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  The boy said nothing, letting out only a shallow, puzzled sigh. He might as well have had a question mark floating above his head.

  I grabbed the palm-sized ashtray hidden inside my desk, and in one swift move, pulled out my hand and sprang to my feet. His eyes clouded with dark terror the instant they seized on the ashtray. He managed to throw up his arms in defense, but I was faster. Like I said, you really ought to get in that first punch.

  I swung and smashed the ashtray against the bulge of his left brow—the supraorbital ridge, to be precise—with a little topspin. The skin there was thin and easy to cut. Gshhh! Right on the sweet spot.

  As the kid staggered back, his left hand went up to his brow. His eyes were out of focus. He was frozen in panic. I could’ve finished him there, but I waited. I wanted everyone in the gallery to get a good look.

  Within seconds, blood was streaming from between his fingers. People usually react to seeing blood in one of two ways: lose the will to fight or pump themselves into a frenzy. I had no idea which way this loser would react and had no intention of risking it. I decided to finish him off.

  I drilled him in the soft part of the knee, putting my full weight into the kick. The kid crashed into a couple of desks and went down on his side. After pushing my desk aside to make some room, I kicked him in the stomach, again and again. Not with the tip but with the top of the foot. A toe kick is harder to pull back on and was liable to rupture the internal organs, not to mention it doesn’t make a sound. But with the top of the foot, it was easier to pull a kick, and a well-executed kick makes a thwack or whump sound, making it the perfect deterrent to scare away any would-be challengers in the gallery.

  I stopped kicking. He was curled up like a newborn baby, trembling. A terrible feeling of sadness came over me. Damn it if this poor kid wasn’t somebody’s precious child.

  After taking a breath, I slid my desk back to its usual spot. I put the ashtray back in the drawer, took out a tiny bottle of adrenaline solution from my bag, and tossed it in the kid’s direction. Just a little of the stuff would stop the bleeding. Honestly, this act of pity wasn’t going to do me any favors in the future. The students in the gallery were sure to spread rumors that “Sugihara’s gotten soft,” which would bring all sorts of challengers like this kid out of the woodwork to take me down. But I think I’m in the clear. Today’s trifecta of ashtray, blood, and kicking was a pretty good show, so by the time school got out, the story would have blown up into something like brick, head trauma, and bawling. If the story settled there, they’d be too spooked to challenge me until the start of summer break.

  Like Malcolm X said, “I don’t call it violence when it’s self-defense. I call it intelligence.”

  I hated violence as much as Malcolm did. But sometimes you don’t have a choice. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, do you turn the other cheek? Hell no. Some jerks will bypass the cheek and hit you where it hurts. Even when you’ve done nothing to deserve it.

  I stepped past the kid, still trembling where he lay, and headed for the door. The dagger-like stares from the gallery were so sharp, I could feel them against the back of my head. I spotted three one-hundred-yen coins on top of the desk by the door. Around the desk sat three students. I stopped and asked no one in particular, “Who’d you bet on?”

  They looked down at once. I slid the coins into my hand and left the classroom. As soon as I left, I realized that this was the first time I’d spoken to them. We’ve been in the same class for two years.

  I went to the cafeteria and bought some milk with one of the coins I’d just procured. Calcium is calming when you’re feeling worked up. The cafeteria was pretty packed, but I managed to find an empty seat at a long table. The others at the table quit talking as soon as I sat down. This was nothing new. I punched the straw through the milk box and drank my milk.

  Three minutes later, I was the only one sitting at the table. Once I drained the milk box, I made a game of knocking it over and righting it to pass the time. After I stood the milk box upright for about the twentieth time, Kato came and sat down across from me, a stupid grin plastered across his face. “I heard you took a wrench to someone’s head.”

  So the current rumor going around involved a wrench. I shook my head. “It was an ashtray. You remember the ashtray.”

  Kato narrowed his eyes and stroked the bridge of his too-prominent nose with a loving finger.

