chapter
thirty-eight
I
spent the next few days in a torment about whether to contact Sayaka. I was reasonably confident that, with Mad Dog believing I was dead, she would be safe. And that probably no one was watching her. Probably. But if I was wrong, I could get her killed. I kept morbidly imagining what it would have been like to tear back to the hotel on Thanatos that night and find her not alive and angry, but raped and beaten and dead. The thought was unbearable. I’d been lucky the first time had been just a threat. I doubted I’d get so lucky again.
When I was ready, I called Tatsu. We met at Meiji Shrine. He looked long and hard at my shaved head when we saw each other, but said nothing. As we strolled beneath the shrine’s towering trees, he told me how things had gone at Ueno and with McGraw. He’d handled everything just as I had hoped, and no one suspected anything. I briefed him on what I’d learned from McGraw. It was the least I could do.
“You’re lucky you were able to speak to him,” he told me. “It must have been just afterward that someone executed him at Zōshigaya Cemetery.”
“I know, I saw something on the news. Maybe someone in his organization learned he was flapping his gums.”
“Indeed,” he said dryly. It wasn’t always easy for me to know what Tatsu was thinking. But one thing was becoming clear about his general philosophy: being a cop was more about the ends than it was about the means.
“Will you be able to use any of what I’ve told you?” I asked.
“I think so, though it will take some time, and some maneuvering. I understand the corruption goes to the very top—Finance Minister Satō, Air Force Chief of Staff Genda, even Prime Minister Tanaka. But with the information you’ve given me, I can make at least some of it come out.”
“What about the States? McGraw suggested he was spreading the skim to American politicians, too.”
“It would be naïve to believe otherwise. Whether anyone will care is another story. But supposedly there’s a senator named Frank Church who’s forming a committee on intelligence and other abuses. This might interest him, too. I’ll get him what I can.”
We walked. It was pleasant under the trees, cool for a summer morning, quiet. The shrine itself was an oasis of stillness within the swirling city around it. It was the kind of place I loved in Tokyo. The kind of place I would miss.
“It’s been relatively quiet for the Keisatsucho since you died,” he said. “Other than McGraw, no more bodies turning up.”
“Well, that’s good. I’m sure you guys need a break from time to time.”
“Yes. Though I keep expecting to hear about Fukumoto Junior’s untimely demise. But for the moment, he seems to be all right.”
Mad Dog. Punting on him wasn’t easy for me. I reminded myself for probably the hundredth time it was the right call, the only call. McGraw’s death could be attributed to a dispute with the guy he had hired to kill me. Mad Dog dying right afterward would be too much of a coincidence. Tatsu had handled the discrepancies with the yakuza’s body, but if anyone started looking too closely, the story would unravel. And if the story unraveled, Sayaka would be at risk again. So Mad Dog got to live. I took some small comfort in knowing my decision was a sign of greater maturity and self-control. But still, it was killing me.
“As long as Mad Dog thinks I’m dead,” I said, “he has nothing to fear from me.”
“But while he’s alive, you won’t be safe in Japan.”
Christ. Was Tatsu encouraging me to go after Mad Dog? I would have loved to, but I didn’t want to tell him why I couldn’t.
“Of course,” he went on, “Fukumoto Junior is weak, and not widely respected. He is seen in certain quarters as illegitimate, the product of nepotism. His enemies might even learn of his role in his own father’s death. I wouldn’t want to be him if that information were to emerge.”
I looked at him. Was he telling me he was going to make that happen?
“Anyway,” he continued, “perhaps you’ll be able to return sooner than you imagine.”
“I don’t know what will be here for me when I do.”
“I’ll be here. Perhaps we can work together again.”
I laughed. “Oh, have we been working together?”
He shrugged. “Not always intentionally, but our activities often seem to dovetail, do they not? Would it be a bad thing if that were to…continue?”
“I don’t know. I’d have to think about it.” I doubted I would, though. I had no desire to ever again be part of anyone else’s larger strategy. I might be a contractor, but I was never going to be an employee.
“You know,” he said, “there’s just one thing I don’t understand.”
“Yes?”
