Rainfall

“Hai,” she answered, to Satoh-san’s relieved nod of approval. He carefully poured off two measures of the bronze liquid and recorked the bottle.

“What makes this malt special is the balance of flavors — flavors that would ordinarily compete with or override one another,” he told us, his voice low and slightly grave. “There is peat, smoke, perfume, sherry, and the salt smell of the sea. It took forty years for this malt to realize the potential of its own character, just like a person. Please, enjoy.” He bowed and moved to the other end of the bar.

“I’m almost afraid to drink it,” Midori said, smiling and raising the glass before her, watching the light turn the liquid to amber.

“Satoh-san always provides a brief lecture on what you’re about to experience. It’s one of the best things about this place. He’s a student of single malts.”

“Jaa, kanpai,” she said, and we touched glasses and drank. She paused for a moment afterward, then said, “Wow, that is good. Like a caress.”

“Like what your music sounds like.”

She smiled and gave me one of her shoulder checks. “I enjoyed our conversation the other day at Tsuta,” she said. “I’d like to hear more about your experiences growing up in two worlds.”

“I’m not sure how interesting a story that is.”

“Tell it to me, and I’ll tell you if it’s interesting.”

She was much more a listener than a talker, which would make my job of collecting operational intelligence more difficult. Let’s just see where this goes, I thought.

“Home for me was a little town in upstate New York. My mother took me there after my father died so she could be close to her parents,” I said.

“Did you spend any time in Japan after that?”

“Some. During my junior year in high school, my father’s parents wrote to me about a new U.S./Japan high- school exchange program that would allow me to spend a semester at a Japanese high school. I was actually pretty homesick at the time and enrolled right away. So ultimately, I got to spend a semester at Saitama Gakuen.”

“Just one semester? Your mother must have wanted you back.”

“Part of her did. I think another part of her was relieved to have some time to focus on her own career. I was pretty wild at that age.” This seemed an appropriate euphemism for constant fights and other discipline problems at school.

“How was the semester?”

I shrugged. Some of these memories were not particularly pleasant. “You know what it’s like for returnees. It’s bad enough if you’re just an ordinary Japanese kid with an accent that’s been Americanized by time abroad. If you’re half-American on top of it, you’re practically a freak.”

I saw a deep sympathy in her eyes that made me feel I was worsening a betrayal. “I know what it’s like to be a returnee child,” she said. “And you had envisioned the semester as a homecoming. You must have felt so alienated.”

I waved my hand as though it was nothing. “It’s all in the past.”

“Anyway, after high school?”

“After high school was Vietnam.”

“You were in Vietnam? You look young for that.”

I smiled. “I was a teenager when I joined the army, and when I got there the war was already well under way.” I was aware that I was sharing more personal details than I should have. I didn’t care.

“How long were you over there?”

“Three years.”

“I thought that back then getting drafted meant only one year.”

“It did. I wasn’t drafted.”

Her eyes widened. “You volunteered?”

It had been ages since I had talked about any of this, or even thought about it. “I know it sounds a little strange from this distance. But yes, I volunteered. I wanted to prove that I was American to the people who doubted it because of my eyes, my skin. And then, when I was over there, in a war against Asians, I had to prove it even more, so I stayed. I took dangerous assignments. I did some crazy things.”

We were quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Can I ask, are those the things that you said ‘haunt’ you?”

“Some of them,” I said evenly. But this would go no further. She may have had guidelines about inviting strangers to performances, but my rules regarding these matters are stricter still. We were getting close to places that even I can look at only obliquely.

Her fingers were resting lightly on the sides of her glass, and without thinking I reached out and took them into my hands, raised them before my face. “I bet I could tell from your hands that you play the piano,” I said. “Your fingers are slender, but they look strong.”

She twisted her hands around, so that now she was holding mine. “You can tell a lot from a person’s hands,” she said. “In mine you see the piano. In yours I see bushido. But on the joints, not the knuckles . . . what do you do, judo? Aikido?”

Bushido means the martial ways, the way of the warrior. She was talking about the calluses on the first and second joints of all my fingers, the result of years of gripping and twisting the heavy cotton judogi. She was holding my hands in a businesslike way, as though to examine them, but there was a gentleness in her touch and I felt electricity running all the way up my arms.