Rising Sun: A Novel (48 page)

“Ah. You remember we talked about bribery. One of Eddie’s bribes was to a low-level security officer named Tanaka. I believe Eddie supplied him with drugs. Anyway, Eddie had known him for a couple of years. And when Ishiguro ordered Tanaka to pull the tapes, Tanaka told Eddie.”

“And Eddie went down and got the tapes himself.”

“Yes. Together with Tanaka.”

“But Phillips said Eddie was alone.”

“Phillips lied, because he knew Tanaka. That’s also why he didn’t make more of a fuss—Tanaka said it was all right. But when Phillips told us the story, he left Tanaka out.”

“And then?”

“Ishiguro sent a couple of guys to clean out Cheryl’s
apartment. Tanaka took the tapes someplace to get them copied. Eddie went to the party in the hills.”

“But Eddie kept one.”

“Yes.”

I thought it over. “But when we talked to Eddie at the party, he told a completely different story.”

Connor nodded. “He lied.”

“Even to you, his friend?”

Connor shrugged. “He thought he could get away with it.”

“What about Ishiguro? Why did he kill the girl?”

“To get Morton in his pocket. And it worked—they got Morton to change his position on MicroCon. For a while there, Morton was going to allow the sale to go forward.”

“Ishiguro would kill her for that? For some corporate sale?”

“No, I don’t think it was calculated at all. Ishiguro was highstrung, under great pressure. He felt he had to prove himself to his superiors. He had much at stake—so much, that he behaved differently from an ordinary Japanese under these circumstances. And in a moment of extreme pressure, he killed the girl, yes. As he said, she was a woman of no importance.”

“Jesus.”

“But I think there’s more to it than that. Morton was very ambivalent about the Japanese. I had the sense there was a lot of resentment—those jokes about dropping the bomb, all that. And having sex on the boardroom table. It’s … disrespectful, wouldn’t you say? It must have infuriated Ishiguro.”

“And who called in the murder?”

“Eddie.”

“Why?”

“To embarrass Nakamoto. Eddie got Morton safely back to the party, and then called in. Probably from a phone somewhere at the party. When he called, he didn’t know about the security cameras yet. Then Tanaka told him about them, and Eddie started to worry that Ishiguro might set him up. So he called back.”

“And he asked for his friend John Connor.”

“Yes.”

I said, “So Eddie was Koichi Nishi?”

Connor nodded. “His little joke. Koichi Nishi is the name of a character in a famous Japanese movie about corporate corruption.”

Connor finished his coffee and pushed away from the counter.

“And Ishiguro? Why did the Japanese abandon him?”

“Ishiguro had played it too fast and loose. He acted too independently Thursday night. They don’t like that. Nakamoto would have sent him back pretty soon. He was destined to spend the rest of his life in Japan in a
madogiwa-zoku.
A window seat. Somebody who’s bypassed by corporate decisions, and stares out the window all day. In a way, it’s a life sentence.”

I thought it over. “So when you used the car phone, calling the station, telling them what you planned … who was listening?”

“Hard to say.” Connor shrugged. “But I liked Eddie. I owed him one. I didn’t want to see Ishiguro go home.”

Back in the office there was an elderly woman waiting for me. She was dressed in black and she introduced herself as Cheryl Austin’s grandmother. Cheryl’s parents died in a car crash when she was four, and she had raised the little girl afterward. She wanted to thank me for my help in the investigation. She talked about what Cheryl had been like, as a little girl. How she had grown up in Texas.

“Of course, she was pretty,” she said, “and the boys surely did like her. Always a bunch of them hanging around, you couldn’t shake them off with a stick.” She paused. “Of course, I never thought she was entirely right in the head. But she wanted to keep those boys around. And she liked them to fight over her, too. I remember she was seven or eight, she’d get those kids brawling in the dust, and she’d clap her hands and watch them go at it. By the time she was teenage, she was real good at it. Knew just what to do. It wasn’t real nice to see. No, something was wrong in the
head. She could be mean. And that song, she always played it, day and night. About lose my mind, I’d think.”

“Jerry Lee Lewis?”

“Of course, I knew why. That was her Daddy’s favorite song. When she was just a little bit of a thing, he’d drive her to town in his convertible, with his arm around her, and the radio making that awful racket. She’d have her best sundress on. She was such a pretty thing when she was a child. The image of her mother.”

Then the woman started to cry, thinking about that. I got her a Kleenex. Tried to be sympathetic.

And pretty soon she wanted to know what had happened. How Cheryl had died.

I didn’t know what to say to her.

As I was coming out of the ground-floor entrance to Parker Center, walking out by the fountains, a Japanese man in a suit stopped me. He was about forty, with dark hair and a mustache. He greeted me formally, and gave me his card. It took a moment to realize that this was Mr. Shirai, the head of finance for Nakamoto.

“I wanted to see you in person, Sumisu-san, to express to you how much my company regrets the behavior of Mr. Ishiguro. His actions were not proper and he acted without authority. Nakamoto is an honorable company and we do not violate the law. I want to assure you that he does not represent our company, or what we stand for in doing business. In this country, the work of Mr. Ishiguro put him in contact with many investment bankers, and men who make leveraged buyouts. Frankly, I believe he was too long in America. He adopted many bad habits here.”

So there it was, an apology and an insult in the same moment. I didn’t know what to say to him, either.

Finally, I said, “Mr. Shirai, there was the offer of financing, for a small house …”

“Oh, yes?”

“Yes. Perhaps you didn’t hear of it.”

“Actually, I believe I have heard something of that.”

