Hard Rain

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 Fuku-oka, 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 that 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
    e-mail 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 that 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 ago 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 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 ... chigatte. Chigatte, 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 come to rest there, too gargantuan to be carted away.
    I walked for hours, marveling