I stared stupidly at the kid’s picture until Momo took it back. She linked her arm through mine and tugged me toward the park. “Do you want to hear?” she said.
Part of me knew even then that the right answer was, What about that job at the pastry shop? Shouldn’t you be getting some sleep? But Momo felt good in the dark. Her head came up to my shoulder. It was just me and her and the cherry trees. Even the crows had gone to bed.
“Tell me all about it,” I said.
“Ryu would be twenty-five now,” Momo said. “Five years younger than me But something happened to him. As a teenager. He became hikikomori. How do you say in English? Maybe stay-at-home boy. This is big problem in Japan, you know.”
I didn’t.
“Ryu stopped going school, all day in his room, never come out. I am finishing high school, I can’t help. Nobody can help. My parents operate farm. It’s very bad situation.”
“Farm?”
“My family is from small village. It’s hard life for them. Young people want to go Tokyo.”
“Including you?”
Momo took her time answering. We walked along the edge of the artificial lake, where you could rent rowboats and churn through floating cherry blossoms. There were pedal boats too, in the shape of enormous white swans, and I could just make out a long row of them at the dock. Their curved necks made them look like cobras ready to strike.
“I came here to look for Ryu,” Momo finally said. “One day he was gone. We thought he would go Tokyo. So I became Tokyo Girl.”
Inokashira Park was deserted. In a few hours it would be thronging with dog walkers and schoolgirls with furry pink animals dangling from their book bags. Commuters on bicycles would weave around babies and banjo players. The pedestrian mall outside the Tom and Mary would be a river of humanity. There were thirteen million people in Tokyo. How did you find one runaway kid?
“It took three years,” Momo said, as though she had read my thoughts. “Just I keep trying. There are many places in Tokyo where homeless go. You don’t see them.”
I thought of the vomiting gaijin on the train. There, but invisible.
“Ryu was in one of these places. He looked not so good. But he’s trying. Sometimes he let me bring him food. In winter, it’s very cold here. But Ryu was getting better. Even he starts talking about getting a job. Then jishin.”
She said the last word in a whisper. I leaned down.
“Earthquake,” Momo said. “Fukushima. Everybody changed.”
“Even in Tokyo?”
“Fukushima is not so far. We have many aftershock in Tokyo. And then there is reactor situation. Everybody is frightened. Everybody is angry.”
That much I knew. I could still see the crowds in Meiji Park, the protesters’ flags and radiation masks and megaphones.
“And then you lost him again,” I said. We were halfway through the park now, and I was beginning to feel lost myself. At night, the pleasant and familiar became unfriendly. The massive trees that provided such welcome shade during the day now seemed to enclose and threaten. Their twisted trunks became the looming creatures of nightmares. A ghostly pool of light floated toward us, and I jumped. But it was only a lone pedestrian, head bowed over a glowing smartphone.
“The yakuza took him. To Fukushima. I never saw Ryu again.”
“The yakuza?” This was going too fast. “I thought yakuza were, like, small-time gangsters. Extortion, protection money, construction, that kind of thing.” And piano bars, I thought. Maybe Momo didn’t quite understand my English, but she got the message.
“Not now. Now yakuza are businessmen. No more cutting fingers off if you make mistake. Whatever you want, yakuza give you good price.”
“But what does that have to do with your brother?”
“Yakuza provide people too. Especially for jobs nobody want. You remember Fukushima Fifty?”
Heroic workers struggle to contain runaway reactors? I did remember that. A newspaper story read on a crowded train. It seemed like another life now. Before Momo.
“Not only fifty. Many more. My brother one of Fukushima Fifty. Your boss sent him there.”
We were nearing the border of the park. Now the path would follow the sluggish river to the next station, at Kugayama. There would be houses again now, with miniature front gardens and orange trees and the dusty park where the old men played shogi. I just wanted to sleep.
“Goto’s not my boss,” I said.
Momo squeezed my arm and pulled me to a stop. She looked up at me, half smiling.
“Did you know that Japanese boys used to capture crickets?” she said. “They keep them as little pets, in cages.”
“I didn’t know that.” Where was this going?
Momo laughed. “Now you are Goto’s cricket.”
“Only until I quit.”
Momo pulled me ahead. We were under streetlights again, and they lit the overhanging trees from beneath. The ghostly branches spanned the river. In a few minutes we would pass the Foot Park shoe store and the Snack Bohème bar with the neon sign that read Whiskey and Music. And then I’d be home.
“Ryu couldn’t quit the job Goto gave him,” Momo finally said. “Neither can you.”
We left the river and passed a tidy row of locked commuter bicycles outside the train station. The tracks ran twenty feet from my little block of bachelor apartments. The trains would rattle the clothes hanger on my balcony and cover my shirts with dust.
“Thank you for listening my story,” Momo said. She stood on tiptoe, brushed my cheek with her lips, then ran into the station. Fast but effective.
Maybe I should have asked Momo how she knew her brother was dead. But my rational self seemed to have run away with her.