Midnight and the Meaning of Love (28 page)

The Sudan in me observed his humanity and understood his manner and believed in the honor system. The Brooklyn in me did not, could, would not,
refused
. Back inside the room, I put my duffel bag up on my bed. I unpacked only the items I would need for one night. Even though the two-night fee I had already paid was nonrefundable, I decided I would be up and out of here in the morning with my mind set on finding a better spot to chill while I carried out my plans to link back up with Akemi.

I don’t exactly know what kind of impact being transported from empire to empire has on the human body. But I do know that it
does
have an impact. To snatch my energy back and regain my focus, I pushed the bed all the way into the corner. I moved the desk all the way over and slid the chair underneath. With a wide-enough space now, I did 200 push-ups, 250 sit-ups, and 150 deep knee bends. I sparred an imaginary rival and I didn’t let up until I defeated him. When I did, I collapsed onto the hard floor, dragged myself to the wall, and sat with my back pressed against it, my knees bent below me and my body balanced on my toes. I would remain this way until I thought everything through.

With my injured shoulder tightening up some more and eighteen minutes into thought, I concluded that when the girl Iwa Ikeda heard the airport announcement that came over the loudspeaker in Japanese, she realized that I was somewhere in Japan. Maybe she even deciphered that I was calling from Narita Airport. For some reason, she was willing to help me and Akemi in the beginning, at least to connect over the telephone. I figured that was easy for her as long as I was seven thousand miles away, but not in person. She must’ve never expected me to come here. My arrival had shocked her, surprised her, or maybe disappointed her. She was like the others. She had underestimated me.

More troubling to me was that I never got to find out if my wife was actually there at Iwa Ikeda’s house waiting to talk with me when I called, like I had requested her to be in my previous voice mail that I left days ago. Did this girl Iwa only need to turn around and hand Akemi the phone, but instead had smiled at her and said, “It’s nobody. It was the wrong number”? If Akemi was there waiting, could the girl have pretended that I never kept my word and called?

Or maybe she never gave her my initial message in the first place. And who was this Iwa anyway and how close a friendship did she and Akemi share? How good a friend could she be if she knew Akemi’s true heart and still sabotaged her?

The voice in the human mind that purposely tries to argue in the opposite direction of life and love suggested that maybe Akemi was at fault somewhere in all of this. Maybe
she
wanted my call but not my visit. But I shut that voice down. The devil is a liar.

Under a dim lamp, I pulled out those three addresses once more. One was in Ginza, which was close by and a prefecture of Tokyo, and the other in Roppongi Hills, which was also part of Tokyo, and the last one was three hours away in Kyoto. I needed to solidify my strategy. Should I attempt to meet and talk with her father first, as Umma suggested, and anticipate that he would allow me to see Akemi afterward? Or should I seek Akemi out face to face first and then confront her father soon after?

Chiasa said that all schools were closed in Japan for Golden Week. This meant that the school address that I had in Kyoto wouldn’t work at this moment. I needed to check with Chiasa and find out exactly when the schools reopened. For now, the other two Tokyo addresses were my only option. I just had to be careful not to do anything that gave Akemi’s father the upper hand. After all, he wanted to steal her away from me permanently, didn’t he?

After dealing with my study cards, flipping, reciting, and memorizing, I wanted to go back outside to explore the Tokyo night. Easily, I could get over to Ginza and peep and feel out the place where the address was located. Was it Nakamura’s house, their Tokyo apartment, or his office? But I couldn’t leave my luggage in an unlocked room. I wouldn’t gamble with my Tims, Clarks, Laurens, or my gear, compounded by the value of my Umma’s gifts and the items that belonged to my wife.

I took out the book that Sensei had given to me concerning Akemi’s father. Sensei was right, I needed real information on this guy to know what I was up against. “Know thy enemy,” Sun Tzu had written in his book
The Art of War
, which Sensei required me to read when I was twelve years young. It took me some time, a lot of thought and vocabulary word checking in the
Webster’s Dictionary
, but I read it.