“I said there had been no more bodies as such, but there was another shooting. Just last night.”
“Really?”
“Yes. A quite prominent LDP politician. Nobuo Kamioka. You might know the name.”
“No, it doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Indeed. What’s strange is that he was shot in the spine. He’ll never walk again, but his assailant didn’t kill him.”
“Maybe the assailant missed.”
“Kamioka claims the assailant was a Buddhist monk. And that before pulling the trigger, the monk told him, ‘Karma is a bitch.’ Does that mean anything to you?”
“Only that, if karma’s a bitch, I hate to think of what it’s got in store for me.”
“A coincidence, then, that you called me only this morning, not before?”
“What, do you think I had something to take care of first?”
He shrugged. “I was expecting you to call sooner. The very morning you were ‘killed’ in Ueno Park, in fact.”
“Sorry. I got hung up.”
“I have the strangest feeling ballistics will match the bullet that killed McGraw with the one that paralyzed Kamioka.”
“Think you’ll find the gun?”
“No, I’m quite certain we won’t.”
“Well, that’s a shame.”
He glanced at my scalp. “I also wondered about your new hairstyle.”
“Just a summer look. I’ll probably grow it out again.”
He gave up and we walked in silence again. At the exit at Harajuku, he handed me a passport. “You can go anywhere now,” he said. “But where?”
Tokyoites surged past us in all directions, going to work, going for coffee, going shopping, going home. The scene was madcap, frenetic, like something played back on film at just slightly faster than normal speed. The sun moved behind a dark cloud, and for a moment the city looked lit in sepia.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But when I open a newspaper and read about a scandal involving American payoffs to Japanese politicians? I’ll think of you.”
He smiled. “I don’t think Fukumoto Junior will last.”
“We’ll see.”
“But other than that, I hope Tokyo will be peaceful for a while.”
I thought of Sayaka. “I’m sure it will be.”
chapter
thirty-nine
A
s it turned out, Mad Dog lasted only about two years. I don’t know whether Tatsu had anything to do with it, but apparently a cabal of Gokumatsu-gumi lieutenants had him killed, and proceeded to govern as a council, instead.
Not long after that, Senator Church’s committee convened in America. Lockheed was accused of paying tens of millions of dollars in bribes to foreign officials—not just in Japan, but all over the world. None of it was traced to American politicians. The focus was all on Lockheed and its rogue board of directors. Still, in Japan the scandal took down the finance minister, the air force chief of staff, and even the prime minister, as Tatsu had hoped. So that was something.
With America’s attention diverted to Lockheed, did McGraw’s program reconstitute? Probably. Trying to stamp out payoffs to politicians is like trying to outlaw prostitution. Hell, it’s the
same
as trying to outlaw prostitution. Corruption, I’d learned, isn’t discrete, and what appears to be a series of floating structures is in fact an archipelago, its islands continuous, connected, coalescing below the waterline. But I didn’t care. It wasn’t my problem, and I wasn’t going to let it be. When I’d killed Ozawa at the
sentō
, I’d briefly wondered whether I was now one of the bad guys. By the time I did McGraw, I’d figured out there are no bad guys, any more than there are good guys. There are only smart people, and stupid ones; puppets, and puppet masters. Better a wise
rōnin
, I decided, than a naïve samurai.
Still, I thought maybe Tatsu had a point with his notion of limits. I’d told McGraw he’d been wrong to go after Sayaka because she was a girl, because she was a non-principal. And his response was that I was making a virtue of a necessity, that he and I were just the same. Was he right? I recognized that would depend on me. I decided to live with limits. Or at least try to.
Miyamoto kept my secret, and we wound up working together when I returned to Japan. And Tatsu and I wound up working together, too—quite a lot, in fact. But that’s all another story, and none of it happened until many years later. Because, even though Mad Dog didn’t last, my self-imposed exile did. I spent a decade fighting in various mercenary conflicts, and while those, too, are other stories, perhaps for another occasion, for now I’ll just say that, at the time, I told myself those conflicts were the reason I stayed away. But in retrospect, I realize they were more of an excuse. The real reason was Sayaka.
