John Rain 08: Graveyard of Memories (39 page)
I wish I’d told her I loved her. It bothers me that I didn’t. I’d been so close, and then I’d held back. I tell myself it would have made no difference, and I believe that’s true. But at least then she would have known.
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 had been someone else, or something else.
But who, or what, would that be? I try to imagine it and I can’t. It feels like a delusion, a deception, a dream.
All the world’s a stage
, isn’t that what Shakespeare said?
And all the men and women merely players
.
And so they are. So we all are. But that’s poetry. The prose is simpler. Sometimes there’s just what you can do. And what you can’t.
Acknowledgments
O
nce again, my friends Koichiro Fukasawa and Yukie Kito were invaluable in answering all my questions about Tokyo: new and old; native and foreign; cultured and
gehin
. They also introduced me to Taihō Chinese Restaurant in Minami Azabu, which I used in the book and which for the food alone would have deserved a grateful acknowledgment. And they were great occasional company while I was otherwise living like a hermit in Tokyo, researching and writing the book.
I’m sure I got any number of things wrong about life for paraplegics, and I look forward to people sharing their thoughts so I can update the “Mistakes” page on my website. Whatever errors I might have made, they were in spite of the excellent information I found on various websites. A few that were particularly helpful were:
10 Correct Ways to Interact with People with Disabilities
http://www.themobilityresource.com/10-correct-ways-to-interact-with-people-with-disabilities/
10 Things to Never Say to a Person in a Wheelchair
http://www.themobilityresource.com/10-things-to-never-say-to-a-person-in-a-wheelchair/
Dating Paraplegics: The Ultimate Guide
http://www.streetsie.com/dating-paraplegics-guide/
Deep Sea Diving in a Wheelchair (Sue Austin)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCWIGN3181U&feature=endscreen&NR=1
How to Push a Wheelchair
http://cripwheels.blogspot.jp/2006/07/how-to-push-wheelchair_31.html
Sex and Paraplegia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TaLQiiFUUY
Cameron Hughes is the guy who urged me to stop acting like the world was made only of walkies and to create a character with disabilities, and Sayaka wouldn’t have come to be without his encouragement. He was also generous in sharing his insights, experiences, and suggestions for further reading. And I’m sure he’ll be the first person to point out my mistakes. ☺
Once again, I’m indebted to Michael Kleindl of Tokyo Food Life, who’s been ferreting out the most offbeat, delicious, out-of-the-way restaurants, bars, and coffeehouses in Tokyo for over twenty years. Mike was kind enough to point me in the direction of a few places that have been around since 1972 or earlier (you can find links on the “Places” page of my website, linked below), and as always his recommendations were a pleasure to research and hugely enriched the book:
http://www.barryeisler.com/photo_places.php
Nobuo Kamioka, Professor of English Language and Cultures, Gakushuin University, kindly recommended several books of photographs of 1960s and 1970s Tokyo that were especially helpful as I tried to imagine the city of forty years ago. More on these in the Author’s Note.
If you want to see your humble author using the kind of circle drag Rain deploys in Ueno, here’s your video. That’s uber-martial artist, teacher, and writer Wim Demeere showing me how to make the drag nastier. If you recognize Wim’s name, it might be because I named a character after him who appeared in several of the Rain books. Rain finally took him out when they met face-to-face, but if it had been the real Demeere, I think Rain might have been in trouble. Check out Wim’s Rain fan fiction on his great self-defense blog:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODCfOWTy8po#at=225
While we’re on the subject of combat techniques, as with everything else that appears in the book I’ve tried to convey Rain’s chapter 1 suplay as vividly as possible. But if you want to see the move in the real world as well as in your imagination, here are two nice examples—the first executed by a seven-year-old!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLkUbYTSexs
Also: for more on the Tueller Drill “21 feet” rule, here are two videos. I practiced this kind of drill with Simunition at Peyton Quinn’s Rocky Mountain Combat Applications Training institute, and it is eye-opening. Twenty-one feet is a lot closer than you might think:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwHYRBNc9r8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL1zX-SrBH0
To the extent I get violence right in my fiction, I have many great instructors to thank, including Massad Ayoob, Tony Blauer, and Rory Miller. Their courses and other materials are superb and I highly recommend them for anyone who wants to be safer in the world, or just to create more realistic violence on the page:
http://www.massadayoobgroup.com
Rain’s notion of “Don’t insult him, don’t challenge him, don’t threaten him, don’t deny it’s happening, give him a face-saving exit” is courtesy of Peyton Quinn of the Rocky Mountain Combat Applications Training institute. Another great course:
The flying triangle strangle in chapter 3 is courtesy of Dave Camarillo’s excellent book
Guerilla Jiu-Jitsu: Revolutionizing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
, a must for any serious grappler:
I don’t know much about electricity, but learned a lot from this website on fatal electric shocks:
http://engineering.dartmouth.edu/safety/electrical/TheFatalCurrent.html
MythBusters
was hugely helpful in helping me understand that yes, a dropped appliance really can electrocute you in the bathtub. Note, though, that the
MythBusters
didn’t get everything quite right. In fact, electricity in fresh water can be more dangerous than electricity in salt:
http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/appliances-in-the-bath-minimyth.htm
http://www.boatus.com/seaworthy/magazine/2013/july/electric-shock-drowning-explained.asp
Tom Hayses and Dan Levin were generous in sharing their expertise on all matters electrical and helping me tune up the electrocution sequence. I’m not particularly technical and might have gotten something wrong anyway, but not for lack of trying on their part.
