CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Who goes there?

All things come to an end, and, fortunately for me, by late August 2011 I stopped having chemotherapy. It wasn’t all bad. Every cloud has a silver lining, and I wouldn’t say that about cancer or chemotherapy with a straight face, but there were surprising, weird benefits.

I lost a lot of weight; I don’t think I’d been able to fit into a pair of size-33 jeans for years. I had a lower libido, which also kept me out of trouble. The doctors also warned me there was a chance that chemotherapy might make me sterile, and they were right. Think of the lifetime savings in condoms! Banzai.

My writing output dwindled from a flood of articles to a small stream. I had been writing for The Atlantic Wire, The Daily Beast, The Japan Times, and sometimes for ZAITEN, but between March and August 2011 my output declined drastically. I didn’t have the energy. To finish one article took me weeks.

I went home to Missouri between chemo sessions and my due diligence work that I had to keep doing because it paid the bills. I spent time hanging out with the family. Beni and Ray were great kids, still pre-teens and feisty, but never getting into trouble. They had essentially grown up in the U.S., but the due diligence gigs provided the means for to me travel back home often. I was grateful for all of that. I had decided not to tell them about the cancer. I had many low-energy days, but I tried to time my trips when I was at the tail end of a chemotherapy session before the next one came.

But things being what they were, I had to spend a lot of time in Japan. And I spent much of it with Michiel.

After a while, I’ve noticed, there is a sickness fatigue that settles in among the friends of those who are ill. Fewer people come to see them. Maybe they write, send postcards, or promise to drop by, but they don’t. This didn’t bother Michiel in the least.

We spent a lot of time in her hospital room at St. Marianna University School of Medicine in Kawasaki. I knew the hospital very well. After another relapse of leukemia, she was there for a large part of 2009. As a matter of fact, I still knew her room number in the blood diseases ward by heart.

Whenever I walked into her room, she was doing yoga on the bed. All over the world, hospitals have an unpleasant over-sanitized smell. It conceals the smell of the dead, dying, and sick. One summer, I volunteered as an orderly at the Harry S. Truman Veterans Hospital, where my father was the chief of pathology. After a while, I began to recognize the scent of the terminally ill. It wasn’t nauseating, but it wasn’t fragrant either. Michiel never had a room to herself, and people came and went. Sometimes, they were very ill.

Due to chemo, she developed some allergies. Air fresheners made her sick. Gluten made her nauseous. Every time I came back from my travels to Japan, I brought her bags of gluten-free cookies, cereals, and snacks. She was always outrageously grateful, but it was never an act. Mimi was always like that.

I decided I was going to make her an organic air freshener. I found a recipe in a New Age magazine called Real Simple, but it was still a bit complicated. The recipe called for coffee grounds (dry), cinnamon, dried ginger, and sandalwood chips. The sandalwood was pricey, but I knew someone who had some—Ryōgen, my landlord from decades ago and my Zen master. I dropped by without notice, and he didn’t seem to mind.

He had met Michiel once, and was saddened to hear about her condition. Upon entering the temple, he invited me to his room on the first floor before the main seating area and diagonally across from the stairs. His hot-water kettle and his green tea pot were on the long table, as usual. Papers, newsletters, and envelopes were piled up in semi-orderly piles. I explained my plan to make Mimi some homemade air freshener.

He had me wait while he went into the back of the temple, behind the Buddhist altar, and rummaged around for some sandalwood.

“It’s really nice of you,” he told me. “Hospitals are sad places, and the air is horrible. Sandalwood will purify the air and give her some peace.”

“Yes, I hope so.”

“Here you go,” he said, handing me a bag full of sandalwood pieces.

“Thank you, very much,” I said, taking them with a bow.

My response in normal Japanese would have been, “No, that’s too much” or “Are you sure?”

But that fake formality annoyed Ryōgen immensely.

If you asked, “Is it really okay?” he’d probably respond, “No, it’s not okay. Give it back.”

Or, “I wouldn’t offer it if I didn’t mean it. Just say thank you and take it.”

I knew the drill.

“What’s going to happen to her now?” he asked.

“She’s probably going to get a bone-marrow transplant from her mother. The theory is that the last transplants from her brother were too good. Because he was such a perfect match, her immune system was not stimulated to fight off the next leukemia invasion. That’s why they hope this one will work. Her white blood cells have to be removed prior to the transplant, so that the transplant takes well.”

“How many bone-marrow transplants has she had so far?”

“I think two.”

“Ah.”

“Ah?”

“Then she will probably die this time. Her time in this incarnation may be over. I hope that she lives.”

He said it as nonchalantly as he might say, “It looks as if it might be a cold and windy day tomorrow. Wear your good coat.” That was just the way he spoke.

“I hope she survives as well. She’s survived three relapses. Miracles happen.”

“Sometimes,” he said, averting his eyes, and pouring me a cup of tea. I drank it down, and thanked him again and left.

It was a very short walk to the station. Ryōgen never really minced words. He was brutally honest, which was unusual in Japanese society. But being brutally honest didn’t mean that he was always right.

Though I’m not much of an artisan, I was able to grind, smash, and pulverize the ingredients by following the instructions to create a pleasant potpourri. But there were rules about these things at the hospital, so I ended up putting it in small scent bags. In Japan, these are called nioi bukuro. Mimi loved the homemade air freshener. She kept one bag under her pillow, and secretly put one into the air conditioner/heater so that the scent wafted from it gently. It made the room seem subtly more pleasant.

