 
HARAJUKU (+)

The Summer That Never Ends

by S. Michael Choi

Original text, copyright 2011. Revised version, copyright 2013.

Smashwords Edition

THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. ALL CHARACTERS AND EVENTS ARE A FIGMENT OF IMAGINATION AND ANY RESEMBLENCE TO REAL CHARACTERS AND EVENTS IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL.

THE MORAL RIGHT OF THE AUTHOR TO BE ACCREDITED AUTHORSHIP OF THIS WORK IS ASSERTED.

COVER PHOTOGRAPH CC ATTRIB thecrypt.co.uk. USE OF THIS OPEN-SOURCE PHOTOGRAPH DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN ENDORSEMENT BY THECRYPT OF THIS WORK OR ANY OF THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THIS WORK. Edited by Paint.net freeshare/shareware photo editing software.

categories: fiction, Japan, Tokyo, Harajuku, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Roppongi, expats, expatriates, drugs

for: M

# I.

It can begin anywhere.

Soren comes up to me on the Keihin-Tohoku line home from work on a Thursday evening and at first I don't know who he is. All I notice is a figure in my peripheral vision standing up out of one of the traincar seats, approaching me, and in clear unaccented American English saying, "Ritchie? Ritchie, is that you?" Surprised by this unexpected greeting, I look over and realize that I do recognize the person. His name is...Soren. Right. Soren Soutern. Three weeks ago, he had put an advertisement on Tokyo Craigslist, offering to trade a box of English-language books for a packet of non-Japanese cigarettes. It's not easy for expats to get paperbacks and moreover, the whole ad had been funny, reading 'deliver me a pack of non-Japanese cigarettes and you have an entire cardboard box of recent books.' With all these earnest 'English lessons for 2500 yen' or 'Japanese girl seeks English language partner for foreign exchange' entries crowding up the listserv, the slightly sarcastic, seemingly ironic ad had to be investigated. Moreover, I had had, by chance, a whole carton of duty-free Sobranies lying around the apartment that I had picked up last visit stateside and never found anyone to gift to. So I called up the listed phone number, noted the unexpected address, and went later that day with the cigarettes and a tacky American-flag lighter added in purely as a bonus, and returned home that evening with a good-sized box of both cheap paperbacks and some quality college lit titles all in decent condition, definitely a good deal.

That day I had answered the advertisement, I had also found myself unexpectedly recognizing the other person. You see, when Soren opened the door to his Roppongi Hills apartment, the individual, perhaps in my mind's eye some spoiled university student living with his parents, maybe even a Japanese (they take on unusual English names sometimes; they think it's cool) is actually on the contrary a tallish, good-looking twenty-something foreigner, sandy-haired and trim, who I had definitely seen before in the Tokyo foreigner scene. Soren and I had actually not talked before. But he had a way of standing out from the crowd: wearing his always completely fashionable clothes, he was invariably seen with this unbelievably beautiful and tall Japanese girl, a gazelle-like figure who looked like she had stepped from the pages of a fashion magazine and carried herself knowing it. Soren and I had nodded to each other a few times at social events, the 'foreigner nod' you give to other foreigners when living abroad, but had never really spoken. It was part of the "rules of cool," of course; you knew dozens of people you never deigned to even exchange names with.

If Soren does not come up to me on the train now, three weeks after our trade of books for cigarettes, perhaps we are destined never to enter each other's lives. We will go our separate ways in the city of Tokyo, population twenty million, attend a handful of parties or get-togethers in common, perpetually recognize each other solely by appearance, and then move on to whatever it is we will do in the years to come. But Soren does come up to me, he does make that approach despite it being a minor violation of the rules of cool, and I do not call him out on it. Rather, I greet him friendlily and ask how the cigarettes are working out.

"Fine, fine. But actually Ritchie, I'm kinda looking for something else."

"Uh, sure, what do you need?"

"Do you know where I can score some drugs?"

At this response, I feel like groaning aloud. This is exactly how quickly the twenty-four-year old gets to the point, and my first reaction is to wonder if I give off some sort of drug-vibe--if I don't in some strange way communicate without being aware of it, "hey, I'm clearly a lowlife drug dealer. Come up to me if you want to score." But that's absurd. I know for a fact that to all outside appearances I am the utterly conventional-looking twenty-one year old Tokyo foreigner expat that I am in truth. And If anything, I look a hundred times more conventional than your average expat because I try to avoid the strange Tokyo street fashions that some expats seem to adopt after living here for some time--usually only with indifferent success. At twenty-two, I'm rather indifferently conventional, a sort of Mugi and occasional Uniqlo-shopper, casually fashionable without being too perfectly in the now. Yet truth be told: I'm also sort of oddly wide-ranging in my choice of acquaintances. I've been in Japan for fourteen months now, and through a willingness to know all sorts of random people you encounter in the foreign scene, I can, unfortunately, actually get Soren what he wants. I'm not a drug dealer. I'm really not. But it's true, forty minutes later, I'm at Roppongi Hills climbing up the stairs to the main plaza with two pills of ecstasy—MDMA—hidden in an orange pill container in my messenger bag and a flicker of a smirk on my face. I'm smirking because it's Japan, because I am, well, officially, supplying drugs, and because the place is just ridiculous.

Soren's building, Roppongi Hills, you see, only just then finished, is the talk of all Tokyo. Built by the "visionary" Minoru Mori, the miniature "city within a city" Cosmopolitan Living Concept was this fantastically gigantic 'megaproject' that destroyed several entire neighborhoods to put in multi-billion dollar pod-shaped 'arcologies' of luxury housing, a hotel, entertainment facilities, and offices. From your sixteen thousand U.S. dollar a month apartment, you can take a number of escalators and moving sidewalks to your Merrill Lynch finance job, stop briefly at the organic fourth-floor supermarket, and then be sped up twenty stories to your private health club overlooking some of the most stunning vantage points of Tokyo, all without ever having to expose yourself to all the pollution, street crime, and assorted other highly risky dangers of Japan's capital. So this is why I had earlier thought that the young man at the other end of the phone line had to be somebody living with his parents. What twenty-something could afford such a place? But as it is, Soren's father, a New York City commercial real estate and securities tycoon, purchased the apartment in the Towers straight out for use by his son and probably to recycle some cash whose origins weren't entirely clear. It's a sort of a ridiculously great sort of pad for a young guy to have, and though I'm not from a desperately poor background, I'm without being obvious about it, all eyes. Technically I should be intimidated. Technically, I should be so awed by the sheer amount of power that Soren's wealth implies that I should quake in my New Balance sneakers and run back to my downscale Ueno pad. But with the blasé confidence inspired by the sort of division-less equality of expat life, I walk into Soren's apartment and plop down on his black leather couch where he had served me orange juice three weeks prior. I lean my head back to feel the full blast of the apartment's air-conditioning that I remembered as quite effective.

"So you got the stuff?" Soren asks, nervously.

"Yeah, dude. Got it all." I spill out the contents of the medicine vial onto his palm. He looks at the pills suspiciously.

"Where'd you get 'em from? How do you know that guy?"

"Relax. Friend of a friend named Big-T, he just mixed them in with some prescription pills last trip back from New York City."

"And how long has your friend known Big-T?"

"Only like two years, but he knows somebody who knew T from back home since elementary school. They're totally legit."

The answer seems to satisfy Soren. Looking almost plaintive, he gulps down a pill of E with a glass of ice water.

"Wow, in the middle of the day?" I say. "Oh my god. I thought you were going to use them at some party or something."

"Been too long, man--I really needed to score, it's just been that kind of week. What do I owe you?"

"Nothing, dude. I don't actually want to become a drug dealer—they're all yours on the house."

"Cool... thanks. I mean really."

We sit around his place waiting for the Ecstasy to kick in, and leaning back, I take in the interior decoration. There's this curious temporary feel about the decor, as if Soren's not quite psychologically deciding to settle in: lots of white space on the walls where art prints or posters should go, entire sections of wall-space completely empty. Pop Chinese kitsch—a little Chairman Mao figurine, a poster of revolutionary Chinese farm workers complete with inscrutable slogan—doesn't really fill up the place, but I do catch sight of the SubZero refrigerator, the Bang & Olufsen touch-pad stereo—I knew these things from magazine ads; it's my first time seeing the actual items.

"So, just curious man," I say, "you said when we swapped for the paperbacks that you recognized me. Was this true? You really know who I am? What do you know about me?"

"Yeah, dude, sure. I definitely seen you around the place Ritchie. You're like...well, one of the hipsters always hanging out, into some or another artistic b.s."

I laugh. "Really? I thought I was rather boring actually."

"No, dude man. Wasn't there some hot little blonde number hanging around you all the time? She your girlfriend?"

"Nah, she's just a friend. We were sitting next to each other on the same plane when we came over, and then we kept running into each other, so we keep in touch. But you know, I don't think we feel the slightest bit of any sort of chemistry with each other." I ask him in turn about his apparent girlfriend—the unbelievable modelesque "gazelle" girl that some of us have been talking over endlessly--but Soren smiles sheepishly.

"Actually Ayako and I are not really boyfriend-girlfriend either. She's still moping over some ex of hers, won't let me sleep with her."

"Oh my god," I say, "You realize you just disappointed the entire male gaijin population of Tokyo? Everyone thinks that girl is unbelievable."

"Yeah, she's something isn't she?"

"She's like this girl out of like some mists and samurai novel—not your typical tiny little J-cutie, all fluff, but somebody like...Tale of Genji, samurai and cherry blossoms or something. Ancient Japan. 'Cuz she's tall."

"Yeah well, she's just letting me sleep in bed with her, not a move further."

"That's it?"

"Yeah, Ritchie. I like, try to touch her when we're in bed, but she just moves away."

"That's really sad," I say laughing. "You share a bed with a girl night after night, but you don't actually get any play."

We sit there silently for a moment, thoughtful, and the afternoon atmosphere seems filled with a sense of foreboding. The immensity of the city sprawl hundreds of meters below the floor-to-ceiling windows is silent and unyielding, and for a moment one might almost characterize it as strangely oppressive. The sun is appreciably low in the sky and one can begin to see the blinking patterns of light that mark buildings on commercial drives as the changeover from daytime to evening begins. Then, the silence is suddenly interrupted by the shrill ring of the telephone, which Soren, sitting near to, reaches over and picks up. It's friends of his; they want to go for a ride. Soren sounds almost sheepish as he answers a series of rapid-fire questions, something to do with a BMW Z3 wrapped around a telephone pole, or actually just punched against a highway barrier, "no engine damage, dude, no engine damage--just sheet metal!" that's all, really. There's some mutual agreement being hammered out, and then he puts down the phone.

"Uh, Ritchie, you free tonight?"

"Yeah, what's up?"

"People hanging out. Let's go!" So we hustle, and take the elevator down and walk over to Roppongi-dori, where there's a white Infiniti SUV backing up traffic. Five minutes later, we're taking the onramp to the elevated expressways that shoot between the skyscrapers. I realize I recognize the driver, Takashi, too, a young Japanese dude who seems to know all the foreigners, everywhere, all the time. I say hello and he smiles back and everyone's already talking excitedly to each other. "Like we should totally share life stories and all because that's all we really have, each other," says somebody's dizzy chick. I put on sunglasses; I grin.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, it's because cars are rare, because the trains run so regularly and everything is so convenient that getting to drive around the city is an experience of itself. It's exactly that part of Tokyo near the river engineering works, where suddenly there's just sky on the break of evening that makes you feel that you've made the right decision and this is where you ought to be, the center of the universe, the cutting edge of the cutting edge. Paris? NYC? Those places are so last year! On a day of clouds or rain, Tokyo washes aclean, and everywhere, in everything large and small, the palpable influence of the foreign aesthetic, the Japan feel, infiltrates everything, so that there's art and potential in all things, a brief glance from a girl on the sidewalk, the seemingly flimsy architecture. You're at once in an ancient, ancient foreign country and this new plastic fantastically new metropolis, the center of so much action and desire. That evening, we end up in Aoyama.

"You know the bassist for Quality of Light?"

"Yeah. We went to college together. He's a good guy."

"No way, that's way cool."

Soren knows a hole-in-the-wall bar on a side street, someplace you'd only ever find out about if somebody took you there. We enter the place, and for the first few moments are just staring around at things: the entire interior is molded in white 60s plastic, with corresponding day-glo fixtures and a colorful, retro circle motif, lime and orange, repeated on the bar stools, wall decorations, and lights. Cibo Matto is blaring from wall-mounted speakers. "Man, this place is melting," somebody says, and we're laughing at something, though we don't know what. The hostess comes over and seats us at a booth.

"So, Takashi," I say, finding myself next to him, "what's been going on in your world?"

"Ahh, not much, Ritchie, same old same old. So many people coming, so many people leaving, my head spinning, you know?"

"Yeah, I understand the feeling exactly. Still, there are a few people who seem to just thrive here, hey?"

"Yeah, I guess a few. But then sometimes I feel when new kids come in, I just getting older."

"Don't worry, dude, you look about twenty years old."

"That's what people say. But Ritchie, I thirty now! So old!"

I chit-chat with one of the girls, the one who wants life stories, but she seems a bit spaced-out, just being like "wow" to everything and not seeming to quite grasp any responses, and then as a group we talk about where the most authentic Mexican food is in the city, though we all agree it's impossible to really get the stuff anywhere in Japan. This is a topic of massive importance to the foreigners of Tokyo, the subject of thousands of conversations and bitter feuds, but tonight Takashi's antsiness does not disappear, and then in what seems all of a sudden but is probably nothing of the sort, he gets a phone call and talks excitedly to whoever it is on the other end, and then has to leave, promises to meet up later that evening, and the girls, including the spacey one, decide they'd like to go for a spin as well, and suddenly all of a sudden it's back to just Soren and me, staring into our drinks as rock music blares. I'm not actually all that close to Takashi, I know him just as the 'foreigner-lover English speaker' but Soren apparently has some kind of prior relationship, and maybe as a side-effect of the Ecstasy, he seems troubled by some sort of social diss, some emotional intensification even if there's no basis in logic. Or maybe Soren actually does take it harder than most; maybe he projects unruffled confidence so habitually it makes him actually much more full of doubt inside.

"Man, I think I'm about to have a breakdown."

"No, bad idea, about what? Just take a deep breath and calm down."

"No, I mean really man. I'm about to go." Suddenly he gets up and stalks off to the bathroom. When he comes back, there's the faint odor of vomit coming from him. "You wouldn't understand. There's some other stuff going on, and it's like I'm never going to get free of it. Anyway...that felt good," he says, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. "Just the drugs talking."

"Are you okay now?"

"Let me see."

A few minutes pass, and we hang out in the bar thinking our private thoughts. Things seem to settle, but then all over again, Soren feels claustrophobic-the walls are closing in, fast—and much worse this time. He needs to go; he really needs to get out of here. "C'mon Ritchie, help me out here man." We pay the check and leave. I look for a cab. Soren's pupils are dilated.

"It's kind of a waste," I say, after he tells me he wants to take a Prozac to shut down the MDMA. "Don't you know how hard it is to score good stuff?" But then, he is sweating and pale, maybe even green. He disappears again, this time for a convenient alley, and then returns. "Ok, let's get the cab."

This time, one is right there. We hustle the driver; we ride back to Roppongi, and then double-time all the way back up to Soren's twentieth-floor apartment. "Okay, okay," he says, after he sweeps dozens of vials out of the bathroom medicine cabinet, and finally—finally—finally--finds that Prozac, which he dry-swallows, gulping it down. Both of us collapse onto his black leather coach where we had started the evening, but with the view now of the city fully night.

"So you feel better now?"

"A thousand percent," he says, with eyes closed, and shudders. He's subdued, but it's only been a matter of seconds since he swallowed the Prozac, far too early for the SSRI to have had any impact. It's true what they say, I think, it is all in the mind.

"Were we sitting near an overpass, and then I went and took a piss at one point?"

"Right before we got the cab."

"Okay good, I was starting to think I hallucinated that."

For a few hot moments, I feel a flash of hatred. It's one thing if those who have more than you have greater strength of character. But I would never let myself get into this sort of state. As quickly as it comes, though, the feeling passes; I recognize the absurdity of the situation; I'm not going to get caught up in it. It's actually much later before I consider the possibility that the whole breakdown is an internal, drug-induced mind-game on Soren's part, a sort of emotional trick. He's lonely; he wants a male friend. This is his way of establishing grounds for me not to feel inferior in his presence, as so many others did.

In this way, begins Soren's and my friendship, a brief, breathless, high-octane, flighty sort of relationship that fuels itself precisely because so many come and go in that city. That summer I meet Soren, I have already been in Japan for more than an entire year, and probably met upwards of two hundred people, most of whom I end up meeting only once or twice again if ever. Such is the young gaijin expat reality. My Tokyo days, however, date from the beginning of knowing Soren, for it is only through him that the chaos and churn begin to fall into a recognizable pattern, and hence, one that can be exploited. You go to people's parties, but do not throw your own. You ask for favors, but manage to delay recompense. You mooch and prevail, because there is a brand new person to meet just around the corner or landing at Narita, and they are too dazed and confused at the rush of oncoming sensations, they are so young and naive and so easily fooled, all the intensely foreign and new exotic surroundings dazzling their senses, to understand what is happening, and they accept anything and everything as merely part of the experience. So long as you are relentlessly recognized as being in the know, the process is entirely sustainable. In this way Tokyo yields up to me. If my new engagement of the city is actually the one that is truly naïve and trivial, if I accept this external system as my own without proper skepticism, then this is only something inevitable, a completely foreseeable counter-season to the austerity of a working-class childhood and a university life on scholarship. In Japan, with Soren, with his flowing stream of acquaintances and connections, the onrushing flood-tide of people streaming through the city, and finally, yet most certainly not unimportantly, the apartment that becomes the solar center of a constellation of activity for a free-spending crowd of young undisciplined expats, I am reborn into a priest of restlessness and a prophet of those without code.

"Oh don't invite Julian, he's such a weirdo!" Soren is on his cell phone. "What?" A pause. "Oh it's his film that came out?" Pause. "Well I guess he has to be there then."

I sit at the kitchen counter, suppressing a grin and nursing a Fuzzy Navel. After his call ends, Soren comes over.

"Isn't there some way to have a party for somebody but not actually invite them?"

"Yeah, I definitely think so. Especially if it's like a birthday party, then you know, you can like bring out a cake, and instead of the person blowing out the candles, everyone can just do it."

"Say, there's an idea!" Soren considers for a moment. "Seriously though, what else do you know about what's going on? I'd really like to keep a mile away from Julian, he's this guy who's gone all weird from living here too long."

"Well, there's this new guy at work, Brad, and I promised to show him around. He said he knew some people visiting and I can find out what's up."

"He cool?"

"California surfer. Lemme make a call."

"OK."

So, I make the call. We are, however, disappointed. Half-a-dozen text messages and voice calls streaming across the great Kanto plain later, it's clear there's already too much momentum forming for at least starting off with the indie filmmaker's night out that his artsy friends have assembled together. We could try to get something else started in Shibuya maybe, playing on the seeds of an existing trio looking to get more time in J-pop sugarhigh central, but clearly the best choice is to at least start off the evening at Lush, and then we see what happens from there.

"Oh well, at least I can stay in Roppongi tonight," says Soren, looking at the bright side of things. "Oh wait, dry cleaning." Soren looks over at his Chairman Mao clock. "Ahhh! It's gonna close. Ritchie, do me a favor?" He's already racing out the door.

"Wha?"

"I gotta go pick up my dry cleaning, so go meet Ayako in front of Almond's? You guys all go over to Lush together, and I'll meet you guys there." Almond's coffeeshop is on the way. Arriving at the intersection, I spot Ayako immediately. As I wrote, she's tall and extraordinarily beautiful, and when she looks and smiles, my knees weaken just for a moment: it's like a sun shining. But I don't betray it. I smile back, and raise my hand in casual greeting.

"Yo, Ayako!"

"Hey Ritchie. My friends coming fifu-teen minutes."

"No problem. So how are things with you?"

"Great. Have we decided what we going to do yet?"

"Well, it looks like there's some filmmaker who just released a film and people want to go to his thing first, but then after that, I think it's pretty open."

"Cool. I like movie!"

Ayako's friends show up almost immediately thereafter. While cute, they don't quite eclipse the shining supernova that is Ayako Ishibashi, J-girl goddess. One might suspect they are almost chosen by Ayako to frame and complement her looks, two retainers who don't outshine the queen. But, perhaps as a consequence of being more down to earth, they are friendly and cool and speak decent English, and in half Japanese, half-English, we muddle through some cheerful small-talk as we walk over to Lush and people already streaming in, the indie black-clad artsy people who already have a table, and some group of somebody's friends also arriving as we arrive just as my cell phone buzzes to announce an incoming text. "WHERE U AT?" It's Brad. "COME ON OVER," I text back. "LUSH ON ROPPONGI-DORI."

The August heat hangs heavy on the street, and tonight, girls in kimono and sunglasses clop down the sidewalk in their wooden sandals, geta, giving a cultural edge to the general street sleaze that prevails. I sit back and order a gin and tonic and the girls get frozen margaritas. From the next table over: "Are you hunting tonight?" "The predator always hunts." Laughter. Hands waving at arriving friends.

"So I worry about Soren these days," comments Ayako, perhaps a trifle wistfully.

"Oh yeah?"

"Like he get in car accident, maybe living too much stress in life, it's not good."

"I'm sure it's just a phase. City life is kinda intense, I guess."

"Somebody needs to take care Soren. Somebody who really cares him."

"I think you're a great influence." My words, however, don't seem to have any impact. Ayako continues to look a wistful, and she toys with the umbrella in her tropical drink. Our attention is then drawn to the artsy table, with the arrival of the night's man of the hour, the filmmaker Julian Hara.

"Hey Julian!" "The maestro arrives!" "Welcome!" The artsy types with their ironic 1950s glasses and hipster dress shirts welcome their friend with glad cries being full of themselves and pleased.

"You wanna go and congratulate the filmmaker?" I whisper over to Ayako.

"Okay." She says. "Let's go after he settles down."

For the moment before we go over, I study this figure of local fame and my impressions are less than completely favorable. Julian's thin as a reed, with a sort of neurotic look to his appearance and sallow skin. His fashion sense in terms of the torso is dead on—completely stylized Japanese UNIQLO sleek, but there's something weird about the way his head is perched on the whole deal, an out-of-place, nerdy, sallow speckled complexion off-putting lego-head on top of a thin torso that's otherwise pure Roppongi hipster. It's almost as if he can't quite shake off the person he really is, that the head is the real Julian, still Canadian geek but exposure to Japan (girlfriend?) has educated his fashion sense to the point of an up-to-date wardrobe, so that the body is neat hipster. Wiry black hair and ectomorph's build complete the impression of an art-school loser.

I think Julian gives a tiny flinch when he notices Ayako and me walking over to him. (Or is it that everyone inside at Lush, actually, gives a little but real, detectable reaction when I walk in with J-goddess in tow...)

"So, Julian, congratulations on the release of your film. I'll have to get a copy from you."

"Um, thank you. Um, it's underlying aesthetic truth to e-e-essential entropy of um, things, vision of p-p-post-apocalyptic Tokyo, um, being in now, s-s-subterranean truths."

I look for a second at the film-maker with the strangely nerdy head spouting off. "Uh, okay. Well, sounds like I can't miss it then."

Ayako beams at the nervous Julian. "I'll definitely check it out."

"Um, thank you." And there's a moment of awkwardness and then that's that.

Brad, my new colleague, arrives next. Unfortunately, he's going to turn out to be one of those people who can't stand the country for some reason and will return home to Playa del Rey within three months, but tonight, he outdoes himself. He shows up with his promised friends and they turn out to be three hot girls and this backpacking girl from Australia he met about five hours ago. We all pull up chairs around our table and start chattering away, as our waitress brings another round of iced drinks, wet with condensation from the summer heat.

Brad's backpacking friend: "Hey, so everyone just has to wear a uniform while they're in school?"

"Yeah, it's just the way it is in this country."

"But it's Saturday."

"Yeah, but they think it's stylish and flattering so they wear it even on weekends. And some schools still have Saturday morning sessions."

"No way, that's far out. This country is weird!"

It is easy to get caught up in the excitement of a new arrival and of course, our own time in-country is at this point measured in months. The conversation can be truly endless: all the spectacle and all the phenomena and all the theories, and the impact of the mass media telling us What Japan Is in all those convulated ways everyone has, those theories that everyone starts making up when nine months living abroad turns you into some sort of cross-cultural studies expert. Without even realizing it, an hour or two passes into the evening when I go to the bathroom and I notice that Soren's arrived in a fresh new shirt just pressed from the cleaners.

"So there I was with the little aspiring actress girl and we were both getting pretty drunk, and then Miki, remember Miki?" His audience eases in closer to hear the story. "Miki had always liked me, but then she started licking me on my other cheek, and I was like, okay." We smile. "Then all of a sudden, Takashi-he hadn't said a word all evening, he was just being grumpy, suddenly has this, like spasm, this freakout, and he says, 'Solen alleady habu girlfliend! Solen alleady habu girlfriend!' And he just looked exactly like this little angry Japanese general, this little Tojo getting all heated." General laughter erupts. "I couldn't control myself. I laughed out my drink onto the table."

"That's Takashi. He's our little white-trash Japanese."

"Aw shut up, you're Euro-trash French, Devra."

"That I am. That I am."

"I hate Japanese men. One time I was sitting there peacefully on the train and an old guy whipped out his penis and started masturbating in front of me. I mean, this is the problem here, this is a nation of perverts."

A general cringe.

"If you ask around, every Western girl in her twenties who's been here at least three months, and I mean every single one, has been either groped or stalked or flashed by some Japanese perv at some point."

I feel the need to intervene. "Yeah, but it's the safest country in the world for women to walk around at night. You can't say that about New York or London."

"You just don't understand. It was disgusting. I don't care if I can walk around at night if I'm not safe on the train in broad daylight."

"What did the other passengers do?" pipes in an girl.

"Nothing. That's it! They just pretended not to see what was going on."

The males present nod their sympathies. There may, however, be the faintest of amused smiles flickering on their faces for the briefest of deniable moments.

"I think Japanese guys are all gay. Or at least eighty percent. Come on, how else do you explain those little handbags some of them carry? The salon hair-does?"

"Oh no," says two or three people. "You're reading it all wrong... European men also..."

Julian and Soren meet later that evening. It's at least two or three in the morning, right before the film-maker and some of his friends call it a night, and only the real hard-core Roppongi crowd is staying on, the regulars of GASPanic, the downmarket club of last resort. Julian calls Soren "boy wonder" or "boy band" which is unexpected, but the timing is perfect, and it's just so unexpected out of the shy, neurotic nerd that for two seconds we're staring at him in incredulity before we erupt in laughter, we do have to give him absolute credit for it, Soren's smirk notwithstanding. And anyway, it's just Tokyo in the summer, no one can really hold anything against anyone, not when you're young and well-dressed and beautiful, and in this Japan just this once. Groups coalesce, merge, drift apart, and rejoin throughout the small numbered hours, our cell phones buzzing, our texts tripping back and forth across the space of a few hundred yards or across the city. One of the girls for reasons known only to her makes me take a pair of sneakers to her friend in another club, and I oblige because she's cute and somebody I've known for a full year now, which by Tokyo standards makes us old friends. The main body ends up going to Vanilla: it's just so in this summer, and we drift in and out of GASPanic and the other more pure-play meat market clubs, and finally some people mosey over to the Wall Street that has the underground dance floor. I end up watching a soccer game at a bar (live, it's daytime in Europe) with a German girl before saying "Auf Wiedersehen" and putting her on the correct train, or maybe that's some other night, all of these summer Tokyo weekends blend together in a seamless, tipsy succession, so many nights of listless drinking, chit-chat, smoking cigarettes, clubbing, casual flirtation, tipsy bumping into each other on the dance floor, tipsy accidental hand on the girl. But no actually, it was definitely that night, just one of those high summer nights, after so many hours of clubbing almost deafened from the music, leaving 811 you are surprised at how the sun has already begun to rise, you can see the day has already begun, and you can see over there, Tokyo Tower, silent, uncommenting, still, in the summer sky already lightening to day.

# II.

As promised to Julian the filmmaker, I grab a copy of his film. Melanie, his girlfriend and one of the main artsy girls, gladly gives me a copy in her energetic promotion of all things cultural and artistic. I do not regret watching it. The film is about two hours long, but in its way riveting: starting with this existentialist opening (working class Japanese guy ("Daiichi") being forced out to ride motorcycle away from his small Hokkaido town after being framed for a crime, decrepit dirt-road bridge collapsing as metaphor for complete break with youth), the story follows the protagonist as he makes contact with and is slowly accepted by Tokyo gang. Tokyo gang is shown to being squeezed by economic pressures and a rival out-of-town gang moving in, ultimately leading to leader of Tokyo gang being killed. There's some esotErik exchange of public posturing/ritual insults with the other gang, and then young junior foreign (Australian) member of gang decides to go for kill against enemy leader in violation of yakuza code (and perhaps as positioning for leadership of gang). But in surprise twist, former girlfriend of the Tokyo gang's leader, herself member, turns on the young upstart, (out of national solidarity? protection of gangster code?) and the gang, now utterly without hope, reduced in number its forces turning in on itself, starts to run amok with the film in its jump-cut, blaring-rock music conclusion leaving you no doubt that they're all going to be wiped out, one-by-one.

It's such a bleak, pessimistic work. I walk around for a few days in a sort of daze. Even a second or third viewing later, I still get drained watching the thing, that's how perfectly tuned the work is. But despite my best efforts, Soren refuses to watch.

"Screw him, man, that guy's bad news."

"I think it'd be cool just to know what it's about so you'll understand when people talk about it."

"Thanks, but not thanks."

If our ancestors could talk; if our grandparents, our great-grandparents who settled the American heartland, had coaxed wheat and corn out of reluctant soil or those who had come over in the 19th century, disembarked onto Ellis Island, endured the hostility and prejudice of the already established and worked in sweatshops and factories to build a new life could speak, most probably they would have counseled me, Ritchie Ufuo, to call a halt, to stop things before they spiraled out of control, to avoid Soren who was so different from me and yet seemed to offer so much. I know my grandfather, a Varangian and Midwesterner with his stoic and unstoppable stubborn ways, would have laughed at the $300 hair-styled Soutern, and even my late father, a mathematics major and actuary, with his perpetual green light-shade and mincing ways , would probably have seen little to gain from the image and flash superstar, although there are some family photographs that show my father meeting Allen Ginsberg, shaking hands with other Greenwich Village poets; perhaps he would have found this meeting of minds an opportunity for adventure--I'm not entirely sure.

What I am relatively sure about, however, is that no matter how idealistic or broad-minded any ancestor of mine was, the mainstream folk values, "common sense" in so many words, would probably have dictated that I immediately put a halt to Soren's next little project, but then, what exactly is youth if not a series of hijinks and follies? Ayako finally leaves Soren, their relationship unconsummated, her still wistful, him barely noticing. In this post-breakup period, Soutern comes up with his latest hare-brained scheme.

"Actually, though, Ritchie, I have a project for you."

"Eh?"

"So you had no trouble getting your hands on a steady supply of X?"

"Well..." And then he lays out his plans.

Soren has a sort of "hippie chemist" contact at Tokyo University, the top school of Japan, who's involved in fringe, psychedelic research that the mainstream won't touch. The chemist absolutely refuses to synthesize MDMA itself--that would be a crime possibly leading to twelve years in jail, but if he is assured of a regular--and pure--supply of the base material, he may able to synthesize an entirely new designer drug, WINDOW, which is supposed to reveal your 'true personality' or 'restore your childhood self' before all the traumas of middle school and high school made you who you are today. I'm skeptical of this; I know plenty of family members who would say "no, stop! this is exactly where things are going wrong," but they aren't present, are they? Nobody can say "halt!" Further, Soutern has an angle on me to assure compliance. With an actual corporate job, however mindless, I'm one notch above the NOVA drones and "eikaiwa tutors" and earn just sufficient to keep up with Soren's lifestyle of living by whim. I live for the day, and my credit card balance is incrementally growing. But in just the three weeks I've known him, I've spent something like a thousand a week and probably enjoyed twice or three times that much off of Soren's tabs.

