The Source of My Discomfort

This year started in Tokyo. I was seeing someone I had spoken to many times over video, but this would be the first time in person. I suggested we meet out by the canal at the foot of Kagurazaka, actually a remnant moat. Tokyo is not Venice, but there are many of these almost secret waterways. There was a restaurant that I thought would make a good spot to discuss a touchy business deal, but once I got there I found out it was closed. They were still shut down for the new year’s holiday.

That morning I had a whiled away a couple of hours around Jimbocho, but it was too early. The bookstores and art galleries didn’t open until noon. The whole atmosphere was funereal. It wasn’t just the gloomy weather, cold by local standards. When I first returned to Japan almost ten years ago, after several years’ away, I was glad to find hardly anything had changed. I remember going to one of those narrow, cluttered shops and seeing the same volumes of modern poetry—Sadakazu Fujii, Kazuko Shiraishi, and a translation of Gary Snyder, if I recall—sitting undisturbed on the same shelves where I left them years ago. Probably no one had bothered to thumb through those editions since then, much less buy one, but now it looked like the old standbys of the neighborhood, the ones that seemed they would outlast technology, whatever else was “trending,” and even their own desiccated owners—the ones that had survived economic crisis after crisis, the Olympics, and the pandemic—were finally going down or had at last succumbed. I was disheartened to find even Komiyama Shoten had scaled back to being open just four days a week and that new, anodyne outlets hawking accouterments for airy lifestyles were being built on the ruins of those that insolvently indulged in obscure interests.

Maybe this time Japan really was finished, and I couldn’t help but note the reason I had come to this neighborhood in the first place was to make a withdrawal of yen from my U.S. bank account, in order to take advantage of the favorable exchange rate. How low could it go? A better market indicator were the faces and body language of the people around me. There was something defeated about them this morning, languid even by Japanese standards, and that’s when it hit me that I’d flown in on the last day of the new year’s holiday. Today was everybody’s first day back at work. I’d lost track because the U.S. had been back to the hustle over a week ago, but Japan was still waking from its winter sleep.

It started to rain, a sprinkle, but the skies intimated worse. I ducked under a narrow ledge and took my phone out to text the person I was meeting that our restaurant was closed, but I’d wait for him. We could move to somewhere else, since there were plenty of other places to eat in the area. Despite the modicum of shelter, droplets dotted my screen as I typed. When I tried wiping them away with my sleeve, they just broke up into smaller dots, like beads of mercury. The rain began to pick up. It fell on the still waters of the canal, as concentric circles that rippled across its mirrored surface, under bare branches of cherry trees that would blossom gaudily along the canal come spring.

Normally I’d start getting tired right about now, having gotten in just the day before, but I slept well on the flight. It was the first time I’d taken business class in more than twenty years. That one time was only because of a random upgrade, when airlines were more casual about this sort of thing. Back then the flight attendant took us for honeymooners and even slipped us a bottle of champagne (Billecart-Salmon rosé) that we ended up hauling all over the Chinese countryside, too scared to open it, having never the occasion to drink such an expensive bottle before. As ridiculous as it sounds, this was the first business-class flight in my life for, well, business reasons, even though I am a frequent flyer and have been in corporate executive roles for years. I have not lacked the option, but I prefer economy-class, thinking the differences (without quite knowing what they were) did not justify the cost.

So I had my routines in steerage down to an efficient science. On the other hand, the plethora of new offerings in the luxury section, from the extra bedding, screen size, and seat-position settings to the copious amount of food, threw me. I did a good job of embarrassing myself acting like a total rube, not knowing about the shoulder strap, ordering too much wine (the good stuff, Laurent-Perrier champagne, Etude pinor noir from Carneros), and touching the bread in the basket when I should have pointed to what I wanted, so the attendant could pick it up with her tongs. The attendants seemed to enjoy easy banter with others in my section, probably regulars, but they eyed my trips to the bathroom with suspicion. Probably they had been informed, as we are all being informed on nowadays, that I was only using expiring points for this upgrade. Despite the disorientation, I got a good, horizontal night’s sleep.

As for the shame I experienced, it spoke to the discomfort I still felt in my role. It was certainly one I never sought. I had come to it, I still believe, by accident. I realize this is scarcely to be believed, especially by the young strivers in the audience, who feel the whole world arrayed against them. You would not be wrong, but such things are possible. Accidents are possible. Anything is possible. There will be moments when all this fragments into pieces.

To begin with, these are the words of a writer, with lists of book recommendations, self-promotional plugs, and secrets of the trade to come. How could there not? But I am not a writer, nor even a reader. I am a businessperson. The person who is doing the writing is not me. Is that a source of the discomfort? Probably, and in that case, that is no accident. But I am comfortable: I am good at what I do, and part of the reason for that is because what I do comes naturally. This is only one of the personae that I am being increasingly burdened with, not including the one that is writing this account, the one you are already getting to know, through this language and in the moments when it sneaks off to, say, browse poetry in a used bookshop. Those are not my real interests. There will be other lives in this account, lives lived so deeply they will seem like the real ones and this one, the one that takes overseas business trips, will feel like a dream. This will be the most open-ended thing I have ever written, and it will bring those lives closer together than ever before.

I recognized the face coming down the middle of the crosswalk from all those times I had seen it talk on screens. He did not look like me. I blend into the background here. My coworkers once told me how easily they lose me in crowds. I remembered, after having not been here for a while, how I felt an almost sensual release in making the descent into the subway station and merging into the rush-hour swarm of salarymen: the loss of one’s will and hesitance, the giving up to the purpose-driven totality. By contrast, this other was an easy mark, tall enough that he walked with hunched shoulders in a way that must have been exacerbated by his being in Japan.

We moved to the second floor of a traditional wooden house, in a cobblestone alley. By custom we talked around the issue, but this did the job of breaking the ice. After sharing war stories about our respective situations, we began to commiserate over our burdens, both of us responsible for stakeholders we had no control over. At this point, I could feel him easing up and slowing down. I am not Machiavellian in business. I am sincere and patient, or try to come off that way (and so am perhaps the most Machialvellian of them all). When it finally came time to lay our cards on the table, we were further apart than I thought, but by now the wariness had softened, I could feel him growing impatient, and I began steering us to shore. He finally confessed he would rather work together over any other option, which I took as a sign of his sincerity, whether false or not did not matter to me. We were able to meet in the middle, which would allow me to save face to my board. At least it would look like I hadn’t been taken in.

Outside it rained harder. Neither of us had thought to bring umbrellas, which was not very Japanese of us. Our conversation slowed, but we had nothing left to talk about. We just had to wait it out. We parted in front of the subway entrance with warm feelings. I took the train to headquarters to report on my progress. On the upper floors of a high-rise with panoramic views of the Shinjuku skyline and (on a clear day, which was not today) Mount Fuji, they translated and recorded my every word. I didn’t realize they were doing this while I talked, having forgotten it was standard procedure now. After I got the notes back, I wished I had been a bit more circumspect, but there was nothing in them I wouldn’t commit to, if pressed.

I had learned that much about being here by now. You behaved as if you were being watched, even when you were sure you were completely alone.