“You know,” he said, “there’s just one thing I don’t understand.”
“Yes?”
“I said there had been no more bodies as such, but there was another shooting. Just last night.”
“Really?”
“Yes. A quite prominent LDP politician. Nobuo Kamioka. You might know the name.”
“No, it doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Indeed. What’s strange is that he was shot in the spine. He’ll never walk again, but his assailant didn’t kill him.”
“Maybe the assailant missed.”
“Kamioka claims the assailant was a Buddhist monk. And that before pulling the trigger, the monk told him, ‘Karma is a bitch.’ Does that mean anything to you?”
“Only that, if karma’s a bitch, I hate to think of what it’s got in store for me.”
“A coincidence, then, that you called me only this morning, not before?”
“What, do you think I had something to take care of first?”
He shrugged. “I was expecting you to call sooner. The very morning you were ‘killed’ in Ueno Park, in fact.”
“Sorry. I got hung up.”
“I have the strangest feeling ballistics will match the bullet that killed McGraw with the one that paralyzed Kamioka.”
“Think you’ll find the gun?”
“No, I’m quite certain we won’t.”
“Well, that’s a shame.”
He glanced at my scalp. “I also wondered about your new hairstyle.”
“Just a summer look. I’ll probably grow it out again.”
He gave up and we walked in silence again. At the exit at Harajuku, he handed me a passport. “You can go anywhere now,” he said. “But where?”
Tokyoites surged past us in all directions, going to work, going for coffee, going shopping, going home. The scene was madcap, frenetic, like something played back on film at just slightly faster than normal speed. The sun moved behind a dark cloud, and for a moment the city looked lit in sepia.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But when I open a newspaper and read about a scandal involving American payoffs to Japanese politicians? I’ll think of you.”
He smiled. “I don’t think Fukumoto Junior will last.”
“We’ll see.”
“But other than that, I hope Tokyo will be peaceful for a while.”
I thought of Sayaka. “I’m sure it will be.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
As it turned out, Mad Dog lasted only about two years. I don’t know whether Tatsu had anything to do with it, but apparently a cabal of Gokumatsu-gumi lieutenants had him killed, and proceeded to govern as a council, instead.
Not long after that, Senator Church’s committee convened in America. Lockheed was accused of paying tens of millions of dollars in bribes to foreign officials — not just in Japan, but all over the world. None of it was traced to American politicians. The focus was all on Lockheed and its rogue board of directors. Still, in Japan the scandal took down the finance minister, the air force chief of staff, and even the prime minister, as Tatsu had hoped. So that was something.
With America’s attention diverted to Lockheed, did McGraw’s program reconstitute? Probably. Trying to stamp out payoffs to politicians is like trying to outlaw prostitution. Hell, it’s the same as trying to outlaw prostitution. Corruption, I’d learned, isn’t discrete, and what appears to be a series of floating structures is in fact an archipelago, its islands continuous, connected, coalescing below the waterline. But I didn’t care. It wasn’t my problem, and I wasn’t going to let it be. When I’d killed Ozawa at the sentō, I’d briefly wondered whether I was now one of the bad guys. By the time I did McGraw, I’d figured out there are no bad guys, any more than there are good guys. There are only smart people, and stupid ones; puppets, and puppet masters. Better a wise rōnin, I decided, than a naïve samurai.
Still, I thought maybe Tatsu had a point with his notion of limits. I’d told McGraw he’d been wrong to go after Sayaka because she was a girl, because she was a non-principal. And his response was that I was making a virtue of a necessity, that he and I were just the same. Was he right? I recognized that would depend on me. I decided to live with limits. Or at least try to.
Miyamoto kept my secret, and we wound up working together when I returned to Japan. And Tatsu and I wound up working together, too — quite a lot, in fact. But that’s all another story, and none of it happened until many years later. Because, even though Mad Dog didn’t last, my self-imposed exile did. I spent a decade fighting in various mercenary conflicts, and while those, too, are other stories, perhaps for another occasion, for now I’ll just say that, at the time, I told myself those conflicts were the reason I stayed away. But in retrospect, I realize they were more of an excuse. The real reason was Sayaka.
I wanted to contact her before I left Japan. Of course I did. But I was afraid Mad Dog would learn I was still alive and might come after her again. It was torture to hold back. I had no way of knowing what she knew or what she believed after the last time I saw her at the hotel. Maybe she saw something on the news about what happened at Ueno, and believed I was dead. Maybe she hadn’t heard anything, and didn’t know why I’d walked away or what had become of me. Maybe she heard about Kamioka, shot in the back, his spine severed, and thought of karma, and wondered whether karma was me. But if I contacted her, what would happen? If I saw her, I didn’t think I could bear not to be with her. And if I was with her, she would become a target again.
So I went back to war, in unlikely places, far from Japan, far from everything that had happened, far from Sayaka. To protect her.
No. That isn’t true. It’s not a lie, but it isn’t the truth.
Because even after Mad Dog was killed, still I stayed away. I told myself that surely, one way or the other, she would have forgotten me? Moved on? Built a new life? But over time, I realized my reluctance was because of more than that. It was because…of what she would think of me if she knew what I had done. What I had become. What I was.
How could she understand? The money I had given her — she would want to know where it came from. Maybe she would be horrified she had taken it, and hate me for having persuaded her. She would ask questions, incessant, probing questions, and no matter what I told her, she would believe the truth was even more appalling. And probably it would be. I would implore her, explain my limits, and she would hear nothing but the rationalizations of a monster.
I was paralyzed by longing and fear. And as the years went by, somehow, no matter how close I came to trying to find her, I always held back. I told myself that if I really cared about her, I should just leave her alone.
But in the end, I couldn’t.
She wasn’t easy to track down. You have to remember, this was long before Google, and Facebook, and all the other tools that make it easy for people you’d prefer to keep in your past to occupy your present. But eventually, I found her. She had made it to America, her dream. San Francisco. She had gone to college, and then started a foundation for teaching disabled people skills. She’d received awards from various Asian American organizations. She’d even gone scuba diving and skydiving in her wheelchair, just as she’d said she would. Life magazine wrote an article about her exploits, praising her as “an inspiration, an example of the limitlessness of the human spirit and of the opportunities afforded by the American Dream.”
And she was married. A Korean American. A lawyer. Probably a good guy. They had a son, the first time I checked. Eventually, when I checked again, they had a second.