Rainfall

being followed. From the station I would catch the train to Shinbashi, and from Shinbashi to the station at Yokosuka. I could have gone directly from Tokyo Station, but preferred a more circuitous route for my usual reasons.

    It was a brisk, clear morning: rare weather for Tokyo, and the kind I’ve always liked best. As I cut across Hibiya Park I saw a small
asagao
, a morning glory, blooming improbably in the cold spray of one of the fountains. It was a summer flower, and looked sad to me, as though it knew it would die soon in the autumn chill.

    At Tokyo Station I bought a ticket to Shinbashi, where I transferred to the Yokosuka line, checking my back on the way. I bought a two-way ticket to Yokosuka, although a one-way would have been marginally more secure. All soldiers are superstitious, as Crazy Jake had liked to say, and old habits die hard.

    I got on the train at 7:00, and it eased out of the station four minutes later, precisely on time. Seventy-four minutes after that we pulled into Yokusuka Station, across the harbor from the naval base. I stepped out onto the platform, attaché case in hand, and busied myself making an ostensible phone call from a public booth while the other passengers who had gotten off the train departed.

    From the station I walked along the esplanade that follows the waterline of Yokosuka Harbor. A cold wind sliced across the water into my face, smelling faintly of the sea. The sky was dark, in contrast to the clear weather in Tokyo.
Too good to last
, I thought.

    The harbor surface was as gray and foreboding as the sky. I paused on a wooden walkway overlooking the harbor, watching the brooding U.S. warships at rest, the clumps of hills behind them startlingly green against the gray of everything else. The detritus of the military was rhythmically washing up against the sea-wall below me: empty bottles, cigarette packs, plastic bags like some bizarre and decaying species of sea creature that had been wounded in the deep and come to the surface to die.

    The harbor reminded me of Yokohama, and the long-ago Sunday mornings when my mother would take me there. Yokohama was where she went to church, and she was going to raise me as a Catholic. Back then we left from Shibuya Station, and the trip took over an hour, not the twenty minutes in which the distance can be covered today.

    I remember the long train rides, on which my mother would always take my hand, literally leading me away from my father’s displeasure at the imposition of this primitive Western ritual on his impressionable young son. The church was an insidiously sensory experience: the settled, wooden smells of old paper and seat cushions; the erect pews, rigid as body casts; the glittering light of stained-glass angels; the ominous echoes of the liturgy; the bland taste of the Eucharist. All catalyzed by a dawning sense that the experience took place through a window that my father, the other half of my cultural heritage, would have preferred to keep closed.

    People like to say that the West is a guilt-based culture, while that of Japan is based on shame, with the chief distinction being that the former is an internalized emotion while the latter depends on the presence of a group.

    But I can tell you as the Tiresias of these two worlds that the distinction is less important than people would have you believe. Guilt is what happens when there isn’t a group to shame you. Regret, horror, atrocity: if the group doesn’t care, we simply invent a God who does. A God who might be swayed by the subsequent good acts, or at least efforts, of an erstwhile wrongdoer.

    I heard tires crunching gravel, and turned toward the parking lot behind me just in time to see the first of three black sedans brake to a stop a few meters from where I was standing. The rear doors flew open and a man got out on each side. All Caucasians.
Holtzer
, I thought.

    The follow-on cars stopped to the left and right of the lead; with my back to the water, I was encircled. Two more men got out of each of the additional cars. All of them were brandishing compact Berettas.

    “Get in,” the one closest to me growled, gesturing to the lead car with his gun.

    “I don’t think so,” I said evenly. If they were going to kill me, I’d make them do it here.

    Six of them stood around me in a semicircle. If they closed in a little tighter, I could try to blast through one of the guys at the outer edge — his opposite number would be afraid to shoot,