Chapter 2

Hiroshi had been fortunate in getting a window seat on the crowded commuter train. Now, with his face concealed behind his open newspaper, he stared at the landscape whipping by, but saw only images of Katsumi and HaJime as though projected onto a television screen. Using his mind as a remote control, he played back the scene that had unwound over breakfast this morning and found the review left him feeling uneasy. As though his wife and son had, at some point in time and unobserved by him, moved onto another planet where they were living a different life and speaking a language he could not understand.

Hiroshi turned off the remote, and the window became a camera lens, freeze-framing for an instant the images that flashed into view and were at once gone. A cherry tree, barren of blossoms in May, appeared then vanished. He closed his eyes, recalling how the tree had looked only a month ago, and saw the image like a footprint on the shore of his retina. He lost himself in the imagined scent of the flowers, until the train pulled into Tokyo’s Ueno Station where its doors opened and Hiroshi folded his newspaper.  He picked up his briefcase and squeezed in with the other sardines seeking to transfer from their bullet-shaped conveyance to a subway container that would transport them to their final destinations.

Hiroshi surfaced from the underground with another school of fish at the Ginza District exit and, once he was on the sidewalk, was reminded of how overpopulation breeds behaviors of violence or conformity. America was an example of the former, Japan of the latter. Here, the citizens surrendered personal identity to the necessities of not rocking the crowded boat of their country.

Hundreds of worker bees — dressed like him, looking like him, hurrying like him — were swarming along this street toward their destinations, intent only upon supporting their hives.

The masses of uniform humanity claimed so much space that Hiroshi began to feel as though he were suffocating. He looked up, thinking that if he focused on the sky, breathing would become easier. But the sight of some architectural spears thrust into the firmament only increased his awareness that cities were cement prisons with names, and his was called Tokyo.

Hiroshi entered his office building with a sense of relief, and let others crowd onto the first elevator to arrive, waiting for the next with the hope that he might be the only passenger. He was, and this gave him time in which to reflect on his shortcomings in the practice of Zen Buddhism, his inadequate performance as a husband and father, and his failure at being the type of son his father would have him be.

Katsumi’s remark about his childhood this morning made him wonder. Was his difficulty in meeting his own expectations and those of others due to his role in this life having been scripted by his father after Hiroshi’s mother died when he was only three years old? Had she lived or had Shoichiro remarried, he probably would not have been his father’s only child and, if lucky, not his only son.

Had this happened, Hiroshi could have cloistered himself behind monastic walls where he could have devoted his life to the practice of zazen and the search for enlightenment. And be shielded from the arrows of illusion.

The elevator stopped at Hiroshi’s floor and he exited, quelling his musings as he moved down the corridor until he reached the door with the sign that announced “Nakamura Meat Co.” He unlocked it and went inside. The receptionist had not yet arrived, and the small waiting room was empty, so Hiroshi relocked the door, left his briefcase and newspaper in his office, and proceeded down a hallway to another door, where he knocked.

At the muffled response, Hiroshi entered, closed the door behind him, and bowed. Only then did he look at his father and, as always, thought that this would be his own mirror image when he had lived for 62 years. When age had turned his black hair to the color of steel, and time and suffering had carved deep crevices into the rock of his face, as they had that of his parent.

“Good morning, Nakamura-san,” Hiroshi said, his voice hushed in deference.

Shoichiro, who at this early hour was already hard at work behind his desk, looked up, his eyes dissecting his son with the precision of a scalpel.

“If you lived in the city, you could be at work sooner,” he said. Then a memory shadowed his eyes and he added, “But life in the country is safer for the family.”

This veiled reference to a taboo subject at once summoned an image of the atomic mushroom cloud towering over Hiroshima. An image imprinted in their minds by photographs and reflected in the mirrors of their eyes, even though neither had witnessed the horror themselves.

Hiroshi had not yet been born on that sixth day of August in 1945, and his father, sixteen at the time, had come down with the flu during a family visit to his paternal grandparents’ home in a small country village. For this reason, he had been left behind when his parents and siblings went to Hiroshima to shop. They never returned, and their remaining child never recovered from his guilt over having survived them.

Shoichiro vanquished the memory by breaking eye contact with his son, and busying himself with some papers on his desk.

“Yamada-san called,” he said, pretending the nightmare moment had not occurred. “Doesn’t think he can renew his contract. Says he’s grown too big for us.”

“Yamaguchi-san and I are entertaining him and his associates tonight,” Hiroshi replied, his expression and voice all business.

