I looked up into the stands. Pig Eyes’s buddy was there, gripping the railing, his face frozen in shock. I smiled at him, the smile no more than a grimace from the exertion I was putting into the strangle. He was watching his friend die in my hands and I was glad. I wanted him to see what I would be coming to do to him.
Then his paralysis broke, and he turned and ran. I saw no resolution in his expression or his posture, only panic, and I understood he wasn’t coming to the aid of his friend, only trying to save himself. I had to choose — finish Pig Eyes, or pursue the one I sensed was the principal?
And suddenly I realized it was no choice at all. I couldn’t kill this guy, not right in the great hall of the Kodokan in front of two hundred witnesses. Of course I’d be able to claim it was an accident, but a successful prosecution wasn’t even my main concern. It was the investigation itself, the inevitable attention, that I couldn’t afford. I’d seen dozens of people choked out on the tatami, two concussions, and one horrifically broken leg. Judo is a contact sport and accidents happen. But a death? That would be headline news.
Hating that I had to do it, I released the strangle and shoved Pig Eyes off me. His back heaved and a remarkable quantity of pressurized puke shot from his mouth and nose. I supposed that meant he would live. I scrambled to my feet and ran for the stairs. The great hall tilted in my vision and I threw an arm out to balance myself, still unsteady from the effects of lack of oxygen. People were watching me, maybe wondering if I was going to be sick and trying to get clear of the tatami before doing so. I blasted through the exit doors and took the stairs to the stands three at a time, one hand on the bannister because I didn’t trust my balance yet. I yanked open the doors, but the chinpira was gone. There were two sets of stairs — he must have taken the other.
Maybe there was still a chance. I turned and bolted down the stairs, bursting into the lobby at the bottom and looking wildly right and left. No one, just the wrinkled oba-san behind the concession stand. “Did someone just run out of here?” I said. “From down the steps?”
She didn’t answer, instead simply raising her eyebrows and tilting her head toward the main doors. I dashed out to the sidewalk and looked left and right. A few passersby, mostly salaryman types in suits heading home after a long day at the office, glancing in curiosity at a sweating judoka standing barefoot and wild-eyed on the sidewalk. There was no sign of the chinpira.
Damn. But maybe I could learn something from the other guy. I headed back inside and raced up the stairs. I paused outside the doors to the daidōjō, and saw a small crowd gathered around Pig Eyes. They were helping him to his feet, while giving wide berth to the area on the tatami newly decorated with his vomit. This wasn’t going to work. I had to go.
I headed down to the locker room, quickly changed into my street clothes, and packed up my gear. No time to shower. I didn’t want to answer any questions and I didn’t want to linger another minute now that these people, whoever they were, knew they could find me here. I had to go. I didn’t realize it at that moment — and couldn’t have comprehended it, even if I had — but I was about to begin a decade of life as a fugitive.
CHAPTER FOUR
I rode Thanatos to Nishi Nippori, the northeast of the city. Nishi Nippori was boring, blue collar, and unremarkable in every way — the kind of place no one who didn’t live there ever bothered to visit. I had taken an apartment there because it was about the cheapest place I could find that still offered a station on the Yamanote loop line. Between the train and Thanatos, there was nowhere in the city center I couldn’t reach in under a half hour. Something in a slightly more upscale neighborhood wouldn’t have offended me, and better proximity to the Kodokan would have been nice. But even back then, there was something that made me want to stand aloof from the society around me. The war was a significant part of it, but not all. I’d been told in a hundred ways while growing up in Tokyo that I wasn’t welcome, that I didn’t really belong. Maybe keeping the city at a distance was my way of saying, Fine, I don’t want you, either.
Feeling a little paranoid, I circled the block before arriving at my building, a squat wooden structure surrounded by weeds and skeletal bushes. It offered a view, to use that term loosely, of the Yamanote train tracks below, which were in the process of being expanded to handle Tokyo’s ever-burgeoning population. I parked Thanatos in front and looked down. The tableau, bleached to harsh white by overhead klieg lights, was a forbidding mass of concrete blocks, giant transformers, and steel rails. Beyond it all, more gray buildings and a sky the color of ashes against the neon glow of the city beneath.
I realized it was lucky I’d taken this place, and not something on the main street among the various shops and restaurants surrounding the station. The decision had been driven entirely by the better rent — everything closer to the station had been more expensive — but now I saw there were tactical advantages here, too. If anyone knew where I lived — and after the Kodokan anything might be possible — it would be much easier for them to ambush me amid the tumult surrounding the train station. Here, they’d have no concealment. I’d have to remember that next time I chose a place.
I went inside, climbed the stairs to the third floor, and unlocked the door of the six-mat room. Tatami mats are a standard unit of measurement in Japan, and six of them come to about nine feet by twelve. I pushed the door open wide, and flipped on the light switch before going inside. I couldn’t imagine anyone would be waiting for me, but not long ago I couldn’t have imagined anyone tracking me to the Kodokan, either. The room was hot, still, and empty — just a futon in one corner, a desk and chair in another, and a bureau in a third. A kitchen that was really no more than a stove; a bathroom as spacious as what you get on a commercial airliner; a tiny genkan with a worn cabinet for storing shoes. More a bivouac than an apartment, but at the moment I wasn’t sorry I didn’t have much to my name. I hurriedly packed a bag: some clothes; my passport; a toothbrush. A handful of mementos from my childhood — letters from my parents, a few fading photographs, that kind of thing. Tokens and talismans of the past. I don’t know why I grabbed anything that wasn’t strictly practical. Maybe a desire to prevent anyone who searched the place later from uncovering something personal. Maybe a superstitious sense that the past was a kind of anchor that would keep me from drifting over a horizon I was still afraid to cross.