“Technology wins out again, huh?”

  I pointed at one player’s upper arm as an example. “Look at that one. It doesn’t even make any sense. Do you read Japanese?”

  “Sukosh.” He stretched his thumb and index finger a centimeter apart. “Enough to know which manga to buy.”

  “Well, that kanji on Number 45 is wrong. Maybe he wanted the kanji for chikara, you know, strong, or maybe katakana, sword. But it’s not any of those things.”

  “So what does it mean?”

  “Nothing in Japanese. But looks like a man’s nose, ne?”

  The manga store owner laughed. That I had the ability to make anyone laugh—besides Roberto, and that was unintentional—was surprising to me.

  “You speak English well,” he said.

  “I lived in Yokosuka—an American military base—for two years. My mother’s second husband. She married an American.”

  It was actually her first marriage, but I always counted my father as her first, even though they never got married. My older sisters counted their father as our mother’s first. Marriage and family lineages to us were ephemeral and changeable. No wonder none of us really fit into Japanese society. Last I heard my oldest sister was in Ghana with the JICA, Japan’s version of the Peace Corps. My other sister was somewhere in the American Midwest with her white husband. And my mother was in Honolulu operating a bar in Chinatown. I hadn’t kept in touch with them and I didn’t dare try to reconnect, for their sake more than mine.

  “That’s why,” the manga store owner said.

  “What?”

  “You don’t seem like a typical Japanese girl.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I heard that time after time. Not only in America, but also in Japan.

  “You’re not afraid to be lonely. And you’re not into that kawaii thing.”

  His words stung. So he felt I was lonely. And obviously not kawaii, cute.

  “It’s a compliment,” he said. And when I didn’t look convinced, he put his hand in mine and squeezed. “Really.”

  We stayed like that throughout the rest of the game, and it seemed like all my blood had rushed down into that hand. It felt good to be touched. Nobuo and I never held hands—that was only for silly university lovers, not for us.

  There were still ten minutes left in the game; the Clippers were losing by sixteen points. Streams of spectators were leaving the stands for home. The manga shop owner and I stayed until the very end.

  “I can walk to my car,” I said when we were outside the arena. “No trouble.”

  “No, I’ll drive you.” We walked to a neighboring lot where his hybrid Toyota was parked. I couldn’t really make out the color in the darkness. We got into the Toyota and I directed him to my car. He parked in an empty spot next to mine. He then turned to me and leaned his lips into mine. I was expecting a soft kiss but instead he blew air in my cheeks. It startled me and I withdrew slightly. I didn’t know if it was a joke. Did Americans kiss like this?

  “You do not know my name,” I said. What I really meant was that I didn’t know his.

  “Do I need to?” He then said goodbye, waited until I was in my car, and drove away.

  I woke up the next morning with my throat parched. Was I coming down with something? My throat was the weakest part of my body. Whenever I got sick, I felt it in my throat first. I tried gargling with salt water but it only made me thirstier.

  I spent extra time cleaning my teeth and drying my hair. I wore a dress that I had bought on the Venice Boardwalk on a whim. I knew that I was being stupid, but I couldn’t help it. Two years without a man was actually a long time.

  Once I turned into our parking lot, I noticed it immediately. The manga shop was completely empty. I quickly parked—it happened to be in a customer’s spot, but I didn’t care—and peered into the store. There were no books on the shelves. Not even crumpled up newspapers or Styrofoam peanuts on the bamboo floors. It was as if nobody had ever moved in. As I looked up at the tattoo shop, Roberto’s grinning face was visible through our window.

  When I entered the shop, Roberto was filing his nails. “How was your date, by the way?” he asked and laughed.

  “How do you know I went?”

  “I saw you on TV,” he said. “You looked like you were in love.”

  My fingertips grew cold and clammy; I felt faint.

  “What happened to your boyfriend, anyhow? He seemed like he left in an awful hurry.”

  “You saw him leave?”

