Chapter
four
I rode Thanatos to Nishi Nippori, the northeast of the city. Nishi Nippori was boring, blue collar, and unremarkable in every way—the kind of place no one who didn’t live there ever bothered to visit. I had taken an apartment there because it was about the cheapest place I could find that still offered a station on the Yamanote loop line. Between the train and Thanatos, there was nowhere in the city center I couldn’t reach in under a half hour. Something in a slightly more upscale neighborhood wouldn’t have offended me, and better proximity to the Kodokan would have been nice. But even back then, there was something that made me want to stand aloof from the society around me. The war was a significant part of it, but not all. I’d been told in a hundred ways while growing up in Tokyo that I wasn’t welcome, that I didn’t really belong. Maybe keeping the city at a distance was my way of saying, Fine, I don’t want you, either.
Feeling a little paranoid, I circled the block before arriving at my building, a squat wooden structure surrounded by weeds and skeletal bushes. It offered a view, to use that term loosely, of the Yamanote train tracks below, which were in the process of being expanded to handle Tokyo’s ever-burgeoning population. I parked Thanatos in front and looked down. The tableau, bleached to harsh white by overhead klieg lights, was a forbidding mass of concrete blocks, giant transformers, and steel rails. Beyond it all, more gray buildings and a sky the color of ashes against the neon glow of the city beneath.
I realized it was lucky I’d taken this place, and not something on the main street among the various shops and restaurants surrounding the station. The decision had been driven entirely by the better rent—everything closer to the station had been more expensive—but now I saw there were tactical advantages here, too. If anyone knew where I lived—and after the Kodokan anything might be possible—it would be much easier for them to ambush me amid the tumult surrounding the train station. Here, they’d have no concealment. I’d have to remember that next time I chose a place.
I went inside, climbed the stairs to the third floor, and unlocked the door of the six-mat room. Tatami mats are a standard unit of measurement in Japan, and six of them come to about nine feet by twelve. I pushed the door open wide, and flipped on the light switch before going inside. I couldn’t imagine anyone would be waiting for me, but not long ago I couldn’t have imagined anyone tracking me to the Kodokan, either. The room was hot, still, and empty—just a futon in one corner, a desk and chair in another, and a bureau in a third. A kitchen that was really no more than a stove; a bathroom as spacious as what you get on a commercial airliner; a tiny genkan with a worn cabinet for storing shoes. More a bivouac than an apartment, but at the moment I wasn’t sorry I didn’t have much to my name. I hurriedly packed a bag: some clothes; my passport; a toothbrush. A handful of mementos from my childhood—letters from my parents, a few fading photographs, that kind of thing. Tokens and talismans of the past. I don’t know why I grabbed anything that wasn’t strictly practical. Maybe a desire to prevent anyone who searched the place later from uncovering something personal. Maybe a superstitious sense that the past was a kind of anchor that would keep me from drifting over a horizon I was still afraid to cross.
I headed out, pausing on each riser on the way down to check the stairs below me, sweat trickling down my back. I was used to moving with extreme care in the jungle—pause, look, listen, move; pause, look, listen, move—and there was something incongruous about doing the same thing now on a wooden stairwell. I told myself the precautions were temporary. The war in Vietnam didn’t last forever; this one wouldn’t, either.
Outside, I slung the bag across my neck and shoulder, got on Thanatos, and started up the engine. I paused to gaze once more at the industrial wasteland below me. It was ugly, and I had always ignored it before. But suddenly it felt like some comforting thing that was about to be torn away from me. I knew I couldn’t come back until I figured out what the hell was going on. And, whatever it was, resolved it. But when would that be? And how?
I rode off, Thanatos’s engine whining, wanting only to put some distance between myself and the apartment or anywhere else someone might lay an ambush. It started to rain but I didn’t care; I was soaked with sweat already. The city went by me in a wet, gray blur, windshield wipers and umbrellas and dripping overpasses and eaves, droplets fine as mist suspended in Thanatos’s headlight.
Away from the apartment, I started to relax a little and think. My gut told me the run-in with the three chinpira in Ueno had been a coincidence. If they were still after me, it was likely follow-up—revenge for the outcome of the initial encounter. But then how had they known where to find me?
I considered. They’d seen how confidently and crisply I’d dropped the lead guy with that suplay. Maybe they hadn’t recognized the move specifically, but I was clearly some kind of grappler, and one whose skills were pretty sharp. If you were looking for a grappler in Tokyo, where would you start? It wouldn’t be a sure thing, of course, but with nothing more to go on, you might want to check out judo dojos. And the one you’d probably begin with, because it’s the biggest and best known, would be the Kodokan.
I chewed on that, and couldn’t find anything wrong with it. Yeah, it made sense. A little imagination, a little diligence, and a little luck, and there I was. They’d probably been thinking it would be a long shot. They must have been thrilled when the bet paid out.
Well, it hadn’t paid out quite the way they’d been hoping. But damn, it had been a near thing. That guy in the daidōjō had been intent to kill me—I had seen it in his pig eyes. So who were these people? They had enough time and manpower to start casing judo dojos in Tokyo on a long-shot bet. They were motivated enough by revenge to invest that time and manpower. And they had at least one guy on the payroll who was willing to kill someone, in a public venue in front of two hundred witnesses, just because they told him to.
