Rainfall

I browsed for a bit in the classical section, then moved on to jazz. On impulse I checked to see whether Midori had a CD. She did: Another Time. The cover showed her standing under a streetlamp in what looked like one of the seedier parts of Shinjuku, her arms folded in front of her, her profile in shadows. I didn’t recognize the label — something still small-time. She wasn’t there yet, but I believed Mama was right, that she would be.

I started to return it to its place on the shelf, then thought, Christ, it’s just music. If you like it, buy it. Still, a clerk might remember. So I also picked up a collection of someone else’s jazz instrumentals 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 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.