by Diana Renn
“No! By finding the painting.”
I stare at her.
“Fujikawa’s probably not too hard to find,” Reika goes on. “Gang bosses and gangsters here live in houses with addresses, like regular people. They have real offices, too. They’re so powerful, most regular people just leave them alone. Unfortunately, so do the police, most of the time. Finding a gang boss isn’t impossible, but it isn’t the greatest idea, either. They’re kind of known for seeking revenge, violently, when people try to nab them.”
I nod slowly, thinking of the polite-yet-menacing letter that Fujikawa wrote to Kenji.
“So we’ll look for the painting,” says Reika. “Then Kenji can give Fujikawa what he wants and get this guy off his back.”
She’s so cheerful, I have to laugh. “You act like we could really find the painting.”
She frowns. “Why not? Don’t you think it could be here in Japan? Maybe even in the Yamada Building, right under Kenji’s nose, just like the drawings were.”
“Yeah, but wouldn’t the painting have turned up during the renovations, like the drawings did? Especially since a painting would be a lot bigger than the portfolio of drawings.”
“It’s a huge building. Maybe not every nook and cranny was explored.”
“I don’t know, Reika. Kenji’s been looking for over two decades. He would have found it by now. At the meeting with the FBI people last week, no one even mentioned finding the painting as a remote possibility.”
“Why are you so freaking cautious?”
“Cautious!” I glare at her. “After all I did, following Skye around downtown Seattle? Coming up with scenarios to explain stuff? Which, FYI, actually helped out the FBI.”
“That’s all great. But no offense, sometimes you hold back, you know?” says Reika. “I feel like you need to jump in and really look. The painting’s still out there. Don’t you see, Violet? You’re getting a second chance at solving this mystery!” She pumps a fist in the air. “Ganbatte! Let’s find that painting!”
Something stirs inside me. I’ve been going down the wrong path, looking for the person or people who took the drawings. It’s the painting I need to look for, not the criminal. “I guess I could talk to Kenji and find out where he’s already looked for the painting.”
“Now you’re talking. Are there any clues we could start with?”
Suddenly, more than anything, I want to find that canvas. Having a great victory would be the only way to make my dad notice me. If it’s success he appreciates, I’ll give him success.
“There might be a clue,” I say. “Kenji mentioned something about a picture of ayu. That’s a river trout, I think.”
“Right.” Reika nods. “A freshwater delicacy. They’re popular to eat in the summer.”
“Okay, so Tomonori Yamada was an amateur artist, and when they found his body on the tracks, the only thing in his briefcase was a drawing he did, showing two ayu. They thought it was a clue as to why he killed himself, like he couldn’t live because he couldn’t be an artist. But you know what? I don’t think he really killed himself. Someone could have pushed him off that platform, and taken his shoes and socks off to make it look like a suicide.”
Reika nods. “I’d buy that. I read somewhere that there are tons of suicides in Japan, but lots of them are probably murders that were never investigated.”
“And I think the ayu could be some kind of clue related to the painting,” I go on, thinking out loud. “Maybe Tomonori knew his life was in danger and wanted his brother to find the art.”
“Yeah! So here’s the deal. When you start work tomorrow, you have to look around the Yamada Building for anything related to ayu.”
“Maybe the fish are in some office art. Or a symbol on a door. Or woven into a rug.”
“Or a maybe someone named Ayu works there and knows something about the painting. I can check the company directory online, and call a receptionist, too.”
“Great idea!”
“Oh, and maybe I can come to the office again and talk to Hideki.” Reika twirls a lock of hair around her finger and inspects her dark eye makeup in the mirror. “I bet I could get him to open up about his memories of his dad, and find out what ayu might have meant to him.”
“No way.”
“Why not? He could have key information about Tomonori and the painting!”
“My dad’s working for Hideki. There’s a lot of money riding on this mural. If my dad finds out we’re asking questions, especially to someone as important as Hideki, I’m grounded.”
“All right, don’t bite my head off. By the way, you are rocking that shirt. It’s so sugoi!”