Usually, I took a taxi up to see her, and sometimes Saigo drove me. While on the road, I learned how to fight off car sickness and write well. Also, I worked on the way back. When I took the train up, I timed it so I could get a seat and either read or write.

However, I had to give the hospital props for finally getting wi-fi. Back in 2009, Mimi and I had only been able to communicate by texts on her cellphone, which was a far cry from a smartphone. Eventually, I resorted to buying her a mobile router so she could communicate with her friends and, of course, me, and we were finally able to become Facebook friends. Thanks, Zuck.

But in the spring of 2011, nearly two years later, here we were again. There was a sort of déjà vu to it all, like a dream that was repeating. As I got better, Mimi alternated between getting better and getting worse. There were drugs keeping the leukemia at bay, but the underlying condition had to be addressed.

We played board games, shared books, and watched movies. She started preparing for her master’s degree. I remember one afternoon in May we snuck out to a nearby park and spent the afternoon discussing her future. She seemed a little downbeat.

“What’s up, Mimi?”

“Jake,” she said, exhaling, “I’m thinking of changing my area of focus in graduate studies. I don’t think I’m going to focus on human trafficking in Japan anymore. It doesn’t seem as relevant as it was when I started.”

“Okay,” I said. “I think that’s probably wise.”

“You’re not disappointed in me?”

“No, not at all. I get it.”

A lot had happened since I’d written a recommendation in March 2007 to support her application to the Monterey Institute of International Studies Graduate School of International Policy Studies. In her essay to apply for the graduate school, Michiel had written:

I aspire for a career at an international organization such as the IOM (International Organization for Migration), where I can fight for my all-time passion, combatting human trafficking. [Not only do I find it personally abhorrent, but intellectually, it] is a terrible exploit of labor that robs women, men and children of their freedom and dignity. In fact, human trafficking is too polite of a term. “Modern slavery” is a more apt expression. Perhaps if portrayed by this term, more people would share my vehemence to combat it.

I [have done] fieldwork with a nongovernmental organization called The Asia Foundation, assisting rescued victims of human trafficking in Japan by guiding them to shelters, getting in touch with their families, and arranging flights home if they desired it.

I have also taken the approach of public awareness. In order to decrease the demand in Japan, I helped organize seminars with the Foundation to make the current situation public. The majority of Japanese do not have the faintest idea that they live in the largest destination country for victims of trafficking.

Worse, most look down upon these foreigners with menial jobs, having no idea that they were tricked into coming to Japan, their passports taken away upon arrival, forced into debt, not paid for their services, and threatened with the death of their families if they were to run away.

And that was still true in 2007. But now it was 2011.

In my own way, I’d been waging a war on human trafficking in Japan, and she had been a sister in arms. And when I thought about it, it wasn’t “I”—it was “Us.” She had helped me get hold of a copy of the International Labor Organization (ILO) report on human trafficking in Japan in 2005. The Japanese government had paid for the research, but when they read the report, they told the ILO to bury it and not release it to the public.

It was a scathing indictment of Japan’s lack of interest in helping human trafficking victims and of its consistent failure to prosecute the cold-blooded criminals running the operations. This passage, in particular, brought it all home:

Japan’s commitment to rigid migration policies and its strong position against illegal migration may have informed its hesitancy to recognize and deal with trafficking in general. Some difficulties arise in clearly defining human trafficking, people smuggling and illegal immigration when dealing with actual cases, largely because of the clandestine nature of these activities. Similarly, victims of trafficking may be perceived to be voluntary participants in illegal immigration, which thereby removes their right to protection.

While there is international consensus that trafficking victims should be treated as such and should receive proper protection and rehabilitation, in practice they still are very often arrested, detained, and deported as illegal immigrants.

Victims frequently bear all costs of the deceptions they have undergone, while the traffickers retain their profits and are rarely prosecuted.

Michiel and I had read the whole thing on a tight deadline, picked out the most important parts, and translated them. I wrote the article for the Yomiuri Shimbun, and it landed on the front page. It was such an embarrassment to the government of Japan that they delayed their announcement of planned anti-trafficking measures, and as result strengthened them.

Michiel had been an incredible help in drafting the report on human trafficking in Japan for the U.S. State Department from 2006 to 2008. It made me think of how long I’d known her and what a stand-up ally she was in all things. I remember how she had chewed out a U.S. State Department representative who didn’t understand that most sex work in Japan was legal, and that to label all sex work as human trafficking was a tremendous disservice to real victims and sex workers.

We’d done good work. But things had changed.

Human trafficking—at least sex trafficking—hadn’t completely vanished, but it had been mostly shut down in Japan by 2011. The cost for organized crime was too high, so, for the most part, they moved out of the business of exploiting foreign women. Zengeiren, which was effectively a human trafficking business lobby, stopped having board meetings at the Liberal Democratic Party’s headquarters. Some of their meetings were chaired by former prime minister Shinzo Abe, which tells you how well connected they were to the government. So-called entertainer visas were strictly monitored now, and rarely issued. Immigration raids had put the fear of God into the seedier clubs. Even Polaris Project Japan had to change its focus to domestic trafficking.

The future wasn’t what it used to be.

I gave her a hug as we sat on the bench.

