A Lonely Resurrection

though nothing had happened, though the pervading silence indicated that indeed something had.
    A part of my mind that’s always running in the background logged what I saw as the yakuza’s assets: raw strength, experience with violence, familiarity with principles of continuous attack. Under weaknesses, I placed lack of self-control, shortness of breath after a brief and one-sided fight, and a lack of real skill, as evidenced by the relatively minimal damage he had caused despite the ferocity of his assault.
    Unless he was a borderline sociopath, which was statistically unlikely, I knew the yakuza would now be feeling slightly uneasy about what people must have made of his outburst. I took the opportunity to stroll over to the bench-press station and ask him if he needed a spot.
    “Warui na,”
he thanked me, grateful, I knew, for the comfort this simple interaction afforded him.
    “Iya,”
I replied. It’s nothing. I stood over him and helped him get the bar in the air. I noted that he was moving a hundred and fifty-five kilos. He managed two repetitions, with some assistance from me on the second. He would still be fully adrenalized from his recent altercation, and I made a mental note of the limits of his strength at this exercise.
    I helped him guide the bar back onto the uprights, then whistled quietly through my teeth in slightly theatrical deference to his power. I moved to the foot of the bench as he sat up and told him if he needed another spot, he should just ask me. He nodded his head in gruff thanks and I began to turn away.
    I paused as though considering whether to add something, then turned back to him. “That guy should have checked to see if you were done with this station,” I said in Japanese. “Some people have no manners. You taught him a lesson.”
    He nodded again, pleased at my astute assessment of the important social service he had provided in pulverizing some harmless idiot, and I knew he would be comfortable calling on me, his new friend, from time to time when he needed a spot.
    Like tonight, I hoped. I moved quickly down Gaienhigashi-dori, easing past pedestrians on the crowded sidewalk, ignoring the cacophony of traffic and sound trucks and touts, using the chrome and glass around me to gauge whether there was anyone to my rear trying to keep up. I turned right just before the Roi Roppongi building, then right again onto the club’s street, where I paused behind a thicket of parked bicycles, my back to the incongruous pink exterior of a Starbucks, waiting to see who might be trailing in my wake. A few groups of young partygoers drifted by, caught up in the urgent business of entertaining themselves and failing to notice the man standing quietly in the shadows. No one set off my radar. After a few minutes, I made my way to the club.
    The facility occupied the ground floor of a gray commercial building hemmed in by rusting fire escapes and choked with high-tension wires that clung to the structure’s façade like rotting vegetation. Across from it was a parking lot crowded by Mercedeses with darkened windows and high-performance tires, the status symbols of the country’s elite and of its criminals, each aping the other, comfortably sharing the pleasures of the night in Roppongi’s tawdry demimonde. The street itself was illuminated only by the indifferent glow of a single arched lamplight, its base festooned with flyers advertising the area’s innumerable sexual services, in the shadows of its own luminescence looking like the elongated neck of some antediluvian bird shedding diseased and curling feathers.
    The shades were drawn behind the club’s plate-glass windows, but I spotted the yakuza’s anodized aluminum Harley-Davidson V-Rod parked in front, surrounded by commuter bicycles like a shark amidst pilot fish. Just past the windows was the entrance to the building. I tried the door, but it was locked.
    I backed up a few steps to the club windows and tapped on the glass. A moment later the lights went off inside.
Nice,
I thought. He had cut the lights so he could peek through the shades without being seen from outside. I waited, knowing he was watching me and checking the street.
    The lights went back on, and a moment later the yakuza appeared in the entranceway to the building. He was wearing gray sweatpants and a black cutaway A-shirt, along with the obligatory weightlifting gloves. Obviously in the middle of a workout.
    He opened the door, his eyes searching the