Rain Fall

by Barry Eisler

  She smiled again. “That’s pretty authentic.”

  “So is the suggestion.”

  “I thought you were going to Paul Stuart.”

  “I was. But now I’m thirsty. Do you know the Tsuta coffeehouse? It’s great. And right around the corner, just off Koto-dori.”

  Her arms were still folded across her chest. “I don’t know it.”

  “Then you’ve got to try it. Koyama-san serves the best coffee in Tokyo, and you can drink it listening to Bach or Chopin, looking out onto a wonderful secret garden.”

  “A secret garden?” she asked, playing for time, I knew. “What’s the secret?”

  I gave her a sober look. “Koyama-san says that if I tell you, I have to kill you. So it would be better if you were to see for yourself.”

  She laughed again, cornered but seeming not to mind. “I think I’d have to know your name first,” she said.

  “Fujiwara Junichi,” I replied, bowing automatically. Fujiwara was my father’s last name.

  She returned the bow. “It’s nice to meet you, Fujiwara-san.”

  “Let me introduce you to Tsuta,” I said, smiling, and we headed off.

  The stroll over to Tsuta took less than five minutes, during which we made small talk about how the city had changed over the years, how we missed the days when the boulevard in front of Yoyogi Park was closed to automobile traffic on Sundays and host to a delirious outdoor party of costumed revelers, when the identity of Japanese jazz was being newly forged in a thousand basement bars and coffeehouses, when there was no gleaming new City Hall in Shinjuku and the area was alive with real yearning and romance and grit. I enjoyed talking with her, and knew at some level that this was strange, even undesirable.

  We were in luck, and one of Tsuta’s two tables, each of which overlooks the establishment’s secret garden through a single oversized picture window, was open and waiting for us. Alone, I typically enjoy a seat at the counter, where a view of Koyama-san’s reverential coffee preparations is always a wonder, but today I wanted an atmosphere more conducive to conversation. We each ordered the house demitasse, made with an intense dark roast, and sat at right angles to each other, so that we could both see the garden.

  “How long have you lived in Tokyo?” I asked, when we were settled in.

  “On and off for my whole life, really,” she said, slowly stirring a spoonful of sugar crystals into her demitasse. “I lived abroad for a few years when I was little, but mostly I grew up in Chiba, one town over. I used to come to Tokyo all the time when I was a teenager, to try to sneak into the live houses and listen to jazz. Then I spent four years in New York, studying at Julliard. After that, I came back to Tokyo. And you?”

  “Same as you — off and on for my whole life.”

  “And where did you learn to order coffee in an authentic New York accent?”

  I took a sip of the bitter liquid before me and considered how to answer. It’s rare for me to share biographical details. The things I have done, and continue to do, have marked me, just as Crazy Jake said they would, and, even if the mark is invisible to most of the wider world, I am always aware of its presence. Intimacy is no longer familiar to me. Probably, I sometimes realize with a measure of regret, it is no longer possible.

  I haven’t had a real relationship in Japan since my move into the shadows. There were some faltering dates, perfunctory on my part. Tatsu, and some other friends that I no longer see, sometimes tried to set me up with women they knew. But where were these relationships going to go, when the two subjects that most define me were unmentionable, taboo? Imagine the conversation: “I served in Vietnam.” “How did you manage that?” “I’m half American, you see, a mongrel.”

  There are a few women from the mizu shobai, the water trade, as Japan calls its demimonde, whom I see from time to time. We’ve known each other long enough so that things are no longer conducted on a straight cash basis, expensive gifts instead providing the necessary currency and context, and there is even a certain degree of mutual affection. They all assume that I’m married, an assumption that makes it easy for me to explain the subtle security measures in which I engage as a matter of course. And the assumption also renders explainable the suspended, on-again, off-again nature of our relationship, and my reticence about personal details.

  But Midori had a reticence about her, too, a reticence she had just breached in telling me a bit about her childhood. I knew that if I failed to reciprocate, I would learn nothing more from her.

  “I grew up in both countries,” I said after a long pause. “I never lived in New York, but I’ve spent some time there, and I know some of the region’s accents.”

  Her eyes widened. “You grew up in Japan and the States?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you come to do that?”

  “My mother was American.”

  I was aware of a slight intensification of her gaze, as she searched for the first time for the Caucasian in my features. You can still spot it, if you know what you’re looking for.

  “You don’t look very . . . I mean, I think you must have inherited mostly your father’s features.”

  “That bothers some people.”

  “What does?”

  “That I look Japanese, but I’m really something else.”

  I remembered for a moment the first time I heard the word ainoko, half-breed. It happened at school, and I asked my father about it that night. He scowled and said only, “Taishita koto nai.” It’s nothing. But pretty soon I got to hear the word while the ijimekko, the school bullies, were busy trying to beat the shit out of me, and I put two and two together.

  She smiled. “I don’t know about other people. For me, the intersection of cultures is where things get most interesting.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sure. Look at jazz. Roots in black America, branches in Japan and all over the world.”

  “You’re unusual. Japanese are typically racist.” I realized that my tone was more bitter than I had intended.

  “I don’t know that the country is so racist. It’s just been insular for so long, and we’re always afraid of what’s new or unknown.”

  Ordinarily I find such idealism in the face of all contrary facts irritating, but I recognized that Midori was simply projecting her own good sentiment onto everyone around her. Looking into her dark, earnest eyes, I couldn’t help smiling. She smiled back, her full lips parting and lighting up her eyes, and I had to look away.

  “What was it like to grow up that way, in two countries, two cultures?” she asked. “It must have been incredible.”

  “Pretty standard, really,” I said, reflexively.

  She paused, her demitasse halfway to her lips. “I don’t see how something like that could really be ‘standard.’ ”

  Careful, John. “No. It was difficult, actually. I had a hard time fitting in either place.”

  The demitasse continued upward, and she took a sip. “Where did you spend more time?”

  “I lived in Japan until I was about ten, then mostly in the States after that. I came back here in the early eighties.”

  “To be with your parents?”

  I shook my head. “No. They were already gone.”

  My tone rendered unambiguous the word gone, and she nodded in sympathy. “Were you very young?”

  “Early teens,” I said, averaging things out, still trying to keep it vague when I could.

  “That’s terrible, to lose both parents so young. Were you close with them?”

  Close? Although my face bore the stamp of his Asian features, and although he married an American, I believe my father had a typically outsized Japanese focus on race. The bullying I received in school both enraged and ashamed him.

  “Fairly close, I suppose. They’ve been gone a long time.”

  “Do you think you’ll go back to America?”

  “I did at one point,” I said, remembering how I’d gotten drawn into the work it now seemed like I’d been doing forever.
“After returning as an adult, I spent ten years here always thinking I would stay just one more and then go back. Now I don’t really dwell on it.”

  “Does Japan feel like home to you?”

  I remembered what Crazy Jake told me, just before I did what he asked of me. There’s no home for us, John. Not after what we’ve done.

  “It’s become my home, I guess,” I said after a long time. “What about you? Would you want to live in America again?”

  She was gently tapping on her demitasse, her fingers rippling up its sides from pinky to forefinger, and I thought, She plays her moods. What would my hands do if I could do that?

  “I really loved New York,” she said after a moment, smiling at some memory, “and I’d like to go back eventually, even to stay for a while. My manager thinks that the band isn’t too far off. We’ve got a gig at the Vanguard in November; that’ll really put us on the map.”

  The Village Vanguard, the Manhattan mecca of live jazz. “The Vanguard?” I said, impressed. “That’s quite a pedigree. Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, the whole pantheon.”

  “It’s a big opportunity,” she said, nodding.

  “You could leverage that, make New York your base, if you wanted to.”

  “We’ll see. Don’t forget, I’ve lived in New York before. It’s a great place, maybe the most exciting place I’ve ever been. But it’s like swimming underwater, you know? At first you feel as though you could go along forever, seeing everything from this new perspective, but eventually you have to come up for air. After four years, it was time for me to come home.”

  That was the opening. “You must have had indulgent parents, if they were willing to send you abroad for that long.”

  She smiled faintly. “My mother died when I was young — same as you. My father sent me to Julliard. He loved jazz and was thrilled that I wanted to be a jazz pianist.”

  “Mama told me you lost him recently,” I said, hearing a flat echo of the words in my ears. “I’m sorry.” She bowed her head in acknowledgment of my expression of sympathy, and I asked, “What did he do?”

  “He was a bureaucrat.” This is an honorable profession in Japan, and the Japanese word kanryo lacks the negative connotations of its English counterpart.

  “With what ministry?”

  “For most of his career, the Kensetsusho.” The construction ministry.

  We were making some progress. I noticed that the manipulation was making me uncomfortable. Finish the interview, I thought. Then get the hell out. She puts you off your game; this is dangerous.

  “Construction must have been a stuffy place for a jazz enthusiast,” I said.

  “It was hard for him at times,” she acknowledged, and suddenly I sensed guardedness. Her posture hadn’t changed, her expression was the same, but somehow I knew she had been ready to say more and then had thought better of it. If I had touched a nerve, she had barely shown it. She wouldn’t have expected me to notice.

  I nodded, I hoped reassuringly. “I know a little bit about being uncomfortable in your environment. At least your father’s daughter doesn’t have any problems like that — doing gigs at Alfie makes a lot of sense for a jazz pianist.”

  I felt the odd tension for a second longer, then she laughed softly as though she had decided to let something go. I wasn’t sure what I had brushed up against, and would consider it later.

  “So, four years in New York,” I said. “That’s a long time. You must have had a very different perspective when you returned.”

  “I did. The person who returns from living abroad isn’t the same person who left originally.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Your outlook changes. You don’t take things for granted that you used to. For instance, I noticed in New York that when one cab cut off another, the driver who got cut off would always yell at the other driver and do this” — she did a perfect imitation of a New York cabbie flipping someone the bird — “and I realized this was because Americans assume that the other person intended to do what he did, so they want to teach the person a lesson. But you know, in Japan, people almost never get upset in those situations. Japanese look at other people’s mistakes more as something arbitrary, like the weather, I think, not so much as something to get angry about. I hadn’t thought about that before I lived in New York.”

