“That’s terrible, to lose both parents so young. Were you close with them?”
Close? Although my face bore the stamp of his Asian features, and although he married an American, I believe my father had a typically outsized Japanese focus on race. The bullying I received in school both enraged and ashamed him.
“Fairly close, I suppose. They’ve been gone a long time.”
“Do you think you’ll go back to America?”
“I did at one point,” I said, remembering how I’d gotten drawn into the work it now seemed like I’d been doing forever. “After returning as an adult, I spent ten years here always thinking I would stay just one more and then go back. Now I don’t really dwell on it.”
“Does Japan feel like home to you?”
I remembered what Crazy Jake told me, just before I did what he asked of me. There’s no home for us, John. Not after what we’ve done.
“It’s become my home, I guess,” I said after a long time. “What about you? Would you want to live in America again?”
She was gently tapping on her demitasse, her fingers rippling up its sides from pinky to forefinger, and I thought, She plays her moods. What would my hands do if I could do that?
“I really loved New York,” she said after a moment, smiling at some memory, “and I’d like to go back eventually, even to stay for a while. My manager thinks that the band isn’t too far off. We’ve got a gig at the Vanguard in November; that’ll really put us on the map.”
The Village Vanguard, the Manhattan mecca of live jazz. “The Vanguard?” I said, impressed. “That’s quite a pedigree. Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, the whole pantheon.”
“It’s a big opportunity,” she said, nodding.
“You could leverage that, make New York your base, if you wanted to.”
“We’ll see. Don’t forget, I’ve lived in New York before. It’s a great place, maybe the most exciting place I’ve ever been. But it’s like swimming underwater, you know? At first you feel as though you could go along forever, seeing everything from this new perspective, but eventually you have to come up for air. After four years, it was time for me to come home.”
That was the opening. “You must have had indulgent parents, if they were willing to send you abroad for that long.”
She smiled faintly. “My mother died when I was young — same as you. My father sent me to Julliard. He loved jazz and was thrilled that I wanted to be a jazz pianist.”
“Mama told me you lost him recently,” I said, hearing a flat echo of the words in my ears. “I’m sorry.” She bowed her head in acknowledgment of my expression of sympathy, and I asked, “What did he do?”
“He was a bureaucrat.” This is an honorable profession in Japan, and the Japanese word kanryo lacks the negative connotations of its English counterpart.
“With what ministry?”
“For most of his career, the Kensetsusho.” The construction ministry.
We were making some progress. I noticed that the manipulation was making me uncomfortable. Finish the interview, I thought. Then get the hell out. She puts you off your game; this is dangerous.
“Construction must have been a stuffy place for a jazz enthusiast,” I said.
“It was hard for him at times,” she acknowledged, and suddenly I sensed guardedness. Her posture hadn’t changed, her expression was the same, but somehow I knew she had been ready to say more and then had thought better of it. If I had touched a nerve, she had barely shown it. She wouldn’t have expected me to notice.
I nodded, I hoped reassuringly. “I know a little bit about being uncomfortable in your environment. At least your father’s daughter doesn’t have any problems like that — doing gigs at Alfie makes a lot of sense for a jazz pianist.”
I felt the odd tension for a second longer, then she laughed softly as though she had decided to let something go. I wasn’t sure what I had brushed up against, and would consider it later.
“So, four years in New York,” I said. “That’s a long time. You must have had a very different perspective when you returned.”
“I did. The person who returns from living abroad isn’t the same person who left originally.”
“How do you mean?”
“Your outlook changes. You don’t take things for granted that you used to. For instance, I noticed in New York that when one cab cut off another, the driver who got cut off would always yell at the other driver and do this” — she did a perfect imitation of a New York cabbie flipping someone the bird — “and I realized this was because Americans assume that the other person intended to do what he did, so they want to teach the person a lesson. But you know, in Japan, people almost never get upset in those situations. Japanese look at other people’s mistakes more as something arbitrary, like the weather, I think, not so much as something to get angry about. I hadn’t thought about that before I lived in New York.”
“I’ve noticed that difference, too. I like the Japanese way better. It’s something to aspire to.”
“But which are you? Japanese or American? The outlook, I mean,” she added quickly, I knew for fear of insulting me by being too direct.
I looked at her, thinking for an instant of her father. I thought of other people I’ve worked with, and how much different my life might have been if I’d never known them. “I’m not sure,” I said, finally, glancing away. “As you seem to have noticed at Alfie, I’m not a very forgiving person.”
She paused. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” I responded, not knowing what was coming.
“What did you mean, when you said we had ‘rescued’ you?”
“Just trying to strike up a conversation,” I said. It sounded flip, and I saw immediately from her eyes that it was the wrong response.
You have to show her a little bit, I thought again, not sure whether I was compromising or rationalizing. I sighed. “I was talking about things I’ve done, things I knew, or thought I knew, were right,” I said, switching to English, which was more comfortable for me on this subject. “But then later it turned out they weren’t. At times those things haunt me.”
“Haunt you?” she asked, not understanding.
“Borei no yo ni.” Like a ghost.
“My music made the ghosts go away?”
I nodded and smiled, but the smile turned sad. “It did. I’ll have to listen to it more often.”
“Because they’ll come back?”
Jesus, John, get off this. “It’s more like they’re always there. Sugita koto wa, sugita koto da.” The past is the past.
“You have regrets?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“Probably. But are yours like everyone else’s?”
“That I wouldn’t know. I don’t usually compare.”
“But you just did.”
I chuckled. “You’re tough” was all I could say.
She shook her head. “I don’t mean to be.”
“I think you do. But you wear it well.”
“What about the saying ‘I only regret the things I haven’t done’?”
I shook my head. “That’s someone else’s saying. Someone who must have spent a lot of time at home.”
I knew I would learn nothing more about her father or the stranger today without questions that would betray my true intention in asking them. It was time to start winding things down.
“Any more shopping today?” I asked.
“I was going to, but I’ve got someone to meet in Jinbocho in less than an hour.”
“A friend?” I asked, professionally curious.
She smiled. “My manager.”
I paid the bill and walked back to Aoyama-dori. The crowds had thinned, and the air felt cold and heavy. The temperature had dropped in the two and a half weeks since I had taken out Kawamura. I looked up and saw unbroken clouds.