“Nice recovery. But you’re still not talking to Hideki. No matter how kakkoi he is.”
We walk out of the fitting room a few minutes later with our new plan and a few sugoi, or awesome, outfits from the store’s sale rack. At the end of the fitting-room hallway, we find Yoshi. He creases his newspaper and pockets it, then escorts us to the cash register.
With Yoshi shadowing, Reika and I stroll down the street to find a kissaten, or manga café. For a blissful couple of hours, I don’t worry about the van Gogh case. We swing our shopping bags and laugh at the funny English phrases on them. Mine says IT’S DURABLE, AND IT WILL STAY IN FASHION. Reika has two bags. One says BE SATISFINED WITH PURE BEAUTY. The other is decorated with black cats floating serenely in bubbles. The words FRIENDSHIP WORMS THE HEART weave around the bubbles.
While lunching at a noodle shop, Reika and I use our cell phones to check the Yamada Building’s vast online employee directory. I read the English page; she reads the Japanese one. The only person we find with ayu in the name is a Mayumi Ozawa. But when Reika calls to speak with her, she finds out she’s only twenty-two, a brand-new office girl at the company. She wasn’t even alive when Tomonori hid that painting. There’s nothing we can do until I start work.
After lunch, we hit another kissaten, browsing shelves bursting with manga titles, playing a few video games, drinking way too much bubble tea, laughing uncontrollably over nothing at all. Reika flirts with two guys playing video games. While they drool over her and completely ignore me, I buy the latest two issues of Vampire Sleuths. They’re untranslated, but out a full year before the English versions will hit the shelves. My consolation prize for being invisible.
When Reika finally tears herself away from the guys, she promises to help me read them if I can’t understand them from the pictures alone. Her offer is so sincere that I forgive her a little for ignoring me while she flirted.
In the afternoon, I walk Reika to a subway station. She gives me a sad little wave from the steps. “Oh, hey, Violet!” she calls back to me.
“Yeah?” I turn.
And then she says as crowds of people swarm by, “Don’t worry. The sting operation is totally going to work. The FBI does this kind of thing all the time. But still, as soon as you find out, email me, okay?”
Chikuso. I thought Reika was more careful than that. Anyone nearby could have heard!
1
7
Even though Reika has just broadcast the secret sting operation loud enough for everyone on the street to hear, it seems, fortunately, like no one is paying attention. The only people not swarming toward the subway entrance are a flock of uniformed schoolgirls eating sticks of chocolate Pocky.
And Yoshi, of course. But he’s transfixed by a big flat-screen TV on the side of a building. A baseball game. Yomiuri Giants versus Hiroshima Carp. A player is scoring a home run. The camera pans to the stadium crowd going wild with applause but no cheering, and an electronic sign above the playing field proclaiming, in English: “We can be shinin’ stars.” There’s a sentimental smile on Yoshi’s face. He looks on the verge of weeping.
I manage to tear him away from the screen. We walk back toward the
Yamada Building.
Crossing Omotesando-dori to leave Harajuku, I forget that Japanese drivers use the other side of the road. A passing taxi nearly takes me out. Yoshi grabs my arm and yanks me back onto the sidewalk just in time. Minutes later, when a group of schoolchildren run up to practice English phrases, Yoshi shoos them away. “I am a pencil!” one boy shouts at me inexplicably. Yoshi takes him by the collar and hauls him off to his teacher. When I trip over a curb and fall, Yoshi steers me over to a bench and buys me a cold, sugary drink called Pocari Sweat from a vending machine. “Hey, uh, thanks for saving me today,” I tell him. “Like, over and over again.”
“Douzo,” he murmurs shyly, looking down.
I smile. I think I officially have a second friend in Japan.
* * *
BACK IN THE Yamada Building, the temperature has risen a few more degrees, thanks to my dad’s selfish request. Businessmen are loosening ties, receptionists fanning themselves. Another change: my dad is now protected from curious onlookers by an assortment of screens. Some are folding Japanese screens, gold with patterns of koi. Some are office cubicle partitions, or bulletin boards on metal stands. For a guy who says he hates drama, he’s sure got quite the stage.
