I didn’t sleep well that night—what was left of it. It wasn’t the trains that kept me awake, or the after-buzz of late-night performing. I’d played in Kaz Nakamura’s bar in Nanaimo four nights a week for three years before Kaz disappeared. I knew how to hit the pillow, switch off and get six solid hours.
But in all that time, I hadn’t exactly lived a life of romantic excess. For a guy who had tuned pianos all day, taken a nap and then played all night, the chances of hooking up with the right woman were slim.
But I was in a city of thirteen million now. Statistically, there were 162 times the number of women in Tokyo than there were in Nanaimo. And you had to be living under a rock not to realize that many Japanese women found Western men attractive. I’d seen plenty of giddy, glamorous girls clinging to lumbering Australians and Americans. Now maybe I was part of the pool. Still—a couple of weeks fantasizing about a woman on a train, and suddenly she’s kissing me under a streetlight? It was too easy.
That was what was keeping me awake. Kisses didn’t normally land on me quite that easily. Momo’s had been more of a peck than a kiss, but it had still felt good. Replaying it in the eerie silence before the trains started rattling past my window had been good for an hour or so of insomnia. Dissecting everything she’d told me about her brother’s tragedy and the business practices of my new employer had taken care of the rest. Eventually I decided to dwell on the kiss rather than the story. I finally drifted off to the sound of my neighbor coughing through the wall.
Waking up was one of those experiences that reminds you not to take anything for granted in Japan. Two things registered. First, there was natural light leaking through the grimy blind, so it had to be dawn. Second, my bed was moving. Not just my bed—the whole floor, the whole room, probably the whole building, was swaying. It was like lying on an air mattress in a swimming pool when the fat guy jumps in. The weirdest thing was the silence. No crashes, no creaks, not even the sound of a picture falling off the wall. Not that I had any pictures.
The earthquake lasted a minute or so, long enough to make me wonder whether it was ever going to stop. Another aftershock from the big one in Fukushima? I knew that if I flipped on the TV, a serious-looking lady would already be standing in front of a map of Japan. A pulsing red dot would tell us the location and how bad it was. For weeks the coastline between Tokyo and Fukushima had been a string of red lights. I waited this one out, but I got the message: if you think you’ve got everything figured out, think again.
At least I was smart enough to do a little research on Mr. Goto. When my room stopped swimming, I fried two eggs, grilled a halved baguette, opened a tub of excellent yogurt and made coffee. Food was cheap in Japan, and always startlingly fresh. I turned on my laptop.
There was plenty to read, in English, on Akiko’s jazz-loving sugar daddy. Mr. Goto was something of a celebrity, if you followed the ups and downs of what some people called the Japanese Mafia—the yakuza. The missing finger meant he was old-school. In those days, having a digit chopped off was the price you paid for missteps on your climb up the ladder. For a guy in his sixties, as Goto seemed to be, today’s young yakuza must have seemed spineless and soft. No tattoos, and their intact fingers in legitimate businesses, just like the mob in North America. Technically, being a yakuza wasn’t even illegal.
Goto seemed to be high up in one of the three major yakuza “families” in Tokyo. It made sense that he’d have his hand in a bar or two, and that he could indulge his fondness for jazz and young women. So yes, Goto was a bad guy, but I had known that the moment he stepped into Akiko’s music lesson. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything helpful on the responsibilities of a lowly employee like me. Momo’s warning about my being somehow bound to Akiko’s protector was going to have to wait to be proved valid.
She had been right, though, about yakuza involvement in Fukushima. The story about her brother and others being scooped off the street and put to work in the nuclear reactor looked true. And it wasn’t just Western reporters and bloggers with an agenda who were sounding the alarm. There were plenty of Japanese sources too, one of them writing in tolerable English. He had actually gotten himself sent into the reactors and sneaked his stories out. The heroic Fukushima Fifty had been a lot more than fifty, and most of them had come from the lowest level of Japanese society. The final link wasn’t a pleasant one. TEPCO, the all-powerful electric utility, had subcontracted the hiring of these unfortunate men to the yakuza.
Or so the Internet told me. How was I to judge? Hiring workers was a perfectly legal thing to do. The way the yakuza put it, they were doing a public service. And if Momo was right, that meant you had to give Goto some credit. The thing is, was she right?
They say that Japan’s crowded society functions smoothly because all Japanese learn, right from the start, how to keep their real feelings behind a mask. Deception is a survival skill. I’d seen the TEPCO top brass covering their asses on TV, and I seemed to be working for a Tokyo gangster who had a place in Japanese society. As far as I was concerned, such people were unlikable, dishonest, possibly even evil. Against that, Momo had felt good on my arm, and I could still feel that almost-kiss. I decided to go with what felt good.
A train jammed with commuters thundered past my apartment, and the last of my coffee trembled in its cup. The trains were coming every five minutes or so now, peak commuter timing. I’d overslept. Today was Wednesday, so I’d be spending some serious time on the train myself. I had Mrs. Ogawa at ten, then Goto’s enigmatic girlfriend. After that, if there were no more aftershocks to throw the trains off schedule, I would see Momo again on the 8:03 out of Shibuya. I couldn’t wait.