“Michiel,” I told her, “look at it this way. We sort of won. Polaris Project Japan. Asia Foundation. The U.S. State Department. The HELP organization. The cops, and the few legislators that actually gave a damn. Our efforts actually changed things.”

She gave me a high-five.

“Yes, I guess you did. You changed things. You made a difference.”

“No, you were with me every step of the way. We changed things. We did it. Not that I’d ever want to quote George Bush, but more or less, ‘Mission Accomplished.’ There are new battles to be fought, new causes to support, new ways to make the world a better place. It’s all right to change paths. You’ll find something right for you.”

And then she buried her face in my shoulder and cried—happy tears. As though she was relieved.

It was a good moment. We had helped accomplish something that relieved a lot of suffering and helped put away some bad guys, or at least cut off their revenue streams. You must savor your victories when you have them. Most of the time in the struggle against the evils of the world, you lose.

When we went back to the hospital, Michiel contacted her mentor and advisor, Professor Tsuneo Akaha, and let him know that she would be changing her focus. She was happy about it, and I was happy for her.

I kept delivering her gluten-free snacks from the U.S. I refused a lot of due diligence work, as I had some money saved up. I put my house in order, and redecorated it. I went to museums. I slept a lot. And I visited Mimi whenever she could see me. I was going back and forth to the States often. I wanted to spend time with Beni and Ray, in case I didn’t have as long as I once imagined I’d have.

In the fall of 2011, I walked with Beni through the local mall, and we stopped at her favorite trinket store, Claire’s, where she bought headbands and earrings, and all the things that an eleven-year-old loves to have and share with her friends.

I spotted a strange little necklace for $9.99 with a Yin and Yang dangling off it—the symbol of peace and balance in the Far East, and especially in Taoism. The white side (Yin) had a “B” in black, and the black side had “FF” in white. You could pull the necklace apart and put it back again, because the two halves were magnetic. I didn’t know what BFF meant, because I was square and three decades away from being eleven. I asked Beni to translate for me. She gave me that look.

“Dad,” she said, “BFF means Best Friends Forever. You take one half, and you give the other half to your BFF. That’s how it works.”

“Do you have a BFF?”

“Maybe Leila, but I’m not sure. I might have two.”

“Two?”

“Technically speaking, you can have more than one, Dad.”

“Oh, technically speaking,” I replied. She didn’t catch my hint of sarcasm.

“That means ‘in a way.’ You probably should have only one BFF, but some people have two. You’re lucky to have even one.”

I was a lucky man. I bought the necklace for Michiel. It was a cheesy gift, but I hoped she’d like it. We were both fans of Eastern philosophy, and she’d been reading quite a bit of it over the years. According to some schools of Taoism: “Yin and Yang are dependent opposing forces that flow in a natural cycle, always seeking balance. Though they are opposing, they are not in opposition to one another. As part of the Tao, they are merely two aspects of a single reality. Each contains the seed of the other, which is why we see a black spot of Yin in the white Yang and vice versa.”

When I came to visit her at the hospital, I took out the box and showed her the necklace, and told her that I’d been shopping with Beni when I’d found it. I then tried to explain to her what it was. She stopped me, laughing. “Jake, I was an eleven-year-old-girl once. I know what a BFF is! You’re so silly.”

I pulled the necklace apart, and put her half around her neck and tried to put on my half, but my fingers were a little numb. She did it for me. And then we leaned in and joined our halves a couple of times to make sure the magnet was working right. It made a pleasant click. I felt happier than I had in months. It was the best $9.99 I’d ever spent.

We were very different people, and yet we were very similar. Maybe we had grown to be that way. She was the Yin (the female/principle of light) and I was the Yang (the male/principle of darkness). But really, I think she was much stronger than me, and she had a dark sense of humor.

In early October, as we walked around the hospital grounds, Mimi took me aside to have “a serious talk.” I remember that it was just beginning to get cold, and we were in that strange, wondrous part of dusk known as tasogare.

Tasogare refers to that moment as we edge from day into night when you can make out the shapes of the people walking toward you, but you can’t see their faces. The word comes from old Japanese, meaning, “Who goes there?”

For months, I’d sometimes been interrupting our walks to go off for a short smoke. I didn’t do this today. I had stopped smoking on October 1, the day Japan’s exclusionary ordinances directed at organized crime went into effect nationwide. Michiel had helped me prepare the article on it for The Atlantic Wire.

I understood what a big deal that was. It was going to make all of Japan a lot less yakuza-friendly; it was the start of the Big Chill. The laws varied in the details, but they all criminalized sharing profits with the yakuza or paying them off.

In other words, if you paid protection money to the yakuza, or used them to facilitate your business affairs, you would be treated as a criminal. You might be warned once, but if you persisted in doing business with them, you would have your name released to the public, and be fined, imprisoned, or all of the above.

It was the beginning of the end of the yakuza; they were on their way out. I could feel it. Just like fighting human trafficking in Japan was fighting a war that was almost over, crusading against the yakuza was only going to speed up what was now inevitable.

Who goes there? The yakuza. But not for long.

Autumn would be one long tasogare: Yakuza tasogare. Human trafficking tasogare. Seasonal tasogare. Summer was leaving, fall was coming, and winter was not far away.

I’d spent the whole night working on the article, woken up the morning of October 1, and immediately lit up a clove. I couldn’t taste anything, and thought the pack was stale. I lit up another one. Same problem. Then I opened a fresh pack. Nothing.

