So no, I never contacted her. I watched, but only from a distance. I listened, but didn’t speak.
Instead, I tried to make myself forget. To forget that first time, when I’d intervened with the drunken asshole at the hotel and she had wheeled out to the street to reluctantly thank me, and the way her face had glowed while Terumasa Hino played at Taro, and later that night, when we had kissed at Kitazawa-gawa, and I’d pissed myself so she wouldn’t feel embarrassed, and the way she’d let me move her arms in the bath so I could touch her breasts, and how she liked to turn her head and watch as she guided me inside her, and how she’d cried when she learned she could come, and those glorious mornings we would exhaust ourselves in her small bed, and how beautiful she was to me, how she was so, so beautiful.
Sometimes I go to her Facebook page. It’s silly, I know. Pathetic. And every time I do, I promise myself next time I’ll be stronger. I don’t even know what impels me. Why are the most painful memories also the sweetest; why does the sweetness always draw us back no matter how long the pain might have kept us away beforehand? I don’t know, any more than I know why sometimes I have to sit in the dark and listen to Terumasa Hino playing “Alone, Alone and Alone.” I just do. I can’t seem to help periodically disinterring that little box of memories, no matter how lachrymose its contents. I try to stop. But sometimes there’s just what you can do, and what you can’t.
The years have been kind to her, very kind. She’s graying now, but her hair is still long and her smile still radiant, and that guardedness, that toughness that had so characterized her when we first met, is gone now, replaced by an easy comfort and confidence. She doesn’t need anyone to think she’s tough. She knows she is. And maybe her family has softened her. She has grandchildren now. Toddlers, but still. Where do the decades go.
I look at her photographs, and the photographs of her family, and I imagine a life that might have been but that wasn’t, a life I naïvely thought I could achieve and might even deserve, but that circumstances and my own actions precluded.
I wish I’d told her I loved her. It bothers me that I didn’t. I’d been so close, and then I’d held back. I tell myself it would have made no difference, and I believe that’s true. But at least then she would have known.
I miss her. God, I do. It’s beyond missing; it’s a kind of mourning. And not just for everything we had, but for everything we might have had, could have had, if only I had made other choices, if only I had been someone else, or something else.
But who, or what, would that be? I try to imagine it and I can’t. It feels like a delusion, a deception, a dream.
All the world’s a stage, isn’t that what Shakespeare said? And all the men and women merely players.
And so they are. So we all are. But that’s poetry. The prose is simpler. Sometimes there’s just what you can do. And what you can’t.
Acknowledgments
Once again, my friends Koichiro Fukasawa and Yukie Kito were invaluable in answering all my questions about Tokyo: new and old; native and foreign; cultured and gehin. They also introduced me to Taihō Chinese Restaurant in Minami Azabu, which I used in the book and which for the food alone would have deserved a grateful acknowledgment. And they were great occasional company while I was otherwise living like a hermit in Tokyo, researching and writing the book.
I’m sure I got any number of things wrong about life for paraplegics, and I look forward to people sharing their thoughts so I can update the “Mistakes” page on my website. Whatever errors I might have made, they were in spite of the excellent information I found on various websites. A few that were particularly helpful were:
10 Correct Ways to Interact with People with Disabilities
http://www.themobilityresource.com/10-correct-ways-to-interact-with-people-with-disabilities/
10 Things to Never Say to a Person in a Wheelchair
http://www.themobilityresource.com/10-things-to-never-say-to-a-person-in-a-wheelchair/
Dating Paraplegics: The Ultimate Guide
http://www.streetsie.com/dating-paraplegics-guide/
Deep Sea Diving in a Wheelchair (Sue Austin)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCWIGN3181U&feature=endscreen&NR=1
How to Push a Wheelchair
http://cripwheels.blogspot.jp/2006/07/how-to-push-wheelchair_31.html
Sex and Paraplegia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TaLQiiFUUY
Cameron Hughes is the guy who urged me to stop acting like the world was made only of walkies and to create a character with disabilities, and Sayaka wouldn’t have come to be without his encouragement. He was also generous in sharing his insights, experiences, and suggestions for further reading. And I’m sure he’ll be the first person to point out my mistakes. ☺
Once again, I’m indebted to Michael Kleindl of Tokyo Food Life, who’s been ferreting out the most offbeat, delicious, out-of-the-way restaurants, bars, and coffeehouses in Tokyo for over twenty years. Mike was kind enough to point me in the direction of a few places that have been around since 1972 or earlier (you can find links on the “Places” page of my website, linked below), and as always his recommendations were a pleasure to research and hugely enriched the book:
http://www.tokyofoodlife.com
http://www.barryeisler.com/photo_places.php
Nobuo Kamioka, Professor of English Language and Cultures, Gakushuin University, kindly recommended several books of photographs of 1960s and 1970s Tokyo that were especially helpful as I tried to imagine the city of forty years ago. More on these in the Author’s Note.
If you want to see your humble author using the kind of circle drag Rain deploys in Ueno, here’s your video. That’s uber-martial artist, teacher, and writer Wim Demeere showing me how to make the drag nastier. If you recognize Wim’s name, it might be because I named a character after him who appeared in several of the Rain books. Rain finally took him out when they met face-to-face, but if it had been the real Demeere, I think Rain might have been in trouble. Check out Wim’s Rain fan fiction on his great self-defense blog:
http://www.wimsblog.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODCfOWTy8po#at=225
While we’re on the subject of combat techniques, as with everything else that appears in the book I’ve tried to convey Rain’s chapter 1 suplay as vividly as possible. But if you want to see the move in the real world as well as in your imagination, here are two nice examples — the first executed by a seven-year-old!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLkUbYTSexs
http://www.flowrestling.org/coverage/249282-Journeymen-Freestyle-Duals/video/632901-Araoz-5pt-Throw-SUPLAY
Also: for more on the Tueller Drill “21 feet” rule, here are two videos. I practiced this kind of drill with Simunition at Peyton Quinn’s Rocky Mountain Combat Applications Training institute, and it is eye-opening. Twenty-one feet is a lot closer than you might think:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwHYRBNc9r8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL1zX-SrBH0
To the extent I get violence right in my fiction, I have many great instructors to thank, including Massad Ayoob, Tony Blauer, and Rory Miller. Their courses and other materials are superb and I highly recommend them for anyone who wants to be safer in the world, or just to create more realistic violence on the page: