4.24 Bombshell

Returning to the interrogation room, I sat back down in the seat across from Ozawa who was jotting something down in a notebook.

Ever since the Thursday morning raid when the narcotics officer had told me to come in for questioning on Sunday, I pored over the few books I owned* on body language and reading people–books I had originally bought to improve my prospects with the opposite sex–to learn how I might lie more convincingly.

What I gleaned was this: keep your hands away from your face, especially your mouth; try not to swallow so much; smile from time to time; if you insist on touching your nose, do so deliberately–give it a good rub; and, never tug at the collar of your shirt. You should also hold your hands out, revealing the palms to show that you’re being open; refrain from maintaining eye contact for too long because, contrary to what common sense my have you believe, liars usually do not look away when they stretch the truth; and, to build rapport with the person questioning you, subtly mimic his body language.

“Ozawa-san, you’ve asked me why my cousin sent her medicine,” I began, leaning forward, my hands on the desk, palms open. “I honestly don’t know. We haven’t had much contact since she left Japan. We’ve never once spoken over the phone, and as for e-mail, we only mail each other a few times a year.”

My nose started to tickle, but I resisted the temptation to scratch it.

“I was surprised when Naila mailed me last month to say that she had sent a package for my birthday. It was totally unexpected. I can’t remember the last time anyone sent me anything. I’m sure Customs has records, so you can verify this with Nakata-san.”

My nose and my eyes were now itching like a son of a bitch, but I kept my hands on the desk, as far away from my face as possible.

“As for why she would send her medicine, I really can’t say. She never mentioned it in the few mails she wrote. She never asked if I had wanted it, and I never asked for her to send it.”

My whole goddamn face felt as if it were crawling with ants. My mouth was becoming a pool of saliva.

“Earlier I mentioned that Naila might have sent the medicine because she might have been under the impression, the false impression mind you, that I wanted it.”

“And what would have given her that impression?” Ozawa said.

“I’d been feeling down in the dumps,” I said, my body as itchy as a leper’s.

“Why?”

“A lot of things,” I answered. “My wife remarried in April . . . the university work had become boring and uninspiring . . . and I was about to turn forty.”

“And you told your cousin these things?”

“No.”

“No?”

I took my handkerchief out and gave my nose a nice, long blow to try and rein in all the tics driving me bonkers.

“No,” I said, returning the handkerchief to my pocket and placing my hands back on the desk. “I mentioned them to my aunt, Naila’s mother. We’ve always been close and it’s always been easier to talk to Aunt Michelin than to my own mother about what’s bothering me. My aunt must have blabbered on to Naila about how depressed I was and then Naila must have decided to send me her medicine. This is all conjecture on my part, of course. The fact of the matter is that I have no idea why my cousin sent her medicine, and, frankly speaking, I’m rather pissed off that she would do such a reckless, irresponsible thing.”

“Okay, okay,” Ozawa said, closing his notebook and resting his pen on top of it. He leaned back in his seat and massaged his left shoulder a bit. “That should be enough for today.”

When Nakata came and stood in the doorway, Ozawa turned to him to say that we were finished.

I sat back in my own chair and started to breathe a little easier. I’d done it. I’d gotten through the day without cracking, without spilling the beans, without incriminating myself, without . . .

“Boncoeur,” Nakata said.

“Yes?”

“We need you to come back tomorrow.”

“Yes, you said so before. One o’clock, right?”

“Right, one o’clock,” Nakata said. “Oh, yes, one other thing . . . “

“What’s that?”

“We may arrest you tomorrow.”

___________________________

*Pease, Allan & Barbara, The Definitive Book of Body Language, London: Orion Books Ltd., 2004.

Dimitrius, Jo-Ellen & Mark Mazzarella, Reading People, New York: Random House, 1998.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved.

4.23 Exit Stage Left

Ozawa leaned forward, forearms on the desktop. “Boncoeur, why did your cousin send the drugs to you this time?”

I leaned back in my chair, out of reach from those meaty hands of his, and replied, “I honestly don’t know.”

Ozawa sat back in his chair and let out a groan.

“If it’s alright with you,” I said, “I’d like to use the restroom.”

“Make it quick,” he said, waving me away.

I got up and left the interrogation room. It had grown dark outside. A clock on the wall showed eight-thirty. I’d been with the Narcotics and Customs agents for nearly twelve hours and, yet, I wasn’t the least bit tired. My mind was still racing at five miles a minute. Had that been fast enough to keep me paces ahead of Ozawa and Nakata?

In the restroom, I splashed water on my face and, taking several deep breaths, considered what I had told the two men, and, more crucially, what I had not. After rehearsing how I was going to answer Ozawa’s question, I returned to the interrogation room.

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved.

4.22 The Second Time

Ozawa had been listening and rubbed his brow with one of his meaty hands as if to say it was all a load of crap. Changing the subject, he asked me to clarify what I had asked my cousin to send me.

“You mentioned earlier that you asked your cousin to send the cookies and, what was that, the dryer sheets, right? But you didn’t ask for the other things. When did you ask for these things?”

“Probably while she was still here.”

“Why probably?”

“Well, those are fairly standard requests for me. Whenever someone goes to the States, I always say, ‘Hey, if it’s no trouble, could you get me A, B, and C?’ I’m sure I said the same thing to her sometime.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you ask her to send those things?”

“Because, as far as I know, you can’t find them in Japan. If I could, I wouldn’t need to ask.”

“And the charcoal?”

“I didn’t ask for that. Not from Naila, at least. I was surprised that she would send it.”

“And the pills?”

“As I have already told you: I never wanted them. I never asked her to send them. And I had no idea that they were on their way. I didn’t even known that she had sent me a package until she mailed me.”

Nakata paged through the thick folder, and said, “Boncoeur, you seem like a nice guy, and, to be frank, we’d normally let it slide if it weren’t the second time.”

“Second time?” I said. “What do you mean second time?”

“You tried to smuggle this same drug into Japan before,” he accused rabidly.

Nakata was proving himself to be as wildly emotional as a menopausal housewife: one moment he’d be chatty and in a playfully good mood, the next he’d be frothing at the mouth. I couldn’t trust anything he was saying.

“I never did any such thing,” I said.

“But you did,” Nakata said. “We intercepted it and sent you a letter.”

“You sent me a letter? A letter to me? Me?”

“W-w-well, uh, no, we sent it to your cousin, Naila.”

“Ahhh, that . . . “

“But it was sent to your address. This is your address, right? And this is your cousin’s name, is it not?” Nakata was holding the thick folder as if it were a newborn child. Shifting his shoulders, he showed me the page he was looking at. The tell-tale letter was covered with a sheet of paper to prevent me from seeing what had been written. He pointed at my address.

“Yes, that is my address, but I don’t know who this is.”

“That’s your cousin’s name, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“What do you mean ‘no’? That’s your cousin’s name.”

“My cousin’s name is Naila, N-A-I-L-A, not . . . Geez, what does this say? N-O-G-B. Nogbuh?”

“The spelling’s not important,” he said, yanking the folder away. “Look, Boncoeur, if you not going to cooperate . . .”

“Nakata-san, I am cooperating. I’ve been cooperating all day and I intend to continue cooperating. I want to settle this matter as much as you do, but . . . ” Jesus Christ! “But, I also want to be thorough and precise.”

Nakata left the interrogation room in a huff and I might be mistaken but I think I caught Ozawa rolling his eyes.

“When you got the letter from Customs . . . ” Ozawa began.

“I never got a letter.”

“When your cousin got the letter . . .”

“When a letter addressed to someone named ‘Nogb’ arrived from Customs, I figured it was probably for her, name misspelt, notwithstanding, and handed it to my cousin.”

“You didn’t read it?”

“Did I read the letter? I recall a letter coming, but, no, I do not remember reading it.”

“A letter comes from Customs and you don’t bother to read it?” Ozawa said skeptically. “How come?”

“You’re asking me about something that happened two years ago, and all I can say is that I don’t remember. I don’t think I read the letter. Even if I had, I don’t remember what the letter said. Ozawa-san, I can’t even remember for sure when that letter came.”

Ozawa hollered out to Nakata to check the date of the letter and a moment later the Customs man poked his homely mug into the room.

