Novels

Halfway to the Stars

By William Wetherall

Teasers

Prologue

The morning Professor Hoffman was found in his office, slumped over his desk, a hole in his temple, a pistol on the floor below his hand, I was supposed to have been his bagel and cheese. He was quite notorious, far beyond the dark corridors of the History of Art Department, for his break-of-dawn conferences at Caffe Strada, where he ate his favorite graduate students for breakfast.

Hoffman lived alone in a brown-shingle home that hung on the side of the Berkeley hills a mile south of campus. He would walk out his door at six, drop down the stairs of Avalon Walk to the street that fell to College, and arrive at Bancroft well before half past the hour to claim a patio table at Strada. I would leave my stucco-fronted Northside flat about the same time, peddle over Holy Hill, coast down Euclid, traverse the campus to Kroeber Hall, chain my bike to a rack at Hearst Museum, and cross Bancroft to Strada for the privilege of sitting in the fog with one of the world's foremost authorities on early Chinese art.

Hoffman and I would huddle over heat lamps, and he'd nurse one mug of Bianca Mocha after another as he flipped through the draft of a paper I'd be writing on Han mirrors in Japanese tombs, or something else so clearly earth-shaking it couldn't wait for a higher sun. In the midst of making a critical point, he would suddenly cock his ear to catch the crescendo of voices from the table behind me, the Strada office of a Nobel laureate chemist and his groupies. While thus eavesdropping on other Berkeley early birds, he'd eye me from the side of his head, over the screen of his laptop, and smile at my squirming with a question he knew had no answer.

On the evening he was murdered, though, Hoffman had left a message on my cell phone, asking me to come instead to his proper office on the fourth floor of Doe Library at seven the next morning. He expected to have something very exciting to show me, he said. I knew he would also bring a couple of bags of fresh croissants and muffins, and there would be all the tea and coffee I could drink. Doe's toilets, too, would be free, unlike Strada's quarter a squat.

But there were to be no more zero-period meetings, anywhere, with Professor Hoffman, my graduate advisor and mentor of three years. I saw him for the last time, face-to-face, at his funeral. It was held under the bluest of winter skies at the Greek Theatre, a few mornings after the Coroner's Bureau finally released his body to the mortuary and what remained of his estanged family.

Hundreds of people filed into the chairs on the lawn in front of the stage for a secular ceremony presided over by the archaeologist Kenneth Delano, Hoffman's longtime friend and rival, formally of Stanford, then privately engaged in appraisals and consulting. I was invited to join the small contingent of close colleagues, including Delano, who accompanied Hoffman and his family to the crematorium afterward. That evening, bundled in heavy coats and mufflers, we consecrated his ashes to the sunset off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Several tv-news crews had set up at the entrance and around the lawn, and reporters and photographers working the crowds as they streamed in and out. Among the journalists was one Kevin Mathews, a second-year J-School grad and Chronicle intern who had known me barely a day yet was already stalking me, probing into my life and my relationship with Hoffman, and pressing me to help him write an investigative piece on my mentor's turbulent life and violent death.

[ Keven comes on to Erika by asking about her name ]

"I've been meaning to ask you about your name."

"What about it?"

"It's not very Chinese."

"Who are you to decide what's Chinese?"

"I was just . . ."

"Even if being Chinese had anything to do with with it?"

"Don't get me wrong. I . . ."

"Let's not talk about my name."

"You don't like it?"

"I don't like talking . . ."

"It's a nice name."

"Am I supposed to care if you like it?"

"You don't like it?"

"Not especially. But it seems I'm stuck with it."

"What's wrong with it?"

"It sounds wierd."

"Wierd? AIRY-kuh?"

"It's EH-ree-kah."

"ERR-ree-kuh."

"Not quite. But that's better than you-REE-kah."

"Eureka? Who would say that?"

"You'd be suprised."

"Still, I think it's nice."

"In third grade, I think it was, a boy in another class, who had lived in New York and kept to himself, came over to where I was eating lunch with my friends. He saw the name on my lunch box, pronounced it AIRY-kuh, like you, and asked loud enough for the whole school to hear if I was half. My friends took it from there, and I spent the rest of the day denying that I wasn't one-hundred percent Japanese."

"But you said your mother was Chinese."

"She was, but she naturalized. So both of my parents were Japanese. And both were Asian. So I didn't want to say I was half."

"I thought half's just mixed, never mind race."

"It's all about race, and for most people it's a visual thing. I hate that. Anyway, like it's anyone's business."

"Sure. But now you don't mind people asking?"

"Asking what?"

"What you are."

"I just don't react."

"But you answer their questions."

"I've mellowed. I'm politer."

"Diplomatic?"

"I've learned to give people the benefit of doubt."

"About what?"

"If they're racists or just naive."

"Which am I?"

"Both."

[ Erika talks to her mother about her name ]

That night, after dinner, I confronted my mother.

"Why did you name me Erika? It's so un-Japanese."

"It's very international," she said. "It could Russian, French, English, even Japanese. And it's written with two characters that make a very nice Chinese name."

"Lihua? So common, so trite. There must be a million Wise Flowers in the world."

"You're lucky I didn't give birth to you in China during the Cultural Revolution. I might have had to name you something like Fragrant Soldier or Public Fragrance.

