Authors: Sujata Massey
There really was no chance of leaving Kyushu that night. My suspicions about the length of the trip were confirmed when the local bus finally got me to the nearest train station, and I realized there was an hour’s wait for the next limited express train to Fukuoka. The agent for All Nippon Airways said that the final plane to Tokyo left Fukuoka around seven. Given that I’d be getting to Fukuoka around nine, the agent offered to make a reservation for me at the ANA hotel. I told her I’d decide on hotels when I arrived and make the reservation myself. Actually, I planned to use a different name and stay at a different hotel, paying cash to protect my anonymity.
I checked my watch again and bought a can of hot Georgia Coffee from the station’s vending machine. As I sipped, I congratulated myself for seeking out the Sakurais. What I’d learned about Kenichi Harada commissioning a reproduction of the ibex vessel had been fascinating. But it still left a question—why had he done it? Takeo had said that he’d been given the vessel—the fake one, though he didn’t know it—after he’d admired Mr. Harada’s possession. But why hadn’t Mr. Harada given him the real thing—especially if the piece was going to stay in the family?
I drank more coffee, and as the caffeine shot through me, so did a new idea. Mr. Harada might have felt that he should not burden his future son-in-law with an illegal piece. On the other hand, he obviously knew he was in possession of a priceless artwork, and he simply might not have wanted to give it up. Famous artworks that were stolen had to remain under wraps; they were too well known to be sold, and they usually remained in the original thief’s hands or were traded to another underworld figure.
And as far as the underworld went, I’d always assumed that Mr. Harada was a customer—but maybe he had played a more active role. He was a diplomat who’d traveled freely through the Middle East before the war, and because of his status, he was probably exempted from luggage screening more rigorous than the basic security X-ray.
I looked around the station and spotted a deserted row of seats. I sat down, took my cell phone out of my backpack, and punched in Takeo’s private number.
“It’s me. Can you talk?” I asked when he picked up.
“Yes, if I can fit you in between TBS and NHK and the other news organizations I never knew existed! Have you been busy, too?”
“Not that way. Nobody knows where I am.”
“Well, where are you?” He sounded impatient.
“In southwestern Kyushu.”
“Oh! So you’ve run away. I wish I could do that.”
“Takeo, I need to ask you something. Did you ever go to Emi’s family’s summer house?”
“Twice. Why?”
“Do you remember the address?”
“Certainly. If you went all the way to Kyushu to find it, you’re in the wrong place. The house is on the Izu Peninsula, about an hour and a half from Tokyo.”
If Mr. Harada had driven all the way from Kyushu to Izu, perhaps it was because he didn’t want the vessel to be noticed by the airport security staff—since now that he was a government minister, he wouldn’t have the blessing of diplomatic clearances anymore. Why he hadn’t used the train seemed mysterious, though. Maybe he just didn’t want to be noticed, especially if the country house was where the vessel wound up. I asked Takeo if this was the place where he’d first laid eyes on the vessel.
“Yes, but—Rei, you’re not thinking of breaking in, are you?”
“Of course not. But I would greatly appreciate learning the address from you.”
“I don’t believe it! You’re up to the same business as when you came to my house during the storm.”
“I’m sorry, Takeo. But if you let me know about this place, I might be able to do something that—shifts attention from you, and the whole horrible misunderstanding may resolve.”
“How will it shift attention from me if you get caught as a burglar again? There’s high security at the place—it’s not like my country house.”
High security, because there had to be priceless treasures within. Things were coming together in my mind. Knowing what Takeo had told me, I wouldn’t go inside, but I’d feel I’d done all I could if I could give the address to Brenda and Michael quickly and let them get a search warrant. Now there was enough information to get a warrant, I was almost certain. But I couldn’t tell Takeo about my plan.
“Takeo, please. Just tell me the name of the town. You won’t be implicated for helping me in any way, if you just tell me that—I can do the rest.”
“No, I won’t.”
“You just care about yourself, don’t you?” I said, utterly frustrated.
