“One thing led to another and, well, we were blessed with Emi’s arrival in May of ’97. But it was a mixed blessing. Tomoko never understood how to live in America, and I didn’t notice until it was too late. She never warmed to my friends and family. She bought into the American Dream, but never made the down-payments, you know what I mean?”
“No, I don’t.”
“No, well, she didn’t either. Your head can be in two places, but your body has to be in one. By the time I noticed it wasn’t working, it was too late, way too late to fix. This was years after Emi was born, of course. And by that time, she was shacked up with a Korean fellow she’d known since her home stay.”
I made a note in my head not to choose any Korean pop music if he changed his mind about singing.
“That was grounds for divorce right there, but that was the last thing I wanted, for Emi’s sake. But she insisted. So it went through and the custody hearing was all set. I was prepared to share custody of Emi, but I guess she wasn’t. She ran, which seems to be what she’s good at. Only next thing I know, my daughter didn’t come home from school.
“I spent all night driving around. I called the cops, and they did what one Arizona state trooper for every 300 miles could do—nothing. I was frantic, losing it. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t function. The whole time I had this headache and sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach: She’d taken Emi from me and only the Lord knew where she was.
“Then four days later I heard Emi’s voice on my voice mail. It’s right here.”
He pulled out his phone and held it like a business card in both hands, head bowed. He played the message.
A girl’s tinny voice spoke: “Daddy, don’t worry, I’m on vacation with mommy. We’re going to learn Japanese. Sorry, you can’t come with us. It’s a secret place. I’m going to be studying very hard and then I’m going to fly back home. Love you Daddy, and I… Mommy says we’ve got to go now.”
Mr. Blackmore put the phone in his shirt pocket and toyed with his hat some more.
“Miss Walker. I’m desperate. Please help me. You are my only hope. I can’t do this alone.”
I rubbed my eyes. I had to think what to do. What was the common sense thing?
You could hear screeching coming from the room next door.
“What’s up with them?”
“It’s only Kara.”
“Is it contagious?”
“No, it’s Korean pop music.”
He stuck his eyebrows together.
“Let’s go Mr. Blackmore. Follow me.”
Subject: Noughts and Crosses
From: James Walker
To: Hana Walker
Date: 8th April, 2008
Scoop,
You should never start an email with “sorry” but, well, I’m sorry I haven’t seen so much of you just lately. I know you are fending for yourself and you shouldn’t have to so soon after your mother’s illness. Your mother deserved so much more attention from me, I know, especially once she started to get sick. She never complained. She was indestructible, unstoppable. Well, we know that wasn’t true. But there are things you can’t understand yet about the world and what men and women do in it. I can’t explain to you. You have to discover them for yourself.
I’m working on a story. Yeah, I’m always working on a story, I know, but this one is the big one. It’s something that I’ve worked my career toward. It’s something that your mother would be proud of. You always used to ask “Do you love me or love your job?” I hope you realise one day that telling people’s stories—it’s what I do. It’s not always what I want to do, but it is just something that I have to do. I’m doing this because I love you. And your mother. That doesn’t make much sense, does it? Sometimes I can’t explain, even if that’s my job.
Did your mother ever tell you how we ended up in Abiko? Do you want to know the real reason? This is off the record, but you have a right to know. It was nothing to do with the price of land or commuting distance to Tokyo or your junior high school or any of those inconsequential things that we tell people. It was destiny. At least, that’s what your mother believed. And when she got a belief in her head, there was no shaking it.
This kid with piercing eyes was sitting outside Kita-Shinjuku station near the one-room apartment we were renting, just before you were born. As soon as he saw us, he beckoned us over and started drawing noughts and crosses.
I said: “Keiko, he’s just a kid looking to fleece the punters,” but your mother would have none of it. She sat down and he told us to ask him one question about the future. Your mother asked “Where should we bring up our child?” He was silent. I gave him a hint: “Tokyo?” He closed his eyes and drew a small cross. He shook his head. “London?” A large cross. No. “Hokkaido?” Three small crosses. “Chiba Prefecture?” asked your mother. This got a small circle and a nod of the head.
Then it became a game of narrowing down the cities. Kashiwa? Cross. Kimitsu? Funabashi? These got big crosses. Your mother went through every town she could think of. Finally, from the dredges of her memory, she pulled out a plum: Abiko. Big circles. He kept drawing them, even with his eyes open now.
He put his hands on your mother’s belly and looked straight into her eyes: “Your daughter will be a great woman. You must bring her up in Abiko. She will build a bridge between two worlds.” “She? It’s a girl?” I said. “Of course,” the kid said, “She will do great things. Very great things.” So believe in yourself, OK?
Anyway, this long and winding email is to say that I have a few difficult things to do now for this story. It could make me a very unpopular chap (even more unpopular than I am right now with you). Sometimes people don’t like to hear the truth, even if they must.
Should anything happen to me, know one thing: I will always love you, will always be proud of you, no matter what you do in life. As long as you are true to yourself, nothing else matters.
When this is all over, you and I will be able to move on. If things go badly, there is one person you can trust. Kentaro Yamanaka. He is the priest who married your mother and me. You know the place. You should always watch out for religious types, but I make an exception in his case. You can trust him with your life, Hana. He is a good man, when he’s not on the Premium Malts.