"10000 yen at Bright, 30000 yen tab at the basement place..." Soren tabs off his fingers, pointing out how much I'm mooching off his unlimited funds. I would like to retort back, "but I wouldn't even be in those expensive places if you didn't have to live at every top end nightclub," but I realize he is, if anything, underestimating how much I've underpaid.

"Okay, okay, fine, I'll call up T, and I'll get the supply going." And with this issue settled, instantly the atmosphere is back to positive. "Just out of curiosity, dude, why does Julian annoy you so much, anyway?"

Soren looks thoughtful. "Ritchie, the guy would be a nobody back home. He probably was, and the problem is that when people like him arrive in Japan, it's like they suddenly get to be somebody, and it gives normal people a bad name."

"The charisma man effect." I offer, blowing out cigarette smoke.

"Yeah, exactly! You have these thousands of people who are essentially McDonalds fry clerks back home, but as soon as they arrive here, they're immediately rock-stars or 'film-makers' because the girls here think they're really cool. Give me a break. And the effect of that is that when you get somebody like me, genuinely an item back home, who actually was a figure in London or in New..." But by now I am tuning Soren out, even if nodding sympathetically in pretend interest. And by the time we forcefully bang open the sliding door and troop back in, I notice, for the first time, that there's a sort of Soren-smell to the apartment, a sort of masculine, leathery stink. The thought occurs to me that this has something to do with why three or four girls vomited at his last party.

"Well, I do have something for us tonight, something you'd be interested in." Soren says, stretching as he walks across the clothing-strewn living room.

"Eh?"

"Some Brazilian girl's dad is having a reception at the American Club. Big trade deal closed with the Nipponese. Lots of businesspeople, way-o."

We've just gotten off a huge party, the apartment isn't even fully cleaned up yet, and there'll have to be a sayonara night for a couple people leaving soon. Soren's birthday is coming up in mid-August, and that will only cap off another hot summer of consecutive all nighters, another killer season. So for tonight, this Brazilian thing's a good event: something low-key, relaxing, requiring absolutely no preparation. We laze around with a Playstation for a while, and then get changed to go. Expectations are met--the trade reception turns out to be a bunch of middle-aged people, pot-bellied middle-aged middle-managers trying to tell bad jokes (e.g. "I work for DHL. Do you know what DHL stands for?" "No." "Delayed, Held-up, Or Lost") or smirking at dirty stories ("Do you know what the H in DHL did with his money?") Yet the food is decent; the Americana furniture a pleasant change of pace. I suck on a rib while a black U.S. federal trade official goes off on "most favored trading status."

"... mutually beneficial to all three of our great countries, yet energizing synergies all over the world. Free trade is the foundation for any true global-wide specialization of economies, the fundamental foundation for societies that have free-speech and freedom of thought. So..."

There's really reason for me to pay special attention, but for some reason I find myself paying close attention to the speaker. He seems stuffed full of theories and intellectual arguments, yet is strangely hypnotic at the same time such that I can't quite dismiss him. There's something tremendously earnest about the man, as if he believes he is the cutting edge of historical forces, that he is being driven along a holy mission, possessing so much vitality that his ideas will renew America, a volcanic force inside of him bursting to get out, yet somehow, ineffably, fundamentally flawed. Somehow completely missing some major, unspoken point that everyone else understands. When I crack one of the bones with an audible snap, some old dowager at the table throws me a dirty look. But I don't care.

"Oh man, check this out." Soren hands me his cell. "STUCK IN TRAFFIC" reads the display.

"No Brazilian girl tonight?" I ask.

"Guess not."

"Well let's at least load up on champagne, hey?" We ditch the table and make for the drinks.

At the drink table, we discover there is one person our age present tonight, a half-black Louisiana girl with intensely green eyes. She's wearing a skirt that's about five inches long.

"Hello. Dominique LeFauve." She offers her hand

"Soren Soutern."

"Ritchie Ufuo. So I hope you're not too bored by tonight?"

Dominique laughs. "Call the ambulance."

The three of us find a quiet corridor where we can compare notes and in short order establish our situations. Having completed a year at Bryn Mawr, Dominique's now taking a year off and spending it in the most exotic of the comfortable foreign countries. Tonight's speaker, the trade official with his relentless paean free trade, free trade, free trade is actually her father, a senior political commissioner with the American consulate here. Japan has intrigued Dominique since childhood, "it's so futuristic here. I think they're ahead of us by twenty years," and though she doesn't really speak any Japanese, she's eager to learn. She'd love to be shown around. Dominique flirts with us both, a little tipsy on champagne, and it's enjoyable, but is there the undertone of something suppressed? "I will expect to hear further from you gentlemen," she says, at the end of an evening, two hands on each of our shoulders. Dominique LeFauve, 19.

Who would have thought so many new people, so many dramatic events could be crammed into one early summer that never seems to end? How many other weeks in our lives will ever be so absolutely hyped-up and hyperactive, pushing from one new person to the next, studying everyone like a flower and plucking only the perfect specimens, a life totally revolutionized, a distance of so few weeks into which so much change occurs? The Tokyo University chemist accepts the supply of drugs that he immediately denatures with alcohol and then gets to work on adjusting with his advanced 'molecular factory' machine; he's so confident of his work that he even asks for blood samples so that he can produce individually-tailored drugs matched to your DNA so that there'll be no ill effects and no unexpected events. In the heat of the summer that begins to slither in and then grip tenaciously to Tokyo Special Metropolitan District, in one first wave of heat that seems almost luminous while we wait for the designer MDMA to be manufactured, I begin a lazy, timeless game become implicitly recognized by all parties. Soren and I are casual rivals; Dominique is the prize, and although Soren has the apartment, the cash, and the circle of sycophants, I am not even all that interested in the girl, I am trying to win her just so Soren can't, Soren who has everything else in life. I take Dominique around the city, showing her Harajuku and Shibuya first, and then Roppongi, Shimokitazawa, Odaiba, Ebisu, and the Ueno area. And here I have certain advantages, a genuine street-level knowledge of things and perhaps a slightly wider circle of acquaintances. There is a pleasure in this, in being the knowledgeable guide to a girl discovering a city, the one in the know, complete with anecdote and insider's insight. After a long afternoon with sweat on your brow, it is a good thing to have a beer with a pretty girl, a girl who attracts attention from onlooking men. My lips brush hers on Tokyo Tower observation deck; she sighs and says something about Japan as dreamland, a future in now, and I accept this as common ground. If there are moments of unaccountable weirdness, a strange, conflicting feeling sometimes of desire and repulsion, (we have coffee this one time, and she has some sort of fit, almost inviting me to push her around verbally, to dominate her on a psychological level if we're going to have any conversation at all, pushy submissive, people are looking) there are also good, fine, pleasant times as well, the Tokyo aquarium, the day at Venusfort and Decks in Odaiba, where we drop coins into the penny arcade and play video games side-by-side, as carefree as grade school kids. Everyone else in the city becomes a sort of scenery, useful merely for how they provide a picturesque setting to the progress of things, which is a slow, intentionally deliberate and pleasurable process. For Dominique, she is playing around with two guys she calls "really handsome" without being too serious, playing them against each other. I'm not sure exactly of the depth of her involvement with Soren, of course--there are plenty of times as well when we hang out in our comfortable three. He does at one point make some inquires and decides to share with me what he's found out. Tyrell, an old friend, on the phone, scoffs at the suggestion that Dominique is "taking a year off from Bryn Mawr to travel." He is evasive; he alludes to something that happened at a Lower Merion Country Club, but he refuses to commit to any one version of events. All he leaves us with at the end of the phone call is, "Dominique LeFauve spent seventeen years being a perfect little Catholic schoolgirl from a rich little Southern family, and then one day she woke up and decided to worship Satan."

These are rare periods, these summers that never end. It seems almost in retrospect there is a black and white separation between that period, that weird, fey, dissonant summer with the sky foreboding and forbidding, and the time that went before, but seemingly just as I first meet so many new and exotic personalities, I am inheriting as well a past history of circulating events, such that it becomes almost too complicated and impossible to speak of the second or third tier lieutenants who surrounded Soren, or the strange Waseda student from China, Shan Le, who was already in Soren's circle and was his almost exotic friend.

"And jeez wasn't it weird how he kept that Chinese dude around, like stuffed in his closet just for when he needed him..."

"Yeah, like some below-the-stairs retard cousin he's pull out when he wanted to offend people. I can totally see that dude pulling a knife on somebody." And then the conversation would turn to all sorts of stories from the era before I knew him; weird moments everyone now begins to recall. "So Soren's father had contributed great sums to a school and Soren went to a banquet they threw as a representative. Shan is there as one of the beneficiaries of the scholarships that are funded by the donated cash, dressed up and wheeled out for the night to explain in awkward English how grateful they are for the support. At the dinner table, the two hit it off."

"No way, you guys got it all wrong. It's three a.m. on a late Friday night, and Soren has just slept with some flaky little Paris Hilton-wannabe who has starred in a number of low-budget Hollywood flicks and has come to Tokyo in some misguided belief that if she's at least somebody in Hollywood, in Tokyo she's a goddess from the heavens. The girl is passed-out drunk, completely zonked-out high on cocaine, and barely coherent if awoken. When Soren orders some Chinese food and the delivery boy arrives, the possibility of a ridiculously amusing prank occurs to him. For 50000 yen cash, the delivery boy is convinced to undress and spend the night in that bed. When the starlet awakes the next morning, what she discovers is that her vaguely-remembered night of a handsome young finance playboy was apparently in reality involved a barely-literate Chinese food delivery boy and of course she's so mortified and so terrified Soren will tell everyone that now she's his slave. And that delivery boy is Shan!"

These are some of the stories that circulate around why a rich American scion of the mega-rich is associating with a dirt-poor scholarship student from Zhejiang Province. The real story is just the simplest. Shan and Soren just met. It could have been on the street, in some park, or some random casual acquaintance. Soren had some sort of back of the mind thing for China; I sometimes saw him with a study book practicing the strange, tonal language, and he collected vintage 1960s era posters to decorate his walls. Alone among that group of varying and turbulent surrounding circle, this was exactly it: they were entirely compatible. When Soren went just a little too far, when he had some girl ready to be completely outraged at something he said, he could always bring Shan out of whatever little box he stored him in, and be like, "Look, this is the alternative. Do you notice the complete lack of desire to please or attract women? The 100% lack of fashion sense? How he plays the Titanic theme song on repeat play for seven hours and not only the lack of ability in clever conversation, but even the lack of desire to learn such a thing? Be grateful you're in the company of a guy who at least opens doors for you! This is what being an American guy is all about. Show some gratitude!" And that would be usually enough; that would shut up most girls.

The thing about social relationships of course is that it isn't exactly the type who is similar to you with whom you are compatible. Shan's off-putting vulgarity, his peasant butt-scratching ways; this had its use, just as my own semi-working class roots of country Pennsylvania bind me as the loyal foil to the thousand-dollar nights. But things reach their head with the involvement of Shan's other use, that of mere guinea pig.

"Got 'em!" says Soren, triumphantly, returning with two resealable plastic baggies, each marked with white draftsman's tape and oddly-cloyingly written names 'SOREN' and 'RITCHIE.' The hippie chemist has delivered and a sample of twenty pills each, produced by the best minds of Tokyo University chemistry department, represents individually-engineered designer MDMA analogue, or 'MADO,' 'WINDOW' in Japanese. But of course, the bags sit for some days, as we both uneasily wonder what it is like to be the first person to try something.

"So-len, ah so," says Shan, shifting his way inside one afternoon and then dissolving into excitable Mandarin with Soren slightly smug at his ability to respond.

"Jing-jong-jang-jing-rong-feng," or something another says the Chinese boy.

"Bao fung wang ding ding rong sing ten," replies Soren, and the two discuss some totally irrelevant matter, but at the end of which, suddenly Soren's eyes narrow, and he says, "Ah, but there is something you can do for me."

Shan looks up nervously. His head is shaved fairly close (he cuts his own hair, using an exotic barbership tool he owns) and he is dressed in bicycle tights ever since he discovered high-end bicycles.

"Ritchie, give me a hand."

Maybe this is wrong. Maybe this is a form of pure evil. But that's the thing, Soren has no right whatsoever to hang out, he really doesn't belong in this sort of social atmosphere by any means, and the cost is being the first one to try out the hippie chemist's new Ecstasy-variant. He resists a bit, but we make it clear the piper is coming due. "Eat it! Eat it! Swallow it!" we scream at him, and the Chinese boy reluctantly swallows, almost with a verge of tear in his eye. You can't physically force somebody to swallow, but we're just on the edge of doing so, and then we wait, but there are no immediate observable effects.

Soren and I stare at each other, above the nearly shaven head of the bicycle-tights wearing Chinese university student.

In the days to come there are a number of casual meetings with Shan, the pretext of which is covering our fascination with what changes WINDOW/MADO might elicit in our human guinea pig. The night he actually took the drug, the twenty-one year old wandered off into the night to get into whatever misadventures he sought out, possibly not sleeping a wink, possibly not entirely understanding what was happening to him, but all we get from him, strangely, is "thanks!" Shan claims he understands now; he recounts some story from his childhood when a budding romance was developing with a neighborhood six-year-old and a more aggressive boy, similar age but tougher, stepped in and stole her away. Shan's personality does change, becoming more aggressive, dominant, and he curses more. But he doesn't die or seem to other suffer any physical effects, so this is the first test of the product, that it is not poison per se, and although Shan gives the tiniest of little starts when we point out that he curses more in regular speech, he starts speaking a more loose and aggressive 'street English' and 'street Japanese' and indeed may have become more accepted by the community.

He was never a "good boy" so to speak, and when you look at a university, any university, you can always see delightful Chinese exchange students or foreign students with their tightly knit community; why would an individual not choose to integrate with his own nationality and economic background, one filled with such delightful girls? But without much further ado, we hum and haw for a bit, and then finally, the day arrives when the thing can't be avoided, and then reaching into the plastic baggies marked with our names, Soren and I also take a pill each of the designer Ecstasy and pass a sleepless night on the rooftop of Roppongi Hills, staring with dilated pupils at the night sky over Tokyo. Many accounts exist of people experiencing some sort of 'euphoria' or 'high.' But perhaps this is some designer novelty, something different and new, I don't experience any of this. Rather the vacancy of some days had opened up, a period without especial social activity or mandatory care-taking of some newly arrived individual, and instead, in this calm, in this respite during the period of high summer, and with the pills sitting for some days in the plastic bag, we took them out one evening and with a glass of ice-cold water, washed them down, and then the stars rushed down into us.

Drama and circumstances surrounding their decision to dabble in psychodelics, and the visuals, hallucinations, visions, etc. they experienced as 'mind-expanding' drugs worked their effect. Common to many of these stories: the question of the 'roll' or the 'high,' to experience X was for some reason almost universally called "rolling," as users talked about the experience as if they were on a roller-coaster, dipping and rising in a high-speed trip, experiencing the ordinary day through a whole new prism of experience, with elation, euphoria, and profound "spiritual insight" developing, "I am rolling into the fourth dimension onto a blue and purple triangle-throbbing trip." As for myself, I did not "roll;" I felt no expanding joy of consciousness nor any sense of euphoria or overwhelming happiness. Rather, as Shan had reported, what came back to me in a flood of long-forgotten memories were the primordial experiences of childhood and young adulthood. I suddenly accessed a part of my memory having to do with a first trip to the carnival, a gaseous, spaceous feeling as if smoke-filled chambers had opened in my brain, combined then, all of a sudden with the flooding memories of middle-school. "Hello superstar!" Taller than my peers, more coordinated and developing earlier, I was a star on the basketball court and ahead of group as well in academics. A "total platform," as the slang of our town went, I was good at both sports and academics, and correspondingly, with a little charm, extremely popular even adored and considered an obvious "most likely to succeed" individual. MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED. All of that, however, came to a crashing halt the day the police showed up at our little split-level house in Lafayetteville, informing us that our father had been involved in a terrible high-speed crash on the interstate. Just like that day turned to night, and my life forever changed. One can never forget the terrible swinging motion of the trees, as the trooper leaned over to the car we had pulled up in; the terrible trees in their frantic wind-swept motion, through the windshield, unstoppable.

"We're so very sorry." There was Social Security, of course. There were survivor payments from the government and from the insurance companies, but what the unbending rule of society was, of course, was that 'everybody smiles when you are smiling, but when you cry you cry alone.' Or it was 'nothing succeeds like success.' The banal platitudes never felt so real until they happened; they happened to you.

It was after the death of my father that things turned around, that my sister became fat, that my younger brother started having all those continual "emotional problems" and counseling sessions, the endless abruptness of a widowed family. The attempt to adjust style to convey intensification of thought under psychoactives in intentional of course, but whatever its affect, of course becoming part of a widow's family was real and it was real and it was real. This is real, this is memory, this is the illusion fading away. My jump-shot did not fade away overnight; rather, what occurred was a slow, slow, slow wearing away of status, a certain form of insolence that was suddenly tolerated rather than instantly retaliated, a new face, new kid moving to the district establishing his status by suddenly identifying the easy target, the one who tried to start a conflict, a loss of confidence, a deterioration in grades, a recognition that I wasn't one of the top minds whereas before everything had just come instantly, magically, without effort. The switch to high school was a big drop down; suddenly there was nobody who remembered the old Ritchie, the one who had confidently led hiking trips across the Pennsylvania mountains or the one who had shown kindness to old friends going through a rough patch, suddenly there were more communities at our regional-level high school instant of our neighborhood middle school, and then soon, I was one of the less visible, not absolutely at the bottom of the social heap, but one of the also-rans, picked later for teams during gym periods, a slow toughening of the outside self that had once been innocent and energetic.

So that was high school. Sympathy lasted a year or two. Suddenly the crush of personalities had returned. And from talk of a full scholarship to a private university, the possibility of being one of the great, the slow erase of status and even, if that was not all, the initial growth spurt that had made me top 10% in height in junior high meant a premature ending of growth, to be at the end in the bottom third, not absolutely consigned to pathology, but suddenly not the born leader.

Who can summarize a Pennsylvania high school-hood in terms of drear roads, roadside wire, used cars, possessions that had to be sold, the heavy weight of depression and inertia and slipping into the lower middle-class? What emotional valence can capture the terribly tan grasses dried in autumn, the moronic stare of farmers, the colonial houses that are replaced by clapboard and then by vinyl sheeting? And what, then, of a university, not the once hoped for LaSalle, Lafayette, or even Drew or Drexel but the inevitable State, the massive concrete dorm, the assignment to data-entry 18302 out of graduating class of 24000, a number for administrators, a face to be added, if it desired, to the university's heroes or achievers.

WINDOW erased those years. To some degree I am just echoing what the Shanghai boy had reported, that it induced a period of intense retrospection, a sleepless night where your old self returned. That night, Soren and I went to the top of Roppongi Hills, the most fashionable location in Tokyo, and through a disused maintenance hallway accessed the rooftop helipad area, where amidst clattering machinery we inherited the vastness of the night sky and the absolute crystalline glittering perfection of the metropolis itself. A gash, Shinjuku Park, and a dark area, the Emperor's Palace, were the sole valleys of darkness amidst a shimmering, twinkling diamond carpet, and here, Soren, with his pupils dilated, and rushing off to self-examinations of his own, confessed that everything had to be the way it was, that everything was exactly the way it should be.

"I admit the first time I met you, I instantly knew that we were cosmically connected, that something great was going to come out of all this." And from here, Soren went on, speaking for hours, about the "synergy of personalities," about "controlling the foreigner scene," about "Roppongi finance" and the mild trouble had experienced with an ingrate, some foreigner who had enjoyed a friendship with him but never in the end reciprocated, and how I was different, how my character was good, and how somebody questioning and restraining was needed to focus and blockade the over-enthusiasms of someone like him, infinitely trying new things. In the space of so many hours it seemed he spoke endlessly, but the singing wind, the cloudless night sky, the lightened effect of the city projecting against atmospheric dust, of course constitute themselves a sort of revelation or vision all in themselves. I looked up at the billions of stars, and they rushed down, and I became one with them.

# III.

High summer begins, a period of warm and fluttery days, sweet and sultry, carrying the premonition of further things. Weeks passed, with Soren's "synergy" as he spoke, underway, with domination of the social scene at posh clubs and evenings of laughter and new people sorted through as a science, an art, and a profit-making enterprise. I think the average night I am down two or three hundred dollars over what I made at work, but even work was charming and easy those weeks, and every once in a while, cash would return in a flurry. It comes from strange places: a fast-talking Brooklyn stockbroker who had set up an entire company based on revolutionary oil filters that obviated the need for oil changes (stock price went from 140 yen/share to north of 2300 yen in two weeks, and then almost as quickly failed); a freak hailstorm that dented two thousand parked Mercedes and for whom, purely by chance, we know the right person to offer a contract to and for which we collected a 20% referral fee. These stand out in memory, because they come in the same week and both have to do with automobiles, but there are chaotic, random, and strangely profitable projects that suddenly returned cash after days and days of fruitless chatter.

The idea of "social domination," of course, is all Soren's. It is his strategic thinking plan, the idea that if you existed as the node or brokerage house of information, you could not do terribly, even if massive profit were not possible. The theory of wealth-generation goes something like you committed to one thing and kept repeating it, generating massive profit out of increment improvements in commodities, or it involved merely "staying ahead of the curve, more than afloat," through always knowing what other people were up to and participating as a small but consistent arbiter.

During World War II, the German submarine captains referred to two intervals during the war as "the Happy Time," short, all-too-brief periods when the balance of technology or numbers were on their side and merchant shipping fell like wheat to the scythe with relatively few reversals on their part. Like the U-boat commanders, I had my "first Happy time," as my addition to the Soren clique, combined with a renewal of Tats as a friend, as the occasional inclusion of others flitting in and out of our circle created a sort of social phenomenon of itself, such that the mood of the club or bar was dominated by us. Girls swarmed around, drawn by the local atmosphere of cash flowing freely and laughter without check or embarrassment. And in this period, the previous "best friend of Soren" undoubtedly felt disgraced and rejected rather than rejecting, and the inclusion of others on any given night created its own magic or possibility of profound connection.

The mechanics of a five or seven person group, naturally, can be an all-or-nothing thing. A superb writer could possible create an entire work just on the philosophy, politics, economics, personality theory, "coolness" talk, or just talk about that filled a night, as intervening personalities provided check on dramatic certainties. Or possibly at the very least it sufficed to note that a Hawaiian of part-Filipino ancestry might have his own Pacific and beach-style vibe to add to a crowd of northeasterners, or that the Northeast was escaped, in a sense, in a trip to Japan, an adventure underneath Mt. Fuji and fluttering cherry blossoms. You wanted, as Soren would agree, not just the synergy of two, but the overwhelming unstoppable Flow created by five: the leader, the second-in-command, the one local, Mr. Pacific, and small techie friend. This sort of brilliant clique surrounded by a bevy of twittering females owned everything; it frequently did not even have to pay for drinks. Or perhaps better yet, five was all you needed to thoroughly understand every business or social problem. Was Oracle launching a new human resources software that allowed a corporation to fully maximize its productivity? No one person could grasp its impact, but a mix of five fully comprehended its scope.

Up far north, the air is crisp, as crisp as the cheerful gleam in Soren's eye, as he plans out the delicious details of his 25th and we enter prime summer. If there is one talent this individual can be said to have, if there is one area in which he must be recognized as a past master, his skills superlative, it is in the art of throwing a truly legendary party. And in this activity, Soren is energized and on a mission; he walks around all day his phone buzzing, working out the details of who will be there and who must be shut-out, who will help him organize and bring bottles and arrange for trays for appetizers, and what exactly the perfect time and date is among the hundred immediate acquaintances and three hundred friends of friends, taking full account of all the news and up-to-the-minute changing plans of the immediate preceding days.

"And yo, Ritchie, sorry to break your heart, but I've been hearing your girlfriend is seeing another guy."

"Uh, okay, Soren, whatever you say," I call back, opening up a cardboard box of Absolut.

By now Soren has figured out it wasn't going to happen between him and Dominique, but she and I are not quite a number, either. Soren's messing around with me, displaying a mock resentment that perhaps serves to clear the air. Yet I stop what I'm doing, trying to figure out what his devious mind has come up with this time. "So who's she seeing?"

"Wait, I thought she's not your girlfriend? What do you mean, 'who's she's seeing?' Why would you care? Why is this any of your business."

"Stop being a tool, Soren. "

Soren would play it out longer, maybe even for multiple days, but he's just located this legendary Brazilian caterer, this aunt-figure who deals completely exclusively with fellow Brazilians. Soren had to find a go-between, but he's going to get otherwise unobtainable food, a legendary master of unattainable culinary traditions working exclusively for the Brazilian community, for his party and he needs to confirm it's going to absolutely go through. Thus he lets me in on what's he's heard straightaway, "Shan, dude. Chinese Shan."

I laugh. I mean, I literally laugh out loud. Of all possibilities, this is the most ridiculous. Tom, Bernie, Rick, Herrera, I could list a thousand names of people who might have the slightest of possibilities. But Shan is a fresh-off-the-boat Mainland Chinese poor as dirt university student with a bad hair-cut and ill-fitting clothes. He barely even registers as a proper expat; he's a scholarship student. If he paid the slightest attention to MTV, then maybe in ten years, he'll be remotely hip enough to even talk to a girl. But this is clearly just a weak joke. "Shan?! Chinese Shan? That guy is a fricking coolie!"

Soren retorts, "Reliable sources. Anyway, I will provide details as soon as I bring back the food!"

I dismiss Soren's story from my mind within moments of his leaving. Despite two years of being exposed to metropolitan sophistication, Shan not just dresses funny, but his e-crash has resulted in some strange hybrid-pathetic attempts to unleash cool American slang or Japanese 'street-talk,' but which is uninformed and dated. He ends up turning into a train-wreck (E.g.,"Where you at, my homies representing?") and some real American is just looking at him like, "oh my god, that's just terrible." Shan, is in short, decidedly the most uncool and ridiculous of potential contenders for even a passable let alone an exotically hot American girl, and he has absolutely no chance for a chick like Dominique or any other American girl for that matter. I return to my Fruits magazine, to looking aghast at strangely dressed Japanese subculture-types, but am interrupted not long thereafter by the arrival of the first partygoers.

"Yo, yo, yo, let's get this party started! Ritchie, represent!" It's Herrera. The evening kicks off with Herrera and Max and the rest of the boys tumbling in. They're a little rougher around the edges, a bit urban, but they're absolutely the best sort of people with whom to start a party. And fair to say, Herrera's entire L.A. group is supposed to show up that night, something like twenty people taking a group vacation together, the possibilities are endless.

"The obaasan then gives us a bill for four mahn! We were like, what the hell?" Some prune-faced izakaya owner had gypped the crew cold-facedly. It ended with them skipping the tab and fleeing into the uncaring night. More people start to stream in.

"Do you think we can go up to Sendai? Oh, I want to go to Niseko this season dude."

"He said Lexington Queen was way cooler, but you know, I've never been there..."

"Laney's been doing boatloads of drugs lately. She better stop or..."

The party has begun.

Alcohol begins to flow. I have an ice-cold Heineken in my hand, and I'm catching up with people from around the scene when Soren gets back, this time with two delivery boys carrying the much-anticipated Brazilian food, the holy grail. It's an outrageous success; people are instantly surrounding the food grabbing for plastic forks and paper plates. Beef, pork, chicken barbeque; appetizers, no two alike, that are folded dumplings of meat and beans and spices; black beans and rice; iced cocktail mix—everything just has this glow of freshness and savor that you just can't get in Japanese cuisine. The stuff really is unbelievable; we are literally salivating over what we have been missing. People are drinking, smoking, chatting with each other, getting introduced. Soren dims the lights, and now the swarm of people becomes relentless.

"Oh, hey Dominique! Thought you said you might not..."

I notice when Dominique walks in. We make eye contact, but then she looks away. Green eyes. Soren is standing near the door, so he hugs her, they cheek-kiss, and I don't feel any special need to go welcome her. Her elevator ride also had all of Herrera's Puerto Rican crowd who had as promised were visiting Japan; actually the entire entourage needs to use two elevators, and they're flooding in, they're all dressed up to go clubbing, uniquely Latino and clubkid and glam. They end up enclaving in an entire bedroom, Soren's spare room, and now we have easily one hundred fifty people in one, if somewhat large, apartment. White-hot intensity. The volume is deafening. I take a breather in Soren's bedroom, and he's there too, cuddling with two girls who are obviously quite drunk.

"Hey, Ritchie, how's it going dawg? Meet the two Melinda's!"

"It's Alinda," corrects one of the girls.

"Whatever. Toyota brought them here, they're in Japan for a week!"

One of the girls has her own private stash of marijuana, and she rolls up a joint, which people pass around while listening to rock music. And then, maybe because of the marijuana smoke in the air or maybe just because there's been so much going on out and about these days, Soren and I fall to talking, and the girls get bored; they're just not interested in politics and What It All Means. They try to cut in a few times, and then give up, have their own private discussion, some intense clarification of What We Think about some third girl, not present. The cacophony of party noise floods in, then, as somebody—Herrera--comes by to pay his respects, followed not too long afterwards by Jay, one of Soren's old friends, a club promoter. Time stands absolutely still; one's concentration is completely focused. I want to ask about Soren's new job responsibilities, how he feels about turning into the Man. But he denies it; everything I know about him is just wrong; it's a media/branding company, they're Left. The four of us are just going back-and-forth. We come to agree to that we just have to disagree, Herrera and I are bright young idealists, and there's nothing that will crack Soren and Jay's essential cynicism. Night of the Wolfeans, tho' it's already been done. "Party like it's the last party you'll ever have." And then we go out to the main room.

Irish car bombs, shot-glasses of whiskey dropped into pints of Guinness and gulped down and crazy good gin and tonics made with real Bombay Sapphire, amidst a table of people standing around trying to make a competition out of drinking. Vodka jello shots. Vodka and tonic. Fuzzy navels. Tequila sunrises. I underestimate the alcohol's strength. The party is now reaching a peak, as many people packed into one apartment as possible, it being impossible to get anywhere except by squeezing through, body by body. Soren steals a pair of bongo drums from one of his friends and starts beating them, high as a kite. He is chanting out rhythmically, improvising some kind of strangely skillful reggae chant. Some girl with glitter on her cheeks is trying to speak something into my ear, but I can barely hear her, the music is too loud. It's something about Toyota's internship program that plucks little interns out of Oklahoma and brings them to big bad Japan. And outside, the cityscape of Tokyo is spread out like a carpet of stars, glimmering and flashing, the hustle of commerce on the main thoroughways, the steady constellations of dwelling places and office towers.

It may be 3am or so when I decide to take another breather, this time finding an unoccupied room, lighting up a cigarette, and sprawling back on a coach. Herrera's group says they want to go out to 911 and GasPanic, the clubs they read about in their guidebooks. I'm thinking about the merits of tagging along when the door opens and Dominique walks in.

"Hello, stranger," she says.

I pause for a second, but decide I'll play along. "Thought you were ignoring me."

She seems surprised. "Why would you think that?"

"Oh, I don't know. Haven't been returning texts or phone calls lately."

"No way. Sorry about that." She walks over to the coach, sits down next to me, and a second later, my lips are on hers, we're all over each other. After about five minutes, we pull apart, catching our breath on opposite ends of the couch.

"So, how have you been Ritchie?" she asks. "I can't believe you haven't been calling."

