A Clean Kill in Tokyo (previously published as Rain Fall)

by Barry Eisler

  I stopped in a Tsutaya music shop and made my way past the teenyboppers in their grunge getups listening to the latest in Japanese pop on the store’s headphones, bobbing their heads to the beats. Strolling to the back of the store, I paused now and then to look through CDs on shelves facing the door, glancing up to see who might be coming in behind me.

  I browsed for a bit in the classical section, then moved on to jazz. On impulse I checked to see whether Midori had a CD. She did: Another Time. The cover showed her standing under a streetlamp in what looked like one of the seedier parts of Shinjuku, her arms folded, her profile in shadows. I didn’t recognize the label—something small-time. She wasn’t there yet, but I believed Mama was right, she would be.

  I started to return it to the shelf, then thought, Christ, it’s just music, if you like it, buy it. Still, a clerk might remember. So I also picked up a collection of another artist’s jazz instrumentals and some Bach concertos on the way to the registers. Chose a long line, harassed-looking clerk. Paid cash. All the guy would remember was that someone bought a few CDs, maybe classical, maybe jazz. Not that anyone was going to ask him.

  I finished the SDR and took the CDs back to my apartment in Sengoku. Sengoku is in the northeast of the city, near the remnants of old Tokyo, what the natives call Shitamachi, the downtown. The area is antique, much of it having survived both the Great Kanto Quake of 1923 and the firebombing that came during the war. The neighborhood has no nightlife beyond the local nomiya, or watering holes, and no commercial district, so there aren’t many transients. Most of its people are Edoko, the real Tokyoites, who live and work in its mom-and-pop shops and its tiny restaurants and bars. Sengoku means “the thousand stones.” I don’t know the origin of the name, but I’ve always liked it.

  It’s not home, but it’s as close as anything I’ve ever had. After my father died, my mother took me back to the States. In the face of her loss and the accompanying upheavals in her life, I think my mother wanted to be close to her parents, who seemed equally eager for a reconciliation. We settled in a town called Dryden in upstate New York, where she took a job as a Japanese instructor at nearby Cornell University and I enrolled in public school.

  Dryden was a predominantly white, working-class town, and my Asian features and nonnative English made me a favorite with the local bullies. I received my first practical lessons in guerilla warfare from the Dryden indigenous population: they hunted me in packs, and I struck back at them on my own terms when they were alone and vulnerable. I understood the guerilla mentality years before I landed at Da Nang.

  My mother was distraught over my constant bruises and scraped knuckles, but was too distracted with her new position at the university and with trying to mend fences with her parents to intervene. I spent most of those years homesick for Japan.

  So I grew up sticking out, only later learning the art of anonymity. In this sense, Sengoku is an anomaly for me. I chose the area before anonymity was an issue, and I stayed by rationalizing that the damage was already done. It’s the kind of place where everyone knows your name, thinks they know your business. At first it made me uncomfortable, everyone recognizing me, pinpointing me. I thought about moving to the west of the city. The west feels exactly like Tokyo and nothing like Japan. It’s brash and fast and new, swirling with caffeinated crowds, alienating and anonymous. I could go there, blend in, disappear.

  But the old downtown has a magic to it, and it’s hard for me to imagine leaving. I like the walk from the subway to my apartment in the evening, up the little merchant’s street painted green and red so that it always feels festive, even in the early darkness of winter. There’s the middle-aged couple that owns the corner five-and-dime, who greet me “Okaeri nasai!”—Welcome home!—when they see me at night, rather than the usual kon ban wa, or good evening. There’s the plump, laughing old woman who runs the video store with the big yellow sign out front and the windows plastered with posters of recent Hollywood releases, whose door is always left open when the weather is cool. She stocks everything from Disney to the most outrageous pornography, and from noon to ten at night, she sits like a jolly Buddha in her little store, watching her own wares on a TV next to the cash register. And there’s the Octopus Woman, who sells takoyaki—fried octopus—from a streetside window in her ancient house, whose face, weary with the accumulated years and boredom of her labors, has come to resemble the very creatures she serves. Every night she shuffles around her stove, pouring her potions in unconscious, repetitive motions, and sometimes giggling children run past her lair, whispering, “Tako onna! Ki o tsukete!” The Octopus Woman! Be careful! And there’s the house of Yamada, the piano teacher, from which, on summer evenings, when darkness comes late, soft notes drift lazily down the street, mingling with the shuffling slippers of bathers returning from the sento, the local public bath.

