Rainfall

sit with the lights down and the music playing, unwinding, following the notes. Listening to the music, looking out the balcony window onto the quiet, narrow streets of Sengoku, I sensed the presence of the past but felt that I was safe from it.

    The neighborhood’s rhythms and rituals, too subtle to appreciate at first, have steeped quietly over the years. They’ve grown on me, infected me, become part of me. Somehow a small step out of the shadows doesn’t seem such a high price to pay for such indulgences. Besides, sticking out is a disadvantage in some ways, an asset in others. Sengoku doesn’t have anonymous places where a stranger can sit and wait for a target to arrive. And until Mom and Pop pull their wares back into their shops at night and roll down the corrugated doors, they’re always out there, watching over the street. If you don’t belong in Sengoku people will notice, wonder what you’re doing there. If you do belong — well, you get noticed in a different way.

    I guess I can live with that.

6

    THE FOLLOWING WEEK I arranged a lunch meeting with Harry at the Issan
sobaya
. I wasn’t going to be able to let go of this little mystery, and I knew I would need his help to solve it.

    Issan is in an old wooden house in Meguro, about fifty meters off Meguro-dori and a five-minute walk from Meguro Station. Utterly unpretentious, it serves some of the best
soba
noodles in Tokyo. I like Issan not just for the quality of its
soba
, but for its air of whimsy, too: there’s a little lost-and-found cabinet by the front entrance, the contents of which haven’t changed in the decade since I discovered the place. I sometimes wonder what the proprietors would say if a customer were to come in and exclaim, “At last! My tortoiseshell shoehorn — I’ve been looking for it for years!”

    One of the restaurant’s petite waitresses escorted me to a low table in a small tatami room, then knelt to take my order. I selected the day’s
umeboshi
, pickled plums, to crunch on while I waited for Harry.

    He rolled in about ten minutes later, led by the same waitress who had seated me. “I guess it was too much to hope that you would pick Las Chicas again,” he said, looking around at the ancient walls and faded signs.

    “I’ve decided it’s time for you to experience more of traditional Japan,” I told him. “I think you’re spending too much time in the electronics stores in Akihabara. Why don’t you try something classic? I recommend the
yuzukiri
.”
Yuzukiri
are
soba
noodles flavored with the juice of a delicate Japanese citrus fruit called the
yuzu
, and an Issan house specialty.

    The waitress came back and took our order: two
yuzukiri
. Harry told me he hadn’t managed to unearth anything particularly revealing about Kawamura, just general biographical details.

    “He was a Liberal Democratic Party lifer,” Harry explained. “Graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1960, political science major, went straight to the government along with the rest of the cream of the crop.”

    “The States could learn something from this. There, the government gets the college rejects. Like sowing the smallest seeds of corn.”

    “I’ve worked with some of them,” Harry said. “Anyway, Kawamura started out crafting administrative guidance for the Japanese consumer electronics industry at the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. MITI was working with companies like Panasonic and Sony to enhance Japan’s position in the world economy, and Kawamura had a lot of power for a guy in his twenties. Steady promotions up the bureaucratic ladder, successful but not spectacular. High marks for architecting strategic domestic semiconductor guidance in the eighties.”

    “That’s all discredited now,” I said absently.

    Harry shrugged. “He took the credit when he could. After MITI he was transferred to the Kensetsusho, the old Construction Ministry, and stayed with it as vice minister of land and infrastructure when Construction was merged into the Kokudokotsusho.”

    He paused and ran his fingers through his unruly hair, doing nothing to improve its appearance. “Look, mostly what I can tell you is basic bio stuff. I need to have a better idea of what I’m looking for, or I might not even recognize it if I see it.”

    “Harry, don’t be so hard on yourself. Let’s just keep working the problem, okay?” I paused, recognizing that this would be dangerous, knowing that, if I wanted to