I give a little laugh. "Oh, just the way things have been. You know a total party boy like me...."

We smile, heaving apart on the couch and catching our breaths. Things are going to turn out okay. But right at this moment, Shan walks in, and within moments comes over, and with completely machismo, sits next to and starts to cuddle with Dominique. So I'm like thinking inside, "wow, it's true!" Dominique makes some resistance, looking at me for a fearful second, but doesn't really stop the dude. I look over and say, "you make me feel sad." And the strangest expression crosses Dominique's face, she looks as terrified as if I had threatened her very life. I walk out the door.

The party outside is starting to fade. The Puerto Ricans leave en masse to pursue the club night they're after; they call up a limousine to be complete rock stars. But there's still one last, most diehard cohort of drunkards left. Soren, having somehow acquired a Hawaiian luau, decides he's just going to completely dig up every last supply he has and just clean out the stash while we play some poker. A cigarette dangles from his lips. He brings out some cards and whiskey and we start to playing.

"So whatever anybody wants, just take it, and thank you." There's a pile of pills, MDMA, ketamine, anti-depressants that can be ground up and snorted, and little bits and pieces of every other Class A substance scattered on the dining room table. "Totally clean it out if you really feeling it."

"Trying to get us under the influence so you can take money from us?"

"Ha-ha."

"Your deal."

Soren and Jay and two of the girls and I play for about an hour as the last people either join in briefly or head out, bidding their farewells and giving their thanks or compliments. Finally, the game gets down to just Soren and me, dueling over a big pile of chips, and the two girls passed out on the couch, who we drape with some blankets out of chivalric spirit. And I've completely forgotten Shan and Dominique until they stumble out of a room, clothes disheveled. Despite the complete end-of-night fatigue and influence of drugs, Soren throws me a meaningful look, and not being easily out-cooled, I shrug, and invite them to pull up seats, we'll let them play in. Shan declines and says he has to go home, speaking in his weird sibilant Chinese accent that he doesn't know how to play, but Dominique, surprisingly, Dominique tells us to deal her in. She and Shan kiss, and then he walks out the door. We shuffle the deck and begin. It's three of us now.

"I raise."

"Show me what you got."

The chips stack up and the cards get tossed around.

"Your deal."

"River card is..."

"Ah whatever." I lose a few hands and then make a stand. Chips starts to flow from Dominique to Soren, and then I luck on a few plays. We're half-an-hour in when I decide to play a conversational bluff. I'm down to about a fifth of the chips, we let Dominique stay alive even though she's really out several times, and Soren has almost won this game. It's now five in the morning possibly; we're exhausted and maybe one or more of us is drugged out; we're all at least half drunk and the sky is beginning to lighten on one fringe.

"So I have a confession to make, guys." I say, and look at the two meaningfully.

Soren smirks. "Whats'it, Ritchie?"

"You know, it's actually really hard to penetrate groups like these?"

"Penetrate?"

"Yeah, like major drug circles, everybody knows each other and everybody takes the same stuff, so the cops can't really break in."

"So what?"

"Well actually guys," I pause and stare at both Dominique and Soren eye to eye, holding pocket eights that haven't panned out. "what I'm saying is that I work for the FBI. You guys are this really difficult drug circle to penetrate and I'm a narc sent to penetrate your ring so I can arrest you."

Soren is now smiling broadly. "Well you're too late, 'cuz I just snorted my last line of cocaine you son of a b..." But he is interrupted by Dominique's strangled cry as she jumps up, scattering the chips, and running into the bathroom to throw the last of the pile of pills Soren has down the toilet, before running out of the apartment, slamming the door. Soren and I look at each other for about two seconds, thinking "what the hell?," before he runs after her and now everything is silent. I feel the passage of time, five minutes. Ten. All alone in the deserted apartment.

Finally Soren comes back, but not meeting me in eye.

"Ritchie, I think it's time for you to leave."

"What? What's going on? Why are you saying that?"

"Ritchie, I'd like you to leave the apartment now."

"Soren, we've been friends for a year now. What are you saying? I'm not really an FBI agent, dude, that's just a joke so I could psych you out of the last hand."

"Ritchie, for the last time, leave my apartment right now." His lips are firmly set.

I give him the finger. And then he walks me out and closes the door behind me.

# IV.

This is the absurdity of my situation. I'm standing in the elevator foyer on the twenty-second story of Roppongi Hills staring at a door that's just been slammed, feeling a sort of rage. Of course I am contemptuous at Dominique, who cannot handle her drugs; and Shan, ridiculous coolie Shan, is not even worth contempt; but Soren, Soren who I have talked down from midnight alcoholic crises; Soren who I have supported on too-drunk-to-walk, taxis refusing to take us four a.m. treks home all the way from Shibuya; Soren, who in truth I have argued with a dozen times before for weeks now, countless screamfests that break out by 3pm and are fully resolved by the third round of drinks that evening but this one feels entirely different, I know this one is really one that's completely different in character, about Soren I feel a genuine and explosive rage, a complete sense of betrayal and wrath. Yet, strangely, or maybe just because all intense emotions inspire their opposites, I experience simultaneously a curious feeling of guilt, almost that I have indeed done something wrong.

Three days later: "Soren, hey Soren are you there? This is Ritchie. I am not a freakin' FBI agent. If I were, I would have arrested your ass years ago. Besides, you have seen me do just about every controlled substance under the sun. How the hell is that going to hold up in court? I honestly don't care if you never talk to me again, but anyway this is the third message I'm leaving for you. My iPod is lying on your kitchen counter. It has an entire library of songs, fully paid for. I would like it back. You don't have to give it back to me in person. You don't have to drop it off in my workplace. Just leave it with your doorman and let me know, I will walk over and pick it up myself. Don't be a tool."

A few days later:

"Soren, it's been a week now. I need that iPod. A personal music player made by Apple, Inc., white metal about the size of a deck of cards lying just to the right of your kitchen sink, probably still plugged-in. Maybe you'd be so kind as to return it to me. Like today. Drop it off at your apartment front desk or just put it in the mail with a little bubble-wrap around it. I'm sure it'll get to me just fine. I'm asking very nicely."

Two weeks:

"Soren, this is the last time I'm going to call. You made me leave your apartment and you did not give me the opportunity to recover a valuable electronic device from your kitchen counter. To be specific, a three-hundred-dollar piece of equipment and one that costs a lot more to replace here in Tokyo. I don't even know if I can get an English-language one here. So come up with the goods or write me a nice fat check. I'm not going to back down from this, because what you're doing is called 'theft.' Got that? 'Theft.' This is Ritchie Ufuo, it's the twenty-third of August at 3pm, and I expect a response or I will pursue all legal means to recover my property."

Something finally clicks, though perhaps not necessarily because of my message. Soren emails me back finally to claim that he had put my iPod in my vestibule mailbox in my very apartment building, in fact the very next day after that crazy night, but I check that thing every day and it definitely wasn't there the day after the party nor is it there now. The mailbox is this little green metal thing, completely unsecured. Anybody could have taken the MP3 player. I kick up another fuss by text message and voicemail, insisting that he at least partially reimburse me, and finally he agrees to hand over 5000 yen, less than $50, and I am just so exhausted and weary of it all that I consent to the tiny, purely symbolic sum of money that really in truth is far less than is fair. And maybe I let a little hint of threat enter this dispute, knowing that rich partyboys living off family money have just a bit more to lose than university grads two years out of college. We meet at a coffeeshop, perhaps both motivated in part to size each other up. Neither of us have to acknowledge that our friendship is over, that now is the time for cold politeness.

"So have you heard anything?"

"Not really; there were some cop cars hanging around my apartment last week, but I'm not sure they were there for me."

Soren looks thoughtful. "I heard Shan got arrested. Seems he pulled a knife on Dominique later that night."

"Shan?" This is a completely unexpected development. "I told you that guy's a weirdo. You seem to keep a real high quality of friend around, don't you."

"OK; well here's your five thousand yen." He turns abruptly and leaves, his untouched coffee steaming away on the table.

My reference to the cop cars is not made up. On the evening of the fourth day after the party, I spent a quiet evening at the Lion's Head pub in Ebisu, eating fish and chips and watching a judo match on the big-screen television with the rest of the regulars. I turned in early, saying goodbye to Tom at the bar, and walk back up the short hill to the Yamanote-line station, my nerves perhaps eighty percent of the way to being calmed down after that strange, intense night.

Shinjuku is between Ebisu and Setagaya. At the main west Tokyo station, I needed to switch trains, and I stopped by a bookstore that I've stopped by a hundred times before to browse some of their English-language titles. I was examining a TIME magazine cover on mad cow disease when I noticed, of all people, Dominique walking in, this time accompanied by a grotesquely obese expat who we had mocked before together, a guy who is so fat that his ankle actually just broke—no fall down the stairs, no trip on an unseen crack in the sidewalk--just a failure of the ankle bones in protest of the four hundred pounds they weren't designed to carry around. There was this odd moment of silence as neither of us acknowledge each other's presence, but internally, I'm thinking, "Pathetic. Is this who you're associating with now? Especially after you're the one who led the round of insults against this guy?" Maybe I even had the slightest urge to just boldly walk forward, extending my hand and saying, "Hi, Dominique! Calmed down a bit now?" But some instinct of self-preservation restrained me, and they left, almost definitely after having noticed me, pausing a bit, and then making a decision, and I, after a few minutes deciding I'm not going to pick up a copy of "Charisma Man: the First Year," rejoined the crowds and the noise in the station proper.

It took me about another forty minutes to get home, counting a brief stop at my neighborhood grocer's for milk. Right when I make the final turn to my street, however, what I saw were two police cars, lights spinning, parked directly in front of my apartment building. I couldn't help but wonder if for some bizarre reason, they're there for me. Without really making it a conscious decision, I decided I'll visit the neighborhood bar, a tiny little Japanese 'izakaya' pub run by the "Chief," an old Japanese man who used to run a bar in Yokosuka and who thus manages a surprising English. Two or three hours later, after having downed a trio of Kirins and my little plastic shopping bag of milk now room temperature, I decide to call it a night for the second time that evening, and this time, when I turn the corner to my apartment, the street is deserted.

This mysterious little incident leaves me once more hyped up, paranoid, and unresolved, so it's almost a relief to get a message on my answering machine a few days after I meet up with Soren:

"Hi Richard Ufuo. This is Tom Fannet from the U.S. Embassy Tokyo. I'm the chief of security here, and my job is to ensure the safety of all U.S. nationals in a foreign country, including you. I was hoping you might be willing to come in and have a little chat. This is purely, 100% voluntary. We've heard there's been some sort of incident involving threats to a U.S. national, and we hope you might help us tell us what you know. Again, you certainly don't have to come in if you don't want.... "

I don't remember the exact wording Fannet uses. But despite his repeated bland assurances that my cooperation is completely voluntarily, he and I both know perfectly well that I don't really have a choice in the thing, not after police cars, not after rumors of Chinese boyfriends pulling out knives. So the next day in the afternoon I get permission from my boss to run some errands, and I hop over to Akasaka.

Receptionist: "Hi, can I help you?"

"Yes, my name is Ritchie Ufuo, I received a call from Tom Fannet to come in and speak."

The woman looks bored. "Uh, yes, let me see if he's available."

Hurried talking and back and forth, hand over the handset despite the two inches of plexiglass. Then the little panel in the window slides open.

"Mr. Ufuo? Mr. Ufuo did you say? He'll be right out."

"Now aren't you impressed that I can just walk in and get Tom Fannet."

"You wouldn't believe it."

Fannet comes out and welcomes me inside the secured area of the embassy in a big, generous cop-like sort of way. He turns out to be a balding middle-aged man with a mustache and a New York accent. We go down the hallway to his office, a fairly decent sized one, piled high with paperwork, and with the walls covered in various certificates and accolades. There's a picture of him shaking hands with President Clinton and a window that looks out into the embassy parking-lot. With a noncommittal expression, he begins.

"So, Ritchie, thanks so much for stopping by. Some tea or coffee maybe?"

"Coffee would be great."

The security chief presses a button on his phone and has some coffee sent in. We make some small talk, and when I describe my job at the company as involving a constant brokering of relationships between the risk-averse Japanese management and the revolutionary possibilities opened by new IT coding, he does seem genuinely interested. But there's also this detectable moment when he switches over to talk business; his entire posture in his chair changes.

"So Ritchie, our meeting today is in many ways completely unnecessary, but I wanted there to be open and honest communication. I don't want you to feel that you aren't a part of the process."

"Okay."

"If you're feeling uncomfortable about certain developments, I do want you to know that your rights and prerogative are respected, and nobody is being allowed to just make claims that are accepted without due consideration for your assessment about things."

"Sir, is this about the police cars in my neighborhood a few days ago?"

Fannet raises an eyebrow, keeping his cards very close.

"You saw police cars?"

"Japanese police vehicles right in front of my apartment."

"But nothing happened, right? Nobody's booked you or accused you for anything."

"I don't need even blue lights."

Fannet continues to look me in the eye. Maybe just because I don't really have any aces up my sleeve, I accept the gambit.

"Look, Mr. Fannet, let's skip the bluffing: I live in Kita-Shinjuku. To get there, I need to pass through Shinjuku Station. I stop into the station bookstore almost every week. The bookstore owner will back me up. I mean, go get the station camera if you don't believe me, because she's not saying that I actually approached her, is she?"

Fannet looks out the window. His heaps and heaps of papers on his desk each topped by dark binders. The New York accent now seem to intensify ever so slightly.

"Ritchie, there are relationships involved which bring their own agendas... "

"But you need to rely on actual evidence. If I run into Dominique by complete coincidence and I don't touch a hair on her head, then how does that all add up to bringing the cavalry out?"

A slightly mollifying voice: "You may have heard that a Chinese national has been arrested..."

"So I've heard. But if he pulled out a knife out on somebody, of course he needs to be charged on those charges."

Fannet nods his head. "Look here, there's no need to worry. Anyway, we understand Mr. Le is of foreign citizenship, so we can't really comment on the situation. We are in full communication with the Chinese embassy about the situation..."

I look Fannet in the eye as he launches into his bureaucratic newspeak and catch a glimmer of an unspoken message in the way his eyes don't leave my face. Do not associate with Shan, for if you do so, you do so at your own peril. Our conversation resumes, and Fannet stonewalls as before, but for my part, and I believe I am not calculating in doing so, merely one individual backed up in a corner, I believe I communicate in return that I will not be a patsy for unfounded charges and that even if I am not wealthy or infinitely connected, I am not helpless, there is not nobody back home who would back me up. I will not be subject to charges and false accusations.

"So what happened, dude? I heard Shan went psycho at Soren's party and pulled out a knife, people were terrified and running out of the place. I've always said that dude is bad news."

It's Herrera who's the first to get to me, and though he's gleeful and laughing and demanding to know What Happened, I make him tell me about his night first, that wild party of Latinos who filled up an entire limousine, laughing and calling out and waving taken-off t-shirts at the uptight Japanese populace. "Well, we hit up Vanilla and we totally partied out all day. Good times. Now as for Shan? He really pull out a knife?"

"Dude, I don't know anything about Shan. From what I saw, I thought he was already gone. If he did pull a knife out, though, I agree he does need to go to jail. That's totally uncool—you can't do that."

Herrera cocks his eyebrow. "And you know Soren's completely disappeared."

"Disappeared? Like he's missing? I just saw him a week ago!"

"Well you're one of the few. He left a message on his voicemail saying he needed to take a little vacation, and then later, it was just changed to saying he needs to focus on work and thanks everyone for turning out. People tried to call his company but the operator won't let them through, and you know, you can't just bother somebody at work for personal life stuff. So nobody can reach him."

"Wow that's weird," I say, thinking it so. "How about the girl? Any news on Dominique?"

Herrera almost looks scared. "Nothing, man. You know her father's the senior trade commissioner for US-Japan relations? He's a big shot in the Republican Party, some guy who's going to actually run the whole thing one day. And Dominique's a psycho girl. Basically if she came up to you putting a gun to her own head, crying she's going to kill herself, you're the one who's going to end up shot somehow, god knows how."

Later, it seems to no small part Soren's over-reaction to things, or perhaps what is really a not unsignalled premeditated life decision to withdraw from the social scene and get serious about work, has its part in exacerbating events as they unfold. When I first met him, he was in some sort of disgrace. My entry into his life inspires one last run in the sun, but he had always been planning to buckle down. It just had to happen this way. His abrupt departure from the social scene, which throws certain comments and tones of voice of especially the last six months in new perspective, turns what might be a private affair into some important, secretive Big Thing that becomes the primary subject matter for all young Tokyo. I don't even in good faith hold the end of our friendship against him, as it was grounded in a superficiality and spontaneity that would have eventually doomed it if not that year, then quite possibly the next. But if Soren doesn't go completely hermit, if he doesn't completely undergo a 180 degree reversal from life-of-the-party to far-off-seen individual, if Soren simply throws a small dinner party or something just to show his face, maybe people are far less likely to get excited, maybe people won't be saying things like "did you hear about the murder?" "Isn't it true there's some crazy stalker Chinese guy who's targeting all Americans?" "Have you heard of some twisted sex game going on in Roppongi Hills and the girl nailed three guys?"

Unfortunately for Shan, he's picked perhaps the worst possible time for getting charged with flashing a knife at an American girl. Only nine months prior, an American girl by the name of Dolores Blair who worked at a hostess bar was killed by her old boyfriend from back home, her body discovered in an alley by trash collectors the next day. The resulting uproar was covered in the international press. So, Dominique on arrival at the embassy that night, we are only months later to discover, is not saying, "Oh, I hung out with this lowlife Chinese dude and he pulled a knife on me," but crying and repeating hysterically "This is another Blair, This is another Blair, This is another Blair, he's trying to kill me, he's trying to kill me, he's trying to kill me, somebody protect me from the crazy stalker" in her statements to the embassy security staff. Lurid news coverage carried by the foreign press had been putting pressure on Japan for six months to reform its "soapland" culture, and no matter what the local police do, they find themselves under criticism, making them a bit more jumpy and sensitive to foreign demands than usual. And third, but I feel real, the suicide of Blair's killer, the weird army drop-out social-recluse, has left a strange feeling of a lack of resolution, a sort of challenge to our collective foreigner's society. We want our criminals to grovel on the stand, begging for mercy and striving their hardest for one sweet more moment of life, only to be ruthlessly punished by the collective judgment of the community. This gives you closure: this makes you say, it's true--criminals are all cowards in the end, this lets you sleep comfortably at night. But for Blair's killer to kill himself too? Somehow this lacks closure. Closure I tell you.

"So, Oh My God, What the Hell Happened at the Party?"

By the fourth time I go over the story, I'm beginning to slightly feel the absurdity of the situation, but this time, it's a big crowd, the first really general audience since Soren's birthday, a random encounter on the street that turns out to be running into a bunch of people out for Italian food. All eyes are on me.

"So there's this Chinese dude, Shan, right? Apparently he pulled out a knife out on Dominique after some kind of argument. But it must have happened a few days after the party."

The girl who first queries me gets a sort of puzzled look.

"But what happened to Soren? Why did he suddenly disappear? Is he even still in Japan?"

"So I hear. Still going to work every day, not like it's hard since it's all in the same building. But I think he just decided that he's had enough of partying."

"Wow, that's so sudden. Weird. Really weird."

It's here and events similar to these that I begin to get my first lessons in what really defines a human being. I watch, unreacting but burning in cynicism, as people who have drunk deeply at Soren's parties, girls who have fluttered about him cooing and tossing their hair, guys who have knocked beer steins with him and called him "mate," now deprived of the free and flowing alcohol, the apartment open at all hours of the day and night, are the quickest to turn on the missing party-boy, competing to see who could come up with the cleverest put-downs on the absent figure. Old Soren would have been all over the scene like a starving bulldog on a meaty bone, ripping out the one-liners and setting up the one-two kills of anyone stupid enough to challenge the existing order. But instead, radiating out of the Hills Residence is just...silence. So it's fashionable now to go on the offensive, secure in the knowledge there won't be payback.

"Hey do you guys remember when he crashed his brand new car just two miles out of the showroom? Talk about a dork, can't even drive straight."

"Yeah I heard he was telling everybody he was sleeping with Shannon, but she says it was him who tried to hit on her when he was drunk, and it wasn't even sexy, just annoying."

So maybe it might be said Shan is outside his league. He's hanging out with people a bit more socially sophisticated than him. He's a first generation Chinese guy studying science at a prestigious Japanese university trying to handle an American girl most guys would have trouble trying to keep on an even keel. You can't skip generations like that--it's you who goes to the West on a scholarship, your son who goes to medical school, and the third generation, the Americanized generation, that finally dates American girls, smokes pot, and complains cleverly about society. Maybe Shan is just trying to skip ahead too much time too quickly. In any case, one day we hear about the police finally coming for him, formal charges have been filed by the U.S. Embassy. Another day my cell phone rings, and its some new girl demanding to know the latest news. And I'm like, "Not entirely sure, but I'll do my best to update; something's just so strange about the whole thing..."

"You think? I think everyone just thinks that guy is a psycho."

"Shan wanted to play the Game, he wanted to go straight from the rice paddy to being a big city player. A guy like that has got to be intense to begin with, but when he can't just seem the grasp the strategy of doing absolutely nothing at all..."

"If you're going to visit him in jail, just don't forget to invite me. I've never been to a jail."

And separately: "Shan, you need to understand this. This is far more at stake here than just getting a criminal record. If you're convicted of a felony, you lose your visa, you lose your scholarship, you lose everything you and your parents have been working for for years. Just admit you had a knife, trust the police will let you off with a warning, and get on with your life already, it's not a serious crime."

"Ritchie, I did not pull knife on Dominique ReyFoorve. I did not pull knife on Dominique. She is crazy girl."

Yet throughout these strange unsettled three weeks, the biggest engine of my cynicism is one of the smallest girls, Lydia, a little chipmunk-faced girl who comes over to join us, and who I watch literally switch positions in mid-sentence as she realizes which way the wind is blowing after spending a week out of town and being out of the loop. One second she's talking about how cool Soren is for getting a gang in to Vanilla ahead of the crowd; the next, she's agreeing how uncool his parties were, how bored she was all the times she was there.

# V.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to say what the major contributing factors are to the crisis of that mad, terrible summer. The simple passage of age reveals that youth, burning with passion and dreams for what they will do with their lives, inevitably clash with each other with a terrible force that comes from mere inexperience. But more simply speaking, it is not the wild crazy riots erupting in China on the anniversary of some wartime atrocity nor the "prep school scandal" of the donor clashing with the established teacher at Tokyo's top international school that sets the mood for things: rather, it is simply the terrible, oppressive heat.

That year is a scorcher. In June comes two one hundred degree days; July has a week of them. August never drops below ninety, and then the heat just kept going. September's temperatures are those of a typical summer's July, and there was no cool and refreshing breeze until the very last day of October, Halloween, when the heat finally broke into an autumn that came fully seven weeks late. With this intense, solar radiance pouring into the urban heat island of Tokyo, all reflective surfaces miniature suns, and the humidity and temperature skyrocketing, the almost palpable waves of heat flowing through concrete walls and intervening trees to hold you in its insufferable grasp, meltingly hot, it is no wonder that the situation is fully primed for an explosive cataclysm. Melting melting melting. We are melting into agonizing heat. That inescapable heat—against which weak Japanese air conditioning units can barely keep up—is like a primeval force, a hated enemy that one meets at every corner. You go left, heat. You go right, heat. Every second stretches into agony, sweat pours from every pore, yet the heat is inescapable. Shimmering and simmering and slithering in broad waves, the heat engulfs one; the heat floods one. You can't think straight. One hundred ten degrees and rising.

"Hey boys and girls, do you like to learn English?!"

There is a kind of male personality, not terribly cool, not terribly smart, but bright enough in its own way to specialize in an intellectual niche of its own, that is attracted to Japan and Japan alone. These kinds of Japanophile boys, and they aren't really fully men, let's be fair, are usually all right to deal with if they have a bit of boy scout in them or an easy-going temperament, but some for whatever reason of personality or background, find themselves caught up in the bizarre uniquely unique mix of Japanese identity such that they become almost a parody of themselves; if they are political without being canny; if they are just macho enough to understand what they aren't but not so macho as to avoid being an English teacher in the first place, well then they turn into a sort of nerdy Japanophile artificially cheerful about teaching middle-school kids English, at worst wearing an American flag bow-tie and perpetual glued-on smile, "English is fun," "English is easy," "let's all learn English today," the famous so-called 'English language monkey.'

In the normal passage of things, these people would always inhabit the niche they do, living out their days in Japan with Dumiko their thirty-six year old Japanese girlfriend, their half-breed children, and their semi-impoverished existence giving way to a life drear and utterly hopeless in some forgotten road-end of lost Japan. What sets the situation into motion, however, is the arrival of Soren a few years prior and his wild, alpha-male partyboy ways, his loud and continual contempt of these "Genki [relentlessly cheerful] English Teacher Monkeys," and the simmering social outrage that I had detected as early as our first meeting, now, finally, can have its way.

Who knew that Redd (English language monkey extraordinaire) would feel such self-hatred and know in some small way that everything Soren said had a point? Who could have told that Julian grew up all his days in Witchita dreaming of all the easy Japanese girls who would drop into his lap and of his clever little intellectual niche he could finally parlay into some kind of cool only to be a half-failed filmmaker? The only thing we knew is that there were these types of individuals, and that for them, Japan was Supposed to Have Been the way they thought it was going to be. But here was the same prep school jock and football hero taunting them as at home, and apparently getting all the girls. Here they find Soren, still cool, still unreachable, still getting all the girls. For them, Soren was the root of all evil, and now, finally, the day of the nerds has come; the hour of the revenge of the geeks has arrived, and they can strike back with all of their repressed fury, so confident and powerful as they choose to do so on the Internet.

"WHOS THE HOTSHOT NOW, COWBOY???"

I remember distinctly the first moment when I hear of the nerdboys' opening salvo. The reason why is because ever since the fiasco with the police cars and Fannet calling me into the embassy, I am walking on eggshells and terrified that any moment, Japanese police will rush out of siren-screeching vehicles and apprehend me for some unknown crime that I haven't committed. Just as I felt a strange surge of guilt after Dominique ran out of the apartment, I feel somehow unsettled and wrong, as if I had done something wrong, as if I'm missing something important. How did Shan find Dominique again? Where are all these accusations and charges coming from? What is this talk of a coffee that Shan denies so eloquently by pointing out that he's never had coffee at all? It is with a shiver of terror that I read the first thread on the online bulletin board where the nerdboys are organizing against Soren; the wording and anonymous posters' names seem almost to allude to me.

"So what REALLY happened on that day..."

"Rockstar rockstar rockstar. Drugs? Or knife-wavers?"

"And oh, I hope I don't crash my car again..."

Because the posts and log-in names are ambiguous, for a good few hours I feel this incredible wave of terror that everyone is turning on me, and that for some reason, everyone thinks I've committed some kind of crime. I find myself logging on and using an anonymous Internet handle (just as the commentators are all anonymous), trying to speak obliquely to cover myself, when in fact, actually, everyone is talking about something completely different; for some strange, bizarre reason, the accepted rumor is that Soren has committed some kind of crime. Apparently, everyone thinks he's pulled a knife or something, and nobody is at this point even talking about Shan, who is the one who is in fact accused by police.

Soren doesn't have to say anything. He has in fact been reclusive for several weeks now, and of course online accusations don't add up to criminal charges. But what is great about him; and this is a beautiful moment; what is truly awesome about this individual, say what you will about our parting of ways, is that Soren, slowly figuring out that the majority of people believe that he is the one charged with a crime, instead of denying things, decides to pretend to completely admit doing it, not giving a rat's ass about Internet nerds typing furiously online.

"Yo S*O*R*E*Nstyle here. I know you've all been hearing static lately about me layin the law down on one of my bitches. But don't get your panties in a twirl; this is just the price of the game—don't hate tha player, hate tha game. I know haters gotta hate, but South Side Crew don't take bones from NEone. If a jigga' makin his way in the world, u all gotta get to the SIDE if you can't STEP UP!!!! ---SORENs*T*Y*L*E"

For no less than two minutes I sit there looking at the bulletin board post agog, as almost everyone else who sees becomes, thinking up and discarding all the dozens of theories of what might be going on (somebody impersonating Soren, Soren having flipped, one of the nerdboys writing something earlier that was misinterpreted, etc.) before realizing exactly, precisely what Soren is doing—and how inspired it truly is. Soren, sitting in his lonely tower and feeling in a perverse mood, has decided purely out of utter and overwhelming contempt for the nerdboys and Beta-male Witchita Japanophile English teacher monkeys with American flag bowties, to lie right through his teeth and claim to be the one who assaulted Dominique. He is doing this because he is totally safe—in truth, there are no police charges that he is the one--so in this zone of freedom offered by the Internet (and this is one final factor in all this; the technologies are just so new and poorly understood, this is around the turn of the century), Soren can come off a thousand times more brash and insouciant than even the Great Persona he projects in real life.

Redd: "Soren, you need to shut up, right now. Everyone is really pissed off at the way you act, coming to this country and giving everyone a bad name like we're all here to just hit on Japanese girls. Your actions are completely unprofessional and now you appear to be admitting to have committed acts of violence against a fellow expat. Take a moment to consider the ramifications of your actions and how it affects how foreigners are treated in this culture."

Redd, poor simple Redd unsophisticated and proud of his teaching certification, five feet seven and one hundred ten pounds, so excruciatingly aware of just who he is, naively and unthinkingly blunders into warfare tricked by the simplest of strategems.

"Dude, maybe everybody doesn't want to become a genki English teacher dipshit. Some of us actually know how to act around girls, and actually can pick up in countries other than Japan. And don't think every girl who coos and says how cool you are actually believes it, you stupid McDonald's fry clerk."

"Soren, your behavior is exactly in life with the serious legal charges that have been levied against you. Your behavior time and again has caused concern to many people, not just me. When you behave in this fashion, all of us have to pay the price in the impact to our reputation and indeed, our treatment by the people hosting us in this nation. If you have indeed assaulted someone in your apartment, I strongly encourage you to turn yourself into the police and confess your crimes. Maybe in this way you can at least to some degree ameliorate the impact of your actions."

"Listen you stupid A.L.T. You are not even a teacher let alone the lawyer you think you are. I have no idea why you think you are regarded as some kind of professional, when all you are is just another backpacking punk-on-a-lark who's discovered a clever way to make a half-way decent salary without too much effort. Go back to being a tape-recorder: all you are is a trained monkey who speaks when and only when the Japanese teacher allows you to." (etc.)

In the first few weeks of the Great Expat Cyberwar, it seems that the nerdboy/anti-Soren coalition is going to win. Soren has made one critical misstep—posting originally under a recognizable log-in, (S*O*R*E*Nstyle) he assumes that everyone else that steps in will pay the same courtesy. Instead, his log-in is immediately under assault by seemingly dozens, even hundreds of separate people, but who may in fact only be just an obsessive, dedicated cadre of the loser coalition generating multiple accounts. Or, of course, it may not be; there are, actually, literally scores of people that Soren has offended or insulted in some way over the previous two years, and some of these people, having gotten wind of the unfolding crisis, log-in just once or twice to put in a bad word against Soren. The first thread, the one on which Soren first clashes with Redd, is just six or seven people with a total of seventy or eighty page views. In two weeks time, page views for threads involving Soren and Redd are totalling over two hundred, on average, and by the end of the month, as soon as either party (or their closest allies) post something, immediate emails are being flashed around Tokyo, and the thread is immediately viewed upwards of seven or eight hundred times within a matter of hours. The snowballing is self-evident and the drama has five hundred people enraptured. Then people (always anonymous, quite possibly sock-puppets of Redd or Julian) start putting up pictures of Soren—a car crash they claim is his and Photoshopped Soren heads on monkeys or other absurd situations, sometimes half a dozen or more a day, such that the entire site goes down and has to be reinstalled due to sheer bandwidth consumption. Coalitions war on each other, dissolve, reorganize, start up anew. It seems every single weirdo and nutcase in Tokyo, every little weird guy with a psychological tic, comes out of the woodwork to point out various flaws or outrages committed by Soren or his gang, every wrapped-up nutjob or freakcase, every loser and weirdo. And even I am drawn into this battle, not quite an ally of Soren, but certainly a clarifier of the worst charges; I think my stature within the expat community rises because I do my part to put out some of the easier-to-put-out fires; I am to some degree a person of moderation and diplomacy, despite the initial awkwardness when I thought people were accusing me.

