A Clean Kill in Tokyo

out a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and sat on the curb.
    No, this guy wasn’t on the stranger’s team, as I had briefly considered. He was tailing him.
    I moved into the shadows at the back of a small commercial parking lot and waited. Fifteen minutes later a scarlet racing-style motorcycle, its exhaust modified to produce the maximum Godzilla-like rumble, roared onto the street. The driver, in matching scarlet racing leathers and full helmet, pulled up in front of Telephone Man. Telephone Man gestured to the stranger’s building and got on the back of the bike, and they blasted off into the night.
    A safe bet the stranger lived here, but the building housed hundreds of units and I had no way of telling which was his or of checking for a name. There would be at least two points of egress, as well, so waiting wouldn’t make sense. I stayed until the sound of the motorcycle had disappeared before getting up and checking the address. Then I headed back toward Ebisu Station.

CHAPTER 5
    F rom Ebisu I took the Hibiya line to Hibiya Station, where I would catch the Mita line home. I never change trains directly, though, and I emerged from the station first to run an SDR.
    I stopped in a Tsutaya music shop and made my way past the teenyboppers in their grunge getups listening to the latest in Japanese pop on the store’s headphones, bobbing their heads to the beats. Strolling to the back of the store, I paused now and then to look through CDs on shelves facing the door, glancing up to see who might be coming in behind me.
    I browsed for a bit in the classical section, then moved on to jazz. On impulse I checked to see whether Midori had a CD. She did:
Another Time.
The cover showed her standing under a streetlamp in what looked like one of the seedier parts of Shinjuku, her arms folded, her profile in shadows. I didn’t recognize the label—something small-time. She wasn’t there yet, but I believed Mama was right, she would be.
    I started to return it to the shelf, then thought,
Christ, it’s just music, if you like it, buy it.
Still, a clerk might remember. So I also picked up a collection of another artist’s jazz instrumentals and some Bach concertos on the way to the registers. Chose a long line, harassed-looking clerk. Paid cash. All the guy would remember was that someone bought a few CDs, maybe classical, maybe jazz. Not that anyone was going to ask him.
    I finished the SDR and took the CDs back to my apartment in Sengoku. Sengoku is in the northeast of the city, near the remnants of old Tokyo, what the natives call
Shitamachi,
the downtown. The area is antique, much of it having survived both the Great Kanto Quake of 1923 and the firebombing that came during the war. The neighborhood has no nightlife beyond the local
nomiya,
or watering holes, and no commercial district, so there aren’t many transients. Most of its people are
Edoko,
the real Tokyoites, who live and work in its mom-and-pop shops and its tiny restaurants and bars.
Sengoku
means “the thousand stones.” I don’t know the origin of the name, but I’ve always liked it.
    It’s not home, but it’s as close as anything I’ve ever had. After my father died, my mother took me back to the States. In the face of her loss and the accompanying upheavals in her life, I think my mother wanted to be close to her parents, who seemed equally eager for a reconciliation. We settled in a town called Dryden in upstate New York, where she took a job as a Japanese instructor at nearby Cornell University and I enrolled in public school.
    Dryden was a predominantly white, working-class town, and my Asian features and nonnative English made me a favorite with the local bullies. I received my first practical lessons in guerilla warfare from the Dryden indigenous population: they hunted me in packs, and I struck back at them on my own terms when they were alone and vulnerable. I understood the guerilla mentality years before I landed at Da Nang.
    My mother was distraught over my constant bruises and scraped knuckles, but was too distracted with her new position at the university and with trying to mend fences with her parents to intervene. I spent most of those years homesick for Japan.
    So I grew up sticking out, only later learning the art of anonymity. In this sense, Sengoku is an anomaly for me. I chose the area before anonymity was an issue, and I stayed by rationalizing that the damage was already done. It’s the kind of place where everyone knows your