The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013

by Dave Eggers

  During the spring, I visited Adelstein in Tokyo, and the first thing he told me was that a week earlier he had been given a diagnosis of liver cancer. He had also nearly completed training to become a Zen Buddhist priest. Adelstein figured that if Goto could do it for protection he could, too. He considered himself a Buddhist, and he liked the concept of karma, although he had told the priest who was training him that he didn’t believe in reincarnation. “He said you don’t have to believe,” Adelstein said. “In Buddhism, it’s not about faith. It’s about doing.”

  He seemed neither surprised nor upset about the cancer diagnosis. The disease had been discovered in the early stages, and doctors at a clinic in Tokyo were treating it with injections of ethanol. They had told Adelstein that the cancer might be connected to diet, or to years of drinking and smoking, or even to Marfan syndrome. Regardless, his tranquillity probably had less to do with Zen than it did with operating in a milieu where everybody knows something about liver problems. One afternoon, we stopped by the neighborhood police station, where Adelstein mentioned the diagnosis to a detective friend. “Wow, you’re just like a yakuza!” the cop said. “Are you actually covered with tattoos?” When we met with one of Adelstein’s criminal contacts, he talked about how his gang boss had originally hoped to get a U.C.L.A. liver, but after Adelstein’s exposé he had been forced to settle for an Australian organ instead. (He eventually went through two Aussie livers, and then died.) Periodically, Adelstein’s driver gave updates on a mutual acquaintance whose liver hadn’t responded to ethanol and was currently being zapped with radio-wave treatment. The driver himself had a lucky liver—his hepatitis C had been successfully treated with interferon.

  The driver’s name was Teruo Mochizuki, and he had a long criminal history. As a teen-ager, he had been a delinquent, until finally his parents, in frustration, passed him off to a local yakuza. Mochizuki joined the Inagawa-kai, and he became addicted to methamphetamines. He had gone to prison four times on drug-related charges. Now in his fifties, he said he had been clean for more than two decades. He was powerfully built, with broad shoulders, no neck, and a bullet-shaped head. Like other yakuza I met, he had expressive eyes, although even the manga brows remained still when I asked about his left hand. He said quietly, “There was some trouble and I had to lose the finger.” He had done it in front of his boss at the gang’s office. A doctor stopped the bleeding, but Mochizuki had declined treatment of the nerve endings. “To repair the finger would be to take back the apology,” he explained. He said that the yakuza tradition is connected to the way that samurai warriors ritually sliced their own stomachs in ancient times. He also remarked that Japanese law grants disability status to a nine-fingered person, but Mochizuki refused to apply, out of respect for his digital apology.

  He had known Adelstein for more than fifteen years. When I asked how they had first met, he told the story casually, as if these were the details of an everyday personal encounter. In 1993, an associate of Mochizuki’s was blackmailing the criminal owner of a pet store, so the owner murdered the yakuza, and, according to rumor, carved up the body and fed it to his dogs. Adelstein, who was single at the time, covered the story and interviewed the dead yakuza’s meth-head girlfriend; almost immediately, they began sleeping together. One day, Mochizuki went to the girlfriend’s house to pay his condolences, and Adelstein answered the door, postcoital.

  I had lots of possible questions but decided to go with the most obvious: “What was your first impression of Jake-san?”

  “My first impression was ‘What an idiot!’ ” Mochizuki said. “You can look all over Japan and you won’t find a reporter willing to do these things. I was surprised that he was fearless. He was just so strange.”

  Over the years, Adelstein and Mochizuki became friends. In 2007, Mochizuki was expelled from the Inagawa-kai, after an internal conflict that he didn’t want to talk about. The following year, Adelstein offered Mochizuki a job as his bodyguard and driver. “I didn’t want to do it,” Mochizuki told me. “Goto is one of the most influential guys in Japan, and nobody would want a job like that. But I felt like I had no other choice.” He explained that Tokyo job prospects are poor for an uneducated middle-aged man with nine fingers and tattoos that show beneath a dress shirt. He now earns about thirty-five hundred dollars a month for driving Adelstein around Tokyo in a black Mercedes S600, which is a common yakuza car model. Adelstein had bought it cheap from a gang contact who was retiring and no longer needed a statement vehicle.

  Mochizuki told me that Adelstein behaved differently from typical Japanese journalists, who are careful not to cross certain lines. “He has no regard for those taboos or restrictions,” he said. “If he were Japanese, he wouldn’t be around right now.” Mochizuki explained that some yakuza dislike Adelstein’s stories, but he is widely recognized as a man of his word. “He has a heart,” Mochizuki said. “People appreciate him for that. It’s not common for somebody who is not Japanese to have this feeling of obligation.”

  Adelstein has published a book about his adventures on the police beat, Tokyo Vice, and is working on two more. A few years ago, he researched human trafficking for the U.S. State Department, and now he serves as a board member for the Polaris Project Japan, a nonprofit that combats the sex trade. Periodically, he does investigations for corporations. The American lawyer who researches organized crime told me that when he first met Adelstein his image was off-putting. But he had become deeply impressed by his work. “He’s a craftsman,” he said. “He takes pride in doing the kind of research he does correctly.” He continued, “It’s this odd thing where you have this white guy who is as close to that part of Japanese society as a person can get.”

  Adelstein follows his strict rules of reciprocity and protection of sources, but otherwise he is willing to do nearly anything to get a story. He said that once, after his marriage had fallen apart, a lonely female cop offered access to a file on Goto if he slept with her, so he did. In the red-light district, he relies on foreign strippers for information, and on a few occasions when they have run into visa problems he has introduced them to gay salarymen who need wives in order to rise at their conservative Japanese companies. Adelstein says he never breaks the law—he puts these people in touch and tells them that they are free to fall in love and get married, and then they are also free to apply for spousal visas and to show up at corporate events together. But he acknowledges that a journalist in America would be appalled. “I’ve slept with sources,” he told me. “I’ve done hard negotiations that are probably tantamount to blackmail. I’ve ransacked rubbish bins for information. I’m willing to get information from organized crime or antisocial forces if the information is good.”

  By now, he’s played the stereotypical role of the crime reporter for so long that he can’t shake the life style. Whenever I went out with him, we always seemed to end up having drinks with some beautiful, bright woman. For five years, he has rented a house in a quiet neighborhood, but it was as if he had just moved in: at night, he dragged a futon out of a closet and slept on the floor of his office. For breakfast, he microwaved instant meals from a convenience store and served them on paper plates. In the kitchen, I counted five bottles of whiskey, four bottles of vodka, and three spoons. There was no table; he ate takeout meals on the couch. He marked his hand with a pen every time he lit a clove cigarette, supposedly to cut back, although once I watched him accumulate six marks while we were en route to a can cer treatment. On that particular day, the doctor decided to postpone the injection of ethanol, but I wasn’t sure that Adelstein’s body noticed the difference. We went straight from the appointment to dinner at a shabu-shabu restaurant, where he ordered two bottles of sake and finished them while waiting for an elegant Japanese-American woman to join us. After that, he had five more drinks at three different bars, and he was still going strong at two in the morning.

  In the farmland of southern Boone County, atop the last line of hills that overlook the Missouri River, stands a six-si
ded pagoda. The structure has three tiers marked by upturned eaves. “It was my impression of what a Japanese house should be,” Eddie Adelstein told me, when I visited in April. He said that he didn’t know much about Japan, having travelled there only once to see his son, but he had always liked the idea of an Asian house. He had a friend in Kansas who specialized in designing six-sided buildings, so they combined their interests. Since 2005, the pagoda has been home to Sunao Adelstein and her two children. Eddie and his wife, Willa, live in another building on the property.

  The neighbors are mostly farmers and people who moved to the countryside for the quiet, but they’ve picked up certain ideas about the yakuza and Tadamasa Goto. “When it started, somebody from the F.B.I. came by and talked to everybody,” Heidi Branaugh, a nurse who lives on a small farm nearby, told me. “It was just odd. The first night I was here, after the sheriff came by, there was a helicopter overhead.” Branaugh keeps a donkey, forty chickens, ten goats, and a dog named Bessie. She said that for a year Bessie barked at the car that the sheriff’s department parked near the pagoda every evening. “They’d sit right up there on the drive, watching. Once, they chased some guys who were looking for mushrooms.”