“No.” His voice cracked. “It’s because I still care about you that I won’t tell. Can’t you understand?”
Takeo hung up, and I sat there with the phone in my hand, watching the crowd of people across the room board the train. The train. It was finally here.
I grabbed my carry-on suitcase and made it onboard just before the conductor blew the whistle.
By the time I got into Fukuoka, the moon was high. I was starving, so I stopped at a little ramen shop for a bowl of steaming noodles topped with a raw egg. Moon-viewing noodles, they were called. The egg cooked slowly atop the noodles, and I ate slowly, savoring the rich taste of the noodles, the broth, everything. Then I felt fortified enough to search for a hotel. I wanted a place where I would be totally anonymous, where no desk clerk would look at me or ask for identification or a credit card. The obvious answer was to stay at a love hotel, where check-in was self-service, in a curtained booth.
I’d stayed in a love hotel once with Hugh, but never with Takeo. Takeo was far too dignified for pop-culture sleaze. Tonight, I chose Love Palace, a hotel in the form of a Gothic castle. I knew that there was still a vacancy because not all the twinkling exterior lights were turned on. I walked quickly into the lonely lobby and then into the check-in booth, drawing the curtain. I realized that I was embarrassed, not just because I might be recognized, but because it was a sorry situation to be checking into a love hotel all by oneself. Still, once I had followed the blinking lights that lit up on the carpet and directed me to my room, I decided that I’d made a very good choice. The room was almost as large as my space at the Hyatt, and the bed was huge and had fresh linens. As I was unpacking my bags, the cell phone rang and I snatched it up.
“Rei.” The voice was husky, full of pain, and maybe slurred with alcohol. Hugh’s voice.
“Oh!” I dropped the phone in surprise, but it just landed softly on the bed.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“A love hotel,” I blurted, before realizing the implication. “I was just looking for a cheap, quiet place to spend the night. I’m actually alone—”
“I’m sure not for long,” Hugh said darkly.
“You must have heard from Angus?”
“Yes. But I already knew the worst. I read the Japanese news online, Rei, and when I Googled your name it led me to a site with scandal pictures—and I saw it there.”
“You would Google the woman you love, rather than just ask her what’s going on?”
“Well, that’s why I called you, actually. To ask.” Hugh’s voice dripped with politeness. “Did you shag him?”
I sucked in my breath, shocked at the hardness of his language. But I couldn’t lie, not for another moment. “Just once. And I’m sorry.”
“Christ.” Hugh was silent for a minute. “I don’t—I can’t believe it. You betrayed me.”
“You must understand that I didn’t go to Japan for that purpose—it was a terrible mistake—”
“You’re asking me to
understand
?”
“It was a mistake!” I repeated. “That picture doesn’t express any kind of intimacy that continued after—the incident, which was really just a one-night stand. In the picture at the pond, it was an accident, I was just trying to help him out—”
“I’m sure you helped him very nicely. And now, Rei, I’m off to work, where I’ll be sitting down with people who actually need my help, and whom I can count on to behave like decent human beings.”
For the second time that day, a man hung up on me.
After I was done crying, I splashed my face with water and looked at myself in the bathroom’s tiny mirror, which had illuminated cherub light fixtures.
There was one last person I could call, someone whom I was reasonably sure would not hang up on me when he heard what I wanted from him.
I dialed Ramzi Birand.
It was noon when I’d transferred from Haneda Airport to Tokyo Station, where I’d promised to meet Ramzi outside the Japan Railway ticket office. However, I found him in a different spot, leaning against a pole plastered with ads for a loan shark agency. It was a wonder I located him. I’d just left my carry-on and the teacups in a storage locker, then paused to scrutinize the tomato and carrot sandwiches at Vegetaria, and it was there, when I was peering into the distance, that I saw him. Despite the crowding at the station, there was space around him, the usual arm’s length Japanese commuters gave a foreign man, even a good-looking one with dark curly hair, a modish peacoat, and flared jeans.