  I listened to Midori’s music a lot that weekend. I’d get home from my office, boil water for a dinner of ramen noodles, then sit with the lights low and the music playing, unwinding, following the notes. Listening to the music, looking out the balcony window onto the quiet, narrow streets of Sengoku, I sensed the presence of the past but felt I was safe from it.

  The neighborhood’s rhythms and rituals, too subtle to appreciate at first, have steeped quietly over the years. They’ve grown on me, infected me, become part of me. Somehow a small step out of the shadows doesn’t seem such a high price to pay for such indulgences. Besides, sticking out is a disadvantage in some ways, an asset in others. Sengoku doesn’t have anonymous places where a stranger can sit and wait for a target to arrive. And until Mom and Pop pull in their wares at night and roll down the corrugated doors, they’re always out there, watching over the street. If you don’t belong in Sengoku, people will notice, wonder what you’re doing there. If you do belong—well, you get noticed in a different way.

  I guess I can live with that.

  CHAPTER 6

  The following week I arranged a lunch meeting with Harry at the Issan sobaya. I couldn’t shake off this little mystery, and I knew I would need his help to solve it.

  Issan is in an old wooden house in Meguro, about fifty meters off Meguro-dori and a five-minute walk from Meguro Station. Utterly unpretentious, it serves some of the best soba noodles in Tokyo. I like Issan not just for the quality of its soba, but also for its air of whimsy: there’s a little lost-and-found cabinet by the front entrance, the contents of which haven’t changed in the decade since I discovered the place. I sometimes wonder what the proprietors would say if a customer were to come in and exclaim, “At last! My tortoise shell shoe horn—I’ve been looking for it for years!”

  One of the restaurant’s petite waitresses escorted me to a low table in a small tatami room, then knelt to take my order. I selected the day’s umeboshi, pickled plums, to crunch on while I waited for Harry.

  He rolled in about ten minutes later, led by the same waitress who had seated me. “I guess it was too much to hope you would pick Las Chicas again,” he said, looking around at the ancient walls and faded signs.

  “I’ve decided it’s time for you to experience more of traditional Japan,” I told him. “I think you’re spending too much time in the electronics stores in Akihabara. Why don’t you try something classic? I recommend the yuzukiri.” Yuzukiri are soba noodles flavored with the juice of a delicate Japanese citrus fruit called the yuzu, and an Issan house specialty.

  The waitress came back and took our order: two yuzukiri. Harry told me he hadn’t managed to unearth anything particularly revealing about Kawamura, just general biographical details.

  “He was a Liberal Democratic Party lifer,” Harry explained. “Graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1960, political science major, went straight to the government along with the rest of the cream of the crop.”

  “The States could learn something from this. There, the government gets the college rejects. Like sowing the smallest seeds of corn.”

  “I’ve worked with some of them,” Harr
y said. “Anyway, Kawamura started out crafting administrative guidance for the Japanese consumer electronics industry at the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. MITI was working with companies like Panasonic and Sony to enhance Japan’s position in the world economy, and Kawamura had a lot of power for a guy in his twenties. Steady promotions up the bureaucratic ladder, successful but not spectacular. High marks for architecting strategic domestic semiconductor guidance in the eighties.”

  “That’s all discredited now,” I said absently.

  Harry shrugged. “He took the credit when he could. After MITI he was transferred to the Kensetsusho, the old Construction Ministry, and stayed with it as Vice Minister of Land and Infrastructure when Construction was merged into the Kokudokotsusho.”