  Three years earlier, I’d been admitted to this private all-boys Japanese school, which had a rating about as high as the calories in an egg white. But as someone who’d been educated in Korean schools and studied less than a year for the entrance exams, getting in meant as much to me as if I’d been accepted to the University of Tokyo.

  One day about two weeks before the start of the term, I was summoned to the high school. I was shown into the office, where the vice principal and the teacher in charge of incoming first-years asked me to “attend school under an alias to avoid any problems.” In other words, they wanted me to take a Japanese name and conceal my heritage, because going by my Korean name might get me bullied.

  “I take pride in my name passed down to me by my ancestors. Concealing it would be like throwing away my pride. I won’t do it.”

  Actually, those words never left my mouth. I did as I was told. Why? Because ever since I’d announced my intention to go to a Japanese high school, my Korean teachers had really laid into me. One teacher called me an ethnic traitor. A turncoat. I’ve been called worse, but more about that later.

  Branded an ethnic traitor, I decided to thoroughly betray the ethnicity to which I belong. But even though I’d agreed to go by a Japanese name, I had no intention of hiding that I was Korean. Not that I was going to brag about it either.

  At least, I wasn’t going to do it. But just as you might expect from a second-rate school, the teachers were second-rate too, and they listed the name of my junior high school, which includes the words “North Korean,” alongside my Japanese name, “Sugihara,” in the student register.

  The first challenger appeared before me three days after the entrance ceremony. Korean schools have always been seen as these exclusionary karate dojos crawling with thugs. A full-contact dojo, no less. Needless to say, that was just a stereotype. Plenty of tenderhearted guys would rather spend the day in a meadow, weaving poppies into necklaces. Then there are the vicious types who would find no greater pleasure than in fighting brown bears over spawning salmon in a raging current. I’d be willing to bet that Japanese schools have their fair share of both, but sadly, the bears in the Korean schools have been fed a bellyful of discrimination. They keep feasting on that salmon, fattening up, growing more savage by the day. That frightening image is planted in the minds of the Japanese and takes root as the reality for all Koreans.

  So basically, to the students at my new school, I was a walking dojo signboard with the word “Korean” written across it. As in dojo yaburi—the practice of crashing a rival dojo and challenging its members to a match—if they beat me and returned with my signboard, they’d score points with their pals. Stupid, I know. But it made sense to me.

  The first challenger turned out to be Kato. Kato was a bona fide badass, whose father was a top lieutenant in a criminal organization. I was pretty fired up, given how it was my first match, and I broke Kato’s nose with an ashtray. Though I beat Kato easily enough, I worried about what his father’s crew might do to me. Turned out to be a whole lot of worry over nothing. Kato saw his busted-up face as an opportunity to get plastic surgery on his nose, which he never much liked anyway.

  After a while, Kato showed up one day with a sheepish smile, rubbing the ridge of his shapely nose, and said, “Thanks a lot.”

  His father, who also seemed pleased with the result, said, “You gave my kid an upgrade,” and took me to dinner at an expensive restaurant in Ginza. Kato’s father was missing the pinky finger on his left hand.

  Kato was the first friend I made in high school and the only one I coul
d ever call a true friend.

  Kato stopped rubbing his nose and said, as if he had just remembered, “Today’s my birthday.”

  “Well, you’re not getting anything from me.”

  “I wasn’t expecting it.” Kato produced a strip of paper from the pocket of his school uniform and handed it to me. “A ticket to my birthday party.”

  “A party? Who do you think you are?”

  “Well, my old man’s paying for it, so . . .”

  “How much are you selling these things for?” I asked, referring to the ticket.

  Kato smirked and said that it was a trade secret. Shoving the ticket in my pocket, I told him that I’d go if I was feeling up to it.

  “There’s going to be lots of cute girls there,” Kato said. “I promise you a good time.” He got up from his seat, clicked his tongue, and added, “I almost forgot. My father wanted me to tell you to come by the house some time.”

  “No, thanks,” I answered. “I don’t like yakuza. They bully the weak.”