[ Erika on her mother ]

It's funny how you can grow up and not know your parents, nor even know you don't know them. One day you discover they're not who you think they are. You realize that you've been taking them for granted. They've always been there, like the moon. They orbit you, and you see in them whatever you want to see. They hang there in your sky, day and night, yet you barely notice them. Now and then you gaze at their fullness. At times you wish their light away. Then you miss them in the darkness of a world they no longer illuminate.

When Mama went, I wanted to follow her, and catch up with her, then travel with her backward in time. I wanted to witness the moment of her conception, then share with her every joy and sorrow she had before and after she conceived me.

Papa had a secretive side he began to reveal a year or so after Mama's death. By then he'd recovered from the shock of surviving a woman he fully expected would survive him. He'd learned to do things he'd always depended on her for. He'd stopped feeling guilty about her early demise. He'd regained his sense of humor, now only slightly less bubbly than it had been before she began to show symptoms.

[ Erika on biking to school ]

Free-falling down Euclid, flying across Hearst with or against the light, darting between the turreted towers of North Gate, coasting by Earth Sciences, then pedaling around Memorial Glade to Moffitt and Doe, comes as close to rebirth as one can get from this side of the divide. The exhileration of the late-autumn air is heightened by the thrill of the ride. Zipping along street after tree-lined street of homes and stores, in a stream of car, truck, and bus traffic that thickens the closer you get to campus -- with bikers and an odd assortment of skaters and kickboarders, joggers and marathoners, dog walkers, baby and grannie strollers, lope-along leg stretchers and kick-butt power hoofers, their ears covered by headphones and their nose buried in a book on string theory -- heightens your sense of nearness to the divide, your awareness of how easily a spill in the path of an onrushing bus, a car door opened into your front wheel, a second glance at a hunk with the tighest ass you've ever seen, could speed your way to the other side, with no guarantee of when you'd be back, or as what you might be the next time around.

Bicycle racks are in short supply, especially around Doe. But the gods were kind to me. Near the southwest entrance, where I rarely find an empty rack even at seven in the morning, I spotted one that had my name all over it, and I pedaled toward it with all my might lest the guy coming up on my right cut me off. He fell back, though, and vanished in sight and mind as I veered left toward the bank of ranks.

[ Erika under investigation ]

The night Hoffman was shot in his office I was having dinner at the home of a San Francisco art dealer. Rumors of my intimacy with Hoffman, my call to him that evening, his email to me an hour before he is thought to have died, my inability to prove that I could not have been in his office then, and a lack of evidence pointing at anyone else, made me the only suspect the first two days of the investigation. The police told me they didn't think I did it, but they had to rule me out, and the more I cooperated with them, the quicker they could clear me of suspicion. Or so I was led to believe.

[ Earth day demos trump Hoffman murder ]

The next morning I unfolded the Chronicle, fully expecting to see Hoffman's murder at the top. But the headline read "Huge S.F. pro-Hetch-Hetchy march / Dam removal militants break off fire hydrants". I'd entirely forgotten that Monday was Earth Day, and that thousands of students and other people had joined events around the Bay Area in support of various environmental causes. Thousands had paraded down Market Street to the City Hall to protest a recent decision by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to disregard a private proposal to restore the Hetch Hetchy Valley, flooded by the O'Shaughnessy Dam in 1923. Though vaguely aware that the dam had something to do with the city's water supply, I hadn't been following the dam-removal movement. I'd been to Yosemite once in my teens and could understand the desire to restore its smaller neighbor to its former glory. Yet I had some trouble with the editorial decision to give the resuscitation of a drowned river more attention than the cold-blooded murder of America's foremost expert on early Chinese art.

Though the dam controversy got more front-page play, Hoffman's story was featured right below the fold and continued at the top of the back page, while the rest of the march report was buried inside. I released my breath, my faith in the Chronicle's judgment of news worth somewhat restored, then frowned when I noticed the shorter article, "Police question research assistant", and spotted my name in the second paragraph.

[ Hoffman as tea maker ]

Hoffman had a lot of peculiar habits, for instance the way he made tea. He never used bags, and did without even a tea pot or strainer. He'd just spoon or shake leaves into a cup and pour in some boiling water. "They go to the bottom," he said more than once when serving me tea and seeing me smile at the way he made it. There were always some floaters, though, and now and then one stuck to a tooth and stayed there forever. Not long after I began working with him, I gave him a box of green tea in bags, hoping he might offer me some, but the box sat with his cache of bulk tea for months opened but unused. Then one day he picked it up and said, "This is probably not as good as you're used to in Japan, but why don't you take it home with you?"

"You can't use them?" I said.

"Someone gave them to me, but you know how much I detest bags," he said. "They're so wasteful."

"Thank you," I said, and took the tea home, where it still sits on a shelf.

[ Erika on father ]

I recognized my father in Hoffman's manner of relating with colleagues and students. He didn't wear a watch and had no clocks in his office or study. He'd listen to whatever you had to say, interrupting only to clarify or sharpen.

"What is your periodization for Shang?"

"You're referring to Mori?"

"I would suggest it's more red than vermillion."

Or just when you thought you'd said all you could or wanted to, and were about to make an exit, he'd ask a question that couldn't have been better designed to keep you there another hour.

All this was great if you craved such one-on-ones with Hoffman and happened to be the one who had his ear. It was an entirely different matter if you were the one left waiting for your turn outside his door. On the phone he was quite the opposite. He couldn't bear to let it ring, and couldn't wait to get off, which worked to the advantage of the audience.

[ Hoffman on Delano ]

"This is where Delano and I part company. He calls himself an art historian, but most of what he writes is more like historical fiction, a sort of science fiction looking backwards."

