A Clean Kill in Tokyo

Saitama. I was still homesick for Japan, so I enrolled right away.”
    “Your mother must have been reluctant to let you go.”
    “Part of her was. I think another part of her was relieved to have some time to focus on her own career. I was pretty wild at that age.” This seemed an appropriate euphemism for constant fights and other discipline problems at school.
    “How was the semester?”
    I shrugged. Some of these memories were not particularly pleasant. “You know what it’s like for returnees. It’s bad enough if you’re just an ordinary Japanese kid with an accent that’s been Americanized by time abroad. If you’re half-American on top of it, you’re practically a freak.”
    I saw a deep sympathy in her eyes that made me feel I was worsening a betrayal. “I know what it’s like to be a returnee child,” she said. “And you had envisioned the semester as a homecoming. You must have felt so alienated.”
    I waved my hand as though it was nothing. “It’s all in the past.”
    “Anyway, after high school?”
    “After high school was Vietnam.”
    “You were in Vietnam? You look young for that.”
    I smiled. “I was a teenager when I joined the Army, and when I got there the war was already well under way.” I was aware I was sharing more personal details than I should have. I didn’t care.
    “How long were you over there?”
    “Three years.”
    “I thought back then getting drafted meant only one year.”
    “It did. I wasn’t drafted.”
    Her eyes widened. “You volunteered?”
    It had been ages since I had talked about any of this, or even thought about it. “I know it sounds a little strange from this distance. But yes, I volunteered. I wanted to prove I was American to the people who doubted it because of my eyes, my skin. And then, when I was over there, in a war against Asians, I had to prove it even more, so I stayed. I took dangerous assignments. I did some crazy things.”
    We were quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Can I ask, are those the things you said ‘haunt’ you?”
    “Some of them,” I said evenly. But this would go no further. She may have had guidelines about inviting strangers to performances, but my rules regarding these matters are stricter still. We were getting close to places even I can look at only obliquely.
    Her fingers were resting lightly on the sides of her glass, and without thinking I reached out and took them into my hands, raised them before my face. “I bet I could tell from your hands you play the piano,” I said. “Your fingers are slender, but they look strong.”
    She twisted her hands around, so that now she was holding mine. “You can tell a lot from a person’s hands,” she said. “In mine you see the piano. In yours I see
bushido.
But on the joints, not the knuckles—what do you do, judo? Aikido?”
    Bushido
means the martial ways, the way of the warrior. She was talking about the calluses on the first and second joints of all my fingers, the result of years of gripping and twisting the heavy cotton
judogi.
She was holding my hands in a businesslike way, as though to examine them, but there was a gentleness in her touch and I felt electricity running up my arms.
    I withdrew my hands, afraid of what else she might read in them. “These days just judo. Grappling, throwing, strangles—it’s a practical martial art. And the Kodokan is the best place in the world for judo.”
    “I know the Kodokan. I studied aikido at a little
dojo
in Ochanomizu, one stop away on the Chuo line.”
    “What’s a jazz pianist doing studying aikido?”
    “It was before I got really serious about the piano, and I don’t practice anymore because it’s too hard on the hands. I did it because I got bullied in school for a while—my father once had a tour in the States. I told you I know what it’s like to be a returnee.”
    “Did the aikido help?”
    “Not at first. It took me a while to get good. But the bullies gave me incentive to keep practicing. One day, one of them grabbed my arm, and I threw her with
sankyo.
After that, they left me alone. Which was good, because
sankyo
was actually the only throw I knew well enough to do.”
    I looked at her, imagining what it would be like to be on the
sankyo
receiving end of the determination that was taking her to increasing renown, maybe to fame, in jazz circles.
    She lifted her glass with the fingers of both hands, and I noticed an economy of movement to the simple act. It was graceful, pleasant to