Country of Origin

by Don Lee

  It was a pedestrian recital, but his friends clapped heartily, and the man returned to the booth wiping a handkerchief across his brow, immensely relieved. This was another ritualistic initiation: everyone felt closer after a weaker member had endured such a petrifying trial, risking exposure and embarrassment but pulling through with the others’ support.

  “You sing?” Moe said to Lisa.

  “No, no,” she said. He was the first customer to ask.

  “Please sing,” Curly said.

  “Oh, I would really rather not, if that’s okay.” When she was a child, her parents had sometimes tried to get her onstage with them, but she had hated singing in public, convinced everyone in the audience was trying to dissect her features.

  “Why you don’t sing?” Curly asked.

  “Sing,” Moe said, more as an order than a request.

  Larry looked at her without expression.

  She exhaled. “All right.” She stood and smoothed out her dress and walked nervously to the microphone. Out of the blue, she decided on “My Funny Valentine,” and straightaway, she flubbed it. She was half a beat late entering the song, and had to ask the piano player to start over.

  “Gomen nasai,” she apologized into the microphone. “Hazukashii.”

  She took several deep breaths. She told herself to relax, listen to the music. She closed her eyes and began to sing, letting the lyrics come to her.

  The four minutes she was up there would remain a blank to Lisa, the moment both interminable and evaporative. She would remember nothing of that first performance, although people would keep talking about it the rest of the time she was at Rendezvous, about the purity of her voice, about her perfect pitch and three-octave range, her slow, melancholy, mysterious phrasing, her haunting timbre, her dramatic use of crescendo and sustain, about the influences and nuances of blues and jazz they heard—Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin, Billie Holiday, Odetta Felious, even Joan Baez. Most of all, they talked about the overpowering emotion that flowed out of her, the rawness and passion. It stopped them in their tracks. It broke their hearts. It left them so stupefied, they did not clap when Lisa finished the song, and, slinking back to her booth, she was horrified, believing she must have been terrible.

  Finally, Moe began clapping, and the applause grew and grew, booming, and Midori, in the back of the room, looked on with a mixture of surprise and mercantile interest, and Emi, from the next booth, glared at Lisa with unadulterated hatred, and Harper Boyd smiled and said, “I knew I’d regret bringing you here.”

  ELEVEN

  IT WAS standing-room-only in P-Moto 180, the gallery in Ginza, for the opening reception of Julia’s photography show. The bulk of the crowd was made up of Japanese artists, collectors, and students and colleagues from the ISA, with a small cluster of people from the embassy: Jay Steiner, the cultural attaché, the Kelihers and the Congrieves, and Julia’s husband, Vincent Kitamura, who was roaming through the gallery on his own.

  Tom squeezed through the crowd to Julia, who was surrounded by Yoshi, the owner of Flashbacks, and some artist friends from his bar. She didn’t appear pleased to see Tom. “This is a surprise,” she said. She hadn’t sent him an invitation.

  She had been assiduously avoiding Tom, often not returning the messages he left for her at the ISA, cool and curt when he did happen to catch her. Her aloofness had only made Tom more desperate to see her, and, remembering her show, he had found the time and location in a listing of gallery openings.

  She leaned closer to him and whispered, “I can’t talk to you here. Do you understand?”

  Yoshi said something in Japanese to the group that Tom didn’t comprehend, and they all laughed.

  “I hope you like the show,” Julia said, and turned to greet an elderly patron.

  Stung, Tom wandered away from them to look at photographs.

