Ransom Read Free

ten cases of canned sweet beans and a life-sized poster of Olivia Hussey as Juliet. Microphones and matches had helped to determine the outcome. All very tasteful. Coming up next was a man who swallowed live gerbils. Somebody, Ransom thought, ought to save Japan from the Japanese. He hated to admit it, but the crap his father turned out was better than this.
    He left at ten and rode home along the river, which rippled with moonlight like the slow bulk of a sleeping reptile. The river looked much better at night, when you couldn’t see the submarine garbage and the water’s dubious tint. He stopped beside the Imadegawa Bridge and shut down the bike, an aging Honda 350 Scrambler that fashion-conscious Japanese bikers wouldn’t be seen dead on. The air coming off the river was cool and rank with effluvia. The moving water made him restless. It was April and he could feel the ferment of soil and flora around him. He was twenty-six years old and he had been in this country almost two years. He felt a keen pang of nostalgia, but he didn’t know for what. Maybe for the time before he had realized that good intentions don’t make you innocent, for the time when he had less to regret. Ransom wasn’t sure if he was waiting for something to happen, or hoping that nothing would. Sometimes he felt he was preparing for some sort of confrontation, and at other times he believed that he had seen enough trouble already.
    Ransom kick-started the bike and turned around, retracing part of the route he had just taken, giving in to an urge he had been resisting—for easy company and conversation in his native tongue.

2
    Buffalo Rome was the place to go if you hankered to see someone you’d met in Katmandu or Chiang Mai. The Asia pilgrims were a different type from the less druggy Japan hands, professorial students of Muromachi period temple architecture, acolytes of Zen and tea ceremony. The Dharma Bums washed up here after bleary months on the subcontinent, travelling high and dry—ahead of the monsoon rains, behind the cannabis harvest—arriving at this terminus trailing strange stories and doctrines. The Japanese patrons, mostly students whose costumes ranged from beatnik to proto-punk, were here to cop some cool from the various gaijin.
    The first person Ransom picked out of the crowd was the narc sitting near the door. Shades, Berkeley sweatshirt and beads. The obvious wig. He smiled when he saw Ransom and snapped his fingers. “Be crazy,” he said.
    â€œRock out, baby,” Ransom said.
    â€œRight on.” The narc held out his palm and Ransom slapped him five, wondering if there were a special school where these cops were trained, and if so who were the teachers. Buffalo Rome had yet to host a single bust, not that it lacked for drugs; only the mentally impaired couldmistake a Kyoto narc for a real person. All this was amusing until you considered the fate of someone busted by sheer luck. The Japanese took dope very seriously, reportedly to the point of beating prisoners on the feet, withholding food for days, interrogating round the clock. Ransom had avoided drugs for some time, so it didn’t much concern him now, although thinking about it always made him nervous, reminded him of casualties.
    Ransom generally felt slightly tainted after a night at Buffalo Rome. He stayed away for weeks at a time, then went in three or four nights running. That his friend Miles Ryder was co-owner was among the reasons he found for squandering his time and money there. He saw Miles’s Stetson above the heads at the bar. As always, returning after a fair absence, Ransom had the impression of great space; the bar was huge by Japanese standards—nearly the size of an indoor tennis court, with a high cathedral ceiling. Before Ryder and his silent partner had turned it into an absurdly profitable watering hole, this had been a sake warehouse. They had set up a bar at one end, a stage at the other