CHAPTER TWELVE

The envelope

March 11, 2011

If you don’t really want to know the answer, don’t ask the question. Many people think they want the truth, or ought to know the truth, but when you tell it to them, they act as though you’ve personally assaulted them. Sometimes their reaction is to try to punch you, so learn to duck … or learn to fight.

If people don’t like the message nowadays, they attack the messenger. The messenger and the message are treated as if they were one and the same, especially in journalism, and maybe it’s always been that way for private investigators. Sometimes, you get hired by a client to determine whether the firm they’re doing business with is actually a yakuza front company, and when you tell them that is indeed the unfortunate case, they will fight you every step of the way when you try to turn in your report.

It’s a hard world when doing the job you were hired to do gets you nothing but trouble. Sometimes, the people who hired you to make sure they’re complying with the law and not doing business with anti-social forces don’t want an answer; they just want an alibi.

It was in 2011 that I began to have doubts about whether I wanted to stay in the business of finding out the truth.

In 2011, the world as I knew it started to melt down: physically, metaphysically, metaphorically—everything I thought I’d accomplished seemed inconsequential. I had been playing a winning hand for years, and suddenly the dealer at the upper table called my bluff, I had to fold, and the house had won. Maybe it was time to cash in my chips and get the hell out of Japanland.

It all started on March 11. I was in New York City, not Tokyo.

The Hardest Men in Town was the title of the yakuza film festival sponsored by the Japan Society in New York City, and I had been invited there to speak about the difference between yakuza films and the reality of the yakuza.

I even was lucky enough to have lunch with Paul Schrader, writer of Taxi Driver, directed by Martin Scorsese. Schrader had also written a wonderful and unusual film called The Yakuza, directed by Sidney Pollack in 1975, which featured Robert Mitchum and iconic yakuza film star Ken Takakura. Schrader enthralled me with tales of why his film Mishima, about Japan’s literary genius turned right-wing bodybuilder revolutionary, Yukio Mishima, was never shown in Tokyo. He said that Ken Takakura had accepted the part, but later had to apologetically bow out, saying, “The people I work for will not allow me to be in this film. I hope you understand.”

Mishima was homosexual or bisexual. It wasn’t something people in Japan felt comfortable seeing on screen. Still, I was surprised to know that Takakura had even considered the role.

After finishing lunch with Schrader, I knew I had work to do. I had a few outstanding cases in my inbox—some corporate reports. I went up to my room late in the day to call my boss in what would have been his afternoon in Tokyo. We made chit-chat for a bit, and then I heard some rustling.

“I think we’re having a bit of an earthquake,” he deadpanned.

The rustling grew louder. I could hear people in the office talking to each other in gradually louder tones.

“Is everything all right?” I asked.

“The whole building is swaying. This is quite the earthquake.”

“Maybe you should get out of there. Please let me know you’re safe when you can.”

“Shall do,” he said. And he hung up.

I had no idea what the hell was happening. I called up NHK News (the BBC News of Japan) on my iPhone, which had been introduced to the world a mere three years before and had quickly become the phone of choice in the land of rising technology. The first reports were coming in of a massive earthquake. I tried calling my roommates back in Tokyo, but all the phone lines were busy or dead.

I spent the next hour watching a disaster unfold in slow motion—from across the ocean.

At 2.46 pm a 9.0-magnitude earthquake (the fourth-largest in recorded history) occurred off the coast of Japan. The earthquake started a geological disaster, like hitting the jackpot on a pachinko machine, but with nothing good coming of it. The tremors unleashed a massive tsunami, taller than Tokyo Tower, which reached Japan within half an hour. Cities were wiped out. Thousands of people died or simply vanished into the pounding waters.

And those waves went on to crash into the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. There were reports that the plants were in critical condition and that there might even be a nuclear meltdown.

It was bad news upon bad news. I hopped into a small coffee shop near the Japan Society and asked them to turn on their TV, and I watched. I started emailing friends. At least email was working. Twitter was working. Facebook—kind of. But I couldn’t get anyone on the phone. In those days, I still called people instead of texting them. I didn’t know anyone or have any friends who lived near the epicenter of the earthquake. That was something of a relief, but if I didn’t feel the tragedy personally yet, it didn’t mean I didn’t understand the depth of the calamity.