I said, “I was wondering what you intended to do about that offer now.”

There was a long silence.

Just the splash of the fountains off to my right.

Shirai squinted at me in the hazy afternoon light, trying to decide how to play it.

Finally he said, “Sumisu-san, the offer is improper. It is of course withdrawn.”

“Thank you, Mr. Shirai,” I said.

Connor and I drove back to my apartment. Neither of us talked. I was driving on the Santa Monica freeway. The signs overhead had been spray-painted by gangs. I was aware of how uneven and bumpy the roadway was. To the right, the skyscrapers around Westwood stood hazy in smog. The landscape looked poor and decrepit.

Finally I said, “So is that all this was? Just competition between Nakamoto and some other Japanese company? Over MicroCon? Or what?”

Connor shrugged. “Multiple purposes, probably. The Japanese think in those ways. And to them, America is now only an arena for their competition. That much is true. We’re just not very important, in their eyes.”

We came to my street. There was a time when I thought it was pleasant, a little tree-lined street of apartments, with a playground at the end of the block for my daughter. Now I wasn’t feeling that way. The air was bad, and the street seemed dirty, unpleasant.

I parked the car. Connor got out, shook my hand. “Don’t be discouraged.”

“I am.”

“Don’t be. It’s very serious. But it can all change. It’s changed before. It can change again.”

“I guess.”

“What are you going to do now?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I feel like going somewhere else. But there’s nowhere to go.”

He nodded. “Leave the department?”

“Probably. Certainly leave Special Services. It’s too … unclear for me.”

He nodded. “Take care,
kōhai.
Thanks for your help.”

“You, too,
sempai.
”

I was tired. I climbed the stairs to my apartment and went inside. It was quiet, with my daughter gone. I got a can of Coke from the refrigerator and walked into the living room, but my back hurt when I sat in the chair. I got up again, and turned on the television. I couldn’t watch it. I thought of how Connor said everybody in America focused on the unimportant things. It was like the situation with Japan: if you sell the country to Japan, then they will own it, whether you like it or not. And people who own things do what they want with them. That’s how it works.

I walked into my bedroom and changed my clothes. On the bedside table, I saw the pictures from my daughter’s birthday that I had been sorting when all this started. The pictures that didn’t look like her, that didn’t fit the reality anymore. I listened to the tinny laughter from the television in the other room. I used to think things were basically all right. But they’re not all right.

I walked into my daughter’s room. I looked at her crib, and her covers with the elephants sewn on it. I thought of the way she slept, so trustingly, lying on her back, her arms thrown over her head. I thought of the way she trusted me to make her world for her now. And I thought of the world that she would grow into. And as I started to make her bed, I felt uneasy in my heart.

“People deny reality. They fight against real feelings caused by real circumstances. They build mental worlds of shoulds, oughts, and might-have-beens. Real changes begin with real appraisal and acceptance of what is. Then realistic action is possible.”

These are the words of David Reynolds, an American exponent of Japanese Morita psychotherapy. He is speaking of personal behavior, but his comments are applicable to the economic behavior of nations, as well.

Sooner or later, the United States must come to grips with the fact that Japan has become the leading industrial nation in the world. The Japanese have the longest lifespan. They have the highest employment, the highest literacy, the smallest gap between rich and poor. Their manufactured products have the highest quality. They have the best food. The fact is that a country the size of Montana, with half our population, will soon have an economy equal to ours.

But they haven’t succeeded by doing things our way. Japan is not a Western industrial state; it is organized quite differently. And the Japanese have invented a new kind of trade—adversarial trade, trade like war, trade intended to wipe out the competition—which America has failed to understand for several decades. The United States keeps insisting the Japanese do things our way. But increasingly, their response is to ask, why should
we
change? We’re doing better than you are. And indeed they are.

What should the American response be? It is absurd to blame Japan for successful behavior, or to suggest that they slow down. The Japanese consider such American reactions
childish whining, and they are right. It is more appropriate for the United States to wake up, to see Japan clearly, and to act realistically.

In the end, that will mean major changes in the United States, but it is inevitably the task of the weaker partner to adjust to the demands of a relationship. And the United States is now without question the weaker partner in any economic discussion with Japan.

A century ago, when Admiral Perry’s American fleet opened the nation, Japan was a feudal society. The Japanese realized they had to change, and they did. Starting in the 1860s, they brought in thousands of Western specialists to advise them on how to change their government and their industries. The entire society underwent a revolution. There was a second convulsion, equally dramatic, after World War II.

But in both cases, the Japanese faced the challenge squarely, and met it. They didn’t say, let the Americans buy our land and our institutions and hope they will teach us to do things better. Not at all. The Japanese invited thousands of experts to visit—and then sent them home again. We would do well to take the same approach. The Japanese are not our saviors. They are our competitors. We should not forget it.

For advice and assistance during my research, I am grateful to Nina Easton, James Flanigan, Ken Reich, and David Shaw, all of the
Los Angeles Times
; Steve Clemons of the Japan America Society of Southern California; Senator Al Gore; Jim Wilson of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Kevin O’Connor of Hewlett-Packard; Lieutenant Fred Nixon of the Los Angeles Police Department; Ron Insana of CNBC/FNN; and Keith Manasco. For suggestions and corrections of the manuscript at various points, I am indebted to Mike Backes, Douglas Crichton, James Fallows, Karel van Wolferen, and Sonny Mehta. Valery Wright shepherded the manuscript through seemingly endless revisions, Shinoi Osuka and later Sumi Adachi Sovak assisted ably with the Japanese text, and Roger McPeek gave me his understanding of video technology and future security systems.