  Sunao Adelstein told me that she was tired of thinking about Goto. In 2008, the F.B.I. had advised the family to install an alarm system and buy some guns, because it wouldn’t be too hard for a hit man to track down a pagoda near the Missouri River. Since then, the authorities believed that the local risk had passed, although at the time of my visit Sunao had not returned to Japan for two years, because the Tokyo police were still concerned about Goto’s threat. Su nao used to work as a business reporter in Tokyo, but now she was studying accounting and trying to adjust to life in rural Missouri. She liked the pagoda, although she complained that there was almost no closet space, because the designer had been so obsessed with the Japanese exterior. Who would have imagined that a pagoda needed closets? “Very often I think, Why am I living here?” she said. “I grew up in Saitama. It’s not a big city, but it’s a suburb of Tokyo. I never dealt with ticks, with bugs. I hate ticks!”

  Sunao is a slender, pretty woman, and she took me for a walk in the countryside with the children. She wore a short red skirt and black leggings; periodically, she stopped to check for ticks. After years of living apart, she and Jake had finally decided to file for legal separation. She said that her husband had changed after his research took him deep into the criminal underworld. “He was beaten by somebody, so he was wary. He was not goofy Jake anymore,” she said. “He would use words the yakuza way.” She continued, “It has to do with the facial expression, the way they speak. When he got angry, he was like this. We argued once and he said, ‘Omae niwa kankeine! Kono Bakayaro!’ I thought, Oh, he knows bad Japanese now.”

  She said that at one time she had hoped he would find a different career, but now she realized that it would never happen. Some of Adelstein’s friends and family told me that he was addicted to the excitement, while others mentioned that he was too attached to the character that he had created. But beneath the chaotic personal life there was also something deeply moralistic about his outlook. He seemed to have more faith in giri than he did in any system of justice, and he could respect even a criminal as long as the man kept his word. “He expects people to be fair and honest,” his father told me.

  Eddie Adelstein said that his own experiences with crime had influenced his son. He worked as a pathologist at the V.A. hospital in Columbia, and had served as the county medical examiner for more than twenty years. In the early nineteen-nineties, patients suddenly began dying at a high rate, and there were rumors about a nurse named Richard Williams. Finally, Dr. Adelstein commissioned an epidemiologist, who performed a study and said that there was evidence of foul play: it was ten times more likely that a patient would die during one of Williams’s shifts than under another nurse’s care. Some believed that the nurse might be killing patients by injecting codeine, but nobody knew for certain. When Dr. Adelstein approached hospital administrators, their first response was to hide the findings. “Everybody who took part in the coverup was promoted, and everybody who tried to expose it was punished,” he said.

  Williams eventually left the hospital, but the director gave him a letter of recommendation that helped him find a job at a rural nursing home. During Williams’s first year at the nursing home, there was a sudden increase in deaths over the preceding year. Dr. Adelstein and others took the story to the F.B.I., Congress, and “ABC News.” The F.B.I. investigated, but forensic results were incomplete, in part because labs were too busy with tests related to the O. J. Simpson trial. Williams was charged, but the case was dismissed when prosecutors could not determine the cause of death. At last report, he was living quietly in suburban St. Louis. He is suspected of murdering as many as forty-two people, many of them war veterans—more victims than are attributed to Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, or Tadamasa Goto.

  All that had happened while Jake Adelstein was starting his career in Japan. “It made me extremely distrustful of everyone,” he told me. “The biggest lesson I took was that even when you’re in the right, when you’re doing something good, you won’t be rewarded.” And it occurred to me that the darkest element of his life wasn’t the image he projected of the tormented reporter, or even the crazy yakuza stories. Beneath all the exoticism, it was actually the normalcy of crime that was most disturbing. Whether you’re in Missouri or Tokyo, things aren’t always what they seem—the nurse might be a murderer, and the gangster might run a hedge fund.

