A Clean Kill in Tokyo

crowds drift past, I flipped the switch on the unit and heard a slight hiss in the earpiece that told me the connection had been established. Other than that, there was silence. Nothing to do but wait.
    A construction crew had set up a few meters down from Blue Mountain’s entrance, where they were repairing potholes. Four workers busied themselves mixing the gravel and measuring out the right amounts—about two more men than were needed, but the yakuza, the Japanese mob, works closely with the construction industry and insists that workers be provided with work. The government, pleased at this additional avenue of job creation, is complicit. Unemployment is kept at socially tolerable levels. The machine rolls on.
    As a Vice Minister at the
Kokudokotsusho,
Midori’s father would have been in charge of construction and most of the major public-works projects throughout Japan. He would have been hip deep in a lot of this. Not such a surprise that someone wanted him to come to an untimely end.
    Two middle-aged men in black suits and ties, modern Japanese funeral attire, left the coffee shop, and the aroma of hot gravel wafted over to my table. The smell reminded me of my childhood in Japan, of the spring mornings when my mother would walk me to school for the first day of the new term. It seemed the roads were always being repaved at that time of year, and to me this kind of construction still smells like a portent of a fresh round of bullying and ostracism.
    Sometimes I feel as though my life has been divided into segments. I would call them chapters, but the pieces are divided so abruptly that the whole lacks the kind of continuity chapters would impart. The first segment ends when my father was killed, an event that shattered a world of predictability and security, replacing it with vulnerability and fear. There is another break where I receive the brief military telegram telling me my mother has died, offering stateside leave for the funeral. With my mother’s death, I lost an emotional center of gravity, a faraway psychic governor on my behavior, and was left suffused with a new and awful sense of freedom. Cambodia was a further rupture, a deeper step into darkness.
    Strangely, the time my mother took me to the United States from our home in Japan does not represent a dividing line, then or now. I was an outsider in both places, and the move merely confirmed that status. Nor are any of my subsequent geographic ramblings particularly distinct. For a decade after Crazy Jake’s funeral, I wandered the earth a mercenary, daring the gods to kill me but surviving because part of me was already dead.
    I was fighting alongside Lebanese Christians in Beirut when the CIA recruited me to train the Mujahadeen guerillas battling the Soviets in Afghanistan. I was perfect: combat experience, and a mercenary history that allowed for maximum governmental deniability.
    For me, there has always been a war, and the time before feels unreal, dreamlike. War is the basis from which I approach everything else. War is all I really know. You know the Buddhist parable? “A monk awoke from a dream that he was a butterfly, then wondered whether he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man.”
    At a little after eleven, I heard sounds of movement within Midori’s apartment. Footsteps, then running water, which I took to be a shower. She worked at night, I realized; of course she would be a late riser. Then, shortly before noon, I heard a closing exterior door and the mechanical click of a lock, and I knew she was finally on the move.
    I paid for the two espressos I had drunk and walked out onto Omotesando-dori, where I began to amble in the direction of JR Harajuku Station. I wanted to get to the pedestrian overpass at Harajuku. This would give me a panoramic view, but it would also leave me exposed, so I wouldn’t be able to linger.
    The timing was good. I only had to wait on the overpass for a minute before I caught sight of her. She was approaching from the direction of her apartment building and made a right onto Omotesando-dori. It was easy for me to follow her from there.
    Her hair was tied back in a ponytail, her dark eyes concealed by sunglasses. She was wearing snug black pants and a black V-necked sweater, and walked confidently, with purpose. I had to admit she looked good.
    Enough,
I told myself.
How she looks has nothing to do with this.
    She was carrying a shopping bag I recognized from the distinctive maple color came from