"True historians are supposed to work forward from the past in a scholarly way. They stay within the limits of what they can reasonably infer from the artifacts, texts, and other available evidence. Of course they formulate theories and hypotheses, but as scientists they take the view that pure speculation proves nothing."

"I assume all artifacts and texts have something in common, something that informs all human experience no matter when or where we witness or find it. I see the human condition as a tapestry of the realities and truths that weave the present into the past and future."

"We've had this argument before, Doug."

"And I'll repeat what I've told you before: I think you're being intellectually dishonest. You've allowed yourself to be brainwashed by postmodernist nihilism. You're buying into their arguments because, increasingly, they are controlling the research funds and journals. They're main purpose is to gain power, and their principle strategy is to press the past and even the future into the service of their here-and-now ideology."

"When I see a carving from a tomb that was closed two millennia ago, I see a product of human hands that were agents of a human soul. Whereas you see classes and castes, slave owners and slaves, racial and gender discrimination, victor's values, everything except what might connect the hearts of those that created and used the carving with the hearts of those who found them in the ground, and who have found them mysterious, awesome, beautiful."

"You lack any sense of resistence to false thinking. You're ready to believe that a screwdriver could be anything you want it to be. Sure, some people use screwdrivers to cut the tape of a parcel or jimmy a lock. But does this give us the right to regard a screwdriver as an instrument for relieving an itch in our ears? Why read political motives into the differences between a plumber's tools and a doctor's instruments?"

"But that's what you do. You see the figurine as something more than a grave accessory. In your desire to feed current fashions in academia, you insist on eroticizing the figurine in a way that helps feminists today avenge themselves against the real and imagined misogynists of the past. You are mainly concerned with the political correctness of musueum displays. What was probably only a fertility goddess, put in the tomb to ensure that the woman would give birth to lots of healthy babies in the next world, becomes, in your deconstructionist eyes, a dildo, a symbol of female liberation from dependency on males for sexual pleasure.

"And for lending your considerable authority and charm to this view, you are applauded by all the people who appraise what you say in terms of its relevancy to present-day social issues, its sensitivity to the agendas of racial and gender politics, its promotion of multiculturalism and diversity, and how much it helps all living victims of history empower themselves against the forces that continue to oppress them.

"You're very good at imagining things you couldn't possibly have experienced."

[ Hoffman as classical Asianist ]

Hoffman was one of those Asianists who combined a classical education with a love of art. He believed in examining the past through its own lenses, rather than from modern or mostmodern perceptions. For him, "Asia" was just a relic of four millenniua of Hittite, Greek, Roman, and European geography. The governments that define and guard the borders of Asian countries today have nothing to do with early Asia, except that they control the lands on which the ancients built their towns and tombs. That some caretakers of ancient art may be, biological or culturally, the ancestors of the artisans that produced it mattered little to Hoffman. They were members of families and clans and regional peoples, but above all they were humans.

Hoffman's Asia was anything but singular. It was fractured by all the the usual variations of the human condition. For him, the themes that inspired Asian art were no different than those which inspired the art of the Mediterranean, Africa, Europe, or the Americas. Art was human.

Asia, for Hoffman, was just another cauldron of peoples struggling to survive for the same biological reasons. They inhabited different environments with different climates and resources. Their lives were ordered by a variety of cultures that placed different technologies and tools at their disposal. Survival was the only theme that all people had in common, and no other theme distinquished Asia from, say, Africa or the Americas. Asia was just another fold of the human condition. The boundaries of geopolitical entities like China and Japan have been constanly shifting. While fashionable to speak of them in the singular, they are really pluralities that defy reduction to a singular, past or present.

He went out of his way to illuminate and respect contemporary modes of seeing the world. Kings were kings. Slaves were slaves. Men were men, and women were women. Period. There were no contexts, much less subtexts, for the simple reason that there were no texts. There were only hands, tools, materials, and beliefs. He found no evidence that ancients died for reasons unique to their time and place. The died for the reasons that all humans everywhere, at all times, have died.

[ Hoffman's ashes ]

Everyone who knew Hoffman was there. His ex-wife and four of his five children, two sons-in-law and three grandchildren, sat in the front row. The UC Berkeley chancellor, the dean of the College of Letters and Science, the chairman of the History of Art Department, and attaches from the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese consulates in San Francisco, were also seated in front, and beside them, ramrod straight in a dress uniform, was the chief of the campus police, who I'd seen at a press conference.

Sitting behind Hoffman's family and the dignitaries were many of his colleagues and students, and most of the departmental staff. Art historians, archaeologists, and Asianists came from as far away as London and Beijing to say farewell. Local museum directors and patrons, curators and collectors, gallery owners and dealers, even a reputed smuggler were there. Members of the Asia Society, Oakland and San Francisco Chinatown associations, and other groups came in some number. A few plainclothes officers, including the two detectives who had questioned me about all manner of things, were studying the mourners while paying their own respects.

Delano and I trailed behind Hoffman's family. We paused at the railing a few meters shy of where they stopped to scatter him.

As much as I loved the Golden Gate Bridge, and never missed a chance to see its vermillion towers from a plane, or to gaze at it from Holy Hill anytime of day but especially in the evening, I knew preciously little about it. I mainly knew it to be a Mecca for jumpers all over the world, and hence I expected to find it fitted with barriers or at least nets. But there I was, leaning with Delano against a rail that either of us could easily have climbed. And on the other side, so far below I felt a dizzy watching a container ship come in and disappear under the bridge behind me, was nothing but a dark jade sea.

