“Am I prettier than Akiko-san?”
I hadn’t seen that one coming. “My student?”
“Unh.” Momo snuggled a little closer into my chest.
“How could you know about Akiko?”
Momo laughed. “Everyone knows who is Goto’s mistress. Akiko-san is not only one. But, I think, she is only one who takes piano lessons.” Another squeeze. “From a such sweet gaijin.”
They say that really big cities are just a collection of towns. Tokyo obviously qualified, and Momo and I were the proof. We’d gone from sharing a train car to cuddling on barstools and discussing my piano students. I gave her an answering squeeze. “You and Akiko? Not even in the same league. Akiko the icicle, I call her.”
“Unh?”
“It’s like a long, hanging spear of ice. Sometimes it drops on your head.”
Momo digested this information. It seemed to satisfy her. Then she said, “Can I ask favor?”
Japanese taverns are loud places. The cooks and the servers yell orders back and forth. They greet and thank their customers, bang woks and plunge various forms of protein into seething oil. Alarm bells, especially the tiny internal ones, are hard to hear in a Japanese tavern at one in the morning. At least, that’s my excuse.
“A favor? Why not?” Already I was thinking of next Sunday.
“Only if it’s okay with you,” Momo said. She did an endearing sideways thing with her lower lip.
“Of course it’s okay. What’s the favor?”
“Goto-san keeps an account book. But it’s not money. It’s a list of names, dates, ages. Places.”
I yawned. Now that I’d eaten, I suddenly felt exhausted. “An account book,” I said. “Not too surprising. What’s the favor?”
Momo dropped my arm and began to doodle in a puddle of soya sauce. “This one has names of all men his company sold to TEPCO. For work in reactor.”
“The Fukushima Fifty?”
“And Ryu, I think. I have to know. All I need is, see this list.” She seized my arm again. “I need to know. My parents need to know. Can you help us?”
“You want me to steal an account book from a yakuza boss.”
“No, no, not steal. Just—just only if you see it. Then you can tell me. That man, I think he killed my brother.” She wiped up the spilled sauce and crumpled the napkin. “I need to know,” she said again. Her voice had gotten small, and she lowered her head. “O-negai shimasu.” Please.
What harm could it do? People left things lying around. Maybe I would spot the ledger, maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe Goto carried it around in his precious crocodile briefcase. She wasn’t asking me to steal it.
“How will I recognize it?” I said. Momo took a pen out of her bag and wrote two characters on the back of the bill for our food. Squiggles and dots. They meant nothing to me, but I could recognize them if I saw them again. I pulled out some money for the food and put the bill in my wallet.
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
Momo pulled my head down and brushed my ear with her lips. She bit gently. “Next Sunday,” she whispered.
When I got back to my apartment, my legs had turned to lead and my memory had turned selective. Account books and dead brothers were no match for flavored sake and a nip on the ear. I crept into the phone-booth-sized shower and stood under the hot water, washing off scented oils from the Fifteen Love. By the time I whipped the covers off my bed, I was half asleep. But what I uncovered woke me up fast.
There was a fish in my bed. And not just any fish. Sunshine, Akiko’s favorite koi, had been opened from gills to tail, the guts artfully arranged on the sheet. Heart, liver, pearly coils of intestine, the shiny, deflated balloon of the swim bladder. And two slender white fingers of the testes, so Akiko had been right. Sunshine was a boy. His insides were dusted with golden scales. If a fish could commit hara-kiri, it would want to look like this, artful and obscene.
Sunshine’s eyes were clouded, and he was starting to smell. I grabbed the edges of the sheet and drew it around him. Then I rolled everything into a bloody white package and shoved it into the refrigerator next to a four-pack of Asahi. But Sunshine’s juices had seeped into the mattress. My bed smelled like the Tsukiji fish market at the end of a long day.
I pulled the blanket off, curled up on the floor and tried to sleep. The light beside my bed was still on, and I wasn’t about to turn it off. And the questions kept coming at me like an army of unkillable zombies. None of the answers made me feel any better.
Who had done this? Someone with a sharp knife, a taste for violence and a sense of its formalities. Goto didn’t need to do this kind of work, but he had men in suits and cheap cologne who would. Why was easily answered. This was obviously a warning. But why me? And why now? True, I’d seen a well-dressed thug come out of Akiko’s house, but how did that make me a threat? If Goto didn’t want me around his girlfriend, all he had to do was tell her to stop the lessons. The last time I’d seen the man, he was shelling out ten-thousand-yen notes each time I played one of his favorites. Maybe he was just the kind of person who liked to spread the hurt around. And maybe this was why Momo had called my apartment dangerous.
I’d spent the entire evening hidden away in a love hotel, a place where discretion was the entire point. Momo and her determination to get to the bottom of her brother’s death couldn’t possibly have anything to do with Sunshine’s. No, the only connection I had to anyone who got off on disemboweling pet fish was Akiko. I tried to imagine a man in a hot suit chasing a big fish around with a net. Did he club it to death first? Did he put the corpse in his trunk, in true gangster style? Did he ransack Akiko’s house for one of my business cards to get my address, or did he just beat it out of her?
That was as far as I had gotten when the first trains began to run at five in the morning. Akiko would either cancel her lessons, or she wouldn’t. Either way, it was about her, not me. Sunshine was her favorite, not mine. I would wait and see and count the days until next Wednesday. I pulled the fishy blanket around my shoulders. I concentrated on how I’d felt when Momo had emerged from the shower and stepped into the churning purple of the marble hot tub. Finally I drifted off.