At this point, I realized my face was numb. I ran to a clinic open in the mornings, explained my symptoms, and the doctor immediately had me swallow some aspirin. He suggested I’d just had an ischemic stroke, which happens when a blood vessel gets blocked, depriving part of the brain of oxygen. It was sometimes seen in heavy smokers. I took the hint. I stopped smoking.

As we were walking, Michiel asked me if I wanted to smoke. I told her that I’d quit and explained why. She was delighted.

“Oh my God, Jake. I thought you’d never quit.”

“Mimi, I thought you’d never be able not to tell me to quit, and you never did. You never said anything about it.”

“Would you have listened?”

“Probably not.”

“Well, listen to me now.” Michiel took my hand and said, “Jake, remember I said I wanted to have a serious talk.”

“Yes, I’m avoiding it.”

She didn’t laugh.

“Jake, you’re getting a lot better. You need to get back to work. You can’t spend all your time here with me. The hospital is for sick people, and you’re well now.”

I protested. She nodded, but was firm.

“I love it, too. But you’re a writer. That’s who you are. Time to start writing again. I’ll be your back-up. Just like the old days.”

And so I reconciled myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to die anytime soon, and I went back to work. There was plenty to do.

I still spent a lot of time with Mimi at the hospital. We were getting very close. In addition to watching movies and doing yoga on her bed, we discussed books we read, and went for walks. Yoga wasn’t easy for me. Michiel joked that I was the stiffest human being on the face of the Earth.

I brought her lots of magazines to read. Cosmopolitan. Women’s Health. Bitch—which isn’t what you’re thinking it’s about. Elle. Of course, The New Yorker. I developed a fondness for Cosmo. We’d take the quizzes together now and then.

At times, we escaped the hospital grounds, for a few hours at least. That was dependent on how she was being medically treated at the time. I would work on due diligence reports on the ride up to the hospital, and we would review them in her room.

And then, in November, something magical happened.

They say that when you reach satori—the great enlightenment—it hits you like a bolt of lightning, without warning. Until I get there, I won’t really know. I do know that my closest experience to it happened on the night of November 8, 2011, when I was sitting on the edge of Mimi’s hospital bed with her head on mine, and we were watching The Adjustment Bureau together. The movie had been on her wish list for a long time. I wanted to see it, too, and with her. Philip K. Dick, who wrote the original, is one of my favorite writers.

As we watched the film, there was a moment when I felt as if I was seeing her for the first time. After so many years. I had been seeing her as I remembered her, not as the amazing woman she had become.

The chemotherapy had turned her long hair prematurely gray, but her smile and the sparkle in her eyes hadn’t changed at all. She wasn’t Mimi-chan. She wasn’t an over-enthusiastic, idealistic college kid with big cheeks and a big smile. She wasn’t Little Orphan Annie.

She was more alive than ever, despite her fourth relapse of leukemia. She was a woman who had suffered, endured, survived, and blossomed. She was a beautiful woman. Her smile was ethereal and mystical. She glowed. However, that may have been caused by the sunlight coming through the window—what photographers call the golden hour.

“Mimi,” I nudged her gently, “what did you think of the film? Did you fall asleep?”

She said sleepily, “No, I didn’t fall asleep, Jake. I loved the movie.”

“What did you love about the movie?”

“You promise not to laugh?”

“I promise not to laugh unless you tell me you love Matt Damon.”

She giggled, and didn’t say anything else.

“Come on. Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“I loved it because I believe in angels—tenshi. I really do. And I’ve seen them. Sometimes I write to them in my diary.”

“Tenshi?” I asked her in Japanese. This is a habit you develop when you’re bilingual and your friend is, too. After hearing the word in English, you repeat it in Japanese just to make sure you really heard it.

“Yes. Tenshi na no yo.”

I could not give a snappy reply, because she was very sincere. She had survived the disease three times. If anyone had seen an angel, it was her. After taking a deep breath, I pondered for a moment.

I took her hand. “I find that beautiful. It’s wonderful. No, I am not laughing. I have never seen them, and I don’t believe in them, but I am open to the possibility.”

She squeezed my hand.

“What did you think of the movie, Jake? Did you like it, too?”

“It departed from K. Dick’s original story.”

“Definitely. But I was wondering if you liked it. Did you like it? Honestly. Tell me what you think.”

I stumbled for the right words, gently touching the Yin necklace around her neck, and then let it go. “I think that this world of ours needs an adjustment.”

She looked up at me and I looked back, and we both leaned forward. Our lips met. She smelled of sandalwood. This wasn’t the sachet I’d made for her; it was just her. Honestly, I hadn’t really thought about it, but I thought Michiel would taste like strawberries and cream. Her kiss was cinnamon-sugar, spice, chilli pepper, and salted caramel.

I’m ashamed to say as a writer that I didn’t have any dazzling thing to say to her. I just muttered, “Holy fuck.”

And she feigned shock.

“Such language, Jake!”

We kissed again. I mumbled, “We really shouldn’t be doing this.”

“But we are,” she whispered back.

I didn’t know where this would go, but I didn’t want to think about it.

She put her arms around my back and pulled me close, and I followed her lead. And the world went silent. The last flash of sunlight lit up her face, and it reflected in her eyes like a sunburst.