For the first hour, I dealt with the news with detached calm. I made a checklist of people to contact. And I went through that list, one by one. I’d done this before, but it was a different kind of looming disaster back then.

Slowly, I started to feel a gnawing in my gut, as if I had been so busy that I had missed eating lunch and dinner, and there was no food in the house. I had a Zagnut bar in my luggage and took a bite, but I wasn’t hungry. All I did was leave toasted peanut butter and coconut debris on the counter of the hotel room. I went back to the computer, typing away.

People started writing to me, calling me. It was the worst disaster to happen in the decades I’d spent in Japan, and I wasn’t there. Normally, that’s where I was all the time. In some ways, I suppose the timing couldn’t have been better, because it must have been a terrifying week to be there.

I wanted to go back and make sure the people I loved were safe and sound, but the airports had shut down. Getting home would turn out to be an odyssey.

March 18, 2011

The only flight that would take me home left from San Francisco. It was a short flight, compared to going back from New York. The plane was nearly empty. Three of the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant had already probably melted down. The authorities had evacuated the entire area around the plant, which had become a forbidden zone. There were rumors that a radioactive cloud was drifting from Fukushima to Tokyo. The situation didn’t seem under control.

Had I survived a natural disaster only to fly back to a man-made disaster—was I doing the equivalent of taking a flight back to Chernobyl? The information available was contradictory and not encouraging. Was there another even bigger earthquake on the horizon?

I tried not to think about it.

I had a row to myself on the plane—rows upon rows to myself. I walked the aisles and thought about what I needed to do. The plane had a skeleton crew.

The flight attendants would vanish now and then, and it would seem like I was on a ghost ship. There were no crying kids in the seats, and the lights were low. When we approached Tokyo and started to descend, it looked like the whole country had gone dark. Could a few nuclear reactors going off the grid have crashed the electrical system? All across Japan, the lights were dimmed; there were only tiny points of light. We floated down into a field of fireflies.

The first thing I did when I got off the plane in Narita was find a place to have a smoke, and as soon as I lit up, I felt both a sense of relief and a weird, sweet kind of dread. It had taken me a week to get back from New York.

I was lucky enough to have someone pick me up. Saigo, my reliable ex-yakuza driver and bodyguard, showed up on time in his black Mercedes-Benz, the gas-guzzling monster he insisted on using for work. On my way home from the airport, we dropped off a bag of supplies (toilet paper, diapers, instant ramen, and blankets) to an Inagawa-kai yakuza boss who I knew would take them where they were needed.

It had been hard to get all the bags onto the plane. United Airlines could have charged me for excess baggage, and almost did. The man at the check-in asked me why I was carrying so much, and I told him I was bringing relief supplies because of the earthquake. He said to me, “I am from Chile, where we had a terrible earthquake years ago. I think it’s wonderful what you’re doing.” He didn’t charge me. It was a nice moment.

When I got back to my house at 11.00 pm, on the wooden shelf in the entranceway was the white A4-sized envelope with the results of my very expensive medical check-up that I’d had done before I had left for New York. I had all but forgotten about it.

I opened it up. It was not good news. They had found a 3.6-centimeter tumor in my liver, probably cancerous: “Please come in for a follow-up examination as soon as possible.”

I read the letter twice. I looked at the data twenty times—the pictures, the charts, the scans, the numbers. What did it all mean?

I felt confident that if there was a fortune-telling Magic 8-Ball in my hands, the answer floating in the murky waters would be “Outlook Not So Good” over and over. For a fleeting second, I thought about writing bad poetry, or maybe a haiku. But then I remembered the immortal words of Basho, the great poet, who once said the following:

How witty is he,

who sees a flash of lightning and does not say,

“Life is fleeting.”

