A Lonely Resurrection

try to get pretty much any job, or file a tax return, or when you try to cross a border—in short, when you try to do any one of the innumerable things for which you needed your new identity in the first place—a “what’s wrong with this picture” alert will pop up on someone’s screen, and you will be promptly and thoroughly screwed.
    So what about the identity of someone who’s still living? This works fine for short-term scams, known colloquially as “identity theft” though perhaps better understood as “identity borrowing,” but is infeasible for anything long-term. After all, who’s going to be responsible for those new credit cards? And where do the bills get sent? Okay, then what about using someone who’s, say, disappeared for some reason, assuming you even know of such a person? Well, what about it? Did the person have debts? Was he a drug dealer? Because if he had anyone looking for him before, now they’ll be looking for you. And anyway, what do you do if Mr. Missing Person suddenly resurfaces?
    Of course, if you happen to know of someone who’s dead because you’re the one who killed him, that’s a little different. True, you’d have to dispose of the body—in a manner that ensures it will never be found—a risky and often grisly chore that isn’t for everyone. But if you’ve come this far, and if you know no one is going to report the person dead, or even missing, you’ve got something potentially valuable on your hands. If you also know he’s got a good credit history, because you’ve gone on paying bills incurred in his name, you might just have landed yourself a winner.
    So yes, I did carry out the contract on the unfortunate Mr. Yamada, but I didn’t tell the client that. Instead, the subject seemed to have gone “underground,” I reported, unable to resist the pun. Perhaps he had somehow gotten wind of the fact that a contract had been put out on his life? The client hired a PI, who confirmed the presence of all the indicia of sudden flight: a closed bank account and other personal matters efficiently tied up; mail forwarded to a foreign drop; missing clothes and other personal items from the apartment. I, of course, had been taking care of all of this. The client let me know that, for his purposes, disappearance was as good as death, and that I needn’t trouble myself tracking Yamada down to complete the contract. I was paid for my efforts anyway—no one wants someone like me to feel he may have been treated unfairly—and that was that. The client himself has long since come to his own unfortunate end, and enough time has elapsed for me to have resurrected Yamada-san, opening up a small consulting operation in his unobtrusive name, paying taxes, securing an appropriate postal address, incurring debt and paying it off—all the little things that, taken together, add up to existence as a thoroughly unremarkable, thoroughly legitimate, member of society.
    All I had to do now was slip into the Yamada identity and begin my new life. But first, Taro Yamada had to do some of the things any guy in his position would do after deciding to give up on his failed consulting business and move to Brazil to teach third-generation Japanese their now forgotten language. He needed a visa, a legitimate bank account—as opposed to the illegitimate, pseudonymous ones I maintain offshore—assistance with housing, an office. He would be nominally based in São Paulo, where almost half of Brazil’s ethnic Japanese are concentrated, which would make him even more difficult to track to Rio. It would have been easier to take care of much of this with the assistance of the Japanese consulate in Brasilia, of course, but Mr. Yamada preferred less formal, less traceable means.
    While I went about setting Yamada up in Brazil, I read about a string of corruption scandals and wondered how they figured in Tatsu’s shadow war with Yamaoto. Universal Studios Japan, it turned out, had been serving food that was nine months past its due date and falsifying labels to hide it, while operating a drinking fountain that was pumping out untreated industrial water. Mister Donut was in the habit of fortifying its wares with meat dumplings containing banned additives. Snow Brand Food liked to save a few yen by recycling old milk and failing to clean factory pipes. Couldn’t cover that one up—fifteen thousand people were poisoned. Mitsubishi Motors and Bridgestone got nailed hard, concealing defects in cars