Right, must be off. Got a train to catch, and I have to run this story about Teganuma past the Community Page editor at the Japan Times. Then the story will be out there in public. Wish me luck. You never know, it might turn into a best-seller and then your college bills will be paid. I’ll be home by 8 p.m. Let’s do a burger or something. Or natto if you insist.
All my love,
Papa
03:32
“Follow me,” I said, “I’ll take you to Abiko’s best traditional Japanese inn.”
We left the karaoke bar and cut through the empty car park to an unlit side street just wide enough for us to walk side by side.
“Do people ever make fun of your ethnicity, Miss Walker?”
“My what?”
“Do people ever call you bad words, Miss Walker?”
His breath made clouds in the air.
“Bad words?”
“Like half-breed?”
“Oh. Ainoko? It happens. But there are worse things than words.”
“There surely are, there surely are.”
We were standing outside under a wooden sign with peeling paint. Ryokan Tomimasu.
“This is Abiko’s best traditional inn?”
“It’s Abiko’s only traditional inn.”
We climbed a steep hill to the entrance. I pushed open the stubborn wooden sliding front door as silently as I could.
“It’s unlocked?” Mr. Blackmore said in a high voice.
“Japan’s a safe country.”
“Right.”
We stepped in to the sunken genkan entrance hall, a sea of pebbles cemented into the floor. Waiting a step above this on the wooden floor were two pairs of green plastic slippers.
“Welcome to Ryokan Tomimasu.”
A man as tall as Mr. Blackmore waited by the stairs.
“I’m so sorry to arrive so late, and thank you for answering my last-minute call,” I said in Japanese.
“No problem, Walker-san. It’s my job and I am happy to do it. Any other night I might have been asleep. But tonight we are honoured to have the Crown Prince’s brother, Prince Akishino staying for the National Bird Festival tomorrow.”
“A prince? Wow.”
“So, I’m afraid the honoured guest will have to stay in the room down the hall, next to the toilets.”
He looked at Mr. Blackmore and bowed.
“What did he say, Miss Walker?”
“Umm, he said he’s sorry but he put you next to the toilets.”
Mr. Blackmore bowed awkwardly, with his hands together like he was in Thailand.
“Tell him, whatever, as long as there’re pancakes for breakfast and none of that raw egg and little white, black-eyed fish. And definitely none of that rotten bean curd natto that Tomoko used to eat for breakfast.”
“It’s good for you, you know. I bet if you tried it, you’d like it.” He wrinkled his nose.
“The guest would love to have a full Japanese breakfast with natto rice,” I said in Japanese.
“Tell the honoured guest we will give him an extra helping.”
“He’d like that,” I said.
“What did he say?”
“He’ll give you an extra helping.”
“Thanks, Miss Walker, you’re a real lifesaver.”
I looked at my feet, rather than meet Mr. Blackmore’s eyes.
We followed the owner up creaking wooden stairs to the room. It was a mini-version of the downstairs entrance hall. A sliding door with another pebble-floor entrance hall. The straw from the six tatami mats in the room smelled like a field of rice. I showed Mr. Blackmore where to leave his slippers. I didn’t need to unroll the futon for him, Master-san had done it already. He poured some green tea from the pump flask into handle-less cups for us both on a knee-high wooden square table, bowed and left.
I sat on the floor and sipped the tea with both hands, enjoying the warmth.
Mr. Blackmore looked around the room.
“No where to sit, huh?”
He lowered himself to the ground and pushed his legs out. I picked the cup up before his knees hit the table, shaking everything on it. I handed him his cup.
“Thanks, Miss Walker. But tell me, what of your folks? Do you live with them? Aren’t they worried about you out this late with a stranger?”
“I’m used to strangers since Mama died.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Me too.”
“And your dad?”
I breathed in the smell of the tatami mats.
“Papa was a freelance Japan correspondent. That’s what it said on his business card. He said he just wanted ‘Hack’ on his tombstone. But he was hit by a train.
“Oh.”
“It was three years ago. Papa used to call me Scoop on account of he reckoned I would have made a great newspaper reporter. That’s the best thing to be in the world, Mr. Blackmore.”
He looked me in the eye.
“I’m not always the most pious man, Miss Walker, but there are some things I’ve come to believe. One of those is that we were put on this Earth to make an effort. Sometimes there is just a moment, a time that is yours, to do the right thing and make everything fall into place. This is your time. This is your moment.”
We were silent.
But a new question bothered me.
“Why don’t you just go to the police?”
He looked up at the ceiling.
“To the Japanese, Tomoko hasn’t broken any laws. She is Japanese, she is the mother. Her daughter is here. I’m the alien. American law holds no sway here. Japan has not signed the Hague Convention. So it doesn’t matter a bit that I’m Emi’s, um, Papa. All she has to do is lie to the courts that I’m some kind of wife-beater.
“To the Japanese, she is a hero for saving her daughter from a foreigner. Never mind that she is breaking U.S. law. Never mind that she took the only thing in this whole world that I ever did right.