I took the results up to the tatami bedroom of my rented old Japanese house. I was too tired to deal with turning on the light; I touched the TaoTronics lamp on the desk, which lit up barely a quarter of the room. As I did so, I caused a minor paper avalanche.

Camille—my French flatmate, a redhead we all called Kami-sama (as if she was a god)—had piled up some of my mail and two weeks’ worth of newspapers on my desk. She had stacked them neatly, and I had quickly and casually knocked them all over the place while fumbling for the light. I shuffled briefly through the newspapers: the Mainichi, Yomiuri, Asahi, Sankei. It was amazing how similar each newspaper’s coverage of the nuclear disaster was; no one was calling it a meltdown yet, and everyone knew that it was.

I stole a glance at the Yomiuri’s coverage—they were pulling their punches. I had worked at that newspaper for twelve-and-a-half years, and I knew that Tokyo Electric Power Company, as one of its biggest advertisers, always got a certain amount of slack.

I searched my desk drawers for a pack of clove cigarettes, found one, and lit up, sucking in the sweet smoke and listening to the crackle of cloves and tobacco. The lit end of the cigarette sparked a little, and I was careful not to set the examination results on fire.

My grasp of Japanese medical terminology is not good, but I was certainly familiar with liver cancer, having seen documents that pertained to the liver cancer of one particularly bad man. Yakuza often have Hep C or other liver problems due to their tattoos, or the dirty needles and awls used in the tattooing process, or their histories of using methamphetamines via injections.

I definitely knew the characters for liver disease, in all its variations. The character for liver in Japanese is an important one. There’s even a compound word in Japanese using the character for liver that means “what is really important.” Literally: liver and heart. Those were important things.

Well, what else was important? After reading a single sheet of paper, everything that I was doing and had done seemed unimportant. In fact, I had been thinking on the long, nearly empty plane ride back that while the yakuza were a social evil and a menace to Japan and perhaps the world, there were worse things than the yakuza. One of them was the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which was lying through its teeth about the nuclear disaster and what they knew—as, possibly, were people in the Japanese government who had let them run amok for decades. I was thinking that really evil people might not necessarily have a tattoo. I chain-smoked a few cigarettes, trying to figure it all out, oscillating between self-pity, anger, hope, and fear.

First of all, there was no mystery here.

The probable reasons for my getting cancer were right in front of my face, between my fingers, and yet I kept smoking. I can’t say that I was surprised. You’re not going to stay well if you smoke all the time, drink excessively, put yourself in stressful situations, exercise rarely, and never get enough sleep—or only sleep when you can find enough sleeping pills to put you out for a few hours.

At least it was not prostate cancer. I might die, but I could at least enjoy fucking around for a few more months, or so I figured. Sex was the only extracurricular activity I enjoyed anymore. I distracted myself by looking at the rest of the results. Other than cancer, I seemed to be in relatively good health for a forty-one-year-old—very soon to be a forty-two-year-old—man.

I tried to calm myself. It wasn’t a definitive diagnosis; it was only a preliminary diagnosis. I started looking at the words I didn’t know in the document, one of them being “cancer marker.” And when I checked what that meant—that it was an indicator of how likely it was that you had cancer—and what my cancer marker was, and the qualitative value of the figures I was seeing, I felt a sort of turbulence. Maybe it was another aftershock, a seismic one.

I wasn’t sure what to do next. I wasn’t sure who to tell. I decided quickly that I wasn’t going to tell my estranged wife or my kids. Why give someone something to worry about when there was nothing they could do about it? I don’t believe that sharing is caring when it comes to personal crises. Sometimes, you just hand someone a burden without any way of alleviating that burden, just to make yourself feel better. The more someone cares about you, the more likely they are to worry about things like this.

They can worry, but they can’t do anything else.

I would talk to my father. He was a pathologist and a coroner. He understood cancer and death. And he had a good sense of humor about those things.

I went for a walk in the neighborhood, still smoking away. The 7-Eleven was open. The lights were half off, and the shelves were nearly empty. As I expected, there was no toilet paper. When disaster strikes, the first thing that people in Japan hoard is toilet paper. Cue the Freudian “anal retentive” jokes. No one is sure why this happens, except that it has happened before. Japanese tradition.

