Rainfall

and some Bach concertos on the way to the registers. Chose a long line, harassed-looking clerk. Paid cash. All the guy would remember was that someone bought a few CDs, maybe classical, maybe jazz. Not that anyone was going to ask him.

    I finished the SDR and took the CDs back to my apartment in Sengoku. Sengoku is in the northeast of the city, near the remnants of old Tokyo, what the natives call
Shitamachi
, the downtown. The area is antique, much of it having survived both the Great Kanto quake of 1923 and the firebombing that came during the war. The neighborhood has no nightlife beyond the local
nomiya
, or watering holes, and no commercial district, so there aren’t many transients. Most of its people are
Edoko
, the real Tokyoites, who live and work in its mom-and-pop shops and its tiny restaurants and bars. “Sengoku” means “the thousand stones.” I don’t know the origin of the name, but I’ve always liked it.

    It’s not home, but it’s as close as anything I’ve ever had. After my father died, my mother took me back to the States. In the face of her loss and the accompanying upheavals in her life, I think my mother wanted to be close to her parents, who seemed equally eager for a reconciliation. We settled in a town called Dryden in upstate New York, where she took a job as a Japanese instructor at nearby Cornell University and I enrolled in public school.

    Dryden was a predominantly white, working-class town, and my Asian features and nonnative English made me a favorite with the local bullies. I received my first practical lessons in guerilla warfare from the Dryden indigenous population: they hunted me in packs, and I struck back at them on my own terms when they were alone and vulnerable. I understood the guerrilla mentality years before I landed at Da Nang.

    My mother was distraught over my constant bruises and scraped knuckles, but was too distracted with her new position at the university and with trying to mend fences with her parents to intervene. I spent most of those years homesick for Japan.

    So I grew up sticking out, only afterwards learning the art of anonymity. In this sense, Sengoku is an anomaly for me. I chose the area before anonymity was an issue, and I stayed by rationalizing that the damage was already done. It’s the kind of place where everyone knows your name, thinks they know your business. At first it made me uncomfortable, everyone recognizing me, pinpointing me. I thought about moving to the west of the city. The west feels exactly like Tokyo and nothing like Japan. It’s brash and fast and new, swirling with caffeineated crowds, alienating and anonymous. I could go there, blend in, disappear.

    But the old downtown has a magic to it, and it’s hard for me to imagine leaving. I like the walk from the subway to my apartment in the evening, up the little merchant’s street painted green and red so that it always feels festive, even in the early darkness of winter. There’s the middle-aged couple that owns the corner five-and-dime, who greet me “
Okaeri nasai
!” — Welcome home! — when they see me at night, rather than the usual “
Kon ban wa
,” or good evening. There’s the plump, laughing old woman who runs the video store with the big yellow sign out front and the windows plastered with posters of recent Hollywood releases, whose door is always left open when the weather is cool. She stocks everything from Disney to the most outrageous pornography, and from noon to ten at night, she sits like a jolly Buddha in her little store, watching her own wares on a TV next to the cash register. And there’s the Octopus Woman, who sells
takoyaki
— fried octopus — from a streetside window in her ancient house, whose face, weary with the accumulated years and boredom of her labors, has come to resemble the creatures that go into her food. Every night she shuffles around her stove, pouring her potions in unconscious, repetitive motions, and sometimes when I walk by, I see giggling children running past, whispering, “
Tako onna! Ki o tsukete
!” The Octopus Woman! Be careful! And there’s the house of Yamada, the piano teacher, from which, on summer evenings, when darkness comes late, soft notes drift lazily down the street, mingling with the shuffling slippers of bathers returning from the
sento
, the local public bath.

    I listened to Midori’s music a lot that weekend. I’d get home from my office, boil water for a dinner of
ramen
noodles, then