HELEN WAS thinking of May’s brother as she stepped from the elevator. Annoyed she’d flirted even a little, she promised to keep her eyes to herself in the future. It had only been for a second but that was no excuse. He shouldn’t have made her laugh, that was the problem.
She breezed right past the mailbox and out the building. It was late afternoon and the air was warm. She could smell spring flowers. The shrine was in shadows. Because it was a very small shrine no ferocious lions guarded the gate. Instead, the tabby cat sat on the offering box in front of the alter. It stretched and batted at the thick cord hanging from the prayer bell.
“Hi, cat,” Helen said, and checked her watch. She had just enough time to show May her new boots before she had to go to work.
If only she’d walked straight into the coffee shop, chatted for a few minutes and then headed for the office—what a cause for rejoicing that would have been. What progress!
But her regretful heart pulled her back. The tabby’s eyes glowed in the shadows, watching as Helen returned to the lobby and opened her mailbox. A phone bill from KDD, a pink business card from a hooker service and a letter from her mom in Ottawa. She put the bill and letter in her bag and slammed the mailbox shut.
She was so stupid. Almost two years now. She whispered—facts are facts, nothing will ever change—and bowed her head. But the mantra was worn out. It didn’t help when the phone made her jump and the sight of a mailman made her bleed. She closed her eyes—why hurt yourself so?—and begged to forget. To forget that son of a bitch, to forget to check the mail.
May and Kiyomi looked up from their homework. Helen sat down, Manny smiled, and May made introductions. Helen asked for a cup of tea and glanced at a snazzy pair of sneakers attached to a body in one of the booths.
“Cool shoes,” she laughed.
“That’s Sam,” May explained. “He’s asleep.”
“I can see that. Why don’t you wake him up?”
“Manny said to leave him alone because he’s got jet lag.”
“It’s four-thirty in the afternoon. If you let him sleep like that he’ll never adjust.”
Helen spoke without really thinking. It never entered her head that she might want Sam awake because she was feeling a little down. Other than Hiroshi, she hardly ever talked to men. They couldn’t be trusted and they never listened, anyway.
But when May didn’t move fast enough, Helen insisted. “Come, on. Go wake him up.”
This time something clicked. She wondered what the hell she was doing and why she didn’t finish her tea and get her ass to work.
May climbed down from her stool and hesitated. “Well, OK, but if he gets mad, I’m gonna blame you.”
“Sure. I can handle it,” Helen agreed. You blew it, dummy, too late to back out now.
May tentatively jiggled Sam’s foot. He moved underneath a blanket of newspapers. There was nothing diffident about her second attempt. She grabbed the foot and yanked, nearly dragging him off the seat.
Kiyomi and Manny laughed as Sam groaned and sat up. Helen smiled and stretched like the tabby. Big silver earrings swayed beneath her ears. They gathered up the light in the room and bounced it into his eyes. He blinked and shook his foot loose from May’s grasp.
“How long have I been asleep?”
“About an hour,” Manny answered.
“You snore!” May accused.
Sam stood up. “Only when I’m really tired and should be left alone.”
May-the-turncoat pointed at Helen. “Don’t blame me, it was her idea.”
His annoyance miraculously vanished. “Well, she’s right. I’ve got to start living here, not back on African time.”
The only seat at the bar was next to Helen. Manny held out the coffee pot but Sam shook his head. He turned to look down the counter at May. This movement also afforded him a better view of Helen.
“Does that espresso machine work?”
“Of course. Do you want some?”
Sam nodded. Helen was wearing jeans and a silk shirt the color of flat-black auto primer. He tried to keep his eyes neutral. But the way her shirt dived off her breasts and darted into her jeans was alarming. Their elbows brushed; she moved away and their knees banged together.
“Excuse me,” they both said, apologies overlapping.
May handed Sam the espresso in a small blue cup. He drank slowly as Manny asked the kids about school. They answered dismissively and scribbled away in exercise books. Helen pulled a paperback from her bag, opened it, closed it, and put it away.
Sam remembered the disaster the night before. Let her talk. But Helen remained silent, her eyes half closed, listening to a song on the jukebox. When the music ended she stood up and pushed a foot in May’s direction.
“I bought those boots I was telling you about.”
May and Kiyomi jumped down to get a better look.
“Too hot,” May applauded.
“Very beautiful,” Kiyomi agreed. Her command of English didn’t allow her to use the slang that May employed.
“Tony Lama’s right?” May asked.
Helen had her back to Sam. She nodded and slowly leaned down. She touched her toes—to adjust the cuff of her jeans. It seemed to take a long time. He set down the blue cup. It banged the saucer and jangled primevally. He remembered a sunset over Brazil but forgot his own name. She straightened up and tossed her hair. Her boots were black and blue, his thoughts red. He was lost in a fog bank of drifting perfume.
