Daughter of the Sword (14 page)

The Americans had a saying: “Silence is golden.” Mariko used to wonder why there was no equivalent in Japanese. It was only when the family moved back to Tokyo that she understood. There was no need for such a saying in Japan. Japanese people didn’t bellow into their cell phones. They didn’t shout across a train car to each other, or laugh so loud that everyone else in the room could hear. Grocery store managers didn’t announce their business over loudspeakers; they found their employees themselves, and even that they did only rarely, because the employees were so well trained that they didn’t need to be told to open another register or to clean up aisle five. Americans would have thought it bizarre to devote that much time to training a grocery store clerk, and yet they were more than happy to complain loudly whenever lines got too long or a clerk gave incorrect change.

Japanese shoppers weren’t like that. Japanese housewives weren’t like that. They tended to keep their suffering silent, and their neighbors tended to do a more thorough job of pretending they didn’t hear what was going on next door. So Mariko had been in a hundred buildings like this one when it should have been a thousand. Every time she had followed protocol, keeping her voice soft and diplomatic when she asked the abusive asshole if there was a problem. Illinois cops were different: they hammered on doors even in the dead of night, and they weren’t afraid to pick a fight with the husband if the wife wouldn’t press charges. At any given hour of any given day, Mariko preferred Japanese silence to American rowdiness, but whenever she worked a domestic she wanted to bash the door down like a good old American cowboy.

It had been nearly a year since she’d been called to a domestic, because ten months ago she’d started her probationary assignment
with Narcotics. Domestics were her least favorite calls, and so she sure as hell didn’t miss them, but now she felt guilty upon returning to the boxing ring. For a lot of her mother’s neighbors it was almost literally that: it was a place they’d go to get in a fight. It wasn’t that way for her mother, who lived alone now and whose husband had been a good, kind man when he was still alive, but Mariko couldn’t help thinking about what happened behind some of the other doors.

That guilt would have to wait for another time, because today had worries of its own. She didn’t know what to anticipate with Saori. They hadn’t spoken to each other since Mariko dropped her off at detox eight days before, and though Mariko always hoped rehab would bring her sister some emotional stability, in her heart of hearts she didn’t know whether she’d be having dinner with the twenty-two-year-old her sister really was or the petulant teenager her sister preferred to act like all too often.

In any case, Saori was due to be at her meeting at five o’clock, and so Mariko had deliberately timed her arrival at her mother’s place for five minutes after five, rather than coming straight over when her shift ended at four o’clock. She hadn’t spoken to their mother face-to-face since Saori’s most recent drug bust, and she hoped that with a little one-on-one time she might talk their mother into maintaining a unified front. Too often their mother made excuses for Saori’s addiction, but maybe this time Mariko could convince her to stand strong.

Even that was likely to create a quarrel if it wasn’t handled right, and Mariko knew full well how bad she was at handling this sort of thing. She’d spent her formative years in the States, and that had deprived her of the peacemaker mentality that defined so many Japanese women. She was a foreigner in her own country. That was why men like Lieutenant Ko didn’t like her: Mariko had no sense of how to be conciliatory. That, plus the fact that she actually had ambitions toward a career, made her more than a foreigner; by her culture’s standards she was clinically insane. That was certainly how men like Ko saw her, and how her mother saw her too. How could she explain to her mother
that for an addict like Saori, all the diplomacy and peacemaking and refusal to confront simply amounted to enabling?

Mariko had no interest in quarreling with her mother, especially not on this of all days. But this was not the day to avoid seeing her mother either, so she pushed the revolving door and entered the lobby, leaving a handprint on the otherwise unblemished steel.

She found her mother exactly where she expected to find her, in the gym on the fifteenth floor. The building wasn’t posh, but it did have its comforts, and the gym with its Ping-Pong tables had been the reason her mother had moved there. Whenever Mariko came to visit, she inevitably found her either kicking a neighbor’s ass in Ping-Pong or else smoking a cigarette on the terrace outside the gym with the person whose ass she’d just kicked.

