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 na?ve 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.
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 a*shole 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 na?vely 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.