“We must get him to sign before he returns to Yokohama tomorrow,” his father admonished. “Tell him about our expansion. That will change his mind.”

“The sale is not yet final,” Hiroshi reminded his father, but in a respectful tone. “We have not yet received a signed contract from the broker.”

“A formality,” Shoichiro snapped. “Tell Yamada-san about the ranch. That will win him over.” Seeing the misgivings on his son’s face, Shoichiro added with emphasis on each word, “We cannot afford to lose our biggest and most important client.”

Hiroshi bowed his acquiescence and left, carrying with him the burden of Shoichiro’s mandate for his son to commit what could be an act of fraud.

Returning to his office, he debated with himself whether his father had truly understood what he was asking. To commit a crime would be to lose honor, and without honor, one could not live. His father would never be guilty of such an act. Probably he knew he would have the signed contract from the broker by tomorrow morning, which would make Hiroshi’s negotiating promises premature, but not criminal.

As he sat down behind the desk in his small, sparsely furnished office, Hiroshi accepted that he really had no choice in the matter. One’s father must be obeyed. So he plunged into work to divert his attention from the troublesome matter.

“Good morning, Nakamura-san. Have you had lunch, yet?”

Hiroshi had been so concentrated on reviewing the marketing plan he had created for Yamada that it was a few seconds before the familiar voice registered.

He looked up from the proposal to find his associate, Takeshi Yamaguchi, standing in the open doorway of his office, looking and sounding deferential as befitted his younger age and the fact that he was addressing his boss.

The formal pose of his manager of public relations always amused Hiroshi, though it would have been inappropriate for him to allow this to show. What did not amuse him were the bloodshot eyes that blearily returned his gaze.

 He motioned Yamaguchi into his office, which his associate did with alacrity, closing the door behind him and leaning back against it. Now that they were private, Yamaguchi flashed a broad smile that rarely failed to charm clients and entice women.

Hiroshi gestured his associate to a chair across the desk from him, and Yamaguchi lowered his trim, five-foot-eight-inch frame into it, then grasped his head in both hands.

“Got any aspirin?” he asked, all pretense at a formal relationship gone.

“You are hung over again,” Hiroshi said, unaware that the stern, disapproving look he gave Yamaguchi was the same one he had bestowed on his son earlier that morning.

“Takes practice to become the best at ikkinomi,” Yamaguchi replied with a wry grin.

“One-breath drinking can kill you.”

Takeshi lost his grin, but gave a shrug of indifference.

“Speaking of which, did you hear that Inobe killed himself. Imagine! Hara

kiri in this day and age.”

“There are some who still believe that honor is more precious than life.”

“Honor?” Yamaguchi repeated, raising a doubtful eyebrow. “It was only a matter of fraud.”

“Only? There are no acceptable degrees of dishonor.”

“How about degrees of success?” Yamaguchi countered, his grin returning.

“You closed the deal.”

“And to celebrate my success, you can take me to lunch at Midori’s. They’ve got the best buckwheat noodles in Tokyo. Soba and a cold beer are just what I need for my hangover.”

“No beer,” Hiroshi admonished, standing and retrieving his suit jacket.

As they went down the hallway, past other offices and through the waiting room, Takeshi followed Hiroshi at a respectful distance. Even in the elevator, they both maintained an appropriate formality. But once they were out of the building and merged into the lunchtime throng on the sidewalks, the two men dropped their professional personas.

Hiroshi stopped in front of a shop window to gaze at a silk-screen painting of a geisha.

“Why don’t you just buy the thing, instead of staring at it every time we walk by?” Takeshi asked. “Don’t understand what you see in it, anyway. Her neck is so long it looks almost deformed.”

“The artist deliberately elongated it to resemble that of a swan, because the back of a woman’s neck, which was once seldom revealed in public, was at that time thought to be one of the most beautiful and provocative areas of the female form.”

 “I can think of parts of the female anatomy I like better,” Takeshi grinned. “But you, you’re always talking about times that are long gone.”

 “It is just that I keep wondering,” Hiroshi mused aloud, his eyes still on the image of the geisha, “why it is that the old and the new cannot seem to coexist? Why must one thing be forsaken in order to make way for another? I believe this is one of the ways in which cultures are lost.”

“Geishas still exist,” Takeshi pointed out.

“Yes,” Hiroshi agreed, turning away from the shop window. “But the allure of mystery has been lost. And it’s the mysterious that intrigues and inspires us to rise above the mundane.”

“You’re making my headache worse,” Takeshi complained.