"Why's everyone acting like we're on a covert mission?" I said.

"What we're about to do isn't exactly legal."

"You mean we could get arrested for this?"

"The CHP might tell us to move on. Or look the other way."

"What's wrong with scattering ashes?"

"Most people around here would say nothing. The vast majority are opting for cremation. Afterall, this is San Franciso."

"So why don't they change the law?"

"It's a state law. California has a higher cremation rate than most other states, but the bottom line is that all human remains, even ashes, must be accounted for. If you take custody of someone's remains, you're responsible for the integrity of the remains. You can't just dump someone's ashes on a mountain side or in a river. You can scatter them on land if there are no local restrictions, but only with permission. And you're required to report the time, place, and other circumstances of the scattering."

"Sounds complicated."

"I understand Japan has the highest cremation rate in the world."

"That may be true. But there's some local variation there, too."

"The law was changed here two years ago. Until then you had to be at least three nautical miles away from the coast."

"And now?"

"Now it can be anywhere that's at least 500 yards offshore. But not in a stream or lake. And not off a bridge or pier."

"You know a lot about this."

"I buried a friend at sea last year."

"A friend?"

"He died of AIDS."

"I didn't know Delano very well. Either Hoffman or someone at the museum had told me his lover had died. I had simply assumed his lover had been a woman. Perhaps she had been. What difference did it make? A lover is a lover.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Right below us."

"Off the bridge?"

"No. From a boat owned by a licensed cremation remains disposer. One day it's chartered out for fishing, whale watching, coastal cruising, parties, whatever. And the next day it's used to scatter cremains."

"Cremains."

"The language lives."

[ Erika's first impression of Kevin ]

I am not given to casting nasty remarks about someone I've just met. Walking away from my first encounter with Kevin, though, I heard myself muttering "Asshole!" so loud I feared, then hoped, he might have lingered behind and heard me. Turning my head, I saw he'd already kicked off and was coasting down the hill. He braked to a stop in front of Durant Hall, locked his bike by the bushes near the steps, and darted inside without looking back. I wondered what business he had in Durant, home to the Department of East Asian Languages. In my almost daily visits to the East Asian Library, and in all the times I'd hidden away in the quiet confines of the East Asian Studies Lounge, I couldn't recall ever seeing him there. Not that I was in the habit of actually seeing everyone I walked by, sat near, or even talked to, but Kevin was not someone who would escape anyones notice.

[ Erika and Kevin have one of their moody conversations,
this one over coffee and donuts at an off-campus café ]

"Do you think I'm a crustacean?" I said.

"A crustacean?" Kevin said. "What's this all about?"

"Just answer my question. Am I a crustacean?"

Kevin squinted at me then grinned and said, "If you are, you've got a great exoskeleton."

"I was beginning to hope that my first impressions of you were wrong," I said, flashing my most diplomatic smile, something my mother said I'd picked up from my father.

"You can rest assured I'm perfectly normal in that respect," he said, tilting his head and leering.

I slanted my head the other way, focused on his ear, and saw a curious sea shell on a sandy beach.

"I was hoping you might be an anomaly," I said.

"No way," he said, as he leaned across the table and puckered his lips.

I pulled back, straightened my head, and said, "I guess all men are the same."

He bolted to attention in his chair and impishly smiled, but his cheeks flushed.

"What do you expect me to be?"

"More intelligent, less carnal."

His brows shot toward his hairline, and I imagined him years from now, his hair receding beyond the horizon as my father's had while I was growing up.

"I thought I was paying you a compliment."

"You compliment me by playing along with what I'm trying to say."

"Okay. Someone's called you a crustacean and you don't like it. Just tell me who he is, and I'll beat the shit out of him."

"See? Typical macho posturing."

"Jesus," he said, an edge on his voice, then he took a deep breath. "Okay. I don't think your skeleton is exo, because obviously you've got your own inner core. But while we're spouting metaphors, may I suggest that you not be so thick-skinned?"

This time I truly smiled at him and said, "Touché."

He laughed and said, "May I say I like your smile?"

"You may," I said. "And I like your ears."

"My ears? No one's ever said that before."

"Well, no one's every said I'm a crustacean before."

"I never said you were."

"I never said you did."

"You just . . . what is this all about?"

"A guy in my seminar claimed that western egos are different from Asian egos. It was so dumb. He said westerners are more independent because they have a strong sense of who they are as individuals. Whereas Asians are more interdependent because they see themselves as part of a group."

"And he called you a crustacian?"

"He said Asians were crustacians because their identities are formed by the various groups that constitute their exoskeletons."

"So they have no identity outside their groups? No sense of 'me' without a sense of 'we'? Shapeless blobs of protoplasm?"

"That's a pretty keen way of putting it."

"Is that a compliment?"

"Possibly. Let me think about it."

"Do you think he's right?"

"Of course not. Most people everywhere depend almost entirely on belonging to a gender, family, class, race, community, vocation, and nation for their sense of self."

"Do you think I do? And how about you?"

His eyes peered straight into mine and mine into his.

"I think we're both struggling to find something within ourselves that transcends such superficial elements."

"You won't get angry if I tell you frankly what I think?" Kevin said, softening his gaze.

"No," I said, bracing myself.

