She was draped against the veined boulder that jutted up from the snow and gravel in the rock garden of Dr. Mayuzumi’s estate. One hand had been placed demurely over her pubes—the Japanese have a horror of pubic hair that has caused it to become the last taboo of their pornography—the other was flung against her forehead. A trickle of blood ran from the side of her lip down her slender neck, past one breast, to a puddle beside her left thigh.
When I got there with my notebook and my camera, they were milling around in the cloister that ran all the way around the rectangular rock garden. Their breath hung in the still cold air, and no one had touched the body yet, not even the police.
I hadn’t come to Sapporo to cover a slasher; I’d come there for the Snow Festival. I’d only been in town for a couple of hours. I’d only just started unpacking when I got the phone call from the Tokyo office and had to grab a taxi to this estate just outside town. I didn’t even have time to put on a coat.
To say that it was cold doesn’t begin to describe it. But I’d been feeling this cold since I was just a winchinchala back at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. I stood there in my Benetton sweatshirt and my Reeboks and looked out of place. I ignored the cold.
A police officer was addressing the press. They weren’t like stateside reporters; there was a pecking order—the Yomiuri and Asahi Shimbun people got the best places, the tabloids hunched down low in the back and spoke only when spoken to—gravely, taking turns, scribbling solemnly in notebooks. They all wore dark suits.
I’d had Japanese at Berkeley, but I couldn’t follow much, so I just stood there staring at the corpse. There wasn’t a strand of that stringy blond hair that was out of place. It was the work of an artist.
It was the hair that jolted me into remembering who she was. So this wasn’t just another newspaper story after all.
The snow was beginning to obliterate the artist’s handiwork—powdering down her hair, whitening away her freckles. She’d been laughing all the way from San Francisco to Narita Airport. I still had her card in my purse.
I snapped a picture. When the flash went off they all froze and turned toward me all at once, like a many-headed monster. It’s uncanny the way they can do that. Then they all smiled that strained, belittling smile that I’d been experiencing ever since I’d arrived in Japan a week before.
“Look,” I said at last, “I’m with the Oakland Tribune.” Suddenly I realized that there wasn’t a single woman among all those ranked reporters. In fact, there were no other women there at all. I felt even more self-conscious. No one spoke to me at all. It didn’t matter that what I was wearing stood out against the black-white-and-gray like a peacock in a hen coop. I was a woman; I was a gaijin; I wasn’t there.
Presently the police officer murmured something. They all laughed in unison and turned back to their note-taking. One reporter, perhaps taking pity on me, said, “American consulate will be here soon. You talk to them.”
“Yeah, right,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood for bullshit. “Listen, folks, I know this woman. I can i-den-ti-fy her, wakarimashita?”
The many-headed monster swiveled around again. There was consternation behind the soldered-on smiles. I had the distinct impression they didn’t feel it was my place to say anything at all.
At that moment, the people from the consulate arrived. There was a selfimportant bald man with a briefcase and a slender black woman. A few flashbulbs went off. The woman, like me, hadn’t planned on a visit to the Mayuzumi estate on a snowy afternoon. She was dressed to the gills, probably about to hit one of those diplomatic receptions.
“I’m Esmeralda O’Neil,” she said to the police officer. “I understand that an American citizen’s been—” She stopped when she saw the corpse.
The policeman spoke directly to the bald man. The bald man deferred to the black woman. The policeman couldn’t seem to grasp that Esmeralda O’Neil was the bald man’s boss.
“Look here—” I said. “I can tell you who she is.”
This time I got more attention. More flashes went off. Esmeralda turned to me. “You’re Marie, aren’t you? Marie Wounded Bird. They told us you were coming, and to take care of you,” she said. “I was hoping to meet you at the reception tonight. ”
“I didn’t get invited,” I said testily.
“Who is she?” she said. She was a woman who recovered quickly—a real diplomat, I decided.
“Her name’s Molly Danzig. She’s a dancer. She sat next to me on the flight from San Francisco. She works—worked—at a karaoke bar here in Sapporo— the rooftop lounge at the Otani Prince Towers.”
“You know anything else about her, darlin’?”
“Not really.”
She looked at the corpse again. “Jesus fucking Christ.” She turned to the police officer and began talking to him in rapid Japanese. Then she turned back to me. “Look, hon,” she said, “all hell’s gonna break loose in no time flat; CNN’s already on their way. Why don’t you come to the reception with us?” Then, taking me by the arm so that her aide couldn’t hear her, she added, “You don’t know what it’s like here, hon. Machismo up the wazoo. I’d give anything for an hour of plain old down-home girl talk. So—reception?”
“I’m not sure ... I’d feel a bit like trespassing.”
“Why darlin’, you’ve already gone and done that! This is the Mayuzumi estate we’re standing in now . . . and the reception is Dr. Mayuzumi’s bash to welcome the foreign dignitaries to the Snow Festival.” I had heard of this Mayuzumi vaguely. Textiles, beer, personal computers. Finger in every pie.
The Japanese reporters were already starting to leave. They filed out in rows, starting with the upscale newspapers and ending with the tabloids. It was only then that I noticed the man with the sketch pad.
At first I thought he must be an American. Even from the other side of the rock garden I could see that he had the most piercing blue eyes. He was kneeling by the railing of the cloister. In spite of the cold he was just wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He had long black hair and a thick beard. He was hairy . . . bearlike, almost. Asians are hardly ever hairy.
The policeman barked an order at him. He backed off. But there was something in his body language, something simultaneously deferential and defiant, something that identified him as a member of a conquered people, a kind of hopelessness. It was so achingly familiar it made me lose my cool and just gape at him. That was how my mother always behaved when the social worker came around. Or the priest from the St. Francis Mission. Or whenever they’d come around to haul my dad off to jail for the weekend because he’d guzzled down too much mniwakan and made himself a nuisance. All my aunts and uncles acted that way toward white people. The only one who never did was Grandpa Mahtowashte. And that was because he was too busy communicating with the bears to pay any attention to the real world.