“I got them at that shop you showed me in Roppongi.”
“How much?” May asked.
Helen bent to fix the other cuff. “Sixty-thousand.”
“Expensive,” Sam said.
Helen looked back. Her face was upside down; her blond hair brushed the floor. She smiled. “Not really. You’d better get used to Tokyo prices.”
She glanced at the time, said she was late, and walked toward the door. Manny set the blue tea cup in the sink and it rattled loudly. Sam waited for his head to clear. There were a lot of things he’d better get used to.
It was Friday and Asakusa was packed with tourists getting a head start on the weekend. They chattered and flowed through the alleys like a conga line. Helen stopped outside Tawaramachi Station and stared across the street. The Sumiyoshi-kai buffoons were doing their spring cleaning.
A chubby young man in jeans and a James Dean T-shirt was washing a window. Two other gangsters kibitzed nearby. Both sported punch perms, the short tight curls favored by yakuza lowlifes. Their polyester leisure suits—lime green and mango orange—were bright enough to glow in the dark. The shorter of the two wore open-toed house slippers with rhinestones and stacked heels. True punks always minced around in their girlfriend’s footwear.
Helen smiled. There were three or four shops in Asakusa that catered to the peculiar taste of the yakuza. Old couples, probably retired gangsters and their molls, guarded their wares with menacing eyes. Dust motes sparkled in their hair as the oldsters flitted between light and shadow, pawing through cardboard boxes stenciled “Made in China.”
A door opened a the gang’s headquarters and an older mobster stepped out. He wore white everything—suit, shirt, shoes and tie. Eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses, he yelled up at a workman on a ladder. The man had removed the gang’s crest and was touching up with daubs of beige paint. A new sign with discreetly brushed characters leaned on the building. It read: Sumiyoshi Import-Export.
Helen had seen enough. The latest government edict, officially declaring the yakuza as criminals, seemed to be having some effect after all. Oddly, this conclusion had eluded the police and politicians for decades.
The Sumiyoshi-kai and other gangs had been outraged and had sued, claiming harassment. They hadn’t been laughed out of court as might have been expected, but had lost their cases, anyway.
Small printing firms nationwide had cheered as thousands of hoodlums had lined up to buy new business cards. No longer were Big Boss, Crime Chieftain and Junior Thug acceptable job titles. Painters and sign makers had also prospered as the criminals made at least minimal effort to conceal their malicious intent.
Her train arrived and Helen hopped aboard. It was half-empty and she sank into a seat with pleasure. Ten minutes and seven stops later she changed to the Tozai line at Nihombashi. The platform was thick with teenagers ready to party in western neighborhoods of Aoyama, Shibuya and Shinjuku.
Helen stayed near the door, she had only one stop to go and didn’t want to fight through the giggling girls and shy young men when the train arrived. It took about a minute from Nihombashi to Otemachi and she was one of only a few passengers to get off at the city’s financial center.
Otemachi was quiet, as if catching its breath at the end of a work day. Rush-hour would begin in a moment but for now the district seemed eerily deserted. Helen tossed her bag over her shoulder and strolled down the wide sidewalks. She was happy, she smiled as if she owned the place. Tall hopeless buildings loomed in the fading light. They had no discernible character. Across the street a solitary pedestrian walked below Nomura Securities toward Tokyo Station.
She reached a crosswalk and stopped, pleased to enjoy a moment of silence in city that often hurt her ears. A black Nissan President sat at the traffic light, waiting to make a turn. The light changed to green and she stepped into the street.
The limousine wanted to go first. It dove forward and threatened to run her over if she didn’t yield. Helen had the right of way. She set her jaw and kept walking. The limo bucked and leaped again, determined to scare her and make her jump back. Its tires protested, the hood dipped, its bumper stopped two inches from her legs. Like awkward dancers they hesitated.
Helen took another step, angry and obstinate. Let the driver run her down if he would. A Japanese would back off, she never could. She’d lost all patience with these senseless acts of intimidation. The bumper touched her thighs and pushed. She gave ground and almost fell.
Helen panicked. She threw her bag at the limo, it smacked into the windshield and bounced onto the hood. The driver was an old man with thinning hair and thick glasses. He looked more bewildered than hostile. Amazed at the gaijin’s anger, he felt his world turn on end.
She scrambled around the car and screamed in the window. “You dumb motherfucker. What are you doing?”
He cringed, he bowed, he fluttered his hands. “Excuse me,” he cried, again and again.
She switched to Japanese, a language with limited obscenities. “Stupid...stupid...stupid!”
