*FORSAKEN AUDIENCE
The security booth at the turnoff to the unmarked road leading to Yamato Lodge was unmanned. The front gate of the hilltop estate was untended and unlocked. The winding gravel drive leading into the lodge was pitted with potholes and puddles, while on both sides of the bumpy road stood shacks in shambles and thatched cottages in advanced states of decay, all contributing to a general air of neglect. So far, so good, Yamato Lodge was low key and unobtrusive, made to look decrepit, if not abandoned, by design.
She stepped out of the car, inhaling the moist, fetid air of the forest, expecting to be greeted by a representative of the lodge as per protocol. She waited and waited but no one came. Not so good.
She ventured across the crunchy gravel up the steps into the welcome lobby to find the hall cloaked in shadows, unlit and unheated. The premises were utterly silent but for the sound of her own heartbeat.
The glaring absence of even a discreet welcome party could mean only one thing; the hidden fortress had been breached and was operating under “empty city” emergency mode.
The lockdown didn’t bode well for the business at hand, but it gave Miki a much-needed moment of privacy. She kicked off her heels and pattered across the cool tatami floor of the dark, austere lobby, intent on entering the men’s room, since that was the only kind of restroom on offer in an old man’s club like this. Satisfied she was alone, in the flesh, though certainly not undetected electronically, she quickly ducked inside, exchanging her plaid lobby slippers for a pair of blue bathroom slippers. She slinked into a stall and slammed the creaky stall door shut.
She double wiped the seat to rid it of man germs, flushed the water a few times to purify the flow, and then did her thing. She washed up and then flicked on the light of her phone to check her hair in the pitifully undersized men’s mirror. Preoccupied with a rogue clump of hair that made her bangs look uneven, she absent-mindedly skulked back into the lobby, forgetting to exchange her toilet slippers for her lobby slippers.
Just then she heard the crunch of gravel as a heavy vehicle pulled in the driveway. It was a bus, which could mean only one thing. A large entourage of supporters from the city were on their way in. She still had a few minutes, for it was customary for such visitors to walk the last hundred ceremonial yards along the tree-lined processional walkway that led to the lodge. Soon the lobby would be teeming with men; time to slip out the back door.
She hurried down a drafty wooden corridor that skirted the side of the main building to enter a small courtyard. After tiptoeing around the haunted grounds, it was a relief to be greeted by a person in the flesh. It was Kamiuma-kun, a familiar, reassuring presence at last. He was a physician by training, but his principle role as of late was to serve as the old man’s retainer and personal attendant. He greeted her with a sober nod, softened by a bemused smile, when he saw she was still wearing the blue slippers from the men’s toilet. He gave her the slippers off his feet and braved the cool ground barefoot as he hurriedly led her through a walled-in garden to a tea-drinking pavilion decorated with old scrolls and a small alcove.
Pleased though she was to see him, she could detect his distress and knew that matter at hand was as serious as serious could be. His normally confident, charismatic élan had been put in check, his face betrayed by undercurrents of melancholy and fear. The overall aura of decline was accentuated as much by the creaky floorboards as the tattered clothes he wore; he looked every bit the part of menial help in an old mansion gone to seed. His weary, worried eyes indicated that things were not unfolding as smoothly as planned.
She dutifully followed him as he negotiated a maze of narrow corridors and open-air gardens, crossing stepping stone paths and arched bridges to enter yet another walled compound. Along the way, the two of them moved with unspoken intimacy, almost like husband and wife. They come at last to open-aired pavilion on the edge of a hilltop promontory, a point remote enough from Yamato Lodge proper that they could shout and not be heard by the new arrivals gathering in the lobby.
If there be prying eyes, they would certainly take note of her ladyship, in an old men’s club such as this, anything female would stand out, but she had been inside before and knew the drill. She would appear to be alone in the garden, chatting with the help, while awaiting audience with the unseen one. The unseen one would see her not in the main hall, nor in his office, but right here, disguised as influential retainer disguised as a man of ordinary bearing in unremarkable dress.
Solicitous as ever, Kamiuma ministered to her while she waited, unwrapping a furoshiki basket, presenting her with ume boshi rice balls, cinnamon senbei crackers and a thermos of green tea.
“Arigatou,” Miki sighed, regarding the dressed-in-rags retainer with more than a touch of affection.