I poke my head in. The smell of paint makes me choke. “Knock, knock,” I say.
“Who’s there?” my dad asks. He has white flecks of paint all over his hair. He sits cross-legged at the foot of the wall, a pencil and a pad of paper on his lap. A few feet away, on a stool, is a bento lunch box with rice and teriyaki chicken. Eight small glass Coke bottles are strewn around the floor. He’s drunk all the Coke, but barely picked at his food. I remember Skye told me to make sure he eats.
“Violet,” I reply.
“Violet who?”
I could have hiked up Mount Fuji and never returned, and he wouldn’t have even noticed.
He actually smiles. “Remember you used to do those knock-knock jokes all the time?”
“Huh? Oh. Sure. About a hundred years ago.”
“What happened to those? Some of them were pretty clever.”
“Thanks. But I’m in high school now? We don’t really do knock-knock jokes anymore.”
What happened to playing the Frame Game? I want to ask him. And what happened to all the school photos I gave you, and why aren’t they in your house?
“Well? Violet who?” he prompts.
“Violet a good meal go to waste?” I point to the bento box.
He chuckles. “See, you haven’t lost your touch.”
“You should really eat something. Lunch was a long time ago.”
“I know. I’ll get to it.”
“I ate lunch,” I volunteer, since he didn’t bother to ask. “Reika took me to this awesome noodle shop. The only sign for it was a piece of blue fabric with some kanji characters on it. People wiped their hands on the cloth when they left. It’s how they thank the chef.”
“Cool.” He’s staring at that wall again, so intensely you’d think he was trying to bore a hole through it with his eyes. I don’t think he heard a word.
“Can I watch you work?”
“Well, that’d be as exciting as watching paint dry. In fact, that’s exactly what it would be. I spent my day re-priming, and I can’t do anything else till it settles, so I’m working out some ideas on paper.” Frowning, he studies the pencil sketch on the paper, the outline of a bridge.
“You’re doing a bridge painting? Like van Gogh did?”
“Hideki wants to use a bridge as a metaphor to connect Eastern and Western cultures, and as a symbol of their company. But the design I proposed isn’t going to work after all.”
“Do you have to paint a bridge? It’s your art.”
“There’s a lot of money in a commission like this. And everyone’s got an opinion. Especially Hideki. Even though the guy didn’t inherit one shred of his dad’s or his uncle’s vision for art. He should stick to closing deals and stop looking over my shoulder.”
“My art teacher says if you try to please everyone, you just end up with a mess.”
“She’s right. Then again, if someone wants to pay you a hundred grand for some feel-good corporate crap, and to match the colors in the carpet samples, you tend to forget that advice. But somewhere the integrity of the artist has to count for something. I have to find a way to sign my name to something I believe in.”
I watch as he crumples that paper and starts again. “Maybe there’s some other way to show a bridge,” I suggest. “Sometimes people are kind of like bridges, stretched between two things. Like Reika, with two cultures—oh, it’s stupid. Forget it,” I mumble as he crumples another page. He’s clearly not in the mood for advice. “Hey, can I lay out some paints or brushes for you for tomorrow?” Maybe if he remembers the knock-knock jokes, he’ll remember that I used to do little jobs for him. That we used to hang out and have fun.
But he’s sketching now, “in the zone,” I guess, as my art teacher likes to say.
I retreat, shifting the screens to close him off completely from the rest of the lobby. Maybe the best way to help him is just to let him have his space. An art he’s perfected over the years.
1
8
The next morning, I say good-bye to my dad in the lobby and head upstairs with Yoshi for my first day of work. I’m wearing one of my new Harajuku outfits: the silky red top with a swishy black-and-red floral skirt. Only my black Converse sneakers ruin the look. I’ve still had no luck finding sandals my size. My feet are already sweating. The temperature in the building is up another ten degrees from yesterday.