Redd: "The problem with Americans is that they think they can just barge into anywhere and start taking over. What's true for foreign policy is true for individuals. As an Australian, I know there are certain culture differences that each country respects and obeys that American people..."

There are certain generalized topics—international politics, religion, sexual mores—that draw in just about everybody and whose page counts and viewer numbers exceed even the usual Soren vs. Redd sniping. In these battles, the line between the two sides becomes blurred, such that instead of AB vs. CD, it's A vs. BCD or ABC vs. D and many one-time posters. There are even these extremely rare times when Soren and Redd actually agree on something or at least find a common ground on which to respectfully disagree. It becomes this regular thing; this habit of our days to jump online once a day during lunchtime or at a coffeebreak, on some weekend afternoon between other responsibilities and see what fresh outrages have erupted, and everyone jumps in; I mean really everyone. Julian the filmmaker makes it his specialty to write ambiguous posts that at first sight aren't what they really are. Trashy fast-talking ditzy American girls post off-topic remarks, completely missing the point. But it is at the same time that I begin to learn what genuine hatred is, because Redd, despite all voluminous posting, is not really offering up actionable critiques of our old gang, things we have done, or organizations in the world that appear in the news. Rather, his rage is really a function of the fact that he really is a loser and does not have any particular skill, quality, or achievement that he can be proud of. I think he knows who he is; I think he feels a considerable amount of self-hatred at the person he has become: a late twenties middle-school assistant language teacher making eleven hundred yen an hour to grade his thirteen-year-old students and the mannerisms, put down by the tenured Japanese teaching staff, lectured on his teaching style, and with the artificial personality of a forcibly and perpetually cheerful "Hey boys and girls!" English assistant that he has been for so many years. This itself, of course, is not truly contemptible. What is contemptible is that what his writings show is that he really wants everyone else in the world to be like this too. He wants a world in which there are no achievers, no excellence, no urban sophisticates or dangerous sex appeal. No crazy parties and drama that leaves you almost spending the night in jail. Everyone will become a lower-middle class Ozzie expat with a fat girlfriend. And when he starts attacking me; when he makes these outrageous claims about things I have said or done at parties that he wasn't even invited to, I feel my teeth grit; I feel myself go on edge.

By the third month of the Cyberwar, mid-October, the student government types—Tokyo's Coordinators for International Relations, decide to step in. Ours is not actually the only crisis unfolding that overwhelming, suffocatingly hot summer. Some random American girl who ends up staying in Japan for only four months has some fit of hysteria and claims a Japanese or Chinese was waiting for her on her balcony.

"I came home... and he was standing there right at the balcony. It was him! That Chinese guy who pulled out a knife on Dominique!"

I can never quite understand where the believability factor kicks in, but the community being what it is, rumors again start to circulate. "Soren's friend" Shan (who ironically is actually the only person charged by the police; Soren is completely behind any claims he is under investigation or has committed any crimes) is now everywhere, is seemingly lurking behind every park tree and inside every trash can, ready to leap out and slash innocent girls newly arrived to Japan. With all that sentiment in the air, impetus for the "Town Hall meeting" comes from two individuals Liam, a genial Tokyo City international affairs coordinator (overseeing the young foreigner community in Tokyo) from Dublin, and Melanie, the artsy printmaker and design fanatic who's going out with Julian. (Julian, who by the way abuses his powers as volunteer website manager for the official Tokyo bulletin board to hack into accounts on the main expat bulletin board.) Liam and Melanie between the two actually have enough pull to notify all aggrieved parties, including the socially-absent Soren as well as Redd himself. So the emails go out, and on a Friday evening we assemble at the international affairs office in Ebisu city.

"So I'd just like to start this off by thanking everyone who took the time to come out tonight. I know that there were a lot of fun things you could be doing and that everyone had other plans and places to go this evening, but the fact that you would all come out shows how much you value the community and how much you care about the extended family that we really are.

"Now I've been asked to deal with the matter of personal safety first—I've had a conversation with the security office at the U.S. Embassy..."

(Does Melanie throw me a quick glance here?)

"and they have reassured me that nobody's safety is in peril. There were some charges involving an individual menacing with a knife, but the matter seems to be simply a domestic dispute and the person charged with the crimes is being handled by the Japanese police. There is no reason for anyone here to feel that they are going to be personally targeted or threatened."

A voice calls out from the back of the room. "But how about my friend Judy? She had an entire laundry load disappear off her outside clothesline last Thursday. The people here are perverts."

Melanie looks up, ever so slightly, in frustration. "Look, we live in a city of twelve million people. In every major city of the world..."

"No, no, no, what we're trying to say is that people don't feel safe here. There's something wrong with Japan."

The room dissolves into a bunch of separate arguments and competing yells, but Melanie is able to restore order again.

"People, please, this is not the forum in which we discuss the totality of Japan. We just need to deal with some of the wilder of the rumors going around, realize that we're all here for each other, and share whatever it is information that we do have. Now if you need to talk one-on-one with me later, if you're not comfortable with this free-for-all public forum, that's fine too. We can't order any two people to talk." Redd and Soren sit in opposite corners of the room, glowering. "I'll be here all tonight, and I'm ready to talk about whatever issues you're facing, even if it's just a matter of you wondering how you can get cable and Internet hooked up. Now right now, I think Liam wanted to talk about another issue facing us?"

"Thank you, Melanie." The cheerful Irishman gets up and faces the dining tables. "Now as some of you have heard, there's been a number of incidents online in which people have been posting personal information and private photographs in a public setting." Soren's face twists; some things have crossed the line. "We know that there is a lot of frustration out there, and there have been things going on in the past that weren't always the correct way to act, but... some people are feeling that certain things being said are out-of-hand and possibly even against the laws here in this country. We all know that regulations differ from country to country and customs are always greatly different, but I thought that was exactly why we came here. Tolerance; respect for others; understanding—there is no nationality that has a monopoly on any of these."

"How about basic free speech?"

There's an anonymous cat-call from somewhere in the back.

"Friends, let's not argue principles but examine feelings and look for solutions. If a person can write something online, that doesn't mean they should."

"That's exactly the problem Liam! There are people who would never say something face to face, but they're putting it on the bulletin board because they can get away with it."

I find myself agreeing. More voices erupt.

"How about the Death List Shan wrote? People are genuinely concerned about their safety!"

Soren smirks. Finally average individuals are realizing that he is not the one who is being accused of any crime. Liam shrugs. "I do not know anything about this. What is strange is that everybody seems to know somebody who knows somebody who's heard of it, but nobody's ever actually personally seen or heard anything like that from out of him themselves. In any case, just like Melanie, if you need to talk to somebody in private, you can come talk to me, and I hope we can all come together as a community and not panic out on everybody all the time. Especially if you're just arrived, I am sorry if you feel like you are entering a vortex, things are not usually like this." Liam sitting down near me and looking flustered, comments, "Man, people don't know the half of things."

"Certain people are using the situation for their own ends," whispers one of the other CIRs.

"There was a time, you know, when you had to have a master's in Japanese or something to be able to work here, you had more of a stake, it wasn't just party as hard as I can for two years and get out."

"Some people think it was a little strange for a girl to just have her panties flying around in the sunshine on a first floor balcony and then get mad when they disappear. Has anybody actually seen this prowler of hers?"

"What are you trying to say? That she's to blame for the sex crime?!"

"After the Blair thing, you know, we must err on the side of safety. I don't want to see that happen on my time here. I would feel responsible."

"You're a misogynist! You don't understand what..."

The meeting goes on in its plodding, bureaucratic way, although the real conflict, the one between Soren and Redd is on everyone's mind. We all maintain this polite fiction that recycling separation, residency registration, and embassy notifications are what we all assembled to learn about. But finally the meeting ends, and Liam announces that there will people going to the local restaurant to have dinner and drinks for anyone who wishes, and lo and behold, both Redd and Soren in their separate groups join this general procession, though with definite distance between them. The evening air, hot and muggy, is just another one of those crazy prolonged heat wave nights that we still don't know the end of, but the walk to the restaurant is not far, and here we begin to eat and drink, noticing, of course, when Soren walks by and finally sits down next to Soren to launch the face-to-face confrontation so delayed and inevitable.

"Hi Redd. How are you doing?"

"Hi Soren, how professional of you to come out tonight."

"Well I certainly wouldn't miss the chance to hear your opinions said to my face for once..."

Soren's wit does not desert him. For two hours they argue, matching each other drink for drink, and some stay and some go, but the hours on the clock pass by into the small hours of the morning. Redd is beginning to get confused. Julian swims in and out, insulting Soren and then walking off, too chicken to sit down and hear a retort. Finally, at three a.m., and a reliable witness reports there might be a gleam in his eye, Soren goes off to buy beers for everybody at the table, except Redd, and this is entirely calculated; this is just one final calculated gesture of somebody who is definitely very drunk directed at somebody he has already left in a smoking heap that night; and finally, Redd erupts, he's totally lost control, he swings his arms wildly and knocks Soren's stein of beer over, spilling liquid all over.

"See, I told you! I told you everyone! That guy is a psycho!" yells Soren. And his victory is complete; Redd, as a result of this wild arm-swinging, is now going to be characterized as a beer-stein throwing, truly violent psycho drunkard alcoholic. Redd is screaming and out of control, and his face is completely red, and Julian's girlfriend Melanie finally intervenes; she comes over to soothe him and take him off, and it's just Soren's gang left; his friends from finance; neutral parties, Soren has finally won on the field of actual battle, his victory known to all. I am pleased. Sipping down my free beer, I reflect on the justice of things; the fact that Internet twerps really don't have it in the end.

"Freakin' homosexuals," mutters Soren, swaying and drunk beyond belief. This is the last I see him, going off, barely able to walk, his friend of eighteen months or so, but a person with whom he will not again associate, as all our destinies are to come, looking back at me with blurry unfocused eyes. Actually the night ends with Soren in disgrace as well, blind drunk, being taken to the local lock-up by the police and apparently some ill-considered digs against homosexuals added to the list of Soren's offenses by separate Redd allies, even if Redd's claim to moral authority is destroyed that night. Redd's position always rested on that he was a professional and a teacher and mature, and with everyone now knowing that he is a violent beer-stein thrower, he is eventually to be hounded out of Japan, but somebody in Julian's crowd leaps to the forefront of the anti-Soren brigade, claiming to be "traumatized" by things said at an even in which he wasn't even present and then proceeds to start a blog dedicated exclusively to Soren, post after post, sighting after sighting, and this is really curious, this is really something special, this is strangely obsessive in its own way. And so finally Soren does retreat again from the scene, this time even from online defense, and all the weirdoes and people with strange little psychological tics can run free, enjoying their brief little heyday in the sun, the victory dance of the losers and geeks and weirdoes over the fallen god, believing themselves equals because they are the only ones who remain.

# VI.

There's no one moment when I realize I have become the sole survivor and heir to a kingdom. No official transfer ceremony, no coronation, not even a specific event marks my accession to a position precarious yet refined, a strange and unintended outcome to the collision of massive forces in the night, great battleships that have unleashed titanic broadsides against each other, leaving the smoke and dust slowly clearing to reveal only the tiniest of frigates, the smallest of corvettes, still mightily chugging onward as its larger counterparts have sprung great leaks and are settling, slowly, into the fathomless sea. Rather, there is simply this one Saturday morning when my phone starts ringing—and doesn't stop—a succession of people who not only want to know the latest happenings, but are also looking to plan and undertake new get-togethers and social occasions of their own. I have become the mediator and communicator of plans; the fount of life and activity, the alpha dog of Tokyo if by fate and not design.

"So yeah, we can crash at Mayumi's parents' place, and Jon will be packing some tents just in case everything falls through. If worst comes to worst, there is a sort of time-share place that will let us have rooms for 150, you know 1.5 mahn, that'll be fine."

Buzz on the telephone; Erik's question.

"Yeah, no problem. Just as long as you have a grill and keep it away from trees or whatever."

Confirmatory and conclusatory buzz.

"Great, thanks, good stuff. See you in a bit."

It is the third weekend of October, the final gasp of that crazy summer that never ends. It is still warm enough to go to the beach, it is still hot enough indeed that a trip to Kamakura, two hours south of Tokyo, a half-thought out excursion that becomes the immediate It event from anyone who hears about it; and at 10am that morning, it seems the phone won't stop buzzing from last minute additions, not Jon, a somewhat awkward software engineer who was planning on celebrating his birthday with a beach picnic with Japanese colleagues; not Erik, the old Soren faithful who now falls into my orbit; not Maggie, who just wants updates on Shan—which at that moment I presently lack. Not until forty minutes later am I able to rise out of bed out of bed to prepare breakfast and pack the cooler full of ice in my Ueno apartment, but I am already being to sense the social lay of things, the lie of the land.

"So I'm trying to go up to Iwaki last month, but I think we miss the right stop--turns out there's another foreigner on the train with me, little blonde girl who I end up talking to, name of Charis. Just arrived here in Japan, third week, finishing orientation in Tokyo before her group gets assigned to wherever. But she'll be living in Kanagawa."

By the time we get on the highway to Kamakura, Erik is explaining to me his prior weekend as we both wear sunglasses and stare out into the well-trafficked, but not jammed up roadway. The windows are down and the fresh air is breezing in.

"And so she'll be coming out today?"

"Yeah. She and her whole group I think."

"Cool, cool, good stuff."

We enter a tunnel with the highway noise-reflecting walls suddenly giving way to a first view of the sea, and the effect is of leaving behind Japan and coming into a tropical paradise. The sun almost seems to leap up in intensity, and the building architecture seems suddenly changed, resorty and universally terraced, subtropical foliage pushing up against the street itself. The dazzling light on the sea is not quite eclipsed by the almost pure white of the sand. Simultaneously: "Ahhh!"

It takes about twenty minutes for us to find the surfer girl, Mayumi's, place, a little beach-style house tucked away two blocks inland from Enoshima. She's in, already dressed in her wetsuit for surfing, and we greet her and her friends cheerily before making our way to the water to stake out a spot. Crowds from all over begin to pile in, and it isn't long before Tokyo acquaintances start showing up, in couples or small groups, our knot of towels on the warm sand spreading out now to thirty or forty meters, and everyone a hive of activity, slopping on greasy sunscreen, passing out beers, catching up with people you haven't seen in weeks.

"Hello... hello... hello..." Brad has lost half a centimeter of thumb in an accident with a papercutter; Satoko has just returned from north Japan. An ultralight buzzes in the Indian summer air, the pilot easing out against a stiff shore breeze and then circling back inland. But without much ado, we jump out into the water to swim and play, and then back to the sand to bake in the hot sun. Only after lunch, a quick raid of coolers packed in trunks and the local convenience store, do the new NOVA teachers arrive, at first from a distance, a group of more foreigners who by their cupped hands and beeline for us, are merely clearly people from our group.

"Oh wait, Ritchie, this is the group I was telling you about. Just arrived in country, working for NOVA, and going through orientation together."

Erik goes out to greet the new arrivals, about six in number, three guys and three girls, one of whom is the small blonde Charis. We introduce ourselves.

"So you've going to be based in Miyagi?"

"Yeah, know anything?"

"Hear there's good skiing."

"But far from Tokyo."

"You can bullet-train it in two hours."

It's strange; there's no reason for her to distinctly remember my name, but after the initial sitdown on the beach while everyone is getting to know each other, exchanging names, details, Charis comes over and sits down next to me, she definitely picks me out among the people already here as the person she wishes to talk to.

"So Ritchie, you've been here two years now?"

"Yeah, thereabouts. How long you staying?"

"Maybe a year or two tops. This country is just the first step, but your hand is still getting held here. I want to go out to China or Thailand next."

"Wow, that's cool." We continue to talk for the next hour or so, watching people come and go, tossing around a frisbee or forming pair or triples to talk to young Japanese. Through the shade of sunglasses, I perceive the strange familiarity of Charis' posture; a weird ease with each other that cannot be simulated. If I were to make a human being have perfect conversational responses, they would probably be exactly everything Charis says, a display of adventure, femininity, and dazzling good 'cute-girl' looks. She's Texan, Republican, and Christian, but aside from that, or maybe precisely because of that, she's totally confident, carefree, and distinctly flirtatious, the moment comes when she clearly is making some kind of move, though I smile, and keep my cool. Some of the group decides to make a beer run; we'll tag along, but she'll walk with me, a traffic light will separate us from the others, and we'll let the gang go on ahead and follow just a block behind.

"They have these little love hotels here in Tokyo, right?" comments Charis, looking at an example of garish beach architecture. "For eighty bucks you get a place with groovy 60s furniture and flashing disco lights?"

"I think some are like that. Or you can get a cowboy theme if that's what you want. Bunch right in Shibuya, all clustered on one hill."

"I want to go to a love hotel sometime."

I look back at Charis with wide eyes until she realizes what she said.

"I mean," she says, blushing, "I just want to see what they look like."

High-noon passes into afternoon, and we throw around a frisbee in the surf, we bake in the sun, we talk to pretty Japanese girls with sun bleached hair and dark tans. Jon's group, conservatively attired, almost awkward, yet never ridiculous, sit on their formally laid out beach towels and smile politely at attempts to talk to them; some of us who know him play this little game of pretending we're all here on account of him, and the uptight natives don't react as if anything is out of the ordinary; all you can detect is a sense of distinct Japanese conservatism. A few more people dribble in even as our group dwindles, the sun starts to swing to the other side of the sky, and a beautiful sunset begins, achingly slow into the warm late summer waters.

"So what do you think of the Japanese judicial system?" asks somebody, and the crowd begins to fall into separate knots of conversations, heatedly debating the fairness of the Japanese judicial system, referring in particular to an English backpacker allegedly found with a suitcase full of pills. Erik, who has a law degree, explicates some bizarre peculiarities of the Japanese system and we listen intently. But, as the sun continues its descent, our conversation returns to more simple-minded things.

"Hey, dude, imagine if like the rest of the world disappeared and we all had to be stuck on this beach forever, kill wild pigs and just try to survive. Wouldn't that be awesome?"

I glance over at the surfer dude who brings this up and listen as the conversation unfolds.

Charis: "If the whole world disappeared and we were in a survival situation, I know there are some people I'd have to take out."

"Whoa, really? Like who?"

Charis smirks. "I don't have anybody in particular in mind. But some people impose themselves on others in a way that's harmless so long as we're all in a functioning society, but in a desperate survival situation, would be a liability none of us could afford."

"Wow, intense. I figure as long as I got good ganja and good surf, party's on."

It is the last weekend of a hyper summer. This summer changes our lives, and many people, too many, have been sucked into its maelstrom logic. But yet the seeds of the future are here as well; I remember, actually, now, that little Emma first shows us here, her easy-going irony something really nice and funny. John ,Sue, Mack, Michelle, Tanya; if this isn't their first time out, it's one of the earliest, in a sunlit space our paths to cross, carrying with it the promise of future great things. No more crisis! No more mad excursions of the heart! Somewhere unconsciously my hands and Charis meet, as the sun finally sinks into the blaze of water, all eyes seaward.

Off to the side, conversation: "It's not so much the facts, if these even exist, as your attitude towards them. Are expats people who just can't fit in at home, or are they the explorers of the world? Why do we heroize Christopher Columbus, but not want to hear too much about our friend backpacking from Timbuktu to Thailand?"

"I met a girl who said travelers and non-travelers just can't be friends. If you're sitting in an office back home waiting for the next promotion to come in three years, the last thing you want to hear about is your friend climbing Machu Picchu."

"But the thing is that nobody ever heard of a traveler just ending up at home, a complete wreck and regretting ever taking off. It bothers people that other people don't see the value of trying to become physically rich, when experiences are what count."

Night begins its slow takeover. We are down to a mere two dozen now; the thought of a beach fire is expressed but doesn't quite get underway. "Plans for October..." "Career back home..." "Why do the Japanese do..." Snippets of conversation and longer, more involved ones, as darkness finally sets in. To the right, hundreds of meters away, a pier juts out into the surf, and just barely, shadowy figures, night fisherman, can be seen, extending lines carefully.

"Dare me to go skinny-dip?"

Charis.

"Oh, no, you wouldn't." But a low murmur turns into a group cry as Charis gets up and starts walking to the surf, turning her head to smirk once, and then peeling off layer by layer. Her bum is perfect; tight and firm.

"Go Charis! Go Charis!"

We watch her, a pale figure, paddling out into the surf, and it's clear that the fishermen, now all facing our direction, have figured out what is going on.

"Somebody else!"

Taking up the challenge, a half-minute later I go out to join her and the group is once again cheering.

"Hey Charis!"

"Hey Ritchie!"

"Nice water!"

"Yeah, it's awesome."

"Paddle out more?"

"You bet."

...

"Think they'll join us?"

"Give 'em a minute or two."

"Yeah."

Charis and I do not become girlfriend-boyfriend—or at least, not right away. She is, after all, still a devout Christian and her work placement, to Fukushima, prevents the possibility of seeing each other on more than a biweekly basis. The next actual situation confronting me is the reality that although Redd is already on his way out and Julian, without the original impetus, is reduced to needling and occasionally sarcastic remarks online, my situation is actually quite precarious. A turnover of new Japan arrivals is getting adjusted to Japan, and I am known to have been associated in some way with the old disgraced regime; if I do nothing but stand still, I will just be a person of poor reputation, possibly even involved with the criminal Shan, the drug-user Dominique, the disgraced Soren.

My solution to this predicament is simple. I can't do anything about Internet or real life rumor mongering, and there will always be a faint taint of some negative association, but if I engage the newcomers and improve their lives, I will at least not be in the same total disgrace that Soren is in and in any case my ability to deal with the vague and undefined threats like Dominique and her over-protective father will only be improved. As it turns out, a simple defense measure turns out to overwhelmingly successful to an almost offense degree.

"So we'll go to Ageha but we'll get there by all packing into one train?"

"Why don't we just pre-game and take the long way around?"

"You mean, actually on the commuter train?"

"Yeah exactly."

A spur of the moment decision to get to a Halloween club night becomes what is now annually celebrated in Tokyo as the "Yamanote Halloween Train." Packing a commuter train car in silly Halloween costumes, we cause such a ruckus and manage to drink so much alcohol that the story hits the evening news. Expats in Japan still commemorate this one crazy night out, although I understand the police are now on the watch for this behavior. November, right before the snow hits, we have a Tokyo scavenger hunt, one that takes twenty or so teams, some as big as a dozen people, racing around the city and confusing the natives with their strange costumes and get-ups. December means "remainers" events going on, the typical "internationalization" get-togethers that bring demure Japanese women in their mid-20s, Christmas parties and then the great Japanese New Year, consecutive days of continual Golden Week partying. Finally, the long winter months are broken up with ski trips, more casual weekends at the Lion's Head or Kita-Setagaya, before spring finally peeks its faint pink nose into the atmosphere, a giant blind mole with a smile on its face, hesitant, snuffling forward, scraping away against the frozen ground of winter.

In the market streets or amid the unrelenting, yet ever so civilized crowds, one becomes almost hypnotized, fundamentally moved in some esoteric way, questioning one's very assumptions on human nature, modernity, Westernness. Seen from an elevated train, the varied neighborhoods of Tokyo pass by, frozen moments of children playing a ball game, locked into their destinies, light sparkling off glittering crystal skyscrapers, still lifes in memory, implicit in promise in experience, a quality impossible to capture in text. Yet this is also the period when I become a native Tokyo-ite. One day I find myself walking through Shinjuku Station, and suddenly—gestalt—the pattern of the entire city-block sized labyrinth of tunnels and passageways falls into place. Then, finding myself looking at a subway map, I realize that I'm not looking at the various paths and extensions as a tourist would—curious at the breadth and reach, looking for familiar landmarks—but as a city-dweller, simply looking for the quickest connection to a necessary destination. I have gone native. And against this backdrop, this unity of self and environment, a special girl who takes the train into the city twice a month for a relationship that doesn't quite have a name, I have become the mediator of situation.

"Uh, Ritchie? Mr. Ritchie, sir? There's someone who claims to know you personally?"

By spring of the year after the great crisis, I have become sufficiently dominant in young Tokyo's social scene that I hold regular court in Eden, which is pretty much the top club of the hour that year. An individual wishing to see me must pass not one, but two layers of inspection just to receive an audience—the bouncer at the velvet rope to the VIP room first, and then, second, my closest lieutenants who themselves with a mere dismissive look can cause an entire roomful of partygoers to erupt into laughter at some futile attempt to "break in." It is therefore highly surprising, even shocking, when an apparently dirt-poor unfashionable Japanese guy somehow manages to get himself brought into the chamber of leisure and savoir faire on a high Friday night.

"I'm sorry, but he claims to know you personally and was able to tell me your phone number—just says he just got out of jail and doesn't even have the cash to call."

My eyes widen as I recognize Shan. In the perversity of the moment and the supreme boredom of the early evening, I throw caution to the wind and smile wickedly. "Okay, let's see what he wants."

In the dark blue mood-lighted room, I receive Shan on two black leather cushioned sofa-seats as around me, my lieutenants peek out of the corner of their eye in genuine shock and curiosity. Elegant women in black cocktail dresses look bored and sip pink cocktails; the ambient music is of old-school trance/house; and I find myself in a deliciously perverse mood.

"So, Shan Le, what can I do for you?"

"Ritchie, uh, Ritchie, please you have to help me."

"Calm down, calm down. What is the problem?"

"Dominique. She is crazy girl. She keeps telling police that I pull a knife on her. They put me in jail. I had to stand in one place for two days. People get tortured. No talking. It's terrible situation. Terrible."

I raise one eyebrow. "Really Shan? I find that hard to believe. I really don't think a modern developed country like Japan tortures its prisoners. Maybe you just got in a fight."

"No, Ritchie, please. I'm begging you. It's terrible in Japanese jail. They have different jail for Chinese person. No visa; no paperwork; I had to do factory work sixteen hours day. Hell on earth."

"Well Shan, that sounds like a character building experience. But I don't see what it has to do with anything I can do."

"I just got out of jail. Waseda won't let me into dorm; I don't have my clothes, my things, no money. I just need place to stay. And maybe paperwork for lawyer. Help me please. I do anything."

With the full certainty that anything I can do for Shan is a slap in the face for the dog Dominique, I signal to a friend to come over, and his arrangements—starting with just being able to crash on the tatami floor of somebody we know in Minowa, are made.

It starts with a half-starved, beaten, possibly hallucinating impoverished Chinese ex-Waseda student showing up in my majestic surroundings and proceeds from there over the course of about nine more months in that remarkable city that once defined an empire. The time is around the turn of the century; the city is a city of twelve million; and the fashions that adorn the girls walking around will show up in New York the following year.

"Okay, Shan, let's start from the beginning. How exactly did you get in this mess?"

The Chinese boy takes a deep breath. He has washed up and rested for two days, and he looks a little less pitiful. But his weight is still down and he has developed a nervous tic in his left cheek.

"So...I am sitting there peacefully in my dormitory room studying when suddenly four Japanese police officers, wearing full riot gear outfit and carrying big black sticks march in. I jump up; I am terror-fied. They say that I have pulled knife on Dominique; that Dominique is victim of crime. But this is lie!"

I exchange glances with Erik, loyal lieutenant, who looks carefully back.

"So these people arrest you and charge you with assault and battery for no reason at all? They do it just because they don't like you?"

"Yeah, Dominique is crazy girl! She just like cause trouble!"

"Have you ever hung out with her? Maybe you just were carrying a knife once and she saw it and panicked?"

"No. I just know her through when she at same party. I never even be in same room with her alone."

"Not even once."

Shan breathes in and out again heavily. "Okay. There is one time when I go to her apartment."

We settle back. It is good to hear the truth.

"I lend Dominique a magazine. And I am reading Maxim magazine, the section where readers can send in jokes to get $500. And I remember reading the same joke in an old issue. So I call up Dominique to get the magazine back."

Erik cuts in. "So you are reading Maxim magazine and you see a joke repeated. So this is important enough for you to go confirm this injustice by going to get the magazine back from Dominique."

The comment flies over Shan's head, but I exchange a quick glance of mirth with Erik.

"Yes, but this is only time. And I never bring knife."

"Have you ever kissed Dominique, Shan?"

"No, never."

Apparently so much time has passed and the experience of a Japanese jail has been so traumatic, that Shan doesn't even remember any more that he kissed Dominique in my presence. But he is apparently so involved in his lie, the myth that he doesn't even know Dominique all that well, that he responds automatically and with a straight face. Now it's my turn to sigh.

"Well, Shan, you know what? We'll see what we can do. But you do have to get your own place and find your own job. The ideal is for you to return to your studies, but if Waseda has kicked you out, that's that. Have you considered transferring to a Chinese university?"

"No. That is impossible. I will not go back to China."

"Okay. But then if you would rather be a working person here rather than a university student in China, I think you have to commit to finding work commensurate with a high school degree. You have to work in a restaurant or something; I'm sure I know somebody who can help you."

Suddenly tears are brimming in Shan's eyes. "How did this happen, Litchie? I was getting top grades in Waseda University. I always getting top marks."

I do sympathize. "I don't know. I almost feel like I am missing one important piece, that it's staring me right in front of my eyes. But I don't have unlimited resources, Shan. Money comes from somewhere."

Erik agrees to help Shan with his one final request—to get a letter sent out to some British NGO that Shan found on the Internet—a non-profit committed to helping reform the Japanese legal system. It doesn't sound promising, but we're certainly not going to get that involved in Shan's problems—not with him lying through his teeth at people who gave him a place to stay, and not after we've seen some documents the Embassy has dug up about Shan stealing from his employer and installing illegal-access software on Waseda lab computers. He seems really rough-edged; really uncouth. And he did have a knife, somebody remembers—some U.S. Marine combat knife that he purchased on the Internet. God knows where it went.

Shan gets out of jail—his first stint—roughly in May or June. Things now start to get far more complicated than before Shan does clearly go to jail, but given the efficiency with which everything is run in the country, as well as the politics of Sino-Japanese politics, it's hard to imagine that he is actually tortured (as he claims) or that he endures prison violence in a country known for its ritualized displays of form rather than street-level thuggery. What's clear is that from the beginning point, it's going to be a battle of unequals. Shan is one simple half-coolie Chinese scholarship student; Commissioner Charles Henry Monroe LeFauve is the senior trade commissioner in the Division of International Trade, United States Embassy in Tokyo. The outcome is never in doubt—it's just things are going to be a little complex.

Fresh out of jail, head shaven, an ugly scar on his cheek ("I cut it shaving."), Shan Le leaps into action with all the restless energy of an over-talented under-prepared university student. The letter—several letters—go out to various non-profit groups, political officials, semi-tangentially related random organizations (a scam human-cloning company; two or three diploma mills), and somehow out of this Shan hits pay-dirt. Jury Trial, a British NGO of unknown background, decides to jump in; they already have an office in downtown Tokyo.

"Did you know that 99% of people arrested by Japanese police are convicted, and that after one hundred forty years after exposure to modern jurisprudence, Japan still doesn't have a trial-by-one's-peers criminal court system?"

Elsa Jayne, the London-trained barrister and smartly-cut corporate-attired individual with a mad, crazed gleam in her eye on a Thursday afternoon after Shan convinces me to attend his first meeting with the group starts lecturing me on Jury Trial's position. (He thinks he will have greater prestige with a Westerner accompanying him to his meeting. Jury Trial itself is nonplussed, neither positive nor negative.)

