Her name was Momo, and she worked in a pastry shop in Shibuya. The rally she sent me to didn’t feature rock throwing and riot police. But it was huge. Even the police put the numbers at more than a hundred thousand—a lot of people to be crammed into Meiji Park on a sweltering July day. I circulated around the edge of a sea of chanting people in yellow vests and gas masks. People beat drums and waved yellow No Nukes signs. Various speakers whipped up the crowd, including a tattooed ex-stripper turned environmentalist. Although Japanese people tend to have a lot of faith in routine, this event was anything but.
My own routines continued. My gigs at the Tom and Mary got better. My students plodded on. Every week Mrs. Ogawa looked a little more heat-flushed. Akiko turned on the air-conditioning, and I began to pack a sweater to the lesson. Akiko became icier too, as though I had committed a blunder so grave you couldn’t even acknowledge it. She never mentioned Mr. Goto.
But Goto and his customers at the Tom and Mary were doing good things for my bottom line. One night the stars aligned. I hit my stride and never lost it. Thousand-yen tips settled on my piano like the autumn leaves in Inokashira Park. Even Kenji looked on the verge of smiling. I’ve made it, I thought. It was a tiny triumph, my shaky start as a real musician in one of the world’s toughest markets. Next up was a walk through the deserted park and the sweet dive onto my futon. Perfection.
And that should have been that, one of life’s little highs that we never get enough of. But it wasn’t. I looked up, and there was Momo.
She was alone at a table along the wall. I’d given her my business card and gone to the protest rally. We’d even taken to nodding to each other on the 8:03 from Shibuya, but I’d never expected to see her here. And in two seconds I went on full alert. It was like accelerating for a green light and having it suddenly turn red. Because Momo wasn’t gazing adoringly in my direction or swaying happily over a forest of empties. She was staring at the back of Goto’s head. I could almost see the bull’s-eye.
I managed to get Oscar Peterson’s “Night Train” safely into the station, and by the time I looked up again, Momo was gone. I slipped past Goto and his friends at the bar and out into the warm night. Momo was waiting. The smile I looked forward to every Wednesday on the train wasn’t in evidence. She fell into step beside me. When we reached the end of the lane and turned down toward the park, she stayed with me, so close I could smell her perfume.
We started down the broad steps that led to the park. Halfway down, she tugged at my elbow and got in front of me. She had to look up to meet my eyes.
“They are bad men,” she said. Her eyes never left mine.
“Who?”
“You know. Goto.” She spat the name out like a rotten oyster.
I was tired. My shoulders hurt. Suddenly I just wanted to be home in bed. “How do you know about Goto?” I said.
Momo opened the leather bag I’d always admired on the train. She pulled out a wallet and extracted a snapshot. A young man, maybe twenty. Jacket and tie, black glasses, serious expression.
“My brother,” Momo said. “His name was Ryu.” She took a long, wavering breath. “Goto killed him.”
I felt like the shiny steel ball caroming around inside a pachinko machine. There are lots of pachinko parlors in Japan. Each one is a garish, bonging, smoke-filled universe of pinball addicts hammering money into slots. The Japanese couldn’t seem to get enough pachinko. And there was lots of money in it. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Mr. Goto owned a couple of pachinko parlors.
Now here I was, pinballed in a single day from earnest, boring Mrs. Ogawa—ping!—to a mobster in my student’s living room. And then, only a few days later, letting it all hang out in a subterranean piano bar—pong!—and pocketing five hundred bucks a night in tips. That alone would have been enough to make any sensible person consider taking a breather. But no, whoever was playing my machine had something else in store. I’d also developed a crush on someone I didn’t know. Fair enough—Tokyo is full of attractive women. But this one was gazing up at me in the glow of a streetlight outside Inokashira Park at one in the morning. Boinnng! Now was definitely the time to hand back the picture of Momo’s dead brother, hang up the Out of Order sign and take myself out of the game.
None of which, of course, I did.