The only thing that made sense was, the three in Ueno hadn’t been just punks. They were more connected than I’d guessed. Maybe one or more of them was a made member of one of the yakuza clans. Maybe I’d pissed off the wrong people.
The really wrong ones.
I nodded as I bombed along on Thanatos, pleased with myself for coming up with what felt like the right explanation. It was only later that I came to learn how dangerous it is to allow yourself to be seduced by that first attractive theory. If you don’t keep testing for alternatives, you might wind up satisfying yourself with, and proceeding on, what’s no more than a partial truth. And a partial truth, I would understand soon enough, can be more dangerous than a lie.
If the problem was yakuza, what would be the solution? McGraw might be helpful. At a minimum, he would have access to information I didn’t. But if he knew I had this much heat on me, I didn’t know what he might do. Probably just cut me loose. Damn it, I didn’t want to take that chance. Better to just sit tight and wait to hear from him—he’d said he would be in touch as soon as he learned anything about what had happened in Ueno.
But shit, if I waited to tell him about the latest problem, he’d conclude—correctly—that I was holding out on him. He wouldn’t like it.
It wasn’t an easy decision, but I decided not to call him. Better to seek forgiveness than ask permission. I’d give him another day, anyway, and give myself a night to sleep on it.
Sleep. Where the hell was that going to happen? A hotel, I supposed. But not one of the big ones—I couldn’t afford the rates, for one thing, and didn’t want to deal with a front desk or other forms of scrutiny, for another.
I looked up at a passing road sign and saw I was heading toward Uguisudani—Nightingale Valley, though if nightingales had ever been prevalent there, they had long since departed for more salubrious climes. The area was known, even notorious, for streetwalkers, many of them of the “mature” variety, and for its profusion of love hotels. These were smaller establishments catering, as the nomenclature implies, to amorous couples looking for a place they could use for an hour or at most a night. Love hotels were numerous, they were discreet, and they were everywhere. Tens of thousands of people rotated through them every day, sometimes every hour. Finding someone hopping from one to another one night at a time would be a shell game not even the yakuza could win.
I parked Thanatos in a lot overflowing with bicycles and motor scooters, and walked along the road paralleling the train tracks. The night was still warm and it had stopped raining, but my clothes were wet, and I was cold to the point of shivering. I picked up a bento dinner from a vendor, and turned in to a labyrinth of twisting alleys lit in the gaudiest neon, the signs advertising places with names like p-ssy Cat and Aladdin’s Cave and Casanova, some with plaster cupid statues in front of them, others with illuminated fountains, each more garish than the next. Hookers dressed to cater to every fantasy—demure schoolgirl, brazen slut, leather-clad dominatrix—trawled the area, sizing me up, trying for eye contact, forgetting me the moment they failed to achieve it.
I ducked down a particularly narrow alley, and was rewarded with a place called Hotel Apex. Devoid of cupids, fountains, or even neon, it was obviously a no-frills place serving the lower end of the market. Just what I was looking for. I ducked inside the privacy wall and went through the front door. Inside was a tiny lobby—not much more than a vestibule—with a reception window to the left and an elevator the width of a coffin straight ahead. I stepped over to the reception window, and was surprised to see a very pretty girl sitting on the other side of the glass. I had been expecting an oba-san—the standard receptionist in this type of establishment being an old woman.
The girl glanced up at me, her expression neutral. It looked like she had been reading something, though I couldn’t see what. There was a tape recorder on the desk to her left, playing some kind of jazz. I loved Bill Evans—I’d first heard Sunday at the Village Vanguard when I was sixteen—but didn’t know much beyond that, and didn’t recognize what she was listening to.
“Rest or stay?” she asked, meaning did I want a room by the hour, or for the whole night. Her tone indicated supreme lack of interest, and pretty as she was, there was something tough in her demeanor, though I couldn’t put my finger on what. She had long hair, at the moment pulled into a ponytail. Her skin was beautiful, I couldn’t help but notice, and—in contrast to that of the professional girls outside—unembellished by makeup. Nor was she dressed to impress: a navy sweatshirt with New York City stitched across the front in faded gray letters; no earrings; no adornments. I wouldn’t say I was particularly subtle or sophisticated at the time, but I got the message she was trying to convey: I’m not trying to look good for you, so leave me the f*ck alone.
“Uh, a stay, I guess,” I said.
She looked at me for a moment, probably wondering how someone could be so dumb that he wandered into a love hotel not knowing if he wanted a room for an hour or for the whole night. The fact that I was alone wasn’t itself remarkable—plenty of men checked in to love hotels by themselves and then phoned for takeout. But they probably had a clue about how long they wanted the room.
Still, all she said was, “Four thousand yen.”
I fished the money out of a pocket and pushed it through a hole in the glass. She scooped it into a drawer and slid a key in the other direction. “Three-oh-two,” she said. “Left as you come out of the elevator.”
I took the key and thanked her. She nodded and looked down again, to whatever I guessed she was reading in her lap. I wanted to say something more, but couldn’t think of what, or even why. If she noticed my hesitation, she gave no sign.
After a moment, I turned and went to the elevator. I didn’t want to think about my situation, or what I was going to do about it. All I cared about right then was the thought of the hottest bath I could stand, then my bento dinner, then sleep. I’d worry about tomorrow once it arrived.