 “Then let’s go,” Hiroshi said, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

They rounded a corner and continued down another street, then turned into an alley lined on both sides with noodle shops, all with banners fluttering brightly colored wings, like flocks of exotic birds bidding passersby to come in.

Hiroshi and Takeshi entered Midori’s crowded shop, placed their orders and squeezed into a table, leaning across to each other, talking loudly so they could hear themselves above the babble of voices around them.

“Want to go riding this Sunday?” Takeshi asked, his gaze scouting their surroundings for attractive girls.

“You and your horses.”

“Too many John Wayne movies when I was growing up.”

“With those videos you rent, you still watch too many John Wayne movies. And at 27, you’re still not grown-up.”

“The ladies think I am,” Takeshi said, making his point by winking at a young woman who was staring at him from another table. Then, returning his attention to Hiroshi, he leaned back in his chair and gave a creditable imitation of the legendary Western film star, except for pronouncing the English letters of “l” and “r,” which always tangled the Japanese tongue.

“Well, Pilgrim,” he drawled, “looks like we’ve got us a few things to talk over.”

“Yes,” Hiroshi responded in English, but without Takeshi’s fake drawl. “Like how we are going to get Yamada to renew his contract with us tonight over dinner.”

“Not to worry,” Takeshi continued in English, but dropping the John Wayne mimicry. “For us, it’ll be a piece of cake.”

“Piece of cake?”

“American for it’ll be easy. Too bad they didn’t teach you American slang and stuff in that English course you took. Want me to teach you some to lighten up your English? So you don’t sound so formal?”

“Want me to teach you how to ride without a saddle?” Hiroshi countered.

He and Takeshi had joined a Western riding club a few years before because his associate had convinced him that the skill would be useful PR should they ever visit the cattle ranch of one of their suppliers.

“Cowboys ride Western saddles,” Takeshi retorted. “Only the Indians rode bareback, and they were the bad guys.”

“Really?” Hiroshi said with an innocent expression. “And here I always thought that those who invaded a country and killed its indigenous people were the villains.”

Before Takeshi could think of a response, a waitress arrived with their orders on a tray, and Hiroshi decided not to comment on his associate’s bottle of beer.

After she had set the large bowls of soba on the table and left, both men leaned forward to inhale the aroma of the fragrant, steaming broth in which the noodles were served. Then, all thoughts of business banished by their salivary glands, they attacked their food with vigor.

Later that day, Hiroshi found Takeshi attacking the song “Don’t Fence Me In” with similar vigor when he arrived at his associate’s tiny apartment. He had come from the office to pick Takeshi up so his associate wouldn’t be late for their business dinner, only to find himself waiting for Takeshi to finished knotting his tie in front of a full-length mirror while dancing in place and singing along with a recording tuned to a volume that made Hiroshi wince. And even though he had been here before, he gazed about him with a bemused expression.

The walls of the combination living and sleeping room were covered with old movie posters for Westerns that had featured John Wayne. There also was an impressive collection of cowboy memorabilia crowded into the bachelor quarters, including a pair of spurs that had been mounted on a wall near one of the posters.

“Okay,” Takeshi proclaimed, after adjusting his suit jacket. Then as he turned toward Hiroshi, he pretended to pull a pair of pistols from imaginary side holsters, aimed at his boss, and drawled in his John Wayne voice, “Let’s go ambush and bushwhack those varmints!”

“The evening ahead of us is nothing to joke about,” Hiroshi said, a trace of grimness in his voice.

Takeshi abruptly dropped his hands to his sides and gave a small bow. “No, Nakamura-san,” he said in the deferential tone that automatically returned whenever a shift away from their tenuous friendship occurred.

“It is possible,” Hiroshi continued, oblivious to the change in his associate’s demeanor, “that I may have to tell Yamada about — “

He broke off, considering, and when he resumed, spoke as one carefully choosing his words.

 “ — about our company expansion.”

“You finally got the signed contract on the cattle ranch!” Takeshi guessed, grinning with enthusiasm.

“I hope it will not be necessary to speak of it,” Hiroshi said, averting his eyes and turning to leave. “But you are not to appear surprised if I do.” He paused in the open doorway and added over his shoulder, “You understand?”

“Yes, Nakamura-san,” Takeshi replied with another bow.

“Good,” Hiroshi said, appearing distracted, and went out the door.

Takeshi followed him, feeling a bit disoriented. Because during the almost five years he had worked with Hiroshi Nakamura, he had never before seen this man look distracted. And he could think of only one explanation for this atypical behavior: Hiroshi’s father must have ordered his son to get Yamada’s contract renewed, even if it meant commiting what currently would be an act of fraud.