John Rain 08: Graveyard of Memories by Barry Eisler Page A

other premier hanami locations, and therefore less crowded. She had taken me there many times when I was small, usually on the Arakawa-sen, which today is the city’s sole surviving public tram line. Even back then, the trams were dying out, being buried by train tracks as fast as the city’s wooden houses were being torn down and replaced by ferroconcrete.
    I was still early for the meeting, so on a whim I parked Thanatos outside Waseda Station and boarded the Arakawa line, which would take me to Zōshigaya. A pastel-yellow train was already waiting at the terminal—a pretty fancy description for an open-air, street-level platform adjacent to the sidewalk—so I walked on, paid the fare, and moved past a dozen other passengers toward the back of the single-car carrier, really no larger than a bus. A young mother was holding her small son’s hand by one of the windows. The child was asking, Why aren’t we going? and the woman was smiling and explaining that of course we had to wait for the other passengers but that soon we would be off. I looked away, surprised by a feeling of overwhelming sadness. Some of my earliest memories were of my own mother taking me for a ride on the chin-chin densha , the ding-ding train, so named for the distinct double bell the driver sounds when pulling out of a station, and when the train started forward and the bell rang, I felt my eyes grow moist. My mother had succumbed to cancer just over a year earlier, while I was away at war. Her absence was still an acute ache in my life, and being back here on the train sharpened it. It wasn’t just the sound of the bell—everything around me suddenly reminded me of what now was lost. The serene and sedate neighborhoods rolling slowly by; the tracks half overgrown with grass; the gentle swaying of the train and the chunk-chunk, chunk-chunk of the wheels passing over the ties. The chin-chin densha was still here, steady and stalwart, and I was glad for that. But I was riding it alone now, a rōnin , a revenant returned from some faraway place, my past and everyone part of it sundered, irretrievable, accessible to me now only as painful and haunted memories, some still sharp, some increasingly indistinct.
    The train continued along at its leisurely pace, chunk-chunk, chunk-chunk , settling into stations along the way, waiting for passengers to board and depart, easing forward again with its musical chin-chin . I was the only passenger to get off at Zōshigaya. I waited until the train had pulled away, then walked across the tracks. Across from me, on the other side of a sleepy, narrow street, was the cemetery. But for a profusion of markers sprouting up from the moss-covered earth, it might have been a small forest planted in the midst of the city around it.
    I entered along the northwest path, then stopped. Insects buzzed around me and there was a slight rustling of tree leaves. Other than that, everything was completely still. And yet, something didn’t feel right. This was where McGraw had told me to meet him, but I realized there was no reason I had to approach from this angle, which is what he would have been expecting. I could as easily have approached through the cemetery from the opposite direction, or from any direction at all.
    I shook off the feeling, thinking it must have been the sudden splash of green, the sound of unseen insects, that was triggering combat reflexes shaped in the jungle. McGraw had no reason to set me up. I was just being paranoid. Still, no downside to coming in along a less obvious route. I started to back up, but then saw McGraw, strolling along one of the east–west paths to my right, a map in one hand and a camera in the other. He looked like nothing more than a foreign tourist on an outing. Which I supposed was exactly the point. He nodded his head at me and walked over. Yeah, I was being paranoid. All right.
    I had to admit, I was impressed by the choice of venue. I didn’t think many foreigners living in