A Lonely Resurrection

octogenarian, his shoulders bent with the weight of age, his slippers shuffling along the cobblestones, his passage as timeless and resolute as the ancient city itself.
    I supposed it was strange to feel the urge to say goodbye to any of this. After all, none of it had ever been mine. I had understood even as a child that to be half Japanese is to be half something else, and to be half something else is to be
. . . chigatteiru. Chigatteiru,
meaning “different,” but equally meaning “wrong.” The language, like the culture, makes no distinction.
    I also went to Kyoto. I had found no occasion to visit the city in over twenty years, and was struck to find that the graceful, vital metropolis I remembered was nearly extinct, disappearing like an unloved garden given over to vapid, industrious weeds. Where was the fulgent peak of Higashi Honganji Temple, sweeping upward among the surrounding tiled roofs like the upturned chin of a princess among her retainers? That magnificent view, which had once greeted travelers to the city, was now blotted out by the new train station, an abomination that sprawled along a half-mile length of tracks like a massive turd that had plummeted from space and embedded itself there, too gargantuan to be carted away.
    I walked for hours, marveling at the extent of the destruction. Cars drove through Daitokuji Temple. Mount Hiei, the birthplace of Japanese Buddhism, had been turned into a parking lot, with an entertainment emporium on its summit. Streets that had once been lined with ancient wooden houses accented with bamboo trellises were now tawdry with plastic and aluminum and neon, the wooden houses dismantled and gone. Everywhere were metastasizing telephone lines, riots of electric wires, laundry hanging from prefabricated apartment windows like tears from idiot eyes.
    On my way back to Osaka, I entered the Grand Hotel, more or less the geographic center of the city. I took the elevator to the top floor, where, with the exception of the Toji Pagoda and a sliver of the Honganji Temple roof, I was confronted in all directions by nothing but interchangeable urban blight. The city’s living beauty had been beaten back into clusters of cowering refugees, like the results of some inexplicable experiment in cultural apartheid.
    I thought of the poem by Basho, the wandering bard, which had moved me when my mother had first related it, on my earliest visit to the city. She had taken my hand as we stood upon the towering scaffold of Kiyomizu Temple, looking out upon the still city before us, and, surprising me with her accented Japanese, had said:
    Kyou nite mo kyou natsukashiya. . .
    Though in Kyoto, I long for Kyoto. . .
    But the meaning of the poem, once a paean to ineffable, unfulfillable longing, had changed. Like the city itself, it was now sadly ironic.
    I smiled without mirth, thinking that, if any of this had been mine, I would have taken better care of it.
This is what you get if you put your trust in government,
I thought.
People ought to know better.
    I felt my pager buzz. I unclipped it and saw the code Tatsu and I had established to identify ourselves, along with a phone number. I’d been half expecting something like this, but not quite so soon.
Shit,
I thought.
Things are so close.
    I took the elevator down to the lobby, and walked out into the street. When I had found a payphone in a suitably innocuous location, I inserted a phone card and punched in Tatsu’s number. I could have just ignored him, but it was hard to predict what he might do in response to that. Better to know what he wanted, while maintaining the appearance of cooperation.
    There was a single ring, then I heard his voice.
“Moshi moshi,”
he said, without identifying himself.
    “Hello,” I replied, in Japanese.
    “Are you still in the same place?”
    “Why would I want to leave?” I asked, letting him hear the sarcasm.
    “I thought that, after our last meeting, you might choose to. . . travel again.”
    “I might. Haven’t gotten around to it yet. I thought you’d know that.”
    “I am trying to respect your privacy.”
    Bastard. Even when he was busily ruining my life, he could always coax a smile out of me. “I appreciate that,” I told him.
    “I would like to see you again, if you wouldn’t mind.”
    I hesitated. He already knew where I lived. He didn’t have to arrange a meeting elsewhere, if he’d wanted to get to me. “Social visit?” I asked.
    “That is up to