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  On the opposite side of the room, Azuma loosened his necktie and took a seat. No sooner had he sat down than I saw what looked like a big white rubber ball hurrying in his direction. It was Cindy, the Italian-American secretary. When my father wasn’t around, the Japanese men in the company often gossiped about her, a single girl with a pair of massive breasts—a curiosity in itself. They must also have found her attractive because she was rather short—just about my height—and bleached her hair a dazzling blond. Running up to Azuma in her tight silver dress, she threw herself on him, pressing with her breasts. First she motioned at the dance floor with her chin, and then at me. Azuma just sat there, head down, biting his lower lip.

  I hadn’t heard any of the rumors about Azuma and Cindy before, but at this point I didn’t need to. She tugged at his arm with both hands; there was something unmistakably erotic about the way those hands clung to him. I could see why Yaji and Kita had hesitated to say anything. In those days, being involved with local women was taboo in Japanese companies, and though Azuma was a local hire and had a measure of freedom that others didn’t, it was still better not to have his relationship with an American secretary brought out into the open. Yaji and Kita had been trying to protect him from his superiors.

  The lights went down. Cindy’s voice, half cajoling, half threatening, grew louder in the darkness. Then “Blue Moon” started to play, and her voice, sounding in snatches through the music, as if coming from the bottom of a well, echoed through the room—or so it seemed to me. I wanted to cover my ears, and my eyes.

  Once again, Azuma stood up decisively. He reached out, took her bare elbow, and drew her close to him.

  Though well into my teens, I was still an all-too-literary girl, indifferent to men’s physical appearance; neither good looks nor masculinity appealed to me. Women’s looks concerned me, and I very much wanted to be beautiful and attractive, but when it came to men I was only interested in their souls, the loftiness of their minds—though I wasn’t quite sure what a lofty mind was. I longed to see in them courage and the urge to reach for something higher. That girl couldn’t take her eyes off the scene before her.

  Azuma led Cindy out to the middle of the dance floor… and, wrapping both arms around her, swayed with her to the music. In the darkness, those arms looked cruel, as if they were going to crush the soft body. I took in his angular shoulders, accentuated by his suit jacket, his sinewy neck, his rigid face. There was now a fiery anger in the face. But why was he so angry? I knew it had nothing to do with me or the woman he held in his arms. It seemed to seep out of him like something he couldn’t contain. His head tilted toward the white of the woman’s neck, but his eyes were focused far away.

  When we were dancing, he had held that rage in tight control. And now, as if in reaction, he was no longer holding it back. He was alight with rage. I feared that other people in the room were as little able as I was to take their eyes off him.

  The music ended and the lights came up. Azuma escorted her over to where a group of other secretaries were sitting, turned, and walked away. Dazed, she sank into her seat and made no attempt to follow him, even with her eyes.

  Beneath the bright lights, everything suddenly looked wan, signaling the end of the party. I saw that my father was deep in conversation with Mrs. Cohen, and my mother with Irie, both apparently oblivious to the disturbing scene my eyes had been drawn to. Before long, everyone was standing up and saying goodbye.

  That night, my sleep was troubled by dreams.

  WHEN I THINK back to that New Year’s party, it must have taken place when Azuma was at his most restless. Every day, he went through the same repetitive tasks in the repair room, with all his inner power pent up. His days came and went without any promise of change.

  Before long, though, a change did take place, and it transformed his life. It began in an unremarkable way: Azuma, who had been fixing compact cameras, was called upon to repair some endoscopes—gastroscopic cameras—owing to a shortage of qualified staff. I heard about it in one of the family conversations that invariably took place in the breakfast nook, during either the Easter vacation or the summer break. Although I kept as a guilty secret the image of Azuma slow-dancing to “Blue Moon,” I was too preoccupied with my life in Boston to feel more than a prick of surprised interest—I had no way of seeing that this change would have long-lasting consequences.

  Azuma was the sort of man who would have eventually unlocked the way to a better future no matter how difficult his situation, I think. Yet this particular move was a sign that he was born under an especially lucky star. The events it set in motion were bound up with the nature of the product he was given to repair.

  As a child, like any child, I used to think I was at the center of the universe, the moon and stars revolving around me. So it was that I naively believed that my journey to America with my family was my uniquely personal destiny, wholly unrelated to outside events, or the tide of history. Of course the opposite was true: our family was merely caught up in the tide of history and swept over to New York, riding on the crest of the economic advance that allowed Japan to become the first country in Asia to rank alongside the wealthy West. When I recall the days before we left Japan, I see them as a black-and-white newsreel with the title Japan’s Economic Miracle: my mother, with her kimono sleeves tied up, packing and trying to decide what to take and what to discard when we sold our house; Nanae and I proudly telling our classmates we were going to America; our excited relatives coming to Haneda Airport to see us off. My father was approached by the company and sent to the States precisely because, at that time, the export that was gaining star status, moving on from the transistor radio, was the compact camera his company made. Later, an array of Japanese star products followed: televisions, motorcycles, videocassette recorders, cars, video games. My father’s company also planned to diversify its exports. From early on, it laid emphasis on a groundbreaking medical device it was the first to develop: the endoscope.