  Kato made like he was about to cry. “C’mon, don’t hate. He’s trying to earn a living, like everyone else. Besides, he really likes you. He’s always going on about how you’re going to be someone someday.”

  “All right,” I answered. “I’ll think about it.”

  A look of relief came over his face. Kato said, “I’ll see ya,” and turned to leave.

  “Tell your old man I said hi.”

  The yakuza’s son turned around, cracked a broad smile, and held up his hand as if to say, You got it.

  After school.

  I didn’t have any friends to hang out with, and after getting kicked off the basketball team the year before, I didn’t have anywhere else to go but home. I didn’t feel like going straight back, so I killed some time at the bookstore, reading anthropology and archaeology books. Eventually, I bought a book and went home.

  When I got home and went into the kitchen for some milk, I found my father sitting at the table with his arms crossed, sullen. There was no sign of my mother.

  “Again?” I said, alluding to her absence as I cracked open the refrigerator.

  “She says she wants to go to Phuket with her friends,” my old man said, pouting.

  “So let her, for crying out loud.”

  “You know we’ve been struggling lately,” he spat out.

  Until a few years ago, my father ran four prize-exchange booths for several pachinko parlors. But now that number was down to two. The reason goes something like this: One day, the police paid a visit to a pachinko parlor that my father did business with and informed the owner that my father had deep ties with the yakuza, that his profits were fattening the wallets of the syndicate and bankrolling their activities. Then the police added, “If you insist on associating with those types, we’re going to have to keep a close eye on you.”

  The owner knew full well my father had no ties with the yakuza, but knowing what would happen if he defied the state authorities, he had no choice but to obey. And just like that, the owner ended a twenty-year relationship with my father, and a new exchange booth run by an ex-cop opened for business. Running a prize-exchange booth was a pretty profitable business. True to their nickname—“dogs”—the police have a highly developed sense of smell and an amazing ability to sniff out money.

  When my father lost two exchange booths back-to-back, my mother cried foul and discrimination and bloody murder and all sorts of other things.

  To this, my father said, “We’ve still got two booths. We had zero in the beginning. We started with nothing. Now, I may not be good at math, but I know two is more than zero.” And he flashed a grin.

  In his twenty-six bouts as a professional boxer, my father was never knocked down. Not once did his knee touch the mat. That toughness earned him the nickname “Reinforced Concrete.” His ring name was “Hideyoshi Sugihara.” As in Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the sixteenth-century ruler of Japan. The name was apparently decided by the gym’s owner. It was not a popular name among his Zainichi friends.

  One look at my father’s grin, and my mother’s face had softened into a smile. Soon tears trickled out of the corners of her slivered eyes. “Such a shame.”

  That same mother had apparently gotten into another argument with my father and left the house for the third time this year. Losing the exchange booths and going to Hawaii had made my mother stronger. The Korean character has always been deeply colored by Confucian ideals, and that tradition was passed on to the Zainichi community. Roughly put, Confucianism was about respecting your elders. In our household, that basically translated to “the wife and child are forbidden to oppose the head of the house.”

  So at meals, my mother always served the old man two more dishes than herself or me. But after my parents came back from Hawaii, that number increased to four.

  “What’s with all the extra dishes lately?” my father asked one day after dinner, patting his bulging belly.

  My mother, who was in the kitchen, cleaning up, chirped, “I was hoping you’d get diabetes.”

  While my father was reeling from this unexpected counterpunch, my mother came out of the kitchen and plopped down on a chair. Then she grabbed the weekly magazine from the edge of the table and began reading, the magazine propped up so my father and I could get a good look at the headline on the cover: “Monster Wife Laces Abusive Husband’s Dinner with Arsenic!” Peeking out from behind the magazine was a smile as wicked as Jack Nicholson’s.

  And that’s how Confucianism met its defeat. Henceforth, we all got an equal number of dishes, and my mother, who’d rarely been allowed to go out, started spending nights out at the movies, karaoke, and the salon with her friends. My mother was still in her thirties.

