steaming bowl of noodles, pork, rice and pickles. This method of
ordering would become my modus operandi over the following days and
nights. I can tell you that I felt a lot better about myself after my
breakfast. I spent a few hours at the restaurant before hailing a cab for
Chiyoda-ku district. I had an engagement.
If you didn't already know, a few years back I wrote a satirical thriller
policier, set, predictably, in the restaurant business. Based loosely on my
experiences at Work Progress and with the "Italian fraternal
organization" I mentioned earlier, it was acquired for translation by the
eminent Japanese publishing house, Hayakawa. Being the hustler that I
am, upon learning I was headed for Tokyo I immediately contacted my
Japanese publisher, volunteering, a bit disingenuously, to do "anything I
could" to help promote the book over there. I don't know how nice or
how welcome a thing to do it was. The book had been out for a while—
and clearly had not set the world on fire. David Hasselhoff might have
hit it big over there; Airwolf reruns were once huge on the Pacific Rim;
but my little book had not, I think, caused my publishers to send for me
to satisfy public demand for a closer look. What a responsibility, I now
realized, what a situation I had saddled Hayakawa with, giving them an
alarming one week's notice of my arrival.
However horrified they might privately have been, they responded with
enormous tact and hospitality. An event was organized. A reception
committee was formed. Cars were laid on. Lunches arranged. Copies of
my book were found and quickly displayed in the ground-floor bookstore
of their corporate offices. So, I found myself headed off to the Chiyoda-
ku district to meet the chef of La Rivière, a restaurant adjacent to and
owned by my publisher. I was to cook a meal evocative of my earlier
work of fiction for the benefit of the press, provide a few bons mots at a
press conference, appear on Japanese cable TV (network also owned by
my publisher) and in every way cause inconvenience to strangers who
had been nothing but generous to me from afar.