So I cracked open the old but well-kept pages of
Never Surrender
, the softcover book, a biography written about my wife’s father.

FOREWORD

Born on August 9, 1945, the same day that America dropped a two-ton bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, three days after America dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, Naoko Nakamura is said to have revenge embedded in his soul. He never got the chance to meet his father, an ammunitions mogul who was evaporated by the American bomb, the grand finale to an unprecedented bombing campaign that made most of Japan a heap of toxic ashes scattered around impromptu graveyards. Instantly his father’s body liquefied. After it evaporated, only his teeth remained to identify him and confirm his death.

Hisashi Nakamura’s teeth were discovered more than a year after the atomic blast. They were lodged in the cement of a Nagasaki sidewalk, much like the prints of dinosaurs and other ancient creatures that have been excavated from rocks. He did leave a will, however, in which Naoko Nakamura, his only son, was bequeathed several hundred acres of prime property in various locations throughout Japan. Naoko Nakamura, according to the will, was to receive deed to the properties on his twentieth birthday, at which time he would become their legal owner.

During his early years, Naoko Nakamura was an erudite student obsessed with military history, military training, political science, and strategies of amassing power. As the majority of Japanese were rebuilding and busy actively forging friendships with America, as well as social and cultural exchanges and partnerships, Naoko Nakamura was patiently plotting and planning his own financial and political wealth and quietly ensuring his influence.

Known for being inflexible, calculating, and cold in both his business and personal dealings, Naoko Nakamura parted ways and severed ties even with his own mother. Enraged that Hana Nakamura, while he was still a child, had sold off prime portions of his father’s properties to the American government, which then used the properties to erect and expand American military bases in Japan, Naoko at age twenty grabbed what remained of his inheritance and discontinued his communication with her, even becoming estranged from his two stepbrothers born of her second marriage.

Within a year, Naoko Nakamura was rumored to have formed a secret and financial alliance with Yakuza boss Omote Tora, wherein Naoko laundered hundreds of millions of yen for the gangster. These illicit revenues formed the foundation of Naoko Nakamura’s wealth. It also won Naoko pivotal friendships and solid connections because of his ability to access, appropriate, lend, and borrow huge sums of capital. Naoko Nakamura and Omote Tora both deny that any secret alliance existed between them, yet Naoko benefited from the rumor of being aligned with “major muscle.” They have never been seen or photographed together in any public or private setting.

By 1970, when he was twenty-five, Naoko Nakamura’s company, the Pan Asian Corporation, was poised to take over several key lucrative Asian markets where Americans had dominated in the past. Using a brand of “Asian solidarity” that his critics considered a false cover and a method of increasing his own wealth, Naoko grabbed the ghost of the past to forge forward and dominate.

When I finished reading the Foreword, I had circled six words:
excavated, bequeathed, erudite, estranged, laundered
, and
illicit
. Immediately I looked them up and wrote them down in my pocket notebook after committing their meaning to my memory. As I sat thinking, there was one major point in the book that stood out in my mind: “He never got the chance to meet his father.” I thought to myself that this one fact could easily make any boy half a man. As I tried to imagine never having met my own father, I couldn’t. I couldn’t erase the deep love or powerful lessons that came to me directly from my father in
person. I tried to subtract the parts of me that came from my father, but nothing was left over. As I tried to push myself to imagine it, my thoughts simply exploded and I didn’t want to know. Maybe if I had not ever met my father, I’d just be crazy like those Brooklyn boys in my American hood.

“Inflexible, calculating, and cold …” the author had described Nakamura. I didn’t need to write that down. I would remember that description for as long as he would remember that atomic bomb.

Heavy-minded, I lay down with my back purposely pressed against my luggage. If there were an intruder here at Shinjuku Uchi bent on robbery, he would have to be clever enough to get past me as I slept and behind me to remove my fifty-pound duffel bag without me waking.
Impossible
, I assured myself. When I lay down, something in my duffel was poking me. I got up and grabbed the bag and un-hooked the top. When I looked in and felt around, I could tell it was Akemi’s five-inch heels that were digging into my back. I snatched them out and also removed her hardback diary. I placed the shoes on my desktop, stood them side by side. I lay her diary down at first. Then I picked it back up, flipping through the first few pages.