  After bringing the milk carton to my mouth and taking several gulps, I asked my father, “If we’re as bad off as you say, then how come you’re golfing all the time? You even bought a membership. You’re full of crap.”

  My father had taken up golf after he came back from Hawaii.

  “Golf is the shot in the arm I need to keep me going,” he offered lamely.

  “You don’t think housewives need a shot in the arm every now and then?”

  “Let me tell you something about women—”

  “North Korea, South Korea, China, and every other country steeped in Confucianism are past their glory days,” I cut in. “The days of acting all high and mighty just because you’re a man or ridiculously old are over.”

  My father glowered. “You got a few more years’ schooling than I did, and now you’re going to lecture me?”

  He’d only had an elementary school education because of the chaos during and after the war.

  I shoved the milk back in the refrigerator and scooted out of the kitchen. As I climbed the stairs, his voice caught me from behind. “What about dinner?”

  I yelled back down, “Instant curry!”

  As soon as I entered my room, I called my mother on the cordless. She always stayed with a girlfriend who owned a yakiniku restaurant. No one answered at the house, so I called the restaurant. My mom picked up the phone. She said something about being busy prepping for the dinner rush and asked, “How is he doing?”

  “I’d give him about two weeks.”

  “Two weeks . . .”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll survive.”

  “I’m sorry to put you out. Why don’t you come to the restaurant for dinner? Everyone here wants to see you.”

  “Yeah. Soon, I promise.”

  After I hung up the phone, I got out of my school uniform and stretched out on the bed in my boxers. I heard putt, putt, putt from down below. The old man must’ve started practicing his putting. Whenever he fell in to a funk, he practiced his putting stroke for hours and hours, like some kind of self-imposed discipline training.

  Putt, putt, putt, put, putt . . .

  The steady noise began to sound like the gloomy patter of raindrops. I was feeling hungry but was in no mood to eat curry that came out of a pouch. I jumped ou
t of bed, reached into the pocket of the school jacket hanging from a hanger, and took out the ticket to Kato’s birthday party. I checked the back of the ticket: the party was in Roppongi. Not a neighborhood I particularly liked. Thinking it was better than being stuck in the house, I decided to go out.

  I put on a black turtleneck sweater and some blue jeans. I stuck my head into the living room and told my father I’d be home late. He muttered cheerlessly, “Stay out of trouble,” without bothering to look up.

  Putt, putt, putt, putt, putt . . .

  I’d give him a week.

  I left the house.

  I got off the Yamanote Line at Ebisu, transferred to the Hibiya Line, and arrived in Roppongi. I turned off Roppongi Street at Almond Cafe and walked all the way down Gaien Higashi Street just shy of Toranomon.

  The club where Kato’s party was being held, Z, stood away from the main street. When I opened the heavy wooden door, a muddle of dance beats, cigarette smoke, the stench of alcohol, and body heat came flooding out of the dim interior. As much as I tried to dodge any of the offensive sensations, it was no use. I took a deep breath, getting my fill of the fresh outside air, and went inside.

  Z was a loft-style club. The first floor where you entered was a loft, and the spacious area below was a dance floor. Takeshita, a kid from school who was always hanging with Kato, was stationed by the door, holding a wad of tickets in his hand. He must have been roped into ticket duty. He mugged a look of shock upon seeing me.

  “Didn’t think you’d show up,” said Takeshita.

  I gave him a lazy nod and handed him my ticket. A mob of bodies gyrated to a thumping beat on the floor below. I scanned the loft area. Most of the tables were occupied. Tracking my gaze, Takeshita asked, “Want me to clear you a table?”

  Dubious, I asked, “Can you?”

  Takeshita shrugged. He walked up to a couple sitting at a round bar table and whispered something in their ears. The couple rose reluctantly to their feet and disappeared down the stairs to the dance floor.

  Takeshita returned and made an okay sign with his fingers. When I thanked him, a genuine look of surprise came over his face. I guess my reputation around school is that I’m some kind of jerk.