A Clean Kill in Tokyo

name, thinks they know your business. At first it made me uncomfortable, everyone recognizing me, pinpointing me. I thought about moving to the west of the city. The west feels exactly like Tokyo and nothing like Japan. It’s brash and fast and new, swirling with caffeinated crowds, alienating and anonymous. I could go there, blend in, disappear.
    But the old downtown has a magic to it, and it’s hard for me to imagine leaving. I like the walk from the subway to my apartment in the evening, up the little merchant’s street painted green and red so that it always feels festive, even in the early darkness of winter. There’s the middle-aged couple that owns the corner five-and-dime, who greet me “
Okaeri nasai!”
—Welcome home!—when they see me at night, rather than the usual
kon ban wa,
or good evening. There’s the plump, laughing old woman who runs the video store with the big yellow sign out front and the windows plastered with posters of recent Hollywood releases, whose door is always left open when the weather is cool. She stocks everything from Disney to the most outrageous pornography, and from noon to ten at night, she sits like a jolly Buddha in her little store, watching her own wares on a TV next to the cash register. And there’s the Octopus Woman, who sells
takoyaki
—fried octopus—from a streetside window in her ancient house, whose face, weary with the accumulated years and boredom of her labors, has come to resemble the very creatures she serves. Every night she shuffles around her stove, pouring her potions in unconscious, repetitive motions, and sometimes giggling children run past her lair, whispering,
“Tako onna! Ki o tsukete!”
The Octopus Woman! Be careful! And there’s the house of Yamada, the piano teacher, from which, on summer evenings, when darkness comes late, soft notes drift lazily down the street, mingling with the shuffling slippers of bathers returning from the
sento,
the local public bath.
    I listened to Midori’s music a lot that weekend. I’d get home from my office, boil water for a dinner of
ramen
noodles, then sit with the lights low and the music playing, unwinding, following the notes. Listening to the music, looking out the balcony window onto the quiet, narrow streets of Sengoku, I sensed the presence of the past but felt I was safe from it.
    The neighborhood’s rhythms and rituals, too subtle to appreciate at first, have steeped quietly over the years. They’ve grown on me, infected me, become part of me. Somehow a small step out of the shadows doesn’t seem such a high price to pay for such indulgences. Besides, sticking out is a disadvantage in some ways, an asset in others. Sengoku doesn’t have anonymous places where a stranger can sit and wait for a target to arrive. And until Mom and Pop pull in their wares at night and roll down the corrugated doors, they’re always out there, watching over the street. If you don’t belong in Sengoku, people will notice, wonder what you’re doing there. If you do belong—well, you get noticed in a different way.
    I guess I can live with that.

CHAPTER 6
    T he following week I arranged a lunch meeting with Harry at the Issan
sobaya
. I couldn’t shake off this little mystery, and I knew I would need his help to solve it.
    Issan is in an old wooden house in Meguro, about fifty meters off Meguro-dori and a five-minute walk from Meguro Station. Utterly unpretentious, it serves some of the best
soba
noodles in Tokyo. I like Issan not just for the quality of its
soba,
but also for its air of whimsy: there’s a little lost-and-found cabinet by the front entrance, the contents of which haven’t changed in the decade since I discovered the place. I sometimes wonder what the proprietors would say if a customer were to come in and exclaim, “At last! My tortoise shell shoe horn—I’ve been looking for it for years!”
    One of the restaurant’s petite waitresses escorted me to a low table in a small tatami room, then knelt to take my order. I selected the day’s
umeboshi,
pickled plums, to crunch on while I waited for Harry.
    He rolled in about ten minutes later, led by the same waitress who had seated me. “I guess it was too much to hope you would pick Las Chicas again,” he said, looking around at the ancient walls and faded signs.
    “I’ve decided it’s time for you to experience more of traditional Japan,” I told him. “I think you’re spending too much time in the electronics stores in