Milton concentrated on his surroundings as he walked toward Takashi Nishimoto’s tower block. This used to be Sanya, but the district’s name had been expunged from official records in the sixties by a government that was embarrassed by the poverty that was cheek by jowl with the prosperity of the rest of the city. Instead, the area had been divided into the districts of Kiyokawa and Zutsumi. This area was the former, and it did not look too different to the other districts that Milton had visited since he had arrived in the city. The buildings looked in good condition, and there was no shortage of supermarkets and neighbourhood stores that offered groceries and other necessities to the men and women who passed in and out of their doors. But, as Milton looked, he saw the subtle signs that suggested that Kiyokawa was not as affluent as the other districts that he had seen. He saw children in patched clothes, parents eking out as much wear from them as possible. Men in cheap plastic flip-flops sat on park benches, sipping alcopops from colourful Chu-Hi cans. There were hotels and hostels and kichinyado lodgings with signs in the windows that offered the cheapest rates that Milton had seen since arriving in Tokyo. The buildings might have been substantial and well appointed, a world away from the shanties of other cities that Milton had visited—Rio, Juarez, Manila—but there was the same atmosphere of thwarted ambition and desperation. The people who lived here were not so different.

Milton passed through a park, making his way around two men who were playing shogi on a board that they had laid on the ground, and then through a scrum of kids who bustled around him with their hands outstretched, begging for change. He left through a set of iron gates and turned on to the road that led to Takashi’s stronghold.

The tower block sat on the north side of a crossroads, a modern-looking structure with twelve storeys. It was slender, with an exterior staircase that ascended to the top. Milton counted seven windows per floor, suggesting three or four apartments on each. There was a trio of men loitering outside, younger than the retired day labourers who shuffled between their hostels and the dive bars where they drank their problems away. Milton was the only Westerner on the street and, as they noticed his approach, they turned to face him and stared at him with threatening eyes.