"I'm not sure such elements are that superficial, or of equal superficiality. I can't imagine you transcending your femininity. And when I'm with you, as I am now, I want to transcend everything I am except my masculinity."

I opened my mouth, not knowing whether to object despite my promise not to, or let it pass. Then surrendering to other feelings that had begun to stir me, I smiled at him, pulled my bag off the corner of the chair as I stood, then leaned across the table, planted a kiss on his cheek, and turned toward the door.

"Bus my tray, okay? I'll see you at the press conference tomorrow."

[ Kevin's J-School classmate ]

"How was Shanghai?" Kevin asked his classmate, who had gone there to cover a new-media summit as part of his J-school thesis research.

"It's quite a place. You hafta go sometime," his friend said.

"It would ruin me in no time," Kevin said. "I hear the babes who twitch around the hotels need attention so badly it's hard not to give it to them."

"You've been reading

i>Shanghai Baby," I said

"No. That was the observation of Shanghai whores by a guy named Joe in 1923. Later known as Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell."

"Joe was a pretty good man," Kevin's friend said.

"Barbara Tuchman thought so anyway."

"I wonder how things would have gone had Truman listened to him instead of his anti-commie advisers."

"Probably no different. Governments, being stupid, will always find ways to screw things up."

"But how will they screw up? That's the question that makes history a horse race."

"Which is why I don't get all the fuss some people make about history. Everyone knows the outcome. One horse or another will win, and for a while will get more attention. But the losers will still get their oats and race another day. And today's winner is bound to lose, sooner more likely than later."

"The problem is, which one wins which race, why and with what consequences. That's what makes history interesting."

"Are you saying we all die, and life is fun only because we don't know when or where?"

"Or how. "

"In bed alone, or humped over a lover?"

"You're getting the point," Kevin's friend said, then to me, "What do you think about all this, Erika?"

"I think you should both get a life," I said.

[ Keven and Wang on history ]

"It's all about history," Wang said.

"What is history?" Kevin said.

I raised my brows, and when I caught Kevin's eye he winked.

"Zhang Zenglong called it a whore because anybody with money or power can screw it."

"Sure. It's written by people with the will and means to write it. But that doesn't tell us what it is," Kevin said.

It was going to be a long afternoon.

[ Keven and Wang on Niels Bohr ]

"Anything could happen," Kevin said.

"Predictions are difficult, especially about the future," Wang said.

"You've been reading Yogi Berra," Kevin said.

"No, Niels Bohr. I've never heard of Yogi Berra."

"I can't say I've heard of Niels Bohr."

"You've heard of Einstein, I hope."

"Right. So Bohr was a physicist? And you must have heard of the Yankees."

"So Berra must have been a baseball player."

"As famous as Einstein, at least in New York."

"When did Berra die?"

"I think he's still alive. Or he was a couple of years ago, when I caught him on TV talking about his new book."

"What was it called?"

"I Really Didn't Say Everything I Said or something."

"See? Maybe he said it but didn't."

"Most Americans seem to think he did."

"Well, Bohr was born in 1885 and died in 1962, and spent most of his life in Copenhagen, so it's highly unlikely the two gentlemen ever met or even knew of each other. Maybe they both came up with it. That happens, you know."

"Anyway, we agree that anything could happen."

"Anything. And there's no way you can be prepared. But a general who goes into battle without a plan is a fool. That was Eisenhower."

"Who added that a general unwilling to deviate from his plan is a bigger fool."

"Something like that. What's your plan?"

The Black Buddha

By William Wetherall

Teasers

Prologue

Jackson Smith was not having a nightmare. He was very much awake and was running for his life. Three men with kives were chasing him down a back street in Shinjuku. The fastest of them closed the distance and kicked Smith's free foot behind the other. Smith plunged headlong to the pavement, and as he rolled over to face his attackers, the one with the hunting knife fell on him and plunged the blade upward under his ribs. He quickly pulled out his knife and jumped to the side, as the other two men stabbed out Smith's eyes. The assailant who had stabbed Smith in the chest then carved an X on his forehead, and the three men faded into the remains of the night.

News of Jackson Smith's murder spread through the embassy like a fire up a dry brushy ravine. Jaws dropped, heads shook, eyes stared out windows. Smith's secretary started sobbing. Her assistant, smiling back her own feelings, hugged her until the convulsions stopped, then helped her wipe the tears from her face. Few others would miss him, though. Some, like Second Consul Nelson, could barely conceal his sense of liberation, if not exactly his delight, that Smith was gone.

Smith had come up through the ranks bucking the system, rendering as little as possible unto Caesar, ignoring all but the most inflexible conventions of protocol, breaking any embassy rule that stood between him and his family, his sense of service to ideals that his country championed at least when politically convenient, and his dedication to a long list of "human causes" as he preferred to call what conservatives called "social problems" and liberals dubbed "social issues". His gods were his wife and children, and his desire to improve the conditions of life for all people. Red tape, waste, incompetence, corruption, and toadyism and hypocrisy were his natural enemies.

The only principal in the case who would never be able to recall where he was, and what he was doing, shortly after 10 o'clock that morning when news bulletins first reported that two joggers had spotted his half-submerged body in a tangle of duckweed at the edge of the broken donut of tepid, murky water that rings the Imperial Palace in the heart of Tokyo. Smith was a familiar figure to local policemen like Kawamoto. When posted to Japan three years ago, rather than live in the Embassy Compound, he and his wife rented a three bedroom apartment in Kojimachi. Another resident, a publisher of right-wing books, had protested the admission of a black family into the building. Smith and his wife had also made news when, instead of sending their two boys to an expensive American school on the other side of Tokyo, they enrolled them in a public school just a few blocks away, and some parents objected.