“Mimi,” I said, “let’s sneak the hell out of here.”

And we did. We closed the curtain on her bed, and out we went into the night.

We had a blast. I booked us the best room available in the closest love hotel. It was “The Ritz of Love Hotels,” I assured her. We took a bubble bath in the lit-up jacuzzi. We ordered a pizza—even though it wasn’t gluten-free. We speculated as to whether the lights in the bathtub actually lit up in any discernible pattern. We fiddled with the body sonic, a kind of built-in speaker in the bed that made it vibrate. We listened to every kind of music, including gamelan music from Indonesia, on one of the many channels of music available.

She told me that she had bought an album by Adele and that I’d really love it.

“Maybe we can find a channel playing her?”

No luck. There was no dedicated Adele channel.

I suggested we pull up one of her songs on my iPad. “I’ll buy it from iTunes, and we can listen to it! What’s the best song?”

“Oh, that would be ‘Rolling in the Deep.’”

“Really? What a surprise.”

“Why?”

“She doesn’t even live in Japan, and she’s writing songs about love hotels.”

Michiel threw a pillow at me, and it landed solidly on the back of my head. It was a great song. We listened to that, too. And then we rolled in the deep. And we slept together, and we woke up and slept again. There was nothing awkward about it. It felt as natural as diving into a swimming pool on a summer’s day.

While we were recuperating on the sofa—I was exhausted, but she’d been given so many steroids that she was full of limitless energy—I told her about the MEG case, in which a group of enterprising criminals had hidden cameras in love hotels, taken photos of couples having sex, and then sold the footage in a series of commercial videos.

“You’re so romantic, Jake,” she cooed sarcastically with her head on my chest and her chin on her hands, looking up at me.

“I’m just sharing with you my vast knowledge of love hotels.”

She raised her thin, red eyebrows and gave me a faux-angry face.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s an occupational hazard.”

She just smiled and tapped me on the chest with a finger.

“Well, Jake, if we are being filmed, don’t you think we should be giving our best performance? C’mon, wake up. It’s show-time, ne.”

She fell asleep around 4.00 am, and I let her sleep. I’d have to sneak her back into the hospital by 6.00 am.

I remember watching her sleeping curled up in a ball, a smile on her face, with the gamelan music still playing, and waiting for a wave of guilt and regret to hit me. It didn’t come.

Everything seemed right with the world. And as I stroked her reddish hair streaked with gray, she pulled me closer, and we both fell asleep.

In the end, I managed to get her back to the hospital on time. I think we framed it as an early-morning walk. We returned by 5.55. A nurse—let’s call her Akimoto-san—told me as I walked Michiel back to her room, “It is way too early for visiting hours. However, I will let it slide this time.”

I sent Michiel a quick note on my way back: “Thanks for the lovely very long afternoon. It was really good seeing you and watching the movie.”

Rather than tip-toe around our new relationship, we footsied. People in Japan excel at living in gray zones. Neither of us discussed what the future held or what the status of our relationship was.

Were we now going to be boyfriend and girlfriend? Or were we just hooking up? Would we be friends with benefits? I wasn’t sure, and didn’t ask. There was nothing different about us, except that we were physically intimate. As best as I could, I had been there for her when she was suffering, empathizing with her and helping when I could, and she had done the same for me. I was happy for her when she was happy, and she felt the same way for me. There was nothing complicated about it.

Michiel had a mischievous side that many people were unaware of, and I liked that, too. She told me how, in high school, she and her friends went to Hawaii under the pretext that it was a school trip, and she made a fake brochure that explained it all. Perhaps she would have gotten away with it if she hadn’t messed up by not answering her phone. Her parents called the school, which of course knew nothing about the fake trip. Her cover was blown. Her parents were horrified, and she was grounded for weeks.

I had always pictured her as a little Miss Goody Two-Shoes, but as she told me the story in sheepish tones, I started laughing out loud.

“Michiel, you’re a little con artist. Or con woman!”

“Jake, I felt so bad. My parents were angry and disappointed. That was the last time I did anything like that.”

I assured her that among the crimes of the world, it ranked very low, but I gave her an A for effort. We had about four days of bliss before I had to return to the real world and get back to work.

We talked like we had never talked before, and about things we wouldn’t normally discuss. Despite her wanting children, the multiple bouts of leukemia had made it nearly impossible for her. I told her adoption was always an option. I almost said, “We could adopt children” during our conversation, but I refrained from saying it.

As the doctors tried to prepare Michiel for more chemotherapy, which was needed to keep the leukemia at bay, they had to put a port in her. However, the port became infected.

Her temperature rose to forty degrees on November 17. She shivered violently for the entire week. However, the fever subsided. She was allowed to go home for a few days on the 22nd. While she was at home, we slipped out for a few hours.

We didn’t stay out very long. We came back, checked in, had Chinese food at the hospital restaurant. After dinner, while we were walking outside the hospital grounds, discreetly holding hands, she leaned into me and said, “Ne, ne, I have a question.”

“Shoot.”

And then, with a wicked smile on her face and pulling me close as though she was going to confide a great secret in me, she whispered, “Which do you think will die first: me, you, or our romantic relationship?”

It took me a second to compute this, but she was already throwing back her head, laughing so hard that she could barely breathe. I gently pulled her closer.

“Oh, definitely, our romantic relationship. I’m a terrible man-whore. Of course, I’ll fuck this up.”