“We can’t be too careful,” he said, as poker-faced as ever, scanning the perimeter. “They have people everywhere.”
Opposition spies had penetrated the outer fortress, he explained. An elderly scribe, a long-time loyalist, had been stabbed and killed just the day before, apparently mistaken for the old man in plainclothes guise. Nowhere was safe any more.
They discussed the upcoming documentary expedition, with special attention to Sino-Japanese sensitivities. Almost as an afterthought, Miki related that she had selected two trusted foreigners to accompany her on Fuji.
“You are too trusting,” he chided, mildly admonishing her.
“But they might come in useful.”
“I know the two of whom you speak. The Chinese woman has a clean record, but her national identity not only raises eyebrows but issues of trust. As for the American, he is not to be trusted. He slipped outside the hotel this morning, in violation of the terms of his confinement. What’s more, he was in the bar last night and invited back to his room an unknown woman who is being looked into now.”
“No worry. She is one of us. I personally arranged for an experienced man-handler from our Ginza hostess club to be on the lookout for him in the hotel. How better to keep him out of trouble?”
“A slovenly man like that was consorting with one of our high-end hostesses?”
“Oddly enough, he met her once before, on his own. Intelligence tells us they first met on the train. Truly a chance meeting, at least according to the report I read. As it turned out, she happens to have clearance. What he didn’t know, and presumably still doesn’t know, is that she works undercover for us.”
“But why go to the trouble? Sometimes I don’t understand you at all.”
“If you’d seen his files, you’d know. If we don’t provide ‘trouble,’ he’d soon enough find it on his own, and that entails even greater risk. Especially in a hotel like that.”
“But why do you need him at all? Maybe Nakayama had the right idea.”
“Enough of that. It will all become clear in the next few days.”
She leaned closer to the charcoal stove, warming her hands while he set out the tea. “And his female assistant, do you not worry about the people from SPT establishing contact with her?”
“Leave that to me…”
“Ah, Sensei is about to come…” he whispered, standing up abruptly in response to a crackle in his hidden earpiece.
He bowed respectfully and withdrew, leaving Miki, who was now standing at a attention, for all appearances alone, though he only receded as far as a strategic glen overlooking the garden. To keep up appearances, he took up the rake as a lowly gardener would, painstakingly extracting rogue leaves from the mossy surface. He raked gently and rhythmically, never once letting her out of his sight.
A doddering old man dressed in a wool cap and worn army jacket came limping across the lawn. Miki’s heart sank. Not because she didn’t want to see the man, not because of the man’s appalling fashion sense, not because he’d been short with her the last time they met, but because he looked so weak. He was enfeebled, his gait halting, his carriage clearly off-balance.
They exchanged emotion-laden nods as she put her hand on his shoulder. She helped him into his seat and then poured him a hot cup of tea, placing it on the table before him.
He inhaled uneasily, as if to savor the warm vapor rising from his teacup, but then waved his hand dismissing any further ritual courtesy. Time was short.
Disconcerted that this most formal of men should dispense with all formality, she strained to read his eyes and make the most of every utterance. Between bouts of almost uncontrollable coughing, he conveyed his basic guiding principles and the necessary protocols for the trying days ahead.
Ever willful, even in the august presence of a truly authoritative man, she offered a few thoughts of her own. Over the old man’s shoulder she could see the retainer, rake in hand, keeping watch on the perimeter, keenly eyeing all angles of entry, on the lookout for infiltrators and intruders.
“A change in weather is imminent,” the old man said, turning his attention to the airy firmament. “Behold the incoming fleet of clouds. See how the moist air spontaneously takes form as it sails in from the sea, tumbling, dissolving, and reforming itself as avatars in the shape of animals?”
She saw only clouds.
“Can you not distinguish the rapidly unraveling forms,” he pressed on. His withered visage had an infantile quality, his enthusiasm oddly childish. “The galloping horse, diving dragon, coiled snake, and leaping tiger?
She looked and looked, straining to see what he saw, but she still saw only clouds. Getting desperate, she conjured up a huge celestial tadpole, but even that was a stretch. Was it her not seeing things that were there, or him, seeing things that weren’t?
Either way, the vista was tranquil and magnificent. A shimmering lens cloud refracted the white light of the sun, floating above Mount Fuji like a celestial halo. She gazed at the tree-framed mountain, trying to learn from it, trying to love it, and at length she could almost discern the hidden spirit of the mountain as it watched over their hushed conversation like an aloof, impartial judge.
