Death in Little Tokyo

21

The next morning I woke to an empty bed. On Mariko’s pillow was a note that I picked up and read:

Ken-san,

Had to go to work. You were sleeping so soundly, I didn’t have the heart to wake you. I made you breakfast. (How domestic! Fair warning-I have my sights set on you, and you know how persistent Japanese girls can be!)

Your breakfast is in the oven staying warm. I’ll talk to you after work-Pick me up! — We’ll celebrate you cracking the case. (We’ll go someplace-my treat!).

Love, M

I got up and found a breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, and sausage waiting for me in the oven of my tiny stove. Sitting at my table, spreading strawberry jam on my toast, I reflected that I was unemployed, over forty, and beaten up, but that I could be doing a lot worse in life.

I went over to the doughnut shop and bought a copy of the Times. There, buried in the Metro section, was a small story about the police arrests of Rita Newly and the two Yakuza. The article referred to the Yakuza and Rita as suspects in the murder of a Japanese businessman in Little Tokyo, as well as other crimes. The reference to the murder of Matsuda left a nagging thought in my mind that I turned over and over.

I’m not a good cook, but I do have a couple of dishes I like to make. On occasion I’ve made a dish and found that my meager kitchen was missing a spice or herb called for in the recipe. I’ve gone ahead and made the dish, but it didn’t taste quite right. Matsuda’s murder didn’t taste quite right.

The Yakuza were the prime candidates for the murderers. Evan Okada told me they liked to use swords, and Ezekiel told me the Yakuza could be very nasty characters. More importantly, I wouldn’t believe anything the Yakuza said so their denial about their involvement in Matsuda’s murder was worthless to me. Still, Matsuda was their man, and although he could have done something that would make them want to eliminate him, it still didn’t taste right.

Rita’s boyfriend George had a temper and Rita was as cold as they come, but although I could see either of them plugging someone with Rita’s little chrome pistol, I couldn’t see them hacking away at someone when pulling a trigger would do. That didn’t taste right, either.

Angela Sanchez was an enigma. I still didn’t know for sure if she was the woman I saw in Matsuda’s room. Her boyfriend (or whatever he was) was a nasty character in his own right, but I found it hard to believe the police could mistake wounds caused by a large knife with wounds caused by a sword. That didn’t taste quite right, either.

Feeling restless, I put on some shoes and decided to take a walk around Silver Lake. Silver Lake is one of the oldest reservoirs in Los Angeles and one of the few that remain open despite efforts by the Department of Water and Power to cover it. It covers seventy acres and there’s another small open reservoir called Ivanhoe directly adjacent to it that’s another ten acres. Los Angeles has about a tenth the open space that urban planners says is desirable, and in a city with so little open space, finding such a large expanse of open blue water right in the center of the city is both a treat and a solace. That’s the reason local residents and environmentalists fought hard to prevent the DWP from covering it.

If you live in Oregon or Canada or someplace like that, the things that city dwellers try to save must seem pathetic. When faced with the grandeur of the Columbia River Gorge, for instance, Silver Lake seems pretty puny. Despite its name, it’s not even a real lake. It’s a man-made reservoir with concrete sides. Yet most people have a need to cling to some kind of nature, and if carelessness and the march of civilization has wiped out the grand examples of nature around you, then you fight to preserve what is left. I grew up in Hawaii, where I was never too far from the ocean. Around me was lush tropic vegetation with flowering ginger, hibiscus, and spreading banyan trees. In Los Angeles the closest thing I can come to that is a hibiscus bush that grows in front of my apartment. You take what you can get.

My apartment is about a ten-minute walk from the water. Although the reservoirs are bounded by curving city streets, on a weekday morning the traffic is minimal, and it is good to walk around, looking at the blue water, the trees that surround the water’s edge, and the colorful houses perched on the hillsides that surround the reservoir. A fence surrounds the reservoir, but at places the road is within a few feet of the water. It’s always peaceful to make the walk around the lake.

Usually walking around the reservoir relaxes me, but today I was keyed up and agitated. The sun reflected in the rippling water of the reservoir was beautiful, making tiny silver-colored peaks. But my mind wasn’t on my surroundings. Perversely, I suppose being involved with violent death should make you more in tune with nature, but I was too preoccupied to enjoy myself.

After my walk I felt a little better. For all I knew, the police were removing a bloody sword from the apartment of one of the Yakuza while I was fretting over the taste of dishes. I decided to adopt some of the AA philosophy I’ve heard from Mariko and take things one day at a time, leaving things in the hands of a higher power. So I spent the rest of the day reading and resting, and tried to banish murders and mysteries and bad dreams from my mind.

When I swung by the Kawashiri Boutique to pick up Mariko that evening I was in a good mood and I had almost forgotten about Matsuda’s murder or my nightmares. Mariko took me to one of the small cafes in Little Tokyo, where we enjoyed a sukiyaki dinner.

Little Tokyo has changed a lot since I’ve lived in Los Angeles. It used to be a quaint haven for little shops and restaurants catering to local residents. Since the effects of urban renewal it’s a lot slicker, a lot more commercial, and a lot less fun.

Little Tokyo is close enough to the nest of large public buildings in downtown L.A. to be caught in urban renewal. The Otani Hotel, Japanese Village, the Golden Cherry Blossom Hotel, and Weller Court Plaza are all tangible symbols of this renewal, but change is not obtained without a price.

When the Weller Court Plaza and the new Otani Hotel were constructed in the late 1970s, several buildings, including a building known as the Sun Building, were torn down. The Sun Building had housed many old first generation Japanese, the Issei, and it also served as a cultural center of sorts. It was a place where ikebana flower-arranging lessons, Japanese folk dance clubs, and Japanese Go game clubs could congregate to preserve the culture and to retain some scrap of community in a rapidly changing world.

When the Sun Building and others were scheduled to be torn down to make room for the new plaza and hotel, local activists protested vehemently to the point of being arrested for disrupting the Los Angeles city council. I remember seeing my cousin Thomas, who was a protest leader, on the TV news being dragged up the aisles of the L.A. city council chamber by police. My mother, who was still alive at that time, was mortified. Now cousin Thomas sits on a couple of city commissions, and he’s active in Republican politics. Time does strange things.

This disruption mirrored disruption to the community and I found it ironic that the cause of all this disruption were Japanese nationals who had decided in the 1970s that real estate in the U.S. was a good long-term investment. All this new Japanese money displaced the early Japanese pioneers that came to the U.S. to set down roots and who suffered during World War II’s camps.

The place where Mariko took me for dinner was one of the few holdovers from the old Little Tokyo; it was a small storefront with booths and a mom-and-pop feel to it. As promised, Mariko paid.

“I’ve got another little surprise,” she said at the end of dinner. “I noticed the NuArt Theater in West Los Angeles is playing one of your favorite movies.”

“What’s that?”

“Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, with Toshiro Mifune. It’s on a double bill with Sanjuro, also with Mifune. Sanjuro is the sequel to Yojimbo.”

“Great,” I said with genuine pleasure. “I just love Yojimbo, and I’ve never seen the sequel.”

Mariko checked her watch. “We’ve got almost an hour to get there,” she said. “So there’s plenty of time.”

We left the restaurant and drove my Nissan onto the Santa Monica Freeway, then onto the San Diego Freeway and off on Santa Monica Boulevard. There was the NuArt, a theater that plays a whole series of revival movies and classics.

Yojimbo (“The Bodyguard”) is the story of a down-and-out samurai who comes into a town inhabited by thieves, thugs, and gamblers. The plot and staging are set in 1860 Japan, but the action and characters are taken right out of an old-fashioned American western. In fact, a Clint Eastwood western, A Fistful of Dollars, was later made using Yojimbo’s plotline.

Toshiro Mifune plays the samurai hero of the movie with a worldly, swaggering style, and his sagacity and martial skills are in sharp contrast to his grubby and disheveled appearance. I’ve seen Yojimbo three or four times, but I enjoyed it just as much this time as when I first saw it.

As do many people, I love movies. They form a common base for allusions in our society. Two hundred years ago educated people could allude to Greek myths and others would understand. A hundred years ago allusions to the Bible could be used and understood. Now it’s movies.

Kurosawa movies are a special favorite of mine, and a double bill of his early samurai movies was perfect. In the second movie on the bill, Sanjuro, Mifune plays the same down-and-out samurai, but this time he’s involved in fighting corruption within a clan. He helps a group of young boys to understand that appearances of people are not always indicators of what kind of heart and intentions they have. It reminded me of Rita Newly. In Sanjuro, the handsome statesman in the clan turns out to be a crook and the horse-faced administrator, the butt of caustic comments from the boys, turns out to be a capable leader interested in clearing up the corruption in the clan.

There are the typical Kurosawa twists and turns in the plot, with plenty of humor and action. The bad but handsome statesman kidnaps the good administrator, and Mifune and the boys want to rescue him. Unfortunately the boys keep dashing around like Kabuki samurai messing things up. Mifune uses his wits, skill, and experience to discover where the kidnapped administrator is being held.

After the boys have upset another of his efforts to rescue the administrator, Mifune sits with them in a hiding place scolding the boys for their foolish action and false steps, which constantly delay the resolution of the problem. ‘At this rate, I’ll be an old man,’ the subtitle read on the screen as Mifune used his samurai sword in an effective parody of an old man with a walking stick.

After many misadventures, Mifune finally leads the boys in a successful effort to rescue the rightful head of the clan. Then, at the end, there’s a tense standoff between Mifune and the chief villain. They stand facing each other for long minutes and finally engage in a quick-draw contest right out of a “B” western. Only in this movie they used swords instead of guns. Mifune, of course, wins. The boys, who witnessed the quick-draw duel, are full of admiration for Mifune. But Mifune is furious with the way the boys glorify violence. ‘The best swords stay in their scabbard,’ Mifune warns.

I thought about what I had seen on the screen for a long time afterward. In a way it was a kind of epiphany. But the transformation that comes with an epiphany is an emotional, not a logical, experience. And what was necessary to transform what I knew into what I could prove was logic and facts, not a sudden inspiration.