Year of the Talking Dog: A Hana Walker Mystery (The Hana Walker Mysteries Book 2) (10 page)

Tears roll down my cheeks, and I don’t even try to stop them. I don’t even know if I’m crying for Steve, for me, or the end of a dream.

“I knew him, but now he’s gone,” I say.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

My Dad’s old Mini Cooper has seen better days. The wooden dashboard is chipped. The stuffing is coming out of the passenger seat and I can feel every bump, every pebble and every gap on the road surface as the car trundles on through the underground highways of Tokyo. It’s been 45 minutes and still Uncle Kentaro hasn’t spoken. The tunnel lights are orange yellow and the hum of fans along the roof of the tunnel every 30 seconds makes me think the whole city would collapse if any of the propellers stopped turning. If the fans stopped moving for just 30 seconds, the roof would cave in and the skyscrapers of Tokyo would crush us to nothing.

“I think I can take whatever the world throws at me. Just not a crazy masked man with a sword who wants to kill me. I need a bit of help to deal with that.”

A flicker of a smile crosses Uncle Kentaro’s face. But he keeps staring ahead at the road in front. The tunnel becomes a motorway and then we’re crossing a river. We head east, away from the city. We spend the rest of the journey to Abiko in silence.
 

We pull into the gravel path of the shrine and I find myself sitting on the tatami mat floor in Uncle Kentaro’s front room reserved for out-of-town guests and door-to-door salesmen. It stinks of tobacco. The ugliest dress I’ve ever seen is hanging from Uncle Kentaro’s sword, which he got for winning the Chiba kendo championships, hanging above the tokonoma
display area. The dress is green with yellow triangles.

“What’s with the dress?”

“It was Emi’s. She got a job as a cleaner at Skytree, but quit the second day of training.”

“It’s a very ugly dress.”

“She decided to go back to America. You could do that job. Use your English and learn a little Japanese.”

I snort. “Right. Skytree would be about the last place on Earth I’d go.”

“You didn’t used to be scared of heights. Before the accident you were fine.”

“Lots of things changed after that.”

“Yes.” Uncle Kentaro toys with his cigarette. He rolls it around in his hand. “But you could get back all that you lost. That blow to the head didn’t kill you. The doctors said the parts that were affected weren’t to do with long-term language memory. You just have to relearn what was lost. And what you lost was your confidence. It’s all psychosomatic. It’s all in your head.”

“That’s easy for you to say. But for me, I have to relearn everything I can’t do. That means going back to being a child again. And that doesn’t get me any closer to finding out why Steve died.”

Smack.
 

Uncle Kentaro slams a sliding door open in the futon cupboard. He unrolls a musty futon. He reaches up and takes out sheets and a pillow from behind the top sliding doors of the futon cupboard built in to the wall. He doesn’t speak.

“Thank you,” I say. “In the morning, I will try to figure out what is going on with the crazy man and just what happened to Steve because…”

“No.”

“No? But I have to…”

Uncle Kentaro claps his hands together once like he does when he’s summoning the attention of the gods in a ceremony.

“No. I’ll tell you what you have to do. You have to forget about Steve. You have to forget about masked men with swords.”

“But that’s…”

Uncle Kentaro’s lower lip quivers.

“This is not a discussion. This is the part where I speak and you listen. All I want to hear from you is yes or no, you got that?”

“OK.”

He glares at me.

“I mean yes, yes, I got it.”

“Right. I agreed to take you in because I owe that much to your father, you got that?”

“Yes.”

“It’s like Japan will always owe an apology to the world for the war. It must keep apologising for the actions of its ancestors.”

“Yes.”

“It’s the same for you. You’ve had a tough time for sure. You’ve been hurt. I get why you revere all that is not Japanese, your English side and London as your home and all that… but it’s time you faced the truth. Your mother was Japanese and Japan is your home, whether you accept it or not. It’s more your home than England ever will be.”

“No.”