“The twelfth of March.”

“Two-thousand-five?” I said. “I mean, Heisei seventeen, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Now I know why I don’t remember,” I began. “A lot of things were going on at that time. I was under an unbelievable amount of stress. I was just about to change jobs, to start teaching at the university and there was a lot of paperwork to do. Deadlines. On top of that, my relationship with my cousin was at its lowest point. She had moved back to my place in February and was causing me all kinds of grief. She’d come home at three or four in the morning drunk most of the time. She even vomited several times on the tatami no less. There’s still a stain on one of the mats. We weren’t talking much then. And if that weren’t bad enough, there was the earthquake that month.”

“The earthquake?” Nakata said.

“On the twentieth.”

“Oh, that’s right. There was one.”

“Not just one. We had nearly two months of earthquakes and daily aftershocks. I was sick most of the time with all the rocking. I had two apartments at the time . . . “

“Two?”

“Long story. Both of the apartments took big hits, got really trashed. You should have seen my place. All the cabinets were knocked over, there was broken glass everywhere and water shooting out of one of the faucets. The water went through the floor and flooded the two apartments below mine. Of course, I didn’t have earthquake insurance. No one did back then, because, well anyone could have told you, Fukuoka doesn’t have earthquakes. And to make matters worse, this battle-ax downstairs sued me for water damage. My god, what a month! So, there right in the middle of all that chaos, a letter comes from Customs and I may have looked at it, I may not have looked at it, but the point is I don’t recall reading it. It was, to be frank, the least of my problems.”

“The least of your problems.”

“My cousin’s medicine didn’t make it through Customs. It wasn’t my problem, it was hers.”

“Did you talk about it?” Ozawa asked.

“Not really. Like I said, we weren’t talking much at the time. I recall asking one of my students, a doctor, if Naila could get her prescription filled in Japan, but she said she couldn’t.”

“Did this doctor say why?”

“She only said something about it not being sold in Japan. I figured that probably just hadn’t been approved yet, what with the strict approval system here. Again, I didn’t really put much thought into it. It was Naila ’s problem, like I’ve said.”

“Did she try again?” Nakata asked.

“Try what?”

“To smuggle the drugs in,” he said.

“She never tried to smuggle anything in. My mother had the prescription filled in the States and sent it to Japan. My mother is no drug trafficker, by the way, she’s a perfectly respectable housewife in her seventies.”

“Okay, okay,” Ozawa said. “Did Naila ever try to get the medicine sent again?”

“No. There was no reason to. She was moving to the States in a matter of months with her boyfriend. The two got married by and by.”

“Did you ask your cousin to send the medicine?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“So why did she send it this time?”

-

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

© Aonghas Crowe, 2009. All rights reserved.

4.21 Bah, humbug!

“I’d never been so depressed,” I said to Ozawa. “And I’m not talking about feeling blah. I mean black, black, black depression. I’d really rather not talk about it, but . . . ” Another well-timed tear rolled down my cheek. I stopped speaking, took a handkerchief from my pocket and dabbed my eyes. Taking a deep breath, I continued. “It’s embarrassing for me to admit that I could be so weak, but . . . I don’t want to lie to you.”

-

Looking back I’m not sure why Nacky’s leaving me had such a deep impact. I couldn’t eat or sleep for weeks. All I wanted was death to pay me a friendly visit and take away the pain.

At the time, I thought, I believed it was because I truly loved Nacky. That wasn’t it, though. I did love her in a hopelessly unsustainable way. There was an affinity, a chemistry, that was real, but it was destined to burn itself out eventually. I should have realized that and enjoyed the time we had rather than hope to inveigle new sparks out of an old fire.

But, now, now that so many years have passed, I think the reason I was so upset was that I had broken up with a lot of people and the loneliness, the loss was finally catching up with me.

The summer before, as I have already said, I dumped Azami. However unhappy we had been in the preceding year, leaving her hadn’t been easy. She’d been an integral part of my life for several years. She had pushed me to chase my dreams. In the end, though, she pushed too hard.

In a sense when I broke up with Azami I was admitting that I couldn’t live up to the expectations she had of me. She had been putting a lot of pressure on me to write, to do this or that, and never hesitated to voice her disappointment when I didn’t give my all. Azami believed she was helping me, of course, but I felt as I was being stifled.

Still, many nights when Nacky was laying by my side, my thoughts turned inevitably to Azami, that black stain bleeding ever further into the picture: Where was she? Was she okay? Could this naked woman sleeping beside me ever replace her?

There was the divorce, too.

After eight years of acrimony, I was finally free. I should have been whirling in ecstasy like a dervish, and for a short while I was. But, the euphoria at being emancipated quickly waned, only to be uprooted by a creeping emotional exhaustion that seeped its way through my meat and into the marrow of my bones. There I was, thirty-eight going on thirty-nine, only eighteen short months from forty.

A week after the divorce, I lay on my futon, howling like an injured dog, mourning the years that had been lost to that hollow marriage. If only I could be thirty again, sitting on the steps of Nishi Koen (West Park), a canopy of cherry blossoms above me, a twenty-nine-year-old Yuko at my side, and all nearly a decade of mistakes yet unmade. Rather than ask Yuko if she would marry me as I did that fateful night, I would break up with her and begin taking the first steps down the road leading to an entirely different life.

Wishing for the present to fold back upon itself and make me thirty again was as effective as praying to a god who probably didn’t exist and, most likely didn’t care for petty human regrets even if he did. The best I could hope for was to not be stupid enough to repeat past mistakes.

A few weeks later, Nacky was out of the picture, too, and the hole only grew larger. I was 38, desperately alone, rudderless, and back at zero and looking at a long, lonely slog to recover my self-respect. And if that weren’t enough to get me down in the dumps, Christmas was upon us.

-

“Naila wasn’t living with me at the time. She had found her own apartment. I didn’t think it was safe for me to be alone, so I asked her to come back to move back to my place until I started feeling better.”

“When was this?” Ozawa asked.

“Early December, 2004.”

“And you asked her for the drugs then?”

“No, I didn’t ask for the medicine. She offered it to me.”

“And you took it?” He looked at me as if I were mad.

“I was hesitant at first . . . But, she said it would pick me up. And, well, it seemed a healthier, better alternative than continuing to drown my sorrows in alcohol.”

“And?”

“I tried the Adderall and, well, I have to be honest with you, it worked. It helped me get my mind off of my ex-girlfriend and begin moving on.”

“How long did you take the drug?”

“Adderall? I don’t know. This is, what, almost two years ago.”

“Several months?”

“No, no, no. I didn’t take her medicine very long. Two weeks, I think. No more than three weeks.”

“So you liked the drug,” Nakata kicked in. “Whassit called, Addoh . . .” .

“Adderall. Did I like the Adderall? What’s to like?” I took another drink from my green tea. “You know, I suffer from rhinitis–my damn nose is running like a leaky faucet all year long–so, I take Paburon, Paburon S, in the winter, Contact in the summer. They do the trick. If you asked me, though, if I liked Paburon, I’d tell you I wished I didn’t have to take it. But, you know, it really does work. If I ever come across something that’s better, though, I’ll change medicines . . . As for the depression, I found that going back to my old girlfriend Azami and focusing on my writing and photography was far more effective than Adderall could ever be at making life worth the trouble it is. Adderall helped, really did, but it wasn’t something I could, or wanted to, continue taking.”

“When did you stop taking it,” Ozawa asked.

“Mid December, I guess.”

“And you never took it again?”

“No.”

“Why not?” Nakata piped in again.

“My cousin was taking it nearly every day, may still be for all I know. She told me once that Adderall made her feel normal. Adderall made me feel jittery and overly self-conscious.”

“Nevertheless, you took it for two weeks . . . “

“About two weeks. And, yes, I did take it. As I’ve already said, I was extremely depressed.”

“Are you often depressed?” Nakata asked.

“Not often, no.”

“But you were depressed then?”

“Yes. Very much so.”

“Where did Naila get the Adderall she gave you?”

“She brought it with her.”

“She smuggled it into Japan?” Nakata said.