"Simon Arner, a UK citizen, was convicted and sentenced to 38-years in prison because somebody hid a satchet of ecstasy pills in his luggage upon his arrival in Narita. A young promising university graduate who loses the rest of his life because he can't even provide evidence in his defense to a group of fair-minded, community-oriented citizens!"

I don't know if I will ever understand these single-minded, single-issued crusaders who seem so absolutely certain about their one fixed idea that they approach it with such maniacal enthusiasm. Jury Trial also has another lawyer on staff, an older Jewish gentlemen with rheumy eyes and arthritic; he makes cynical little remarks and cracks jokes about Shan but otherwise remains silent; he is a social observer.

"Shan, tell us what happened with this woman. Why is she coming after you?

"You should see the university! They come in with four police officers, each carrying kendo stick! It is humiliation! In front of all my dormitory mates!"

"That isn't the question. What is your explanation for Dominique's behavior?"

"Dominique is hating me! She is liar and criminal!"

This is the problem. This is the problem. For all his bluster, all his yelling and screaming, Shan is completely unable to come up with an explanation for why Dominique is behaving the way she is, whereas the other side is able to come up with if not compelling, at least consistent, series of events; they are able to come up with a story that even if unprovable and relying on hearsay, assigns motivations to all parties involved. Claim: Shan and Dominique had coffee together. Claim: Shan and Dominique were going out. Claim: Shan pulled a knife out on Dominique. Fact: Dominique showed up crying and hysterical at the embassy. Who can poke a hole in this story? And so the lawyers meet; they nod their heads; all sides trade point for point, but theirs is the firmer narrative. Shan is a dork, beyond dorkiness. If he just says, 'look I pulled out a knife,' it's 30 days, maybe a letter in a file. People at Waseda are even trying to help him. But he's pig-headed, stubborn. He offers no explanation why Dominique would make up charges against him, although insists and insists and insists that she's making up everything out of whole cloth. LeFauve brings out "Rihanna Paciano," a three-hundred pound pock-marked monstrosity, dispatched from Washington as special "Gender Affairs Officer" directly from the State Department.

"It's simple, actually. Shan is a degenerate, primitive, Neanderthal male, one who hands out with notorious womanizers and alleged drug-users; he wanted Dominique LeFauve, his advances were rejected, and so he pulled out a knife. This is criminal behavior. He is clearly a near rapist!"

"Shan, did you date Dominique LeFauve? Did you go to a café with her?"

"No, I never do such thing. This is impossible. I don't even drink coffee!"

Silence fills the conference room.

"Shan, your point is not a refutation of Dominique's claim. It's like somebody says, 'I saw Shan at McDonald's last week.' And you respond, 'But I don't even eat hamburgers!' Okay, maybe you don't. Maybe you went there to eat salad. And maybe you went to a café to drink tea. Don't bring up irrelevancies!"

"Dominique LeFauve is convicted drug-trafficker. I have the photocopy of her past!"

Paciano straightens in her seat. "This is protected information! Irrelevant to topic at hand and protected by generally regarded principles of victim shield laws."

"Victim? Victim? Who is victim? She is only accuser!"

"Okay; okay, we will use this terminology."

The meeting dissolves into cacophony. All sides are arguing at cross-purposes; all sides are fixed and rigid in their thinking, with bulging eyes and single-issue hot buttons. And the meeting, a one last attempt at compromise, is the last one they ever have; from here on out the process is entirely acrimonious. Now I know what human garbage is! From a women's college in Oregon direct to the halls of power in Washington D.C., with a completely gender-obsessed crazed feminist three-hundred pound view of the world, Paciano calls me in to try to intimidate me, but I stonewall her, too; she gets less out of me than even Fannet.

"You better watch your back! We're taking this guy down. Maybe we'll burn you too!"

"Do your worst Paciano. Nobody's charging me with anything."

"We can change that lickety split, Ritchie! Dominique's actually said some interesting things about you, too!"

What monsters! Maybe Shan could have pulled it off. Maybe had he been willing to work the system with a little more sophistication, he could have shot holes a mile wide in Dominique's story, cast doubt on her confused and internally-inconsistent version of events, (take a look, anybody can see them) but the die is cast. If there's some wavering at the diplomatic mission about how to play the cards, with Shan's complete intransigence and his completely hostile approach to genuine compromise-finding, there is finally a hardening of sentiment, and the Chinese Embassy, never more than mildly concerned (and sending a representative only because Shan is, after all, a Waseda student), finally signals they will not stand behind their citizen; he too apparently loses favor with them, sending an email in which he accidentally appends a file of his plans to wreak "woe and justice" on the LeFauve clan; this doesn't go over well with the polite mandarins of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Waseda student or not. The tide begins to turn against Shan; Jury Trial brings me in.

"Okay, this is the plan. We need to bring out Dominique's prior arrest. We need to press hard for a complete dismissal of charges based on absolute lack of evidence. We can't afford to lose even one administrative point."

"So we'll sign the first memorandum on separation of the two; standard boilerplate."

Jayne looks at me curiously.

"This is all for you, though, isn't it? You don't need to be involved anymore, nobody's calling you to the stand."

"Yeah, yeah. See you later."

Shan comes out to the hallway to see me off. "You go enjoy your day?"

"Oh no, now LeFauve wants me to testify at his lawyer's office."

All at once he is tense; his shoulders are immediately locked into position and he stares at me with steely eyes.

"Joking! I can't stand them!"

"No joke like that."

The paperwork, signed almost off-handedly, proves to be critical in the end. Buried in the boilerplate is a provision that Shan not visit complainant's "school or workplace." But Dominique is taking Japanese classes at Waseda for two bloody weeks; he becomes guilty as charged that very evening, when he returns to his dorm. Sixty day sentence.

LeFauve senior, although maniacal and pig-headed, isn't entirely a demonic figure. Actually given paranoia about future events, I do a lot of digging into his past, and his story is not without justifiable pathos; he, too, will be burned and cut to pieces, and the tragedy of it is only that it had to happen abroad; he couldn't function in the only where he could. Quick summary? Think: Catholic upbringing, a half a shade of Clarence Thomas, a half a shade of Alan Keyes; just a beautiful Japan-only specialist variant of it; a potential to get somewhere in the party or in government, but it has to be kicked out here; it has to go to war this year.

"We need to launch a total war here! We need total shock and awe! This is my only daughter! This is my baby!"

I download an old video off the Internet of LeFauve just to better understand the man, and I almost feel sorry for him. I almost understand this purely intellectual view of the world, this frustrated intellectual growing up in Arlington, Black intellectual in a racist system, to become a beautifully incompetent competent, right on the verge of being the embodiment of party values, but always, inevitably, outside, right-wing values but intellectualized neocon version of it rather than quiet conservative. If only human beings ran like computer systems, he would be a great leader; he would be able to intellectualize everything into a perfection of sorts. But LeFauve is a tragic hero, too, doomed to maniacally follow things to their mutually destructive conclusion even if compromise would leave everyone better off. So, then: neither side can win. Shan is right on the verge of going over to a full conviction when he drums up his own activist support; Japan's lack of a jury system is looking bad in international terms; LeFauve has enough pull to keep getting Shan in jail on little bureaucratic reasons, but never enough to do anything but enrage him and inspire him further to defend his case. Meanwhile, our group of foreigners is facing its own minor problems; we get assets like Joe the tallish basketball player with his silky voice, little Emma is getting a soccer tourney put together, good things are happening too, but on the other hand a Canadian monstrosity (a pale version of Paciano?) is sending me cranky emails because she doesn't get advance notice of social events.

"Um, I don't have to email you? I don't owe you anything?" I text back. But she doesn't seem to get the point. Finally I have to have her politely removed from a private party she wasn't invited to, which creates an awkward moment, but drives home the importance of immediately discouraging unpleasant people from talking to me. Now I understand your sentiments, Soren!

"Do not come to my apartment if you weigh four hundred pounds. Thank you everyone."

As the conflict wears on, my relationship with Charis continues apace. After months of courtship, she in a half-tipsy mood has another one of her Freudian slips where she suggests sleeping with me, but this time I think her values are about to change. Christianity can't quite put a finger on the way the Japanese act; despite hundreds of years of contact, less than 2% of Japanese adhere to the religion. So the experience of living in rural Fukushima is good for Charis; it broadens her understanding of the world, and if all goes to plan, she'll sleep with me in a month or two: of this, I am sure. Yet even if it doesn't happen, those are great days; magic moments. Romance, baby! We are Tokyo's darlings when we walk into the expensive restaurant or exclusive club; she is so beautiful people turn and stare, and I get jealous or approving looks from men. Yet perhaps it is also true that our situation—my situation-- is also slowly but inexorably beginning to slip. In the race of time versus aging, acquisition versus expenditure, there are people who ever so slightly seem to be pulling away; the prices just keep on rising and sometimes I saw fashionable groups of people who almost approach my own in terms of greatness. My empire, never fully mine, is collapsing. An outside observer might almost suggest that I am merely living the residual greatness of the Soren 'monarchy' as much as I might claim my people are producing their own genuine novelty. Difficult to say. In any case, I might pleasantly go to seed; I might enjoy every moment of the long ride down, but things can never be so simple...

LeFauve:"Okay, the facts are simple. We have a very violent, very primitive, very aggressive terroristic-threat making Chinese thug, and we have a civilized, elite university American young lady on the other. Obviously Shan Le is a little out of his league here, doesn't quite know how to treat women. We have papers here, one, two, three. Work at the school library: fired for adding 10000 yen cash balance to his library account. Work at the school computer center: fired for adding illegitimate remote access software to a university mainframe. Said to have been fined for an illegally modified airgun three years ago—firearms, please, firearms. Criminal, thug, unable to follow the rules."

"Well..."

"Why exactly are you defending this guy? This is a pure breakdown of good and evil..."

I disagree, but only keep a non-committal look. LeFauve sighs; leans back in his chair.

"Ritchie, look you are in over your head. I can't afford to let a public event spiral out of control. This is my daughter. My only precious daughter. A girl far away from home. Try to develop a sense of chivalry."

"I have some problems with the behaviour of Dominique. Actually, she's done some weird things..."

"Most people don't totally agree with each other. This is human politics."

"No, I am talking about something a little more fundamental. There are basic human norms of how we should treat each other, and your daughter is a little strange..."

Actually I am not entirely not with sympathy for the father. His story is one of being a self-made individual, a builder of empires, a wordsmith, a lawyer. But too much has happened; events have now spun me farther than I can hope to retreat from, and I do not know at this point that Dominique was friends with the murdered hostess girl; I don't know about years of psychological counseling, about the fabulous problems of the rich and directionless and all their lies and allegiances and hidden alliances. I just feel this overwhelming hatred towards somebody who has done me petty wrong.

"Okay, fine, listen, Ritchie. Maybe you do have some kind of point. I can make amends. I need you on the team. You certainly don't make all that much at Energia. You like the good life; you like clubs; you like cash. Things... can be arranged."

I hear LeFauve very clearly. Acres of future territory stretch before me; the pure cusp of the moment.

"You're talking perjury."

"I am talking about putting a convicted criminal, a dangerous terroristic thug behind bars. I am talking about protecting my daughter."

"I'm sorry. I can't testify to things I haven't seen."

"You will be punished."

Dominique is nutty beyond all belief; she is nutty in that self-destructive way genuinely nutty people are. Actually I was the one who aggressively insulted her at a cafe; who knows how she conflated it with Shan. Who knows why.

# VII.

Of course in retrospect it's easy to say, "how foolish! what idiocy! of course you should have known that tangling with a senior government official would be complete suicide." What this forgets, however, is that once a process has begun, it is difficult to see the escape doors, viz., "the tiger has been mounted, now ride it all the way through." I walk out of Astor into a drizzly Tokyo street, my heart pounding, my senses out of tune, and it seems that those who watch me go do so with a certain cool curiosity. Yet in my pocket, or so I believe, I still have dangerous cards -- a Texan girl, social status, links to all sorts of shady characters, and the pure, raw optimism of someone who has accomplished major scores. Forget sexual conquests, beautiful women, fast cars, private accesses, all the public status symbols that hurt others so much more when the displayer is young and handsome. Soren is gone. I am prince of Tokyo. What thrills the heart is to watch an entire weekend unfold, all the component parts flying in from all directions, and to be entirely in charge of the process, the power-broker who decides ultimate outcomes, subject only to the basic physical limitation that nobody can monopolize everything or be everywhere at every time, but walking out into a drizzly street, the thread turns once again, and suddenly, of all people, after all the monumental passage of weeks, a beat-up looking foreigner suddenly comes up to me on the pavement.

"Soren, oh my god, what's happened to you?"

"Oh yeah, Ritchie, oh man, haven't slept in days. It's craziness, man, totally wild."

"Are you okay? What's wrong? What's being going on all these weeks?"

And in this way the story unwinds...

After we parted ways that crazy party--seems like a lifetime ago, right?--I got really concerned because at work the pressure started building up because we had a hard-ass new Managing Director. It was intense; people were just avoiding each other in the staff room or completely ignoring each other at the water cooler, and really, somebody was even rifling through my desk when I wasn't there, it was fanatic versus fanatic and nobody wanted to be the one cut or have his project cut-out under them.

Ritchie, it's been intense.

At my level of finance, you know, it's never about the forty or fifty thousand one ways. You know, this economy, it has a lot of infrastructure already built in, so sometimes you have a twenty-two year old managing two or three hundred million dollars of commodities a year--that's not an exaggeration. What they have in the chemicals department, for example, is a guy who sits at a desk, and he's looking at 0.01% changes in the prices of basic chemical components, a million gallons of methane, three million barrels of liquefied natural gas, four thousand tons of sulfur, and the difference in pricing between Shenzhen Petrochemical Supply and Vladivostok Trading Company is only 0.01 cents per cubic square meter, but multiplied by a full tanker-load order, that's a difference of thousands of dollars in cash, and day-in, day-out two hundred days a year all you need is a reliable twenty-year old university graduate to just type in the microscopically better pricing order and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries turns a slight profit that quarter.

It got frantic at work. I think people were following me; possibly related to the dust-up with Dominique, possibly Chinese security officers related to Shan; they were rifling through my desk at work, trying to leave little cameras or hidden microphones, edging me out of the next promotion, but anyway I'm getting ahead of myself, most likely it was a sort of executive training program called CLARION, a Canadian group dealing in information flow in the marketplace, heavily tied into Danish and Greek shipping, knowing how to predict global marketplace changes before they happen, and in the end, being transformational to the company's nature itself, vertical integration becoming full-scale total awareness-integration, the corporation as a living, breathing, information-gathering organism.

CLARION recruits people like me; people who have their own finances and assets, who can make big plays, and who have that right combination of being a leader, can back it up when things go sour, and know how to cover their bets with the right sorts of insurance and leveraging. They've placed people into all the big names of the multinationals, the really ancient trade guilds and consortiums of Europe, and all the all-star business consulting groups. They really have what it takes and the best thing of all was that they only recruit who they choose from all the public groups--you can't apply to join, because they find you.

I don't know how much of all the investigation and poking around my workplace was CLARION and how much was jealous coworkers who saw me being placed into all the big deals. Do you remember that oil filter thing we did earlier this summer? You remember, Ritchie, right? You even scraped together three thousand dollars of your own and had it jump by seven times, didn't you? The business world is full of things like this. In commodities, even if you just by accident end up owning 80% or more of the production, then you determine the price. And let's say the next month three Taiwanese computer chip manufacturers announce gallium-doping is the next big thing in silicon chip design? If you had the gallium, you're rich.

They put me in charge of my first big international contract, a huge deal, aviation-quality steel. We had Russians who were working on titanium for decades before the US or Japan or anybody else took any interest: the processes seem immensely crude to Western scientists' eyes, but the output is like nothing even a microforge in the US can make. But the thing was, this was just supposed to be a sort of training exercise for me. CLARION wanted me to learn what the limits of things were, and they deliberately let me fail, so I could understand how things go wrong, and what my own psychology was.

I flew back to the US, Ritchie. When everything started going south, I jumped back to Colorado--my family has a house there and I know my father has a black American Express. I just needed enough cash to cover a week's worth of option calls, and I did it, I was ballsy enough to do it, and saved myself from a twenty million dollar shortfall, although we had to sell the house, Ritchie. My father was pissed. I took the hit like I man, and I thought it was all over, but the CLARION officer was there at the workplace the next day and said I was still on, we were still cool. We tried another, smaller project for our next thing, and things have been going great.

It's really great, this thing. You know, all the top executives and country leaders, they're associated with this thing or similar sorts of training programs, it really means I've been recognized, that I'm going places. Forget little pump-and-dump on penny stocks, this is the real breakthrough, when we preassemble shipping based on El Nino ocean currents so that the coffee-makers who make a bumper crop suddenly have to pay whatever we ask to get the beans out to the gourmet markets. I mean this is really big stuff, big league matters, I'm shaping the course of history here, and I'm altering the financial markets to generate serious ROI. We got EBITDA, we got non-reporting private capital, we got second-round investors just cherry-picking after the angels have gotten in.

You know the thing about business is that it's all a confidence game. There are hundred of stories about some guy who was just about to corner the silver market, hundreds of millions in profit, and he fell short by just a half million or so. The British government could have defended the pound against Soros if they hadn't lost a UBS line-of-credit right at the critical moment. And all the mom-and-pop nickel-and-dime gold sellers during the IMF crisis in Korea actually did just save their main banks from going insolvent. If you have that last penny of support, you win. It's that simple. You win. So you just gotta stay the course and invest big when the market turns your way.

You know I had to do a commodities project, that was part of the learning curve. And then I had to do finance, and it's just a different way of looking at the world, see? Totally quant. What we can do is model this one Japanese housewife pinching her pennies, and she sees an Australian bond offering at 1.5% interest. Well Australia is a developed country, high prestige in Japan. So given that the local bank is offering 0.25%, a certain predictable proportion of the society will jump ship and move to Australian triple-A debt. Forget Romania, forget Bangladesh, Mrs. Watanabe doesn't touch those things. So instead, we run a 'yen-carry trade.' What we do is borrow money from the banks, all the way-too-conservative Mrs. Watanabes earning 0.25%, we pay them 0.5%, then we go to Iceland or somewhere and earn 5% off our cash. Easy money. You ride it for years, or you leverage it and go spectacular in a month.

This is, like, "taking advantage of the risk-adverse Mrs. Watanabe," you get it? All the things we make fun of about Japan, how they're stiff, how're they're prejudiced. We're using it against them. We make the cash, we spend it, and they keep on being the stiff and awkward people they are.

So there's commodities with frozen methane; there's ship-movements so you understand how to predict global trade patterns; there's finance so you understand FOREX and the BOJ loan rates. After you complete all the modules, then you can run a country portfolio, private equity, huge sums of money. All you need is 0.5% improvement over the index and you're a stellar all-star. It's performance, performance, performance, and all underperformers just get cut. There's opportunity with reforming public education, CALPERS is the biggest pension fund in the world, you'd be amazed at these obscure endowments that control huge chunks of the Dow, and everything you learn is something about quantitative analysis, people management, and trade.

Finally I just completed a product management with 200 contract workers and medical documents. It was a 22.5 million/year company based out of Delaware, and the whole trick was trying to get more productivity out of people without touching the 99.9% accuracy rate. So we went for a software implementation with real-time coding and feedback, and that was like the final icing on the cake, a semi-entrepreneurial start-up transformed into true enterprise-level functionality, a turn-key product that the right legal team M&A right into a Fortune 500 corp.

I'm telling you, biz consulting--it's really where it's at for pure global perspective. You eat a ham sandwich in Prague at a kiosk, sit down to fish and chips in Copenhagen, and then wrap up drinks in Kensington, London, then you really see how the whole marketplace works together. It's like being aloft seventy hours a week, you know every airline and every power out in the airport. You get automatic upgrades if you're an elite flyer, and the NYC-Tokyo routing only has to be done twice in a year and you're silver. I got tags on all the bags, and I know which airline lounge has the best breakfast with all the servers knowing me by name. You keep two apartments going because you don't know which one you're closer to flying, and you just march up to the airline counters and buy tickets if the client is allowing you to expense it, and who wouldn't if it's to save a 40 million/year factory from regulators?

Traveling, you know, it's an art. There are a group of people who have the Platinum status, and they get quadruple mileage. But with expenses like hotels and things, you gotta go online, buy the discount merchandise. Used to be you had a good travel office or a person in-house who could slowly accumulate the connections to get the deals, but now it's all electronic, find the distressed merchandise at 70% off.

Sheraton, Intercontinental, that's prestige level quality, and if your business contact is some Czech, their eyes show it when you're booked there, and you meet in the conference room there, it can be a payback on the contract. The four-star service, the waiters and staff in cummerbunds, that can close a deal. Then you got Hilton which is "always dependably mediocre," except that sometimes in the far-off corners that's all you have. With a 800-number for concierge service you can score tickets to sold-out events, you can tip the right people in every city for real access, not just any waiter you see. Then you also gotta manage jet-lag, traveling west over east any time, and the cycle of your day is itself the object of focus; you gotta ride the peaks and troughs as part of your job, it's what makes the professional.

Every city, you gotta know it only through the arrival and the departure. There's nothing in like sticking to one location for seven years, that's for the weenies. The profit exists at some point, some locale at any given week, and if you didn't see Dubai coming years ago, you're out of the loop. The credit agencies can't even keep up.

You start with sovereign wealth funds, the oil barons and their cash, the management and due-diligence you carry out in order to ensure they're not being fleeced. If you're good, you can pare off assets in a bloated European company and somehow end up with the remainder valued more than the original thing. If you march into Germany with an understanding of their work-visa program, you're set for taking advantage of their machine tools with those Eastern European companies that actually have something, and then you finally start to understand global trade.

But the thing in the end is that it's still all information flow, it's still all what you're hearing on the streets, it's still about putting your own coin in the game to build trust and to leverage it as much as you can. We gotta raise capital, Ritchie. I'm sitting on something big. Every little thousand counts. It's a real breakthrough. We can really make it.

If this had been the entirety of Soren's pitch, I probably would have shrugged my shoulders and turned my back on my old friend. Competence, "I am Mr. Senior-level Director at Prestigious Finance Group" only goes so far when there's past history of abandonment and an obvious undertone that peons like me are still incapable of seeing "the big picture," that we can't trust the evidence of our own senses. But the thing is, when the rain drizzling down, and Soren haggard and unshaven and looking thirty-five, and then finally, icing on the cake, he develops this complete expression of loss and forlorn bewilderment, I clap him on his back and say, "let's take one thing at a time. Have a drink!"

The recitation of several weeks' adventures in the misting rain has left Soren's shoulders drenched, and we make our way to the chain Irish pub in the basement, slipping down narrow and not quite even wooden stairs to the hideout in which various Westerners are relaxing. Ordering drinks at the bar, we settle in to a booth.

"Yeah, I was only visiting when I was in university. My older brother was working here, and man, those were the glory days."

"How so?"

"Well, he was in finance, see? So he had this huge apartment in Roppongi-chome, we had a wrap-around balcony, and man we got babes."

"Nice."

"It was unfreakinbeliveable."

"So you want to go back to those days?"

"Hell yeah."

"Okay. Let's rock and roll."

The rainy season, 'tsuyu,' is changing over to first fall—and at no time do I think that we were going to become friends for life. But maybe that is the beauty of it; that is why everything can just go as it does without ever looking back.

Soren is speaking excitedly to me, leaning forward on the chaise longue and posturing as a supplicant. "Did you know that the decolonization of Asia began with the Japanese takeover of Vietnam? The Vietnamese had never before seen white men following Asian orders, but the Japanese just went in there and raped loads of French girls. They don't talk about it in history books because it's been totally hushed up."

"Yeah?"

"And a British officer defected right before Singapore. Perfect family background, perfect education, no disciplinary problems in the past. But he decided of his own free will that the Japanese side was the morally superior side. Totally covered up. This is what history is really like!"

Soren—a paranoid conspiracy theorist? His ancestors were imperialists--but what he resented was not that they had whined about the "white man's burden" while breeding a string of half-castes in the slums, but that they were unable to keep it up--that he had been left, so to speak, holding the bag, crushed with the weight of historical guilt without any of the rewards of empire. Was this the process that resulted, finally, in chasing after the very lowest quality of woman; playing for the very lowest stakes. "C'mon mate, c'mon mate, c'mon mate!" Our courtiers now would have dismayed faces (but their reactions would be completely predictable, jokes obvious, responses in any given situation preordained to the fourth or fifth degree) could they watch as the reigning prince returns to being led out of the court by an ill-mannered rogue, so disheveled, unattractive, and poorly-dressed as to be beneath contempt, and the prince is happy! The prince is actually genuinely cheerful! Few have seen such expressions of genuine unadulterated joy, ear-to-ear smiling!

"Ritchie, I am curious, though. What's brought you to Japan? Why are you here?"

I breathe out.

"Well. Long story."

"No rush."

"I first came here when I was nineteen. I saved up pocket money from my part-time job, and as soon as I could, I went out west by rail-pass. Then, as I was bouncing around Los Angeles, this email arrived in my inbox—it was for a flight special to Kyoto, only $350 round-trip. I checked my bank balance; I realized I could do it, so I hopped on the flight."

For some reason everything this night is about origins. Two bicyclists from England are present, one by the unlikely name of Nicolas Christmas, and the mood therefore, is about "your first experience of Japan," which the pair are experiencing but doing so uniquely, by physically biking all the way from Tokyo to Fukuoka.

"What are you going to eat? How are you going to avoid the cops?"

"Oh they won't bother us. We've already had some practice runs out of the city. And you know...instant noodles and green tea, goes a long way."

There is no harm, one supposes, in recording that there is some obscure half-manuscript in extremely limited circulation on the Internet, about somebody's "first trip to Japan," the emotional crux of the selection being the traveler's being picked up by three young Japanese, two guys and a girl, and how at first it seems the guys are going to resentfully keep him away from her, and then it seems like they're going to leave her with him at the lodge, but whether this work will be lost to the mists of time or whether the author eventually realized that there wasn't a fully completed book in him, nevertheless the topic of "the first trip" inspired a long-lasting webcomic, and a famous movie, and undoubtedly repeated itself, in some fashion, for countless thousands. The absolute boom of the 80s may be over, but even today, at this moment, some pony-tailed Australian is landing at Narita to begin a gig with GEOS, and he is enraptured by the country, he is as swept away as the busloads of wide-eyed American or British schoolgirls being disgorged onto Montmartre, at this very moment, at this inescapable repetition of upbringing and foreignness. The obsessive specialist heading straight to Akihabara or the culture-jammer fascinated by the punk rock scene; the 'enraptured by onsens' crowd wanting nothing more than to wear a hakama forever; they were all in the right country for the Western male, a counterpart to the girls' experience in Italy or France.

"So how about you, Soren? Did you get all googly-eyed at your first year?"

"Dude, I still have a pic." He whipped out a cell phone. "Isn't she hot?"

The girl was all right, nothing spectacular.

"My only regret is that things are ending, in this regard. The party in this sense does have to end, sooner or later, if not necessarily tonight."

"Okay, first we're going to hit 811, then we're going to hit Motown, then we gonna hit GASPanic!"

These are the very lowest of the low, the dens of the absolute bottom-feeders, places worth only a half-hour or bemused hour or two in other lifetimes, but one has to start somewhere, of course.

"Okay Soren. Let me explain this place to you. This is still early, so that's why people aren't here, but that line of military hair-cut guys will be sitting on their 600 yen beers all night. They want to score. Next month they might be in Timbuktu, so there's no next week, and there's no three months from now. Over there, we have an old Asia hand--girl looks kinda young, probably from Thailand or Cambodia; he's just here to show off, have some fun watching the whole show. Over there we got a mix of less dramatic players-- maybe they'll score, maybe they won't, maybe you'll see real sophistication pop out, but we'll need to go to Eden to see..."

Already, however, with the launch of music, Soren is out ("Eden?! That place is for snobs!"), and his target of choice is a PVC-boot-wearing 40-year old Japanese divorcee, a used-up, fat disgusting excuse for a human being whose very proximity makes me retch a little in my throat. It takes me half an hour to recover.

"Soren! Soren! What are you doing? That woman is absolutely wretched!"

"Hey mate! Old girls need love too!"

And that is it. That is exactly it. He is completely irrepressible. He doesn't care at all that onlookers are wearing expressions of shock and contempt. He doesn't care that if he looks in the mirror, he'll see a twenty-six year old who just needs to get his act together. What he has, instead, is zest: pure, unadulterated love of the game, dancing and prancing, jumping and jittering, hands flying to and fro, unself-conscious, singing along to the music when he knows the words with wild abandon. However degenerate his form of the game, his is an indomitable will to get the score tonight. We are perfect because we go after different things. Here, this place, now: this is the only reality, this is the only freedom, and ephemeral nineteen year olds who walk in are forever lost to his grasp. Freedom--freedom--freedom: American great essential quality communicating in a straight-line pure and unbroken like a bolt of lightning through his family line. And I surrender to this will, you see; I ignore the oddness that his car keys are "lost" when I want to go get my jacket (he knows this is a ploy to leave; he wants me here, a friend assists him), I ignore the weirdness of our being unable to leave the club at two, three in the morning as the music blasts on and streams of after-after-afterparty goers replenish the ranks. Eye-contact, dance move, smile or frown; signal interest, signal decline. The throb of music is the only underscore to continuing and increasing drunkenness, the outer senses failing, the refinement passing away, reduction to the absolute lowest denominator. Tiredness gives way to weariness and weariness gives way to total fatigue. But after total fatigue, there is even another level, an exhaustion so complete, so moral, that one reverts to a more primitive personality, a complete surrender to the music.

"Dude! Dude! Dude! You are freakin' awesome! Where did you learn to dance. Those Russian hostesses are in freakin' awe!"

Eden is now so far away. My hands lay down unknown archaeologies of rhythm; they uncover civilizations that have risen and fallen in millenia of inborn memory, and on these, I build a superstructure that is at once ancient yet new. Around me swirl an entire archipelago of Russian hostesses who have streamed in for their hour to party. Tatiana. Olga. Natasha. Ekaterina. Girls from forgotten Siberian factory cities making 3000 yen an hour base pouring drinks to Japanese businessmen. The club is a dark womb, a black cave of flashing lights and laser lines, and I am a god of dance, creator and destroyer of worlds. Such beauty; such raw intense drunken communion, whiff of a joint, 600 beats per minute, blonde hair, blue eyes. Half-friends and semi-acquaintances stream in; in the outside street alley a few words and hard-to-find goods are exchanged. But then it's back inside the club; warm and dry.

"So who are you going for?"

"I don't know maybe that one."

"Don't let the American whale snag you."

It is that weekend; or it is another one, that I find myself following a text message through Saturday afternoon to Soren's car, parked conveniently just north of the Roppongi crossing, to stumble bleary eyed into the passenger seat and doze away a somewhat sunlit afternoon. Intimations of a faint communion with eternity had existed before; like the city as a girl peeking at you from behind a fan from some long-ago forgotten initial day to streetscenes, frozen, in which the sunlight passes through the spray of water to prism beautifully into a kaleidoscope of colors. Now, finally, however, I understand. Time has finally frozen. Grabbing a pocket Nikon, I snap a picture of a perfect afternoon's subdued light, this moment never to exist again, this moment never to be recovered.

"Where is this going? Where is this going?"

Soren has no answer. But I can see, as clearly as if from a tall vista, how inevitable everything that is to come, how inevitable it was everything that led up to this moment, as trapped as Soren is in his fate, as trapped as I am in the prison that I have made of my own making, the prison that I have now come to reject as worthless and ragged, as pointless as torn and used clothing. Already from here: the keeping score; Soren to offer additional rides in his car, the drive up to Moka, a walking away in winter-time, feet stepping on snow making the most awful of possible sounds. He knows he is in decline. He knows that our friendship is based on absolute tenuousness. We will throw rocks from tetrapod breakwaters into the uncaring Japanese sea, we will break beer bottles in midnight streets, and this is just the same as sunday afternoons but everything is just a facsimile of the things we used to do.

