The rain starts outside Yokohama somewhere around midnight. Riku doesn't pull over.
He's been riding for eleven hours. His back aches in the specific, familiar way it aches after eleven hours on a bike, and his jacket is soaked through to the lining, and the expressway is nearly empty — just the rain and the headlights of distant trucks and the orange smear of the city getting brighter ahead of him. He doesn't think about the rain. He doesn't think about the distance. He thinks about a name written on a piece of paper he found in Sendai three days ago, wedged behind a fight posting board in the back of a pachinko parlor. One name in a column of names, half of them crossed out.
Iida Genzo.
Still in Yokohama. Still running circuits. Still alive.
Riku takes the Yokohama exit and drops into the city.
* * *
He finds a capsule hotel near Kannai that takes cash and doesn't ask questions. The man at the front desk glances at Riku's soaked jacket, at the duffel bag slung over one shoulder, at nothing in particular, and slides a key across the counter without a word. Riku appreciates this. He tips well.
The capsule is smaller than the last one but cleaner. He strips off the wet jacket and hangs it from a hook and lies down on top of the blanket and stares at the curved ceiling six inches above his face. There is a small screen mounted in the upper corner showing a news broadcast with the sound off. He watches a politician gesture at something without watching it. His eyes close.
He doesn't sleep. He hasn't slept well since Sendai. Before Sendai it was Morioka, and before that Aomori, and before that a string of nights in the north that blur together into one long dark interrupted by rest stops and conbini fluorescence and the specific loneliness of a highway at 3am. He'd followed the thread north first because a name had pointed him north, and the name had been wrong, and he'd ridden back south through the mountains in the rain. That had been six weeks ago.
He'd found the pachinko parlor by accident.
He thinks about this occasionally — how much of what he's doing runs on accident. How a blown tire had put him in that particular alley in Sendai. How the alley happened to be behind that particular building. How the posting board was visible through the window because the lock on the back door was broken. He's not a superstitious man. He doesn't think the universe is trying to help him. He thinks he rode north for three weeks on bad information and the blown tire and the broken lock were just bad tire and broken lock, and the name behind the board was just luck, and luck is not a plan.
But he's still going to follow it.
He opens his eyes. The politician is still gesturing. Riku looks at the ceiling and thinks about what he remembers about Iida Genzo.
* * *
Eight years ago, Iida was a promoter. Not a big one — a local operator, the kind of man who rented warehouses and bribed the right people and kept a stable of four or five fighters on loose retainer. He ran cards in the port district, mostly, where the dock workers and the money that moved through the port liked to watch men hurt each other on a Friday night. Iida had a gift for matching. He knew which fights would be close and which would be quick and he scheduled them with an instinct that kept crowds coming back.
Riku had fought on three of his cards. This was before the Kanto circuit, before the reputation, back when he was still taking any fight that paid. He remembered Iida as a small, neatly dressed man who smelled of cigarettes and hair oil and who counted money with the focused tenderness of someone handling something fragile. He was not warm. He was not cruel. He was professional in the way that men who have decided to stop caring about certain things are professional.
They'd spoken maybe a dozen times. Mostly logistics. Once, after a fight Riku had won badly — he'd broken two fingers on his left hand on a man's skull, a stupid mistake, he'd been overcommitting all night — Iida had handed him a bag of ice and said, without looking at him: you fight like you're trying to punish yourself. Riku hadn't known what to say to that. He still didn't.
He doesn't know how deep Iida is in Kurohana. The name on the list didn't say. What it said was: Yokohama, port circuit, Iida G. — with a figure beside it that implied a financial relationship, not just an association. Which meant Iida wasn't a casual affiliate. Which meant Iida knew things.
Riku needs someone who knows things.
He closes his eyes again. This time, eventually, he sleeps.
* * *
He's at the port district by seven.
It's still raining, lighter now, a gray drizzle that softens the edges of the cranes and the container stacks along the waterfront. He walks with his hands in the pockets of a dry jacket — a gray one this time, bought at a Don Quijote near the station, cheap and anonymous. The black jacket is hanging in the capsule hotel. He has two jackets now because the black one is too recognizable. He learned this in Aomori, where someone who shouldn't have known what he looked like knew what he looked like. He'd ridden out that night and hadn't slept until Sendai.
The port district is awake at this hour.
Workers in high-vis vests. Forklifts moving somewhere out of sight, the sound of them carrying across the water. A row of vending machines outside a logistics office, three men in hard hats drinking hot coffee from cans. Riku buys a canned coffee and stands near the water and drinks it and watches.
He's not looking for anything specific yet. He's looking for texture. How a place carries itself in the morning tells you things you can't learn any other way — where the edges are, which streets feel watched, which ones feel forgotten. Yokohama's port district feels, in the gray morning rain, like a place that has been many things and settled into being whatever is most convenient.
There are tourist developments three blocks east, new condominiums overlooking the bay. Here, at this end, it's still just work and water and the smell of salt and engine oil.
He finishes the coffee and drops the can in a bin and starts walking south along the waterfront.
He's looking for the kind of establishment that doesn't open until evening but has daytime people anyway. There are always daytime people. Men who run errands, who take deliveries, who need to be somewhere without being somewhere officially. In every port city Riku has been in, these men congregate around the same kinds of places: certain restaurants that serve lunch to nobody in particular, certain small offices above certain small shops, certain parking structures where cars sit for hours without moving.
He finds what he's looking for twenty minutes into his walk: a ramen shop tucked between a marine supply store and a shuttered karaoke bar. The ramen shop is open. Through the fogged window he counts four men eating at the counter and one man in a booth who is not eating, who is reading something on his phone and occasionally looking up at the room in a way that has nothing to do with the food.
Riku walks past without slowing. He notes the street name. He notes the alley beside the marine supply store and where it leads. He notes the car parked in front of the karaoke bar — a gray Alphard, engine off, someone in the driver's seat.
He turns the corner and keeps walking.
* * *
He spends the day learning the district.
By the time evening comes he knows three things. First: the underground circuit here is still running, and running regularly — he'd found a posting, not physical this time but a reference passed in conversation between two men outside the ramen shop who didn't know he was listening. Second: it runs out of a warehouse near Pier 10, the same general area as eight years ago, which meant either Iida was sentimental or the arrangement was too profitable to relocate. Third: there is a name that keeps coming up in the peripheral language of the district, spoken without weight, the way people say the name of something that's just part of the landscape. That name is not Iida.
It's Sakamoto.
Riku stands at the waterfront as the last light goes out of the sky. The rain has stopped. The harbor smells like diesel and the sea. Somewhere behind him a crane is still working, its yellow light swinging in slow arcs over the container stacks. He watches the water.
Sakamoto. He doesn't know that name. It's not on the list from Sendai. Which means either the circuit has changed hands in the time since the list was made, or Sakamoto is a layer between the circuit and Iida, or Iida is working under a name he doesn't use in public.
All three of these possibilities mean the same thing: he needs to get inside before he'll know which one is true.
He thinks about what Iida had said to him, eleven years ago, over a bag of ice in a warehouse that smelled of sweat and old smoke. You fight like you're trying to punish yourself.
He'd understood it better, later. He wasn't sure Iida had meant it as criticism.
He turns from the water and walks back toward the city. Tomorrow night he'll find the warehouse. Tonight he eats and he sleeps and he doesn't think about what comes after — not the fight, not the information he needs from Iida, not the road to Osaka after that, not the shape of the thing waiting at the end of all of it.
One thing at a time.
He walks until the lights of the city close around him and the harbor disappears behind the buildings, and then he keeps walking.