“I have three days to find Emi. I have two tickets in my back pocket. One for me. One for her.”
Now I got it.
“You’re asking me to help you kidnap a girl?”
“No. Much more than that. I’m asking you to save my daughter from a fate that’s not hers.”
I had to think this through. And quick. Mr. Blackmore’s eyes were fixed on me. Intense. Confused. Begging. What would Papa do if I were Emi, and he were Mr. Blackmore?
I knew what he would do.
“Mr. Blackmore, I get forgetful and confused. Aunt Tanaka says I don’t know life. But I know what it’s like to have no Papa. And if I can help another girl like me be with hers, I’ll do everything I can to help, but I’m just a girl and I’m only half-Japanese and…”
Mr. Blackmore lifted my chin up and held my face in front of his.
“You are not half of anything,” he said, “you are double, two wholes–Japanese and Western, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. You are the way God meant you to be.”
“Thank you. I don’t know about God,” I said, “but I do have a good contact.”
05:34
I left Mr. Blackmore in the ryokan and walked away from the lake, uphill through the early-morning half light. The air was chilly but kept me awake. I took my shoes off and cut through the back streets to Shibasakidai and the shrine in my bare feet. The cold of the concrete was less painful than the heels.
I passed through a tunnel cut under the train tracks that ran through the heart of Abiko—a business hotel, a couple of multi-story manshons and hairdressing salons—and ambled for 40 minutes past the boarded up hardware store and the liquor store to the only place open at this time, a convenience store.
I put my shoes back on and bought breakfast. I pulled the plastic covering from the seaweed and tucked into the natto rice ball right outside the store. Aunt Tanaka said you are not supposed to eat standing up outside, but I didn’t think anyone would notice so early.
I was standing by a signboard, a blue “P” pointing to a gravel patch with a Japan Tobacco vending machine and parking for 20 cars, though only two were there, a rusty green Mini Cooper and a shiny white Toyota.
A man in his 50s wearing a yukata robe and black funnel hat walked around the new car. Then he took out a stick with white feathers, and shook it above the bonnet, the driver’s side, the boot, and the passenger door. He chanted and rustled the feathers. A cockerel crowed in the distance.
The man looked over in my direction and winked.
“Hi, Uncle Kentaro.”
He waved back, but continued his chants. I followed the road past a rotting wooden shack and climbed the stone steps that were cut into a thicket of pine and bamboo. By the time I was at the top of the hill I was panting, my breath disappearing into the mists behind me.
Ahead on either side of the path were two giant grey fox statues. One had a key in its mouth, and the other had a fox cub in its paw. Above them were two red wooden beams of the torii gate spanning the path. To the left of them was a wooden water trough. It might have been like this for ever and ever. Or maybe just a couple of years.
The water was ice-cold on my hands, but the grease-stained towel hanging from a wire coat hanger overhead looked dirtier than the ground. I bit my lip and shook my hands around, and ran them across my hot pants and regretted it as the water dripped down the Lycra onto my bare legs. I skipped beneath the gate along a stepping stone path lined with head-high stone lanterns at every step.
I fished out all the change from my hip bag and threw it all between the wooden bars of the donation trough. The coins clattered to the base of the box. I clapped my hands twice. Then I bowed my head and whispered a prayer: “Help me find this guy’s daughter. Please keep his daughter safe. Please?
I could do with a lucky break. Could I get something else to wear too?”
“Don’t push your luck.”
I spun round. Uncle Kentaro had his feather stick in one hand, and half-smoked cigarette in the other.
“The inari don’t mind doing little favours,” he said, nodding to the fox statues, “but it looks like you are in big trouble now.”
“How do you know?”
“You didn’t come home last night, you make a generous donation, and those clothes. Those hot pants are bad news.”
“But Aunt Tanaka said it is good for business.”
“Aunt Tanaka should mind her own business sometimes, Hana-chan.”
He stepped forward and ruffled my hair. “I was worried about you. You’d better tell me what trouble you are in before your aunt does.”
The three lines under each eye turned into a dozen as he smiled. The way he stayed bent slightly toward me, with his head cocked, made him look like a waiter ready to take down my order.
“Oh, I brought you a gift from the konbini, Uncle Kentaro.”
I handed him a package. He smiled.
“Two cans of Premium Malts? Well, at least your taste in beer is better than your taste in clothes. Hurry, let’s get in out of the cold. We can watch the figure skating.”
We walked into the rotting wooden house. The corrugated-iron roof was orange-red from rust. It was as cold inside as it was out. He took his wooden sandals off, placing them neatly together facing the door. I kicked my high heels off.
Uncle Kentaro’s place stank of cigarettes. The tatami mats reeked of it, and the walls and paper screens that blocked out light from all the windows were covered in brown scum. The only furniture was a stand for the plasma TV, and a Volkswagen hubcap in the centre of the room overflowing with white cigarette butts.
“You are in for a treat,” he said. He dropped cross-legged onto the floor and looked at the TV. “Who’s your girl? Kim or Mao?”
“I don’t watch much TV,” I said.
Half Life: A Hana Walker Mystery (The Hana Walker Mysteries Book 1) Page 3