“No. She brought it with her when she came. Her doctor had given her something like a six-month prescription, I believe, before she left. As far as I know, Customs didn’t bother to check her bags when she entered the country. At any rate, I didn’t know she was on the medication until well after she had arrived, and neither of us had any idea that Adderall was so strictly controlled in Japan. If she had known that it was, I doubt she would have brought it with her in the first place.”

-

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

© Aonghas Crowe, 2009. All rights reserved.

4.20 Heisei Sixteen

In the annals of my personal history, 2004 may very well go down as the worst year ever, narrowly beating 2003 for the dismal honor of annus horribilis.

When my niece Haruna was born, Azami lost what little hope she still had that I would ever leave my wife and left me instead for another man. It was hardly unexpected: we had been drifting apart. Still, it came as devastating blow to me and I double up my efforts to once and for all divorce Yuko to prove to Azami and myself that I could be the master of my own fate rather than be mastered by it.

After weeks of wrangling with Yuko and getting nowhere, I finally resorted to confronting her sister Kumiko with the truth that the two of us had been separated for a year. Two days later Yuko gave in.

For Yuko, who had come of age during Japan’s “Bubble Economy” when money flowed like water and a young woman’s self-worth was as overinflated as the land values, however, each quid had its quo; and every tit was returned with a tat. From day one of our marriage, Yuko would not so much as take a step in my direction unless I first scattered coins on the path before her. Getting her to consent to a divorce she did not want then wasn’t going to be cheap.

All the same, the figure she demanded went beyond the beyonds.

“You’ve got to be joking!” I said.

“Take it or leave it,” she replied coldly.

As if the last seven years hadn’t been bad enough, the contract Yuko was expecting me to sign would commit me in essence to a year of indentured servitude. Over the next twelve months I would hand over sixty percent of my income so that she could book passage on the Peace Boat, a ship departing in July on a three-month-long, round-the-world cruise.

“But, I’m barely making ends meet as it is,” I protested.

“Take it or leave it.”

I placed the contract on the table before me and, biting the bullet, signed my name.

-

It was a Pyrrhic victory in the classic sense in that had I become any more victorious in my dealings with Yuko I would have ended up utterly ruined–financially, spiritually, and physically. Over the next ten months, I eked out a living as every extra yen I made got thrown into that money pit of an estranged wife.

In the meantime, Azami and I reunited and spent Christmas and New Year’s together, the first time we would do so without my having to cut and run back to Yuko’s side. I had hoped that this would mark the beginning of a sunny, happy period in our relationship, but it didn’t. The skies grew ever darker.

On the surface, we tried to pretend that we were happy, but deep down we simmered with resentment. I was still angry that Azami could leave me for another man; she was disgusted with me for being such a mawkish pushover when it came to dealing with my wife and her family. Every “I love you” we uttered was done so through gritted teeth.

Money being tight made matters worse. If only we could have escaped for a week, taken a trip somewhere sunny and warm and forgotten our troubles, then perhaps we might have healed our wounded hearts rather than let them fester.

-

Over the first half of 2004, six months that limped along like a dog with three legs, I had to scrimp and save so that I might have enough money at the end of the month to pay Yuko her pound of flesh. The sacrifices I was making month in, month out turned my hair gray and tore at the fabric of Azami and my relationship. By spring that relationship had been ripped to shreds.

On the other hand, as Yuko’s departure on the Peace Boat neared, a modicum of civility returned to my dealings with my wife, thanks in no small measure by the sincere efforts of her brother-in-law, Kenta, and sister.

Yuko and I eventually came to an agreement that when we did indeed put a legal end to our marriage after she returned in October, we would still try to remain family. What’s more, I could move back to our larger apartment in Daimyo when she left on her trip and Yuko, upon returning to Japan, would move into the smaller apartment in Imaizumi.

When I first consulted with my friend Jean years earlier about how I might end the marriage to my advantage, he suggested hiring someone to have an affair with Yuko and getting the photographic evidence to use against her if she balked. It was, after all, what he did with his own wife. “And look at me today!”

Fidelity had never been my strong suit so it struck me has egregiously hypocritical of me to point a finger at my wife when four were pointing right back at me.

No, coaxing and cajoling was the only way to go, and while it took time, much longer than I would have liked, in the end I was getting everything I had hoped to get out of the divorce. For the first time in a long time was able to smile.

To Azami, however, it all smacked of backpedalling. The past nine months had been hard on us and it’s not surprising that our love would sour as badly as it did. A few days after the Peace Boat set sail, I moved back to Daimyo and left Azami.

It killed me to say goodbye to Azami after all we had been through together. She had been my lover and best friend through some of the worst years of my marriage, had given me the encouragement and assistance to finally leave the wife with whom I had been so unhappy for so long.

But the relationship had long grown tired precisely at a time when I needed to feel fresh and alive again, to feel as if my best years were still ahead of me. And so, I reached out to a new lover.

At thirty-two, Nacky was a good deal older than Azami, but still beautiful, vivacious, and had a joie de vivre that Azami had lost.

I fell hard for her the moment we met. It was at a mutual friend’s birthday party. I had arrived late, getting to the club shortly after midnight when everyone was already drunk and dancing their fool heads off. Nacky walked right up to me, introduced herself in broken English, and, taking my face in her hands, planted a big wet kiss on my lips. After chatting for an hour or so, we went home together and made love until the wee hours of the morning.

For the next three months while Yuko was sailing the world, Nacky and I had about as much fun as two lovers in the wildly passionate throes of a young relationship can have.

It was also at this time that my cousin, Naila, came to Japan, and it wasn’t long before Nacky, her older sister, my cousin and I were all going out together.  Two months into the relationship, and with too much rum flowing through my veins, I told Nacky that I wanted her to have my children.

Holding Nacky tightly in my arms, I could picture it clearly, this new life I would lead where all the past mistakes would have been small steps to getting to this point, this happiness, this content. Seeping into the picture, however, was a black stain, a growing regret at having dumped Azami.

Looking back, it’s easy to understand that my relationship with Nacky burned too hot and fast to ever last. Still, it came as a massive blow to me when, only a week after her thirty-third birthday which had been so tender, loving and affectionate, Nacky text’d me saying that she never wanted to ever see me again. It was as unexpected as that first kiss, and for weeks I was inconsolable. I had broken up with Azami, the true love of my life, in July, divorced Yuko after eight barren and wasted years in November, and, now three weeks before Christmas, this woman I had imagined myself one day settling down with suddenly dumped me.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

© Aonghas Crowe, 2009. All rights reserved.

4.19 Naila

How many times had I tried to contact Naila only to hear the phone ring and ring and ring and ring? “Yal’la, Naila! Pick up the goddamn phone!” I’d yell into the receiver hoping that she’d be able to hear my growing desperation half a world away.

What was I going to tell the police now? I had the so-called “right to remain silent”, but the police reserved the might to beat me senseless if I kept my trap shut.

Without Naila’s corroboration, every word uttered to Ozawa and Nakata was a wager, a wager with very dismal consequences if I placed the wrong bet. Were I to lie, only to have my cousin tell the truth, then I’d be twice damned as a criminal and a liar. But, what if I were to tell the truth only to have Naila lie to protect me? She was in the States. The Japanese police couldn’t touch her. Or could they?

After three fitful nights ruminating over this, I figured the only thing I could reasonably do was to carefully tip-toe down the narrow path that meandered between veracity and prevarication. Just close enough to the truth to be embarrassing, but not so much so as to be self-damning.

“My cousin, she, ah, isn’t really what you’d call normal.”

“What do you mean?” Nakata asked. He closed the door to the interrogation room and sat down next to Ozawa.

“I love my cousin,” I said. “She’s an exceptionally bright, beautiful young woman. She could do anything, be anything she wanted with her talent and looks. The thing is, she has . . . I mean she had a problem with drugs. With Heroin.”

My interrogators’ eyes widened. They scribbled furiously in their notebooks.

“My aunt was besides herself with grief when she found out,” I continued. “Despite being thrown into rehab in Canada a couple of times, Naila wouldn’t give up the habit. I have no idea what it’s like–I’ve never been into drugs, myself–but, I can well imagine that it’s no easy thing trying to give up heroin. My aunt, she just couldn’t take it anymore: Naila’s lies, the sneaking around, the disruption to everyone’s lives. My aunt wanted to get rid of Naila, so I suggested she come to Japan.”