I bought some chips, and I almost bought a bottle of Zima, “the malternative,” but then I decided to just buy a bottle of Mitsuya Cider.

I was glad I had toilet paper at home. I thought about the shortage as I was walking back, and came to one conclusion. It wasn’t just a Japan problem. Maybe it happens all over the world—crisis turns people into selfish assholes, and the first thing they think about is taking care of their own asshole.

For some reason, I remembered that when I started working for the newspaper in 1993, I was told that a wise reporter never drinks alone—it’s a gateway to becoming an alcoholic, and I already had one vice that was bad for me. Now, there were 10,000 thoughts in my head. I couldn’t think straight. I wanted some sort of sign from the universe as to what I should do next. I decided not to go straight home from the 7-Eleven, but to go and drink down at the Hachimangu shrine. The huge stairs going up to the shrine from the park were always a good place to sit and think late at night. I could go buy a fortune, if they were open. I’m superstitious, and I wanted metaphysical reassurance.

The shrine was closed; there were no signs from the stars to be had. I sat on the concrete steps, shivering a little in the cold, finished my cider, and smoked a cigarette. When I got back home, I had only an occasional sense of swaying and dizziness; there were still tremors every day and every night. They weren’t so bad, Camille said; they had been much worse while I was gone. “This is not my lucky year,” she told me.

Yeah, this year was turning out to be an unlucky one. Unlucky for everyone. Maybe I just needed a lucky charm to ward off the diagnosis if I could find one before going back in for a follow-up consultation on Monday. That made no sense, but that’s magical thinking for you.

I was sure I had a lucky charm somewhere, maybe pinned to my wooden desk, perhaps under the newspapers. It was either the one that warded off evil or guaranteed victory. I wondered if luck was a replenishable substance. I had a vague recollection that you were supposed to replace the protective talismans and other knick-knacks every year. Clearly, I had not been paying proper tribute to the gods.

I was still looking for it when I saw the placard. I’ve never been a huge fan of inspirational literature, but I did have a quote from my Zen master—although I thought of him more like a Zen big brother—written in Japanese calligraphy on a small placard taped to the wall.

I’m not sure that he was the person who said it originally, or if he was paraphrasing someone else, but I had been moved by the words when he had said them to me earlier in the year:

It’s never too late

to be what you might

have been.

… Or wanted to be.

Yeah, it was a lovely sentiment, but maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe sometimes it is too late to be the person you wanted to be.

I put the placard in my left hand, and I stepped onto the balcony. It was eerily quiet; there were no sounds of people chatting, no cars passing in the distance, no trains running. It was as if someone had pressed “mute” on the remote control of the world. Many people had already fled Tokyo, thinking that the nuclear accident might get even worse, that a cloud of deadly radiation might waft down to us in the metropolis. Massive numbers of gaijin had left Japan for safer places, earning the ridicule of those who had stayed behind, calling them “flyjin.”

Well, I didn’t consider them cowards or foolish. No one knew what the hell was going on in Japan. I’d only come back because I had work to do and people to take care of.

I had two cigarettes left. I put the second-to-last one in my mouth. There was a blue plastic bucket of water in the corner of the balcony, next to a faucet. Out of frustration, or in a kind of existential temper tantrum, I took out my lighter, and I set the placard on fire and dropped it into the bucket after it had almost completely burned to a crisp. I had second thoughts about what I was doing, but, of course, once you set fire to something, it’s a little too late to have second thoughts.

I wanted to listen to depressing music, maybe early Miles Davis, while I smoked the last cigarette of the night, but the batteries in my headphones were dead, and I didn’t want to go downstairs to look for new ones. In the hush of the night, I smoked my Gudan down to the stub and tossed it in the bucket. I went inside, closed the door behind me, and took two sleeping pills—Halcion to knock me out, and Nitrazepam (Nerubon) to keep me asleep.

As I felt the Halcion kick in, dragging me down to sleep, I couldn’t stop thinking about the placard. Maybe it really was too late to change anything at all.