A drive through Tokyo at dusk provides plenty of time for reflection, and the winking on of all that neon does produce a certain magic. Chisel Face and I crawled along. Tokyo traffic was having its nightly heart attack. Wherever we were going, we were going there slowly.
Still, there was plenty to see. A tourist might have enjoyed passing the gardens of the official residence or the car on a turntable in the Maserati dealership. They might have noticed the pet hotels and the electric light pouring out of the concrete canyons of Akihabara and Shinjuku. But the average tourist wasn’t sitting in an air-conditioned Mercedes, counting the rolls of skin on the back of the driver’s neck.
Chisel Face was not a patient driver. Every time traffic stopped, he snapped the hand brake on, and the map on the GPS screen was replaced by a sumo wrestling match. Two mountainous men circled the ring, looking for an opening. They looked like enormous babies in diapers. The instant traffic began to move again, Chisel Face snapped the hand brake off, the wrestlers vanished, and we lurched forward. It was starting to make me sick. Only once did I actually see the men connect, and they slammed into each other like stags. The impact straightened both wrestlers into a desperate, locked stagger. Each clutched the other’s loincloth for leverage. At least it was a fair fight. I’d already tried my door. I was locked in.
I tried to remember the word for “where.” Something that began with D. Dozo? That meant “please go ahead,” I was pretty sure. Not what my situation called for. Finally it came to me.
“Doko?” I said. “Come on, doko!”
Chisel Face turned and smiled. He had a single gold tooth. “Tsukiji,” he said. The light turned green, the wrestlers vanished in mid-leap and we shot forward again.
Tsukiji was the fish market where Mrs. Ogawa’s husband worked. Every tourist had heard of Tsukiji. The rows of deep-frozen tuna like torpedoes. The samurai swords parting thousands of dollars worth of raw, red flesh. The trays and racks and aquariums of fish and shrimp and mollusks, some dead, some still alive. Some, like the eels swimming weakly in their own blood, were somewhere in between. Tsukiji was the most famous fish market in the world. Whatever was going to happen to me, a prime tourist destination seemed the last place to choose. But I didn’t know the Japanese word for “why.”
The Tsukiji market was built on Tokyo Bay back when the fish arrived by boat from Japanese waters, not from all over the world by air. It took another hour of stop-and-go to get there. My bladder was bursting from fear and whiskey, and I wanted to throw up.
Finally the traffic thinned. The roads became narrower and the shops more tightly spaced, as though we were going back in time. Tsukiji was a district, not just a market, and these streets were its arteries. Shops sold rubber boots, knives, gloves, ski masks, meat hooks. They looked like good places for serial killers to pick up supplies. There were more restaurants even than in the food-infested streets of Shibuya. All of them small, all of them unlikely ever to see a Western face. But many of them were shuttered. The streets were oddly unclogged too. What kind of place was this, where merchants shut down so early?
We pulled up beside a mountain of white polystyrene boxes piled against a low, weathered concrete building. Nearby, rows of refrigerated trucks idled into the night air. Beyond were freighters and cruise ships and fast ferries riding the surface like water beetles. My door swung open. Chisel Face beckoned me out. I mimed “full bladder,” clutching my crotch and swinging from side to side. He pushed me around the mound of boxes, and I peed against the wall of the market while my carsickness subsided. Then he pulled me past a long line of parked forklifts, dug a key out of his pocket and unshackled the hasp on a door I would never even have noticed.
This was not the tourist entrance. Inside, there were no tourists. There were no people of any kind. No fish, no light, just a humid coolness that smelled vaguely of the sea. Tsukiji Market was empty.
If I’d been less focused on jazz, I’d have known that Tsukiji opens at four in the morning. The tuna are auctioned at five. The yellowtail and eels and flounder depart on handcarts, bicycles, trucks, scooters, forklifts. The merchants slurp their noodles in the restaurants until two in the afternoon, and then it’s all put to bed until midnight. I’d also have known that a man with Goto’s reach was perfectly capable of owning one of the coveted licences to trade in Tsukiji Market. That he could come and go as he wished. And that if he wanted a long, undisturbed chat in the evening, a private office in Tsukiji was the perfect place to do it. We were like lovers visiting a love hotel just to get a little privacy.
Chisel Face pulled out a flashlight and nudged me along a concrete floor. It seemed to run forever beneath low-hanging strings of naked lightbulbs. We passed long tables piled with metal trays and looming band saws. We sidestepped shadowy kiosks where the sellers did their calculations and kept their records. On some of the tables, shallow aquariums gurgled, and in one of them I caught the ghoulish gleam of a startled octopus. The floor was wet. I could see just enough to know that there were countless corridors to either side. If I bolted, I’d be lost in seconds.
Finally we reached a narrow hallway with a row of locked doors. Offices? Tea rooms? Torture chambers? Chisel Face unlocked one of them, kicked the door open and pushed me inside. Then he flicked the light on.
A half dozen chairs ringed a beaten-up wooden table littered with newspapers and magazines. It looked like the kind of place where you waited for your new tires to be installed. Chisel Face selected an inch-thick comic book and settled in to read.
I looked around. Desk, fax machine, grimy telephone, filing cabinet. One door, no window. Outside, a few lonely sea urchins and octopuses. By tomorrow they’d be gone, eaten raw and maybe even wriggling. Whatever was about to happen to me, it couldn’t be that bad. A lecture from Goto, some putting me in my place, and I’d be out of here before the next shift showed up. Given the language barrier with Goto and the people who worked for him, most of the ranting would go right over my head. As usual, I’d never know what this was all about.
When the door opened, I realized I was wrong. Yes, it was Goto, and yes, Chisel Face jumped to his feet, ran over to the desk and pulled out the chair. But Goto wasn’t alone. Akiko was two steps behind him, her eyes on the floor. She hadn’t dumped him after all. Or maybe Goto had dragged her here. A second man followed her. He locked the door, walked to the boardroom table and laid Goto’s crocodile briefcase between us. Then he looked at me. It was the third stone face I’d seen today. It was also a face I’d never expected to see again.