A Lonely Resurrection

and tires to avoid safety recalls. The worst, shocking even by Japanese standards, was the news that TEPCO, Tokyo Electric Power, had been caught submitting falsified nuclear safety reports that went back twenty years. The reports failed to list serious problems at eight different reactors, including cracks in concrete containment shrouds.
    The amazing thing wasn’t the scandals, though. It was how little people seemed to care. It must have been frustrating for Tatsu, and I wondered what drove him. In other countries, revelations like these would have precipitated a revolution. But despite the scandals, despite the economy, the Japanese just went right on reelecting the same usual Liberal Democratic Party suspects. Christ, half the problem Tatsu was fighting comprised his nominal superiors, the people to whom, in a sense, he had to salute. How do you keep going, in the face of such determined ignorance and relentless hypocrisy? Why did he bother?
    I read the news and tried to imagine how Tatsu would interpret it, how, indeed, he might even be trying to shape it. Not all of it was bad, I supposed. In fact, there were some developments in the provinces that must have encouraged him. Kitagawa Masayasu beat the bureaucrats in Mie by simply deciding against a proposed nuclear power plant. In Chiba, Domoto Akiko, a sixty-eight-year-old former television reporter, prevailed against candidates backed by business, trade unions, and the various political parties. In Nagano, Governor Tanaka Yasuo stopped all dam building despite pressure from the country’s powerful construction interests. In Tottori, Governor Yoshihiro Katayama opened the prefecture’s books to anyone who wanted to see them, setting a precedent that must have caused his counterparts in Tokyo nearly to soil themselves.
    I also spent time checking computer records on Yukiko and Damask Rose. Compared to Harry I’m a hacking primitive, but I couldn’t ask for his help on this one without revealing that I’d been checking up on him.
    Getting into the club’s tax information gave me Yukiko’s last name: Nohara. From there, I was able to learn a reasonable amount. She was twenty-seven years old, born in Fukuoka, educated at Waseda University. She lived in an apartment building on Kotto-dori in Minami-Aoyama. No arrests. No debt. Nothing remarkable.
    The club was more interesting, and more opaque. It was owned by a succession of offshore corporations. If there were any individual names tied to its ownership, they existed only on certificates of incorporation in someone’s vault, not on computers, where I might have gotten to them. Whoever owned the club didn’t want the world to know of the association. In itself, this wasn’t damning. Cash businesses are always mobbed up.
    Harry could almost certainly have found more on both subjects. It was too bad I couldn’t ask him. I’d just have to give him a heads-up and recommend that he do a little checking himself. It was frustrating, but I didn’t see what else I could do. He might take it badly, but I wouldn’t be around for much longer, anyway.
And who knows?
I thought.
Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe he’ll find nothing.
    Naomi checked out, too. Naomi Nascimento, Brazilian national, arrived in Japan August 24, 2000, courtesy of the JET program. I used the email address she had given me to work backward to where she lived—the Lion’s Gate Building, an apartment complex in Azabu Juban 3-chome. No other information.
    As my preparations for departure approached completion, I made a point of visiting some of the places near Osaka I knew I would never see again. Some were as I remembered them from childhood trips. There was Asuka, birthplace of Yamato Japan, with its long-vacant burial mounds, surfaces carved with supernatural images of beasts and semi-humans, their makers and their meaning lost in the timeless swaying of the rice paddies around them; Koya-san, the holy mountain, reputedly the resting place of Kobo Daishi, Japan’s great saint, who is said to linger near the mountain’s vast necropolis not dead but meditating, his vigil marked by the mantras of monks that drone among the nearby markers of the dead as ancient and eternal as summer insects in primordial groves; and Nara, for a moment some thirteen centuries earlier the new nation’s capital, where, if the morning is young enough and the tourist floodwaters have not yet risen in their quotidian banks, you might find yourself passing a lone