“Why would you do that?” Ozawa asked.

“I wanted to help. And, I figured that being in Japan, she wouldn’t be able to get drugs as easily as she would if she had stayed in Beirut or gone to Europe or the States. She’d have no choice but to go, you know, cold turkey.”

“So she came to Japan,” Ozawa said.

“Yeah. I was surprised that my aunt took me up on my offer so readily. Guess that shows how much she wanted to be rid of my cousin. One day I say, ’send Naila to Japan’ and two weeks later, I’m greeting her at the airport.”

“When did she come?” Nakata asked.

“In August or September of two-thousand-four,” I said.

More busy notations. Heisei 16. You’d think they’d have these things committed to memory, but, no, they have to look it up every time to be safe.

I refrained from mentioning that my cousin was not only jazzed up on smack when she arrived, but had brought her gear with her. I could have killed her when I found out. “What’s the big deal,” she asked. Despite all her smarts, she could be incredibly stupid. “What’s the big deal?” I yelled back. “You could have been arrested at the border, and locked up for months or even years is what!” This surprised her. She thought the customs officials would merely confiscate her gear, and send her on her merry little way.

“And?” Ozawa prodded.

“And, I had a very difficult time.”

“What do you mean?”

“She went through withdrawals the first month she was here. She cried a lot. She’d go from being apoplectic one moment, to cute and sweet the next. Looking back, it probably wasn’t the best thing to add culture shock to all her other problems, but, then again, she did eventually straighten out.”

“She stopped taking drugs,” Ozawa said.

“Yes. She got married to a very straight-laced guy she met here, an MP, by the way. He was doing the same kind of work you guys do–drug enforcement. You may even know him from the joint operations you sometimes carry out.”

If that wasn’t ironic, I don’t know what is.

Ozawa asked for his name.

“David Stern.”

“I may know him.”

“Like I said, he’s very straight-laced. Naila really cleaned up her act, really changed after they met.”

“If you don’t mind,” Ozawa said, “let’s get back to why she sent the drugs.”

“You want to know why my cousin sent the medicine. I’d like to know myself. But without asking her personally, without talking to her I’m afraid I can’t really say why she did it.”

“Boncoeur!” Nakata shouted.

“Please allow me to finish, Nakata-san. I don’t know why Naila sent the medicine, but I can imagine why she may have sent it to me.”

I swallowed hard. I was about to incriminate myself. I would have preferred to deny everything: I know nuttin’! I see nuttin’! I hear nuttin’! I would rather have kept my trap shut, but there was always the chance that they might contact Naila and ask her why she had sent the medicine. If only she had answered the goddamn phone. If only I had been able to talk to her. If only, if only, if only . . . If only I had never started doing drugs in the first place.

“Because she may have thought that I had wanted it,” I said. Then, against my better judgment, and with alarm bells ringing, I admitted to taking my cousin’s medicine.

“When was this?” Ozawa asked, jotting some notes down on his pad.

“December. December oh-four. Heisei sixteen.”

-

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

© Aonghas Crowe, 2009. All rights reserved.

4.18 So what can you tell us?

“So what can you tell us?” Ozawa said, leaning in closer to me with a menacing look.

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you much,” I said. My throat had become bone dry. I unscrewed the cap from the bottle of green tea and took a long swig. “I didn’t ask Naila to send the medicine. I didn’t know she was sending it. And I never wanted or expected her to send it. “

“Then why the hell did she?” Ozawa said slapping the desk.

“You’ll have to ask her because I honestly don’t know.”

“C’mon, Boncoeur,” Ozawa said. “No one sends drugs to another person just like that, just out of the blue.”

“A normal person wouldn’t, no,” I had to admit. “But, my cousin, she isn’t really what you’d call normal.”

“What do you mean?” Nakata asked. He closed the door to the small interrogation room and sat down next to Ozawa.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

© Aonghas Crowe, 2009. All rights reserved.

4.17 Giveth and Taketh

As far as my wife was concerned I was a cold bastard. Be that as it may, I didn’t have a heart callous enough to visit such bad tidings upon her sister while she was pregnant. Despite the long-standing troubles between Yuko and myself, I had grown deeply fond of her family over the years. I was particularly close to her younger sister Kumiko and her husband, Kenta, who insisted upon calling me “brother”.

There is a saying in Japanese, “Ko-wa kasugai” (lit. a child is an iron clamp), which means that children bind married couples together. Thanks to the unborn child growing in Kumiko’s womb, Yuko and my unhappy marriage was granted a stay of execution.

And while Azami wasn’t happy about my decision to postpone the divorce, at least I was now separated from my wife. I had taken a step, albeit a small one, in the right direction.

-

In the meantime, I was bounding like a man engulfed in flames towards serious methamphetamine addiction. The habit was getting costlier and costlier.

Where I could once expect a gram of shabu to sell for only 7000 yen and keep me soaring above the clouds for weeks, the same amount of crystal meth now set me back 20,000~25,000 yen and had me crashing to earth like an Icarus just off the Cretan coast.

A number of factors contributed to the skyrocketing price of methamphetamines at the time: service of the Mangyonbong-92, a ferry which sailed regularly between Niigata, Japan and Wonsan, North Korea, carrying not only passengers, but drugs and missile components as well, was suspended; patrolling of the seas by the Japanese Coast Guard was intensified after 9/11; and, the police had stepped up their anti-trafficking efforts after record hauls of the drug.

The quality was plummeting, too.

When Jean first introduced me to Shinji in a darkened stairwell two years earlier, the drug made my whole body tingle. In the euphoria of that initial high, I felt as if I had woken to a lovely spring day after years of gloom. Bathed in this new positive light. I felt that I could do anything; that the possibilities were, to steal Fujitsu’s tag line, truly infinite.

Like the Lord, however, Shinji giveth and he taketh away. Despite all the promise early on, two years later my dreams remained frustrated. Worse, the eloquence bequeathed did not last. From effortless fluency I began to stumble, finding myself more and more at a loss for words where they had once flowed from my pen. The well was drying up: it was becoming a struggle to pen a single sentence. To add insult to injury, that dissertation I had labored on for over a year was returned to me with a lousy C. The writing was beautiful, at times poetic, the professor had commented, but not very academic.

Oh, how I used to mock people like the Swiss dancer who didn’t do drugs, didn’t drink, or smoke, or eat meat of any kind! When I wondered aloud if “being healthy” really could feel that good, Jean gave me an avuncular pat on the back, “My friend, you’ve been spending too much time with me.” But, after treating this temple of mine like a bus center toilet for so long, being high wasn’t feeling all that good either. My body started to cry foul, demanding restitution.

My muscles ached, and the sinew of my back was a tangle of knots, my head throbbed as if red hot fire pokers were being pressed against the temples. My lungs, too, ached. They were heavy, and congested. I shuddered to think that they might be coated with the very same white powder that clogged my sinuses and dusted my eyelashes during particularly heavy smoking.

After a nearly two years of essentially uninterrupted abuse, my body was screaming for a rest. The poisons which had been making me high, were now dragging me towards a new low. Shinji, the Liberator became Shinji, the Tyrant.

And one day as I was walking in Daimyo, I came across an old friend I hadn’t seen in ages. When he introduced me to his wife, I took her hand causing the woman to let out a squeal as if she had shaken the hand of the Grim Reaper himself.

“You’re hand is like ice,” she said, recoiling.

I was burning up, on fire, a cold sweat rolling down my back. My old friend gave me a queer look and said, “You might be suffering from hyperthermia, Rémy. You’d better see a doctor.”

“I’m not feeling well,” I replied. “Must be a touch of the flu.”

I was breaking down, my body no longer able to take the abuse. Returning to my apartment, I dumped the crystal meth, about a thousand dollar’s worth of the drug, down the toilet, then collapsed onto the floor and started crying.

It’s never a good time to quit.

-

Amphetamines produce a feeling of euphoria by blocking receptors that tell the body to stop producing dopamine and adrenaline allowing these pleasure-inducing neurotransmitters to remain in the bloodstream.

