Rain Fall (13 page)

I swiveled in the other direction. Same seat, right
rear. Three young women who looked like office ladies on a night out. No apparent problem there.

Mr. Bland would be able to watch me throughout the performance, and I needed to avoid the mistake of conspicuous aloneness that he had made. I told the people around me that I was a friend of Midori’s and was here at her invitation; they started asking me questions, and pretty soon we were shooting the shit like old friends.

A waitress came by and I ordered a twelve-year-old Cragganmore. The people around me all followed suit. I was a friend of Kawamura Midori’s, so whatever I had ordered, it must be cool. They probably didn’t know whether they had just ordered scotch, vodka, or a new kind of beer.

When Midori and her trio walked down the side of the room, everyone started clapping. Another thing about Alfie: There, when the musicians first appear, the room fills with reverential silence.

Midori took her place at the piano. She was wearing faded blue jeans and a black velvet blouse, low cut and clinging, her skin dazzling white next to it. She tilted her head forward and touched her fingers to the keys, and the audience grew silent, expectant. She spent a long moment frozen that way, staring at the piano, and then began.

She started slowly, with a coy rendering of Thelonious Monk’s “Brilliant Corners,” but overall she played harder than she had at Alfie, with more abandon, her notes sometimes struggling with the bass and the drums, but finding a harmony in the opposition. Her riffs were angry and she rode them longer,
and when she came back the notes were sweet but you could still sense a frustration, a pacing beneath the surface.

The set lasted for ninety minutes, and the music alternated between a smoky, melodic sound, then elegiac sadness, then a giddy, laughing exuberance that shook the sadness away. Midori finished in a mad, exhilarated riff, and when it was over the applause was unrestrained. Midori stood to acknowledge it, bowing her head. The drummer and bass guitarist were laughing and wiping dripping sweat from their faces with handkerchiefs, and the applause went on and on. What Midori felt when she played, the place her music took her, she had taken the audience there, and the clapping was filled with real gratitude. When it finally faded, Midori and her trio left the stage, and people started to get up and move about.

A few minutes later she reappeared and squeezed in next to me. Her face was still flushed from the performance. “I thought I saw you here,” she said, giving me a mild check with her shoulder. “Thank you for coming.”

“Thank you for inviting me. They were expecting me at the ticket window.”

She smiled. “If I hadn’t told them, you wouldn’t have gotten in, and you can’t hear the music very well from the street, can you?”

“No, the reception is certainly better from where I’m sitting,” I said, looking around as though taking in the grandeur of the Blue Note, but in fact scoping for Mr. Bland.

“Do you want to get something to eat?” she asked. “I’m going to grab something with the band.”

I hesitated. I wasn’t going to have a chance to probe for information with other people around, and I wasn’t eager to broaden my always-small circle of acquaintances.

“Hey, this is your big night, your first gig at the Blue Note,” I said. “You probably want to just enjoy it yourselves.”

“No, no,” she said, giving me another shoulder check. “I’d like you to come. And don’t you want to meet the rest of the band? They were great tonight, weren’t they?”

On the other hand, depending on how the evening progressed, you might have a chance to talk to her alone a bit later.
“They really were. The audience loved you.”

“We were thinking the Living Bar. Do you know it?”

Good choice,
I thought. The Living Bar is an atmospheric place in Omotesando, absurdly named as only the Japanese can name them. It was close by, but we’d have to turn at least five corners to walk there, which would allow me to check our backs and see if Mr. Bland was following.

“Sure. It’s a chain, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but the one in Omotesando is nicer than all the others. They serve lots of interesting little dishes, and the bar is good, too. Good selection of single malts. Mama says you’re a connoisseur.”

“Mama flatters me,” I said, thinking that if I weren’t careful, Mama would put together a damn dossier and start handing it out. “Let me just pay for the drinks.”

She smiled. “They’re already paid for. Let’s go.”

“You paid for me?”

“I told the manager that the person sitting front
center was my special guest.” She switched to English: “So everything is on the house,
ne
?” She smiled, pleased at the chance to use the idiom.

“Okay, then,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Can you wait for just a few minutes? I’ve got a few things to take care of backstage first.”

Getting to her backstage would be too difficult to bother trying. If they were going to make a move, they’d make it outside. “Sure,” I said, getting up and shifting so that my back was to the stage and I could see the room. Too many people were now up and milling about, though, and I couldn’t spot Mr. Bland. “Where do you want to meet?”

“Right here—five minutes.” She turned and walked backstage.

Fifteen minutes later she reappeared through a curtain at the back of the stage. She had changed into a black turtleneck, silk or a fine cashmere, and black slacks. Her hair was loose over her shoulders, her face perfectly framed.

“Sorry to make you wait. I wanted to change—a performance is hard work.”

“No problem,” I said, taking her in. “You look great.”

She smiled. “Let’s go! The band is out front. I’m starving.”

We headed out the front entrance, passing a number of lingering fans who thanked her on the way.
If you wanted to get to her and could time it right,
I thought,
you would wait at the bottom of the stairs of the Caffe Idee, where you would have a view of both the front and side entrances.
Sure enough, Mr. Bland was there, strolling away from us with studied nonchalance.

So much for Benny’s forty-eight hours,
I thought. It was probably just his version of “Act now—offer expires at midnight.” Something he picked up in a sales course somewhere.

The bass guitarist and drummer were waiting for us, and we strolled over. “Tomo-chan, Ko-chan, this is Fujiwara Junichi, the gentleman I mentioned,” Midori said, gesturing to me.

“Hajimemashite,”
I said, bowing.
“Konya no enso wa saiko ni subarashikatta.”
It’s good to meet you. Tonight’s performance was a great pleasure.