  “I’ve noticed that difference, too. I like the Japanese way better. It’s something to aspire to.”

  “But which are you? Japanese or American? The outlook, I mean,” she added quickly, I knew for fear of insulting me by being too direct.

  I looked at her, thinking for an instant of her father. I thought of other people I’ve worked with, and how much different my life might have been if I’d never known them. “I’m not sure,” I said, finally, glancing away. “As you seem to have noticed at Alfie, I’m not a very forgiving person.”

  She paused. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure,” I responded, not knowing what was coming.

  “What did you mean, when you said we had ‘rescued’ you?”

  “Just trying to strike up a conversation,” I said. It sounded flip, and I saw immediately from her eyes that it was the wrong response.

  You have to show her a little bit, I thought again, not sure whether I was compromising or rationalizing. I sighed. “I was talking about things I’ve done, things I knew, or thought I knew, were right,” I said, switching to English, which was more comfortable for me on this subject. “But then later it turned out they weren’t. At times those things haunt me.”

  “Haunt you?” she asked, not understanding.

  “Borei no yo ni.” Like a ghost.

  “My music made the ghosts go away?”

  I nodded and smiled, but the smile turned sad. “It did. I’ll have to listen to it more often.”

  “Because they’ll come back?”

  Jesus, John, get off this. “It’s more like they’re always there. Sugita koto wa, sugita koto da.” The past is the past.

  “You have regrets?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “Probably. But are yours like everyone else’s?”

  “That I wouldn’t know. I don’t usually compare.”

  “But you just did.”

  I chuckled. “You’re tough” was all I could say.

  She shook her head. “I don’t mean to be.”

  “I think you do. But you wear it well.”

  “What about the saying ‘I only regret the things I haven’t done’?”

  I shook my head. “That’s someone else’s saying. Someone who must have spent a lot of time at home.”

  I knew I would learn nothing more about her father or the stranger today without questions that would betray my true intention in asking them. It was time to start winding things down.

  “Any more shopping today?” I asked.

  “I was going to, but I’ve got someone to meet in Jinbocho in less than an hour.”

  “A friend?” I asked, professionally curious.

  She smiled. “My manager.”

  I paid the bill and walked back to Aoyama-dori. The crowds had thinned, and the air felt cold and heavy. The temperature had dropped in the two and a half weeks since I had taken out Kawamura. I looked up and saw unbroken clouds.

  I had enjoyed myself much more than I had expected — more, really, than I had wanted. But the chill cut through my reverie, reviving my memories and doubts. I glanced over at Midori’s face, thinking, What have I done to her? What am I doing?

  “What is it?” she asked, seeing my eyes.

  “Nothing. Just tired.”

  She looked to her right, then again at me. “It felt as though you were looking at someone else.”

  I shook my head. “It’s just us.”

  We walked, our footsteps echoing softly. Then she asked, “Will you come see me play again?”

  “I’d like that.” Stupid thing to say. But I didn’t have to follow through on it.

&nb
sp; “I’m at the Blue Note Friday and Saturday.”

  “I know,” I said, stupid again, and she smiled.

  She flagged down a cab. I held the door for her as she went in, an annoying part of me wondering what it would be like to be getting in with her. As it pulled away from the curb, she rolled down the window and said, “Come alone.”

  8

  THE NEXT FRIDAY I received another page from Harry telling me to check our bulletin board.

  What he had found out was that the stranger on the train was indeed a reporter: Franklin Bulfinch, the Tokyo bureau chief for Forbes magazine. Bulfinch was one of only five male foreigners living in the Daikanyama apartment complex I had seen the stranger enter; all Harry had needed to do was cross-reference the names he found in the local ward directory against the main files kept by the Immigration Bureau. The latter kept information on all foreign residents in Japan, including age, birthplace, address, employer, fingerprints, and a photograph. Using this information, Harry had been able to quickly determine that the other foreigners failed to match the description I had provided. He had also obligingly hacked and uploaded Bulfinch’s photo so I could confirm that we were talking about the same guy. We were.

  Harry had recommended a look at forbes.com, where Bulfinch’s articles were archived. I checked the site, and spent several hours reading Bulfinch’s accounts of suspected alliances between the government and the yakuza, about how the Liberal Democratic Party uses threats, bribery, and intimidation to control the press, about the cost of all this corruption to the average Japanese.

  Bulfinch’s English-language articles had little impact in Japan, and the local media were obviously not following up on his efforts. I imagined this would be frustrating for him. On the other hand, it was probably the reason I hadn’t been tasked with removing him.

  My guess was that Kawamura was one of Bulfinch’s sources, hence the reporter’s presence on the train that morning and his quick search of Kawamura. I felt some abstract admiration for his doggedness: his source is having a heart attack right in front of him, and all he does is search the guy’s pockets for a deliverable.