“Yes, probably. So we live?”

“We live on, and I get to say, ‘See I told you so.’”

“That would be really nice, Jake. Please tell me we will always be friends, with benefits or without benefits.”

We sat on a bench, and I put my arms around her while she leaned back on me. I assured her that no matter what, we would always remain friends, in whatever way that worked.

“Michiel, you have been the most beneficial person in my life, even before we ever kissed, and if we never locked lips again, that wouldn’t change. Every day with you is a benefit.”

She drew a kanji on my hand with her finger, but I don’t know what it was.

We sat there a little while longer in a comfortable silence—the silence of two people who know each other so well that they don’t need to say a word.

Then we went back to the hospital and sat in the little canteen, trying to figure out why multi-strike convertible bonds were such a boon to enterprising financial fraudsters. She had a better grasp of this than I did.

On the stairwell, we kissed once more, and Michiel told me that it would be a while before we could meet in the flesh again.

“I may not be able to see you again until after the transplant. Because … you know.”

“I know,” I told her. “It’s part of the process. The clean room awaits. We can email!”

“We will!”

She playfully reached under my shirt and found the Yang half of our necklace, and pressed it into my chest with one finger and kissed me on the cheek.

“I’m still looking forward to our next night out at the Blue Note. Maybe some big band. More bang for your buck,” she told me with a wink. “Save a date for me,” she whispered, and she snuck out of the stairwell first and went back to her room.

I wasn’t really worried. I believed in miracles.

In the summer of 2010, I had gotten a phone call from someone I had long believed was dead. She wasn’t, and that was a gift. I heard her voice, and years fell off my shoulders. She was out somewhere leading a new life with a new job, a new name, and a new motorcycle.

Things work out sometimes.

I went home in May for Ray’s eighth birthday, which was on May 19. I had planned to stay for a while. I couldn’t visit Michiel anymore, and I wasn’t able to concentrate on my jobs.

I arrived back in Japan two days before Mimi’s transplant, on May 29. Saigo picked me up at the airport. I spent the day bumming around Shimokitazawa aimlessly, not knowing what to do or say. I wanted to be there for the surgery. Even if it was just waving across the room. But …

While I was looking around the area, on a whim, I dropped by Ragtag, a high-end used-clothing store, and was checking out the women’s section when I found the perfect red dress—not strapless, but beautifully made and in Michiel’s size. It was elegant and simple. It felt like silk. I don’t know what it would have cost new, but it was $250 used. If the right woman wore it, she would turn heads. I knew Michiel would look absolutely stunning wearing it when we went out after her recovery. The Cotton Club was more likely to have big band jazz than the Blue Note, but either place would do for her.

That night, Saigo brought me a box of rosters and old yakuza fanzines he had collected for my organized crime database. I repaid him, and he made coffee while I entered the data.

It’s always a little uncomfortable to think that you’re being served coffee by a former yakuza boss, but if I made the coffee, he would be upset. He wanted things spelled out. He worked for me, not the other way around. I let him make the coffee.

As he put it down, he asked, “Are you going to the hospital tomorrow?

No, I told him. I wouldn’t be able to do much more than wave at her from across the room, Michiel had told me.

“Jake-san,” he said, “You know, it’s not our culture to express ourselves directly, and although Michiel is Japanese and American, there’s a lot of Japanese in her, and she’s saying more than you’re reading. So you need to think through some of these things. And you need to start thinking about the possibility that she may die this time. She knows it; you shouldn’t deny it either.”

Meanwhile, he made another pot of coffee and continued to talk.

“I lost my second wife to cancer. There are some things I wish I’d said to her while I still had the chance. You have a chance to say and do the right things.”

He sat down, handed me a cup of coffee, three sticks of sugar, a pair of chopsticks to stir it, and began speaking. He told me the whole story. I had never known he’d had a second wife. After he was done talking, we were both silent.

“Jake-san,” he said, “I give bad advice. I’m not the brightest of guys. I went from being in the top fifty executives of a 10,000-man organization and running an organization of 150 people to being your driver, on the run from debt collectors and the yakuza you pissed off—all in a few months.”

“Hey,” I said, “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

We both laughed. He thought it was funnier than I did.

“What I’m saying is, I wish I had been more honest with my wife. I wish I had said that I loved her. I wish we had talked about dying. I wish I had been there more often, when I could have been there.”

I nodded, “Yeah. Well, it’s different.”

He shook his head.

“No, it’s not so different. I’ve known you for years. Whenever Mimi-chan has been sick, you’ve visited her in the hospital. Every year, she sends you a Christmas card and a New Year’s card. And you do the same.

“I listen to you guys talk in the car. You laugh together; she finishes your sentences. You know so much about her, and she knows everything about you. She worries about you. I can hear it in her voice.

“You go up to the hospital almost every week, and you spend hours with her. You bring her books to read; movies to watch. Every time you go to the U.S., you come back with her favorite magazines and the cookies that her dietician will let her eat—those awful gluten-free things. I see how she looks at you and how you look at her, and I can tell you love each other. You just don’t verbalize it. I don’t know why.”

He paused.

“And I can’t figure out why you don’t tell her how you really feel. Because most of the time—pardon me for saying this—you never know when to shut up.”

I protested.

“She’s my BFF.”

“Isn’t it a little bit more than that? Forgive me if I’m speaking out of place, but isn’t it a lot more than that?”