I wanted to contact her before I left Japan. Of course I did. But I was afraid Mad Dog would learn I was still alive and might come after her again. It was torture to hold back. I had no way of knowing what she knew or what she believed after the last time I saw her at the hotel. Maybe she saw something on the news about what happened at Ueno, and believed I was dead. Maybe she hadn’t heard anything, and didn’t know why I’d walked away or what had become of me. Maybe she heard about Kamioka, shot in the back, his spine severed, and thought of karma, and wondered whether karma was me. But if I contacted her, what would happen? If I saw her, I didn’t think I could bear not to be with her. And if I was with her, she would become a target again.
So I went back to war, in unlikely places, far from Japan, far from everything that had happened, far from Sayaka. To protect her.
No. That isn’t true. It’s not a lie, but it isn’t the truth.
Because even after Mad Dog was killed, still I stayed away. I told myself that surely, one way or the other, she would have forgotten me? Moved on? Built a new life? But over time, I realized my reluctance was because of more than that. It was because…of what she would think of me if she knew what I had done. What I had become. What I
was
.
How could she understand? The money I had given her—she would want to know where it came from. Maybe she would be horrified she had taken it, and hate me for having persuaded her. She would ask questions, incessant, probing questions, and no matter what I told her, she would believe the truth was even more appalling. And probably it would be. I would implore her, explain my limits, and she would hear nothing but the rationalizations of a monster.
I was paralyzed by longing and fear. And as the years went by, somehow, no matter how close I came to trying to find her, I always held back. I told myself that if I really cared about her, I should just leave her alone.
But in the end, I couldn’t.
She wasn’t easy to track down. You have to remember, this was long before Google, and Facebook, and all the other tools that make it easy for people you’d prefer to keep in your past to occupy your present. But eventually, I found her. She had made it to America, her dream. San Francisco. She had gone to college, and then started a foundation for teaching disabled people skills. She’d received awards from various Asian American organizations. She’d even gone scuba diving and skydiving in her wheelchair, just as she’d said she would.
Life
magazine wrote an article about her exploits, praising her as “an inspiration, an example of the limitlessness of the human spirit and of the opportunities afforded by the American Dream.”
And she was married. A Korean American. A lawyer. Probably a good guy. They had a son, the first time I checked. Eventually, when I checked again, they had a second.
So no, I never contacted her. I watched, but only from a distance. I listened, but didn’t speak.
Instead, I tried to make myself forget. To forget that first time, when I’d intervened with the drunken asshole at the hotel and she had wheeled out to the street to reluctantly thank me, and the way her face had glowed while Terumasa Hino played at Taro, and later that night, when we had kissed at Kitazawa-gawa, and I’d pissed myself so she wouldn’t feel embarrassed, and the way she’d let me move her arms in the bath so I could touch her breasts, and how she liked to turn her head and watch as she guided me inside her, and how she’d cried when she learned she could come, and those glorious mornings we would exhaust ourselves in her small bed, and how beautiful she was to me, how she was so, so beautiful.
Sometimes I go to her Facebook page. It’s silly, I know. Pathetic. And every time I do, I promise myself next time I’ll be stronger. I don’t even know what impels me. Why are the most painful memories also the sweetest; why does the sweetness always draw us back no matter how long the pain might have kept us away beforehand? I don’t know, any more than I know why sometimes I have to sit in the dark and listen to Terumasa Hino playing “Alone, Alone and Alone.” I just do. I can’t seem to help periodically disinterring that little box of memories, no matter how lachrymose its contents. I try to stop. But sometimes there’s just what you can do, and what you can’t.
The years have been kind to her, very kind. She’s graying now, but her hair is still long and her smile still radiant, and that guardedness, that toughness that had so characterized her when we first met, is gone now, replaced by an easy comfort and confidence. She doesn’t need anyone to think she’s tough. She knows she is. And maybe her family has softened her. She has grandchildren now. Toddlers, but still. Where do the decades go.
I look at her photographs, and the photographs of her family, and I imagine a life that might have been but that wasn’t, a life I naïvely thought I could achieve and might even deserve, but that circumstances and my own actions precluded.