Makoto was reunited with his father—but in his absence Makoto had to embody his virtues as best he could. He chose not to crush the life out of this man.
Instead, he held his arms wide as if to embrace everyone in the room. “I foresaw this trial long ago. But I shall return to you very soon. I have gone once before to these officers of the law. I go to them now a second time, and there shall not be a third. This I have seen. But while I am gone, my children, the Church of the Divine Wind has much to accomplish. Only four days remain until my greatest sermon, the sermon of the one thousand three hundred and four. You must do your part, as I will do mine.”
All twelve of his disciples nodded, even the foreman who still prostrated himself on the floor. “Go, then, and prepare your brothers and sisters for what is to come. And may the Purging Fire burn away all that is impure in you. May you feel only the peace of those who have already given themselves up for dead.”
13
It took three hours for Mariko and her team to close down the scene at the Sour Plum. At last her sergeant dismissed her, which still felt weird; she was used to being the one who dismissed people. Those days were gone. Now she needed permission just to step outside and get some fresh air.
The rain-slicked streets offered no relief. Kabuki-cho was supposed to be Tokyo on an ecstasy and nicotine binge, but now the whole city was on lithium. The neon still reflected in the puddles, the LEDs still flashed in their millions, but for whom? Hardly anyone was there.
If there was one thing Mariko had come to understand from her formative years in rural Illinois, it was that small-town people cooked at home and big-city people ate out. Her mom’s love of cooking was very much the exception, while Mariko herself proved the rule: if she couldn’t make it in a microwave, it was too much hassle. Let someone else do the cooking and cleanup. Tokyoites had places to be.
So Kabuki-cho’s restaurants should have been filled to bursting. The streets should have been wall-to-wall sarariman, teetering drunkenly out of the bars on their way to penthouse hostess clubs or bargain basement blow job salons. There should have been teenagers with fake IDs, nervous and titillated as they ventured into the strip clubs. It was Friday night, for God’s sake. But instead those places had perhaps a tenth of their customary clientele.
Mariko noticed the same desolation in the Web cafés, the pachinko parlors, the boutique shops selling Pokémon smartphone cases. The city wasn’t dead. It wasn’t like some postapocalyptic movie where the remaining survivors were afraid to leave their homes. It was just that events like a terrorist attack made people reassess the importance of staying at home, and many of them found a new love for the comforts they’d rediscovered there. Mariko wondered how overworked the delivery rooms would be nine months from now, or whether New York and DC had seen a similar baby boom nine months after 9/11.
Mariko saw the city’s desolation mirrored in her own life. Her demotion still weighed on her like a yoke, heavy enough to physically change her posture. Old aches and pains niggled at her. She felt a gaping hole where her sergeant’s bars used to be, a mutilation just like her missing finger. She hadn’t gotten used to that nothingness yet; when she looked at her right hand, she saw the hand of a cripple. Her American upbringing told her there was no disgrace in having a handicap, but Japanese tradition held otherwise. The potency of that tradition suffused every pore of her being with shame. If losing the finger was disgraceful, losing her sergeant’s rank was cause for seppuku. Police officers and samurai were alike: for them, honor was paramount, and Mariko’s honor was indelibly marred. She had lost face and there was no getting it back.
If the empty streets were a mirror, then Mariko didn’t care to look in it anymore. She had turned to head back up to the Sour Plum when she noticed a love hotel across the road. It rented rooms by the hour, with themed rooms catering to different fantasies and fetishes. In most neighborhoods, love hotels catered to ordinary civilians—trysts, one-night stands, spouses looking to spice things up—but in Kabuki-cho it would be johns and