“It’s tough to face the truth, I know. Believe me, I know. I’ve been hiding my identity behind a bottle for as long as I could drink. But I can face facts when I have to. I’m here in Japan and I will be for the rest of this life. Am I happy about this? Are my Korean ancestors happy about this? It really doesn’t matter now. It’s irrelevant. I can barely speak Korean anymore. I don’t know what is happening in Korea now and every day I care even less. Does it matter that the Japanese don’t accept me as fully Japanese? No, that’s irrelevant, too. What matters is not where I am but what I do. I’m here and I do what has to be done to get on with life. You get it?”

“Yes.”

“You really get it? I took you in because you don’t have anywhere else to go. If it’s not me then it’s the street, right?”

“Yes.”

“There isn’t any other place you can go. I’m taking you in because there is no one else. But know this. This is the end of the line. You have to make your own life from now on. You have to forget about pipe dreams. You have to accept the past. You have to make a future, right here, in this country. Start today or you are as good as dead.”
 

He grapples for something at the back of the futon cupboard. He throws a book at me. I catch it in both bands.
Japanese for Busy People.

“Get through a chapter a day and in a month you can get a job. But even if you don’t land a job you’ll have kept yourself out of trouble. I don’t want to hear another word about the crazy man in a mask or that the police have picked you up. No more trouble. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“I’m serious. This is it. You want to stay here, there are two conditions. If you agree to them, we can be family. If you disagree, we go our separate ways. For good. OK? You got it?”

“Yes.”

“Condition 1. Forget about the crazy man with the sword. I guarantee if you forget about him, he will disappear. Do you agree?”

I dig my hands in my jeans pockets. I wonder if what he says is true, but I hope he’s right. But what choice do I have?

“Yes.”

“Condition 2. Forget about Steve and living in England. Your future is here. Start acting like it. Do you agree?”

I keep my hands in both pockets of my jeans. In one I have Firefly’s ID card. In the other is a plastic card. I pull it out. It’s Hayashi Hikaru’s press pass for the AKB concert. The cops gave it back to me, the desk sergeant didn’t realise what it was, and I didn’t think to set him straight. I toy with it. I look at the smiling face of a Japanese woman who has made it to the top of her profession, and I feel sad. But what Uncle Kentaro says is true, there is nowhere else I can go. Not now, not without Steve.
 

“Do you agree?”

I bow my head and I know there’s only one answer I can give.

“Yes.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A minute spent reading
Japanese for Busy People
is a long time. A whole day is murder. Uncle Kentaro makes out that life in a Shinto shrine is an unending list of duties and religious rites, but apart from blessing a car in the morning, a building site in the afternoon and counting the donations in the box at the end of the day, (two ¥100 coins) he spends most of his time on the telephone and smoking Lucky Seven cigarettes.

That leaves him an awful lot of time to make sure I’m doing what I promised. He leaves me be, but is serious about making me study. I start with a chapter in the morning and he checks whether I have done the exercises correctly at lunch, then I have to read to him in the evening before he settles down in front of the television. He makes a note of the sports results, then gives me my homework for the next day.

But just before he goes to bed, he hands me a leaflet.

“What’s this, Uncle?”

“I didn’t think you’d remember. I showed this to you a long time ago. I figure you need something real to focus on between your studies. You need to focus on something other than studying polite Japanese. I got it from the Abiko police kōban.”

I sigh.
 

The less I have to do with policemen the better.

Uncle Kentaro translates the text. “Let’s see now. It says she was five when she disappeared from the street outside her Abiko home in 1996. Nobody has seen her since; the police have no leads. But they do have a ¥10 million reward.”

“Great. I could do with the money. Just, not with the police.”

 
“But think of the mystery! You can try to solve this. Do you think she knows she’s been abducted? Where is she now? What do you think her parents are going through every day not knowing the truth? You’re pretty good at uncovering the truth, Hana, and this needs to be solved. Put your growing Japanese skills to good use.”