When you go cold turkey, the level of dopamine in the blood drops, and depression sets in. Even though I knew it wasn’t real, that it was only chemicals, a lack of them in my bloodstream, that were making me feel miserable and with time I’d get over it. I tried to convince myself that I’d be feeling right as rain again, but as I sat in front of the TV watching the news, tears flooded from my eyes.

It devastated me to think of all the things I had wanted to do, but hadn’t done, all the things I hoped to do, but now doubted my ability to carry them through. I was a loser and the possibilities were depressingly finite, growing more and more limited with each passing day.

After several weeks of moping about and brooding over the missteps that were coming to define my life, my mood started to lift, but only slightly. The next several months would be just as difficult, but for another reason: hypersomnia. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. It was as if after two years of speeding, I had amassed such a debt of sleep depravation that I needed to recalibrate my body. The Sandman’s hourglass had to be turned over to return myself to balance. It was a tough six months, made all the more difficult because I couldn’t tell anyone what I was going through–not Azami, not my wife, and not even Jean who was still using the drug to get through each day, and had been pissed off at me for having flushed the meth down the toilet rather than giving it to him.

Eventually, I would come across an article in The Economist about nootropics, or smart drugs, such as Modafinil and Adrafinil, which not only kept you awake, but also brightened your mood. Who needs High Times to keep you informed about drugs when you can always pick up a copy of The Economist? I found an online dealer of smart drugs and placed an order. To my surprise it arrived in the post a week later. Better living through chemistry, indeed!

-

In May of 2003, my sister-in-law Kumiko gave birth to a beautiful baby girl who she named Haruna. Kumiko and her husband never having been around children were afraid of breaking the small thing. I scooped her up into my arms and held her close to my chest. That wonderful smell of a newborn filling my nostrils, I kissed Haruna on the top of her head and made a promise that no matter what happened between Yuko and me, I would try to give the child the love and support she deserved. This baby was, in a sense, my reset button when my life needed resetting.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

© Aonghas Crowe, 2009. All rights reserved.

4.16 “This is no time for jokes.”

After going line by line through the details of my life as if he were yanking a fine-toothed comb through natty hair, Ozawa finally closed his notebook computer and left the interrogation room.

Kuroda replaced him.

The two were like night and day: Ozawa was beefy, tanned, good looking and confident; Kuroda, on the other hand, was thin, unhealthy looking and wan. It begged the question how two utterly different specimens of man could be hired by the same agency.

I asked Kuroda what he had studied at university.

Chemistry, he replied, and it started to make sense: Kuroda wasn’t supposed to be out on the field or sitting face-to-face with the criminals in interrogation rooms. He was supposed to be in a laboratory, wearing a lab coat, doing chemical analysis of the evidence, and generally keeping out of the way. He was as out of his element as a guppy flopping helplessly on the living room floor.

Some thirty minutes later, Ozawa returned with the Custom’s man, Nakata, in tow. What was to follow would make the session up to then seem like a coffee and donuts function at the local parish.

The tone of the questioning up to this point had been quite civil, but now the two of them were all business. It was as if they could turn their “emotions” on or off with a flick of a switch, going from being my friends to being hard-arses. I hadn’t trusted them when they were being pleasant; I trusted them even less when they started busting my chops.

In the same petulant, blustery tone he had used on the morning of the raid Nakata explained that I had been asked to come in for questioning because of an attempt to smuggle amphetamines and psychotropics into Japan.

“Be that as it may, Nakata-san,” I said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He stomped out of the room and returned with a folder, a good five inches thick, with my full name written in katakana on the spine. He placed the heavy folder on the desk before me, thud, then started thumbing quickly through the hundreds and hundreds of neatly filed documents. I could catch fleeting glimpses of my life as the pages flew by. There were copies from my homepage, printouts from my hotmail account.

“You’ve been busy,” I said, my throat growing dry.

“This is no time for jokes, Boncoeur!”

“Who’s joking? You really have been quite . . . “

“Boncoeur, this is a very serious matter.”

“I know it is. Yes. I’m sorry.”

Good god, how long have they been watching me? What do they already know?

Nakata found what he was searching for and spun the folder around so that I could have a better look.

“This is what we found: eight capsules of this,” Nakata said, his voice growing agitated. He jabbed his finger, a fat little sausage of a finger, at a picture of a blue and white capsule. Then flipping a page and tapping on another picture of baby blue tablets, he said, “Sixteen of these, here. Both of these contain the same substance: dextroamphetamine. Do you understand what I mean by substance? Shall I look it up for you?”

“I-I know what substance means. It’s the other thing, the dex-dextro-whatsit . . .”

“Dextroamphetamine.”

“Yes, that. I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s an amphetamine, Boncoeur. It’s extremely dangerous stuff and it’s prohibited by the Stimulant Drugs Control Act.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. That’s only Adderall.”

“Adder?”

“Adderall. On the other page there.”

Nakata flipped back a page.

“Yes, that’s Adderall.” I wrote it down on a piece of paper for him. “Children take it in the U.S. Anyways, that’s the brand name of the medicine. And here on this page, these small blue tablets here are the generic version.”

“Zenelikku.”

“Generic.”

“Zene-likku.”

“Not zene-likku,” I said. “Ge-ne-ric. All that means is that it’s a ‘no brand’ version of the medicine. It’s he same thing, the same substance, only this one here, Adderall, is much more expensive.”

“I don’t understand,” Nakata replied.

“Honestly, neither do I,” I said. “But that’s a different issue, altogether. Look, in the U.S. many of prescription drugs come in a variety of types: the brand-name ones which can be quite expensive and these cheaper so-called generic versions that are made by a different company.”

“So you do know what this is, then!” Nakata said triumphantly.

“Did I know the active ingredient was dextro, um, dextro-amphetamine? No, I didn’t. Did I know this was Adderall? Yes.”

“How?”

“Well, for one, ‘Adderall’ is printed right here in small letters.”

“Let me see that,” he said, turning the folder around. “Oh, you’re right. I, uh, didn’t notice that. And the other one called Zene-likku . . . “

Ugh. “It’s not called zene-likku,” I said. I removed my glasses and rubbed my brow. “As far as I know, these two are the same thing, the same substance. My cousin used to take both of these, pretty much everyday, while she was living with me two years ago.”

“Okay,” Nakata said. He scribbled some notes down in a note book, then flipping a page, showed me another picture of a small pinkish white pellet, not much bigger than the head of a pin. “Do you know what this is?”

“No, I’ve never seen that before.”

“It’s methylphenidate. Ring any bells?”

“No.”

“It’s a psychotropic.”

“A psychotropic?”

“Yes, a psychotropic. It’s controlled by the Narcotics and Psychotropic Control Act. There were sixty of these pills found.”

“Sixty!” My god.

“Boncoeur, at nine-thirty-seven a.m. on June twelfth a package sent by Ms. Naila Stern addressed to you, Rémy Boncoeur, arrived at Kansai International Airport in Osaka.” Nakata’s voice was growing shrill. “The package contained, among other items, eight capsules and sixteen tablets of dextro-amphetamine and sixty methylphenidate pills. Again, these two substances are controlled substances. At nine thirty-seven, the moment the package was unloaded from the plane, the law was broken. That’s why the police are involved. Do you understand this, Boncoeur?”

“Y-yes. Yes, I think so.”

That knot that had been in my chest since Thursday tightened, my head reeled.

-

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

© Aonghas Crowe, 2009

4.15 Breaking Up Really is Hard to Do

In a cloud of milky white amphetamine smoke, I finished writing my dissertation. By no means the masterpiece I had hoped to write, at least it was finished–150 pages on Japan’s disaffected youth and juvenile crime written, no less, by a disaffected man, a flouter of laws and mores, thirty-something years young.

“Good-bye and good riddance,” I said, clapping my hands, once I had stuffed the manuscript into the mailbox.

And only now that I was done with the Master’s, a course that had gobbled up far more time than I expected, could I turn my attention to the pot simmering on the back burner: my wife, Yuko.