Smith was known to jog around the Imperial Palace, or to Hibiya Park and back, two or three times a week. On mornings like this, he could be seen riding his mountain bike through the government blocks to the embassy. Just last week, on television, Kawamoto had seen a press conference at which Smith had confirmed that the United States had asked for Japan's cooperation in its effort to uncover links between his own division and the Japanese branch of an international forgery ring. If a man can be judged by the kind of people who swarm to his funeral, the living Jackson Smith was a breathing contradiction, a slice of the whole human race.

[ Kuriyama Hiroshi's morning routine ]

Kuriyama Hiroshi, the Prime Minister's Foreign Affairs Advisor, got up at six to run Goro, the German shepherd he had raised as a puppy when at the embassy in Washington five years ago. Reiko, his wife of 28 years, was sound asleep in her own bedroom, and would not get up until seven. Reiko's mother Kume, out of long habit, had been up since five. She had put on a handmade house kimono, her most eccentric gesture to tradition in the ultramodern neighborhood, and was washing clothes, using the water from last night's bath, when Kuriyama came into the bathroom to splash some water on his face and run a comb through his hair. He would shave and shower after running Goro.

Kuriyama, Reiko, and Kume lived in a free-standing, two-story house with four rooms in addition to a living room, kitchen, dining room, and one-and-a-half baths in an upper-middle-class Tokyo suburb an hour by train from Nagatacho and Kasumigaseki, government districts just south of the Imperial Palace. Reiko would rather have lived in the city, but her mother preferred the country, and Kuriyama wanted to be near both. Reiko agreed that the compromise would be good for their children and, someday, their grandchildren. Their son was now living in a company dormitory in another prefecture and was engaged to get married in December. Their less predictable daughter was studying in California. So Reiko had taken over their daughter's room, where she could sleep better, and they had turned their son's room into a guest room. The moments of intimacy were better that way, Kuriyama had agreed after worrying that Reiko was abandoning him.

Every morning he could, Kuriyama ran Goro down the street two blocks, across the rice paddies, along the far dike to the small stream, along the stream back across the paddies to the woods, and through the woods to the road that came out at the back of his home. The run -- the walking and trotting, the waiting for Goro to evacuate his bowels, and the cleaning up -- had become so addictive that Kuriyama always felt more impatient than usual on days he couldn't do it.

The run left Kuriyama just enough time to shave, shower, eat, and get chauffeured (though some days he preferred the trains) to his Nagatacho office by eight-thirty. At nine he would brief the Prime Minister, then work his way through his in-box, morning appointments, and committee meetings until lunch. Today he would eat with the his immediate bosses, the Minister and Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs, before going to Narita International Airport to receive his Russian counterpart, and coincidentally pick up his daughter, who was coming to Japan for a couple of weeks during her summer break. Kuriyama was relieved that this year she'd be coming alone. He hadn't particularly cared for her last boyfriend.

Goro had stopped along the stream and sniffed his way to the spot where he liked to quench his thirst. Kuriyama, while watching the dog lap at the water, rehearsed his briefing with the Prime Minister. Last night he had dined with the Ambassador from Peru. At a quiet night club they had gone to afterward, undisturbed by hostesses, the ambassador had wondered how Japan might respond to a request for military aid to the flagging Fujimori government, which was besieged by guerrillas and on the verge of collapse. Would he, Kuriyama, totally off the record, broach the subject with his ministry and the Prime Minister?

Back on the paved path that ran along the stream, Goro pulled at the reins, already taut, and Kuriyama began lopping along the pace set by Goro. After trotting a ways, Goro abruptly stopped by the usual tree, just off the pavement, sniffed around the leafy duff under the tree, and squatted. Kuriyama pulled an alcohol wipe, a garden trowel, and a plastic bag out of the toilet kit, which was strapped over a shoulders, and waited for Goro to dump the accumlated remains of his meals, which he did every morning, day after day, as punctually as Kuriyama did himself before showering.

Two or three seconds passed before the rusty brown sausage of digested Lovely dog-food began to descend. The first link broke off under its own weight, and Goro shook off the shorter second link, which had clung to him, and it fell across the longer one, which had landed in the shape of a boomerang. Kuriyama decided that the pile looked more like the kanji for "seven" than the katakana for "hi". Neither, though, was a particularly auspicious sign for a day that he wanted very much to go well.

Goro held perfectly still while Kuriyama, hunkering beside him, gripped his collar and wiped him. When finished, Kuriyama released the collar, and Goro darted to the end of the leash, where he quiety watched Kuriyama trowel the steamy stools into the earth. That done, Kuriyama stood, bagged the wipe and trowel, returned them to the toilet kit, and headed home.

As he walked, pausing only a couple of times while Goro marked a bush or pole, Kuriyama smiled to himself. What would people think if they knew that he, the Foreign Affairs Advisor to the Prime Minister of Japan, was a practitioner of the ancient art of stool divination? In his heart, of course, he knew it was all a crock, a silly diversion, a way to take his mind off the gravity of life, during the thirty minutes he spent each morning with Goro, who was growing old faster than he was.

Daigo and John catch CNN reports on Washington riots ]

Daigo switched to a late evening CNN special on the Washington riots.