“Let me buy your ticket,” I said after I’d greeted him and thanked him for meeting me. After the way we’d left things, I wasn’t even sure he’d be willing to give me the address of the country house. It turned out that Emi had taken him by train, and while he thought he could retrace their steps, he couldn’t give me an exact address. Ramzi knew nothing of
kanji
or even the easy
hiragana
alphabet; it was a wonder to me that he’d made it through a semester at Waseda. But then again, he was planning to drop out.
“How do you know which platform is correct, when there are so many?” Ramzi asked in frustration as I led him two platforms over to the place from which the Odoriko limited express trains departed.
“I studied the big map by the ticket machines. You know, the map that looks like a lot of colored spaghetti?”
“Your hair looks like spaghetti,” he said, looking me over.
“It’s a change of pace,” I said. My whole look was different. Back in Fukuoka, I’d had an hour to search the teen boutiques and put together my own version of the Lolita look. I bought a short red pleated skirt, blue-and-yellow striped tights, a yellow sweater with a Doraemon appliqué, and Minnie Mouse barrettes that I’d used to randomly clip strands of my multicolored hair. The salesgirl loved the look. If this was what twenty was supposed to look like, I thought as I surveyed myself in the dressing room mirror, I was actually glad to be ten years older.
The change of costume had been inspired by my conversation at six in the morning with Brenda Martin, whom I’d phoned out of a sense of duty.
“Why go all the way to Izu? You could just give me the address,” she’d said immediately.
“My contact doesn’t know an exact address, but he thinks he can show me the way. Then I’ll share the address with you.” I tried to sound more confident than I felt.
“And who is this contact?”
“It’s nobody in the government, okay?”
“Who is it?” she repeated.
I hesitated before answering. “Ramzi Birand.”
“Do you mean Emi’s ex-boyfriend, with whom you made contact two days ago?”
“Yes. He went there a few times with her, and he’s willing to show me the place. As I mentioned earlier, all things are pointing toward the original ewer being there.”
“I’m concerned that this is too high a risk,” Brenda said. “Especially since your face has been in the newspaper and on TV. How can you expect to do anything anonymously?”
“I already changed my hair—I’ll change more. And Michael didn’t think it was a bad idea.” The fact was that he hadn’t said it was a good idea, either. He’d just told me not to go into the house, and I’d agreed.
“I’m going to call over to him now to get his take on it, because it sounds risky to me. Can you wait until I get back to you?”
“It’s too late. I already made my plan with Ramzi. I can’t let him go out there alone.”
“God help you if you’re not being straight with me,” she grumbled. “In any case, keep your cell phone handy.”
“Come on, I’m at the end of the journey. I’m just getting the address. Then I’m out of here.”
Out of here
, I thought, as Ramzi and I waited for the train. In a way, I wanted out—but another side of me wanted to stay. I had wanted to visit a particular temple with Aunt Norie, and to spend hours at a Sunday morning flea market. I wouldn’t get the chance to do any of this on my visit—or perhaps ever again.
“Why did you do that to yourself with those stupid clothes?” Ramzi’s disapproval of my Lolita look interrupted my brief, self-pitying wallow.
“I wanted to look more your age, so people wouldn’t be surprised at our traveling together.” I paused.
“Emi never dressed like that.”
“Well, she may have had better taste than I do. She definitely had more money.” I changed the topic. “Do you see that train coming in? It’s the Odoriko line. Does it look familiar to you?” I was hoping so, because there were a couple of railway lines that went to Izu, and if I got the wrong one, we would never locate the right town.
“I’m not sure—wait. Dark blue seats. Yes, I remember blue seats,” he said, looking through the windows of the empty train as it rolled up to the platform.
It figured that he would remember a sensory detail and nothing else. After we settled ourselves into two velour seats in the very back—I wanted to be able to see everyone who was sitting around us—I asked him if he remembered the station where he’d disembarked in Izu. Quietly, I told him the names of the stops we had ahead.
