“You’re not very Japanese then.” He chuckled.
“I’m half, and I don’t appreciate comments like that.”
“If Seiho and I had been lucky enough to have a child, I wonder what she would have looked like. Maybe you.”
Joe’s eyes rested on me for longer than I was comfortable, and Mrs. Chapman yawned loudly. I guess it wasn’t much fun to go to dinner with a handsome man your age and find him neglecting you for a slacker.
“We should go,” I said, getting out my wallet.
“It’s my treat.” Joe signaled for the waiter to bring him the check. “And even if you don’t believe in favors, Rei, I do. You owe me something for the money and time I’ve invested in you.”
“Oh!” I was horrified by the connotations, especially after he’d spoken of me like a daughter.
“Sweetheart, I want your best Japanese antique shopping tip. Painted screens are more or less gone forever, tansu are selling sky-high, and you can’t find truly fine pieces anymore.” He looked so comically distraught that I laughed.
“Haven’t you tried going to Heiwajima?”
“That God-awful fair in the Rytsu Center?” Joe looked pained. “It’s pitiful to see my friends’ wives begging for discounts with their terrible Japanese. They wind up lugging home things that probably cost more here than it would in L.A. I’ve been here forty years and I’m beginning to think there’s no point in even shopping anymore!”
“You need to shop smart,” I told him.
“How’s that?”
“Three steps,” I said. “The first is to realize you can’t be an expert in everything. You need to concentrate on what you really love, whether it’s furniture or blue-and-white china. Step two is going to museums, and combining that study with window-shopping every antique store in town. Finally, when you’re shopping at a big sale like Heiwajima, pick up a business card at every stall and look at the address. The dealers from far away would sooner discount their antiques than carry them back.”
“When is this sale?” Mrs. Chapman asked.
“Not until the spring, but I can send you something, if you like. Old fabrics and china are really all I can afford, but my serious love is nineteenth-century wooden furniture. I’ve only bought one big piece. For my parents.”
“How’s that? Don’t they live in California?” Joe asked.
I told him the story of how my mother had begged me to find her a tansu straight out of an art book. The chest had to be made of zelkova wood with iron fittings and a special lacquer finish, and be reasonably old although not decrepit. It took three weekends of combing shops and flea-markets until I found a superb example for a fair price. I paid a teacher returning to the States $300 to include it in her shipment, saving thousands off the cost of private shipping.
“And you want to know the kicker? My mother had it appraised in San Francisco for seven thousand dollars more than I’d paid.”
“Maybe I could do this for the ladies in my retirement community,” Mrs. Chapman looked excited. “That’s the focus for the rest of my stay here—antiques!”
Joe toasted me with his coffee cup. “Why are you even wasting your time teaching English?”
“Nichiyu is a good employer. Sooner or later they’ll let me run the language program.”
“If you really want to work with antiques, you should just do it,” he insisted.
“I’ve heard that before.” I didn’t try to hide my bitterness. “The people who’ve interviewed me here all say go back to the States, maybe I can find a job in San Diego or Seattle where it won’t matter when I can’t read and write kanji. The problem is I don’t want to leave Japan.”
“I see.” Joe paused. “Have you heard of personal shoppers?”
“I used one a few years ago to get all my Christmas shopping done. The problem is they stuck to one store and certainly didn’t look for bargains!” Mrs. Chapman wiped daintily at her mouth with a napkin.
“Exactly. Rei could become a freelance antiques shopper specializing in overseas clients and the expatriate community in Tokyo. It would be easier and cheaper than opening a store.”
“I never thought about retail. Just museums.” I contemplated the dark, sugary sludge at the bottom of my coffee cup, thinking if I drank it, I’d be up all night.
“If you want to be highbrow, give them lectures and trips to museums. I’ll think about it some more.” It was as if an electric light had switched on inside Joe; I knew why Far East Ventures had succeeded.
“The foreigners I know would never go for that,” I protested. “They have enough trouble paying their rent, the telephone, that kind of thing.”
“What about my friends? Corporate couples, military hot shots? I could get you a few introductions.” He pulled an appointment book from his breast pocket. “Let’s do an open house in, say, six weeks?”
“Unlike your hot shots, I don’t have the funds to start a business.” I felt regretful for a moment, thinking of my small savings account, the CDs that couldn’t be touched for ages. I shook myself. It was odd Joe had come up with such generous career advice. Perhaps he was trying to distract me from the search for Setsuko’s relatives.
“With a business like that, you don’t need any capital. Just contacts, PR, a will to succeed!” Joe wouldn’t stop talking.
“I don’t think so.” It was a phenomenal idea for another person. “I’m sorry I took your time. It wasn’t honest of me. Here, please let me share the cost.” I gestured toward his gold American Express card lying atop the dinner check.
“Eight of my friends are watching us. Are you really going to shame me in front of them?” he asked.
I supposed it would look odd if we went Dutch in such a fancy place with such a well-known man. I gave him a half-smile and acquiesced, thinking it best not to end the evening with a scene.
“I do have a marketing question for you,” I said as the three of us zoomed down to the lobby in the New Otani elevator. “We have a situation where we’re trying to promote caffe latte drinks. The question is whether to say latte or ratte. Does it matter?”
“Ratte for all your signs and brochures here and latte overseas.” Joe’s answer came quickly.
“But don’t you think rat looks awful? Won’t people laugh?”
“Why are you working at Nichiyu, to look smart or help sell their products?” Joe challenged. “If you want to move products in this country, you’ve got to adapt.”
On New Year’s Eve, I’d used virtually the same words to criticize Hugh Glendinning. How self-righteous I’d been, priding myself on my encyclopedic knowledge of Japan. Talking to Joe Roncolotta made me realize how much of the book I had left to read.
16
When the telephone shrilled somewhere in the tunnel between night and morning, it took me away from a horrible dream that Mr. Nakamura had become my boss at Nichiyu and Hugh my student. The three of us stood in a classroom filled with giant Almond Pocky sticks that I knew would tumble if anyone moved.
I groped for the telephone in a haze. “Moshi-moshi?”
“My apologies, Shimura-san. It’s Okuhara.”
I snapped on an old, tin lantern I’d electrified into usefulness and squinted at my Seiko alarm clock. It said two-fifteen.
“I’m calling about Mayumi Yogetsu,” The police captain spoke crisply.
“The innkeeper?” If it’s about the torn shji paper, I’m willing to pay.”
“It’s not. Mrs. Yogetsu died in the ambulance this evening, following a fall at eleven o’clock at your neighborhood train station, Minami-Senju.”
I sucked in my breath as Okuhara continued. The engineer had been pulling into the station’s south-bound platform and observed a middle-aged woman waiting alone on the platform. Then, from out of the shadows, another person ran up and shoved her onto the track. The engineer, aiming to stop at a prefixed point at the far end of the track, couldn’t help running over Mrs. Yogetsu. By the time the train stopped and doors opened, the person who pus
hed her was gone.
“You can’t blame this on Hugh.”
“Certainly not. He’s spent this evening pacing his cell, complaining that we should return his laptop computer! Shimura-san, the reason I’m calling is in regard to your role in this incident.”
“My role? I don’t understand.”
“The handbag belonging to the deceased was crushed flat. However, we found a paper inside with your address and telephone number.”
“Oh, no.” I remembered my last call to the inn. Mr. Yogetsu had said his wife wanted to talk with me, and I’d hung up fast.
“When did you return home from work this evening? Is there someone who can verify your presence?”
“I went out again.” I stammered out something about dinner at Trader Vic’s, glad that Joe had paraded me and Mrs. Chapman before so many people. He’d insisted on sending us home in a taxi; the driver would remember us. Still, for Joe to be hassled by a police captain would be a pretty dismal follow-up to the event. “Please wait to call my companion until the morning, I’m sure he’s sleeping now—”
“Wait to call until you’ve prepared him, you mean? I need the name now, so I can put the English-speaking officer in Tokyo on it.”