  He paused and ran his fingers through his unruly hair, doing nothing to improve its appearance. “Look, mostly what I can tell you is basic bio stuff. I need to have a better idea of what I’m looking for, or I might not even recognize it if I see it.”

  I didn’t respond right away. I recognized this would be dangerous, but I knew, if I wanted to solve this mystery, I would take the risk.

  I told him what I had seen at Alfie and afterward, of following the stranger to the apartment in Daikanyama.

  He shook his head. “What are the chances you would run into Kawamura’s daughter like that? Unbelievable.”

  I looked at him closely, not sure that he believed me. “It’s a small world.”

  His face was unreadable. “Or it could be karma.”

  Christ, how much does this kid know? “I didn’t know you believed in karma, Harry.”

  He shrugged. “You think there’s a connection with the break-in at Kawamura’s apartment?”

  “Could be. The guy on the train was looking for something on Kawamura. Couldn’t find it. So he breaks into Kawamura’s apartment. Still can’t find it. Now he thinks the daughter has it, I guess because she would have her father’s things.”

  The waitress brought us the two yuzukiri. Without a sound she knelt on the tatami, placed each dish on the table, slightly repositioned them in accordance with some strict mental framework, stood, bowed, and departed.

  When we were done eating, Harry leaned back against the wall and belched long and low. “It was good,” he admitted.

  “I know.”

  “I want to ask you a question,” he said. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

  “Okay.”

  “What’s your angle on this? Why are you looking so hard? It’s not like you.”

  I thought about telling him I was doing it for a client, but I knew he wouldn’t buy that.

  “Some of what’s been happening doesn’t jibe with what the client told me,” I said. “That makes me uncomfortable.”

  “This uncomfortable?”

  I could see he was in a relentless mood today. “It reminds me of something that happened to me a long time ago,” I said, telling him the truth. “Something I want to make sure never happens again. Let’s leave it at that for now.”

  He held up his hands, palms forward in a gesture of supplication, then leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “Okay, the guy you followed, we can assume he lives in the apartment building. A good number of foreigners live in Daikanyama, but I can’t imagine there are more than a dozen or so in that one building. So we’re already in decent shape.”

  “Good.”

  “The mama-san said he told her he was a reporter?”

  “She did, but that doesn’t mean much. I think he showed her a card, but it could have been fake.”

  “Maybe, but it’s a start. I’ll try to cross check the foreigners I find at that apartment address against the declarations kept at the Nyukan, see if any of the people I identify are with the media.” The Nyukan, or Nyukokukanrikyoku, is Japan’s immigration bureau, part of the Ministry of Justice.

  “Do that. And while you’re at it, see if you can get me the girl’s home address. I tried one-one-zero, but it’s unlisted.”

  He scratched his cheek and looked down, as though trying to hide a smile.

  “What,” I said.

  He looked up. “You like her.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Harry…”

  “You thought she was going to open up for you, and instead she blew you off. Now it’s a challenge. You want another chance.”

  “Harry, you’re dreaming.”

  “Is she pretty? Just tell me that.”

  “I’m not going to give you the satisfaction.”

  “So she’s pretty. You like her.”

  “You’ve been reading too many manga,” I said, referring to the thick, often lascivious pulp comic books that are so popular in Japan.

  “Okay, sure,” he said, and I thought, Christ, he really does read that shit. I’ve hurt his feelings.

  “Come on, Harry, I need your help to get to the bottom of this. That guy on the train was expecting Kawamura to be carrying something, which is why he patted him down. He didn’t find it, though—otherwise, he wouldn’t have been asking Midori questions. Now you tell me: Who currently has possession of all Kawamura’s belongings, including the clothes he was wearing and personal effects he was carrying when he died?”

  “Midori, most likely,” he allowed with a small shrug.

  “Right. She’s still the best lead we’ve got. Get me the information, and we’ll go from there.”

  We talked about other matters for the duration of our lunch. I didn’t tell him about the CD. He’d already leaped to enough conclusions.