  In her artist’s statement, Julia referred to the series as guerrilla photography. They were life-size black-and-white enlargements of people, all from the same vantage point. It looked like it was on a street in Shibuya, near Parco or Marui. In the background, there was an intersection painted with zebra stripes, and pedestrians were crossing quickly from all sides with the stoplight—they called it a scramble in Japan. But the subjects in the photographs had lingered. There were twelve of them: a college student, a housewife, a carpenter, an old man, a schoolgirl, an OL, a cook, a salaryman, an elevator girl, a uniformed cop, a train conductor, a bosozoku—or motorcycle gang—member. Somehow they had been caught unaware—they hadn’t been ready for this, they hadn’t expected this—and they were staring at the camera in strangled expressions, frozen in fright or shock or nervous laughter. Their faces were contorted, their limbs bent at odd, dislocated angles, their fingers arthritic. They were eerie pictures, too candid and raw for comfort, almost pornographic in effect. They were really quite beautiful. They changed the way Tom viewed Julia, her talent and art tangible to him now.

  “Do you want to know how she did them?” Vincent Kitamura, dressed in a stylish silk suit, was standing behind Tom. “She built a trap,” he said.

  He described the setup. She convinced a department store to let her use a display window for bathroom fixtures. She positioned a mirror at eye level, tempting passersby to check their makeup or hair as they waited for the crosswalk signal. (Tom now noticed that several of the subjects had a comb or a brush in hand.) But when they took a step toward the mirror, which was in a recessed alcove of the storefront, unbeknownst to them they triggered a light sensor. A beeping sound then began to emit with alarming volume, the mirror panels slowly swung apart to reveal a Hasselblad camera, the bathroom lights swiveled toward the surprised prey, and the shutter snapped automatically.

  “That’s very clever,” Tom said to Kitamura. “I’d think you’d need an engineering degree.”

  “A friend of mine on TDY built it for her.”

  Tom had an idea what kind of friend that might have been—an electronics specialist from Langley on Temporary Duty to Tokyo to plant bugs or wiretaps. The CIA had some cutesy name for them. Locksmiths? Plumbers?

  They introduced themselves to each other. Kitamura asked Tom where he knew his wife from, and Tom said the reception for the sculptor from New York, at the Grew House. “I believe you were there, too,” Tom said.

  “Was I? I don’t really remember. You’re an aficionado, then. Of art.”

  “I guess I am,” Tom said.

  “If you want to know the truth,” Kitamura said, “I don’t really care for it. The scene, I mean to say. I find these people incredibly pretentious. I’m proud of her, of course. You know, don’t you, how difficult it is for a gaijin to get an exhibition like this? Most places are kashi-garou, rental galleries. It’s almost unheard of for a gaijin to land a kikaku-garou run by curators.”

  “She’s really very talented.”

  “Yes,” Kitamura said. “It’s funny. She didn’t have any particular interest in art or photography when I met her, but she discovered she had a unique gift. She could capture people when they were least expecting it, when they were the most exposed—their vanity, their loneliness, their willingness to compromise themselves, whatever haunted them. She could get people to reveal themselves. She learned to manipulate people into giving her exactly what she wants.”

  They stared at the photograph in front of them. The bosozoku with spiked hair and full leathers was clutching his motorcycle helmet to his chest.

  “Tell me,” Kitamura said, moving closer to Tom, “what is it she’s trying to get from you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What do you suppose she wants?”

  Tom stepped away from him. “Nothing,” he said.

  Kitamura turned to the photograph. “Are you sure?”

  THE NEXT sunday, Tom followed them, needing to see how Julia and her husband interacted when they were alone, in their own element. She had said once that on most Sundays they went to Harajuku for brunch, and at ten in the morning, Tom stationed hims
elf across from Minami Aoyama Daiichi Mansion, the couple’s massive orange-tiled apartment building, and waited for them. It was a cloudy day, but not too cold, pleasant enough to walk, and just past eleven, Julia and Kitamura came out of the building and headed down Omotesando-dori on foot.

  They went to Aux Bacchanales on Meiji-dori, a bustling French bakery with a sidewalk café. While they waited for a table, Tom slipped up the stairs to a crepe restaurant across the street. From the second floor, he watched them standing in line, then sitting at a table, then silently drinking coffee, reading the Sunday Herald-Tribune and the Stars and Stripes, sharing an omelet and a croissant and a brioche.

