Being a tourist in Japan is easy. In my case, I chose Japan because I needed to disappear somewhere safe. It was a no-brainer.
After what happened to me in Nanaimo, I started seeing villains everywhere. My gig as a late-night jazz pianist was over. I started giving the harbor a wide berth, in case someone might snatch me again. Just opening my own apartment door involved double-checking the latch, a lot of deep breaths and one hand on the bear spray I kept in my pocket. It was too bad. I liked Nanaimo. The city fit me like an old pair of jeans. But I’d tripped over those frayed cuffs, and I needed out.
According to the Internet, my chances of being assaulted or kidnapped were lowest in the Nordic countries, in New Zealand and in Japan. It was snowing in Nanaimo the day I did my research, and Denmark and Sweden would just be more of the same. No thanks. All the pictures of New Zealand looked just like British Columbia, and I wanted change. That left Japan, where even if you got incredibly unlucky and someone bopped you over the head, they’d probably say “Excuse me” first.
But what if I ran into Kaz Nakamura? Even if he had gone back to Japan, statistics took care of that one. Japan has 127 million people. The mathematical odds of meeting Kaz were a bullet train of zeroes with a lonely numeral one at the end. Kaz and I had parted ways on a snowy night in Vancouver, and I would never see him again.
I gave my Nanaimo landlord six months’ rent and bought a ticket for Tokyo. I arrived at the end of March. It was just two weeks after an earthquake under the Pacific Ocean had driven a thirty-foot wall of water—a tsunami—through the coastal city of Fukushima. The tidal wave hurdled a seawall. It tossed freighters and ferries ashore like bathtub toys and left buses on hospital roofs. And it turned a nuclear power plant into a leaking, radioactive time bomb. Japan had obviously used up its statistical share of bad luck. I would be fine.
And I was. You couldn’t blame the country for being twitchy about aftershocks and radiation. Maybe that’s why nobody paid much attention to me. Every week I moved to a cheaper hotel, adjusting to my new surroundings and putting off my return.
It’s hard to imagine how thirteen million people keep their cool, but the Japanese in Tokyo manage it. Nobody makes eye contact. The train platforms can be packed, but nobody speaks. Merchants smile and bow. All of this, I began to realize, suited me fine. When an Australian I met in the Excelsior Caffé offered to sublet me his bachelor apartment, I took it. It was that simple.
That was two months ago. Today I was sitting in a noodle shop three minutes from Akiko’s house, fueling up. You can’t go wrong with a bowl of ramen. This place was typical. Six stools faced a scarred wooden counter and a grim-looking chef in a headband and a cloud of steam. He was flinging noodles and vegetables and slices of pork into bowls of his secret broth.
I ordered a Kirin. The place was full of men inhaling wet noodles. I never could do the slurping thing—usually I ended up speckling my shirt with broth. The customers kept their eyes on the TV high up in one corner. A man in a tight suit was saying something alarming about radiation. I knew it was alarming because Japanese TV news features lots of graphics and endlessly repeated footage of scenes of disaster. You didn’t need to understand Japanese to figure out that Tokyo was having another scare about radioactive tap water. On the screen, bottled water flew off the shelves, and housewives dithered over contaminated vegetables. I finished my beer and left a thousand-yen note on the counter. The stylish residential area where Akiko lived was just around the corner.
Ota district was a lot different from Mrs. Ogawa’s neighborhood. The streets were narrow and painted with bewildering markings: arrows, dashes, dots, diamonds, numbers. It was like walking through a game of snakes and ladders. Every house was gated. The lots were small, and few of the houses had windows facing the street. This was Japan, where people looked inward.
From the street, Akiko’s house was a slanted field of shiny blue roof tiles above an iron gate set into a stone wall. The silver Lexus in the tiled carport looked as though it had never left the showroom. I pushed the unmarked button set into the wall, and the gate swung silently open. A path of crushed stone led through a manicured garden with miniature cypress trees that trailed above a mossy pool. A Tokyo crow, big as a raven, muttered at me from the roof.
I squatted and watched two koi chase each other’s tails beneath a sprinkling of cherry petals. One fish was red splashed dramatically on white, like blood. The other was a solid-gold submarine.
“Do you like fish, Frank?”
Akiko’s bare brown toes were right next to me. I struggled to my feet. She knelt and paddled a long finger in the water, and the golden fish turned majestically to nuzzle it. “This one is my favorite. I call him Sunshine.”
Akiko was willowy where Mrs. Ogawa was stout. She’d pulled her long hair into a ponytail that shot skyward before falling down her back. The top half of her was draped in an upscale poncho of earth-colored linen. The rest of her was inside strategically frayed jeans. It was hot in her tiny tropical garden, and I was sweating like a sailor.
“I wouldn’t know what to do with a pet fish,” I said. Akiko stood and smiled. That smile was the only part of her I felt comfortable with. It was lopsided. Maybe the surgeon had slipped. Somebody else had slipped too, and recently, because one of Akiko’s remanufactured eyes was the color of a ripe fig. It was also swollen shut. She caught me looking, but her smile never wavered.
“I walked into a door,” she said. I followed her ponytail across the polished flagstones. Each step left a fleeting footprint on the hot stone, as though she’d been waiting for me in the refrigerator.
Akiko’s piano was better than anything I could ever have owned, a full nine gleaming feet that sat on a purple Persian rug. The only natural light came from a narrow, ceiling-level window that ran the length of one earth-tone wall. A single spotlight lit the keyboard. The only other piece of furniture was a cowhide-and-chrome chair that probably cost a month of my earnings back home. The walls were bare. It was a Zen garden for music.
I sank into the cool leather and watched her bare feet go up and down on the Yamaha’s pedals. Someone needed to tell Akiko to wear shoes to play piano, but it wasn’t going to be me. She was playing Chopin, one of his weepier preludes, a piece we’d been working on for a month. I wondered what it was like to read music with one eye.
The notes were all there, but I knew without even looking at Akiko that something was missing. Akiko had talent, but today she had tension too. Not a good combination for a musician.
I got up. My pants stuck to my legs. I took one slender, locked wrist in my fingers. “Don’t stop playing,” I said. “Try to let go.”
But she did stop. And it wasn’t because I was bent over her wrist like a kindly doctor. It was because there was someone else in the room.