Chapter 1

Red-light Roppongi

There they were. Women, dressed as anything from Catholic school girls to Japanese cartoon characters, teetering on three-inch stilettos under the golden haze of street lights. Neon signs, yellow, purple and pink, flashed all around the women as men in slick-pressed suits called out to pimple-faced boys and overweight tourists from brightly lit archways. Some of these suited men were Japanese; I imagined that they were the club owners, the pimps, or even part of the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia. But the other men, laughing and gesturing wildly with their arms, looked out of place in the Japan I could remember from my childhood. Their skin was dark, even darker than mine. Their hair was curly, even curlier than mine. And their lips were full, even fuller than mine. Their eyes, brown and dreamy, reminded me of my father’s eyes.

A few steps ahead, I noticed an attractive man with a smooth, round face and an afro cut close to his head.

“What are you folks doing tonight?” the smooth-faced man said playfully, his lithe body moving toward mine. I slowed down. The man shifted toward me. I stepped closer. The man held out a flyer. I couldn’t help but grab it. I was a journalist. It was my job to walk up to strangers, to ask them to open up, to bear their souls. I wanted to know what made them tick. Where had they come from? What were their dreams? What had gone wrong? I had come to Japan in the fall of 2001 on a three-month research grant to ask those very questions about my own family. I wanted to know how my mother, a modest Japanese woman from a small boating town in Hokkaido, met my African American father, a soldier sent to Tokyo during the ‘60s. I wanted to know why my mother married him, knowing her family would disown her. I wanted to know why she seemed so unhappy in her marriage, so distant from my father, from us. Did she ever love him, love us?

The door was half-open. I peeked inside to find my mother getting ready for BINGO. I was 9 or 10; we were living in Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

“Momma,” I asked in my best “Quiet” voice.

She grunted as she continued to powder her face with light powder.

“Did you have horses when you were young?”

Her shoulders slumped. “Why you ask me now?”

“I know … Momma. I’m sorry. It’s just that …”

Before I could finish my sentence, my mother cut me off. “Hai. Hai. Hai. Horses. We had them before da war.”

“And lots of land?”

“Hai. … Now go. I no can be late.”

My mother grabbed a black pencil to darken her mole.

“Were you sad when you lost your horses?”

The doorbell rang. My mother raced down the hallway.

“Hah-lo!” she bellowed.

I ran behind her. But by the time I reached her, it was too late.

“Kon-ban-wah!” my mother said.

“Kon-ban- wah, Fumiko-san!” the woman on the other side of the door said, bowing slightly.

I was no longer part of the conversation.

On my list of places to see in Japan were: Hokkaido, my mother’s hometown; Okinawa, our childhood home; and Tokyo, where my father had met my mother. But nowhere on my list was Roppongi. I had never heard of it; and once inside the noisy whirl of hot neon signs and scantily clothed women, I saw no point in it. It was nothing more than a Red-Light District, and why a group of Fulbright students studying everything from robotics to physics would want to come here for dinner boggled my mind.

Even so, it was hard not to look. After all, I was a journalist.

Just ahead of our group were two women walking clumsily in heels. I started to giggle, imagining the women crashing to the ground, stretching their perfectly painted nails out to protect their flawless skin. Their heavily-made faces reminded me of my mother. In her heyday, her painted beauty had turned the heads of many hot-blooded men, my father said, recounting the days he bought her just about anything to get her attention. “She was so darn pretty,” he often said. “I was just so lucky she picked me!”

Unaware of my gaze, the two women skipped up to a dark-skinned man whose southern accent hinted he was from the States. Their arms encircled him. The man returned their affection by plunking his rough hands around their hipless bottoms. The girls broke into high-pitched laughter. Their arms tightened around the man’s waist. His hands took hold of them; pulled them closer. I felt a sudden urge to run up to the trio, to wiggle my body deep into the circle, to look up into their faces; to touch them.

But I turned away.