years, he had never uttered a word about the circumstances surrounding Lisa Countryman’s disappearance. Officially, the written advisory opinion still stood: she was missing and presumed dead.

  In the Tokyo Medical Examiner’s Office in Otsuka, Kenzo handed over the X-rays of Lisa Countryman’s teeth and broken arm that he had gotten from her sister in 1980. He hovered as the ME checked them against the X-rays of the skull and bones that were assembled on the gleaming stainless-steel table behind them.

  “Is it her?” Kenzo asked.

  “It’s her,” the ME said.

  Uncharacteristically, Kenzo took the rest of the day off, and rode seventy minutes on the Tokaido Line out to Oiso. Keiko was pleasantly surprised to see him, and they walked to the beach and sat on a blanket on the sand and watched the surfers.

  They had just celebrated their twentieth anniversary—hard to believe. They never had children, but they had been wonderful companions to each other, no complaints at all. They occupied themselves by taking bunka classes together, going to concerts, museums, traveling to Europe. They even made it onto a golf course, but only twice; they decided they preferred the driving range. Yet lately Keiko had had a tough time of it. During the boom years of the eighties, she had started a successful business, packaging romance vacations for newlyweds to Hawaii, and she had bought two more apartment buildings in Tokyo. But after more than a decade of recession, her business failed, rents dropped, and the real estate market tanked.

  It was such a dismal time in Japan. It almost seemed as if they were dying as a people, their economy in tatters, the population dwindling, the remaining citizens isolated and adrift. Had they been wrong about everything? Kenzo wondered. The power of consensus and obligation, the imperatives of racial purity and harmony?

  Keiko had had to sell her buildings for a deep loss, leaving her with just the one in Oiso, into which she and Kenzo had moved three years ago. She began to suffer from depression and stress-related ailments, and then they had a real scare—a lump in her breast. She was lucky. It was caught early, requiring a lumpectomy and radiation, not a mastectomy and chemo, but Kenzo always worried the cancer might return. She was all he had. She was his life. She was his country of residence.