"I am curious, Soren, how many girls have you slept with? How many girls have you bedded?"

Suddenly on the defensive, he leans back and tries to pretend he hasn't heard.

"Come on, mate. Be a pal. I'm just curious."

Soren lights a cigarette. A tiny voice. "A bit over two hundred. I've lost count."

"Wow. Holy cow. That is an amazing number. Any virgins?"

"Well... well..."

"Well..."

"Well of course a lot of girls are going to tell you they're virgins."

I sit there, in that parked car, on that Saturday afternoon that we are both merely waiting to pass so that we can resume night-time adventures, and I feel the very non-linearity of time, how its grainier and quantumized rather than a smooth flowing stream. The entire future, open to me like a stage with its curtains already open, shocks me into a clear and perfect realization. Soren and I are good friends. We have become each other's 'person of main contact,' the fundamental baseline company of choice even as we continue to associate—of course—with a variety of people. As winter sets in—the long, cold, deep winter that will bring the purity of snow—we will slowly become aware—inevitably--of the economy of our friendship. He will impose on me, using my apartment as his crashpad of choice; I will force him to let me drive because of his constant state of one or another intoxication; I will pass through rain-damp Tokyo streets, gazing with wonder upon the aesthetics of construction sites, and we will slowly—slowly--ease to a breaking of relations. This, without question, is inevitable. But as doomed as this friendship is; as impossible to stop that moment of final accounting, when a certain carefully negotiated sum of money will change hands across an izakaya table, nevertheless we will enjoy our moment in the sun.

The dynamic switches. With Soren now installed as the penitent or seeker, it's me-Soren-Charis-Tats-Herrera, a five person group that had as its core that profit-seeking motive coming from Soren's mysterious capital-intensive project and whatever support to show to Jury Trial and their grand war against judge-only justice systems. But even as this phenomenon was going underway, adventure arrives in the form of three Japanese girls, Eiko, Shiori, and Tomoko, who have decided of their own mysterious logic to revolve around our little unfolding adventure, but bringing their own fey and mysterious beauty and unknown motivations and creating the questions, who will sleep with who? And whose heart must be broken?

Eiko, the most conventional beauty, a lissome black-haired Japanese girl is a somewhat artsy liberal-arts major who went to Reed and spoke fluent English. She cooks, reads a lot, and plays with her hair while pointing out in devastatingly short comment the nature of certain individuals. Shiori, with her dyed hair and Fukuoka origins, actually works for a thirty-person design group, bright enough to graduate near the top of her class at Hakata University, frequently called "the eighth Imperial university," and apparently brings together the team at her high-prestige group. And then Tomoko, the Sacred Heart grad Catholic girl with ballet in her background, tall, graceful, and unreachable, the one who may have had a quarter European in her background, checks the other two in terms of "the group dynamic," playing in her role a key function irreplaceable and decisive.

# VIII.

If I were Hemingway, if I were Faulkner, I would be capable of regripping the flow of the narrative, rekindling the fire that has burned, and died down, and showing the true blaze-blaze-blaze that erupts, the conflagration that finally expands all fuel, destroys everyone, consumes all resources, leaves things forever changed. Unfortunately, of course, "it ends with a whimper, not a bang," and already the conscientious reader understands that things cannot endure, that this final intense, more dramatic, more complicated mix-up, so intense, so intense, so intense for the subjective individual, already contains the seeds of its own destruction, and the ever more dynamic, ever more energetic, ever more frenetic and frantic hypermanic blowup can only be the final act and closing stirrup amidst a broad demographic drawdown. For the outsider, it is easy: this is the elegy, this is the final hurrah. For the experiencer of the reality, it is an intensity kindled anew by the fact that some of the fuel has already been pre-burnt. Charcoal flames more intensely than green wood; the fire tamped down tamped down tamped down once released suddenly flares up everywhere at once. But not, however, the actual weather: summer draws to a close. The hot, miasmic subtropical air begins to retreat from over Kanto, hurried along by breezes that have blown in from the great Asian mainland. As if by a painter's brush, oranges and umbers, reds and browns begin to sweep across the islands of Japan, seen on television news reports in passing, the colors first touching the mountain tops and then creeping southwards and into the lowlands below. In the streets of Tokyo, there is a complementary change as the first light jackets begin to appear on the people, and the girls of Tokyo slowly, reluctantly, abandon their miniskirts and t-shirts for longer apparel. We have one final summer party at Oarai Beach in Ibaraki and make some desultory plans to get something going out to Kyoto, but nothing ever comes of it.

"Ritchie, show up at Shibuya crossing at eight p.m. Saturday. I want money back."

If he wasn't involved in enough drama, Shan had somehow also in the mix of things managed to get himself hit by a Japan Self-Defense Force truck. There are a lot of ironies, here, of course. But the long and the short of it is he is going to be paid a yen thirty million settlement, or almost 300,000 US for his two month stay in hospital and the reconstructive surgery on his legs. Or so he had me believe. Actually the final recompense is only 16,000 US, and much of that is already earmarked for the hospital and administrative fees. I do not know or like Shan enough to investigate what he is doing, and three hundred thousand doesn't sound unreasonable considering the factors involved, especially the sensitivity of military vehicles hitting foreigners so widely reported in East Asian news. But Shan is able to use a sworn promise, hand in the air, pledge to the blood commitment, of providing 10% of settlement to me in return for my support of him in order to encourage my group's support of him during his period of trial. He even buys a few tailor-made shirts and spends some money on expensive drinks to show substance to his stories. The truth does come out eventually, in a curious way, but in the meantime, he's in jail, he's out; I'm visiting; I'm being caught up in events and unable to get funds to him; everything is to and fro.

"Ritchie I want full accounting of money entrusted to you and a refund of anything you haven't spent."

The sound of his voice on that unexpected phone call does send a chill down my back. But stupidly, he doesn't even show up to his promised appointment; and it is only weeks later that he finally manages to hunt me down, at which point I bare my teeth to him and show no sympathy whatsoever as he explains where's he been for the last few months.

"There was an administrative error. They arrested me, but somebody broke into the records office and set fire to the building. So the police had no record of why I was being held, and they thought I was an illegal alien. They kept me on Sado-shima for four months until they figured out what had happened."

"Sado-shima? Isn't that the old place where they exiled people?"

"Mmm."

And Shan is actually being honest, for once; there was indeed a fire set by a deranged criminal that resulted in his extended incarceration; LeFauve for all his influence is almost certainly not behind this.

"Well what did you do? How was it?"

"They kept me out in fields doing carpentry work. It's been goddamn cold."

"Well, I sympathize."

"As for the money..."

As for the money, a fifth, which isn't unreasonable at all, disappeared in the handover from Erik to me, and more than a half we had to pay out to keep his stuff from being evicted from his apartment. After all, he just disappears all of a sudden after telling us that we need to look after his stuff for just a month, so one month drags to two, and two drags to three before we realize we have to cut the rate of spending and move everything to self-storage or we'll drain his bank account in two months. That is also a big waste of time and effort, not to forget all the intangibles of incurring U.S. Embassy wrath for assisting public enemy #1—who can put a price tag on that?

"As for the money, I'm wondering why you need it back at all? You promised 10% of the settlement, do you remember? So that would be three million yen."

"10%? 10%? Do you have paper record of that?"

He looks at me with a look of scorn, but what Shan doesn't realize is that I have one more card than he does.

"No, but as you're smiling, I think you remember exactly well. So why do you need four hundred thousand yen back when you're the one who's supposed to be forking over three million?"

"It's a matter of principle, dog. Hand over full fifteen hundred thousand, and I'll give you what I promised."

But Charis had already played one last card. It's almost bizarre that is the Christian girl, the girl of absolute morals, who suggested we wade through all his legal paperwork when he transferred his goods from his apartment to self-storage. But feminine deviousness trumps absolutism. "LE-SAMA, HERE IS RECEIPT FOR FINAL PAYMENT OF 1.5 MILLION YEN FOR THE INCIDENT TAKING PLACE IN TAKABASHI INVOLVING MINISTRY..." In other words, he's received a administrative apology of fifteen thousand dollars, not 30 million yen. And we looked at each other in the musty storage building; this told us what we need to know.

Shan does eventually get not quite US $5,000 back, which is more than fair; I only later remember the cell phone bill, the other incidentals involved that mean he has taken a very convoluted process to get back a difference of several hundred dollars, an amount he surely would have paid in filing fees considering all the legal rigamarole it takes him to do what he does, not to forget he still owed me the 10% even of $15,000 if not $300,000. Yet I suppose he gets some satisfaction out of finally making bureaucracy work for him, and I suppose in a sense he is pleased to finally have a high-hand on me, to watch me squirm and cough up cash in process that leaves him with a sense of power. More details spill out-- Dominique's drug-trafficking conviction (drugs hidden intimately close), Dominique's psychotic breakdown at the country club leaving one very frightened Chinese (!) male hiding in a bathroom (rumors?), Dominique's apparent charge at one point that it was I, actually, who pulled a knife on her. But finally, all things said, the real thing that needs to be recorded is something that nobody with a name points out.

"And did you see nothing suspicious with the timing of it all? That he gets accused so strangely coincidental with some other expressed incident?"

"No. Not until years, years later, and only after fiascoes of my own."

But more subliminally, something more dark and hidden-- "And what about sudden personality shifts? Do we have no further confessions that need to be made about that?"

"What are you suggesting?"

But the quiet nagging voices are easily silenced and that criminal Shan is sent on his way.

This has been an account in neat and organized form of things that were all happening simultaneously and far more messy, emotionally-trying, and indeed victimizing than as can be expressed in linear form. I am sorry, of course, Erik, for leaving you holding the bag like that, and yes yes yes Julian is that famous auteur who later went on to produce so-and-so movie but is currently curating $6 shows in Bowery. But then, all that being said, there is still that other major occupation of our lives, or simply our occupation, and this is of course at least two thirds of our energies, almost half our waking hours—it is really rather far too charming and amusing to pretend that one jets off to Japan, spends all of one's waking hours going to one or another amusing party or bar or club; that this is all of our lives or even just the meaningful part. I loved Japan, of course. What I didn't tell Soren was that even the dyed-hair swarms of Roppongi that made me physically ill so many years ago also managed to inflict something psychological onto my view of the world. Of course I had known that the Japanese were odd; of course I had known that their cheap bleach-job youth were the trash of Asia. But it had never occurred to me so personally, hit so close to home, that there were aesthetic answers to things; that all of the contradictions of life could be answered in so insouciant a fashion.

In America I am nothing. A graduate of a medium-ranked Pennsylvania university, I can hope to work in a cloth-covered cubicle as a junior programmer at some semi-known company. The girls ignore me; my days are banal; and everything is just absolutely predictable to the nth degree, I have failed even in the timing of my birth, having missed the dot-com bubble that made people just two years older millionaires doing exactly the same major. Japan. I walk down the street, and girls giggle. My very presence in a subway car makes girls toy with their hair, and if I say something in English, I am instantly 'cool' and 'international.' But, even beyond this, even beyond the foreigner cool and all the assorted fringe benefits, detectable even in the most simplistic products or classical works of art, is a faint, tremulous, almost undetectable pathos of things, an indistinct undertone that only the most refined senses can pick up. Like a siren song, the country calls me, and when a salary offer from a company in Tokyo arrives, without a glance backwards I pack my bags and leave. My new company is a clean, bright, happy place overlooking the Dentsu plaza in Shimbashi, and I have the prestigious corner seat; I am the conquering American hero brought in to take our team to the very top of the rankings. And this I do, for a year, a golden year, operating in an archaic and stripped-down version of software that is totally obsolete in the U.S. Meanwhile, lost in daydream, I wonder who is the most perfect of J-girls, Eiko, Shiori, Tomoko? The Reed graduate, the art-firm upper-class beauty, or the lithe Catholic dancer?

"Tell your friend that he's very rude."

Had I known then what I knew just months later; had I had some inkling or prior warning about past history at the company or even just an especially perceptive and friendly ally from the domestic side, I would have been able, at the time of the initial assault, to have quickly turned the tables on the factory foreman and disarmed all onlookers instantly, preventing the internecine struggle that followed, and that left both of our influences hopelessly diminished. But at the time, I am completely focused on my battle with LeFauve; Charis, of all people, has taken this week to show up at my workplace with a prepared lunch, drawings gasps from assembled onlookers; and as people point out—even my stride is different; even my very walk has a combative and dominant edge, the purposeful roll of a fighter and brawler.

Suddenly out of nowhere a middle-aged Japanese guy at the workplace addresses Tats visiting me for lunch.

"That guy, you know, this is the first time he's ever talked to me in my eleven months here. I don't even know his name!"

"Mmm. Maybe that's part of the problem?"

For a second I look at Tats and remember the old saying-- you think you have a Japanese friend, until he enters a Japanese setting and you discover he's somebody else entirely. "You're taking his side?"

Tats grimaces; a look of pain crosses his head. "It's like this—Japanese society is a bit more focused on age and a bit more patriarchal than you might realize... Maybe you need to have some understanding?" The comment ends on a high note of a question; he is split and uncertain on which grounds he stands. But I'm already shutting my ears to this kind of talk; I hang them all with the same cord.

"Christ, Tats. You're part of the foreign community. How can you like support this guy you've never met?"

"He's saying you're not showing proper respect to an older manager on the verge of retirement. You're dismissive of this guy who's sixty years old."

"That's not the issue! He's mad at me because I was visited last week by one of these three Japanese girls who likes me. All right, I don't have time to deal with small dicked losers with inferiority complexes. We have a entire series of products to roll out in six months, and the team had best fall in."

Energia K.K. divides fairly predictably into two camps on either my or the foreman's side, or rather, most of the people seem to have some or other inclination although a noticeable minority remain aloof. As Tats says, Japanese culture still places a premium on the opinion of elders; the foreman is forty-five or older, and I am a freshly-minted university grad. But on the other hand, we are a new media technology company; our floor is filled with talents and design specialists, and these give me a little wink or nod, or otherwise indicate that they need a programming specialist more than a washed-up middle-aged son of an electrician. But then: Shimamura. And it takes me not months, but years to understand his play in this evolving little drama of ours.

"Ah, Ritchie-san. You think we will achieve good results next year?"

"Yes, sir, most definitely! We're all going to do our best, and totally wipe out the competition! Let's all do our very best, 'cuz I think we have a really cracker-jack outfit!"

"Ritchie! Ritchie! Shut the hell up!"

The last comment, of course, is the foreman's. I don't even remember until years later that it is Shimamura who brought on this moment; actually at the moment the most striking and painful realization is the entire room has fallen into silence. The entire company is watching at the end of the year banquet as the foreman stares at me with undisguised malice. I compose my face.

"Yes, sir, understood, and thank you sir."

And conversation resumes.

Man fights against nature, against fellow man, against society, family, nations, reality itself. In the race to divide the pie, certain pieces will go to some individuals; others will seize portions that differ slightly from what they expected, even at times more so than they ever deserved. But conflict in the workplace; the war that takes place in so controlled and polite a setting, is always all that more vicious because the stakes are real.

"Okay this is the problem with foreman. If he had a problem with me, why didn't he come up to me one-on-one and explain what his gripe was. I take issue with the fact that he was talking to me for the first time--for the very first time--only when my friend is visiting the company, causing me to lose face with my friend, and that he is starting the battle only when he is surrounded by two of his friends. Talk about your total pussy!"

My conversation partner, another expat from a different division of the company, nods sympathetically.

"And his team! They don't even hold eye contact with me when we pass in the hall. This is basically your definition of total passive-aggressivity, 'snipe from afar' loser and weaklings are tigers when it's battle at a distance, but completely fall apart face to face! I have things at stake here, too. My IT specialty is only useful to three or four corporations in the world. I can't back off because one pencil-dicked washed-up loser can't manage his own insecurities. What an absolute worthless piece of garbage."

As war breaks out, management and assorted big-picture types race to put out the fire, knowing the potential for open conflict to spread, infect the organization, and bring operations to a stand-still. But as time passes, the dawning realization is that trying to push the two of us together; trying to effect a friendship between the foreman and me, does only more harm rather than good.

"Look Ritchie. Try to look at things from the foreman's point of view. He's a forty-five year old factory labor chief who will never earn more than four-point-five million yen a year. All his life he's wanted a desk in the headquarters, and now he finally gets one, only to immediately run into the hot-shot foreigner talent, brought in at a widely known cool six million a year. You're young; you have a beautiful girlfriend; all the Japanese girls coo at you on the street. Of course he's going to hate you!"

"I understand this. I sympathize with this. But here, just take a look at this winter ski trip list... Sugiyama Daiichi, Nakayama Tomoko, Takahashi Yuuta.. and then, 'RIICHI.' It's like I get to be some parody of a human being; they walk around mockingly saying 'Riichi' 'Riichi' 'Riichi' like I'm some kind of TV entertainment talk show host while they get to be the real human beings." But of course it was all orchestrated by Suzuki, who wanted my job.

It lasts for months. I begin to get on guard, looking for fresh outrages; I know I'm causing stress to the foreman as well, but he has the advantage of numbers, and he is required, by his job, to frequently visit the actual factories; I never know when or where he will turn up. But finally I begin to slip; it's just too much to handle all at once. Sometimes good happens, and sometimes bad, but the trend is down-down-down. It becomes impossible to work; to think straight; and my results are slipping. But finally, finally, I begin to get leverage against the foreman. But it's a meaningless victory anyway.

Unreality arrives, takes a look around, decides it has found a comfortable place, and settles in. It could be any number of things, the workplace conflict that develops when you are the only foreigner; the strange and information-misdirecting Japanese language itself; the culture of permanent masks; or, possibly, simply that impossible high of actually controlling a city, of actually being most senior or capable individual in a metropolis of twenty-odd million, wherein to be twenty-four and to have it all is it itself the perfectly impossible situation. All things had led up to this moment; no compromise is possible; and the city unreels beneath one's feet as if adventure, as if a "video-game reality."

Years later, strolling through familiar neighborhoods and once-forgotten alleyways that the smallness of the place became apparent. Actually, it was perfectly possible to walk from Roppongi to Shibuya; actually if a whole day were committed to it, one could even stroll from Ueno to Shinjuku, but at the time, it seems impossible distant, the taxi ride incredibly exorbitant, the number of establishments innumerable and vast. With a salary of some five thousand U.S. a month, one listens to rumors of the true golden age, of the 1980s wherein English tutors were making a hundred US an hour plus (in 1980s dollars) or of backpackers financing an entire plane ticket with a bottle of contraband Johnny Walker. Possibly the stories just endure, and you yourself are living a golden period, you just don't realize it. Or possibly everything is just bound up in reception and foreignness, exoticism and the art of the in-group. Whatever the case, winter hits that year with a special, crazed intensity. Just as conflict has been simmering for months before finally erupting into the open, so it seems that previous overly-warm years have been storing up some reservoir of cold weather that now breaks upon us with a strength and ferocity that is untold. There is no fall this year, no in-between period when temperatures are temperate and cool, and windbreakers are the perfect accoutrement for a crisp autumn walk through rustlings leaves. Instead, a gigantic blizzard, a veritable winter hurricane, blasts into Kanto, snowing for days straight and bringing the city to an absolute standstill. But the snowhounds; the powder-freaks and winter sportsmen-- these are all giving little winks to each other, and despite all ongoing dialectics; despite the march of schedules and timetables and software release dates, this too is a private reality; a shared understanding against the debacles of the day.

"Shan, I have no desire to hang out with you, but allow me to counsel you this far. You are handling the case completely wrong. I think Waseda would even have backed you up from the start had you just denied her charges without denying that you were in a relationship with her. Your story holds no water, and so you have no credibility."

"Oh yeah, big words now, Mr. Spectator! You know everything about law. Amazing you didn't solve my case already."

"Look the idea is not to save yourself; your own reputation is clearly nonexistent. You have to dig up dirt on Dominique herself."

The battle goes on, November, December, January. Finally January Shan is sent to court for the final hearing, and I'm not there; I only learn later through other means, the trial begins and Shan confronts a subdued, distant Dominique in the courtroom, and all charges are dropped. However, once more there is a technicality. Shan has not been in university sufficiently to be a "full-time student;" he has violated the terms of his visa, even though being found innocent of everything. With his head hanging low and thoughts of the eternal sea, he is led away in stainless-steel chains and LeFauve sneers in victory, his white teeth conspicuous on his dark brown face. At work, my white-hot intensity conflict with the foreman results in no progress and both of us are disgraced in a sense; me for fighting the working man, the foreman for fighting a twenty-four year old, but I am the one on a non-protected contract. Let there be one cautionary voice in my head. Let there be an advisor at this one point in the drama to put a restraining hand on my shoulder, saying 'caution, caution.' But there is no such thing. There is only the absolute zest of the 'video-game existence.' Every moment is pregnant with meaning; every decision is enripened with possibility, every random encounter is another chance to turn things around.

"Hi, you must be new to Tokyo? My name's Ritchie Ufuo. I work with events and the foreigner scene here. Here's my business card. We're doing a ski trip next month."

"Hello, you're with the AEON group? I run a foreigner ski club. This is our flyer."

"Could you post this ski trip flyer in your break room? Thanks..."

Who is this strange person, infinitely active, infinitely restless, infinitely energetic bouncing across Tokyo that last, final winter that decides everything? In recollection he seems scarcely me, somebody else, a caricature of a human being, so absolutely certain the next moment is the most important one, so absolutely convinced of the righteousness of his cause. He is brilliant, this Other Me. He is so close to being totally satisfied—but only the next moment count; only the next win, the next social victory, the next score of a ticket sold to a ski trip. This pushiness, this salesman ship, one hundred tickets at eight hundred dollars, 80000 USD. I know it is me in truth. Even living that person, I am aware of a certain divergence of reality—and Charis, as well, trying to put the brakes on something, succeeding only in seeing the moment of perfect closure pass, only to sadly walk away, only to know how beautiful things are—if only they can be contained. But even the self-aware monster is self-knowingly charging ahead. The breakdown at work is just the final proximate cause; there is no more stopping things now.

"How many you sold?"

"Forty."

"Great. I unloaded thirty-three so far."

"We're going to reach two hundred!"

We are all of us—Soren, Soren, me, maybe even Charis—superficial, immature, childish, perhaps even worthless people. Our superficial interactions reveal a life of total ease, one in which all problems are solved for us, and nothing really important can break through. But even this being the case, I can't help but record that mad, mad winter. It's mad and it's bad, and things are really blowing up now and I can't really be expected to destroy my life, reach some overwhelming poverty just to record genuinely deep things, am I? I am jumping around Tokyo selling ski trip tickets, and I am interfacing with Soren, and I am the center of young Tokyo, take it or leave it. I didn't ask to be born, and I didn't ask for such overwhelming comfort and ease in my life. I was born to it. So I make the most of what I have, and I despise the ugly, the poor, the diseased and infirm, because they do not belong to my circle.

"One hundred ten tickets. Net two hundred bucks each, we will clear twenty grand."

"Not bad. But we can do better."

Let me burn into this paper how awesome we are. Let me write my name across the stars, Ritchie Ufuo, Tokyo events promoter, Soren Soutern, club kid and sunglasses-wearer. We are so unbelievably cool that we do not even know your name.

"How is the thing against the foreman going?"

"He tried again to slap me down; end of year party. Went nowhere."

"Small dick!"

"Typical Jap!"

"But I don't know Soren... I'm getting kinda worn down with this."

"Ritchie! You can't give up now. We have just covered expenses. Keep at it! There's more things involved. We're getting close to another project and you'll get full disclosure, I sweat it!"

I shrug. I have exhausted all good will, all friendship out of tired and less-stimulated friends or "friends," coming off superficial, trivial, pointless to exist. But I cannot lie about these conversations; I cannot record deep things as having been discussed when all we do is pose and blow smoke in other people's eyes. I go from party to party; I am welcomed in thirty different apartment buildings merely by name. But that is all there is in this life, and your miseries and commonplace career moves; your feeble attempts to gain leverage when economies do not yield profits so easily do not impress me. I am me. I am God. I am Ritchie Ufuo.

"So you just arrived Japan? You're living in Chiba? Ah, god you gotta get out of this place."

"No, I like literature. I just want to read, not really party all the time in the city."

"Baby you can't last in that place. It's nowhere! And get out of Chiba, man, there's nothing happening there."

You can pay somebody to distribute fliers, but most likely they'll dump them into a trash can. You can somehow in the middle of things cajole a friendly person to help out, just for the drama, or you can approach likely youngsters who seem too slow to grasp their new surroundings.

"Look, you're done what the last seven weeks? You gotta get out. You have to meet new people."

Cajoling, energetic, riding on the white-hot knife of intensity, I work seventy hour weeks (to futilely try to cover for the conflict with the foreman), and then put in thirty hours building up the events group. Soren's narrowed eyes hint at something bigger, some absolutist reason why we have to go to Tochigi, why the mountains up their contain some absolutist importance in terms of profit or sky tripping, and to some degree we do better as a pair with him explaining the logic and my convincing the individual, although sometimes we split ways to cover more territory. We're possibly hitting 20 or 30% of the actual young foreigner population in the Kanto region. Everything that is to come in young twenty-something foreigner Tokyo gets built that winter. On the ashes of the foundation of the old Soren empire, on a country seeing economic decline at a precise 1.5% a year, I built a superstructure that takes Soren to his highest degree, that integrates all the various currents of six thousand people who count into a perfect, beautiful whole. Maybe you know somebody who lives here during this time and doesn't know me. But probably that person doesn't count. Maybe you think this is all superficial childishness. Yes, this claim holds true. Yet wisdom holds its own tenuous grasp here as well; it's the carefree people who have the most to teach.

"Dude, how about talking about things that count? How about this world full of inequities and unfairness? How about reform and making the world a better place?"

"Give me a freakin' break!"

"Why is it so important we go to Tochigi, anyway?"

"I can explain later, Ritchie, it's just important. We're going to close. I can leverage the profits from this ten or fifteen times, we just need our own skin on the table."

Finally the weekend of the trip opens up with absolute clarity, a clear blue winter sky of limitless visibility; had the sky not been blue, it surely would have been a diamond carpet of stars stretching to the ends of the galaxy. Yet here already we are assembling at Shibuya station; already the cars of our caravan are lining up, and in the pleased relaxed anticipation of maximum physical exertion, we hang out, waiting for the full arrival, self-consciously cool in ski goggles and sunglasses.

"So, ready?"

"Yeah, let's go."

"Uh, Tats, let me ride in your car..."

"Isn't that the one with the..."

A hooded exchange of looks.

We meet up in Shibuya on an early Saturday morning, the sun not quite up, and late night clubbers wasted and drunk stumbling to the main station to await the first train. As the morning fully breaks, our group assembles, and we load up the vehicles with our baggage, sunglasses on in crescendoing light, before finding the expressway and heading north to Tohoku. Our destination for the night is Tochigi, about halfway up to the real far north, but good enough to get real snow. To each side, the city falls away. At first, it's just a matter of each conglomeration of tall buildings becoming less impressive and more far between, but by Inoshiro there are rice paddies to the roadsides and large green fields separating waterways and park walkways, distant elevated tracks the Shinkansen to Morioka. Then finally it's genuine countryside: undeveloped land and the foothills of mountains—forested ridges that surround a highway that ascends inexorably to higher elevations. And here, like a shock, nature hits, like a blow to one's chest, a complete reversal of values; shocking tree movement, shocking sunlight between hillsides, such intense sensation that I feel as if I am a two-dimensional drawing, as unreal as a cinematic separation layer of meaning. Snow falling from a leaden sky! Mountains that rise up to meet us, tower up, into which we plunge! The incredible brilliance of sunlight glittering from an inland lake! Maybe it is because I have spent the last twenty months in the city, nature is almost tangible, frangible, almost a fist in my throat. The mountains are reaching so incredibly high into the sky they seem a creation of surreal dreams. Nobody else, however, seems to notice, and fearful of coming off as crazy, I keep my silence. And the driver, Imai, turns on the traffic radio; he is a bit concerned about being able to get physically back, but as for turning back, this won't happen; we won't let it. It isn't until we pass through a mountain pass that all of a sudden the wind shifts and we are immediately, irrecoverably bombarded with snow. The effect is of a total blizzard. The massive scale of the white-out is so intense, in fact, that out of concern our driver turns on the traffic radio, but of course the true powder-hounds in our caravan will hear nothing of turning back; this is unbelievably positive news for them as we are already a hundred kilometers out of the city. A heavy density of snow falling against a gray-white cloud sky with oncoming traffic providing headlights subdued by the weather and evergreen trees covered with blankets of this and previous snowfall. The roads are covered to the depth of four to six inches and traffic slows to 60 kph pace, evenly spaced out on the mountain highway.

"But at least it's going to be brilliant."

"Un-freakin' believable."

We pile out of the buses; Soren and I organize the foreigners and associated Japanese so everybody knows what is going on.

"Okay, come here; that is where you get your lift ticket. That is our lodge..."

I catch sight of the three Japanese girls, snow bunnies, I feign indifference; I take note of the breathtaking scenery. But then I pull away from the group. I am a much better snowboarder. Somewhere, elevation 4000m, the sight lines are totally open, the heart thrills at the grand vistas that unfold from ridge unto undulating ridge, a veritable sea of mountains stretching as far as the eye can see. And this also—the crystalline perfection of winter air, the hoarfrost, the icy damp of snow crystals that have worked their way between jacket and ski pants. "A dagger in the heart" one writes of cute lost blonde girls small as a button; "a knife down one's throat"--the sensation of countryside opening up before one as one leaves the city—all of its history and baggage—behind; the pain that is so deep, so fundamental, that one is incapacitated and speechless—such terminology can only be reserved for communion with nature, so terrible, so unforgiving, against which our measures of human lives are so frail.

Is there any other way it would happen? The storm hits me at the top of Flattern Peak 2, and here is total white-out; here is visibility two point five meters. Siberia! Stalingrad. The nightmares of winterbound soldiers thousands of kilometers from home. Only indistinct shapes can be seen in the distance; the ropeways mark the path to trails, but whether one returns to the main gate, whether one skis deeper into the park—this is unknown. I am susceptible, of course, to the glorification of the inaccessible and luxuriant where words else fail. Do we read Hemingway because the trauma of senseless slaughter has given him highest wisdom? Or are we voyeurs (and not even so much as our parents' parents' generation) to bohemian Paris, Duisburg limousines, the Crillon, laughing rotund Greek counts both superior and beneath us? These thoughts race through the mind of a snow-bound skier, though practicality returns with the strapping of boot to board, inches off the cliff wall. And then, with heart pounding, to leap off; to jump into the void, and be consumed instantly with the immediate task of meeting the onrush of terrain with a skilled and practiced eye. A sloosha here, and a slash there; a long slide down one gentle incline to fishtail against the sudden approach of tall fir-trees. And then suddenly air where ground is expected; an only subconscious noting of a buried flagline; one is off-piste now, one is off-piste now, the snow is two feet deep and utterly ungroomed. Losing velocity is equal to suicide.

In pure powder, one is weightless. There are over thirty commonly used words to describe various types of snow, but the best, the very best, is champagne—a frothy light nothingness that melts beneath one's skis, that offers minimal resistance yet effortless support. To crash into a bank of champagne is to sink into a perfect pillow of utterly ethereal fluff. In World War II an Allied pilot fell six miles from the sky and landed in a bank of champagne—he survived, whereas any other surface then known to man would have spelled instant death. Flip-turn, flip-turn, flip-turn. In a cloud bank now, I slide through acres of champagne without the slightest expenditure of energy, sense of time, or sensation of gravity. This goes on for seeming eternity. But as quickly as it begins, the trees are now starting to creep in close, we're out of the fog now to noticeably lower terrain, and finally, in a little valley with a melting stream at the bottom, I slush out of snowboardable terrain to collapse, exhausted, into a convenient bank, and seek to take my bearings, knowing a long trek now awaits, if only that much, to return simply to the place I began.

