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through my hair and contemplated my face, using a Fats Navarro CD as a hand mirror. Could she ever feel the same way back? I couldn’t even remember accurately what she looked like. Smooth skin, highish cheekbones, narrowish eyes. Like a Chinese empress. I didn’t really think of her face when I thought of her. She was just there, a color that didn’t have a name yet. The idea of her.
    I got angry with myself. It’s not as if I’m ever going to see her again. This is Tokyo. And besides, even if I did see her again, why should she be in the least bit interested in me? My mind can only hold one thought at a time. I may as well make it a worthwhile thought.
    I thought about Mr. Fujimoto’s offer. What
am
I doing here? Koji’s getting on with his life. All my high school classmates are in college or in a company. I am unfailingly updated on their progress by Koji’s mom. What am I doing?
    A guy in a wheelchair flashed by outside.
    Hey, hey, this is my place, remember. Time for jazz.
    “Undercurrent” by Jim Hall and Bill Evans. An album of water, choppy and brushed by the wind, at other times silent and slow under trees. On other songs, chords glinting on inland seas.
    The girl was there, too, swimming naked on her back, buoyed along by the currents.
    I made myself some green tea and watched the steam rise into the disturbed afternoon. Koji was knocking on the window, grinning at me goonishly, and pressing his face up against the glass so he looked like a poison dwarf.
    I had to grin back. He came in, walking his loping bumpy walk.
    “You were miles away. I came via Mister Donuts. Vanilla Angel donuts okay?”
    “Thanks. Let me make you some tea. This great Keith Jarrett record came in yesterday, you must give it a listen. I can’t believe he makes it up as he goes along.”
    “A hallmark of genius. Fancy a couple of drinks later?”
    “Where?”
    “Dunno. Somewhere frequented by nubile girls on the prowl for young male flesh. The Student’s Union bar perhaps. But if you’re busy sorting out the meaning of existence we could make it another night. Smoke?”
    “Sure. Pull up a chair.”
    Koji likes to think of himself as a ruthless womanizer like Takeshi, but really his emotions are as ruthless as a Vanilla Angel donut. That’s one reason I like him.
    We lit up. “Koji, do you believe in love at first sight?”
    He rocked back on his chair and smiled like a wolf. “Who is she?”
    “No no no no. No one. I was just asking.”
    Koji the philosopher gazed upwards. At length he blew a smoke ring. “I believe in lust at first sight. You gotta keep a certain hardness, or you just turn to goo. And goo isn’t attractive. And whatever you do, don’t let her know how you feel. Or you’re lost.” Koji went into Humphrey Bogart mode. “Stay enigmatic, kid. Stay tough. You hear?”
    “Yeah, yeah, like you, for example. You were as tough as Bambi when you were last in love. But seriously?”
    Another smoke ring. “But seriously … well, love has got to be based on knowledge, hasn’t it? You have to know someone intimately to be able to love them. So love at
first
sight is a contradiction in terms. Unless in that first sight there’s some sort of mystical gigabyte downloading of information from one mind into the other. That doesn’t sound too likely, does it?”
    “Mmm. Dunno.”
    I poured my friend’s tea.
    ————
    The cherry blossoms were suddenly there. Magic, frothing and bubbling and there just above our heads filling the air with color too delicate for words like “pink” or “white.” How had such grim trees created something so otherworldly in a backstreet with no agreed-upon name? An annual miracle, beyond my understanding.
    It was a morning for Ella Fitzgerald. There are fine things in the world, after all. Dignity, refinement, warmth, and humor, where you’d never expect to find them. Even as an old woman, an amputee in a wheelchair, Ella sang like a girl who could still be in high