I didn’t want to talk about it. Because emotions are messy. Because it’s theoretically a bad idea to fall in love with your best friend. Because I didn’t want to think about a world where Michiel wasn’t there anymore.

Saigo continued speaking, softly and slowly.

“I know you want to reassure her. Tell her it’ll work out. And even if all you can do is wave at her, shouldn’t you?”

I sat in my chair, not really sure what to say. He took the coffee cups off the table and washed them. He walked to the door and bowed. He had some final words of advice.

“Jake-san, whatever you think you might want to tell Mimi-chan, now is the time. If you can see her, you should. You may not have a better chance. If I were you, I’d seize the opportunity.”

The bone-marrow transplant was postponed, and was finally scheduled for the morning of May 31, but I still didn’t know what to do. I spoke to Mimi’s father, Bob, who said that he was fine with me coming and that I posed no risk to her, even if I did. He and Hiroko (Michiel’s mom) would also be in the room with her. One more person wouldn’t make a difference, he told me.

But I didn’t want to be a burden. I went to bed at midnight. I didn’t sleep well.

Saigo showed up at my door at 9.00 am on the 31st, ringing the bell. He didn’t call in advance like he usually did when he was going to pick me up. I went downstairs, and before I could say anything, he said to me, “Jake-san, we’re behind schedule. I’m terribly sorry. I woke up late. Please get in the car. We’re going, right?”

“I told you I wasn’t going.”

“Really? That’s not how I remember hearing it. We’d better leave now. I think you said the operation starts at noon.”

“I thought I told you I wasn’t going.”

“No, I think you said you were thinking about not going. That’s not saying you’re not going. And here I am.”

He cocked one eyebrow, tilted his head, and motioned toward the Mercedes-Benz. I got in the car.

We arrived at the hospital before noon. I walked directly toward her room. The nurses just nodded at me and smiled. They knew my face. Nurse Akimoto guided me to where Michiel was going to be treated. She took my hand and gently pulled me. It was a sweet gesture.

Michiel was in the clean room. I disinfected my hands outside her door, and one of the nurses brought me a mask to wear.

I walked in.

Michiel was in bed, in her purple pajamas, I think. The bed was tilted up slightly; she had her head on the pillow, her long gray-and-red hair gently splayed across it, and she was facing slightly toward the door. She was paler than I’d ever seen her.

Her face lit up when she saw me. She smiled.

“Jake! How did you get in here?”

“Michiel, you underestimate my ninja-like stealth. Besides, the nurses like me. I practically have a free pass anywhere in this hospital.”

She laughed, which turned into a slight cough.

“Sasuga, Jake-chan. I’m glad you’re here.”

Her father was there, and I wasn’t supposed to stay long. I stayed a little longer, and Michiel and I talked. We talked even as the nurse began the IV drip that would feed the bone marrow into her blood.

I couldn’t take off my mask. I didn’t want to go, but I made myself say goodbye. As I was getting ready to leave, she reached out her hand, and I took it in mine.

Of course, we probably weren’t supposed to touch. But my hands were clean, and when she held out her tiny hand, holding it in mine was as natural as breathing. And we stayed like that for a long time, our eyes met, and we didn’t say a word.

She let go and waved goodbye. I hovered in the hall a bit more, but she was falling asleep. I waved at her, and she winked and then closed her eyes. Even after I left the room, I could still feel her hand in mine. Even now, sometimes, I can feel that warmth. I can feel her hand in mine, like we were still touching.

Once I got outside, I called Saigo. He came and picked me up near the emergency room ten minutes later.

“How was she?” he asked.

“Good. She was tired. All the chemotherapy up to the transplant has really been hard on her. They have to kill the cancer cells in her body before they transplant the bone marrow cells.”

“Yes, of course. That makes sense.”

Saigo knew a surprising amount of medical lore and terminology. Maybe it was because he had diabetes or because of what had happened to his second wife. Maybe it was because he had been treated with interferon to cure his Hepatitis C years before.

We drove for thirty minutes back to Tokyo, and I didn’t say anything. I was afraid my voice would crack. Finally, I cleared my throat and said what I should have said.

“Thanks for taking me there today.”

He waved his hand and shrugged his shoulders.

“No thanks, necessary. I was just following orders, boss. That’s what I do.”

Mimi had a heart attack a few days after the bone-marrow transplant, and was put into a medically induced coma. I was told that it might be a long time before she was taken out of the coma, so I went home to the United States. When I heard from her family that she was recovering, I booked my ticket back to Japan. I arrived on June 30.

There had been some good news. She was awake and alert and in good spirits, even though all of her hair had fallen out. The bone-marrow transplants and chemotherapy over the years had done strange things to her hair. It had given her curly hair, had gotten straight again, and had gone prematurely gray. Maybe she’d have green hair when it grew back this time.

I was so excited to be able to see her that I had knots in my stomach. I felt giddy—so happy that I could have gone to karaoke and sang. Even sang sober. And I know I’m a terrible singer.

On July 9, I was on the train platform of Shimokitazawa Station heading to her hospital when I got a Facebook notice. Maria, our mutual friend, posted that Michiel had died.

And that’s how I found out. From a Facebook post.

I missed my train. It rushed past me. I recall being the only person on an empty platform, but that can’t have been right. There must have been other people there. But that’s not how I remember it. My memory is of me being left alone on the station with no one there at all.

