The Samurai's Daughter (2 page)

“Of course I'm happy. But I don't want you to think that because he's here I'll stop talking to you, or working on this family history.”

“Actually, I wouldn't mind if we took a break.”

I shook my head. “With that kind of attitude, there would be no
oral histories. We'd never know the experiences of slaves, of Holocaust survivors, of Civil War veterans—or the Shimuras! Come on, Daddy, you know I have a lot more work to do.”

“As do I,” my father said, raising his eyebrows as he looked just beyond me. He was signaling the waitress for the check, when we'd barely started our main courses. “I'm sorry to tell you this, but my office overscheduled me. I'm going to have to go to see five extra patients, starting at one. It's a quarter of one right now—I must leave.”

“Of course,” I said, watching my father slurp the remnants of his soup. He put a twenty on the table and left me to finish up the
zaru soba
and his seafood tempura.

I didn't believe my father's excuse for one minute. He was upset about something: either my history project, or my lover's arrival. Or both.

San Francisco International Airport always gives me a bad feeling. The INS inspectors give me trouble just about every time I return from Japan, even though I'm a U.S. citizen. Hugh would have to face them carrying a European Union passport, with his last stop having been China. This mix of origins might raise their suspicions. On the other hand, he had a great Scottish accent—and he was used to airport hassles. I told myself not to worry too much.

Because of the holiday, it took a long time for me to find a parking space. Once inside the airport, I went directly to the lobby outside the customs area exits; it was already twenty-five minutes after Hugh's plane had landed. I saw him right away. He was chatting animatedly on a pay phone with a small pile of leather suitcases beside him. More than a few people did double takes as they passed by. Hugh was like a human version of a golden retriever: tall and strapping, with a red-gold mane that flopped in his eyes—eyes as dark a green as the peaty bogs in his Scottish homeland. Looking at Hugh as I walked toward him, I was filled with the same old mix of desire and a certain exasperation with myself for being a sucker for the twenty-first century version of Braveheart.

Hugh spotted me, and gave me a smile like the sun. He hung up the phone, and in the next instant he was kissing me as if he'd been away for two years. For someone who'd been flying for
hours, he tasted surprisingly fresh—like a mixture of toothpaste and oranges, two things I like very much.

“Sorry I'm late—I didn't think customs would be so fast for you,” I said when we finally broke apart. I glanced around and sure enough, we had an audience.

“They were brilliant! Some angel in a blue uniform waved me into the American citizens line, and I was through in five minutes.”

“But you're not an American! Considering the current security situation, that shouldn't have happened—”

“She must have known I'm in love with one. Maybe that counts.” Hugh smiled down at me. “By the way, I arranged to have a box with some things from the Washington office sent by overnight delivery to your parents' house. Do you know if it arrived?”

“Yes. It came this morning. Just in the nick of time, I bet, with Christmas Eve tomorrow.” I grabbed the plastic duty-free bags off the top of his luggage pile—bags that I bet held gifts for my parents. Hugh spent much of his life traveling, so airports were his chief shopping centers.

“Your mother said she'd cook on Christmas Day, but I hope I can take care of some of the other evenings: restaurants, theater, et cetera. I've got a decent dining budget from the firm—can you tell me beforehand any family favorites?”

“Well, my favorites and my family's are different,” I said, ruefully thinking of my lunch in Japantown with my father. “I'm a little behind the times, having been away for so long. There's a raw-food restaurant that's super-hot, but I still love a vegetarian organic restaurant called Greens.”

“Isn't that the restaurant cookbook you used to use in Japan—the book with the infamous quinoa timbale recipe?”

“I can't believe you remember that!”

“Of course I do. No quinoa available in all of Japan, so you had me smuggle a baggie of it from New Zealand!”

“Don't talk like that,” I whispered, as I saw heads turning everywhere. “Even though this is California, not
everyone
knows what quinoa is. Someone might think it's contraband—”

“No, the truth is it's a biological weapon.” Hugh exploded in great honking laughter.

“Time to go,” I murmured, trying to seem casual and unruffled as we passed an airport police officer who was giving the two of us a head-to-toes stare.

“Right, darling. I'll keep the good news until we're riding on the cable car and you're showing me the sights.”