During his time with Emi, he explained, he’d always let her be the guide. But he did have an important piece of evidence: a snapshot in his wallet of the two of them grinning, with a historic black ship in the bay behind them.
The black ship made me think of Shimoda, where the U.S. Navy commodore Matthew Perry arrived in 1853 in a black ship and demanded entry to a country that had shut out foreigners for the previous 220 years. Shimoda was the place, Ramzi said, where they’d spent an hour looking around before catching a bus for a thirty-minute ride out to the town where Emi’s parents’ place was. I bit my lip, thinking about how many small towns and villages there might be within half an hour of Shimoda. And who knew if he was even right about the timing of the bus ride?
Fortunately, he had correctly remembered the bus platform, near the Lawson’s store next to the station. He pointed to a bus that showed its destination, Dogashima, in English.
It was ironic, I thought as we rode quietly along, both of us gazing outward, that I’d made it all the way to Shimoda, a place of historical intrigue. An American diplomat, Townsend Harris, had arrived here in 1856 to start the United States’ first consulate in Japan, completely against the wishes of the Japanese. Much diplomatic wrangling followed, but what most Japanese remembered with great distaste was that Consul Harris had asked for the services of a young local woman called Okichi, who reluctantly obeyed the shogunate’s request for her to become his personal maid for several years. Okichi served Harris faithfully as a nurse—and perhaps a mistress—until he retired from duty and returned to the United States, leaving her unprotected from the community’s scorn. Okichi then tried to run a number of businesses, but by the time she was in her fifties, she had become an alcoholic. She finally committed suicide by drowning herself.
Shimoda had numerous memorials to Okichi in its temples and shrines, to remind everyone of the sad sacrifice made by the Japanese people to the future of international relations. I’d read the literature and thought that the real villains had been the community people who’d called Okichi a barbarian, but my sentiment wasn’t shared by many. Everyone thought the tragedy was Harris’s fault, for conscripting her to his service and tainting her reputation.
Foreigner’s cruelty kills Japanese beauty
. That was the way the story had played out 160 years ago in the Japanese popular press. Come to think of it, that headline could have been used in yesterday’s tabloid.
“This is it. I remember getting a bottle of water at that machine.” Ramzi pointed out the window at a Dydo soft drink machine set next to a bench.
The tape recording on the bus had announced this place as Osawa Onsen, where there was a hot spring.
“Did she ever speak to you of the town being called Osawa?” I pushed the stop signal as I spoke.
“I’m not sure.” He frowned. “I’m sorry. I think I heard that word somewhere. Is that this town’s name?” He squinted at the station sign, which was written in
hiragana
.
“Let’s jump off. We can always catch another bus, if we’re wrong.” I was already standing up and following a couple of backpackers who were getting off.
We paid our fares—$11 apiece for just a thirty-minute bus ride—and disembarked. The backpackers walked off, clearly following signs for a hot spring resort.
“Did you take a taxi from this point?” I asked Ramzi.
“No, we walked this way,” Ramzi said, sounding confident. As we walked alongside a rice paddy and then cut through an orange grove, Ramzi explained that Emi had led him on a circuitous route so that people wouldn’t talk. It was a summer house, and the Haradas weren’t there very often, but still, the risk that someone would notice Emi with a boy was too great to bear.
After passing through the fields, we reached a wall at the back of a house. The wall, covered with black tiles fixed in a diamond pattern with thick white plaster, was a fortified style particular to Shimoda, to fortify its houses against strong sea winds. Over this beautiful wall a succulent vine trailed, making it picture-postcard perfect.
“This is the back of the house, I think. I’ll know for certain in a minute,” Ramzi said, leading me along.
“I heard there’s a security system in the house,” I said, eyeing the wall with some nervousness.
“Yes, there’s an alarm system, but I’ve got the code.”
“Really? I wouldn’t want to chance anything,” I said. After he’d revealed his trouble remembering directions, I couldn’t imagine that he’d know any code.