  I first encountered the word “endoscope” a couple of years after my arrival in the States, when a bespectacled technician named Ono made an appearance in our lives. A skillful repairman, Mr. Ono not only knew everything about endoscopes, including how to develop endoscopic film, but also spoke far better English than most college graduates. Around the same time, a new type of guest began visiting our house, people my mother addressed with the honorific Sensei, using the elegant, polite language only women of her generation knew how to speak with any skill. I gathered they were medical doctors expert in handling gastroscopic cameras, invited from Japan to demonstrate in American hospitals how they should be used.

  I also encountered another new term, “sales rep.” My father’s company, which had always used American distributors, decided to hire American salesmen to sell endoscopes on commission. I remember my astonishment when I found out how expensive these endoscopes were, sold in the States at a price much higher than in Japan: two or three thousand dollars apiece. That was more than a brand-new car cost then—to a child’s mind, an astronomical amount. A sales rep earned a 10 percent commission. In those early days the monthly salary of unmarried Japanese employees was only about four or five hundred dollars, that of local hires barely three hundred, so if a sales rep sold a few units a month he could easily support a family.

  That at some stage a local hire like Taro Azuma was permitted to repair endoscopes had to do with the nature of the medical supply business: a manufacturer of precision instruments used for important procedures had to guarantee prompt repairs. This guarantee was indeed critical in selling the product. When sales started to increase, the head office sent out an extra technician for repairs, and a couple of years later, another. Then, at some point the company found itself needing another technician urgently. The people in New York would probably have asked the head office to send out someone else if Taro Azuma hadn’t been there, on the spot. But he was there. Everyone knew he was capable, so they decided to use him, if only as a temporary measure.<
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  The next time I returned home on vacation, I noticed that my father was using phrases like “business trip” and “demonstrating the device” in connection with Azuma. Again, I paid little attention to it: the more settled I was in Boston, the more distant the news about the company became. I wasn’t curious enough to ask what those words had to do with a repairman’s work, and it was a long time before I began to understand their importance in Azuma’s career.

  THE TIMING COULD hardly have been better: he began working on endoscopes a few years after the visiting doctors returned to Japan, which had left our English-speaking expert, Mr. Ono, to demonstrate the use of the cameras by himself. At first he probably made the rounds of the hospitals willingly enough, but, as time went by, he clearly started to feel the strain. It was hard work. For one thing, whereas doctors got to travel with company employees as assistants, Ono had to do it alone, whether to a local hospital or one far away. Long-distance trips meant taking planes, renting cars, and driving around, map in hand, trying to locate the institutions that had shown an interest in the product. Once at the hospital, he had to stand in front of a group of attentive American doctors and make it look easy to insert the tubular camera—which used to be far thicker then—into a stomach and explain and promote the product to people firing question after question at him in English.

  It wore him down. Taro Azuma, who by then was well acquainted with this device, stood on the sidelines, ready to step in, and increasingly it was he who went on these hospital visits. Ono had lifetime job security but no true career prospects, not having a college degree—thus little incentive to push himself—but Azuma had energy to spare, and ability in spades.

  His new role was sealed by the arrival of someone from Japan who specialized in repairing compact cameras, not endoscopes.

  “Azuma has officially been confirmed as a member of the endoscope division,” my father announced rather proudly one day.

  I have no idea exactly how much influence my father brought to bear on his behalf. I imagine the people back home were reluctant to recognize Azuma’s role. The first steps are always critical in building a foundation for any venture, and the endoscope business was still in its infancy. The company had no choice but to rely on local sales representatives to break into the American market, but they must still have wanted to restrict the core of the endoscope department, including the repair personnel, to their own people. This was long before the days when Japanese firms built factories in the States and hired Americans even for management positions. Back then, you were hired in Japan or you were nothing. The head office back then only trusted its homegrown employees, and Azuma, however capable, just wasn’t one of them. So it isn’t unreasonable to think that my father played a key role in convincing them.

  With the official seal of approval on him, the other Japanese employees began to treat him almost as an equal. In retrospect, however, I can see that a far bigger development was already under way. Azuma, an Asian, was now in a position where he was in direct contact with a section of the American establishment, promoting a product it highly appreciated. Commerce, as history confirms, is the best way of building a trusting relationship between people of different cultures. By visiting hospitals and selling endoscopes to American doctors, Azuma was establishing, as a matter of course, personal relations with some of the cleverest and most innovative individuals in America.

  In fact, some of them apparently mistook him for a doctor himself and began calling him Dr. Azuma.

  “If they call you that, let them,” my father cheerfully told him. “Too many Americans don’t take us seriously, so let them believe you went to medical school. They’ll trust you more.”

  Rather than remove the misunderstanding, my father actively encouraged it. When I learned this, I realized he had more than the man’s welfare in mind; it was also his own little bit of mischief. It tickled him that Azuma, who was at the bottom of the company’s hierarchy, who was never included in meetings, and who was virtually ignored when top management came to visit, had been transformed into the most qualified employee in the firm. This deception must surely have helped Azuma put down deeper roots in American soil.