  CHAPTER 7

  The next day I got a page from Harry, who used a preset numeric code to tell me he had uploaded something to a secure site we use. I figured it was Midori’s address, and Harry didn’t disappoint.

  She lived in a small apartment complex called Harajuku Badento Haitsu—Harajuku Verdant Heights—in the shadow of the graceful arches of Tange Kenzo’s 1964 Tokyo Olympic Stadium. Cool Harajuku is the borderland that traverses the long silences and solemn cryptomeria trees of Yoyogi Park and its Meiji Shrine; the frenetic, shopping-addled teen madness of Takeshita-dori; and the elegant boutiques and bistros of Omotesando.

  Harry had confirmed that Midori didn’t have an automobile registered with the Tokyo Motor Vehicles Authority, which meant she would rely on trains: either the JR, which she would pick up at Harajuku Station, or one of the subway lines, which she would access at Meijijingu-mae or Omotesando.

  The problem was that the JR and subway stations were in opposite directions, and she was as likely to use one as the other. With no single chokepoint leading to both sets of stations, I had no basis for choosing either one. I would just have to find the best possible venue for waiting and watching and base my decision on that.

  Omotesando-dori, where the subway stations were located, fit the bill. Known as the Champs Elysées of Tokyo, albeit mostly among people who have never been to Paris, Omotesando-dori is a long shopping boulevard lined with elm trees whose narrow leaves provide first a crown and then a carpet of yellow for a few days every autumn. Its many bistros and coffee shops were designed with Paris-style people watching in mind, and I would be able to spend an hour or two watching the street from various establishments without attracting attention.

  Even so, absent a lot of luck, I would have been in for a very boring few days of waiting and watching. But Harry had an innovation that saved me: a way of remotely turning a phone into a microphone.

  The trick only works with digital phones with a speakerphone feature, where a line can be established even though the handset is in the cradle. The reception is muffled, but you can hear. Anticipating my next move, Harry had tested Midori’s line and had let me know we were good to go.

  At ten o’clock the following Saturday morning, I arrived at the Aoyama Blue Mountain coffee shop on Omotesando-dori, equipped with a small unit that would activate Midori’s phone and a mobile phone for listening in on whatever I connected to. I took a seat at one of the small ta
bles facing the street, where I ordered an espresso from a bored-looking waitress. Watching the meager morning crowds drift past, I flipped the switch on the unit and heard a slight hiss in the earpiece that told me the connection had been established. Other than that, there was silence. Nothing to do but wait.

  A construction crew had set up a few meters down from Blue Mountain’s entrance, where they were repairing potholes. Four workers busied themselves mixing the gravel and measuring out the right amounts—about two more men than were needed, but the yakuza, the Japanese mob, works closely with the construction industry and insists that workers be provided with work. The government, pleased at this additional avenue of job creation, is complicit. Unemployment is kept at socially tolerable levels. The machine rolls on.

  As a Vice Minister at the Kokudokotsusho, Midori’s father would have been in charge of construction and most of the major public-works projects throughout Japan. He would have been hip deep in a lot of this. Not such a surprise that someone wanted him to come to an untimely end.

  Two middle-aged men in black suits and ties, modern Japanese funeral attire, left the coffee shop, and the aroma of hot gravel wafted over to my table. The smell reminded me of my childhood in Japan, of the spring mornings when my mother would walk me to school for the first day of the new term. It seemed the roads were always being repaved at that time of year, and to me this kind of construction still smells like a portent of a fresh round of bullying and ostracism.

  Sometimes I feel as though my life has been divided into segments. I would call them chapters, but the pieces are divided so abruptly that the whole lacks the kind of continuity chapters would impart. The first segment ends when my father was killed, an event that shattered a world of predictability and security, replacing it with vulnerability and fear. There is another break where I receive the brief military telegram telling me my mother has died, offering stateside leave for the funeral. With my mother’s death, I lost an emotional center of gravity, a faraway psychic governor on my behavior, and was left suffused with a new and awful sense of freedom. Cambodia was a further rupture, a deeper step into darkness.