A smiling receptionist comes up and to me and explains, in English, that Mitsue wanted me to tour their museum before reporting for work. I expect to be taken to some other building and am surprised when Yoshi leads me into the elevator. When we step out of the elevator on the third floor, we’re in a corridor facing a set of sliding wooden screens lined with white paper. Yoshi removes his shoes and exchanges them for slippers on a rack and motions for me to do the same. Then Yoshi slides back the shoji screen and leads me into another world.
We’re in a street in old Japan. We stand on a simulated cobblestone street before a wooden building façade with heavy beams and a low, shingled roof. The building within the building is lined with straw mats—tatami, I know, from manga and from Japanese restaurants. They smell like sweet grass. I follow a winding route from room to room. The art, sculptures, and artifacts on display proceed chronologically through centuries of Japanese history. I take in the silk kimonos on the walls, emblazoned with dragons, flowers, birds. I move on and see scrolls, decorative screens, pottery, jewelry, hair combs, porcelain dishes, lacquered bowls, dolls, and musical instruments—stringed instruments called kotos and samisens. Heavy, barrel-shaped taiko drums. Delicate wooden fue, or flutes. There’s even a whole room devoted to ancient swords with elaborately decorated scabbards. I want to draw everything I see.
Room after room, the museum unfolds like a fan, until finally we end up in a brightly lit modern gallery space that reminds me of Margo’s gallery. A sign in Japanese, French, and English reads SPECIAL EXHIBIT: THE INFLUENCE OF JAPANESE PRINTS ON CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS. Velvet ropes mark off the area, which is bustling with art handlers unpacking crates, hanging pictures, drilling holes in walls. The crate with my dad’s four paintings takes up much of the middle of the room. Near it, Mitsue is talking to some handlers. She immediately comes over to greet me.
“Violet-chan! Ohayou gozaimasu. Good morning.”
“Ohayou gozaimasu,” I repeat. I’ve been listening carefully to the hotel staff at breakfast every morning, trying to copy their pronunciation. “Your museum is amazing,” I add. “I didn’t expect it to take up a whole floor of an office building. Wow.”
“Yes, many private galleries and museums in Japan are inside office buildings,” Mits
ue explains. “We do not have districts dedicated to art galleries, like your Pioneer Square in Seattle. I am glad to hear you enjoyed your tour. The museum has been open for only a few months, since the renovation, so it is still a work in progress. The storeroom and archives, where you will work, are just down this hall.” She gestures to a doorway. “Yoshi will take some time off while you work, and he’ll return to take you to lunch. Are you ready to begin?”
“Sure. Any news from Agent Chang?” I can’t resist asking as I follow her down the hall.
“Not yet. The sting takes place in two hours.”
“Are you worried about it?”
“There is no reason to be. The FBI is quite confident these men will walk into the trap. Once they do, the drawings will be returned, and these bad men will be in police custody.”
But now I notice a slight tremor in her voice. Her appearance betrays her state of mind, too. I notice shadows under her eyes that makeup fails to conceal. She’s dressed in a smart, blue sheath dress, but the belt at her waist has missed two loops, and her scarf is tied sloppily.
Just outside the storeroom door, I notice a row of six framed ukiyo-e prints. I pause to look at them while Mitsue searches her purse for a key. “Fish,” I whisper.
They all seem to show carp, but the print closest to the door shows two slender, gray fish that seem different. “What kind of fish are these?” I ask Mitsue.
“These are ayu,” she replies.
I think back to the last “note” Tomonori had left his family, the drawing in his briefcase. “Are they the ones Tomonori drew?”
“Oh, no,” says Mitsue. “This is a print by Hiroshige Ando, who did the original Moon Crossing Bridge. These are all prints from his Small Fish series.”
I can’t stop looking at it. It seems significant, because of the fish and the Hiroshige connection. “How long has it been on this wall?” I ask.
“At least as long as I’ve known Kenji. And far too long. See the fading from the overhead lights? We usually rotate woodblock prints monthly, but these are so light-damaged that we don’t bother. Ah, here is my key.”
