For the next few days, Japan was all about the nuclear reactors in Fukushima. The local media featured apologizing officials and the unimaginable task of cleaning up after a disaster that had turned thousands into refugees. Every one of them had to be sheltered, fed, doctored and reassured. Japan had its hands full. The country also had to deal with Western nations who wouldn’t stop pointing out that TEPCO had dropped the ball from the moment seawater got into the control rooms. North Americans were sending in donations while worrying about contaminated debris washing up on their own beaches.
With this kind of attention, Japan was going to do whatever it took to clean those reactors up. Even if it meant subcontracting the hiring of suicide squads to the yakuza. The Japan Times carried an article on key members of the Tokyo yakuza, and their role in “helping” deal with the crisis. That made me feel better. If Goto had the spotlight on him, maybe he’d back off on the girlfriend bashing and the fish killing.
But when I approached Akiko’s front door on Wednesday, the little speech I had ready, about Sunshine and his stomach contents and my bed, went out the window. Because there were still two koi circling in Akiko’s pond. And one of them was a deep, burnished gold. The door opened silently, and Akiko joined me. She was wearing sunglasses so large they covered a third of her face. We watched the two fish nibble at algae growing on the rocks.
“Sunshine is feeling much better now,” Akiko said. She drew off the sunglasses and led me inside. When she sat down at the piano I saw that one eye was puffy, even under a heavy layer of makeup. If she wasn’t going to acknowledge Sunshine’s disappearance and reincarnation, neither was I. She sat erect as a grade-schooler and played through her Chopin prelude better than any student of mine had ever done. Something—grief, resignation, maybe even anger—was being channeled into this music. There was no need for me to plead for more emotion now.
“Again, please,” I said. I got up and made a slow circle of the piano as she played, and the music was even better this time. Do it, I told myself. Get it over with. I ran my eyes quickly over all the surfaces in the room, although there weren’t many. A chair, an ebony table with a statue of a Chinese courtesan carved from an elephant tusk, which had to be a pointed gift from Goto. Nowhere for even a speck of dust, let alone Momo’s mysterious account book. But I’d looked. I’d done my duty. When I heard a door open, I clasped my hands behind my back, music-teacher style, and kept moving.
“Frank.” Goto clapped me on the shoulder with one hand and held on to the crocodile briefcase in the other. “Good?” he said, gesturing at his girlfriend’s back. Akiko played on. These people had taken discretion to new levels. I was out of my depth.
“Remarkably good,” I said. “All things considered.” Goto whacked me on the back again and headed off into another room, leaving a vapor trail of Dunhill. How many businesses did he have his fingers in? Bars and human trafficking, I already knew. What about prostitution? Maybe a love hotel or two? Maybe the ledger was in the valise, maybe it was under Akiko’s bed. I didn’t care. I couldn’t wait for the lesson to end. I complimented Akiko, accepted my cash and hurried past the reborn Sunshine into the street.
After Akiko’s air-conditioned cell, the pavement threw off heat like a griddle. A sailor-suited teenager on a bicycle swerved around me, and I staggered into a vending machine. It featured a picture of the actor Tommy Lee Jones glaring at a selection of Boss canned coffees. I bought an iced latte, but it didn’t seem to make him any happier. He was frowning all the way to the bank.
My unhappiness was different. Unlike Mr. Jones, I actually lived in Japan. I even worked there. My problem was that, even if I learned the language properly, I would never be anything but a visitor. I would never know what was going on right under my nose.
On the plus side, the food was spectacular and people were polite. My success at the Tom and Mary was a powerful antidote to being a nobody back home. Here, I could be a somebody and a nobody at the same time. The nobody was invisible, but the somebody was making good money, tax free.
But Japanese people confused me. For example, one of my students refused to show any emotion when she played but burst into tears when she tried to imagine a full moon. Another student had rebuilt what had probably been a perfectly good face, allowed her boyfriend to rough her up and refused to cry—but she played beautifully. And her boyfriend—what was I to make of him? In the space of a few weeks he’d dropped a dream job in my lap, had one of his thugs put a deceased fish in my bed and slapped my back like an old friend the next day. Plus he’d caused the death of somebody’s brother in a crippled nuclear reactor. And I was sleeping with that somebody.
I set off for the train station. Train stations were where the cheap restaurants were. I knew I could sit at a kaiten-sushi place—where chefs put color-coded plates of sushi on an endless conveyor belt—and gorge myself for the cost of a hamburger in Canada. Soon I would find myself across from Momo, awaiting her instructions for next Sunday. Momo might be my biggest Japanese puzzle, but she was also the only person I had actually connected with. When you’re alone in a strange country, connection is hard to turn down. And if there was something about my new friend that didn’t add up, the closer it came to Sunday night, the less I could concentrate on doing the math.