“That’d be nice,” he said, an election-poster smile returning to his face. “But by then, I’ll probably have done my time with encyclopedias. I mean, there’s only so many Chinese families to visit. Maybe I’ll have moved on to insurance for Chinese. Or funeral plots. What’s it really matter?”

I wanted to say something. I would never see this guy again in my life. I wanted to say something to him about the Chinese, but what? Nothing came. So we parted with your usual good-byes.

Even now, I still can’t think of anything to say.

5.

SSUPPOSING I FOUND myself chasing another fly ball and ran head-on into a basketball backboard, supposing I woke up once again lying under an arbor with a baseball glove under my head, what words of wisdom could this man of thirty-odd years bring himself to utter? Maybe something like: This is no place for me.

This occurs to me while I’m riding the Yamanote Line. I’m standing by the door, holding on to my ticket so I won’t lose it, gazing out the window at the buildings we pass. Our city, these streets, I don’t know why it makes me so depressed. That old familiar gloom that befalls the city dweller, regular as due dates, cloudy as mental Jell-O. The dirty façades, the nameless crowds, the unremitting noise, the packed rush-hour trains, the gray skies, the billboards on every square centimeter of available space, the hopes and resignation, irritation and excitement. And everywhere, infinite options, infinite possibilities. An infinity, and at the same time, zero. We try to scoop it all up in our hands, and what we get is a handful of zero. That’s the city. That’s when I remember what that Chinese girl said.

This was never any place I was meant to be.

I LOOK AT TOKYO and I think China.

That’s how I’ve met my share of Chinese. I’ve read dozens of books on China, everything from the Annals to Red Star over China. I’ve wanted to find out as much about China as I could. But that China is only my China. Not any China I can read about. It’s the China that sends messages just to me. It’s not the big yellow expanse on the globe, it’s another China. Another hypothesis, another supposition. In a sense, it’s a part of myself that’s been cut off by the word China.

I wander through China. Without ever having boarded a plane. My travels take place here in the Tokyo subways, in the backseat of a taxi. My adventures take me to the waiting room of the nearby dentist, to the bank teller’s window. I can go everywhere and I don’t go anywhere.