“Hey, let’s use English tonight,” Midori said, switching over as she did so. “Fujiwara-san, these guys both spent years in New York. They can order a cab in Brooklyn as well as you can.”

“In that case, please call me John,” I said. I extended my hand to the drummer.

“You can call me Tom,” he said, shaking my hand and bowing simultaneously. He had an open, almost quizzical expression, and was dressed unpretentiously in jeans, a white oxford-cloth shirt, and a blue blazer. There was something sincere in the way he had combined his Western and Japanese greetings, and I found I liked him immediately.

“I remember you from Alfie,” the bassist said, extending his hand carefully. He was dressed predictably in black jeans, turtleneck, and blazer, the sideburns and rectangular glasses all trying a bit too hard for The Look.

“And I remember you,” I said, taking his hand and consciously injecting some warmth into my grip. “You were all wonderful. Mama told me before the
performance that you were all going to be stars, and I can see that she was right.”

Maybe he knew I was soft-soaping him, but he must have felt too good after the performance to care. Or his personality was different in English. Either way, he gave me a small but genuine-looking smile and said, “Thank you for mentioning that. Call me Ken.”

“And call me Midori,” Midori cut in. “Now let’s go, before I starve!”

During the ten-minute walk to
Za Ribingu Baa,
as the locals called it, we all chatted about jazz and how we had discovered it for ourselves. Although I was ten years older than the oldest of them, philosophically we were all purists of the Charlie Parker/Bill Evans/Miles Davis school, and conversation was easy enough.

Periodically I was able to glance behind us as we turned corners. On several of these occasions I spotted Mr. Bland in tow. I didn’t expect him to move while Midori was with all these people, if that’s what he had in mind.

Unless they were desperate, of course, in which case they would take chances, maybe even move sloppily. My ears were intensely focused on the sounds behind us as we walked.

The Living Bar announced its existence in the basement of the Scène Akira building with a discreet sign over the stairs. We walked down and into the entranceway, where we were greeted by a young Japanese man with a stylish brush cut and a well-tailored navy suit with three of its four buttons fastened. Midori, very much the leader of the group, told him we
wanted a table for four; he answered
“ Kashikomarimashita”
in the most polite Japanese and murmured into a small microphone next to the register. By the time he had escorted us inside, a table had been prepared and a waitress was waiting to seat us.

The crowd wasn’t too dense for a Saturday night. Several groups of glamorous-looking women were sitting in high-backed chairs at the black varnished tables, wearing expertly applied makeup and Chanel like it was made for them, their cheekbones in sharp relief in the subdued glow of the overhead incandescent illumination, their hair catching the light. Midori put them to shame.

I wanted the seat facing the entrance, but Tom moved too quickly and took it himself. I was left facing the bar.

As we ordered drinks and enough small appetizers to make for a reasonable meal, I saw the man who had escorted us inside walk Mr. Bland over to the bar. Mr. Bland sat with his back to us, but there was a mirror behind the bar, and I knew he had a good view of the room.

While we waited for our order to arrive, we continued our safe, comfortable conversation about jazz. Several times I considered the merits of removing Mr. Bland. He was part of a numerically superior enemy. If an opportunity presented itself to reduce that number by one, I would take it. If I did it right, his employers would never know of my involvement, and taking him out could buy me more time to get Midori out of this.

At some point, after much of the food had been
consumed and we, along with Mr. Bland, were on our second round of drinks, one of them asked me what I did for a living.

“I’m a consultant,” I told them. “I advise foreign companies on how to bring their goods and services into the Japanese market.”

“That’s good,” Tom said. “It’s too hard for foreigners to do business in Japan. Even today, liberalization is just cosmetic. In many ways it’s the same Japan as during the Tokugawa
bakufu,
closed to the outside world.”

“Yes, but that’s good for John’s business,” Ken added. “Isn’t it, John? Because, if Japan didn’t have so many stupid regulations, if the ministries that inspect incoming food and products weren’t so corrupt, you would need to find a different job,
ne?
”

“C’mon, Ken,” Midori said. “We know how cynical you are. You don’t have to prove it.”

I wondered if Ken might have had too much to drink.

“You used to be cynical, too,” he went on. He turned to me. “When Midori came back from Julliard in New York, she was a radical. She wanted to change everything about Japan. But I guess not anymore.”

“I still want to change things,” Midori said, her voice warm but firm. “It’s just that I don’t think a lot of angry slogans will make any difference. You have to be patient, you have to pick your battles.”

“Which ones have you picked lately?” he asked.

Tom turned to me. “You have to understand, Ken feels like he sold out by doing gigs at established
places like the Blue Note. Sometimes he takes it out on us.”

Ken laughed. “We all sold out.”

Midori rolled her eyes. “C’mon, Ken, give it a rest.”

Ken looked at me. “What about you, John? What’s the American expression: ‘Either you’re a part of the solution, or you’re a part of the problem’?”

I smiled. “There’s a third part, actually: ‘Or you’re a part of the landscape.’ ”

Ken nodded as though internally confirming something. “That’s the worst of all.”

I shrugged. He didn’t matter to me, and it was easy to stay disengaged. “The truth is, I hadn’t really thought of what I do in these terms. Some people have a problem exporting to Japan, I help them out. But you make some good points. I’ll think about what you’re saying.”

He wanted to argue and didn’t know what to do with my agreeable responses, which was fine. “Let’s have another drink,” he said.

“I think I’ve reached my limit,” Midori said. “I’m ready to call it a night.”

As she spoke I noticed Mr. Bland, who was studiously looking elsewhere, clicking a small device about the size of a disposable lighter that he was resting on one knee and pointing in our direction.
Fuck,
I thought.
A camera.