I sat quietly, monitoring the street, watching the stranger sipping his Starbucks beverage and checking his watch. Either he was waiting for someone to meet him there, or he was killing time before a meeting somewhere else.
Turned out it was door number one. After about half an hour had gone by, I was surprised to see Midori heading down the street in our direction. She was checking storefronts as she walked, finally seeing the Starbucks sign and heading in.
Telephone Man pulled out a cell phone, pressed a key, and held the unit to his ear. Nice move for a guy standing in a public phone booth. He hadn’t needed to input the whole number, I noted, so whomever he was calling was a speed dial, someone he would call frequently.
The stranger stood when he saw Midori approaching his table and bowed formally. The bow was good, and I knew this was someone who had been in Japan for some time, who would be comfortable with the language and culture. Midori returned his bow but at a lesser angle, uncertainty in her stance. I sensed that they were not well acquainted. My guess was that Alfie had been their first meeting.
I glanced over at Telephone Man and saw him put away his cell phone. He stayed where he was.
The stranger gestured for Midori to sit; she accepted, and he followed suit. He gestured to the counter, but Midori shook her head. She wasn’t ready to break bread with this man.
I watched them for about ten minutes. As their conversation progressed, the stranger’s gestures took on an air of entreaty, while Midori’s posture grew increasingly rigid. Finally she stood up, bowed quickly, and began to back away. The stranger returned her bow, but much more deeply, and somehow awkwardly.
Which one to follow now? I decided to leave the decision to Telephone Man.
As Midori exited the Starbucks and headed back in the direction of Roppongi, Telephone Man watched her go but held his position. So it was the stranger he wanted, or wanted more.
The stranger left shortly after Midori, returning to Hibiya Station on Roppongi-dori. Telephone Man and I followed, maintaining our previous positions. I stayed with them down to the tracks, waiting a full car’s length down from both until an Ebisu-bound train arrived and we all boarded. I kept my back to them, watching in the reflection of the glass, until the train stopped in Ebisu and I saw them exit.
I stepped off a moment later, hoping the stranger would be heading away, but he was coming toward me. Shit. I slowed my pace, then stopped in front of a station map, examining it at such an angle that neither would be able to see my face as he passed.
It was late, and there were only a half dozen people leaving the station with us. I kept a full riser of stairs between us as we left the bowels of the station, then let them pull a good twenty meters ahead before emerging from the station entrance to follow.
At the edge of Daikanyama, an upscale Tokyo suburb, the stranger turned into a large apartment complex. I watched him insert a key in the entrance door, which opened electronically and then closed behind him. Telephone Man also took obvious note, then continued for about twenty paces past the entrance, where he stopped, pulled out his cell phone, pressed a key, and spoke briefly. Then he pulled out a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and sat down on the curb.
No, this guy wasn’t on the stranger’s team, as I had briefly wondered. He was tailing him.
I moved into the shadows at the back of a small commercial parking lot and waited. Fifteen minutes later a scarlet racing-style motorcycle, its exhaust modified to produce the maximum Godzillalike rumble, roared onto the street. The driver, in matching scarlet racing leathers and full helmet, pulled up in front of Telephone Man. Telephone Man gestured to the stranger’s building and got on the back of the bike, and they blasted off into the night.
A safe bet that the stranger lived here, but the building housed hundreds of units and I had no way of telling which was his or of checking for a name. There would be at least two points of egress, as well, so waiting would be useless. I stayed until the sound of the motorcycle had disappeared before getting up and checking the address. Then I headed back toward Ebisu Station.
5
FROM EBISU I took the Hibiya line to Hibiya Station, where I would change to the Mita line and home. I never change trains directly, though, and I emerged from the station first to run an SDR.
I stopped in a Tsutaya music shop and made my way past the teenyboppers in their grunge costumes listening to the latest Japanese pop sounds on the headphones the store provides, bobbing their heads to the music. Strolling to the back of the store, I paused now and then to look at CDs on shelves that faced the door, glancing up to see who might be coming in behind me.
I browsed for a bit in the classical section, then moved on to jazz. On impulse I checked to see whether Midori had a CD. She did: Another Time. The cover showed her standing under a streetlamp in what looked like one of the seedier parts of Shinjuku, her arms folded in front of her, her profile in shadows. I didn’t recognize the label — something still small-time. She wasn’t there yet, but I believed Mama was right, that she would be.
I started to return it to its place on the shelf, then thought, Christ, it’s just music. If you like it, buy it. Still, a clerk might remember. So I also picked up a collection of someone else’s jazz instrumentals and some Bach concertos on the way to the registers. Chose a long line, harassed-looking clerk. Paid cash. All the guy would remember was that someone bought a few CDs, maybe classical, maybe jazz. Not that anyone was going to ask him.
I finished the SDR and took the CDs back to my apartment in Sengoku. Sengoku is in the northeast of the city, near the remnants of old Tokyo, what the natives call Shitamachi, the downtown. The area is antique, much of it having survived both the Great Kanto quake of 1923 and the firebombing that came during the war. The neighborhood has no nightlife beyond the local nomiya, or watering holes, and no commercial district, so there aren’t many transients. Most of its people are Edoko, the real Tokyoites, who live and work in its mom-and-pop shops and its tiny restaurants and bars. “Sengoku” means “the thousand stones.” I don’t know the origin of the name, but I’ve always liked it.
It’s not home, but it’s as close as anything I’ve ever had. After my father died, my mother took me back to the States. In the face of her loss and the accompanying upheavals in her life, I think my mother wanted to be close to her parents, who seemed equally eager for a reconciliation. We settled in a town called Dryden in upstate New York, where she took a job as a Japanese instructor at nearby Cornell University and I enrolled in public school.
Dryden was a predominantly white, working-class town, and my Asian features and nonnative English made me a favorite with the local bullies. I received my first practical lessons in guerilla warfare from the Dryden indigenous population: they hunted me in packs, and I struck back at them on my own terms when they were alone and vulnerable. I understood the guerrilla mentality years before I landed at Da Nang.
My mother was distraught over my constant bruises and scraped knuckles, but was too distracted with her new position at the university and with trying to mend fences with her parents to intervene. I spent most of those years homesick for Japan.
So I grew up sticking out, only afterwards learning the art of anonymity. In this sense, Sengoku is an anomaly for me. I chose the area before anonymity was an issue, and I stayed by rationalizing that the damage was already done. It’s the kind of place where everyone knows your name, thinks they know your business. At first it made me uncomfortable, everyone recognizing me, pinpointing me. I thought about moving to the west of the city. The west feels exactly like Tokyo and nothing like Japan. It’s brash and fast and new, swirling with caffeineated crowds, alienating and anonymous. I could go there, blend in, disappear.