I hadn't traveled by cable car, of course; the cable cars ran only on a few streets within the city, not all the way out to the exurb where the airport was. I'd used my mother's Japanese SUV, which should have had plenty of room for luggage, but was actually stuffed with enough evergreen roping and candles to burn down San Francisco again. These were all last-minute holiday decorations she had yet to put up.

“It's fake pine roping,” I explained. “My mother bought a lot to decorate the hall for this party we're having December twenty-sixth. I should have warned you—it's going to be big.”

“Boxing Day—that's the day we have our parties in Scotland.” Hugh sneezed again. “Ah, that aroma. It definitely reminds me of certain rural parts of Japan.”

“I miss the Japanese winter smell of sweet potatoes roasting,” I said.

“Yakiiimoo!”
Hugh called out the potato roaster's mournful cry in such a perfect baritone that I looked at him in amazement. In the next instant, I was almost sideswiped by a larger SUV barreling up behind us. I cut to the right just in time.

“I hate this city,” I muttered, slipping an old U2 disc into the CD player. As Bono crooned about finding the real thing, I cast a sideways glance at Hugh—who was looking out the window. Well, there was a lot to see. California Highway 101 ran from the airport to the city, offering vast, shining expanses of blue sea and green hills. I had to admit this was the Bay Area at its most scenic.

“Why so many flags?” Hugh asked, and I followed his gaze to a car ahead of us decked out with tiny American flags that fluttered in the breeze.

“Patriotism,” I said. “Apparently it started after the World Trade Center attacks, and never stopped. Several of our neighbors hang the flag outside their houses.”

“I see them on billboards, too,” Hugh said. “Funny thing, that
patriotism. Where's the line that keeps it from turning into nationalism?”

I glanced up at the billboards, trying to see what he saw. Maybe because I was American, the flags didn't stand out sharply to me. What I noticed was that the billboards in general had become fewer. During my last visit two years ago, the billboards were all hyping dot-com businesses. Now, many of those software pioneers had gone bust like the long-lost gold rush entrepreneurs of 1849.

“Watch your left!” Hugh bellowed, and I had to bring the SUV to heel. I'd almost drifted into the next lane. After so many years away, I had to keep concentrating to stay on the right side of the road, and I had to think twice about directions. Highway 101 was my constant reference point, an often slow but surefire route into the city that became Van Ness, from where I could cut out at Japantown, then take Laguna for the bumpy ride up to Pacific Heights, the beautiful and expensive neighborhood where my parents had been lucky enough to find a bargain twenty-five years ago. As we drove on, Hugh kept up a barrage of questions. Where was Coit Tower? Fisherman's Wharf? The Golden Gate Bridge? The hippies?

I addressed his last question first. “You have to go to the Haight to see the few old hippies who are still alive. Now,
this area
, which is called the Mission, is a mix of Latin American families and yuppies—kind of like Adams-Morgan in Washington. Interestingly enough, one of the city's best Italian restaurants is here—”

“So where's the most romantic place in the city?” Hugh interrupted.

“Hmm.” I had to think hard because I'd never had a serious relationship while living in San Francisco. “I—I'll have to work on that. Why is it so important?”

“Well, actually, Rei, it's Christmas.” Hugh fixed me with an intent gaze. “I've brought two presents for you. There's one I'll give you in front of your family, and the other one is private. I'm seeking a good place to give it to you.”

“Ah,” I said, making a quick, private prediction of absurdly skimpy lingerie. “You're right that we'll need to be out of the house to have any privacy.”

“If that's the case, could we stop somewhere for a few minutes? Can you park the car somewhere?”

“Hugh, the grade on this hill is forty degrees. If I stop now, I'm liable to roll backward—I hate stopping on hills.”

“Okay, can you go around the corner, find a parking lot or something? I must speak to you about something before we reach your parents. It's urgent.”

I shot a nervous glance at him, turned the corner, and noodled along until I reached the parking lot of a Malaysian restaurant I'd never visited. Feeling guilty, I took the only spot available, between a gleaming green Volvo wagon and a rust-spotted VW bug painted in psychedelic colors. Old and new San Francisco—with the foreigners in between. I clicked off the music and then, after a moment's reflection, turned off the car. From Hugh's serious expression, I could guess we would linger for a while.

“All right, Rei. You'll be the first outside of the firm to know. I'm relocating.”

I sighed in exasperation. “You're always relocating. You can't live anywhere more than six months, can you?”

“No, this time it's for longer than that. And I'm going to Japan.”

I shut my eyes, and then opened them. I wasn't dreaming.

“You weren't expecting this.” All of a sudden I could hear the hesitation in his voice.

“It's wonderful news,” I said, meaning it. “Are you sure this isn't the Christmas present? If so, I love it more than anything else I'll get this year. Or next.”

“Well, it certainly seemed like a gift when our senior partner asked if I wanted to do it.”

“I don't understand. I thought the firm in Washington loved having you there to do all their U.K.-American business. Did something go wrong?”

“Nothing of the sort. Andrews and Cheyne have joined with another big firm, Sharp, Witter and Rowe, to file a class-action that will hopefully send me back to Japan.” There are other forms involved, too, but we'll be the leaders—”

“Sharp, Witter and Rowe?” I sat up straight. “Ooh, bad karma. The principal partner, Charles Sharp, has a daughter I went to
school with. Janine Sharp. I couldn't stand her! She was so snobbish and uptight and—”

“It's not Janine I'll be working with,” Hugh said. “Just Charles Sharp! I'm meeting him and the translator who will be assisting me this afternoon.”

“But today is Christmas Eve,” I said.

“Yes, I know, and I'm sorry. I'll be off on the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth, but in order to do that, some groundwork should be laid today. It's a massive, long project ahead of me, with plenty of billable hours. Once we get to your house this evening, we can properly cele—” a giant yawn broke up Hugh's speech—” brate.”

“I'm afraid the celebration is going to be a celibate one.” Meeting his quizzical expression, I explained, “My mother and father assigned you to a third-floor guest room, and there's a prim and proper Japanese pathology fellow staying in a room across the hall from you. Unless she's working at the hospital, and my parents are out too, there won't be the slightest chance for us.”

“Her name is Manami, right? Your mother told me about her. I've been entrusted, in fact, with fixing her up.”

I snorted and put the car in gear. As far as I was concerned, there wasn't much more to talk about. “I can't think of anyone you know who'd be appropriate. Those rugby players are too earthy—”

“I was thinking of a nice Japanese lawyer. I'll be meeting quite a few on this case.”

“Good. I'd like to hear more about it.” I pulled back on the familiar road toward my parents' house. In the old days, I'd walked this route home from school, and there hadn't been many diversions; but now Fillmore, as well as Union, was packed with tantalizing cafes and shops. As I'd viewed the scene in Pacific Heights today, it had seemed that a lot of people took cafe sitting as a kind of career. Well, maybe that was the only option if they were out of work.

“I wish we could stop in one of those cafes to really talk,” Hugh said, following my gaze. “But I've got to get through that meeting first. If I just could drop off my things, have some tea, a shower, and a shave, I'll be off and back as quickly as I can.”

“How will you get there?” I turned onto Green, my parents' street, which had a handsome assortment of late Victorian through Edwardian and 1920s houses. Almost every house wore an elaborate holiday decoration on the door—ranging from Colonial-style wreaths adorned with pomegranates and oranges to silvery wreaths of eucalyptus leaves. Now, with the influx of techno money, everything was in perfect taste; but it was sad that many of the families I remembered from childhood were gone. Some of them had been driven out by skyrocketing property taxes; others had sold because they couldn't ignore the windfall that came from selling to the new titans of industry.

“Taxi. I'm sure there are plenty trolling through the area, given that the British Consulate's here. Is this San Francisco's version of Embassy Row?”

“No. This is strictly a residential block—there's no consulate around. I don't know which building you're talking about.” I didn't look where Hugh was gazing, because I was waiting out a tour bus blocking access into a neighbor's driveway, which I needed to pull into so I could neatly back across the street into my parents' driveway.

“Oh, is it the ambassador's private residence, then?” Hugh sounded worried as I completed my maneuvers and turned off the car. Now I followed his craned neck to look at the tall, extra-wide three-story white house defined by Grecian pillars and an elaborate portico—a portico from which hung ornate swags of evergreen roping, in the center of which was a full-sized Union Jack. I shook my head. My mother had somehow created this last flourish without my noticing.

“Actually, it's our house,” I said in a small voice. “Didn't I tell you that my mother is gaga about flags? She flies them to welcome international guests. You can imagine how over-the-top the house looked when we had psychiatrists visiting from five foreign countries—”

“Oh, my God,” Hugh said. “This is your
home
? It's a bloody palace! An American castle on the highest peak in Pacific Heights—”