  Roberto shook his head. “When I came in, the whole store was cleared out.”

  I went to my station and pretended I was busy arranging my tools. I felt thirsty again and drank two cupfuls of water.

  Roberto gave me an update about an hour later. “Heard more stuff about your boyfriend. You know, that space wasn’t even rented out. He wasn’t supposed to be there. I think that the police might want to talk to you.

  The police? I pinched the loose flesh underneath his arm and twisted. “Do not you tell anyone about me going out with that man. I know nothing about him. Not even his name.”

  “Ow, all right, all right.” Roberto pulled his arm free. I know that I had got him good because his eyes had teared up. “My lips are sealed. Didn’t know you were so touchy about talking to the cops.”

  I knew that my days were numbered at Sawtelle Tattoos. I had been on cable television and now the police might want to question me. I had overstayed my tourist visa ages ago and didn’t have a proper work visa. I had to leave Los Angeles, but for where? Nobuo had ties in Las Vegas, New York City and Hawaii. San Francisco was too obvious and small. Seattle was a possibility. I used to like gray weather, but Southern California had spoiled me. I felt like a wilted plant which was getting a little bit stronger in the sun. To return to dreariness again didn’t appeal to me. But what choice did I have? I should never have let my guard down and gone out with that manga store owner or whoever he was. One night, one kiss, and I was in a big mess again.

  I told myself that this would be my last week at the tattoo parlor. Even though Roberto irritated me, he had been my constant for a while. To leave him and the shop would be like leaving the familiar again and I wasn’t looking forward to the change.

  My first customer that afternoon was a black teenager who came in with a kanji. “I want this. Dog, right?”

  The kanji was wrong. It was missing a dash above the right side of the character, but I didn’t care. Without the dash, it was okii, or big.

  The teenager was scrawny, his arms the thickness of broomsticks. “You eighteen?” I asked. We were pretty informal about those things, but I didn’t need any more legal trouble as I made my way out of town.

  The teenager nodded and showed me his driver’s license.

  The rest of the day was a blur. For dinner I ordered a green tea boba and then two rice balls—one with a pickled plum, the other with dried bonito fish flakes—from the neighboring Japanese grocery store. Then I went to the Internet café down the street and did some research. There were some tattoo shops in Portland. Nobuo would never think of looking for me there.

  When I arrived to work the next day, a middle-aged black woman and man were waiting for me by the counter.

  “What did you do to my son? After that tattoo you gave him, he just ballooned. Just look.”

  I focused on the man’s face. It was the same face of the teenager, only he was about a hundred pounds heavier. His body was humongous.

  “He’s only a minor. Under age. Don’t you have to be a certain age to get a tattoo on his own?” she asked Roberto, who wasn’t smiling.

  I sat there, stunned. Blood raced through my body. “He said that he was eighteen. I saw his ID.”

  “Well, he’s seventeen. I’m going to report your shop to the authorities. To the Health Department. To Channel 2 News. What you all are doing here just ain’t right.”

  “Ma‘am, ma’am,” Roberto was using his serious business voice, “I’m sure that we can work this all out.”

  I retreated to my work station and tried to think hard. He wanted dog, but he got okii. It couldn’t be. The kid must have taken some kind of drug that he wanted to hide from his mother. His increase in size had nothing to do with my tattoo. I mean, how could it? Roberto and the woman were going back and forth and the other tattoo artists were pretending not to listen, but I knew that they were hanging on every word.

  I finally interrupted Roberto. “Maybe he’s allergic to that ink. Let me try something else.”

  I took a different color ink cartridge and loaded my tattoo gun as the boy sat in my chair again. If okii had made him this way, how about plain hito, or person? It wouldn’t be difficult to change a stroke here and there. The work looked ugly, but I didn’t care. Within forty-five minutes, I was finished. Almost immediately, the teenager’s body visibly shrank.

  “Damn,” he murmured, looking at his transformation in the mirror and tightening his now loose sweat pants.