"Democracy, John," he said of the live coverage of a mob of young black men throwing bottles, chunks of pavement, sticks, anything they could lay their hands on, at the cordon of police around the Japanese Embassy. A crowd of people of various races was cheering as two blacks and a white set fire to a Japanese flag.

The camera zoomed in on a black woman and an Asiatic man who were kissing and petting beneath a large white placard that someone had wired to the embassy fence. The sign had been made to look like a personal ad in the classified section, and its large brown and crimson letters read:

African American woman
wants to bait next Jap
emp's hook. Call BARB.

The evening news showed the Prime Minister posing with his new Cabinet on the steps of the Diet Building. The men wore mourning dress, black tailed coats over baggy gray, striped trousers. The single woman was a lotus in the mud with her burgundy suit and yellow blouse.

"My God, would you look at those faces," John said.

"If their not arrogant, the Pope's a Nun," Daigo said.

"Imagine them striking those poses in their birthday suits. Nothing to hide their flabby bellies but their gnarled, liverworted hands."

"That's power, John. If people like that decided to pull the plug on the pretense of democracy in this country, it'd be all over. Already they have the gatekeepers of most major media in their pockets. In a manner of days, they could sew enough seeds of fear to bring the rest under their control. It's happened before. It could very easily happen again. Sure, there'd be a some resistance from radicals in the streets. But most of the bombs would be thrown by the right. And they'd hit mainly the media. The press would quickly give in after a few token editorials protesting the violence. Assassinations would be the order of the day. Old scores would be evened. Someone would disembowel the ex-mayor of Nagasaki at his geriatric home, and they'd get Itami Junzo in the screening room of his studio. This time they wouldn't botch up."

"The only deterrent to a new wave of Japanese militarism is the nuclear arsenal in China. And American bases. Most people think the bases have stayed to protect Japan from the Soviet Union. No way. They're here to protect the rest of Asia from Japan -- and to protect Japan from itself."

"Some people say that MacArthur's biggest mistake was to keep the emperor." Daigo said. "I'd be forced to resign if I publicly stated that I'm inclined to agree. The problem is, we'll never know what would have happened if the Allied Powers had tried Hirohito as a war criminal. The attitudes of many people toward the present mix of politics and the imperial family are very childish. In this respect, MacArthur was being generous to say that we were a people with adult bodies and the minds of 12-year-olds. Many people prefer to cling to soft-headed royalism than face their own ideological inertness. They simply don't want to know what might be right or wrong. They're afraid of making a moral commitment. I'll say one thing in their favor, though -- under merciful, noble leaders, they'd be a benevolent, chivalrous people. But you're going to tell me that one could say this about the people of any country."

John smiled at his friend but said nothing.

[ Kuriyama's Nihonjinroin ]

Kuriyama had grown up in a climate of belief that all Japanese shared the same Yamato blood and possessed the same Yamato spirit. In no sense was he the sort of ideological nationalist who invests all his pride in the myth of ethnic homogeneity-one race, one language, one culture, one historical experience. Yet neither did he feel comfortable with my observation that Japan is as ethnically diverse and conflictual as most other large, complex human communities on the face of the earth. While willing to admit that Japan was not an especially unusual country, and had its share of social problems, he believed that Japan represented a morally superior version of the human condition. "Why else," he once told me, "should I devote my life to a diplomatic career?"

I hadn't seen Hiroshi in ten years, yet the skin on his large, oval face was still taught, except around the eyes where the flesh seemed puffier, perhaps from the pollen of an early autumn grass, if not from age, though I very much doubted it had come from sleeplessness. On an outing to Muir Woods the summer he had passed through San Francisco, when Kaoru and I were living together in Sausalito, I had witnessed him convulsively sneeze for nearly half an hour as we hiked through an area that was full of tan oak. Whereas during lunch that same mild day, at a clearing along the trail overlooking the ocean, his wife Reiko had said, with a frankness that had surprised me until I had gotten to know her better, that with all the drawbacks of marriage to a harried diplomat, at least he never brought his work to bed with him; and from all that Kaoru told me, he didn't toss and turn as much as Reiko did in fits of worry about who their kids might bring home to dinner.

From the looks of his ever-present tan, Hiroshi had spent the weekend on his yacht despite having a grueling schedule, putting out fires and trouble-shooting all over Japan's diplomatic map, while also keeping the Prime Minister and the rest of the Cabinet briefed of new rifts in foreign relations. If anything about him had obviously aged, it was his straight black hair, which was not a strand thinner but was now streaked with silver, and covered his ears down to his fleshy lobes, a privilege of his rank if nothing else. Yet knowing something of his activist youth, his outspoken misgivings about his own ministry and government, and his academic leanings, I strongly suspected that the longer hair was more than a bout of nostalgia or fashion statement.

"Hiroshi," I said, accepting his hand.

"Jim. It's been a long time," he said, pumping my hand as though he expected water to gush out my mouth.

"You're looking great. You're hair, too. You getting ready to retire early? Take a chair at Todai and join the lecture circuit?"

He smiled and released my hand.

"That's about all that a retired diplomat can do. No parachuting into corporate board rooms for us. But not before serving at least one ambassadorship. So I plan to stay in for a couple more tours."

"You got something coming up?"

"I'll be leaving this post at the end of the year, and it looks like I'm going to be the new ambassador to China, where may recall I once served as vice consul. Keep all this to yourself, of course. But to tell you the truth," he continued, while looking over my shoulder at something very distant, "I'm getting too old for these damage control missions."