The truth be told, I had never been more happily married than I was at the time. While my wife was in Canada, I had been free to do what I liked, when I liked, and with whom I liked. I lived the dissolute life of a Bohemian, chasing women, doing drugs, and spending money like there was no tomorrow. And, because I was already taken, I could be aloof with women and convince myself it was for their own good. I could, and did, as I very damned well pleased.

However stupefied I might have been at the time, I still had the sense to recognize that the party couldn’t last. I didn’t expect to keep shipping my wife off to foreign lands indefinitely. I knew I would have to face up to the fact that the sooner we divorced the better for the two of us.

In December of 2001, I traveled to Canada where Yuko had been living since spring, and after spending a night in Vancouver, flew with my wife to Mexico. For a week and a half I enjoyed the sunshine, hundred dollar bottles of Reserva de la Familia Cuervo tequila, Yucatan specialties such as Pollo Pibil and lime soup, the Mayan ruins of Chitzen Itza, and the constant bickering between my wife and myself. Nine months apart and our hearts had grown scarcely fonder.

After Mexico, I completed my tour of NAFTA by flying to Portland, Oregon in time to spend the holidays with my family. My father, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s some five years earlier, was a shell of the man I had known in my youth. He spent his days wandering aimlessly around the house in his a sweat suit, mumbling to himself in French or fiddling with the cords of the curtains, tying them into intricate knots that were as difficult to undo as my marriage with Yuko would eventually prove to be.

Before returning to Japan, I met with my older brother Georges at a Coffee People in Northwest Portland where I confided to him that I would probably leave Yuko within a year.

“It’s probably for the best,” he said with a shrug. Three times married and considering getting hitched a fourth time to “a nice girl from Lebanon–no more bimbos”, Georges was hardly in the position to offer me any marital advice.

“Yuko’s a sweet girl, and I do like her,” he said, “but the two of you’ve never seemed to be very happy together.”

-

No we hadn’t. Since day one of our contentious married life, we had been squabbling over every little thing imaginable. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another, say, the sell by date on the milk, or the cost of the “silky” tissue I blew my nose in.

Hardly a day would pass when she wasn’t fuming about something.

“What is it this time?” I ask.

She doesn’t bother with pleasantries: “Why is it that you always have to go and buy bread only to let it go stale?”

I learned quickly that there was no use in being an active participant in these arguments: I turn around and start walking towards the living room.

“I’ve tried to eat a slice or so a day,” she says, “but I haven’t seen you eat any of it.”

Ugh.

“You haven’t eaten any of the bread, have you?”

“You seem to think that I haven’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I plop down on the sofa and turn on the TV.

“I’m talking to you.”

“Oh, is that what this is? A talk?”

“Why do you do this? Again and again and again. You’ve got no sense in that head of yours.”

Damn, missed the headlines.

“You’d better finish off this bread today,” she says.

“Why?”

“Because you bought it,” she shouts.

Damn right I did. The bread, the eggs, the milk, the bacon, the detergent, the toilet bowl cleaner, the toothpaste, the “silky” tissue. I went to the store alone again, bought it and carried it all home.

“You know, now that I think about it,” I shout back, “I’m probably the only husband in this country of yours who gets chewed out for not finishing the loaf of bread he went out and bought himself.”

“Bastard!”

“Listen, Yuko: your average husband doesn’t even know where the nearest supermarket is, let alone, where the spoons are kept in the kitchen. If he got off his ass, and managed to make it down to the supermarket and back without getting distracted for half the day by the pachinko parlor next door, his wife would be dancing for joy. And I get chewed out because the bread is past its expiration date!”

“That has nothing to do with bread’s expiration date.”

“The hell it does. You should be grateful that I bought the bread in the first place, rather than busting my balls over a few uneaten slices.”

Of course, her anger had nothing to do with the bread either. It just happened to be the most convenient vehicle she could ride in her weekly hysteria parade. Why she failed to understand this, though, flabbergasted me. If attention is what she was so hungry for, all she needed to do was display a little kindness and warmth. Instead, she chose to browbeat me.

-

Back in Japan, I started looking for another apartment to rent, and six months later found one I liked on the tenth floor of a new apartment building in Imaizumi. By the end of the summer of 2002, I had spent a small fortune furnishing it with Kartell furniture, chairs by Philippe Stark, and the minimalist artwork by a Japanese calligrapher.

I also bought some bamboo poles, painted them fire engine read, and made a curtain of sorts outside the sliding glass door that lead to the balcony, beyond which I created a Japanese rock garden with black bamboo, stepping stones, and red lanterns. To the casual observer, it may have looked very “Zen”; it was, however, very much the product of frenetic amphetamine-induced creativity.

I was smoking crystal meth like a champion again, having graduated from foil and was now smoking from a glass pipe, getting so high at times all I could do was sit on the floor of my new apartment, back against the wall, drooling.

And just as I was going to press Yuko for a divorce, her younger sister Kumiko, who had married a year and a half earlier, announced that she was pregnant.

_

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

© Aonghas Crowe, 2009

4.14 Bricks

Ozawa returned to the interrogation room, booting Terahara from his seat.

“If you don’t mind,” he said, opening up his notebook computer, “could you tell me why you got divorced?”

A more appropriate question would have been: what in the world was I thinking when I married Yuko, and how did we ever manage to stay together for eight years?

“I don’t have a simple, ready-made answer, I’m afraid. Whenever I hear about other couples breaking up, it seems the reason is fairly simple: someone cheated, or the husband’s a drunk, or they’ve got financial problems, or there’s been domestic violence. You know, I’m not perfect, but we didn’t have those kinds of problems. I mean, even after we broke up, we’d still go on dates, have dinner together or go to the movies. We’re still friends and I still spend a lot of time with her family. Her grandmother and I are particularly close . . . “

“So why did you break up?”

“I’m a very neat person. You know that already. You’ve seen my place. I’ve always got to have things just so. When I take a shirt out of the closet, I always return the empty hanger to the very right of the closet. Plastic hangers to the right, metal hangers to the left. So they won’t get all tangled up, see? When I take a shirt off, I hang it back up, or throw it in the hamper if it needs washing. I know where everything is. ‘Everything has a place, and everything in its place,’ I always say. Yuko threw things higgedly-piggedly into her closet. Used to drive up the wall. She rarely bothered to clean or straighten the rooms up. It’s not that she was a slob, she wasn’t. Compared to me, she’s probably normal.”

“And this your girlfriend of yours, Azami, she’s neat?”

“I’m sorry, this conversation is got off on the wrong foot,” I said. “If it was only a matter of neatness, Yuko and I’d probably still be together. It was more than that, but that, I don’t know, that was the first of many bricks.”

“The first brick?”

“The first brick, you know, in the wall that grew between Yuko and me, and eventually separated us.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, shutting his notebook computer and leaning back in his chair.

“Like I said, Yuko wasn’t a slob, but she was more, let’s say, ‘tolerant of untidiness’ than I would have liked. She never did much cleaning or helping around the apartment. And it wasn’t because she was busy. I worked much more than she did, ten-plus hours a day, six days a week. I’m no pimp. I was more than happy to, you know, bring home the bacon. The thing that galled me was that after working all day, if I wanted to eat dinner, I would have to run to the supermarket before it closed, get the groceries, and then cook it myself.”

“Really?”

“There was one time, about five years or so ago that I bumped into a student of mine at the supermarket. Nice woman, a few years younger than myself. She had been married a couple of years. It was about ten or so in the evening and she was there doing shopping for the night’s dinner. She was surprised to see, basket full of fruits and veggies and chicken and whatever hanging from my elbow, just like a proper housewife. It made her laugh. ‘Where’s Yuko,’ she asked. My wife was, of course, back at home watching a drama on TV. This student of mine found it so odd that a husband would be doing the grocery shopping. And well, personally, I don’t think it’s a revolutionary idea. Men should do it from time to time. But I was doing it everyday. And as I was walking home, I started thinking, what the hell am I still married for? I liked and respected my wife, but if she had been, say, an employee of mine, I would have fired her long ago. As I walked home from the grocery store, it started to dawn on me how unhappy I was. I could have cried. Let me tell you, that was like a wheelbarrow load of bricks.”

“Bricks?”

“The wall. The wall just got higher and higher from then on.”