  During one of my trips to Japan, I contacted Tadamasa Goto’s publicist, who said that his client wasn’t accepting interviews. So I got in touch with Tomohiko Suzuki, a journalist who has written for yakuza fanzines, which cover criminals as celebrities. Recently, there had been rumors that Suzuki was channelling messages from Goto.

  We met at a Tokyo coffeehouse. Suzuki wore blue work clothes and heavy boots, because he had just returned from a charity event in a town called Minamisoma, which was still suffering from the effects of the tsunami. In recent weeks, yakuza had been donating aid, and Goto had pitched in by sponsoring the day’s charity event, which was called With All Due Respect. When I asked if any famous yakuza had attended, Suzuki named one and said, “He’s the guy who stabbed the cult member in front of the media.” I didn’t pursue the details; by now I understood that the blandly offhand tone of such statements was basically the point.

  Suzuki said that Adelstein’s status as a foreigner had protected him from Goto. People in law enforcement and in diplomatic circles had told me that they still took the threats seriously, but Suzuki said that their caution wasn’t necessary anymore. “Those are the kinds of things that yakuza say all the time,” he said. “It’s kind of like saying ‘Hello’ for a yakuza.”

  A few months later, though, there were reports that Goto had become formally active again in organized crime. Not long after that, new laws went into effect that finally made it illegal to pay off yakuza. It was unclear how rigorously such regulations would be enforced, but they seemed to reflect a growing desire to control criminal groups. Suzuki hadn’t said anything about Goto’s plans during our meeting. He had visited the crime boss just a week earlier. “I didn’t notice anything wrong with him—he looked very healthy,” Suzuki said. “I think U.C.L.A. did a good job.”

  On the morning of my departure, Mochizuki drove Adelstein and me to Narita Airport. Adelstein had heard that somebody had recently smuggled a Marine-issued rifle through customs. “I have a contact in customs that I’ll talk to about it,” he said. “There might be a story.” Afterward, he planned to go to a press conference downtown, and he was dressed in black suit pants, a pin-striped shirt, and a black trenchcoat with red silk lining. He wore his porkpie hat. We had been on the road for a few minutes before he realized that he had forgotten his shoes. He laughed hysterically at his bulky house slippers and said that he’d have to buy a pair of loafers at an airport shop.

  H
e was scheduled to undergo a chemotherapy treatment in about a week. At seven-twenty-five, he lit the day’s first clove cigarette, and he chain-smoked during the long drive to the airport. (A few months later, he would finally succeed in quitting cigarettes.) On the way, Mochizuki asked Adelstein if he’d like to go on a beach vacation with him. “We should do this before one of us has bad health,” the driver said. A couple of nights earlier, I had been in the car when Adelstein asked Mochizuki if he had ever killed a person. The driver paused, as if choosing his words carefully. “I’ve never killed anybody who wasn’t a yakuza,” he said at last, laughing.

  Stories tended to tumble out of Adelstein, full of crazy yakuza details, and today he told a new one. He said that during his period of obsessive research he had conducted an affair with one of Goto’s mistresses. The gangster reportedly kept more than a dozen women in Tokyo and other cities, and Adelstein slept with one who gave him useful information. Eventually, he helped her escape Goto by introducing her to a gay salaryman who needed a wife and was about to be posted overseas. He said that the couple still shared an address in Europe. I asked what the mistress was like.

  “We had this lovely conversation once in bed,” Adelstein said. “She said, ‘Do you love me?’ I said, ‘No, but I like you.’ She said, ‘I like you, too. You’re a lot of fun.’ Then she said, ‘Are you sleeping with me to get information about Goto?’ I said, ‘Pretty much. What about you?’ She said, ‘Well, I hate the motherfucker and every time I sleep with you it’s like I’m stabbing him in the face.’ She was into astronomy. Once, we went to a planetarium in Sunshine City. I think that was the only time we ever went out in public together. That was our only date.” He continued, “It was nice. Another time, I gave her a gift—I bought an expensive planetarium set that Sega makes. She cried.”