Back on the Beat

It’s hard to think when you can’t breathe. It’s even harder to think when you can’t breathe because a yakuza bruiser has you pinned against the wall, with one hand around your neck and the other hand punching your ribs, and your feet are dangling off the floor.

Still, you would be surprised at how quickly sundry thoughts pass through your head.

I was in the entranceway of what was being called a “Russian pub,” the hottest thing in human trafficking at the time in Tokyo. The women were brought over from Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere, allegedly to work as hostesses, and quickly turned over to yakuza groups, which put them to work as indentured prostitutes.

This club was on the third floor of a four-story building in Ike-bukuro, an area that means literally “pond bag.” The area lives up to its name. The club was called Moscow Mule.

It was one of the newer clubs. I’d heard about it from Helena and went to check it out. Like most clubs trafficking in foreign women, it was off limits to foreigners. The problem with foreigners is that they feel sorry for the other foreigners working in the clubs—and they tell the police or the NGOs about it.

If I spoke softly, killed all emotion in my voice, and wore a suit and thick, black-rimmed glasses, I could sometimes pass for a Japanese person in extremely low light. I’d talked my way into the club. But the woman I was interviewing began to break down and cry, which quickly blew my cover.

The eight-fingered, badly tattooed, pock-faced giant bouncer at the door must have picked up on it, because he grabbed me and pulled me outside and into the entranceway, where he started beating the shit out of me. I wasn’t holding my own very well. In fact, I was thinking that I would probably be dead very soon and that this wasn’t how I wanted to check out of the world. Unlike an Apache warrior, I always wake up thinking to myself, “Today is a good day not to die.”

Much as in my early days, I was still a terrible martial artist. Even though I had since studied both karate and aikido, I had no talent for forms or kata or anything at all. The highest compliment my karate teacher ever gave me was “You do everything wrong, your stance is awful, your form is terrible, and your movements are sloppy—but often, because you grasp the underlying principles, what you do … it works. It baffles me.”

I didn’t really have much time to think about what wonderful esoteric wrist lock would get my opponent’s hands off my neck so I could breathe. It was while I was thinking about breathing that I recalled what my old aikido teacher, who was a cop, had once told me was the most effective aikido move of all. It’s effective because even the biggest man in the world can’t survive without taking in oxygen.

I stiffened my fingers and jabbed him repeatedly in the little indentation under the larynx as hard as I could, rapid-fire. It was basic atemi. There was a nice tactile sensation of puncturing fleshy tissue, and he fell back. Now I could breathe.

He couldn’t breathe; he started gagging and fell to his knees. While he was down there I curled my hands into half shells and smash-clapped them over both of his ears as hard as I could. This is called happa-ken, or “the rupturing fist.” In theory, it’s supposed to break a person’s eardrums, throw off their balance, induce nausea, and cause him great pain. In practice, it seemed to work.

He moaned and rocked back. I kicked him in the face and then ran out of the place as fast as I could and kept running all the way to Ike-bukuro station, where I hopped into a cab and told the driver to take me to Roppongi. It was only after I sat in the back of the cab and took a deep breath that I realized how much my frigging ribs hurt. I thought my hands were covered with sweat and blood, and then I realized that it was the pomade from the slicked-back hair of the bouncer. It had a fruity, medicinelike scent to it. Probably Mandom pomade.

I didn’t think about calling the cops. Maybe I could claim to have been defending myself, but I feared I might have overdone it. And I was a foreigner, which meant that in nine out of ten cases, I was presumed guilty until proven guilty. I wasn’t excited about the prospect of possibly going to jail. And though I once might have had the protection of the mighty Yomiuri in case of a dispute, now I was a nobody, a man without a business card or a normal job. I was now just a nonentity, a former journalist working for a foreign government in Japan as an investigator and with no real backup. Yes, maybe a little dangerous, but I felt it was a worthy cause. Good versus evil. I was the good guy. I’d just be more careful.

The next day I called a friend in the drug squad. I’d seen some girls snorting cocaine or meth in the back at the urging of their manager, so I knew there were drugs there. The woman I’d talked to said that all she wanted to do was go home. I figured that one way or another, that would get her home. I didn’t really know what else to do.