“No, I have it. Here, in my calendar.” He patted his pocket.
“Why did you write down the code?” I asked suspiciously.
“I told you that we had plans to meet here again. It made sense for me to know.”
I shook my head. “We mustn’t go in. If two foreigners like us are caught—well, it could mean jail or deportation. Believe me, I have experience in these things.”
“Why did you ask me to bring you here, if you didn’t want to go in?” He sounded impatient.
“As I said to you on the phone, I just wanted to see the place from the outside.”
“Well, I came because I plan to go inside.” He scowled at me.
I hesitated. I supposed my only option was to abandon ship and not go a step farther. If Ramzi stormed the house and something went wrong, the police would come and we would both be in the soup.
“Ramzi, if you go in, it’s your decision. But I’m not going to stay on the premises if you do that. I’m not willing to take the risk.”
He pressed his lips together. “Then why don’t you just go?”
He’d called my bluff. He knew I had to see the house. “Please, Ramzi. Let’s just walk there, and I’ll give you time to mourn, I really will, and then we’ll go back.”
“It’s a left turn ahead, I think. This looks familiar.”
I took the turn with him, and then he stopped. Ahead of us was an especially high wall of diamond tile, with
kanji
characters making up the name Harada on a mailbox, followed by the numbers 2-17-1 and the
kanji
for Isobe. I copied down both the
kanji
characters and my translation to call in to Brenda Martin as soon as I had some privacy, away from Ramzi.
“What are you writing?” Ramzi asked. He’d walked over to a pair of tall, iron gates that barred entrance to a long driveway disappearing into what looked like a small forest. The property was huge; I’d thought only Japanese aristocrats lived that way.
“Two-seventeen-one Isobe Street, in Osawa. That’s the full address,” I said, walking over to join him. “It looks like a beautiful place.”
“Ten hectares of forest. Emi took me around. It’s great,” Ramzi muttered. Then he stepped to the right and flipped open a small box, revealing a keypad. He punched in a code, and slowly, the gates opened.
“You can’t go in,” I said quickly.
Ramzi turned to me. “I told you what I was going to do. Why else did you think I came here?”
As I stared at him, a sense of foreboding started to grow inside me. “Ramzi, what are you planning to do inside the house?”
“It’s not your concern.”
I could hardly choke out the words. “Are you thinking of…ending your life?”
“Suicide? I’ve thought of it before, yes, but not now.” His manner was brisk. “I’m here to take back something that belongs to me.”
“Okay, but let’s—let’s just wait a moment, maybe go around the corner to talk. We shouldn’t just hang around right in front—” I had been thinking that the way we looked was fine for the train, but I was worried that in this exclusive neighborhood, we might attract suspicion.
“Well, if you’re going, I’ll just say good-bye now!” Ramzi shot over his shoulder as he walked through the open gate. I held my breath, imagining motion detectors or another force that would spring to life at Ramzi’s invasion. But nothing happened. He continued up the long pebbled driveway and disappeared around a bend.
I’d thought Ramzi was helping me, but what he really wanted was an assistant of his own. Now I wondered if he was about to deface the house, or steal something from it—perhaps the ibex vessel. Ramzi had never answered me straightforwardly about whether he’d seen the piece; and now, because I’d asked about it, maybe he’d gotten an inkling of how important it was, and how its loss could devastate Emi’s father.
I had promised Michael that I wouldn’t go into the house, but I couldn’t let Ramzi get away with the vessel. And that could be done, if there was anther exit from this large property. I picked up the cell phone and called the first number Brenda had given me, then the second. She didn’t answer either. Well, so much for support. As I listened to her recorded voice tell me to leave a message, I decided against it. I’d come up with a plan.
I was going to walk onto the property, but I would wait in a hidden position outside the house, to see what Ramzi was up to. And then, if things looked bad, I’d call Michael Hendricks. So with a flutter of excitement overlying fear, I nipped through the opening Ramzi had left me, positioning the gate so it looked closed but still would allow me passage out.