12
THE NEXT DAY I contacted Tatsu via pager and our bulletin board, and arranged to meet him at noon at the Ginza-yu sento, or public bath. The sento is a Japanese institution, albeit one that has been in decline since not long after the war, when new apartments began to feature their own tubs and the sento became less a hygienic necessity and more a periodic indulgence. But, like all indulgences that are valued not just for their product but for their process, the sento will never entirely disappear. For in the unhurried rituals of scrubbing and soaking, and in the perspective of profound relaxation that can only be derived from immersion in water that the meek might describe as scalding, there are qualities of devotion, and celebration, and meditation, qualities that are necessary concomitants to a life worth living.
Ginza-yu exists at both geographical and psychological remove from the nearby shopping glitz for which its namesake is best known, hiding almost slyly in the shadow of the Takaracho expressway overpass, and making its presence known only with a faded, hand-painted sign. I waited in a doorway across the street until I saw Tatsu pull up in an unmarked car. He parked at the curb and got out. I watched him turn the corner into the bathhouse’s side entrance, then followed him in.
He saw me as I came up behind him. He had already taken off his shoes, and was about to place them in one of the small lockers just inside the entrance.
“Tell me what you have,” he said.
I retracted a bit as though hurt. He looked at me for a long moment, then sighed and asked, “How are you?”
I bent and took off my shoes. “Fine, thanks for asking. You?”
“Very well.”
“Your wife? Your daughters?”
He couldn’t help smiling at the mention of his family. He nodded and said, “Everyone is fine. Thank you.”
I grinned. “I’ll tell you more inside.”
We put our shoes away. I had already purchased the necessary accoutrements at the convenience store across the street-shampoo, soap, scrubbing cloth, and towels-and handed Tatsu what he needed as we went in. We paid the proprietor the government-mandated and -subsidized four hundred yen apiece, walked up the wide wooden stairs to the changing area, undressed in the unadorned locker room, then went through the sliding glass door to the bath beyond. The bathing area was empty-peak time would be in the evening-and, like the locker room, almost Spartan in its unpretentiousness: nothing more than a large square space, a high ceiling, white tile walls dripping with condensation, bright fluorescent lighting, and an exhaust fan on one wall that seemed forlorn from its long and losing battle with the steam within. The only concession to an aesthetic not strictly utilitarian was a large, brightly colored mosaic of Ginza 4-chome on the wall above the bath itself. We sat down to scrub.
The trick is to use hot water at the spigots where you sit, filling the sento-supplied low plastic pail with increasingly painful bucketfuls and pouring them over your head and body. If you bathe using only tepid water, the soaking tub will be unbearable when you first try to enter it.
Tatsu completed his cleaning cycle with characteristic brusqueness and got in the bath ahead of me. I took a bit longer. When I was ready, I eased in beside him. Immediately I felt my muscles trying to shrink back from the heat, and knew that in a moment they would give up their fruitless struggle and surrender to delirious relaxation.
“Yappari, kore ga saiko da na?” I said to him, feeling myself begin to unwind. This is great, isn’t it?
He nodded. “An unusual place for a meeting. But a good one.”
I settled deeper into the water. “You’ve been drinking all that tea, so I figured you’d appreciate a place that’s good for your health.”
“Ah, you were being considerate. I thought that perhaps this was your way of showing me you had nothing to hide.”
I laughed. I briefed him on the dojo and the underground fights, and on Murakami’s connection with both. I gave him my assessment of Murakami’s strengths and weaknesses: deadly, on the one hand; unable to blend, on the other.
“You say the promoters of these fights are losing money,” he said when I was done.
I watched the mural, my eyes half-closed. “Based on what Murakami told me, yes. At three fights in a night with two-million-yen payouts to the winners, plus expenses, they’ve got to be in the red. Even on those nights where they have two or even one, they can’t be doing more than breaking even.”
“What does that tell you?”
I closed my eyes. “That they’re not doing it for the money.”
“Yes. The question, then, is why are they doing it? What is the benefit they derive?”
I pictured the bridged, predatory smile. “Some of these people, like Murakami, are pretty sick. I think they enjoy it.”
“I’m sure they do. But I doubt that entertainment alone would be sufficient motive to create and sustain this kind of enterprise.”
“What do you think, then?”
“When you were with Special Forces,” he asked, his tone musing and thoughtful, “how did you treat personnel who performed a vital function for the unit?”
I opened my eyes and glanced at him. “Redundancy. A backup. Like an extra kidney.”
“Yes. Now put yourself in Yamaoto’s shoes. With you, he could quietly eliminate anyone who proved uninterested in his rewards, or invulnerable to his blackmail, or who otherwise presented a threat to the machine he has established. You served a vital function. Following your loss, Yamaoto would have learned not to allow such reliance on a single person. He would seek to build redundancy into the system.”
“Even if Murakami had been a total replacement.”
“Which you say he is not.”
“So the dojo Murakami is running, the fights…”
“It seems they constitute a training course of sorts.”
“A training course…,” I said, shaking my head. I saw him looking at me, waiting, one step ahead as usual.
Then I saw it. “Assassins?” I asked.
He raised his eyebrows, as if to say You tell me.
“The dojo is the course introduction,” I said, nodding. “And with the kind of training they do there, they’ve already selected for individuals predisposed to violence. Exposure every day, sometimes twice a day, to that regimen desensitizes the individual further. Being a spectator at actual death matches is the next step.”
“And the fights themselves…”
“The fights complete the process. Sure, the whole thing is just a form of basic training. Better, in fact, because only a relatively few soldiers who pass through basic training experience combat and killing afterward. Here, killing is part of the curriculum. And the cadre you create is composed only of the ones who survive, who are the most proficient at what they’ve learned.”
It made sense. A resort to assassins wasn’t even original. In past centuries, the shogun and daimyo employed ninja in their own internecine struggles. I remembered Yamaoto from our run-in a year earlier and knew he would probably be flattered by the comparison.
“Do you see how this development fits in with Yamaoto’s longer-range plans?” he asked.
I shook my head. It was hard to think through the penetrating heat.
He looked at me the way you might look at a slow but still likable child. “What are Japan’s overall prospects for the future?” he asked.
“How do you mean?”
“As a nation. Where will we be in ten, twenty years?”
I considered. “Not so well off, I suppose. There are a lot of problems-deflation, energy, unemployment, the environment, the banking mess-and no one seems to be able to do anything about it.”
“Yes. And you are correct in distinguishing Japan’s problems, which all countries have, from our powerlessness to solve those problems, in which respect we are unique among industrialized nations.”