Today it was at the tables. Her mother was dressed as if the game were being televised: navy-blue tennis shorts, white socks pulled high, and a matching polo shirt with the Killerspin logo embroidered on the left breast pocket. Mariko opened the door just as her mother returned a serve almost too fast for Mariko to see. The ball dipped left, cut right as soon as it hit the table, and her mother’s opponent dropped her paddle on the table with a defeated thwack that indicated match point.

Her mother pirouetted on her heel, smiling a victor’s smile. “Miko-chan,” she said, double-taking halfway through her spin. “You’re here.”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

Her mother excused herself from her vanquished foe and retrieved her gear bag. “Mom,” Mariko said, “why do you need a whole bag for this game? An extra ball or two I can see, but why the extra paddles?”

“They’re
rackets
, Miko, and anyone who calls them paddles has a lot to learn about table tennis. I’m sure I never questioned you on why you would pay so much for those bike shorts of yours. Or why you own so many pairs. Or why you don’t just bike in your swimsuit.”

“Because—” Mariko cut herself short. There were perfectly good explanations. Triathlon shorts shed water better than cycling shorts,
and if there was a swimsuit out there with enough padding for thirty or forty kilometers on the bike, Mariko hadn’t found it yet. But she swallowed all of that and laughed. “All right, good point. Do you want to catch a smoke first or should we go downstairs?”

“No, we can go right down.” Lowering her voice, her mother said, “To tell you the truth, Maeda-san isn’t much competition. I hardly worked up a sweat.”

Mariko waited until they were alone in the elevator before she brought up the obvious. “How’s Saori?”

“Oh, she’s staying with me,” their mother said. “Staying out of trouble. I’m afraid she’s still a little mad at you for arresting her last week.”

“Is that what she’s saying now? I didn’t arrest her, Mom. I got her out of being arrested. And anyway, it’s hardly my fault—”

“I know.” She patted Mariko’s forearm. “She twists things. I know. It’s not her, honey—it’s the addiction talking.”

Mariko did her best to keep the exasperation from her voice. “You’re making excuses for her. Again.”

“I’m taking care of my daughter in the best way I know how. Is it so bad to try to keep you two from fighting?”

Not exactly a boxing ring, Mariko thought, but not friendly territory either. She had never been able to understand why their mother took Saori’s side. “I’m not fighting her, Mom. I’m doing my job.”

“And who says you need to have that job? What was so wrong with wanting to be a reporter? Nobody stabs reporters.”

She was talking about the Kurihara murder. A meter maid in Yokohama, killed by a large knife according to the ME’s report. It was already a cold case. More than a week old, no motive, no suspects. Mariko and her mother had both taken an interest, each for her own reasons. Mariko’s mother watched too many
Law & Order
reruns, and her imagination tortured her with wild speculations about what might happen to her daughter; an actual attack against a policewoman was impossible for her to ignore. Mariko would have been interested in the
case out of sheer solidarity—you just didn’t fuck with cops—but she also couldn’t let go of the fact that the victim had been crippled before she was killed, and that there was no sign of rape, robbery, or any other motive for the homicide. She didn’t like cases she couldn’t understand, and something told her this woman wasn’t tortured and murdered for giving someone a parking ticket.

But tonight Mariko was distracted from trying to figure out the killer’s motive. The reporter comment had arrested her normal stream of thought. She’d almost forgotten she had wanted to do that. She’d entered college only a few months after her father’s death, and declared a journalism major because she wanted to get to the bottom of what had happened to him. Liver cancer at forty-three was weird, weird enough that it drew attention when he was not just the sixth engineer at his plant to die of it but the one who lived the
longest
.

In good American fashion, it was the suit against the TPC plant in Teutopolis that finally broke the story. Takemata Plastec had moved a number of its Tokyo engineers over there, Mariko’s dad included, and one of them had gone native enough to file a lawsuit. It was his case that revealed the connections between the ’89 earthquake, the microfractures, the vinyl chloride monomer leak, and the angiosarcoma of the liver that cropped up like the plague among TPC employees over the years to follow.

