A vending machine hung tilted from the wall, advertising laundry soap at fifty yen a packet to customers who might as well have been ghosts.
A Fed, a local, and a consultant.
Sold to the public on false pretenses, high officials confessing to ordering torture in violation of treaty and domestic law, and an economic meltdown even former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greensp...
Long-ago lifetime.
When I was ready, I eased in beside him. Immediately I felt my muscles trying to shrink back from the heat, and knew that in a moment they would give up their fruitless struggle and surrender to delir...
Well, the club is open until three in the morning and she works every day. So, by the time she gets home… I get the picture, I said. Though in fact, it was a little hard to imagine Harry with an attac...
We were quiet for a few moments. Then she said, You were right. I wouldn’t have reacted so sharply if what you were saying were untrue. These are things I’ve been thinking about a lot, and I haven’t b...
Treat
Treat me well, and I’ll treat you better. Treat me badly, and I’ll treat you worse.
The walls flickered in the candlelight. The room felt close and warm, like an underground sanctuary.
The hawk with talent hides its talons.
The guy was shrewder than he looked. I realized I had given too much credence to the scrawny body and the obvious age, and had underestimated him. Watching him set up what would be our makeshift class...
That was the dirty little secret of 9/11,
Some vicious thing inside me stirred. I felt it in my gut, the back of my neck, my hands. I thought of Musashi, the master swordsman, who wrote, You must think of neither victory nor of defeat, but on...
Rain shook his head. I don’t like meetings generally. I especially don’t like ones that are unnecessary and proposed by someone else.
Music reveals a personal past of which, until then, each of us was unaware, moving us to lament misfortunes we never suffered and wrongs we did not commit. —Jorge Luis Borges
Knowledge has always flowed upwards, to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves. The principle remains the same in the present era . . . governments dare to aspire, through their intelligence...
I walked on, my footfalls melancholy, respectful of the thick silence around me. Unlike the surrounding city, Aoyama Bochi is changeless, and I had no difficulty finding what drew me despite the decad...
I walked for hours, marveling at the extent of the destruction. Cars drove through Daitokuji Temple. Mount Hiei, the birthplace of Japanese Buddhism, had been turned into a parking lot, with an entert...
I had been watching the yakuza for over a month now, and knew his routines. I’d learned that he liked to vary the times of his workouts, sometimes arriving at the gym early in the morning, sometimes a...