Even under the dim lamplight, embedded between, beside, and below her kanji handwriting, her drawings lit up, stood out, and somehow seemed to breathe life. On one page in the back of her book, I saw the kanji for my name, Mayonaka. I knew it because she had drawn it for me on a napkin at a Jamaican restaurant on our first date up in Harlem. I smiled to myself. It was a curious thing how a man born in the shadow of a bomb, with a heart hardened by history and circumstance, could bring forth such a sweet young daughter, Akemi.

I hooked the duffel bag up and threw it back up against the wall. I lay back down and eased myself into a sleep.

The orange sun saw me first, so bright it burned through the paper-thin curtains and cast colors onto the cream-colored walls. Warm like a sauna, it woke me at 5:00 a.m. boasting that it had cheated me out of my Fajr prayer, which normally had my head pressed to the ground before dawn, especially on this first full day of the Ramadan fast. I took it as both a sign and a reminder that to win on this side of the world, I had to move faster, rise up earlier like their sun, think quicker, and adjust.

I slid my room door open with ease. I glanced down the hall. There was no one out there. I grabbed my towel, washcloth, T-shirt, boxers, and bathroom bag, a black leather case filled with everything I needed.

I walked all the way down to the only men’s room servicing the first floor. Inside there were five showers, and five urinals and three toilets. Instead of the urinals being on the wall and positioned at waist height, their urinals were on the floor! Seemed like the Japanese felt closer to the floor, so they designed the urinals for shorter, smaller men. I took aim.

After showering and dressing, I returned to my room and spread out my second towel onto the floor to serve as a prayer cloth. In the Asian heat I made my prayer.

At 6:15 a.m. in Tokyo, I continued my studies. I cracked open my book on Japanese culture. Even by selecting just a few passages or pages, I believed I might stumble on something useful. The author of
Peculiar People: The Japanese Way
, even before beginning his book, provided a list: “Ten Things I Am Sure You Don’t Know about the
Japanese.” I liked nonfiction writers who could get to the point in a reasonable amount of time, so I decided to concentrate on the list:

1. The Japanese believe that they are superior to all other people in the world. For two thousand years, they did not even allow any foreigners to enter Japan, and they made it illegal for Japanese citizens to leave Japan and go anywhere else in the world. It doesn’t matter who you are, European or African. It does not matter if you are also Asian as well, Korean, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, or even Indian. The only thing that matters to them is whether or not you are Japanese. Every non-Japanese is believed to be less or below them and is described as “foreign,” or gaijin, which in Japanese means “outside people.”

2. The Japanese have the most complicated writing and language system in the world. They use three different forms of writing, hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Years ago there were up to ten thousand kanji that students and citizens of Japan had to learn and perfect. Today the average Japanese student must master hiragana, katakana, and three thousand additional kanji letters. Students beginning from a young age spend ten to twelve hours a day in school and afterschool and night school programs in their highly exhausting and competitive educational system. The Japanese use the fact that most foreigners consider their language impossible to master as evidence that the Japanese are superior.

3. The Japanese are very hard on one another. They do not believe in being or doing minimum or less than the most. They believe every Japanese citizen should strive to be excellent and work for the first-place position every day and all the time. Every Japanese should be ichiban, meaning “number one.”

4. The Japanese are obsessed with all Japanese people being the same and doing the same things. They believe that this is how harmony is maintained in a society. Therefore when you enter a Japanese business or school or government office, all the employees and students are normally dressed exactly the same way. The workers and students look down on anyone who dares to break the “harmony,” or the “sameness.” A person who dares to be different can suffer a lifetime of ridicule and isolation and loss. This practice is known as kata, or the Japanese way, and the Japanese have learned a precise uniform way of doing each and every task, including living life.