I inhaled a bowl of tachigui ramen and a beer near the station, plus about a liter of water to replace what I’d lost in the sentō. It had been a long day, and on top of being tired, I felt half drugged from the excessive time I’d spent soaking in the boiling tub while waiting for Ozawa. But I really wanted to get started on my crash course in lock-picking. I wondered where I might find someone to teach me. It would have to be someone skilled, obviously, while also not unduly concerned about bonding requirements and the other such niceties governing the lock-smithing trade. Which implied…someone who Japanese society didn’t fully accept, and who held himself apart from that society in turn. As I did. My mind immediately flashed on Shin Ōkubo, Tokyo’s Koreatown. Yes, that felt right.
I didn’t feel like riding all the way across Tokyo yet again that day. But what difference would it make? Shin Ōkubo had plenty of love hotels; nearby Shinjuku, even more. I could try to find the right person and then just spend the night in the area. It wasn’t as though I had a fixed address to return to.
I shook my head ruefully. The problem wasn’t riding all the way back to the western side of the city. The problem was, where I really wanted to spend the night was here, in the east. Specifically, in Uguisudani. I wanted to go back to the Hotel Apex and see the girl who worked there again. Which was idiotic, given the amount I already had on my plate, but still.
Well, I supposed I could just head over, look for the kind of guy I needed, then head back. It wasn’t really so far, and rush hour was already long since done, so it wasn’t as though I was going to hit traffic, neither on the way out nor especially coming back. Sure, I was on the run and mixed up in murder, but what did any of that have to do with maybe getting to know a girl a little better?
I was still young, of course. I didn’t yet understand just how dangerous a rationalization could be.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I bombed west on Thanatos, cruising along one of the elevated highways, the lights blurring past me, the cooling evening air glorious after the pummeling heat of the sentō. It took me less than a half hour to reach JR Shin Ōkubo Station, where I parked and started strolling east, along Ōkubo-dōri, the main thoroughfare. Once away from the blinding lights and giddy electronic music of the pachinko parlors surrounding the station, it didn’t just feel like I was in a different section of Tokyo — it felt like I was in a different city entirely. The buildings lining the street were ramshackle, with an insane variety of tiny storefront restaurants serving bolgogi and ogokbap and every kind of kimchi, all of it advertised by laminated photographs with Korean and Japanese captions and by hawkers calling out in a mix of both languages to passersby from the sidewalk. The street itself felt narrow relative to the density of stores and restaurants, offering only one lane in each direction, and the crowded sidewalks would have been dim if there hadn’t been so much indirect light spilling out of the densely clustered shops. There were karaoke joints and massage parlors; counterfeit handbag and perfume purveyors; all-night discount stores selling everything imaginable and all for under a hundred yen. I passed through air pockets perfumed by grilled meat, spiced vegetables, sweet pastries; tobacco and beer and sweat. But the kind of person I was looking for wouldn’t have a shop on the main street. The rents would be too high there, and his trade wouldn’t require the shōtengai foot traffic. His customers would know where he was located, and they would come to him.
A kilometer or so from the station, the crowds began to thin. As packed restaurants gave way to shuttered shops, the sidewalks grew dimmer; the streets, quieter; the atmosphere, for my purposes, more promising.
I turned onto a narrow street lit only by a stand of vending machines. The buildings on either side were mostly of wood, dried and darkened by decades of heat and humidity, their corrugated awnings jagged and torn, exposed bolts bleeding rust. A mad profusion of wires and pipes clung to the facades like the tentacles of some exotic alien parasite, garbage piled in plastic bags beneath the tangled tapestry. All the stores seemed closed. But there were a few dim lights glowing amid the overall gloom ahead, and I moved toward them.
The first place I reached was a tiny bar, filled with eight laughing customers. The second was a Korean noodle place, similarly small, similarly filled. The third was a shop advertising itself in Japanese — and presumably also in Korean, which I couldn’t read — as Spaaki, which in English would be Sparky. I thought perhaps this was a play on the English phrase spare key, and indeed the large image of a key on the bottom of the sign suggested I might have found the place I was looking for.
There was an old, emaciated man sitting at a table inside, a desk light on a swivel arm shining down before him and casting his face in shadow. His tee shirt sagged, and the white headband knotted around his temples and thick glasses perched on his nose made his head look too large for his body. A smoldering cigarette stub dangled from his lips like a growth. Several cooking knives were assembled in a row in front of him, and he was honing one of them with long, precise strokes across a grinding stone. There were clusters of electronics piled up all around — toasters, fans, a vacuum cleaner. This looked like my guy — a benriya, more recently known as a nandemoya, literally a “Mr. Anything,” a local jack-of-all-trades who residents could come to with any household thing they needed help with.
I knocked on the glass. The man looked up from the knife he was sharpening and squinted. “Closed,” he said, in Korean-accented Japanese, around his cigarette. “Come back tomorrow.”
The man was obviously zainichi, as I had hoped. Ethnic Korean, marooned in Japan after the Korean War, welcome in neither country, and belonging to neither. Beholden to neither.
“I can’t wait until tomorrow,” I said, pulling a ten-thousand-yen note from my wallet and pressing it up against the glass. “Are you sure you can’t help me now?”
He looked at me over the tops of his spectacles for a moment, then set down the knife he was working on and stubbed out the cigarette. He didn’t look dangerous, but still I was glad he had laid down the weapon. It implied a certain baseline trust without which there wasn’t much hope he’d be willing to help me.
He walked over and stopped on the other side of the door. “What’s the emergency?”
“I need to learn how locks work.”
He squinted. “You’re locked out?”
“No. I just want to learn.”
The squint deepened. “You want to be an apprentice? I don’t need one.”
“Not an apprentice. I want you to teach me.”
“You sure you’re not just locked out? It would be faster for me to let you in than to teach you to do it yourself.”
“I told you, I’m not locked out. I don’t know anything about locks. I want to learn. I’ll pay you.”
He looked at the ten-thousand-yen note, an encouraging hint of greed in his eyes. “Sure, I could teach you. But I’m not cheap, you know.”
I realized I should have held up a smaller bill. But too late now.
“All right, teach me.”
“Come back tomorrow.”
“No. Now.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Do I seem crazy?”
He grunted. “Crazy people don’t always seem crazy.”
I realized I had no answer for that. Instead of even trying, I knelt and slid the bill under the door. I stood. “I want to start learning now.”