"The foreign press wearing out the old hammer?"

"Jim, you've got to take this more seriously. What good comes from airing out dirtiest linen in public?"

"Maybe it's more than just a matter of being dirty. Maybe the problem's in the linen itself."

"You know what an agitator is, Jim?"

"What you and I were in college."

"Humor me, Jim."

"Okay. Someone who tries to upset the status quo?"

"Precisely. But it's also that thing in the middle of the older washing machines that were still around when I was a kid."

"The spinner?"

"Some of them also spun. But basically, they just shook things around and stirred things up a little bit. Just enough to work the dirt out of the fabric, okay?"

"And what do agitators have to do with damage control?"

"Well, as my father used to tell me, if you agitate to much, you can tear the fabric."

We paused to order two milk teas when the waitress finally came over to our table and deposited two glasses of water on the dark brown veneer surface.

"I'd come home from a demonstration and he'd read some of the literature I had picked up. Railing against the United States, the Emperor system, the Waseda administration, or something. And he'd ask me if I thought that snaking through the streets and shouting slogans did any good. For him, it was worse than mindless. He saw it as self-destructive. I mean, he hated the capitalists as much as I did. But he hated the communists too. And above all, he hated war. He was a boy during World War I. World War II took half his friends. He blames the Korean War for deepening our dependency on the United States at a time when we should have been struggling harder to develop our own foreign policy. Even the Vietnam War that I had become so obsessed with trying to end with protests in front of the American Embassy, he fervently hated. Our main disagreement was over ways to change the world.

"So how do you make an omelet without breaking it?"

"We're not talking about making something. We're talking about preserving something. It's called history."

"Don't we make history?"

"History is like cloth. We may dye it different colors. We may print different patterns on it. But the fabrics of all histories are the same. The warps and woofs of history define how all of us, like it or not, are part of the same canvas. Are you listening to me Jim?"

I was, in fact, listening to Hiroshi, and I could see what he was driving at. But my stare was directed at a woman who had just come in the shop, sat down at a table by the single toilet in the back, and was examining the menu.

"She looks familiar. Like someone I know."

"Jim, you've been living in Japan how many years? Ten?"

"That's close enough."

"And Japanese women still look alike to you?"

"Really. I've seen her before. Very recently, in fact. Like yesterday."

After flirting with them all, he came to roost of what he called "the third pole." I was aware of his involvement in student politics at Waseda in the late sixties, his alliance with the moderate faction of the ministry after being welcomed into its largely Todai fold, his opposition to the ministry's go-along-with-the-others defense of conservative trade and immigration barriers

Views Of Culture (Kuriyama) "Views of culture (Kuriyama) knows that "cultural exchange" has little impact on relationships

[ Peterson condoles Smith's wife Barbara ]

"Barbara," Peterson said to Jackson Smith's wife when she opened the door to let him in.

"The police are working very hard to find out," Peterson said.

"They're barking up the wrong tree with Nelson," she said. "Sure, he's a clumsy bore, and a bit of a back-biter. But I don't see him as JK's killer, grudge or no grudge."

"Did JK tell you much about the problems at the Embassy?"

"Very little. He wasn't much for bringing his work home. I've heard more on the grapevine than from him."

"And you don't think that one of his colleagues had reason to want him dead?"

"Not as far as I know."

"The passport thing could get pretty messy."

"It could."

"JK might have been on to someone."

"Maybe."

"He might have been involved himself."

"I thought you were his friend."

"I was. I still am. I'm also aware that anything's possible."

Barbara looked Peterson straight in the eyes and shook her head.

"I'm sure you're right," Peterson said. Then, taking her hands in his, "You said you had a letter you wanted me to read."

"Yes. Just a minute."

Peterson watched Barbara walk into a back room. She was the kind of woman a man would miss. JK must already miss her. Barbara came back into the living room and handed Peterson a slim white envelope. The flap, at one of the narrow ends, had probably been opened with scissors. Inside was a liner of coarser, purple paper, and inside this was a twice-folded two-page letter, and three photographs.

All of the photos showed JK in a beautifully finished tatami room, legs crossed on thick cushions, at a low lacquered table on which stood a couple of sake tumblers in wooden bases, three sake cups, three pairs of chopsticks on earthenware rests, and several small dishes that had once held things to snack on while drinking.

In two of the photos, a striking young woman in kimono was sitting immediately to JK's left. In one of them she was pouring him sake. In the other she had linked her hand through his arm and was resting her head on his shoulder. In both of them, m, JK and the woman were smiling.

The third picture featured a man sitting at the end of the table to JK's right. The man was Susan's father.

Peterson blamed his surprise on the circumstances in which he found himself examining the photos. In fact, he had no trouble coming up with reasons why Susan's father and JK would have known each other. It had simply never occurred to him that the two men had crossed paths, in Washington if not Tokyo.

The woman was cause for genuine puzzlement. If the setting was one of those exclusive teahouses where the political, bureaucratic, and corporate elite like to entertain one another and others they want to reward or put in their debt, then she was either a waitress or geisha, if not-though very young-the mama.

"Who's the woman?" Peterson said.

Japanese writing, in a neat, fountain-pen hand, filled the first sheet of the letter. The second sheet, bearing only the impressions of the writing on the first sheet, was blank.

One of the photographs showed John with a man that Peterson immediately recognized as Susan's father. In the other, he was sitting behind the same table with a stunning woman in kimono.