“The wall again?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Incidentally, that woman, that student of mine at the supermarket divorced her husband a few months later when she discovered him having an affair.”

“And that’s when you got divorced?”

“No, no, no. That was, I don’t know, maybe three or four years before the divorce. I recall asking for a divorce at the time, but Yuko wouldn’t even consider it. She had a pretty good deal and knew it.”

“So?”

“So, I started to send Yuko away every year.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’d send her away for a couple month every year, just to get her out of my hair. I sent her to the States, to my parents’ home in Oregon, first. About a month. Then, the next year she went for three months. Half a year later she went to Canada for about a year.”

“A year?”

“Well, not exactly a year. Ten months.”

“When was this?”

“2001.”

Ozawa started to look at his converter.

“Heisei 13,” I said.

“Thanks.”

“Anyways, Yuko saw traveling to Canada as a chance to study English; I saw it as a chance to reclaim my life.”

“I don’t get you.”

“Ozawa-san, ageing is like being caught up in a giant, unrelenting whirlpool.”

“You and your metaphors.”

“When you haven’t got much of a vocabulary, you have no choice but to lean heavily upon a metaphor.”

“The whirlpool?”

“Bear with me. When you’re a kid, it feels like you’re floating in an infinite, ocean. The sun shines brightly above, the water is warm and comfortable. You feel as if you’re going be there forever, floating without a worry in the world. Each day passes slowly. A week feels like a month; a year, like an eternity. Then when you’re in your teens, clouds appear, the waters get rough, it feels like something is about to happen, but you don’t quite know what. It’s scary. You’ve got this belief in your heart, though, and it’s really a strong belief, so strong that you start to build dreams upon it. This hope keeps you afloat. Then, when you’re in your twenties, there’s no mistaking it, you’re moving now. A current pulls you forward, faster and faster and faster. But, by your mid thirties, it starts to dawn on you that the direction you’re being pulled might not exactly be the direction you want to go. If you’re lucky and strong enough, you might be able to swim against the current and change the course of your life. Trouble is, most of us aren’t strong, or lucky, or clever, or independent enough. Most people have got kids by then, and, well, all you can do is try to manage the best you can for your kids’ sake, so forget about what you want to do for yourself. And so, you just get pulled into this vortex, going round and round, faster and faster. The years start feeling as if they’re getting shorter and shorter, because, you know they really are. And the ability to change the course of your life becomes increasingly impossible. And then you’re sucked in. You disappear into the darkness. Where did all the time go? What happened to all the things you wanted to do? The dreams? You and all of those dreams and aspirations are pulled under and it’s like you never were that child floating on the surface of a calm warm ocean, the sun shining in your face . . . The game is over, Ozawa-san. There is no reset button.”

I unscrewed the cap of my green tea and took a sip. Looking out the door, I noticed a wooden household Shinto altar, known as a kamidana, above a steel filing cabinet. An offering of water, washed rice and a branch from a sakaki tree had been placed before it.

How odd it was to picture the cops bowing and clapping their hands before the altar, praying to the kami at the start of each day for protection.

Outside, the shadows were lengthening and, judging from the leaves that had grown still on the trees, the strong breeze I enjoyed in the park in the afternoon had died down. I wondered how much longer Ozawa and Nakata were going to keep me there. Were they ever going to let me go? Were they going to give me my cell phone and computers back?

“By the time I was thirty-five,” I told Ozawa, “I knew I had to get out of the marriage. Either that or forfeit my claim on happiness.”

“Your claim on happiness?”

“Yes, we all have a right to be happy.”

“So, your girlfriend, what was her name again?”

“Azami.”

“Azami, right. So, she’s neat?”

“Ozawa-san, I really wish I hadn’t said that. I was just talking from the top of my head. But, yes, yes, Azami is neat. It’s so much more than that, though. Azami isn’t confrontational the way Yuko could be. If I told Yuko to put the unused plastic hangers to the left of the closet she’d make some off-hand derogatory comment about my being too anal, that I’d never make it in life being so particular about things. Which is true, but with Azami, she just accepts my idiosyncrasies. She understands the concept. Doesn’t always follow through with action, but she sees the logic in what I’m saying. With Yuko, I never quite felt we were on the same team. We were always pulling in opposite directions. Azami pulls with me. She often forgets to pick up the rope, so to speak, but she’s always tries to pull in my direction.”

“She cooperates, is what you’re trying to say.”

“Cooperates, yes. And, she’s a lot of fun to be with. Azami and I, we’re always in stitches when we’re together. The other day, she held up a burning match and said, Rémy, this flame is a symbol of our eternal love. This flame . . . ‘ And right as she when she said ‘flame’ again she accidentally blew the flame out and then pretended to panic. Well, I guess, you had to be there to, but it was really quite funny at the time.”

“How did Azami take the news?”

“Not well. I don’t think our relationship is going to survive this. I’ve assured her that it’s all a terrible mistake, and I think she believes me, but still it’s been too much of a shock for her.”

I sighed heavily. A tear fell from my eye.

“Azami is my rudder,” I said. “She keeps me on course.”

“And your wife?”

“She was the rocks I nearly crashed upon.”

 

_

 

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

© Aonghas Crowe, 2009

4.13 Shoo!

Terahara hit the nail smack on its head asking if I’d had a spliff when I was in Thailand.

That bartender on Ko Samui proved to be an exceptionally resourceful man, supplying us not only with enough yaba to keep Jean, Nori and me on cruise control for a week, but also a Ziploc bag full of pot to ease us out of the fast lane.

The day I was returning to Japan, I flushed what remained of my stash–five pink pills and a handful of grass–down the toilet of my hotel room. It was a crying shame to watch it get washed away in a whirlpool of water, but I didn’t want to take any chances when I went through Customs.

Just to be on the safe side, I also turned the pockets of my pants inside out, and gave them a good shaking. I went through all my clothes, the souvenirs and knickknacks I’d bought, and the compartments of my luggage, checking everything more thoroughly than Pére Noël.

Even so, when I arrived at Kansai International, I was embarrassed to find a sniffer dog snooping excitedly around my feet.

Shoo!

God knows the riot of proscribed activities his olfactory nerves were picking up on–yaba, marijuana, the ping-pong pussy . . .

Shoo, dog, shoo!

I don’t know if it was the dog or the wasted expression I was wearing that tipped the Customs inspector off, but damned if he didn’t go through every one of my stinking bags.

“You speak Japanese?”

“I do.”

“What do you do in Japan?”

“I live and work here.”

“You pack these bags yourself?”

“I did.”

“Carrying anything for anyone?”

“No.”

“What’s in that bag?”

“My laundry.”

“Would you open it?”

“Certainly.”

“What were you doing in Thailand?”

“Relaxing.”

How relaxing could the trip have been when I looked like death warmed over?

“What’s in that bag?”

“Souvenirs.”

“Open it.”

“Sure, no problem.”

“Could you turn your pockets inside out?”

“Yeah.”

And so on.

 

_

 

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

© Aonghas Crowe, 2009

4.12 Whoop-de-doo!

After typing up my information for a solid hour Ozawa rubbed his eyes, then got up and left the room. Terahara, taking his place, sat across from me, legs wide open and hands cupped at his crotch. He was wearing a navy blue polo shirt that was a size too small and showed off his pectorals. The guy had bigger tits than my girlfriend.

I should have been in such good shape. My arms had lost their tone and I’d long grown soft around the middle thanks to all the Ron Zacapa Centenario I’d marinated my liver in. If you had put a gun at my head, I would have been able to pump out a good set of push-ups or sit-ups but my body would be creaking the whole time, rattling and backfiring like a jalopy. Still, compared to other guys my age, I was in pretty good shape. Trouble was, as soon as you started comparing yourself to “other guys your age”, the game was over. You might as well put your testicles in the care of Nakata’s dear mother.

“You said you liked traveling,” Terahara began. Every time he came in he had a different question for me: tell me about your rabbit, he’d say; or, have you seen any good movies lately? I couldn’t tell if it was just small talk for politeness’s sake, or if there was something else behind it. I’m sure Ozawa had put him up to him, had told him to throw the gaijin some more softballs. “Where have you been?”