  After they finished eating, they walked through Takeshita-dori, a crowded alley of clothes shops. Kitamura stopped in front of a shirt store, and Julia came up behind him and rested her chin on top of Kitamura’s shoulder, and they stood staring at the shirts. They continued down the alley, then up to Yoyogi-koen. As they entered the park, Julia reached out her hand to her husband, and Kitamura held it, but only briefly, letting go a few paces later to dump the folded newspapers in his shoulder bag into a trash can.

  They found a bench near a pond, and they read for an hour, both absorbed in their books. At one point, Kitamura lifted his head and gazed at the pond, and Julia turned to him. Looking at her husband, she combed her fingers into his hair, the hair above his nape. She kept looking at him, but he never turned to her. He went back to his book, and she went back to hers.

  Tom couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about them. He had expected the opposite of what he had witnessed. He had expected Kitamura to dote on her, and Julia to be the one who was remote. But the casual familiarity with which she had hooked her chin on his shoulder, the way she had looked at him as she touched his hair—what Tom wouldn’t have given to have Julia look at him like that.

  He lay awake in bed, listening to the stillness of his empty, unadorned apartment. In the four months he had been in Tokyo, he had not put up a single decoration, not acquired a single souvenir. Nothing in the apartment could be called a personal effect. He could pack everything he owned into two suitcases in less than ten minutes. This was how he had always lived, how he had grown up. His father had bullied him into adopting the nomadic life of a soldier, an infantryman, had warned him not to get too attached to anything or anyone. The only thing Tom could count on was for Staff Sergeant Matthew Coghlan Hurley, an NCO but rank and file through and through, to adamantly refuse any assignment of permanence. His father would not, he always vowed, become an REMF—rear-echelon motherfucker.

  Yet as much as Tom liked to think of his peripatetic nature as a mark of toughness, he realized it was also a means of self-protection. If he avoided staying in one place too long, if he avoided relying on someone to be there with him, to accept him for what he was and wasn’t, to look upon him with complete devotion, he would never get hurt.

  ANOTHER AMERICAN arrested on a drug charge or a visa violation—that was what Tom thought when he got the call from Kenzo Ota, but when he went down to Azabu Police Station, Ota said he was holding Harper Boyd because she might know something about Lisa Countryman’s disappearance.

  “She was working as a hostess?” Tom asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And you think Lisa was, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “So Lisa was a prostitute.”

  Ota laughed. “No,” he said, and he seemed to take great pleasure in Tom’s naïveté in this matter. He clarified how hostess clubs operated, and he told Tom that Lisa had been a Ph.D. student in cultural anthropology at Berkeley and had been doing fieldwork on the Japanese sex industry.

  “She was undercover, so to speak,” Tom said.

  Confused by the pun, Ota tilted his head at him.

  “Never mind,” Tom told him.

  Harper Boyd wasn’t cooperating. She must have known Lisa at Rocket America; she had a legal visa to teach at the school. Ota assumed they had hostessed together, but Harper had only been employed at the Bogart Den, the Roppongi club where Ota had spotted her, for a month, and she wouldn’t tell him where she had been working before then. She would admit to nothing. In particular, how she had acquired the ten million yen in cash—over fifty thousand dollars—he had found in her apartment. After Ota had brought her to the police station, she had invoked her right to remain silent and had asked for an attorney and a representative from the US Embassy.

  As a Consular Officer, Tom’s first responsibility was to Harper Boyd—to check on her health and treatment and apprise her of Japan’s legal system, with which she was clearly unfamiliar, for as soon as he entered the interrogation room, she was fulminating about the violation of her rights and squawking about Geneva Conventions. “I haven’t seen an attorney yet. I’ve been here since last night,” she said.

  It was almost noon, and she was still wearing her hostess outfit—heavy makeup, a short, slinky cocktail dress. She was tall and blond, with a nice figure, great legs. Exactly Tom’s type, actually.

  “I hate to be the one to tell you this,” he said, “but there are no such things as Miranda rights in Japan.”

  He explained that the police could keep her there for questioning for twenty-three days before indicting her or taking her to court. Even longer. They could continue holding her on a variety of pretexts, claiming, for instance, she might destroy evidence, or arresting her on another charge. Bekken taiho, they called it—a re-arrest. They didn’t need search warrants. There was no bail. She wouldn’t be allowed to make phone calls or write letters or accept visitors. She could hire an attorney, but might only see him twice, for fifteen minutes a visit, before the trial. If she couldn’t afford an attorney, she could ask for a onetime free consultation from the toban bengoshi, the duty attorney, but otherwise, she would not see a lawyer until the day of the trial.

  “Where are we? The Soviet Union?” she asked. “I’m an American.”

  She could be interrogated up to twelve hours a day and, during that time, prohibited from standing or sitting or lying down or leaning against the wall. She might be able to bathe only every five days. If she broke down and confessed, as almost all suspects did, the confession did not have to be recorded or videotaped. It would be written by the police and the prosecutor, and she wouldn’t get to read it before signing it. The confession might be altered after she signed it, anyway. There were no plea bargains, and there was no jury system. She would be tried by three judges, in front of whom there would be a ninety-nine percent chance of conviction. Trials were based not on physical evidence or the testimony of witnesses, but on reports from the police and the prosecutors and on the supposed confession, the absence of which would ensure a much harsher sentence.

  “In other words,” Harper Boyd said, “I am fucked.”

  “I’m afraid you are,” Tom said.

  “Okay, fine. When do I get deported?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Why not? I don’t have the proper visa for—what is it?—entertainment work,” she said. “They deport me, everyone’s happy.”

  “There’s the ten million yen.”

  “What about it?”

  “They want to know how you got it.”

  “Coupons,” she said, smirking. “I’m a hell of a penny pincher.”

  “Their presumption is that you got the money illegally.”

  “Let them prove it.”

  “That’s just it,” Tom said. “They don’t have to prove it. They can hold you on the mere suspicion of illegal activity. You have to prove to them that you got the money legitimately.”

  “This is total bullshit.”

  “If all else fails, they’re going to charge you with tax evasion.”

  “I earned that money,” Harper said.

  “It doesn’t—”

  “It’s my fucking money.”

  If convicted, he told her, she would likely be sent to Tochigi Prison, where the conditions were spartan. She wouldn’t be able to talk to the other inma
tes, or even make eye contact with them. There would be no TV, no books, no smoking, no telephone calls, rarely any visitors.

  “All right, all right,” Harper said. “I get the gruesome picture. What do they want from me?”

  “They want to know if you knew Lisa Countryman.”

  “Why? What’s she done?”

  “So you did know her.”

  “Just tell me what this is about, all right?”

  “She’s disappeared,” Tom said.

  She didn’t seem at all nonplussed by the news. “Yeah, to Hong Kong.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “She didn’t go to Hong Kong?”

  He filled her in on a few of the details: the phone call to the landlord, the stolen passport. Lisa had either gone into hiding or had been kidnapped or murdered. Ota had given Tom a list of questions to ask Harper: Was there any reason for Lisa to go underground? Was she in some sort of danger? Was she into drugs, gambling? Did she have debts? Who were her friends, her lovers? Where was she working? Where did she socialize? Did she have shimei customers who requested her specifically? Were there any who seemed fixated on her? Where and when did Harper see her last? Did Lisa go on a dohan with a customer on June 17? Who had told Harper that Lisa had left for Hong Kong?

  “And what do I get if I answer these questions?” she asked.

  “I told you, there’s no plea bargaining here. You can’t make a deal. I don’t understand why you’re being so evasive. Why can’t you just say where you and Lisa were working?”