  I ONLY HEARD bits and pieces about this when I came home on vacation. Though Azuma still came to our house once in a while for company gatherings, I have little memory of him on these later occasions. Then things happened that spelled the end of my own family’s close relationship with the company. The New York branch had grown so big that they made it a separate American corporation, with one of the directors from the head office brought in as its new president. My father, who was hired in midlife and was never really one of them, was demoted to executive vice-president—a logical enough decision for the company. He was never willing to behave like other corporate employees, submitting to orders, returning home or transferring elsewhere at someone else’s bidding. Besides, he was unsuited not only to obeying orders but to giving them too. So it was just as well for everyone involved that he no longer headed the company. But he didn’t welcome his new position. Even when his colleagues reached out, he pulled back, remaining a bystander. It didn’t help either that my mother was now more inclined to socialize with her own colleagues than with his people. My father was to spend long years out on a limb at his office until, eventually, the diabetes he had developed worsened and he was forced into retirement. When I think about his relationship with Azuma, though, it was perhaps best that things worked out this way.

  Azuma’s meteoric rise coincided with my father’s withdrawal. Demonstrating endoscopes at hospitals led directly to sales almost every time. Before long, Azuma proved himself better at selling the devices than the local reps. The day came when he told the new president he wanted to work independently, like the American salesmen. He had a strong case: he was making the company far more money than the average sales representative did, but earning far less. The president no doubt was shocked, probably angry: a homegrown employee would never have dared make this request. Nonetheless, he gave in. He must have realized the potential benefits of a man like Azuma putting all his energy into selling a product that had already shown great promise. Moreover, given the paternalism pervasive in Japanese corporate culture, it’s possible he felt a certain sympathy for Azuma, a local hire with no high school degree and no future in a Japanese company. With Azuma’s departure, another technician was sent in from Japan to replace him.

  “He’s quite a guy,” Mrs. Cohen said, admiration mixing with a touch of irony in her voice. By that time, she was virtually the only company member whom I still saw at my parents’ house. Many of the ones I knew best had completed their tour of duty in New York and been called back to Japan or transferred to other locations. I, meanwhile, continued living away from home. After I realized I had no gift for painting—something I probably knew all along—I quit art school in Boston and asked my parents to send me to Europe to learn French (yet another attempt to escape from English), and on my return I had resumed the life of a student in a town away from Long Island. Like any American student, I came home every year for Christmas and New Year’s. Since Mrs. Cohen, very much the traditional daughter of the head of a Tohoku fishing village, faithfully came by on New Year’s Day, seeing her became part of the annual ritual for me. And because she and her husband apparently still played an occasional round of golf with Azuma, she remained fairly well informed about what he was up to.

  From her we learned that Azuma had broken up with the bouncy Cindy long ago and that he no longer lived in the garrulous old lady’s basement. He had sold the beat-up yellow Corvair and was driving a red Mustang, brand-new.

  “He’s the top rep, you know,” Mrs. Cohen told us.

  As soon as he started working as an independent agent, he sold more than anybody else. He had the advantage of being in charge of the New York metropolitan area with the greatest concentration of hospitals. And he had the specialist’s knowledge of the product no other salesman could provide. He also worked with singular
discipline. Every day, he woke at four in the morning and headed down the highway for the hospitals alongside early morning delivery trucks. If he had a moment to himself, he hit the library and read everything on the human digestive system he could find, keeping abreast of research. Luckily for him, the endoscope was such a superior product that his efforts were richly rewarded.

  THE PROVERB ABOUT nourishing a serpent in one’s bosom might be how the company would describe Taro Azuma’s conduct from this point on. His record as a salesman soon led to his moving into a smart apartment in a discreet neighborhood of velvet lawns, and buying a big, shiny black Mercedes. In the States it wasn’t unusual for successful salesmen to have a tony address and drive expensive cars; living well was not necessarily an extravagance but a ploy to earn the trust of clients. If Azuma had been an American rep, the Japanese men in the company might have felt a tad envious but not said much about it. But he wasn’t American; he was a fellow countryman, who had worked alongside them all these years. And he now appeared to be pulling in huge sums of money—seventy thousand, even a hundred thousand dollars a month, rumor had it. Whatever the amount, it was likely to be more than the company’s new president earned in a year. Before long, some began demanding that Azuma’s commission be lowered. Whether this move was driven by jealousy or by a desire for a fairer balance among the wage earners is difficult to tell. What seems unjust from the outside is often a change for the better from the inside. But the next time his contract came up, the company lowered his commission from 10 percent to 8.

  I was dismayed to hear about this irregular behavior, but the real story, I found out later, was more devious. With the sales of endoscopes doing far better than originally expected, the company wanted to reduce the commissions of all their salesmen; management took advantage of the widespread resentment of Azuma’s situation to implement a more general readjustment. Lowering his commission would pave the way to lowering that paid to other people in the next round of contract negotiations.