The engineer who had sued paid the price for it. The Americans had a saying for stories like his:
The squeaky wheel gets the grease
. The Takemata Plastec Corporation subscribed to the Japanese counterpart to that saying:
The nail that sticks up gets hammered down
. Once TPC showed it was the Tokyo plant, not the Teutopolis plant, that suffered the leak, the lawsuit in Illinois yielded nothing. Those employees who stayed silent were rewarded for their loyalty. They lived with just as much pain and died just as miserably, but TPC took good care of their families. Mariko’s mother would never have to work again, provided she never raised a fuss.

As a budding journalist, Mariko scooped none of those stories.
Everything came out through the American lawsuit, and Mariko had made it all of three months beyond graduation before her editor told her she just wasn’t a writer. It was a crushing blow at the time, but now Mariko understood she had a greater taste for justice than discovery. She had a talent for research and investigation but was only interested in exercising it in order to nail somebody. Even the best reporter couldn’t uncover corporate scandals on a weekly basis, nor even on a yearly basis. But police investigators spent
every day
unearthing scandal and betrayal and wrongdoing, and better yet, they actually got to do something about it.

“Mom,” Mariko said, “come to think of it, weren’t
you
the one who said I was destined to become a detective?”

“I never said that.”

“You did. As soon as I graduated the academy. You said, ‘What does a reporter need with all that cardio training you do? They don’t chase anybody.’ You said a detective is really an investigative journalist with a badge.”

“Did I?”

“Yes. I said I felt like my whole life had been leading up to this, and you said it was my destiny.”

“No, no. I said it was your fate. Or karma, maybe.”

“I stand corrected,” Mariko said. Her mother observed Buddhist and Christian and Shinto holidays with equal fervor, and she invoked fate, destiny, God’s will, and karmic repercussions interchangeably. Mariko didn’t believe in any of those things. She believed in evidence, and in making the most of opportunity when it presented itself. She was more like her father that way.

The elevator opened onto a dim and warmly lit hallway, and right away Mariko caught the scent of potatoes au gratin wafting from her mother’s door. She knew the smell came from her mother’s kitchen, because her mother always cooked potatoes au gratin on this day. It had been her father’s favorite, and today marked nine years since he lost his battle with cancer. Mariko wished she had been there, to know
for certain whether he’d suffered to the end as she feared, or whether he’d passed in peace as her mother had always told her. She had no appetite for sugarcoated truths, no patience for pretending a hard fact was something other than what it was. There too she was more like her father than her mother.

“I’m trying something new with the potatoes,” her mother said as she opened the apartment door. Clapping her hands and grinning, she said, “Fennel.”

“Yum.” Mariko couldn’t help but smile; her mom announced new recipes with the same fervor with which other women her age announced new grandchildren. “Sounds great, Mom. I can’t wait to—Oh! Saori.”

Her sister was leaning against the oven, the bones of her arms almost as skinny as the oven’s door handle. “Hey,” she said, not looking up from whatever she was texting.

“I thought you’d be at your meeting,” Mariko said.

Saori shrugged, still not looking up. “I went to the three o’clock over in Meguro instead. There’s a cute guy there.”

“Well, good. I’m glad you went. How are they going? Your meetings, I mean.”

Saori always called it a meeting, never naming the organization. That was all right. She didn’t need to broadcast it. Mariko just found it interesting that Saori, and indeed everyone she’d ever met in the program, referred only to meetings. And when they said it, all of them knew what kind of meeting it was. Mariko wondered what word they’d use for meetings at work, or a board meeting, or a shareholders’ meeting.

Again Saori shrugged. “More my business than yours,
neh
?
Anonymous
and all that.”

“I just wanted to know how you’re doing, Saori.”

“Yeah. Always being the big sister. Always taking care of the poor little baby.”

“Now girls,” their mother said, and that was that.

Dinner was superficially pleasant. It never had a shot at being joyous, given the occasion, and given the circumstances of the most recent drug bust Mariko supposed superficial pleasantry was the best they could have hoped for. As always, the food was delicious—better than their father had ever eaten with them, Mariko thought ruefully; their mother watched cooking shows religiously, and the cooking fad hadn’t really been a presence on cable when Mariko and Saori’s father was still alive.