After Captain Okuhara hung up on me, I sat for a few seconds, trying to absorb things. Ironically, I needn’t have hurried from Shiroyama; it seemed death had followed me. Now I could only rack my brain over what Mrs. Yogetsu had wanted to say to me.
Mr. Yogetsu might know. I dialed Minshuku Yogetsu, rehearsing what I’d ask. A policeman answered, so I hung up.
The telephone rang again and Richard groaned in protest from the other side of the wall. I picked up, expecting Okuhara again. What I heard was my name spoken through sniffles. It took a few tries before I could figure out that it was Mariko Ozawa. She apparently had decided to make use of the business card I’d given her.
“Rei-san? I need you,” she whimpered.
“What is it?” I asked with foreboding.
“It’s somebody—somebody’s trying to kill me.”
“What?” I repeated, drawing the covers around me. The temperature in the room seemed to have plummeted.
“Someone grabbed me outside the bar. He put a small sack or something over my head and started choking me. If it wasn’t for the bar’s bouncer coming out, I would have been dead.”
My mind whirled with possibilities, but I forced myself to calm down and ask where she was. She told me Narita, a city northeast of Tokyo known chiefly for its airport.
“Are you planning to fly somewhere?” I asked.
“Yes. That’s why I called, to see if you could lend me your passport and some money.”
“Mariko, we look nothing like each other, and people holding American passports usually speak English. And as for money, I doubt I even make half of what you do!”
“I know, but you seem like the kind of person who saves.”
“Pitifully little. Tell me where you’re staying tonight.” I had a terrible vision of her leaning up against a telephone outside a lonely, closed-up train station.
“Violet Venus.”
“Where?”
“It’s a love hotel. I’m here because it’s cheap and you don’t have to give your name.”
“Tell me exactly what happened.” I drew the receiver under the covers with me to preserve what warmth remained.
“At eight o’clock, I stepped out of the club to get a liter of cream for the white Russians.” It took me a second to realize she was talking about drinks, not people. “Someone was waiting behind the backdoor. I stepped out, and he grabbed me and wrapped something white around my head. I swung back to hit him in the balls, and he started choking me.” A long, shuddering sob. “Then our bouncer opened the back door. The guy threw me on the ground and was gone.”
“Did you get a good look at him?”
“He was behind me, I told you!”
“What about the bouncer?”
“He couldn’t see around the corner to where we were.”
Anticipating a bad answer, I asked, “What did the police say about it?”
“I didn’t call them. Kiki says the less we do with the police, the better. There was a problem some time back about the liquor license.”
“But someone’s after you. You can’t lose your life because your Mama-san has legal difficulties!”
“I’m not going back.” She was sobbing again. “Even though Kiki is probably going to send out some of her friends to find me.”
Given Kiki’s trade, her friends were likely to be gangsters. I could understand why Mariko didn’t want to be found.
“Leaving the bar tonight was very brave and intelligent of you,” I said, trying to convince myself. “I’ll pick you up as soon as the trains start running. And don’t worry, okay? We’re together from now on.”
Mariko reluctantly agreed to return to Tokyo and meet me the following morning outside Shibuya Station at the statue of Hachik, Tokyo’s most famous dog. Urban legend said that the male Akita breed had been the faithful companion to a professor, meeting his train every evening so they could walk home together. The owner died sometime during the twenties and the dog became a stray. Still, he returned to Shibuya every night for more than ten years in the hopes his master’s train would come in. The aged canine became a national symbol of loyalty; when he finally went to doggy heaven in 1935, a bronze replica went up. Hachik’s statue was so popular you had to designate his head or tail as a meeting point.
Pushing my way through hundreds of junior high school students assembling for a field trip, I wondered if, like Hachik, I’d be stood up. But after a minute there was a tug on my sleeve.
“Mariko?” I asked tentatively. The person standing before me wore blond dreadlocks and a black leather jacket, with bootleg jeans worn over platform-heeled boots. Faint bruises showed under a long chiffon scarf that had slipped sideways on her neck.