  “You’ll be hearing from our lawyers,” the mother said before the two of them left.

  Both Roberto and I were still in a state of shock.

  “Am I on some reality TV show?” he asked, searching the walls of the shop for some hidden cameras. “Are you playing a trick on me, Eye?”

  I wished I was.

  After that incident, I wrote down all my customers from the previous day: Buddhist goddess for peace and the kanji for yuuki, courage. Not bad attributes to have. But then I recalled my fourth customer—a punk rocker who opted for the kanji shi, or death.

  “My last customer yesterday, did he pay cash or credit card?” I asked Roberto.

  “Check. Why?”

  “Give me his check.”

  “Why?”

  “Give me the check, Roberto!” I never yelled, so to hear my voice rise like that even frightened me.

  Roberto was afraid too, and handed off a slim stack of checks from underneath the cash drawer in the register. I quickly went through the checks; there weren’t many. All I knew was that this guy owned a car alarm business in Palms that he ran out of his home. I found his check—Shawn Finche—with a phone number.

  I called from my cell phone outside the tattoo shop. Only a dial tone and then a message machine. It was a woman’s voice, “You’re reached Finche Alarms.” Who was this woman? His wife? Finche didn’t seem like a family man, but you never knew about these things. I tried again an hour later and then again and again.

  At ten o’clock at night a person finally answered a phone. A woman, whose voice sounded like the one in the message, only much more subdued.

  “Is Mr. Shawn Finche there?” I asked.

  “Who is this?”

  “Ah—he’s been working on my car alarm.”

  “He’s terribly ill. He went into the hospital last night.”

  “He is not dead,” I couldn’t help but blurt out.

  “Who is this again?” she then asked and I hung up the phone. The phone then began ringing so I turned it off.

  Had I helped to kill Shawn Finche? What had that nameless manga store owner done to me?

  I took me an hour to locate where Shawn Finche had been hospitalized. It was in the ICU at a Catholic hospital in the middle of Los Angeles. I had seen ads about it in the Japanese newspaper; they apparently had a Japanese wing, in which they served Asian patients sticky white rice instead of bread.

  Before I left the tattoo shop, I stuck some irezumi needles and ink in my bag. I had special ordered them through Roberto. He didn’t understand why I needed them. You never know if someone wants traditional Japanese hand tattooing, I told him. If I had been thinking straight, I would have packed my tattoo gun, too.

  When I arrived at the hospital, it was past regular visiting hours. The visitors’ door was locked but a sign said deliveries could be made to the service entrance. I didn’t know what I should do. I saw a security guard step out to walk a nurse to her car. I looked into the window of the side door; no one was there. The door wasn’t properly closed. I slowly pulled at the handle, and I was looking into an empty corridor.

  It wasn’t hard for me for me to find the ICU. There was a large crowd of people—Asians, whites and a couple of blacks—gathered in the first glass cell, crying. A priest was standing next to the bedridden patient, an old dark Asian woman who was breathing hard, free of all the machines around her. The priest held a white book while he spoke softly to them. Nobody, even the nurses, seemed to notice me as I edged deeper into the ICU, looking for the jet black hair of Mr. Shawn Finche.

  He was in a corner room. Finche’s face was pale, almost glowing green in the hospital lights. I checked his upper arm. The fresh tattoo, of course, hadn’t healed yet. But you could still make out the fatal kanji, death.

  I moved up a chair towards his bed and worked as fast as I could. I hadn’t done irezumi since I had been in the U.S., so I was rusty. While I poked the needles into him, he twitched at times and I was worried that he would wake. It wouldn’t take much to change shi into outside, soto. What would soto do to Finche’s body? I wasn’t sure, but it had to be better than death. As I worked, I noticed color begin to return to Finche’s cheeks. By the time I had stuck him for the last time, Finche was almost looking tanned, as if he were sunning himself outside.

  “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” A nurse frowned at me from the doorway.

