Hard Rain

might be
    following Midori and would keep Tatsu scrambling to try to keep up.
    I'd keep the room at the Imperial, of course. That might help throw
    Tatsu off. Also, I'd be able to check the room voice mail remotely, in
    case Midori tried to reach me there. I could stop in from time to
    time, using extra care, just to maintain appearances.
    I kept my head low and did everything I could to try to avoid
    presenting a pretty picture for the cameras, but there was no way to be
    sure. I felt boxed in, claustrophobic.
    Maybe I would just bolt. First thing in the morning, Osaka,
    Blo,finito.
    But I hated the thought that Midori might try to contact me again, only
    to find, again, that I was gone.
    You're already lying to her, I thought. Took you all of a half-hour.
    Then maybe I would stay for another day, two at the most. Yeah, maybe.
    And after that, the next time Midori or Tatsu or anyone else heard from
    me it would be via postcard, par avion.
    I made some aggressive moves to ensure that I wasn't being followed.
    Then I slowed down and drifted through night Tokyo, not knowing where I
    was going, not caring.
    I saw two young furita 'freeters' slackers who had responded to Japan's
    decade-long recession by eschewing positions that were no longer
    available to them anyway, dropping instead into odd jobs like the late
    shift in convenience stores, where they would service the needs of
    other Tokyo night denizens: hollow-eyed parents in search of cleaning
    supplies for the household chores their long commutes and crying babies
    left no time to accomplish during daylight hours; lonely men still
    dressed in the interchangeable shirtsleeves of their day jobs,
    suffering in the midst of the vast city from solitude so acute that not
    even the narcotic of late-night television talk shows could distract
    them from occasional nocturnal forays in search of signs of other life;
    even other furita, on their way back to their parents' houses, which,
    to make their meager ends meet, they still inhabited, who might share a
    tired cigarette and an unfunny joke before sleeping off the morning,
    then rising to do it all over again later that day.
    I passed sanitation workers, construction crews laboring under halogen
    lamps on the potholes of night-quiet streets, insomniac truck drivers silently unloading their wares onto deserted
    sidewalks and silent stoops.
    I found myself near Nogizaka station, and realized that I had been
    unconsciously moving northwest. I stopped. Aoyama Bochi was just
    across from me, silent and brooding, drawing me like a gaping black
    hole whose gravity was even greater than that of surrounding Tokyo.
    Without thinking, I cut across the road, hopping over the metal divider
    at its center. I paused at the stone steps before me, then surrendered
    and walked up to the graves within.
    Immediately the sounds of the street below grew detached, distant, the
    meaningless echoes of urban voices whose urgent notes reached but held
    no sway over the park-like necropolis within. From where I stood, the
    cemetery seemed to have no end. It stretched out before me, a city in
    its own right, its myriad markers windowless tenements in miniature,
    laid out in still symmetry, long boulevards of the dead.
    I moved deeper into the comforting gloom, along a stone walkway covered
    in cherry blossoms that lay like tenebrous snow in the glow of
    lamplights to either side. Just days earlier, these same blossoms had
    been celebrated by living Tokyoites, who came here in their drunken
    thousands to see reflected in the blossom's brief and vital beauty the
    inherent pathos of their own lives. But now the blossoms were fallen,
    the revelers departed, even the garbage disgorged by their parties
    efficiently removed and discarded, and the area was once again given
    over only to the dead.
    I thought of how Midori had once articulated the idea of mono no aware,
    a sensibility that, although frequently obscured during cherry blossom
    viewing by the cacophony of drunken doggerel and generator-powered
    television sets, remains steadfast in one of the two cultures from
    which I
    come. She had called it 'the sadness of being human." A wise,
    accepting sadness, she had said. I admired her for the depths of
    character such a description indicated. For me, sad has always been a
    synonym for bitter, and I suspect this will always be so.
    I walked on, my footfalls melancholy, respectful of the thick silence
    around me. Unlike the surrounding city, Aoyama Bochi