A Clean Kill in Tokyo

married an American, I believe my father had a typically outsized Japanese focus on race. The bullying I received in school both enraged and ashamed him.
    “Fairly close, I suppose. They’ve been gone a long time.”
    “Do you think you’ll go back to America?”
    “I did at one point,” I said, remembering how I’d gotten drawn into the work it now seemed like I’d been doing forever. “After returning as an adult, I spent ten years here always thinking I would stay just one more and then go back. Now I don’t really dwell on it.”
    “Does Japan feel like home to you?”
    I remembered what Crazy Jake had told me, just before I did what he asked of me.
There’s no home for us, John. Not after what we’ve done.
    “It’s become my home, I guess,” I said after a long time. “What about you? Would you want to live in America again?”
    She was gently tapping on her demitasse, her fingers rippling up its sides from pinky to forefinger, and I thought,
She plays her moods. What would my hands do if I could do that?
    “I really loved New York,” she said after a moment, smiling at some memory, “and I’d like to go back eventually, even to stay for a while. My manager thinks the band isn’t too far off. We’ve got a gig at the Vanguard in November, that’ll really put us on the map.”
    The Village Vanguard—the Manhattan Mecca of live jazz. “The Vanguard?” I said, impressed. “That’s quite a pedigree. Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, the whole pantheon.”
    “It’s a big opportunity,” she said, nodding.
    “You could leverage that, make New York your base, if you wanted to.”
    “We’ll see. Don’t forget, I’ve lived in New York before. It’s a great place, maybe the most exciting place I’ve ever been. But it’s like swimming underwater, you know? At first you feel as though you could go along forever, seeing everything from this new perspective, but eventually you have to come up for air. After four years, it was time for me to come home.”
    That was the opening. “You must have had indulgent parents, if they were willing to send you abroad for that long.”
    She smiled faintly. “My mother died when I was young—same as you. My father sent me to Julliard. He loved jazz and was thrilled I wanted to be a jazz pianist.”
    “Mama told me you lost him recently,” I said, hearing a flat echo of the words in my ears. “I’m sorry.” She bowed her head in acknowledgment of my expression of sympathy, and I asked, “What did he do?”
    “He was a bureaucrat.” This is an honorable profession in Japan, and the Japanese word
kanryo
lacks the negative connotations of its English counterpart.
    “With what ministry?”
    “For most of his career, the
Kensetsusho
.” The Construction Ministry.
    We were making some progress. I noticed that the manipulation was making me uncomfortable.
Finish the interview,
I thought.
Then get the hell out. She puts you off your game, this is dangerous.
    “Construction must have been a stuffy place for a jazz enthusiast,” I said.
    “It was hard for him at times,” she acknowledged, and suddenly I sensed guardedness. Her posture hadn’t changed, her expression was the same, but somehow I knew she had been ready to say more and then had thought better of it. If I had touched a nerve, she had barely shown it. She wouldn’t have expected me to notice.
    I nodded, I hoped reassuringly. “I know a little bit about being uncomfortable in your environment. At least your father’s daughter doesn’t have any problems like that—doing gigs at Alfie makes a lot of sense for a jazz pianist.”
    I felt the odd tension for a second longer, then she laughed softly as though she had decided to let something go. I wasn’t sure what I had brushed up against, and would consider it later.
    “So, four years in New York,” I said. “That’s a long time. You must have had a very different perspective when you returned.”
    “I did. The person who returns from living abroad isn’t the same person who left.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “Your outlook changes. You don’t take the same things for granted. For instance, I noticed in New York that when one cab cut off another, the driver who got cut off would always yell at the other driver and do this—” she did a perfect imitation of a New York cabbie flipping someone the bird “—and I realized this was because Americans assume the other person intended to do what he did, so they