“Urusai wa yo.” You’re too loud, she whispered.
“Let’s go quickly, then.” I scanned the crowd and spotted Richard’s blond hair flip-flopping as he strode toward us. I’d told him to wait by the Williams-Sonoma window until I’d given him a signal, but as usual, he jumped the gun.
“Your dreads are to die for. Are you in a band or something?” Richard gushed in slangy Japanese.
Mariko shook her head and blushed. Richard’s blue-eyed blond magic seemed to be doing its usual trick.
“This is Richard,” I said. “He’s sort of like my brother. We share the apartment, I didn’t get the chance to tell you last night.”
“I’ll be your bodyguard, okay?” He moved his hands in a phony karate chop that made a cluster of junior high school girls giggle. “I’ve planned a return trip that’s rather indirect. We’ll switch back and forth between the Ginza and Hanzomon lines to throw off anyone who might be following us.”
“Don’t worry, you look nothing like yourself with that hair,” I told her. Frankly, it made me cringe.
“It’s a wig,” she said with pride. “I thought about bleaching, but there wasn’t time.”
“I know a girl who does it half-price. By the way, I love that jacket. I have a vest that would be amazing with it.”
“You like it? I bought it in Shinjuku at New Boys Look.”
“Tell me about it!” Richard crowed. To me, he mouthed, “Thank you, baby.”
As we traveled north on the subway, the two of them chatted about clothes, which I took as a sign she was beginning to feel safe. When we got out at Minami-Senju Station and started crossing the steel pedestrian bridge that led to the busy main road, Mariko wrinkled her nose at the ever-present stench of diesel fuel.
“This isn’t where I’d expect gaijin to live,” she said.
“It’s what we can afford,” I said, showing her into our building. She complained all the way up the three flights of stairs. When I opened the door to the apartment she brushed past me, treading straight over the linoleum I tried in vain to keep clean.
>
“Your boots!” I called out.
“I thought foreigners wore shoes inside their homes. What’s all this history stuff?” Mariko was gawking at my walls decorated with kimono and wood-block prints.
“It’s part of your heritage. Do you like it?” I hung her leather jacket on a lacquered Kimono rack.
“Aunt Setsuko liked antiques. I prefer the seventies, Pink Lady and all that stuff.”
It was clear to me that Mariko was a master at diversion; she probably was a great hostess. I cut off a stream of comments about the long-gone Pink Lady pop group and insisted she tell Richard and me about her assault.
“What more can I say? I told you everything. I don’t really want to think about it, I just want to be safe again.” She slumped slightly, and Richard was quickly at her side.
“Rei, you have no sensitivity.” He shot me an indignant glance.
“I don’t want what happened to Setsuko to recur,” I told them both. “Mariko, think about who’s been in the bar lately—”
“I talk to a lot of men, and sometimes they get angry when I don’t want to see them privately. There are so many, at least twelve on a slow night and up to twenty when it’s busy…I can’t keep track. It’s also hard to think when I’m hungry,” she said in a little-girl voice.
“Okay, we’ll have breakfast.” I went into the kitchenette and started chopping shtake mushrooms and one limp scallion. I would make a six-egg omelet and cut it three ways.
“Rei, you need to get a better knife. Look how unevenly it slices things,” Richard nagged, as if he ever did more in the kitchen than pop the top off a beer.
“My knife is fine.” I gave him a dirty look. “When the sharpening man comes around again, I’ll go to him. By the way, Mariko, there are a stack of newspapers by the futon, articles I’ve saved about your aunt’s death. You might want to read them.”
She glanced at the Japan Times and put it down. “I can’t read much English. I’m pretty stupid, I guess.”
“That’s not true! You’re smart enough to speak your mind and finally leave that hostess bar.” I would have gone on, but Richard shut me up by offering to translate the Japan Times article into Japanese. Mariko quickly agreed, moving over so Richard could lounge next to her on my futon. They made a cozy pair, Richard stumbling over the occasional phrase in his translation and Mariko snickering. He was making her feel good about herself. I liked that, although it could mean trouble later on.
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