I sigh again. “If she’s still alive.”

“If she’s still alive.”

He passes me the flier. A blurry snapshot of a little girl in the grey empuku uniform of a kindergarten school. She has a bowl cut and a single topknot tied with a pink ribbon. She’s too shy to look straight at the camera.

She’d be twenty this year.

“Interested?” Uncle Kentaro says.

“What’s her name?”

“It says Ishihara.”

“Ishii — stone.”

“Yes, that’s part of the family name. But her first name is a colour.”

I’m good with colours. I look over at Uncle Kentaro. But he’s not saying. I sigh and take a stab in the dark.

“Aoi?”

“Aoi. Aoi is Japanese for blue. Very good. A lucky guess?”

Hardly. I want to scream at him that A O and I were in the drawing Steve made, but I think better of reminding him, maybe this is all part of some plan of his?

“Maybe. How do I find out about Aoi?”

“Well, you could check the internet, but there’s nothing about it in English or Japanese, I looked. You will have to do what people did before the internet.”

“Go to cocktail parties?”

“No. Check the library, or go to a newspaper and check their back issues.”

“I don’t think my Japanese is up to it.”

“You don’t know until you try. And I think you may find that it forces you to improve.” He takes out a Lucky Seven and lights it, then speaks between his teeth. “The best way is not to seek the easy way out but to challenge yourself.”

I feel the plastic ID in my pocket. I have a better idea of how to challenge myself.

“Uncle Kentaro, do you mind if I take a break from my studies and visit Tokyo tomorrow to do some research?”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I’m around the side of the NHK building. Foreigners talking loudly walk in. They look a little flushed like they have been drinking. They must be journalists. Perhaps web journalists. That means they don’t have to dress up. That would explain their sloppy clothes and torn jeans. Aunt Tanaka wouldn’t have approved. They flash their press passes and are waved through with a little bow by an old man in a security uniform. 

I hold Hikaru Hayashi’s press pass. The important thing is to keep my nerve. I come in after the foreigners. To anyone not paying close attention, I look like I’m a straggler, a last one in with the group. I flash my pass at the old guard. I’m gambling that all foreigners look the same and he wouldn’t dream of stopping me for fear of having to speak English. But just in case, I have tied my hair back with an elastic band and put on my flu mask. In the half-light my hair might look black and I could maybe pass for Hikaru Hayashi. Her photo could have been anyone. I can be anyone. At first glance.

And I’m in. I waltz past the guard in the glass box at the inside of the long grey concrete corridor. I pin Hayashi’s ID plastic cover to my chest, realising that I look nothing like the picture in the ID, but that maybe nobody does. And also, it doesn’t matter. As long as you follow the rules, follow the appearance of what is the right thing to do, actually doing the right thing doesn’t make the slightest difference. If that means I have to pretend to be someone I’m not, I can live with that. All this surface stuff doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is finding out the truth of what happened to Steve. And that means, for now, finding Aoi.
 

I let the gang of foreigners ahead of me slip further ahead out of my sight. But I can hear their voices and feet on the concrete grey corridors. Somehow there’s not a hint of the glamour of being in a TV studio, just the musty smell of alcohol and stale tobacco. Not so very different from Uncle Kentaro’s.

I need the newsroom. But I have no idea where it is. The talking and footsteps ahead of me end. I stride purposefully along the corridor. There are benches on either side like in a doctor’s waiting room or in the police station. Black pinned things with no arms. On every other one, men in need of a shave are sleeping. A man in green overalls is looking at one of the news tabloid magazines. He’s too busy to notice me. I get to a lift and stairs. I call the lift, but I don’t want to get in. I see it has gone to the seventh floor. I turn and climb the concrete staircase. I pass the man in green. He’s unfolding a picture from the centrefold of the tabloid magazine. He whistles. They often carry the latest scoops on political scandals. I’m impressed that NHK employees aren’t too snooty to read them.