Is this all metaphor? I know the tears, definitely, are real, the salt water blur behind complete opaque gold-mirrored lenses of my ski goggles, and the central, central pain, a pain like a sensation of freezing—although I am not cold—that burns to the core. A truth has sunk in. Somewhere beneath all the excited outside personality, a calm voice of understanding remains, understanding and comprehending. This is the end; this is the end. Winter is here. In my heart had been borne a hatred so intense that my face became a smiling mask. This isn't "Fear and Trembling;" this isn't about grudges or vendettas or counterstrikes delivered decades later. Rather everything happened the only way it could have happened, and I knew who was behind it, and it was only hours before I returned to the lodge, the sky already evening and twinkling with stars.

This is part of it. I have become TOO COOL. I look at people's faces now and see only the possibility of profit or loss. My skiing has become so good I can't even hang out with the ordinaries anymore; I can't bother to hang out with the crowd. And even Soren is falling behind as I become an eater of pure light and a drinker of mere energy. I will lose my job. But who cares? I will cease all contact with everyone else, but what to matter? The dizzying faces of other human beings, agents of a LeFauve who is actually doing nothing; the workplace conflicts that make us too aesthetically or intellectually outraged to even bother with this thing called reality; I am now infinitely beyond the reach of any other human being, and I can't be bothered with your commonplace concerns. The crash is coming. The crash is coming. Like a dizzying ride down a mountainside of pure, pure snow, I know that I have exceeded all safety boundaries years or eons ago, and the city is conquered, supplicant, legs spread and yielding before my sarcastic, unaccepting, coldly assessing eye. Goodbye Charis! You leave after the moment has become over-ripe. Goodbye Soren! I know when I am being played, and I realize what a long con looks like. Goodbye Shan! You are destined to be judged by the merciless policies of the Tokyo Metropolitan Criminal Court and deported back to Chinkyland. We should have had deep conversations. We should have talked about Life and Despair and Fate and History, but face it, we're all too well-off and beautiful to really ever care. I wish I could be deep. I wish I didn't have to spit in your eye. This is the peak; the final settlement, the most intense of intensities, as subconscious realization enters final adjustment and calculus. You could have kept on to the main thing, the sixty-thousand a year working in flash Micro-basic computing, you could have understood what you had. but it's all dissolved into a sea of flash and nothingness, and the little cues, the subtle facial expressions reveal an eventual fate and a supposed friend's hidden cue. Out on the slopes, through unconscious choice making, I am too cool to hang out with the group, or possibly sentiment has finally turned against me. Maybe the mountains are reaching almost to the heavens, or maybe I've just totally lost it. In these endless peaks, perhaps lives are being hidden. Maybe there's a hermit, retired to his lodge, boiling water; perhaps artists and potters are busy creating their minor creations. It's a blurred and lost reality. But the high has finally peaked, it has finally, finally reached the point of no return.

This is the moment, to be held, and then bobbled, amateurishly, by the failure, by the rock-star at his last spectacular moment. The others have been impressed, it's time to seize the bull by the horns, showing off the skiing ability honed on the Alleghenies and the Poconos, to be the dominant show-off for Eiko, Shiori, or Tomoko. A love affair with a Japanese, a settlement of all involved costs and a retreat from total collapse. Eiko the English speaker, to go to Paris with, to study French together with, coy and infinitely desirable. Shiori the arts-thinker, the life in Japan on the edges of the arts community, the perfect way she delicately folds a towel on a bathroom tower rack, all the small things that constitute a lifetime's memory. Tomoko, the fey and tall Catholic girl, virginal but strong, a girl who just standing up from a chair or walking along the street is a work of art. The answers to everything.

That evening, in the basement of the lodge, where HVAC equipment is whirring away and a solid stone foundation hides all noise from the outside world that the picture unfolds, the conclusion that of course was tied up in the initial meeting, and the terms of which were incorporated into the DNA of the relationship itself arrives, that monstrous beast which has finally opened up its jaws and taken its ferocious swallow. Everything that had happened, all hyper-manic obsessive compulsive, East-West, I am a Westerner in Japan, I am king of all I survey, all hustler, leveraged finance cash settlements event-planning, social engineering, social mining, work-dream-play-talk 7000rpm twirling twinkling plastic fantastic comes to an end. Two big blue plastic barrels, filled to the brim with all the MADO-analogue that has been Soren's "secret investment" all along, WINDOW which is supposed to "awaken" the Japanese personality, WINDOW that will usher in the greening of Japan, a more free-spending consumerism and turn around all the yen-carry bets that went sour the past winter.

"So Ritchie...guess you finally found the genie in the bottle." Soren grins. "Weren't you wondering why you suddenly sold seventy tickets in extremely easy fashion?"

"This is about the drugs."

"This is about people doing what they're told." Soren shakes his head. He is still old and beat-up looking, stressed out, and looking almost junior to me, but of course his eyes gleam with a superior eye.

"Ritchie, Ritchie, Ritchie. This is the basic reality of things. Making money is not easy. How come you can't even keep your job? Even the tickets you sold weren't easy. Your job, you have discovered, is not that simple, and merely staying 'on the level' requires you to spend everything you make. It's all a balancing act, isn't it? Your kind, middle-class, striver, ultimately, is destined to remain in the same socioeconomic class out of which it came. Now you're beginning to see some of the decisions that have to be made on the upper-levels."

"Soren, there are limits to what is...right. If you want to experiment with personality scrambling on your own self, fine, go for it. But you can't stim an entire city."

"Ritchie, either we are above Japan or Japan is above us. This is a distinction that you have failed to make, consistently, as we talked about things throughout the months. They have accepted failure and occupation as a defeated power and become junior to a protecting foreign country. Why do you think we make cash on yen-carry? It's because they refuse to believe in economic expansion. Why do you think the girls flock to us and their guys can't pick up anything but crumbs on the border of our micro-society? It's because power works that way. This is the law.

"Your problem, essentially, is that you want to be enchanted. You are looking for romance. You are looking for things that don't exist. My way is the only way, there is no other option or backdoor."

"Well count me out."

" You'll never work at a prestige-level job again."

Underneath the superstructure of an old 1960s ski lodge, amidst whirring machine and the gigantic blue pipes of a reservoir piping equipment, the end finally came. My skill is not high enough to explain how both phenomena occurred simultaneously: the ever-escalating white-hot knife of greater and greater energy and passion to work, work, work fifty hour workweeks, sixty hour, seventy, always a project volunteered for, always a pure passion for the job surrounded by unsmiling assessments, always the war against ultimately a mirror self, and the cold underlying realization, the disquieting and unforgiving truth that I was borrowing more and more time from a reserve that seemed inexhaustible only due to absolute youth and vanity. There was no CLARION. There was no French poet whispering rhymes in Soren's ear as he jetted from decrepit factory to another, working, essentially, for three dollars an hour. When you see very young people in Japan in serious black suits, they too are paying for that privilege and that itself is a fashion cult. There is only data entry and the rich who get that way because they come from a background that makes sitting down for seventeen hours and doing data entry practicable. Yes, Soutern was rich enough for his family to have four houses in the U.S.; he was well-off enough to rent, for a summer, an apartment in Roppongi Hills. But it was all financed by credit, leveraged bets, and the eternal yen-carry which constitutes a bet, using yen, that the yen-economy would suddenly expand the next quarter, contrary to ninety-six consecutive preceding quarters of anemic growth. You borrowed money from Mrs. Watanabe to invest in the Australian gold mine, but if the yen merely strengthened half a notch against the Aussie dollar, then even if the gold mine hit a vein of pure 24k gold, half your gains were lost. Or, possibly, you placed a bet that the currency would remain strong and that ninety-six quarters of growth would repeat, and then, amazingly, that one quarter the currency would hiccup. Either way you were always betting against the mirror and the house.

This is the conclusion at the final end of things, where ambition had reached its highest point and understood itself to now be teetering at the ridgeline at the top. Soren would collapse, of course, but once again the family would reach into its reserves, lose another vacation house, and then immediately institute emergency measures, rehabilitation, professional counseling, and years later, word would surface that he had finally reached his level of competence, running a restaurant in Belgium or Italy, a small turnover but at least functional, with all talk of 'country management' over. Dominique, to be seen only in passing, still bordering on schizophrenia, eventually seeking London to assuage an abnormality that was inherent. Shan Le completely disappearing out of the picture; Charis also lost to time and history. Tats still hanging out with the foreigners, although a diminished crowd. The economy down another 1.5% at exactly the measured pace it shrinks every year.

By browbeating, bowdlerizing, intensifying to the point of extortion every existing social contact and possible person on the street, you could just possibly earn twenty-thousand for two people in three months of effort, although it meant you lost your job, and your cell phone was going off at work, and you were sleeping only five hours at night, high on your own brain chemicals, astronomical only in your own head. My sins are major and multiple. A promising young Chinese scholar at a top university had his life ruined, after becoming involved with a social circle above his, although to be fair he had strange black marks in his criminal/academic record as well. I possibly bullied Dominique at a cafe once, although it seemed at the time she really desired it. In meeting young foreigners in Japan, those on forty-thousand a year equivalent, I found it easy to make dramatic promises that were never delivered and cultivated an image of competence and access that resulted ultimately in financial gain for me. Our greatest parties were always around the corner and every 'pecha-kucha' program was to generate only whatever few hundred in deliverables, all math being calculated. But whatever I did, I did not pump MDMA-analogue into the Greater Tokyo water supply, to cover yen-carry trades that had gone sour due to fundamental Japanese conservatism about economic growth. I never expanded my sense of purpose or functionality to chemically induce consumer spending by unwitting individuals. And walking upstairs out of the machinery room, down a long and mysterious and darkened hallway that was unairconditioned, almost covered in snow, and then passing the outdoor bath where the three girls, giggling and unselfconsciously naked, eye me to offer not sex, but the communication that there isn't even a possibility of it, Eiko drawing her long wet hair out of the water, Shiori measuring hers with a turned forearm, and with a mock bringing together of two fingers, Tomoko giving me the most curious of all possible smiles, I know now we are truly in decline, addicted to soft and easy pleasures, and I am superficial, incapable of expressing suffering, a mock partyboy who only through luck had his day in the sun.

I collapse and two dollars a day for half a world, communities and ethnic groups and rising Third World nations inching forward, increment by increment. The Filipino guy actually got the girl, death is final, and Blair was just trying to make a living. A Marine dies in Ikebukero. Filling the world up with her south Chinese ideographs, Alice or whatever her name was clawed her way up the corporate ladder. This is about you, or no one absolutely at all. And I am in the category now of the gently-treated friend, and no possibility of love exists if ever it did.

April 2013, Osan.

Author's Afterword

In this year, 2013, modern computer-based analysis can unearth the fact that an extremely well-read individual or highly-regarded professor may have read as few as seven hundred books, perhaps not even twenty or thirty in one specialized field; or that an author's "least timeless work," so to speak, is actually the greatest of their commercial successes. I'm thinking in particular of the great Kazuo Ishiguro, whose The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, one guesses, will still be widely read in fifty years, but whose "least timeless" Never Let Me Go is apparently his best contemporary success. Was it the dramatic cover? Or was Never Let Me Go massively assigned on the secondary school level, beloved by teenagers because it deals with teenagers and perhaps, in some distant way, a cousin of the Hunger Games phenomenon? It's possible even book-industry experts and professionals don't have a full view of the process, and perhaps that's part of the culture-spanning character of literature, wherein an Important Book may be forced onto reluctant teenagers, a Sleeper Hit may slowly gain an audience, or a Bestseller Novel may exist, largely unread, in some tens of thousands of libraries, slowly gaining dust and eventually discarded.

This book, Harajuku (+), is a revised version of the front half of the 2011 novel Harajuku Sunday, or if we presume it to be part of or influenced by the traditions of Japanese literature, it is the 'up' or 'rising' volume of the traditional two-volume Japanese novel (上). Subjected to rigorous analysis, Haruki Murakami's Hear the Wind Sing (1979) was the 'up volume' followed a year later by Pinball, 1973. Murakami followed Pinball with another 'Rat' novel, making his debut work a trilogy, just as later in his career he was to unexpectedly (and to some in his native country, insufferably) add a third part to 1Q84 (2009-10), so in a sense we are lucky to have this eccentric and surrealist writer who is creating a living, responsive body of work, yet in another sense the naysayers are weary of the drama/personality expression involved insofar as it conflicts with the ideal of a 'reclusive artist' with little or no contact with the everyday world. Further, the Up/Down divide reflects a culture-wide preoccupation with the miniature rather than the gigantic, the front-rear divide so vigorously discussed by sociologists, as well as a pessimistic view of the span of a life itself, wherein early promise by definition militates against later success.

The revision process leading to this extended recut of the front half of Harajuku Sunday is a direct response to reader feedback, which might be summarized briefly as "More Soren, More Soren, More Soren." Anyone acquiring a copy of the 2011 text will of course note most dramatically the recharacterization of a separate character into another aspect of Soren, but aside from this issue, there's little or no reason for a first-time reader to go back to the 2011 draft. Typos and misspellings have been corrected, further detail added, and the draft taken from some 35,000 words to in excess of 40,000, but of course, nobody but a Sunday fanatic is expected to go back and locate the earlier draft, which in more settled times might not have been released to the public until having gone through a process that has evolved naturally.

This leads to the question of whether Sunday (+), the presumed 2014 revision/recut of the second half or "下" volume will ever appear. Previous fans of Harajuku Sunday know that Ritchie Ufuo, the narrator of the work, will now have to deal with a life in Tokyo without girlfriend, job, rich best friend, or expansive social circle. Should this revision appear? The question may be more surprisingly difficult for the creator rather than the recipient. "Authors and readers are friends," the famous saying goes, a sort of encouragement to the writer to take care of those who have invested three or four hours to make their way through a work. But the flip side of the equation, hopefully, is some understanding that a creative must sometimes invest six months' of effort, social-withdrawal, and even deterioration of their day career in order to create a novel-length work.

For those who feel they must live in Japan, I will close this afterword by noting Junichiro Tanizaki, Natsumi Soseki, Shusaku Endo, Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, the two Murakami's, and perhaps Natsuo Kirino round out those authors truly capable of transporting the returned expat or Japan-specialist to the "far-off, 'mists and mountains' Japan-world." Western writers David Mitchell, Pico Iyer, and James Clavell despite (because of?) their British origins also seem uniquely endowed with Japanese sensibilities, and of course there's plenty of obscure works, some hidden in libraries, some in used book stores, which could end up being a private and personal delight. Part of the experience of the stream of literature is understanding the evolution of the "national experience" or the "national identity" (insofar as these definitely exist), combined with the oft-commented nature of the 'East-West' difference, and on a more general level, that of the human condition itself. To that end Tanizaki and Soseki do seem to have laid the foundation for what later generations have taken up, and barring absolute disaster for the human race, presumably yet another generation will expand on this foundation their own apparently less profound, but apparently far more evocative take on the eternal book.

Tanizaki's study of obsessions, Soseki's examination of values, the Mishima-Kawabata dynamic and our contemporary Murakami offer some sense of perspective from an individual against apersonal statistical or demographic decline. From this foundation, other national traditions can be examined, and although a purely one-cultural approach only covers so much scope of the human experience, it probably isn't coincidental that John Fowles, for example, understood Britain and then understood Greece; the American with some study of Japan covers a fairly large amount of territory, if not the entire global experience.

In any case, I appreciate the time and effort you've invested in this work, and hopefully you've enjoyed a few hours escapism in a Tokyo that has, in fact, already begun to fade away.

S. Michael Choi

Osan, April 2013.

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If all the sadness of a "beautiful sad-eyed dark-haired girl" could be brought to its highest degree in some sort of characterization of a New Jersey suburb life, dark nights, rain-wet trees, the potentiality that was stifled and never expressed itself, en this would constitute a sort of half-seen vision, a over-romanticization that Shoegazer would call "wildly romantic visions of the decline of my romanticism." It was aesthetic theory and conversation all at once; it was wooden-walled saints bars, it was that sometimes talked about idea of "the girl of our fourteenth summer," before love ever existed, before we had words to describe things, before reality thundered in, took everything away, and went on without you.

The sad eyed German girl at Planckstrasse; the dark-haired mythical samisen-strumming Asian: who could decide between the two? Whose sadness was deeper? SEATTLE would show up one last time; there was space for one last waltz, and it happened, finally, a few years after graduation, in some statistically unlikely coincidence of a few weeks in Seattle proper, as TUSK nervously fumbled for coins in his pocket, found the payphone, and dialed the numbers scribbled on a wrinkled piece of paper. SEATTLE answered.

"Oh TUSK! Totally awesome! You're in Seattle for how long? We should definitely meet!"

The undercurrent of what had passed before them was the undertone for a couple of completely unawkward meetings at a Starbucks (and it was in in Seattle itself) that culminated finally in a long drive out to the eastern part of the state. Neither brought up the issue of past history; it was understood to be under the bridge, and what had changed was merely that SEATTLE had become more in touch with her life goals. he girl who had once refused to clean floors at a bakery was now a senior director at an arts foundation and with her Blackberry clicking away, she continued to manage her workweek even as the two drove in the dark Mercedes out to forest country. She seemed incognizant of her change; she was older, for sure, but if anything more beautiful, her long dark hair had shortened to shoulder length, but she was still somehow incredible, her features were just so refined and Angelina Joliesque that one's throat caught; one was enraptured by beauty.

"I don't know what this is all about," stuttered TUSK. "I mean we're just hurtling through space, to some unknown destination in time, and nobody seems able to stop anything, nobody seems to be in control."

SEATTLE was sympathetic. "But it's exactly that we're all in this situation that makes it able. What would be unbearable if you were the only one caught up like that, and everyone else was in control. So you work with what you have."

"I just feel like my future is even more unknowable than others'. It looks like I'm going to be working in China for a while, some industrial city in the westlands that's all black smoke belching out of coal burning plants and sticky sand-storms that coat everything in a blanket of pollution. It's that, or just be unemployed and sulking at home all day, no choice."

"I'm sure it will be a great adventure. You just have to think that few people actually get to live lives like that. And see, you even think in those terms; how remarkable."

This is what had finally become understood about SEATTLE. Whereas most girls had something inside of them—some punch or kick or desire for something, SEATTLE just didn't have anything inside of her. There was a black-hole—a lack of wanting things, that maybe could only come up when you were born into everything, and were standing to inherit so many millions in so many years, and this was beautiful, this was why she didn't strive after things or ride the corporate ladder; even the accession to director-level at a non-profit was something that happened accidentally, and she was doing it because it was a process of making the world a more organized place. She would leave—in a second, if asked to.

"We were thinking at the time that we were all going to be brilliant artists. We had this idea we'd be famous, we'd be Jack Kerouac, or we'd somehow manage to defeat all odds—all the econ majors, all the science dorks—and be something; be distinctive. But we're just middling successes."

"TUSK, you're worried too much about what you are and not about what you do. Just live each moment by the day; you come into work, you get that day done. What is driving this anxiety?"

It's not certain; or rather, it's certainly not the case that describing what happened that car-trip would make this description any more accurate. Nothing happened, of course; the two drove, they ate at a diner, they got into a canoe and paddled around looking at nature. Underneath was the undercurrent of sexuality; on some level they could have maddeningly ripped each others' clothes off and had frantic sex, but that would almost cheapen what had been going on for so many years, and in any case, the decision was already set. SEATTLE was dedicated to her work; TUSK wasn't going to bring up projects in distant Chinese provinces. He was going to be annoying, in fact; he was going to be insistent on the unfairness of things he was doing, although there was no possible reason for it. They smoked cigarettes at some night-time lamppost; they discussed long-forgotten people, and SEATTLE was maybe a touch narcissistic about things, sipping deliberately on sparkling wine from a local vineyard. Seattle had just decided, some long ago time, that she would just live out her twenties, and then at thirty not push things anymore, not really pursue matters, so her choice was something that was, well, destined, not even a choice really, rather a lack of choice to return. Like a certain other construct in a certain other Japanesque literature stream, she would leave this vale of tears and that would be the result of certain choices and actions, although in this particular case, there wasn't even a precipitating love act. It was just: the sea of nothingness, a data pool, television static.

"When I grew up here in the Pacific Northwest, I guess I always understood that I was different from other people. We had everything; they had nothing. We could never be poor or have needs, others would have to mold themselves into institutions in order to get by; they would have to play by the rules. Tusk was more pure poise, pure energy balanced but never releasing itself."

"SEATTLE is fascinating because she can be anything; she chooses not to be. The economics householders can't choose art; the arts person can choose to be a business manager."

"TUSK thinks of me as a certain type; I am the perfection of 'beautiful sad-eyed dark-haired girl.' It is a form of categorization to be perceived outside as such type; if we are 'Asian artists,' that itself is a value judgment, and that itself is a category that cannot in kind include the tenor of the artistic choice, the path selection that is the predominant motif of events until now. I couldn't be the groundbreaking artist myself—this was TUSK's goal, but then in turn he became silent; he withdrew into himself, he disappointed arguably more than I did, that unofficial non-sellout pack of his nineteenth year (I was twenty-one). Image, sound, memory, impression: these themselves would defy long-winded description. To drown yourself in a Nam June Park video. To lose yourself in regional studies. Even in the ride up, out to eastern Washington, there was coffee, there was a diner, there was those dark mysterious woods spinning past the windshield, an ache for experience or memory or loss, a source of dark creativity, of fears in the night, of the stories that would unfold wherever so they would, an answer to identity art."

"What we did was drive out for long distances, until the odometer ticking over was some kind of event in itself. 19,999 miles, then 20. I think she left, that last time, to get into her car, without looking back, a swerving, a capture in sunlight that would later constitute a memory. It was an episode; an interruption. I showed her the calluses on my palm from intensely gripping the steering wheel in bridge input tunnels in the city; then I showed the map, the distances crossed; that territory."

"You cannot capture the real things in narration. The play of moonlight on a field, that impression of the night drive's back from some favored destination: it was there; those people interacted; that thing was felt."

"Shopping mall, woman questioned, staff at McDonalds wondering at cash changing hands, people at dinner tables not wanting to be talked about openly. Lack of affect; narcissicism."

She was an 'older sister type.' That much was the crux of things, underlay why the relationship would go so far and then proceed no further. If she felt this overwhelming urge to protect TUSK, to keep him from all possible harm, he in turn felt that there was no other girl who could quite pull off things as well as her. And there were fake imitations. The Wellesley girl who thought Paris was the most exotic and appropriate destination for an heiress (please). The actually mentally unstable girl who thought newspaper articles were in reference to her; who criticized random other people at a reunion dinner table (uh, hi, they don't know you). Nobody else could just be pure artistic sentiment combined with an absolute black hole of lack of desire. There was one last swan song, one last flotation, a drifting away into a sea of stars, this game of love that ended just so. Taos would be like that; New York's art scene would be like this; but here, white paper, black ink words, you didn't need a penny more or a penny less, to be transported, transformed.

SEATTLE was beautiful beautiful beautiful. In Tokyo there had been drunken nights. In Kyoto they had both looked with awe at that huge train station with the stairs all the way to the top. And then TUSK had lost his wallet, and shared SEATTLE's sandwich. They argued in such a way that was unforgivable, and then they were all right to each other, and then she walked off at the airport. He had never had a chance; he was deluding himself. But she loved him, too; in an older-sister way.

"Those East Coast boys, so whipped by society, so unable to just be who they are. It's not even the real America really. The woods extend five thousand miles north from Seattle up to the very arctic circle, where they disappear into white snow conifers. The identity politicker, the accumulators; the dingy brown hand extended forward for hand-outs. What do they know of these depths; those silent frozen tundras and dark as night forests where the owls call and the wolves prowl? This is Pacific northwest temperate rain forests."

She graduated; she returned home; she tried to be an artist, but didn't produce anything that was stunningly good. She was all right; she was decent. She was respected. But she herself was beautiful; she herself was so untouchable, so ethereal. "We had one class together, taught by a thin Christian. We came together around the book 'Brideshead Revisited,' and I saw some things TUSK worked on, I thought he was clearly the recessive character. He only understood this by the very end." The road goes on and on. The two drive out to unknown destinations. Neither makes a play for the other.

That was the end of SEATTLE, to be remembered, most intensely, years later, at a program with one hundred eighty SEATTLE copies, but nobody quite comparing, the "" girl with no desires, no future, and no intent to stick around. The lump in one's throat, sticking, was a form of false nostalgia—and something hasn't been captured, either, the Japanese restaurant, the past stories, the one previous relationship that affected everything and made everything impossible. Cell phones, calculators, data pads, consumer electronics streaming in at highest possible velocity into everyone's lives and tearing us all apart.

Farhome tapped on her iPhone. Sunday.

Several years after separating ways with Seattle, Tusk found himself at a Japanese language program located at some time-space-culture nexus directly apposite the experience, and this is a narration or account of those six weeks, two different years of three weeks, taking as it does the institution of the novel, narration, plot, and language as its main theme. In this first and last final accounting of things, things would have to begin with the understanding that like last year and like other programs unfolding, the main play of action was over, and Week 6 could only be about accounting, tying up things, letting go others. Within the fourth floor kitchen, a drama unfolded between three Japanese girls, IOTA, GOAT, and TUSK, and here is a natural segue into that third and interesting personality, IOTA, who found and located her coalition of cute, and then led it at the orientation walkabout; what kind of girl looks for other cute girls and self-identifies with this value as a sort of aesthetic identification, to be little miss oblong-eyes at a program of one hundred girls?

IOTA, and this is what we are getting at, loved the 'kawaii' (cute). What she would do is deliberately buy some little small plate rather than a practical medium or large sized one, so that inconveniently for the next three years she would have to serve herself little tiny mountains of rice or little tiny portions of whatever else was served, while her family rolled their eyes and found their own daughter tiresome, that dinner would be turned into some kind of production, and she would then draw little girly eyes on her pencil sharpener and name inanimate objects; that she would live in a self-created bubble of cute, such that foreign girls especially would depise her, and the only tragedy being, of course, that it would be impossible to inhabit this value-system indefinitely, whereas one could be 'understated,' 'chic,' or even 'archetypical' almost indefinitely. The three Japanese girls stalked about, trying to call out the other. GOAT broke first, dissolving into Japanese, semi-hysterical. TUSK tried to convert this to full psychological dominance, but it was timing; that made everything impossible. IOTA had to return right at that moment, for a beautiful split second TUSK wondered he could convert things into a threesome, but no, that was delusional; that wasn't going to happen in a million years.

"I have a boyfriend!" screamed IOTA.

"Oh God, thanks a lot," muttered TUSK. He walked off, hands in pockets, returned with Rophynol and drugged up the little girl. Somehow magically without committing any improprieties...

But then that didn't happen, either. So many bloody occurrences and separate walkabouts that Seoul itself suggested itself as the next and next-to-last character. ICEPRINCESS was thoughtful. Her Korean boyfriend had finally--finally--made that leap into higher cognition that if he wanted to bring PRINCESS over, he would have to cough out for a private apartment. It didn't have to be big, nor did it have to be central, but something finally clicked that he and she were graduating; they would need some sort of game plan for the future. It only helped matters that ICEPRINCESS was graduating eight months before her boyfriend; he would have time to cook things together while she wrapped up things in Japan. She cooked dinner for him that Tuesday and thought deeply about events.

BARBIEDOLL and Farhome were off shopping in Gangnam. Rockstar walked, alone, by the Han River.

Seoul, the Nagoyaesque city lacking any sort of romantic possibility whatsoever, glittered in the night without comment. It was incapable of direct action, for it was just an abstract entity. Yet in metaphysical terms, it acted. What is to say is that it was particularly the geography of that city of hills and rivers that made up matters. Precisely due to the layout of the streets, the Gwak clan (PRINCESS's boyfriend's extended family) met up in sequence that decided that they would accept PRINCESS's demands for an apartment in hopes of an ultimate alliance. Boyfriend had to serve two years' in the K.A.; after that, the middle-class PRINCESS would be brought into the slightly upper-classish Gwak family, which now having a Japanese wing, could hope for more of a business compatible connection. The way it unfolded was unpenetrable to the Western mind: with simultaneous language in Korean and Japanese, unfolding Kansai-ben and upper-class Korean language, three or four insults and compliments were encoded in precise usage patterns and pauses between syllables that are impossible to represent here. But, for example, the half-millisecond pause before

"New Zealand university" (in Korean)

Was one defense mechanism the inferior culture could offer to the elite commentary offered by PRINCESS's older brother, who was in town for business.

It would be possible, in one sense, to attempt this impossible feat, to just record for whatever posterity's sake that infinitely complicated speech mechanisms by which that most serious of societal mechanisms, the marriage, was carried out. But that would be detraction, ultimately, from the final course of events, 2/1, the program at large, Keiwha drawing to a close in its final week with oral tests and then written. The program directors showed their hand: each question was designed to draw inferences about the class dynamic at large, such information then be unfolded into further class instruction design and the survey, being written out in Japanese and English, offering obvious identifying characteristics about each teacher and class. The Japanese family questioned the Koreans' ancestry; the Koreans commented on how cheap the material of PRINCESS's handbag and sweater were, but all of this was taking place under three layers of politeness, such that nobody looking on could have any clue whatsoever what was happening. Beneath mandarin like faces, the brokers of each family made their decision and then the date was fixed.

"Our family, being of ancestry line XYZ and distinguished lineage ABC, does most respectfully exist in the four thousand year neighborhood of G---, located on the I line..."

"Duty being what it is to our extended corporate ties to MNO chaebol/conglomerate, we do deign to..."

"Presumption being made, the assumption would be that such offer, having been considered in all possible lights, can only lead to..."

Yet this was of course exactly what didn't happen; it was all self-denial and self-family depreciation, underneath of which was only the malice and hopes for improvement. The deal was closed.

Keiwha year two, meanwhile, proceeded unopposed. Socialnode finally knit together her last contact, her excessive desire to be Miss Human Resources finally started sapping her energy and she took off for a sauna to bake in 110 degrees, as tourists from her country and mostly Korean families sweated into sauna-provided clothes. It was hot; these 'jimjjilbang' were great institutions, yet she would never stay in one overnight, that would be untold. Though ICEPRINCESS would be queen always of the appropriate knock-kneed pose at any given moment and Rockstar had clearly won basic aesthetic victory, program victory would actually appear in the end from Boy-4.

"Some of us are going out tonight; last night of the program. Meet up at the main gate."

Such was the laconic text he sent around, to twenty or so names who generated another forty or so followers. Ultimately a full third of the program was assembled at the gate, just in time to catch TUSK being dropped off by G.14 in a government car. (Both sides pretended not to see each other.)

"Guess he's all sizzle and no steak."

"A looker-on."

"Still he's cute..." and some girls did giggle.

It was odd. Boy-1, he of the elite background and best possible looks, was the obvious candidate to be final social leader, but in the end, the group of sixty, a little socially low, a little chubby, gathered around the sort of noisy Boy-4; and Boy-5, nerd and computer programmer, would have no chance whatsoever. So the fifty or so girls took off for a local grilled meat place, and though this was far less in terms of complexity than the previous year (involving three distinct groups, Japanese, European, American), still it made for the only appropriate ending for a monocultural session, one in which the program director folded her hands and felt smug. She signed off on the class leader choices and thought about aesthetics as well, pleased at financial outcomes if not at a lack of dramatic events.

Classroom outcomes: 1/3 coalesced around charismatic and well put together Sayuri; 1/5 class of THETA, Roughcut, and Leaf-3 was bemused at final attempts of flirtation by multiple boys. 1/1, as could be expected, went nowhere and 1/2 was possibly saved by the cheerfulness of its South American contingent; 1/6 had no drama to report.

