Darryl and I, we're like those Mars Rover jockeys: virtual jet lag. Tokyo time and we're trying to hold down paying jobs in two different time zones back here. So Taki's sent Keiko a map, right? And I've sent it to you, and he says six thirty."
"Will I recognize him?"
"What we've seen of him, he's not Ryuichi Sakamoto. Mind you, that's not what Keiko thinks. She's practically told him she'll fork over the booty as soon as she gets home."
She winces. This aspect of what she's up to here makes her extremely uncomfortable.
"But he'll give me the number?"
"I think so. If he doesn't, no pic of Keiko."
"You, I mean she, told him that?' She likes this part of it even less.
"No, of course not. That's a love-offering, something to hold him till she gets the booty back to Tokyo. But you've got to get that number. Make it clear."
"How?"
"Play it by ear."
"Thanks."
"You want to get to the bottom of this littleJbotage thing, don't you?"
"You're implacable."
"So are you. It's why we get along. I'm going to eat this whole bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans now, and sit here grinding my teeth flat until I hear from you."
He hangs up.
She stares back at all those eyes. Hello Kitty and Kogepan and the boneless pandas.
- /
Walking up Roppongi Dori from the ANA Hotel, where she's had the cab drop her, into the shadow of the multi-tiered expressway that looks like the oldest thing in town. Tarkovsky, someone had once told her, had filmed parts of
Now it's been Blade Runnered by half a century of use and pollution, edges of concrete worn porous as coral. Dusk comes early, under here, and she spies signs of homeless encampment, plastic-wrapped blankets tucked back into an uncharacteristically littered scrim of struggling municipal shrubs. Vehicles blast past, overhead, a constant drumming of displaced air, particulates sifting invisibly.
Roppongi she remembers as not so nice a place, one of those inter-zones, a border town of sorts, epicenter of the Bubble's cross-cultural sex trade. She'd gone here with crowds, to bars that were hot then but now likely weren't, but always there'd been an edge of some meanness she hadn't noticed elsewhere in town.
She pauses, aware of the plastic handle of the Parco bag. It's been rubbing against her palm for hours. It feels wrong, for a meeting. Nothing in it but third-best skirt, tights, shrunken black Fruit. She slides it between two ragged bushes bonsai'd by the expressway's shadow, leaving it there, and walks on.
Out of the shadow and up the hill, into actual evening and Roppongi proper. Checking the napkin map copied earlier from laptop screen. Parkaboy had forwarded Taki's segment of a Tokyo map. X marks the spot. One of the little streets behind the main drag. She remembers these as being either glossy or shabby, depending on the business done there.
Shabby, it turns out, after a twenty-minute wander, orienting to the napkin, and at one point spotting Henry Africa's in the distance, that expat bar she remembers, though that's not where she's heading.
Where she's heading, she now sees, scoping it sidewise as she re-connoiters past, is one of those apparently nameless little red-lantern pub-analogs they have here, places where tourists generally don't drink. Set into ground-floor walls in back lanes like this one. Their bare-bones decor or lack of it reminding her of a certain kind of functionally alcoholic corner lounge in lower Manhattan, now nearing extinction as the city's ley lines shifted further still, initially in response to a decade's Dis-neyfication and now to a deeper whammy.
She glimpses, past a dingy noren in an open doorway, empty chrome stools of the soda-fountain spin-around kind, but very low, fronting an equally low bar. Their red upholstery split and bulging. Patched, like her jacket, with peeling tape.
She sighs, squares her shoulders, turns around, and ducks past the noren, into an ancient, complexly layered, and somehow not unpleasant odor of fried sardines, beer, and cigarettes.
No trouble recognizing Taki. He's the sole customer. Rising and bowing, tomato-faced with reflexive embarrassment, to greet her.
"You must be Taki. I'm Cayce Pollard. Keiko's friend from California."
He blinks earnestly, through dandruff-dusted lenses, and bobs there, uncertain whether he should resume his seat. She pulls out the chair opposite him, removes her bag and the Rickson's, hangs them across the back, and seats herself.
Taki sits down. He has an open bottle of beer in front of him. He blinks, saying nothing.
She'd gone back and looked at Parkaboy's initial explanation of Taki again, after she'd sketched the map on a napkin:
