Japantown (10 page)

  became  

“I’m liking this,” Renna said. “There’s an internal logic.”

“True. As people assimilated these early symbols, they began to combine them. A field
was set on top of the symbol for
strength
or
power
to make
, or
man
, who they saw as the ‘power in the field.’ This happened over centuries, much of it in China, some later in Japan.”

Our waitress glided up with Renna’s burger and a lot of hip movement. She craned her neck at the Japanese on the napkin. “You moving up to secret agent, Frank?”

Renna raised his eyes. The waitress was around thirty-five, with abundant honey-blond hair piled on top of a shapely head. A loose strand dangled artfully to one side of a determined chin like a trawl line. I wondered if she ever caught anything with it.

“Night school, Karen. I’m studying to be a linguist in case the city decides to sack me.”

“You, sweetie? They’d never dare.”

The eyes behind the banter were far less cheerful.

I watched her walk away, hips swinging gently. “She casting a line your way?”

Renna nodded. “Just broke up with hubby. She brings me home, she’d be delirious because she’d know I could beat hubby to a pulp when she let it slip and he came after me.”

“And she’d let it slip?”

“Count on it.”

Renna drenched his half-pounder with ketchup, plopped the upper half of the toasted bun on top, then bit into the burger, clutching it in his right hand while holding the napkin with my scrawl aloft in his left.

Renna waved the napkin at me. “Okay, so if we’re talking building blocks, why can’t you take this one apart?”

“Two reasons. First, abstraction. As more and more elements were added, combinations divorced themselves from their simple base meanings. Combine
mountain
with the character for
high
,
, and you get
, the foundation for more abstract words like
kasaru
, which means
to swell
or
increase in volume
. Then you have the historical filter: wood from a
mountain
treated with
fire
under a
roof
gives you
, or
charcoal
. The roof represents the kiln used in the old days to make charcoal.”

“So it’s messy.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“Guess simple was too much to hope for.” Renna snagged another
chunk of his half-pounder. It was maybe his third bite and the burger was about gone. “How much time do you need to check with your people in Japan?”

I considered the time lag. “Their workday started an hour ago. I put an ‘urgent’ tag on it, they’ll send me preliminary findings by the end of the shift, but don’t expect miracles.”

“I’m counting on it.”

I eyed my coffee sourly. “Be warned. Most things Japanese are vague to begin with, even to the Japanese.”

The sentiment sat at the core of my being. Though I was an American born of Caucasian parents, my history, my work, and my personal life were partially bound to Japan. I’d passed much of my childhood playing in the back streets of Tokyo. My wife had been Japanese and my daughter shared her mother’s birthright. My father had spent most of his adult life in Tokyo building up Brodie Security. Japan held a special place in my heart, lending a richness to my days I’d always be grateful for.

Yet, like an aloof friend or lover whose guard never comes down, Japan keeps her distance. For years I believed my status as a
gaijin
—the eternal outsider in an exclusive society—accounted for her fabled elusiveness. But that was only part of it. Over a few bottles of
junmai
saké with some Japanese buddies in Shinjuku, I discovered they suffered the same slights. With my language ability and my knowledge of the people and the country’s traditions, I was enough of an insider to penetrate the surface, they told me. It was simply that every quarter was guarded. Layers upon layers of secrets had piled up over the centuries. Those inside the circle knew; those outside were excluded. And there were circles within circles. That’s when I fully understood Jake’s job, and the one I’d inherited: the calls for help came when the secrets impinged on those outside the circle.

Renna looked disgusted. “I don’t have weeks, so you’ll have to hustle. How many kanji are we talking about?”

“Let’s put it this way. The average person can read about three thousand, and college-educated adults know between four and ten. A typical dictionary holds ten to fifteen thousand characters, but the thirteen-volume
Dai Kanwa Jiten,
which holds all of the historical characters, lists fifty thousand.”