A Lonely Resurrection

to find some comfort in the illusion that I’m part of the society through which I move. A few meters down the street I ducked into the Monsoon Restaurant, where I could enjoy the Southeast Asian-derived cuisine and the anodyne sounds of other people’s conversation.
    I chose a seat set slightly back from the restaurant’s open-air façade, facing the street and entrance, and ordered a simple meal of rice noodles with vegetables. Although it was late for dinner, the tables were mostly occupied. To my left were the remnants of a small office party: a few young men with loosened ties and identical navy suits, two women with them, pretty and more stylishly dressed than their companions, at ease with the traditional Japanese female role of serving food, pouring drinks, and fostering conversation. Behind them, a solitary couple, high school or college kids, leaning toward each other and holding hands across the table, the boy talking with his eyebrows raised as though suggesting something, the girl laughing and shaking her head no. To the other side, a group of older American men, dressed more casually than the other patrons, their voices appropriately low, their skin shining slightly in the light of the table lamps.
    It was slightly surreal, finding myself back in a restaurant or bar after finishing a job, my mind starting to drift, relief settling in after the adrenaline rush had ended. The sensations weren’t new, but the context rendered them strange, like the feel of a familiar business suit donned to attend a funeral.
    I had thought I was out of all this after finishing things with Holtzer, the late chief of the CIA’s Tokyo Station. My cover had been blown, and it was time to reinvent myself, not for the first time. I had thought about the States, maybe the West Coast, San Francisco, someplace with a large Asian population. But establishing a new identity in America, without the sort of groundwork that I had long since prepared in Japan, would have been difficult. Besides, if the CIA had been looking for payback for Holtzer, they might have had an easier time coming after me on their home turf. Staying in Japan left Tatsu to contend with, of course, but Tatsu’s interest in me had nothing to do with revenge, so I had judged him the lesser of the risks.
    I had to smile at that. I had learned that the danger Tatsu posed to me, while certainly less acute than the straightforward possibility of getting put to sleep by some lucky CIA contractor, was far more insidious.
    He had tracked me down in Osaka, Japan’s second largest metropolis, where I had gone after disappearing from Tokyo. I had moved into a high-rise community called Belfa in Miyakojima, the northwest of the city. Belfa was inhabited by sufficient numbers of corporate transferees from other places so that a recent arrival wouldn’t provoke undue attention. It was also home primarily to families with small children, the kind of people who stay aware of the composition of their neighborhood, whose presence makes it difficult to mount effective surveillance or a successful ambush.
    At first I had missed Tokyo, where I had lived for two decades, and was disappointed to find myself in a city the average Tokyoite would reflexively dismiss as a backwater in every category save brute geographical sprawl. But Osaka had grown on me. Its atmosphere, though arguably less sophisticated and cosmopolitan than Tokyo’s, is also lacking in pretense. Unlike Tokyo, whose financial, cultural, and political center of gravity is so strong that at times the city can feel self-satisfied, even solipsistic, Osaka compares itself ceaselessly to other places, its cousin to the northeast chief among them, emerging victorious, of course, in matters of cuisine, financial acumen, and general human goodness. I found something endearing in this scrappy, self-declared contest for supremacy. Maybe we don’t have the refined—read effete—manners, or the most powerful—read corrupt—political establishment, Osaka seems to declare to a Tokyo that isn’t even listening, but we’ve got a bigger heart. Over time, I began to wonder if the city didn’t have a point.
    I had spotted Tatsu behind me one night as I was making my way to Overseas, a jazz club in Honmachi that I had come to like. Although I gave no sign, I had recognized him immediately. Tatsu has a squat build and a way of rolling his shoulders from side to side when he walks that makes him hard to miss. If the tail had