A Clean Kill in Tokyo

course,” the clerk responded immediately. “Kawamura-san told me you might be coming tonight. Please wait here—the second set will start in fifteen minutes, and we want to make certain you have a good seat.”
    I nodded and stepped to the side. As promised, the crowd from the first set started filing out five minutes later, and, as soon as they were clear, I was taken inside, down a wide, steep staircase, and shown to a table right in front of the empty stage.
    No one would ever confuse the Blue Note with Alfie. First, the Blue Note has a high ceiling that conveys a feeling of spaciousness totally unlike Alfie’s almost cave-like intimacy. Also, the whole feel is high-end: plush carpeting, expensive-looking wood paneling, even some flat panel monitors in an antechamber for the obsessive-compulsives who need to surf the Internet between sets. And the crowd is different at the Blue Note, too: first, you can’t even fit a crowd into Alfie, and second, the people at Alfie are there only for the music, whereas, at the Blue Note, people also come to be seen.
    I looked around the room as the second-set crowd flowed in, but nothing set off my radar.
    If you wanted to get to her, and you had a choice of seats, where would you go?
I thought.
You’d stay close to one of the entrances to this floor. That would give you an escape route, if you needed one, and it would keep the entire room in front of you, so you could watch everyone else from behind, instead of the reverse.
    I swiveled and looked behind me as though searching for an acquaintance. There was a Japanese man, mid-forties, sitting all the way in the left rear, near one of the exits. The people next to him were talking to one another; he was obviously alone. He was wearing a dark rumpled suit that fit him like an afterthought. His expression was bland, too bland for my taste. This was a crowd composed of enthusiasts, sitting in twos and threes, waiting eagerly for a performance. Mr. Bland felt like he was trying to be unobtrusive. I filed him as a strong possible.
    I swiveled in the other direction. Same seat, right rear. Three young women who looked like office ladies on a night out. No apparent problem there.
    Mr. Bland would be able to watch me throughout the performance, and I needed to avoid his mistake of conspicuous aloneness. I mentioned to the people around me I was a friend of Midori’s and was here at her invitation; they started asking me questions, and pretty soon we were shooting the shit like old friends.
    A waitress came by and I ordered a twelve-year-old Cragganmore. The people around me followed suit—I was a friend of Kawamura Midori’s, so whatever I ordered, it must have been cool. They probably didn’t know whether they had just ordered scotch, vodka, or a new kind of beer.
    When Midori and her trio walked down the side of the room, everyone started clapping. Another thing about Alfie: There, when the musicians first appear, the room fills with reverential silence.
    Midori took her place at the piano. She was wearing faded blue jeans and a black velvet blouse, low cut and clinging, her skin dazzling white against it. She tilted her head forward and touched her fingers to the keys, and the audience grew silent, expectant. She spent a long moment frozen that way, staring at the piano, and then began.
    She started slowly, with a coy rendering of Thelonious Monk’s “Brilliant Corners,” but overall she played harder than she had at Alfie, with more abandon, her notes sometimes struggling with the bass and drums, but finding a harmony in the opposition. Her riffs were angry and she rode them longer, and when she came back the notes were sweet but you could still sense a frustration, a pacing beneath the surface.
    The set lasted for ninety minutes, and the music alternated from smoky and melodic, to elegiac and sad, then to a giddy, laughing exuberance that shook the sadness away. Midori finished in a mad, exhilarating riff, and when it was over the applause was unrestrained. Midori stood to acknowledge it, bowing her head. The drummer and bassist were laughing and wiping dripping sweat from their faces with handkerchiefs, and the applause went on and on. What Midori felt when she played, the place her music took her, she had taken the audience there, too, and the clapping was filled with real gratitude. When the acclamation finally faded, Midori and her trio left the stage, and people started to get up and move about.
    A few minutes