2/1 saw the division between dynamic poles BARBIEDOLL/Farhome and ICEPRINCESS/Rockstar. It was interesting how both had elements of the other within them; BARBIEDOLL was the quintessential Tokyo mod rocker yet the beta group had the actual rockstar. BARBIEDOLL may have been ultimately socially most prominent yet Rockstar was the most distinctive "famous for fifteen minutes" individual, whose eventual subordination of the Nerdgirl coalition earned some kind of honors; Nerdgirl group of 4 was not entirely contemptible, because they clung to their own ways and would always vote LDP come what may. 2/1's final possible group GOAT + out of class IOTA remembered nothing about their abuse by U.S. government agencies or agency; one of the affects of Rophynol is selective amnesia, and though they wondered why they were so sore, they felt no residual ill will. In fact, they had certain fantastic dreams that week, a result of REM suppression by drug-induced sleep and then the rebound affect; some vision of a sunglass-clad Special Forces officer picking them up and flying them to their dormitory in a very quiet helicopter. And GOAT actually closed the deal with the coffeeshop smiler; they officially became a number, the only one of the program.

AJ-4, 5, 6 were friends, but possibly not to remain in touch after the program. AJ-4 was tall and had her daughter; easy-going. AJ-5 was true grandmother.

2/2, undiscovered territory, saw the earlier departure of first the masculine faced girl and then GREENEYES. Masculine-faced girl, with much male hormone, liked technical things, but felt had to some degree. There were complains: length of program, usage of classtime to do cultural speeches or whatnot. The program was accepting that it was increasingly a shopping and tourist boondoggle rather than serious academic inquiry, although both forces existed. Older British woman saw her husband arrive; they had discussions about a marriage as well in their extended family, and cultural/political anger would simmer but not erupt; the marriage was stable.

3/1, 3/2, and 4/1 and 4/2 populated by older students and more advanced speakers of language, did have one bright faced younger girl who was quite esoteric in her class representative speech, making some interesting points about history that took into account all perspectives. Here was true undiscovered territory, for only in the complexity of language could true political discourse begin. All else was fluff. 4/2 had one eavesdropper; he could be seen as well from the top floor of the new building, sipping coffee, thinking. Only once did he skulk off into a bathroom guiltily; it was just a coincidence of time and space.

The final week could be divided along cultural/linguistic lines. Something had had happened with regard to the Chinese group, which may have coincided to some degree with concurrent longer-term programs involving Malaysians or Cantonese and the young Anan, peppy nineteen year old, made it her point to go out to meet all sorts of random people, white fur hat bobbing, but this wasn't the real wrap-up: it was more esoteric.

THETA walked forward. "You know, you just gotta be what you gotta be!"

She was an artist; the last one to close out this ornithological field report, visual rather than musical or literary, a bright dresser, a wearer of embroidered patterned skirts and bird-like, bemused, a hint of a laugh always on the lips as she explored the visual situation unfolding before her. She had been present at the first conversation with IOTA and GOAT. It was perfect timing.

"Wha! You speak perfect Japanese!"

She crouched; that is, she literally crouched forward agog at hearing the fluidity of the conversation unfolding; it was some sort of important lesson on what a language sounded like to a native speaker when it was learned well rather than merely correctly. THETA was keen on TUSK after this moment.

"GOAT is kinda overstating her position because, you know, we both dress distinctly, but I improvise something differently while GOAT has the small doll outfit everyday. It's a nice dress, but it means she's conservative, you know; she just wants to live in doll world forever.

"It's possible painters are the worst possible commentators on things. We see everything in visual terms, which means that by definition we aren't people-people. In fact, maybe we're the worst to comment on things. But being a painter means taking your own path; finding your own way in the world.

"Things come from within! The answer lies within!"

THETA, more than anyone else, stood out from the crowd; although she was self-involved and individualistic. Between her and ICEPRINCESS, it would be hard to say who exhibited higher qualities, yet one lie already has been encoded since actually Week 6 really was all about ICEPRINCESS, that advanced speaker of polite language, that implicist who broke one little pinky promise and caused storms to erupt, yet still drew the pattern forward more, whose silence rubbed off on one, who communicated things without even trying. ICEPRINCESS wore a new sweater on Monday of the third week; it reflected exactly off classroom dynamics just do. But to call it out would have been like trying to catch a snowflake: it would have ruined it.

The variegated THETA, the 'Kyoto bijin' ICEPRINCESS; both were part of a dynamic of sorts, a counterpoint to the fat-girl coalition, the nerd girl quartet, the cool kids led by BARBIEDOLL, the cute as pie threesome (soon to fall apart) with IOTA at the apex. THETA stood for creation (with radical politics); ICEPRINCESS was concerned with pragmatic realities, and BARBIEDOLL liked revolution and revolt. This was the foundation for aesthetic difference, politely communicated distances between outlooks that could be overplayed but weren't. It would mean war.

"Be whoever you want to be! March to the beat of a different drummer!"

But the nerdgirls, THETA's nemesi, saw flaws to that approach.

"We are who we are we are because of our uniquely unique differences already. We cannot adopt colorful Korean prints; we like subdued colors, afternoon rainshowers and evenings rather than bright sunny summer days. This is Japan!"

"I didn't even spend much time speaking to this boring subgroup of people. Spend all your time at the art galleries, Seoul is alive!"

"Maybe THETA can almost pull it off, but if a boy ever wonder candy necklaces raver style, we'd vomit!"

"Architecture, design, drawing. What else is there in life?"

She was right on this matter, at least; the architecture of the new building had driven people towards the same collection point, on the ground floor, an unanticipated strategic difference. Yet TUSK was nonplussed.

"Leaf 27, Iota 38, variant 5 of nerdgirl 2, and 1/5's charismatic. Something is captured here; that swirl; that tumble; those partnerships of two or three that evolved. Even in the subway station; the nearby shopping mall; the movie that was seen for rest or to kill a few hours, now finally we understood. Yeah computer programmer boy said hello; and by yesterday's close fall, it had all been decided. But if there's one thing that missing from this sort of representation, it's only that things ultimately, were, indeed, unknowable. I don't know why the third teacher was so hostile; it's undiscoverable where rainbow colors entered the Korean aesthetic palette so long ago, and birdlike, THETA became more womanly by the hour. There could be no possible decisions made that weren't subject to retroactive review, and the things that weren't done were the best possible things of all. Compared to the sheer convertibility of last year's adventures, year 2 had buildings that rose out of unexpected corners, wide streets, the span of the Han River. Geography was indeed everything; it underlay it all."
Free Sample from "1500 Days in Shanghai"

by the Same Author,

Coming Soon in 2014

MilkCocoa, before she was KOKO, before she was just KO, was one-half of a visual-novelty act. What that meant was that in Shanghai in the early years of the 2000s, she was an indie rock musician who performed with an extremely huge, extremely gigantic large black man, perhaps in his late twenties, basketball shirt (and this was way before HM, although admitted co-contemporaneous with the back half of Gorillaz), and then, right in front of him, her tininess magnified by the contrast, 6'7" 350 pounds vs. 4'11" 80 pounds, a tiny Shanghaiese doll-like miniature of a girl-child, straight-cut bangs, pigtails, rocker t-shirt and boy shorts, who bounced around the stage carrying her microphone, and cheerful, energetic, loud, created a visual and auditory spectacle that was striking, that stood out, that evolved out of the incestuous member-sharing that was the hallmark of Shanghai rock.

Some held that "Chinese rock" was a Western creation, sponsored and financed by UK and Japanese labels, and created, delivered, and packaged primarily for the expat and then foreign market. Entire bands toured the US marketed solely as "rock music from China." In any case, MilkCocoa, cream, dark coffee, enjoyed a degree of support beyond the mere ironic. The hipsters went to the concerts because pose was hip, so fly sugarcats with mock ironic sideburns feigned an absolute dedication to MilkCocoa that was half understood, while others opened up with a MilkCocoa night before they disappeared at 3 or 4am into clubs that never advertised. And although Shanghai's rock scene was all of two hundred actual performers (city population: 23 million, viz. NYC's 8 million with 4 to 5000 aspiring rock artists), actually it would be overstating matters to declare the scene was borne aloft purely by foreign capital. True, the main livehouse was 51% Japanese owned, two indie movies were paid for out of London or Los Angeles, and US cash financed five or six little web-streaming ventures, but there were two suicides and one almost-certain homicide in the scene. This could not be purchased. China's rock god-father, Cui Jian, could still be approached at music festivals and livehouse openings and name-dropped by itinerant actresses out of L.A., but the existence of black leather motorcycle-clas thin washed-up middle-aged Chinese at the occasion 20rmb group show demonstrated that not everything was purely imitative.

This is about Shanghai. This is about the rock scene. This is about a city that was actually the largest in the world but carried little prestige. "I just got a job in Shanghai," one might remark in Chicago. One's friends would all feel sorry for you. "I landed a position in Dubai" or "I'm starting work in Washington D.C.," and there, ears would perk up, the status of the speaker enhanced.

For these reasons one might begin here as much as anywhere else. YoungPunk, LittlePea were two short-lived groups that were almost exactly quite like MilkCocoa, but either they lacked the Western partner or their tunes were banal, or they just faded before MilkCocoa's crowd-pleasing excellence. If Cocoa made eye contact with Aaron the summer festival for not more than a fraction of a second, and if all of a sudden the moshers were on him, or if the glam rock model band from St. Petersburg wasn't glum and looking for new fans, in the air dense with marijuana, Century Park, then maybe nothing at all would have happened. But that's where the Green Bay Aaron, a painter and international program art teacher, met Co, and so this is where we enter the scene, 23 million teeming Chinese, mostly laborers, heralded by national music, awoken in the morning by group dancers, and bombarded with pollution, yellow dust, PM2.5, noise, blaring horns, klaxons, propaganda, and tumult, out of all this, the tiniest possible thread of destiny or history.

With a cute little bear hat, Cocoa bounced around the stage singing "When I Grow Up," and if she had not yet discovered the little trick of wearing a dark blue sailor top to go with the Hello Kitty hairpins, she was still clearly "mode a la gamine," and she had assembled a rotating crowd of some five hundred fans at any one turnout, half foreigners, half Chinese, with the precise relationship between her and the huge black monster deliberately kept ambiguous. Were they a pair in real life? Did they date or sleep together? Few knew, though one guessed no, since artists don't necessarily get along in that sense with their musical partners, but later, by the fourth or fifth concert, by which time Aaron had finally initiated conversation with her, the truth of their existing relationship came out.

\--Ah ha, so you are dating him.

\--Well, "dating" is an odd word.

Aaron sniffed. --Do you know I have an airplane?

She laughed. He had already told her he was a painting teacher.

\--He says he loves me. I think he's going to marry me.

\--Where is the ring?

The gods—or the gremlins that run the clockwork of the universe—decided they had their games to play. A few weeks later Aaron painted a deck of cards as a extended classroom module for his brood of thirty seventeen-year-olds. That evening, without any prior communication, she sang "Ace/Spades; Queen/Diamonds" newly released. The following week he sketches out hands and delivered a brief lecture about the motif to the students. Not two days passed before MILKCOCOA performed an impromptu encore about "my P.A.W.S (People Against Whaling Society)." There were these washed-up late thirty-something Brits who had said hello to her at the first little folk acoustic event or 30-person unannounced Friday night. The whole joke was that you would only hear by word of mouth. But Aaron was now puzzled at the possible linkage of subconscious—he understood artists, being one, and believed he could identify exactly where the line between stage persona and base personality lay, and with some social contacts with NYC's shoegazer scene and little dalliances in Seoul, Los Angeles, Seattle, El Paso, he wanted this to burn for a long, long time. There could be only the slowest of slow slow plays, against the backdrop of jackhammers and skyscrapers rising, factories churning, the air heavy with pollution, the high-rise residential compounds multiplying like fruit flies. Summer had arrived, and the expats retreated to outdoor pools, artificial beaches, frozen margaritas.It was here, after a few blurry drinks, that hands brushed hands and eyes met, and in a somewhat dazed out alcoholic evening, hearts did whatever they did, and to a few curious coy glances, the two casually disappeared from a night full of wild passes and put-downs, bought drinks and affected conversations. She lived in the French concession.

Aaron would go on to live some kind of life after this infatuation, of course. He would live for many decades afterwards experiencing various ups-and-downs and ending up, as most citizens of the First World, with a better-than-average outcome. But of all the memories, pains, dreams, fears, pleasures, holidays, family get-togethers, periods of poverty and loss, desolation but also redemption, marriage, jobs, friendships and deaths, the memory of the beautiful Shanghai girl-child, small-breasted, guitar strap-strung over her naked shoulder and wakening him on a Sunday morning with sunlight's crepuscular rays streaming in would endure in his memory forever.

Then Milk burst in.

From post-coital afterglow and feelings of warmth and oneness with the world, Aaron went to the other extreme: perfect and absolute terror. A huge, gigantic black man had entered his love chamber and discovered that a thin scrawny white boy had just screwed his girlfriend. Holy fvck! The situation could quickly have led to disaster. Instead the most strangest thing happened. Without taking the slightest notice of the thin Wisconsin boy, Milk began to animatedly refer to a song the duo were composing and Cocoa provided the requisite answers. Then Milk spun on his heels and returned to his mad composing, apparently without noticing his cuckolder at all.

Later that week, things were worked out between Milk and Cocoa as such things are worked out between people who have been both good friends and lovers for years and much of their youth. Milk wrapped up his day job in Shanghai, reception clerk for a magazine, and returned to Durham, N.C. Of all the people covered in this work, only Milk found happiness, family, stability, a good job, tradition, peace, and comfort. He would return home to the States, an uncle would provide him with a good contact who found him a Food and Drug Administration job, he would rise through the ranks and almost make Senior Executive Service, and retire to two two-story homes, three cars and a boat, a brood of children who were all off to the university. Amidst this noise and happiness, a friend of him would ask him, "Milk, what's the secret? How did you unlock the mystery of life and become so great?"

And Milk, the tall big jolly Negro, now 57, would say, "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Lissen' son. It's all very simple. I know when I need to be blind, itz that simple. Thatz all you need in life!"

What had happened with that some filthy rich lobbyist was caught adulterating US meat products and bribing Milk's boss, but Milk just didn't seem to catch on. Eventually yeah the boss got caught and went to jail, but that just meant Milk got promoted, and his boss's boss, who was also in on the take but not obviously so, gave Milk a nice big raise and a honorary gold watch. People just gave Milk everything and Milk kept smiling.

He was the only happy guy in all this span of time.

Anyway, to return to the present. Aaron and Cocoa are entwined. The thing about these brief intense love affairs brought together by "artistic chance" and not through tradition or genuine history is that of course by nature they cannot last. The magic had been enough to bring the two together, Cocoa the poor-little-rich-Chinese mainlander, Aaron the abstract painter from Green Bay, but when the day broke on the real texture of a relationship, about dirty laundry and washing dishes and the career that was already arcing downwards, both already knew that the wild uneasy and passionate flare-up was of its own accord limited. There were four full months of perfection, four golden 30-day spans in which everything worked perfectly, in which even the motion of the trees seems to scribe adoring hymns to love and the city lay before them, ancient, yielding, gloriously in decline. But finally the love-light began to fade, the two split up.

All things can be characterized at least two ways. We can look at Cocoa and say that she was a beauty-rock indie-punk pre-indie-industry meta-goth whose sonic progressions tore down that whisper-thin veil between this and the other world. This brief, poignant love affair that took place in mythical Shanghai (characterized here as whispering plane trees, the French concession buildings in stone and modernist concrete already crumbling under the assault of 21st century Chinese air pollution) with fictional, only in retrospect Suzhou-style canals running through the alleyways (this is fictional; Suzhou was a hundred miles to the west, but memory is elusive) may have been the ultimate rock progression of dada art, Aaron's unthinking subconscious art-mock-if conzept against which we trade the purely subliminal, jazz-influenced improv sequences that marked early Cocoa. Or we can say that just another typical West Chinese girl was trying her hardest to get into Canada, and briefly succeeded for a few years before the visa paperwork fell apart. The judgment is too difficult to make. We proceed.

Whatever analytical bull-crit we impose on all this featherweight recitation of events, the fact of the matter was that there can only be a half-dozen maximum love affairs in a life. How many thousands of losing your head do you have to go through before your disquietingly began to realize the futility of it all? The French, the French-Canadians would encourage this sort of affair as a necessary first experience. But once it was over, once that magic had been lost, we would be left with only the drear and financial realities of this world. A Beijing interlude intervened; but little of that period need be said.

Instead we resume coverage of the Cocoa phenomena at her next awakening, at her leaving behind, once again, polluted, foggy, smoky China and land her at Narita amidst a bustle of other sing-song Chinese in green, rice-paddy Chiba prefecture. The group that had brought her over, a small offshoot of the famous Avex team, had made no misrepresentation about her contract. She would have to teach guitar, 20 hours a week, three weeks off a year, for which she would receive housing and about a thousand a month in spending cash. It was not an entry point to stardom. It was not a training ground for J-pop. It was an opportunity for a twenty-six year old to have some participation in the making of stars, but for which she would receive no additional cash if a protegee succeeded. The official sentiment was that she was lucky to receive this offer, and she was, in the end, Chinese: she accepted this judgment as correct.

Obsessive investigation of interior phenomenon would reveal that Cocoa's interior life began here: all that came prior was mere window-dressing. Locked into a world only with other artists, other young daughters of poor families who found the entertainment industry the only possibility for middle-class cash, the cycle of personalities began to feedback on itself. Three years in, she became unrecognizable. Her inner eye had turned in; her hair had gone platinum blonde; what it found, inside, was beauty.

Rare and difficult phenomenon are by their nature hard to discover and even harder to accurately penetrate. Our best sources on the KO consist of a half-crazed Japanese koto drummer who was briefly her friend before she began speaking only with females. The drummer, one Nagayoshi Shimizu, who had already become addicted to his own cycles of endorphins, was already on his way to an alcoholic death and was already in the habit of speaking in cryptic bursts.

"Idon'treallyknowwhatshewasseeing!"

"Ithinkshewasinlovewithgreenfields!"

"Maybeitwasgreenwood."

What could possibly be meant by this explosive discharges? What was greenwood? What was the mystery of greenwood? Was Shimizu speaking in katakana or in kanji? Nobody could answer these questions. Actually only the next best source offered any sort of solution:

REPORT of the Kiyomizu Temple on 'KO'

Our subject of observation is a twenty-eight year old female Chinese national here on an entertainment visa which has been quietly renewed for her through the Avex head office in Tokyo. She is a guitar teacher and itinerant musician of the tabigeinen-type who has appeared spontaneously in the Tohoku region, researching and expanding on the old koto and enka styles of the region. We believe this is an expression of the...

Here the Kiyomizu temple expands on the religious significance of the appearance of KO, using the vocabulary and terminology of their own internal religious system. Because the faith remains classified as a "new religion," we cannot in good faith lend extreme credence to the belief structure, but this document was useful only in that it was one of the sole available documents for exploring KO and her travels for the next ten years, which was a gap in official record.

Other than these two data points, we have what is best called "hearsay" and then the speculations of the her later years. Apparently she left behind no children but may have been married to a fifty-year old Buddhist monk later in her life. Some sources indicate that very early on, she described her travels as tracing Chinese ideograms across the surface of Japanese physical territory. Unfortunately, there is no information on what those ideograms were, or why she traced those patterns, or if they were efficacious. Similar reports exist in literature of extreme criminals or insane believing "their one act of crime" was actually saving the state from a drastic earthquake. The Japanese terror cult that launched the nerve gas attacks on Tokyo expressed the belief that they were similarly saving the public from disaster. Had KO lost her mind? Or was she actually battling forces from the beyond against which scientific instruments have no power? We would wish, in the cast of the latter, to provide aid and comfort in such a situation, but it is also possible that our help would not be desired.

With any luck this hyper opening hasn't been too incomprehensible or incoherent. It is Shanghai around the turn of the century. A young group of post-punk rockers assembles around Milk, who is an extremely black man, and Cocoa, who is a very tiny Chinese girl. Milk is a temper, a dilettante, a musical guy but no artist. He returns to happiness in the Virginia/North Carolina area and remembers Cocoa as an impossible love. Cocoa is a legendary poet and wanderer who walked and train-rode the steppes of west China before breaking out into the rock scene in Shanghai, population 24 million, total rock scene, 2000 people (artists and concert goers, roughly half-half Western-Chinese). Aaron is the Green Bay, Wisconsin boy who has a glorious vision of Cocoa on a French Concession Sunday, and this liasion is the catalyst of the breakup of MILKCOCOA the band (but which was already on the downswing.)

Cocoa switches her name to Koko, and then just plain Ko, has a brief interlude in Beijing, and then moves to Japan, where for some ten years she disappears from the scene (but is apparently exhaustingly training young aspiring J-pop stars in the art of the six-string or five), eventually becoming an itinerant musician and evolving into more of a folk artist, the Grey Ghost of Tohoku, an "artist of artists," or somebody who produces work primarily known only by the community. She finds a sort of heavily introverted peace with herself, writing gigantic thousand-kilometer wide Chinese ideograms through the process of wandering around the countryside. She enjoys black nights with no stars, conifer forests, and hidden north of Japan villages located in nooks and crannies.

In countryside Japan, she enjoys a second career of sorts, although she is known solely to regionalists, specialists, artists of the folk, and the quiet potters and nature-artists reclusively hiding away in valleys and snow-bound mountains. Some evidence points to involvement with fairly obscure mountain-cults, but Ko shocks and delights by showing up at obscure livehouses and Shimo-kitazawa club openings where all the genuine genuine literati know her. Sightings are elusive and treasured, and the stuff of legend.

That is, so to speak, "the conventional reading." We paint a big large big-eyed cartoon character at the center of the story and declare, there, it's finished, the thing is understood. Alternatively, we can throw away science, logic, the microchip, space travel, linear thought--in other, everything that makes Western culture go around, and then we're left with the possiblity that all the little loose odds and ends are the KO so to speak.

If KO is keeping the Shadow Gnosis out of this plane; if she is actually going around according to religious dictates to repair the breaks in the fabric of the universe and to sew up the occasional creature that's worked its way through, then in that Jewish theological sense, she is one of the twelve "sinless" people on whom the entire world depends, we just don't know it. This entails believing in other worlds, astral planes, shadow creatures, the Gnosis that KO wrapped up in Nagano, all the little small dangerous ones she worked with from Osaka to Sendai and beyond, and an entirely picture emerges of some sort of fire princess or soothsayer, with all detail before mere preparation and the actual, real KO being the creature of starless nights and a shadow Japan.

"Oh dear, oh dear, I shall be late!"

Finally he came, although she had had to wait a lifetime, decades, almost the very end of childbearing years for something all the signs and symbols had declared to arrive at the very start of things. Had there been some madcap afternoon garden party in Shanghai where the French-Canadians had all settled on their future? Had it been declared, settled, seen by all that some found love and others found knowledge? She was thirty-three or thirty-four, and the curious little Japanese monk passed by, carrying his odd watch and a giant spirit hammer. He was a fellow hunter.

"Wait, wait," she said, "I think it went that way!"

And the monk actually paused; his eyes glittered as he realized the girl could see his spirit hammer, and moreover, that she probably was on the trail of the same Shadow Gnosis, and that, of course, this was the fated partnership of SG hunters that was hinted in the texts, that everything, of course, had already been scryed and written down, and so we had to merely accept our fate rather than fight against the impossible.

The stars all went out; the fifty-two year old Buddhist monk with the round face and pale blue robes met the thirty-three year old ex-rocker with the double-blade polearm and the satchel pack. Usage (oo'-sah-geh) and KO had met.

The dichotomy, if such a thing exists, can be said that metropolitan Shanghai, with its glossy CityWeekend magazine aimed at expats, its flowing wine and Monday night dinner specials, its club scene, offered a sort of possible future to Ko. At each interval, at each step of the way, glory beckoned, every video share, every cover of a MilkCocoa song, every write-up seemed to offer a chance to breakout, and wasn't there that one time when an article writer from GQ seemed to be the verge of offering one-and-a-half inches in a rocker special edition? To flip, black-and-white, from this set of realities to the cold, austere, emotionless, futureless airlessness (anymorelessness?) of country Hokkaido and Aomori would possibly have been seen as a profound and breakdown-inducing trauma to any but a healthy, self-conscious artist. This had to be the way it was: this was it.

And it was! Love had arrived! Everyone got a turn on the merry-go-round! This weird sickness or illness, this rapidity of heartbeat and pressed speech that Ko had seen, that she had characterized over and over, had arrived for her! Usage! Fifty-two years old with thinning hair! A head like a round baseball, a Gozaemon head! The former punk rocker with a Hello Kitty tie-on attached to her mobile found herself swept away, as the two, as partners, sought out all the escaped Shadow Gnosis hiding in nooks and crannies of the wilderness and occasionally, blatantly, in city streets or parks. The general public could not see them: they knew them only as an odd shiver or prickly sensation as they walked around a park or took a hiking expedition up in the mountains (those that did, anyway). But Ko and Usage went to work, she with her double-blades, he with his spirit hammer, and the body count of the astral demons piled up, as the months made their way, seasons rolled into each other, and expenses were taken care of by begging and the occasional busking act.

The relationship of the two was intensified by the fact that they shared a same profession.

The present writer after graduating with a dual science-language degree spent some ten years after university supporting himself in the trade of "abstract writing," which entails three to four hours reading a highly scientific technology paper and composing a "general audience" summary. As such, he lacks the ability to create long "scenes" cinematic in scope or presentation, lush with detail, carrying "the clash of personalities." One individual's loss, however, may be an advantage to the world of literature as a whole, as a different, scientific, restrained voice replaces the plethora of free manuscripts clogging up the Internet.

J.K. Rowling could have converted the whole of the previous story into a million-page epic. Markson at least would have inserted further commentary about the abuse of artists by society at large. Gaiman would have pointed out the entry of the sun, "where is the moon?"; whereas various other folk researchers and entomologists undoubtedly scribble in the margins their own hurried observations and commentary.

The general public, however, doesn't like authorial asides. So, we return:

Moment of the Sun: the two-person band MilkCocoa, active in Shanghai sometime before the year 2000, existed in a city that was somewhat "uncool" or "unpopular;" Shanghai in the 1920s has spawned some incredible amount of works in both literature and movies. Shanghai in 2000 was still relatively poor, backwards, uncool, full of nerds with bad haircuts, and people who lived in mud houses, and factories belching pollution. Yet in the Suzhou/Shanghai mythical construction invented here, canals run through the French Concession, and on a blazing early Sunday sun shooting rays around Cocoa as she played a love-ballad on an unamplified six-string Japanese electric guitar, Aaron the abstract painter had his memory permanently altered; he was focused on the visual, and the moment had connected emotion, sexuality, memory, visual spectacle, a fellow artist, timelessness, youth, and the blazing, eternal sun.

The moment was also striking because it marked the watershed for three personalities. The MilkCocoa dynamic was already fading, Cocoa could have followed Milk back to Delaware or Virginia and lived in a two-story house with three cars and a brood of children, but she would have been listless and depressed and possibly eventually cancerous. Milk in his own way understood that he had been on a lark, among the three, he was the genuine non-creative poseur, the "rock star pretender," and although the Chinese had been agog at his spectacle, although on trains their mouths had dropped open, the experience had been finished, he was not a devotee of Chinese culture beyond superficial kungfu moves he knew and he was not intending to spend twenty years striving at work to eventually live in a city that approximated the living standards of his own timewater domicile. Now it can be noted that in China, due to decreased prices for things, twenty-somethings could live in high-rise duplexes, but that is whatever point that needs to be made, that is something whose implications can explored further on. Suffice to say: he endured.

Cocoa went on to change her name to Ko, she moved to Japan and reinvented herself. She became an "artist of artists," or somebody whose creations were understood only by fellow artists, and she spent twenty hours a week training somewhat spoiled youngsters in guitar or upcoming pop artists in hook development. Indeed, one of her chord progressions eventually became part of a plasticized and heavily produced pop hit, so her 20,000 USD/year salary eventually earned a small but real profit margin for the parent company.

Finally much later in her life Ko found spirituality, and began searching for shadow creatures from the other side that had escaped into Japan and had to be wrapped up and sent back. She encountered a syncretist Zen monk named 'Usage,' (not yoo-sidge but oo'-sa-geh) and two became the Bonnie-and-Clyde of spirit hunters, and sent many an astral creature back to the shadow world.

Usage died first. It was a B-type monster, not the familiar S or the dangerous N. B-types were just weak enough that one did not put up one's guard enough, and a careless foot position placed the old monk too close to one of the B's spines, and the slight brush of glittering poison entered Usage, reducing his body, soon, to dust. Ko saw it all happen. Instantly tears blurred her vision, and though she dispatched the creature without further ado, she knew, once again, that life had irrevocably changed.

The remains of the creature lay before her. The mountain river, plunging down from 4000m carried the ice cold message of its origins. And before her, her whole life swirled.

China: the dust-ridden monster of a country, filled with noise, filled with emotion, firecrackers, smokestacks, tonal language, the ever so rare almost liquid individuals who actually had talent, beauty or reserve.

Japan: the population in decline, mountains raging into the sky, rivers slicing down ice-cold, perpetual nightfall, perpetual work as the 53-year old monk and the 37-year old former punk rocker-cum-spirit warrior kept the paperthin boundary between this world and the shadow realm intact. All of a life's breadth, love and war, contained in the miniature tea-cup that was a country that had it all, but nothing at all. Should she apply the edge of her double-blade to her own throat, know oblivion in a second? Her hand trembled...

But she couldn't. It was not the way. She found her way to a dusty town in Hokkaido, hundreds of miles from the nearest other settlement, and began to carry out her painstaking research.

Finally, after the passage of years had turned her own body old and frail, and her withered hands sometimes shook as she dusted off very old, almost crumbling volumes, some of the pattern of the war between the astrals and the shadows and the hunters became clear. Ko found reference to the Kiyomizu temple and accounted for the odd feeling that her doings were sometimes tracked. She uncovered a thesis that suggested that Usage himself was a benign type of Shadow Gnosis, one that misdirected natural-born hunters into chasing relatively innocuous escapees. Putting together her writings, she almost seemed to almost characterize the three-way world.

Milk died a very old man. At the moment of Ko's death, he experienced a stroke that reduced about a fifth of his cognitive capacity. He lived on for another decade, and then had another stroke, which this time was followed by very rapid decline. He lived a happy life and dozens of his grandchildren are all thriving in the Beltway region.

Aaron lived a life somewhere between the absolute reclusiveness of Ko and the genial extroverted gentility of Milk. He never found an explanation for that odd period in his life when his paintings precisely mirrored Cocoa's song lyrics, although one of his friends once scoffed at his recitation of his story and another seemed disquieted.

Other Works by the Same Author

The Flowers of Keiwha (2012)

Full-length novel covering six weeks at a language study program in Seoul. Ensemble cast of some two hundred Japanese girls and the surrounding foreigners navigating the tri-cultural social world that flickers in and out of this reality. Word games and ensemble casting, combined with literary overlay. Available free at smashwords.com.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/112372

"Dancer, Zero" (short story, 2012)

The students at Valley Stream High School, a high-level high school of New Jersey find their lives forever changed after a Russian exchange student arrives. Ballet, culture shock, and growing pains of the high school years. Available free at smashwords.com.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/260188

Harajuku Sunday (2011)

This originating work for this rewrite, Harajuku (+), this 2011 book covers a broader scope of time and has a simpler structure and pattern. Of interest to the devoted fan.

1500 Days in Shanghai (2014)

Coming soon in 2014, 1500 Days covers the cocaine and math-rock madness of the rising city of the Pacific Rim. A companion piece of a kidn to Harajuku Sunday, read about the adventures of the new drug-circle in the old French Concession.