“All over really,” I said. “Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, Northern Africa, South East Asia. The last time I counted I’ve been to over thirty countries.”

“Thirty countries! Get out of here!”

“You know, that’s only fifteen percent of the countries on this earth of ours, so it’s not like I’m a world traveler or anything. How about you?”

“I’ve only been to Guam.”

“Guam, huh? Well, I guess that’s a start. Why haven’t you been to Korea? It’s just an hour’s flight away. You could visit Seoul for two or three days on a package deal for about twenty-five thousand yen. Dirt cheap. You could do the same thing to Shanghai. It’s just as close.”

“Hmm, maybe I’ll think about it.”

“You’re still single, right?”

“Yeah.”

“After you get married, it’ll only get more difficult to travel. And, once you’ve got kids in the picture, well, forget about it, you won’t be able to go anywhere for twenty years, not until you’ve retired. But by then, you’ll be too old to really do anything adventurous. You’ll be going back to Guam for the second time. Whoop-de-doo!”

Terahara looked as if he’d lost some air.

I continued, “You’re still young, though. And single. And have a good job. Now’s the perfect time to travel.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. You should be taking a couple of short trips every year.”

“Where do you recommend?”

“Depends on what you’re interested in. Personally, I like Lebanon best, but if I had to recommend a place to go, I’d say go to Thailand.”

“Thailand?”

“Yeah, there’s a lot to see. Temples, ruins, nature. The food is out of this world. It’s sunny and hot most of the year. And the people are really kind.”

“You ever smoke there?”

“Excuse me?”

“Spliff,” he said.

“Spliff?” I asked. “I don’t follow you.”

So this is what the conversation was all about. It was the same question Windbreaker had asked me the morning of the raid. Terahara must have been high to think I’d be candid with him about something like that.

“You know, a spliff,” he said, pinching an imaginary joint in his fingers and holding it to his mouth. “You ever smoke ganja in Thailand?”

Ganja? Spliff? Where did the guys pick these things up?

“Oh, I gotcha. You’re talking about marijuana, right?”

“Yes.”

“Nah, I haven’t,” I said. “I mean I won’t lie to you. I did smoke a few times in college. But then, who didn’t? I don’t expect you to understand what it’s like.” You hopelessly square bastard! “But, everyone, and I mean every one smokes marijuana in American colleges. A lot of college officials, the police, too, often turn a blind eye to it.”

“Oh? Why?”

“They figure it’s the lesser of two evils.”

“What’s the other evil?”

“Lessee. Drinking and driving.”

“Oh.”

Oh indeed, you moron.

Just a month ago, a rookie cop in the city was arrested for a hit and run incident in which a small boy was killed and his mother was paralyzed. The fucking cop had been loaded when his car hit them crossing a street. Another cop who was with him at the time was arrested for aiding and abetting. He had encouraged the driver to keep going, then tried to sober him up before he turning his friend in. That way, they figured it wouldn’t have been criminal negligence. He’d get off with manslaughter instead and not have to actually serve time in prison.

“No, as I told you all Thursday morning, smoking marijuana isn’t my cup of tea,” I said. “I prefer a nice glass of wine. Really, I can’t understand people who can’t be satisfied with a nice stiff drink.”

What horseshit!

_

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

© Aonghas Crowe, 2009

4.11 Peace and Prosperity

When I returned in the afternoon, Ozawa was sitting in the cramped interrogation room still typing up everything I’d written down earlier. Anytime he needed to confirm something, he’d look up from his notebook computer and ask me.

“You’ve lived in Daimyo, how long?”

“Since ninety-eight, so about eight years. It’ll be eight years in October.”

“Right,” he mumbled to himself. “Nineteen ninety-eight . . .” Dragging a ruler down a sheet of paper with a conversion chart of Japanese and Western calendars he found what he was looking for: the tenth year of Heisei, and typed it into his report.

The Japanese, as it happens, base their calendar on the reigns of their emperors. The current emperor, Akihito, succeeded the throne in 1989 upon the death of his father, emperor Hirohito, whose reign was known as Showa (Enlightened Peace). There was hardly anything peaceful or enlightened about the first two decades of Showa, but never mind that. I don’t think anyone was really paying attention.

Keizo Obuchi announces the name of a new era, "Heisei", for the new Emperor Akihito.

We were currently in the 18th year of Heisei (lit. Peace and Prosperity), or Anno Domini 2006. There hadn’t been much prosperity in Japan for most of the emperor’s reign what with the bursting of the bubble and the lost decade that followed. And despite an absence of war, the present era with its devastating volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and earthquakes, the sarin gas attacks by the Aum Shinrikyo cult, and a string of sensational murders by juveniles could hardly be called peaceful.

I asked Ozawa what year came to mind first whenever he thought of something that had happened in the past, his high school graduation, for example. He stopped typing to consider the question, then said, “I’ve never thought about it, but now that you ask, I’d have to say the Japanese calendar.”

“I suppose if you grow up with it,” I said, “it’s only natural to use it, but, um, isn’t it confusing?”

“How do you figure?”

“Well, if I were to say something happened twenty-one years ago, you would have to go through some mental gymnastics to figure out what the Japanese year was. Twenty years ago was nineteen eighty-six. What year was it in Japan?”

“Um, it was . . .” Ozawa glanced down at the conversion chart.

“Don’t cheat.”

“It was um . . . “

“It was Showa sixty-one.”

“Okay. If I told you I was born in Showa forty-six, how old would I be?”

“Ah . . . ” his eyes rolled to the back of his head as he tried to do the math in his head.

“I’d be thirty-five,” I said after a moment.

He looked down at the chart. “You’re right. It is confusing. But, like I said, I never really thought about it.”

 

_

 

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

© Aonghas Crowe, 2009

4.10 Onigiri

At around eleven-thirty in the morning, having completed the form at last, Ozawa told me I was free to go out and have lunch somewhere so long as I returned by, he checked his watch, by twelve forty-five.

I wasn’t exactly famished, but I jumped at the opportunity to get out of that sickly illuminated, smelly little room and as far away from the narcs as possible.

Popping into a convenience store across the street, I picked up some onigiri (rice balls) and a bottle of green tea, and walked to a small park next to the station. Near the entrance was an empty bench bathed in the bright noon sunlight. I plopped down hard on it and sighed heavily.

I’d been with the narcotics agents for about three hours and so far so good. I had my doubts, however, that the afternoon would be as easy. We hadn’t even touched the reason why I was being investigated. There wouldn’t be any more softball questions when I returned for the afternoon session. Ozawa and Nakata hadn’t asked me to leave the whole day open for the sole purpose of writing down my resume. No question about it. The gloves were going to come off.

The urge to flee had its grip on me again.

What the hell am I doing? I’m still a free man, aren’t I? I haven’t been arrested . . . yet. And didn’t Ozawa tell me the morning of the raid to come in for questioning not only today, but tomorrow afternoon, as well? So, they are going to let me go home today. I could be on a train to Kagoshima this evening. Yeah, I could. Then, I could catch the ferry from–where was that again, oh yeah–Shibushi. I could be in Okinawa by tomorrow afternoon . . .

What little appetite I’d had quickly dissipated when warmed over by the dismal prospect of being arrested. I tossed the onigiri to the pigeons that were cooing and mooching about my feet.

Before long, it was twelve-thirty and time to head back. I looked up at the blue, cloudless sky.

“What a waste,” I said, standing up. It was the first Sunday that wasn’t overcast or rainy a month. “I should be at the beach checking out the peaches rather than cooped up in that room with those sons of bitches.”

On the way back, I rang Azami up from a public phone. I knew she had to be sick with worry.

“Everything’s going fine,” I told her. “Much better than I expected.”

“Oh, Rémy, I’m so relieved to hear that.”

“Azami.”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know what time I’ll be back,” I said. “It might take some time yet. Wait for me, though, will ya?”

“I’ll wait for you . . . Rémy?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

“Thank you . . . I, uh, I love you, too. Bye.”

I hung up the phone, pocketed the postcard with Azami’s photograph and telephone number on it and reluctantly made my way back to the office of the Narcotics Crime Squad.

__

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

© Aonghas Crowe, 2009