  “Just visiting,” I said, immediately getting to my feet. I dropped the needles into my open purse and tried to look as innocent as possible.

  “You can’t be in here.” The nurse quickly checked Finche’s IV bag and his monitors and then glared back at me. “Don’t you move,” she said, leaving for the nurses’ desk.

  Sweat balled up on my nose. Chikusho. I could run out, but who knows if that security guard would be barring my exit at the side door?

  The nurse returned with a colleague and they both crossed their arms. “Only family allowed,” they said.

  “Wife,” I murmured.

  “Yes, she was here. Are you trying to tell us that you’re the wife?”

  “Ah, waiting for the wife to go,” I said. I tried to arch my eyebrows knowingly. It was amazing what a person could do when she was trapped in a corner.

  The nurses exchanged glances. The first nurse looked a little more disgusted than her counterpart and said to me, “It’s probably best if you don’t come around here again.” I couldn’t have agreed more.

  It was midnight and the tattoo parlor was dark. Pitch dark. No lights at all. We were usually open late on Saturdays, sometimes even past eleven. Tonight everyone must have left right at closing time. Roberto usually made sure that the neon light, TATTOOS, was on, but considering what had happened today, it wasn’t a surprise that his routine had been disrupted. I had told him that I would be back later that night to pick up a few of my things for a last-minute vacation. Roberto thought it was a good idea for me to take a break; he didn’t know it was actually for forever.

  As soon as I unlocked the door, I heard banging behind the counter. Someone pulled me from behind and held my mouth shut. The person stank of strong expensive aftershave—it was European but not how an American would wear it.

  A second person closed the blinds on our full-length windows and flipped on the light. In front of me was Nobuo in a black suit and tomato red shirt. He looked fit and healthy. His life without me had served him well.

  “Ai-chan,” he said. “You’ve lost some weight here in America. You looked heavier on television.”

  I looked down at my other captor’s arms. A tattoo of an oni, a demon, flying into action. I knew that image. I had been the one who tattooed it on the arm of Sandy, Nobuo’s bodyguard. His real name was Jiro, but being a baseball fanatic, he had changed it in honor of his idol, Sandy Koufax. In the mirror across from us was Sandy’s ridiculous bleach-blond head towering over me.

  I knew what was coming next. I had left Nobuo and would pay dearly for it. He carefully took off his jacket, hanging it on the back of Roberto’s chair. The banging from behind the counter had been from Roberto. They had apparently tied him up with duct tape and laid him on the linoleum floor. He had since wiggled forward so that his face was visible, his brown eyes wide with fright and a big piece of gray tape over his mouth.

  Sandy loosened his grip on me and then unsheathed a hunter’s knife from a leather case on his belt. He positioned the tip of the knife towards my neck.

  Nobuo then carefully undid the buttons of his shirt. As his shirt hung open I saw the familiar images on his chest—the dragon emerging from smoke, a tattoo that I had created. He then pulled off his shirt and placed it over his jacket. As he walked over to me, his nipples hardened. He looked down into my face, a mixture of both anger and expectation.

  “What have you done to your hands?” he asked, referring to my Okinawan tattoos. “I don’t like them.”

  You don’t have to look at them, I thought to myself. What you’re interested in is what I can do with them.

  He sat down in my tattoo chair, his back towards me, revealing the magnificent orange koi that I had tattooed on him years ago. That’s how I met him, actually. Even though I was relatively inexperienced, he liked the novelty of a female Japanese tattoo artist. He had given me a chance, and I gave him everything in return.

  “You’ve had some new tattoos,” I said, noting a few peony flowers that some amateur added to the water design.

  “But none were good as yours. You’re the master.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Anything,” he said. “Just make sure it’s kawaii.”

  For some couples, gifts of red roses or chocolates would be considered part of courtship. But for Nobuo, it was tattooing. After I tattooed him, he usually would take my body. And tonight he would take my life.

  “I’m going to use the gun,” I told him. “I don’t have any irezumi needles. It will be faster this way.”