The old man confided in her in a way he never had before, and, judging from his doleful, fatalistic tone, never would again. He spoke with a folksy charm, showing an unpretentious and attentive side that had not been in evidence in previous audiences. His belated solicitude was a balm to years of cuts and scrapes and bruises. She parried with him on key points, and not without effect. His hard, hyper-traditional attitude towards women was softening a bit. He backed off from long-held non-negotiable positions and hinted at a willingness to modify some of the immutable eternal truths he claimed to have discovered in communing with the mountain over a lifetime. When she related how the rash Nakayama had not only taken control of the newsroom but was now insinuating himself into her bedroom, an unwanted suitor who would not take no for an answer, he pursed his trembling lips, but said nothing.
With every heartfelt sally, spoken and unspoken, the distance between them dwindled. The faith he had once placed in the ambitious Nakayama as his pre-appointed informal heir, he now acknowledged, was perhaps his greatest folly. At the end of his years, he realized there were only a handful of people he could trust, and the ambitious magnate who burned to be his successor was not among them.
He paused, as if to summon up strength for a concluding round of commentary, but no further words were issued.
Miki kept her head low, eyes on the ground, like a supplicant. It was both a formal show of respect, and the natural pose of someone who has been made to feel like a reprimanded child. Seeking a way to cement her subordination, she played tea caddy.
“Tea?” She looked up with pleading, doe-like eyes, pouring a fresh cup and lifting it to his lips.
“Do remember me after I’m gone,” he said, trembling.
The old man sputtered and started to cough. The retainer, a trained doctor, came running over to attend to his fragile charge. The old man’s age-spotted face went purple from a prolonged fit of coughing.
“On behalf of my liege, I express gratitude for your visit,” the retainer said.
The audience was over.
In the time they took to talk, the weather had changed. Fuji had gone blank, hidden behind a diaphanous sheet of sleet and mist. While the old man was being gently escorted out of view, a gusty wind picked up, whistling across the broad valley. The sun withdrew its warmth, causing her to shudder.
When she flicked on her phone again, the screen was packed with backed up messages. The VTR documentary crew and the Chinese delegation had been delayed at a checkpoint but were now on their way up to the fifth station. She sipped a sip of tepid tea before hurrying back to the car.
She was hemmed in on all sides now, gingerly following the unevenly spaced steppingstones of a path not of her choosing. She was about to make the biggest leap yet in a stratospheric career, a leap into the unknown.
The odds were long; going back to nature in a nation poor in natural resources was an iffy project at best. Not only was the island nation paved from one end to the other and wired to the max, but the juice of the electric system depended on imported oil and volatile nuclear furnaces that spewed toxins more toxic than volcanoes.
But the man had a plan. Millions knew the legend but not the name, multitudes memorized his words, but they knew the mask, not the man. Even here in his hidden headquarters, in the inner sanctum of a time-worn lodge, only his closest aides and chief of staff were aware that he lived among them as one of them. His true identity was almost as fuzzy from up close as from afar. Those who didn’t know couldn’t tell; those who knew wouldn’t.
In public he wore the horned black facemask of an ancient feudal ancestor. Anonymity and obscurity were the necessary accoutrements to project his asymmetrical power.
In private, his whereabouts were forever in a fog, even to his disciples. Even his number one financial backer, TV magnate and world-famous philanthropist, Nakayama Jun had trouble tracking him down.
Strange to say, but it was Nakayama who had done more than anyone to propagate the old man’s fame, though it got twisted up and hitched to the schizophrenic vision of the commerce-driven nationalists. They were all for whistling praise of nature as long as they were allowed to whittle away what little of nature was left.
How could it possibly end well if the unquenchable greed of the tycoon came face to face with the non-negotiable will of the ascetic?
Powerful allies made for powerful enemies. When on air, hunched-over and weighted down in his jet-black headgear and chest armor, the fatigued kingmaker looked like a cross between a decrepit Tokugawa knight and a horned beetle. He was ubiquitous and invisible. He was a shadow, a cipher, above danger, beyond grasp. He was everything and nothing, a will of the wisp, a distant, intimate nameless nobody.
Not just any nobody, though.
He was her father.