A Clean Kill in Tokyo

watch.
    “You do
sado,”
I said, almost thinking out loud.
Sado
is the Japanese tea ceremony. Its practitioners strive through the practice of refined, ritualized movements in the preparation and serving of tea to achieve
wabi
and
sabi
—a sort of effortless elegance in thought and movement, a paring down to the essentials to more elegantly represent a larger, more important concept that would otherwise be obscured.
    “Not since I was a teenager,” she answered, “and even then never well. I’m surprised you can see it. Maybe if I have another drink, it will disappear.”
    “No, I wouldn’t want that,” I said, fighting the feeling of being drawn into those dark eyes. “I like the
sado.”
    She smiled. “What else do you like?”
    Where is she going?
“I don’t know. Lots of things. I like watching you play.”
    “Tell me.”
    I sipped the Ardbeg, peat and smoke meandering across my tongue and throat. “I like the way you start calm, and build on it. I like the way you start playing the music, and then how, when you get going, it’s as though the music is playing you. How you get caught up in it. Because when I feel that happening to you, I get caught up in it also. It pulls me outside myself. I can tell how alive it makes you feel, and it makes me feel that way, too.”
    “What else?”
    I laughed. “What else? That’s not enough?”
    “Not if there’s more.”
    I rolled the glass back and forth between my hands, watching the reflections of light inside.
    “I always feel like you’re looking for something while you’re playing but you can’t find it. So you look harder, but it still eludes you, and the melody starts to get really edgy, but then you hit this point where it’s as though you realize you’re not going to find it, you just can’t, and then the edginess is gone and the music turns sad, but it’s a beautiful sadness, a wise, accepting sadness.”
    I realized again there was something about her that made me open up too much, reveal too much. I needed to control it.
    “It means a lot to me that you recognize that in my music,” she said after a moment. “Because it’s something I’m trying to express. Do you know
mono no aware?”
    “I think so. ‘The pathos of things,’ right?”
    “That’s the usual translation. I like ‘the sadness of being human.’”
    I was surprised to find myself moved by the idea. “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” I said quietly.
    “I remember once, when I was living in Chiba, I took a walk on a winter night. It was warm for winter, and I took off my jacket and sat in the playground of the school where I had gone as a little girl, all by myself, and watched the silhouettes of the tree branches against the sky. I had such a strong awareness that one day, I was going to be gone, but the trees would still be here, the moon would still be above them, shining down, and it made me cry, but a good kind of crying, because I knew it had to be that way. I had to accept it because that’s the way things are. Things end. That’s
mono no aware.”
    Things end.
“Yes, it is,” I said, thinking of her father.
    We were quiet for a moment. Then I asked, “What did Ken mean when he said you were a radical?”
    She took a sip of her Ardbeg. “He’s a romantic. I was hardly a radical. Just rebellious.”
    “Rebellious how?”
    “Look around you, John. Japan is incredibly screwed up. The LDP, the bureaucrats, they’re bleeding the country dry.”
    “There are problems,” I allowed.
    “Problems? The economy’s going to hell, families can’t pay their property taxes, there’s no confidence in the banking system, and all the government can think to do to solve the problem is deficit spending and public works. And you know why? Payoffs to the construction industry. The whole country is covered in concrete, there’s nowhere else to build, so the politicians vote for office parks no one uses, bridges and roads no one drives on, rivers lined with concrete. You know those ugly concrete ‘tetrapods’ lining the Japanese coast, supposedly protecting it from erosion? All the studies show those monstrosities speed erosion; they don’t forestall it. So we’re destroying our own ecosystem to keep the politicians fat and the construction industry rich. Is that what you call just ‘problems’?”
    “Hey, maybe Ken was right,” I said, smiling. “You are pretty radical.”
    She shook her head. “This is just common sense. Tell me the truth,