I resolved to never again be unprepared for the shit hitting the fan. I would pay attention to small things—the way people dressed and spoke and walked. The things that made them part of a background...
I nodded my head at him and gave a small wave of acknowledgment, the gesture communicating, Oh there you are, good. I started walking over. His head turtled in a fraction and his body tensed in the in...
I miss her. God, I do. It’s beyond missing; it’s a kind of mourning. And not just for everything we had, but for everything we might have had, could have had, if only I had made other choices, if only...
I learned a long time ago not to trust, that faith is to life what sticking your chin out is to boxing.
I finished eating and motioned to the waiter that I was ready for the check. I looked around the restaurant one last time. The office party had broken up. The Americans remained, the white noise of th...
I came to the first floor and looked out at the entranceway of the building. For a second I pictured the way she had hugged me here. It already seemed like a long time ago. I felt an unpleasant mixtur...
I also went to Kyoto. I had found no occasion to visit the city in over twenty years, and was struck to find that the graceful, vital metropolis I remembered was nearly extinct, disappearing like an u...
Harry, I only ask because, when you’re young, you sometimes think you can have it both ways. If you’re just having fun, you don’t need to tell her anything. You shouldn’t tell her anything. But if the...
Had I not known that I was dead already I would have mourned my loss of life. —last words of Ota Dokan, scholar of military arts and poet, 1486
Fat droplets of rain started spattering against the city’s concrete skin, against the glass windows of its eyes. A few people with umbrellas opened them. The rest ran for cover. I walked on, through i...
Both women had been wearing earbuds—one of the many things Livia taught her self-defense students never to do, because demonstrating both that you can’t hear and that you’re too naïve to know better i...
His pipe.
Because how could something so awful also contain something so impossibly good?
Astute
Yukiko walked over, her mouth stretching into a feline grin at the sight of Murakami. Naomi followed a moment later. She was wearing another elegant black cocktail dress, this one silk, fitted at the...
When I was about a meter away and beyond the range of his peripheral vision, I took a deep step in, dropped into a squat just behind him, and wrapped my arms tourniquet-tight around his legs just abov...
When I had found a payphone in a suitably innocuous location, I inserted a phone card and punched in Tatsu’s number. I could have just ignored him, but it was hard to predict what he might do in respo...
What did Ian Fleming say? Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. And I don’t believe in waiting for even that much evidence. It was past time to act.
Tokyo is so vast, and can be so cruelly impersonal, that the succor provided by its occasional oasis is sweeter than that of any other place I’ve known. There is the quiet of shrines like Hikawa, indu...
There wasn’t any