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appearances, and Barry’s other books and stories. You can also find Barry on his website , his blog Heart of the Matter , Facebook , and Twitter .



I hadn’t killed anyone in almost four years. But all good things come to an end, eventually.
    It was good to be living in Tokyo again. The face of the city had changed, as it continuously does, but in its eternal, essential energy, Tokyo is immutable. Yes, during my sojourn in safer climes there had occurred an unfortunate profusion of Starbucks and Dean & Delucas, along with their innumerable imitators, but the havens that mattered remained impervious to this latest infestation. There was still jazz at Body & Soul in Minami Aoyama, where no seat is too far from the stage for a quiet word of thanks to the band members at the end of the evening; coffee at Café de l’Ambre in Ginza, where even as he nears his hundredth birthday, proprietor Sekiguchi-sensei arrives daily to roast his own beans, as he has for the last six decades; a tipple at Campbelltoun Loch in Yurakucho, where, if you can secure one of the eight seats in his hidden basement establishment, owner and bartender Nakamura-san will recommend one of his rare bottlings to help melt away, however briefly, the world you came to him to forget.
    I told myself no one was looking for me anymore. But I knew if they were, they’d start with a place I’d been known to frequent. Unless you had unlimited manpower, you couldn’t use the bars or coffee houses or jazz clubs I liked. There were too many of them in Tokyo, for one thing, and my visits would be too hard to predict. You might wait for months, maybe forever, and though there are harder surveillance duty stations than the oases haunted by Tokyo’s roving night denizens, eventually you’d start to stand out, especially if you were a foreigner. Meanwhile, whoever was paying you would be getting impatient for results.
    Which made the Kodokan a unique vulnerability. I’d trained there for nearly twenty-five years before powerful enemies forced me to flee the city, enemies I had, by one means or another, managed to outlast. Judo at the Kodokan had been my only indulgence of anything like a routine, a pattern that could be used to fix me in time and place. Going back to it might have been my way of reassuring myself that my enemies really were all dead. Or it could have been a way of saying
come out, come out, wherever you are.
    Randori
, or free training, was held in the
daidojo
, a modern, two-storied space of four connected competition zones open to bleachers ringing the area a floor above. On any given night, as many as two hundred
judoka
wearing the traditional white
judogi
, male and female, Japanese and foreign, buzz-cut college stars and grizzled veterans, take to the training hall, and the vast space is filled with cries of commitment and grunts of defense; earnest discussions of tactics and techniques in mutually incomprehensible tongues; the drum beat of bodies colliding with the
tatami
and the cymbal slaps of palms offsetting the impact with
ukemi
landings. I’ve always loved the cacophony of the
daidojo
. I’ve stood in it when it’s empty, too, and its solemn daytime stillness, its enormous sense of patience and potential, has its own magic, but it’s the sound of evening training that imbues the space with purpose, that brings the dormant hall to life.
    On training nights the bleachers are usually empty, though nor is it unusual to see a few people sitting here and there and watching the
judoka
practicing below: a student, waiting for a friend; a parent, wondering whether to enroll a child; a martial arts enthusiast, making a pilgrimage to the birthplace of modern judo. So I wasn’t unduly concerned one summer night at the sight of two extra large Caucasians sitting together in the stands, thickly muscled arms crossed over the railing, leaning forward like carrion birds on a telephone line. I logged them the way I reflexively log anything out of