Helen grabbed her bag off the hood and stared in the back seat. A suited executive glanced up from a newspaper. He instinctively retreated from the confrontation—he went far away. His face was calm, his eyes were blank. Helen’s face was red, she was visibly shaking—there was nowhere for her to go but across the street.
She turned down a side street jammed bumper-to-bumper with blue flatbed trucks. They sat below the Nihon Shimbun Building with their engines idling, waiting for the presses to spit out the evening edition. Drivers in blue coveralls argued about baseball as a cloud of exhaust rose into the evening sky.
Diesel fumes mingled with the smell of chicken. The yakitori truck was already doing a brisk business. Girls-who-serve-tea sat side-by-side with senior executives and pressmen black with ink. They lounged on grass mats laid on the sidewalk and toasted each other with big cans of beer. The executives waved sticks of yakitori for emphasis as press photographers on motorcycles roared by.
Helen was surprised—the yakitori man didn’t come around much in the warmer months. He was a winter phenomenon, a movable feast at its best when snow blanketed the streets and red paper lanterns glowed with warm yellow light.
“Helen-san!”
A group of young reporters and sub-editors sat partying on the sidewalk. All worked for the Nihon Shimbun, the mass-circulation daily that owned Helen’s English-language paper, The Tokyo Sun. The Nihon Shimbun claimed a readership in the millions and touted itself as the largest newspaper in the “free world.” The Tokyo Sun, by comparison, sold fifty-thousand papers on a good day. It existed primarily as a shameless purveyor of company propaganda and as a tax write-off.
She spotted Hiroshi in the center of the after-work revelers. He called her name again and held up a can of beer. She shook her head; she didn’t want to wade through the crowd and she was late. He climbed over his friends to get to her.
“Come and join us.” His face was bright red. Like many Japanese, Hiroshi changed color as quick as a chameleon after only a few sips of alcohol. It was, at times, a charming trait, and he made for a cheap date on the nights Helen was buying.
“Sorry,” she said. “I have to get up there, I’m late.”
He smiled. “So what? You’re always late. You haven’t been on time for a night shift in three years.”
She ignored his comment on her tardiness, true though it might be, and asked how his day had gone.
“OK. My editor was in meetings all afternoon.”
“Anything interesting going on?”
Hiroshi was a police beat reporter and a good source for Helen’s column.
“Not really. I’m still working on that piece on jiage.”
Jiage, the violent intimidation of property owners, had escalated dramatically with the rise of land prices in the big cities. The old and the weak were usually the victims. If they refused to sell their downtown homes or shops to land speculators, yakuza punks were brought in to induce them to reconsider. With the police either inept, indifferent, or involved, jiage was flourishing.
It was also old news and the last time Helen had written about it her boss, Ozawa, had thrown a fit and had called her a Japan-basher. He’d moved into the editor’s position three months before and within days had canceled most columns written by foreign staff members, fired the single Chinese writer and convinced two Korean-Japanese editors to seek employment elsewhere. Helen knew her days at the paper were numbered; she often asked herself why she was bothering to hang around at all.
“Unless there’s a new angle, I’m not going to do anything else on jiage,” she said.
Hiroshi stepped closer and lowered his voice. “Can you come over tonight?”
“I don’t think so. Is that OK?”
He looked disappointed but covered it well. “It’s up to you. It’s just that we haven’t been together in a long time.”
Helen turned him down again as gently as she could, dodged a couple of trucks, and ran across the street. She just wasn’t in the mood. After a night shift she wouldn’t make it to his apartment in Shinagawa until after two in the morning. He’d be waiting on the narrow bed that doubled as a couch in his tiny junior salaryman apartment. His clothes would be on the floor, his socks and underwear drying on curtain rods.
At twenty-five, Hiroshi was three years younger than Helen and had never learned to take care of himself. Once he’d hinted that she might straighten up his apartment or possibly wash his dishes. She hadn’t bothered to respond and his mother had done it the following week.
They’d been dating for seven months. He was considerate, often funny and nicely balanced—neither effete like most young men in Tokyo nor tiresomely sexist like the older men. Other than May, he was her only real friend and he made a good one. The time they spent in parks or dancing in clubs was, for Helen, the core of their relationship.
She’d lost interest in sex after John had left. On another warm evening, two blocks away, she’d been going to work and he’d been leaving. They’d passed under a street lamp. She’d wanted to grab his arm and scream, to shake something loose. Anything that would have helped her understand. But the damage had been great and deep. Too helpless and tired to even say goodbye, neither had looked back.
The date, the eighth of May, two years before. The time, seven-twenty p.m. Her memories remained implacable and hasty—too quick to recall the shadows, like bruises, under his eyes and the color of the artificial light. Things indivisible from her daily life—sidewalks and sky—still resonated with the past and triggered a humming in her heart. Helen didn’t know what had happened to her