What had saved my ribs was a boha vest. An antiknifing vest. If you’re going to get killed in Japan, you’re more likely to be stabbed to death than shot. The penalties for using a gun in a crime are steep; this encourages people to use knives. In recent years, the penalties for using a gun have gotten a lot steeper. It’s a crime to own one, another crime to fire it, and an aggravating factor if you wound or kill someone with a firearm. This has brought about a revival of the Japanese sword as a weapon of choice among the yakuza, which was why I wore a boha vest.

The research was going well. The job was to not track the victims but to track the victimizers—to map out the whole sex slavery industry or capture a detailed microcosm of it. I was supposed to find out how the women were brought into the country, who brought them in, who profited from the business, and which politicians and bureaucrats were aiding and abetting the human traffickers. I got an ex–immigration official to give me the name of a Japanese senator, Koki Kobayashi, who had personally pressured him to stop raiding the illegal sex clubs. I had the name of what was considered a human-trafficking lobby, Zengeiren—which held its annual meetings at the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) headquarters. Mind-blowing stuff.

Not a lot of time had passed since I’d been a police reporter, and my information network was still in good shape. Of course, I’d need some help to do the job. I called Helena and invited her out to dinner, having heard she had broken up with her fiancé and was a little depressed. I didn’t just want some help, I wanted to cheer her up as well. I missed her, too. There was a great Japanese restaurant in the Nishi-Azabu area with semiprivate rooms, well lit and quiet. We were supposed to meet in front.

I waited outside by the steps, and she almost ran me over on her motorcycle. I had to step back. She parked, straddling the bike, took off her helmet, and shook out her long hair, stretching her neck and laughing. She had on her standard leather jacket, a pair of tight-fitting blue jeans, and a checkered shirt that looked as if it had been stolen off a thin lumberjack. Her lipstick was jet black. She looked great—a little tired but still great.

“Well, asshole, long time, no see.”

“Asshole? You can’t possibly be talking to me.”

“You’re the only asshole here, asshole. And you know that I mean that as a term of endearment, Jake.”

“I do indeed.”

Somehow she convinced me to go for a ride on her bike. A few times during my reporter days she’d driven me home and I’d found I could barely stand after getting off the bike, I’d been hugging the bike with my legs so hard. I got on, and she told me to put my arms around her waist. She took the helmet and tossed it into the bushes near the restaurant. I protested.

“Live life to the fullest, Jake. This’ll be good for you. Trust me!”

She revved up the engine and before she let go of the brake, she looked over her shoulder and said, “Nice to see you back. I knew you couldn’t stay away for long.”

Then we were off. I think she enjoyed the incredible discomfort that I had riding that thing. She’d whisk through alleys, run lights, spin around—and I had no idea where she was going.

It was a cold night, but it felt good to be on the back of that bike. We drove around aimlessly for twenty minutes, past the ruins of the Ministry of Defense and then down Roppongi-dori and then finally back to the restaurant.

She hopped off the bike in one quick movement. I peeled myself off it.

She smiled at me and grabbed her helmet, and without a word we walked up the stairs to get dinner. I filled her in on what I was doing and how my plans to move back home hadn’t really worked out. We talked about mutual friends. I told her about the research I was doing, and she talked about her own work.

She still wasn’t ashamed of her job. She spoke about it as I would talk tradecraft with my Japanese newspaper reporter friends. It turned out that one of her regulars was actually a fellow reporter whom I knew superficially.

“Don’t you get sick of the work?” I’d always wanted to ask her about that; it seemed to me that she could do so much more with herself.

“You know, I like the work. I tried being an English teacher, which pays all right, but I hate that work. Especially dealing with obsessive grammarians. What’s the past perfect imperative tense? Who gives a fuck, you know? I realized when I took the money the first time for sex that I’d much rather make a living on my back than standing up. Fifty thousand yen—I could work as an English teacher for three eight-hour days and still not clear that.”

It was true.

“Adelstein,” she told me, tapping me on the head with the chopsticks so I would pay attention, “you work your ass off for chump change. I get paid a hundred dollars a minute. You know why?”

“I have no idea.”

“Because most Japanese guys last two minutes. Maybe it’s because the big gaijin woman in front of them freaks them out. I don’t know. They’re in and they’re done before you even realize it. The ones that drive you crazy are the guys who just want to talk. Like this guy from NHK. He never wants to just do it. I wish he would because when he doesn’t, I have to be like nursemaid and psychiatrist and English teacher. What I’m really thinking while I’m listening to him talk on and on is ‘Dammit, let’s just fuck so I can be done with it and get you out of here.’ Sometimes, I just can’t deal with it and I unzip the guy, pull out his dick, and suck him off. Most men shut up when you’re sucking their dick. Probably even you, and you almost never shut up.”

I laughed at that. “You’re right. In terms of pay by the minute, my job can’t touch yours. But doesn’t it depress you a little?”

“Well, that’s when cocaine comes in handy. A little blow, and I’m ready to blow.”

I didn’t laugh at that.

“Jesus Christ, Helena,” I told her, “you’re too smart to be doing that shit. What’s wrong with you?”

She shrugged her shoulders, cocked her head, and batted her eyes.

“Well, it makes sex soooo much better. And work gets so boring. I need something to get me through the day. Sometimes through the night.”

“Do you want to end up dead like those poor bastards last year? You remember them, the guys who thought they were buying coke and ended up overdosing on pure heroin? You could kill yourself with that shit. You do know what I’m talking about, right?”

“I know, I know. I read the translated version of your article. You sent it to me.”

I lectured her some more. I raised my voice. I was a little angry. She sulked a little, stared at the floor.

“I knew you’d be mad at me. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize. Just stop taking that stuff.”

“I know. I will. I will.”

I changed the subject. We talked about The Gate, a translation of a Natsume Soseki novel I’d given her to read. She liked the book. We couldn’t agree whether it had a happy ending or not. She asked me back to her place for a nightcap. It sounded like a good idea to me.

She was living near Shibuya. I made her promise me that she would drive safely. She nodded her head and said in a very singsongy way, “I cross my heart and hope to die, if I should chance to tell a lie. I will be the model driver.”

I guess I should have defined “model driver” before getting back on. By Indy 500 standards, she was probably telling the truth.

When we got to her place, she put a Death Cab for Cutie album on her stereo and we sat down on the couch to talk. She lit some candles, poured some good Australian red wine into coffee cups, and brought it over to me. She put her legs over mine and leaned on me, and I didn’t mind at all. I put my arm around her shoulder and felt very content. For the length of a whole song, we just stayed that way. It was one of the few moments in the last few years of my life that I’d really felt at peace with the world.

“Tell me something, how are you really doing, Helena? I heard you split up with your fiancé. What happened? Do you want to talk about it?”

“Fuck, no. Fuck that motherfucking cocksucker asshole.”

“You have a foul mouth.”

“You have no idea. If you’re really nice, I’ll let you know just how dirty my mouth really is, and believe me, you won’t regret it.”

“I think you want to talk about it. I’m willing to listen if you can stop being a smartass for five minutes.”

“Are you sure that’s okay?”

“Sure.”

She told me what had happened. She’d been dating Carl, who was a trader at one of the foreign companies that had set up offices in Japan. He was good-looking, liked to windsurf. I didn’t know much about him except that I had met him once. He’d really seemed to be fond of her. They had been engaged for a while.

Carl had become suspicious after finding the card of the sex club where she worked inside her wallet. He’d asked one of his Japanese colleagues to check the club out. He couldn’t go himself because no foreigners were allowed.

“Well”—Helena had trouble getting to this part—“his Japanese buddy came to the club, and he fucked me. And he tape-recorded the whole thing. Isn’t that just so damn sick? I mean, what a perverted thing to have done. I was so fucking humiliated. You think that Carl would have figured it out without having to sneak around behind my back like that. Where did he think the money for our trips to Bali was coming from? I was the one paying. You can’t pay for a luxury resort on an English teacher’s salary.”

“So what happened?”

“I got home from work one night, and he was waiting for me. Outside the apartment. He was smiling and normal at first. I didn’t know anything, and then he says, ‘Oh, I have something you should hear,’ and then he puts the tape in the stereo and plays it. Christ, it was so fucking awful. I tried to explain.”

She stopped and gulped down a cupful of wine. I poured her another. She looked away from me and at the wall.

“He was really angry. He called me a lot of terrible things, and then he hit me. A few times. Finally he pushed me on the bed and pulled up my skirt, pulled down my panties, and fucked me, calling me a whore the whole time. He came and he went. And that was that.”

I knew the answer to what I was going to ask, but I choked on the question a little and she stopped me in midsentence.

“Well, I didn’t really have time to fill out the consent form—it kind of sucked.” She was starting to cry a little but laughing through the tears. “You know, he was sobbing part of the time, too. What a pussy! I think he really loved me. I cried too. It hurt. It hurt a lot.”

There’s a time to just shut up. Usually, I talk anyway, but this time I shut up. I hugged her a little closer, and I stroked her hair and held her hand. The CD had stopped playing, and all I could hear was the traffic passing outside and Helena crying very quietly, almost sheepishly. I held her for a long time.

The next day we met for coffee in Starbucks. Things seemed normal. I had some good leads, and it was time to get down to business. There was a nonprofit organization called International Entertainment Association operating out of the swanky and extremely expensive Roppongi Hills Residences apartment complex. It was supposed to be promoting international friendship; what it was actually doing was providing foreign women for the sex trade. One of the staff members had a prior for labor violations related to trafficking foreign women and prostitution. I would hardly have considered it worthy of approval for nonprofit status.

I asked Helena to look into it for me. She was well connected and knew everyone in Roppongi. I warned her to be very careful, but I don’t think she really heard me. She was excited about it. She wanted to help out.

We had an awkward parting.

“Listen,” I said, shaking my finger at her, “if you hear anything, great. Don’t poke around too much. I don’t know much about the people running this NGO other than that they are not very nice.”

“I got it. I will be cautious.”

“Just ask around a little bit. If you have the slightest sense that you’re in danger or anything—cease and desist. You have my number. Call me anytime—in the United States or here.”

“I promise that I will be cautious.”

“Okay. Good.”

I asked her how much longer she planned to be in Japan. She said that she was thinking of leaving in the spring. She’d bought a home in Australia and was considering going back to college—maybe studying “literature or something equally as worthless.”

I got up and prepared to leave after giving her some materials. She tapped me on the shoulder and held out her arms, shook her butt a little.

“Do I get a hug for the road?”

“Absolutely.”

•    •    •

In March, she called me at home in the United States. She told me that she had been asking around and that she believed that the International Entertainment Association was a front for the Goto-gumi.

I almost dropped the phone.

I told her to stop right there, and she got upset. Perhaps she thought I was overreacting or that I thought that she was weak. She could have easily been high. I certainly accused her of that. Either way, our conversation escalated almost to an argument, and then she hung up.

I tried reaching her, but she wouldn’t answer the phone. I called all the next day. I called a friend and asked him to check on her. He promised to and he did—nobody home at her apartment. I was afraid that if I called the regular police, she’d get busted for being a prostitute. I had to go and find her. I shouldn’t have waited even a day. I bumped up my flight to Japan. Sunao was furious.

I kept e-mailing her on the long trip there. I went immediately to the place where she used to work after arriving in Narita. Except when I got there, she wasn’t there. There weren’t any foreign women working there at all. Her e-mail account was not responding, and her phone was dead. I went to her apartment, and the landlord said she hadn’t been back in two or three days.

After a week, there wasn’t any doubt that she had vanished from her apartment and her day job as an English teacher; I checked there as well. She’d provided no forwarding address and had left everything behind in the apartment.

I had no idea what to do.

I did the only thing I could think of. I went to work. International Entertainment Association was associated with the Goto-gumi, so I had to check that out, right. I had to follow up Helena’s lead.

If Goto had been responsible in any way for her vanishing—and I didn’t know that he had—I wanted to know. Even if he hadn’t, I should have returned to work on the story about his liver transplant a long time ago. It was a diversion from the human-trafficking research but not completely off track. I knew I’d be putting myself at risk and probably pissing off Goto again, but I didn’t really care very much. I’d probably already done it anyway.

As the Japanese would say, I’d already eaten the poison, might as well lick the plate.