I didn’t want to believe it, but I knew it was true. I waited a few hours, and I called her mother to be sure.

I don’t even remember how I got home.

A day later, I woke up and began helping with arrangements for her wake and memorial service in San Francisco, scheduled for July 18.

I had consulting work to do in the U.S., and I couldn’t stick around in Japan for the funeral that her parents were planning. Michiel’s funeral service was going to be held on July 12, starting at 1.00 pm, at the Asagao Church. I knew I couldn’t make it.

She wasn’t here anymore anyway. She wasn’t coming back to life. You have to be practical about these things. I did want to pay my condolences. I arrived in San Francisco on July 16.

That evening, I treated myself to a full-body massage at a neo-hippie New Age romiromi Swedish massage parlor place. At random, they give you some pithy advice with your massage, printed on faux washi.

I kept mine. It was a quote from a famous Vietnamese Buddhist teacher:

The Zen Master Lin Chi said, “The miracle is not to walk on water but to walk on the Earth. We can enjoy every minute of our lives. In walking like this, we can inspire others to do the same.”

It was from a book called No Death, No Fear. I read over the quote. Maybe it should have been inspirational. All I could do was think that, of course the dead don’t have fear—they’re dead. Someone should yell at the book editor for that title.

I had managed to get hold of Mimi’s brother, her professor, her friends, and others who couldn’t make it to the funeral in Japan. We had a lovely service on July 18.

At the memorial service, I met Emi Tojima. Emi was a friend from Mimi’s American school in Japan, and she was a freckled half-Japanese hippie spiritualist and ex-hospice nurse, who I hit it off with instantly. We became friends. She offered me some hospice-quality pot, if I recall correctly, but I wasn’t up for it. We all shared stories of Michiel and pictures. Cris was there, too. I hadn’t seen her since that night at the club, when we were all dancing and Michiel felt sick. It made me think. I had been there trying to take care of Michiel when she first fell ill with leukemia, and I had been there almost to the end.

Professor Tsuneo Akaha had very kind words to say. He was already discussing a posthumous graduation for Michiel, and setting up a fund in her name. Talking to her friends was a revelation. There was so much about her that I didn’t know, but then again, there were many things I never asked. You never really know anyone as well as you think you do, and sometimes you don’t even know yourself.

After I got back to Japan, I went to visit her parents again to express my condolences. They lived close by, and it seemed like the right thing to do. We talked for a long time. I mentioned casually after Bob offered me a beer that I was trying not to drink anything. I told him that I was worried I might start drinking alone. “When you’re drinking alone, Mr Brandt, you’ve got problems,” I told him.

He asked me if I’d like to see her room. “It’s as she left it. Top of the stairs, first door on the left. If there’s anything you’d like, let me know.”

When I went upstairs, on her dresser was the other half of the BFF necklace, the counterpart to the one I still had around my neck.

I picked her half up, and put it next to mine. When the two pieces magnetically clicked together, I fell apart. I felt a wave of heat flash through me that made my eyes moist, and everything got blurry. I could barely breathe. I took the necklace off my neck and carefully put it in my coat pocket.

I walked downstairs, and I showed the black-and-white Yin-Yang pendant necklace to her parents. I explained to them what it meant, and they were happy for me to have it. I said my goodbyes to Mr and Mrs Brandt, and stumbled toward the nearest train station. It struck me as I boarded the train that the name of the station, Eifukucho, translated literally as “Eternal Happiness Town.”

It would be such an amazing place to be if it was real.

I rode the train back home shedding tears like a fat American shedding sweat in a Finnish sauna. It felt as though translucent fingernail polish had spilled into my eyes. When I got to my room, I put the necklace in an envelope, and I put it in a box where I kept Michiel’s Christmas cards, her birthday cards to me, her New Year cards, her notes, and her letters over the years. The Christmas CD was in there, too.

I listened to it that day. The last song was a weepy ballad by Sia entitled “My Love.” I’d always thought the CD ended with KT Tunstall’s “The Universe and U,” but that wasn’t the case. Michiel hadn’t written the song down on the list. I hadn’t realized it. It felt like it had been snuck onto the CD while I wasn’t looking. I listened to it over and over.

And now I am home.

Lyrics are always open to interpretation. But I felt like that was the last thing she wanted to say to me. Of course, that’s wishful thinking. You don’t hear things as they are; you hear them as you want them to be. I put the CD back in the box.

Years went by.

I eventually took the red dress back to the resale shop. There’s someone who should go dancing in it, but I’ll never take Michiel to the Blue Note in that dress. There is not a world in which that is going to happen.

Michiel graduated posthumously in 2010. Professor Akaha did set up a scholarship in Michiel’s name. I contributed to it every year.

During the pandemic, he died as well.

In my own mind, I don’t think of myself as being particularly emotional. I consider myself a Vulcan, although I have only one pointed ear, so I’m only a quarter Vulcan. I strive to be a rational and somewhat detached human being. I’m not stoic, but I understand that everything ends.

Still, I never thought I would miss someone so much for so long.

Every July, when the anniversary of her death comes, I deal with it. And I look at her photos, and I feel that radiant smile when I think about her. And I’m okay. And I repeat to myself a little mantra—not that it makes much sense, but it helps.

Michiel isn’t really gone. She’s just not here right now.