“I remember you as a child, playing in the garden with your sister. I remember you as a teenage girl, angry and reckless. I see you now, as a woman, usually so sturdy and strong. I like you best now. I like you better than I have ever liked you before. It is a shame we have had to do everything in the wrong order, but those are the lives you and I have. I would have liked, if I were young and strong, to have courted you, to have made you love me above all others, to have wooed you and won you. I would have liked to have known that when I died, Anya would be inconsolable.”
“Yuji.” I turned on my side so that I could face him. My kimono fell open and I pulled it closed.
He grabbed the obi and wrapped one end around his hand. “I wish I could make love to you.” He pulled me toward him by the belt.
My eyes widened. I was not such a fallen creature that I would make love to a man I barely knew, even if he were my husband.
“But I cannot. I am too weak. Today has been very tiring.” He looked at me. “I am pumped full of drugs and nothing works as it should.”
He was a ridiculously beautiful man, and the sickness had made him almost unbearably so. He looked like a charcoal drawing of a man. In death, he was blacks and whites.
“I think I could have loved you if we’d met when I was a few years older,” I told him.
“What a pity.”
I pulled him to me. I could feel his bones coiling and creaking around me. He must have weighed less than me, and he was terribly cold, too. We were both tired so I pulled open my kimono and then I sealed it so we were both inside.
“This life,” he said when we were eye to eye. “This life,” he repeated. “I will have more reason to miss it than once I thought.”
In the morning, he was gone. Kazuo explained that Yuji had needed to return to his own room on account of his health and that we were to meet him at the Ono Sweets factory later that day.
Back at the house, I changed out of my wedding kimono, which I had been wearing for almost twenty-four hours, and into my regular clothes. The servants were even more deferential than they had been before, but I almost did not know to whom they were speaking when they called me Anya Ono-san. I did not take his name, if you were wondering, but my Japanese was insufficient to explain to the servants that despite what it looked like, I was still Anya Balanchine.
Yuji, accompanied by an even larger entourage of businesspeople than had been at the airport, was waiting for us at the Ono Sweets factory in Osaka. For the first time since I’d arrived, Yuji wore a dark suit. I associated him with that suit and I found it comforting to see him in it again. He introduced me to his colleagues, and then we toured the plant, which was clean, well lit, and well run. There was no telltale scent to indicate that chocolate was being concocted. Their main product appeared to be mochi, a gummy, rice-based dessert.
“Where’s the chocolate?” I whispered to Yuji. “Or do you import it the way my family does?”
“Chocolate is illegal in Japan. You know that,” he replied. “Follow me.”
We separated from the main group and took an elevator down to a room that held a furnace. He pressed a button on the wall. The wall disappeared, and we entered a secret passage that led to a room smelling distinctly of warm chocolate. He pressed another button to close the door.
“I have spent 200 million yen building this underground factory,” Yuji told me, “but, if everything progresses as I hope, soon I will have no need for it.”
As he led me through the secret factory, I noticed that the workers, who were dressed in coveralls, sanitary masks, and gloves, were careful not to make eye contact. The factory had state-of-the-art ovens and thermometers, thick metal cauldrons and scales, and along the walls, bins of unprocessed cacao. As a result of Theo’s teachings, I knew this cacao to be subpar. The color was bad, and the odor and consistency were off.
“You can’t make cacao-based products with this,” I told him. “You can bury low-quality cacao in conventional chocolate with enough sugar or milk, but you can’t make high-percentage cacao products with this. You must change suppliers.”
Yuji nodded. I would need to call Granja Mañana to see if they could supply Ono Sweets as well.
We left the secret factory and went upstairs to meet with Yuji’s legal adviser, Sugiyama, who explained some of the challenges of opening a Dark Room–like club in Japan. “An official from the Department of Wellness will need to place a government stamp on every product, verifying the cacao content and the health benefits. This requires much money,” the adviser said.
“At first,” I said, “but then you’ll save money. You won’t have to run a secret factory, for instance. And if your business is anything like mine, you were paying off officials before. Now you’ll be paying off different officials instead.”
Sugiyama did not look at me or acknowledge that I had spoken. “Perhaps we are better off as operations stand, Ono-san,” he said.
“You must listen to Anya-san,” Yuji said. “This is what I want, Sugiyama-san. This is how it must be. We will no longer be a Pachinko operation.”
“As you wish, Ono-san.” Sugiyama nodded to me.
Yuji and I went outside to wait for a car. “These people are hopelessly conservative, Anya. They resist change. You must insist. I will insist as long as I am able.”
“Where are we going now?” I asked.
“I want to show you where the first cacao bar could be, if you approve. And then I want to introduce you to the world as my wife.”
Though we planned to open five locations in Japan, the location Yuji had selected for the flagship was an old, abandoned teahouse in the middle of the most urban part of Osaka. As soon as you passed through the gray stone front you were in another world. There were sakura trees and a garden with a few stalwart purple irises that had not yet resigned themselves to the despotic weeds. Everything was hopelessly overgrown. The feeling was unlike our location in New York, but it could be lovely. Romantic even.
“Do you think this will suit?” Yuji asked me.
“It is very different from New York,” I said.
“I want a place that will operate in the daylight,” he said. “I am so tired of the darkness.”
“Originally I wanted to do that, too, but my business partner talked me out of it. He said the club should be sexy.”
“I see his point. But the Japanese are different from the Americans. I think we will be better in the daylight here.”
“It can’t be called the Dark Room then.” I paused. “The Light Bar?”
He considered my suggestion. “I like this.”
About fifteen minutes later, several members of the media arrived along with Yosh, Yugi’s company’s publicist, who translated for me the parts of the press conference that were in Japanese.
“Ono-san, it’s been months since anyone has seen you,” one of the interviewers noted. “Rumor has it you are ailing, and you do look very lean.”
“I am not ailing,” Yuji said. “Nor did I summon you here today to discuss my health. I have two announcements to make. The first is that my company will undergo a dramatic reorganization in the months that follow. The second is to introduce Japan to this woman.” He pointed to me. “Her name is Anya Balanchine. She is the president of the renowned Dark Room cacao club in New York City, and she has done me the great honor of becoming my wife.”
Flashbulbs went off. I smiled at the reporters.
The story went global. In certain parts of the world, both my name and my husband’s were notorious, and it was noteworthy, I suppose, that two organized-crime families should have merged. In reality, our families had joined years before, when Leo had married the illegitimate Noriko.