For Rain’s thoughts on the effects of proximity in killing, I’m again indebted to Lt. Col. Dave Grossman for his disturbing, original book,
On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
:
Dr. Yoshikatsu Eto and Dr. Hiroyuki Ida, both of Tokyo’s Jikei University School of Medicine, were generous in providing a tour of the institution’s facilities and in answering my unusual questions about the disposition of the dead at and through the hospital. Obviously, the shenanigans that occur in the hospital’s morgue in the story are the product only of my (twisted, yes, I know) imagination, and in any event reflect a security posture from an era much more innocent than the current one.
Once again, Jeroen ten Berge and Rob Siders provided terrific cover design and formatting services:
Thanks as always to the extraordinarily eclectic group of “foodies with a violence problem” who hang out at Marc “Animal” MacYoung’s and Dianna Gordon’s No Nonsense Self-Defense, for good humor, good fellowship, and a ton of insights, particularly regarding the real costs of violence:
http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com
Thanks to Naomi Andrews, Jeroen ten Berge, Alan Eisler, Koichiro Fukasawa, Dan Gillmor, Montie Guthrie, Tom Hayse, Charlotte Herscher, Mike Killman, Lori Kupfer, Dan Levin, Lara Perkins, Ken Rosenberg, Johanna Rosenbohm, Ted Schlein, and Alan Turkus for helpful comments on the manuscript.
Most of all, thanks to my wife, Laura, for damn near a quarter century of unwavering support, belief, and confidence, in every kind of weather. And awesome editorial, too. Thanks, babe, for everything.
Author’s Note
P
art of my writing method has always involved extensive on-site research for all the locales I use, but obviously
Graveyard of Memories
, set in 1972, presented a challenge in this regard. The challenge was multiplied by my desire to use real places—bars and jazz clubs and coffeehouses—that readers could visit if they wished.
I decided on a threefold solution: use existing places that have been around since at least 1972; concentrate the action in the older parts of Tokyo, chiefly in the east of the city, which have changed less over the decades than those in the more cosmopolitan west; and peruse photo books of 1960s and 1970s Tokyo to get a better feel for what’s different and what is largely unchanged. For lovers of the city, I recommend these books (the translations, doubtless inelegant or worse, are mine):
(
A Little in the Past of Tokyo: Images of the Downtown 30 Years Ago
, Kouhei Wakameda)
(
Tokyo Photo Book: The Story of a Changing City, 1948–2000
, Minoru Ishii)
(
1960s Tokyo: Memories of a City of Trams That Ran Like Water
, Akira Ikeda)
The result, as always, is a series of locations that are described as I found them—but also as best as I could imagine they looked and felt when Rain was only twenty.
That said, here and there I had to cheat a little, and this is the place to come clean. So: although Taro, the jazz club to which Rain takes Sayaka in Shinjuku’s Kabukichō, is long gone, its successor, Body & Soul, also opened by Kyoko Seki, is alive and well in Minami Aoyama. It’s one of Tokyo’s best and worth the trip: