Can You Write Me a New Story?

(April 2020)

It is late morning, and although a cold front has crossed into Japan overnight and brought with it cloud cover and a temperature in the mid-forties, Ichihara has decided to take a walk. I am tagging along beside him, but in truth he’s operating alone, clearly he’s thinking about the case, turning information over in his head. He’s had meetings and phone calls with a string professors and research assistants from around the globe for the past two days–working what he’s taken to calling the Irkutsk Angle. It doesn’t seem to have yielded anything as far as I can tell. At least, no professor has yielded a “Charlie Cooper” equation or “slimeball” formula that will reveal the man.

But It all has him muttering to himself and walking along at a brisk pace, head down, fingers on chin.

I follow him along, nearly jogging to keep up, Dr. Watson to his Sherlock.

My jacket isn’t as good at cutting the cold as his topcoat is, and I find myself blowing into my hand and rubbing my fingers together as we wade through the stream of people. A collection of young women ahead of us are all wearing pastel shoes shaped with wings on the inside, and plaid stretch pants that are apparently all the style this month. They speak with a steady flow of chatter and laughter that is apparently universal across cultures.

We pass a row of high-end clothes boutiques, and a restaurant with salarymen eating early lunch and pecking at datapads between bites from their bento boxes and plates of sushi and fried fish tempura and, of course, sea weed.

“Are we going anywhere,” I say.

And that’s when Ichihara stops stone cold.

He stand there, his coat tails swaying with their momentum until they come to a stop, falling toward the cement like a frozen waterfall. The expression on his face is strange, questioning, with a dash of wonder, and a full measure of WTF.

“What is it?”

The corner of one lip turns up. His eyes grow distant as he looks up to the skyline that is pale and dull against the gray sky.

“I’m serious, Yuni. Are you okay?”

I put my hand on his shoulder and he starts as if I was a ghost.

Then his face draws a lipless smile. He turns to me, and puts his other arm on my other shoulder.

“You are a good friend, Casey Neal. Can you write me a new story?”

“Sure. Of course. What do you want.”

He nods his head down the road to a place called Eggo Meggo.

“Coffee on me today,” is all he says.

So, I write the story he outlined for me between three cups of coffee and a cheese danish. The food in Japan is very good, I admit. Perhaps too good. I haven’t weighed myself since I got here, but I’m sure I’ve put on a few pounds.

I’m still young, though, I think to myself. I can still run them off when I get a chance.

It’s the story of baseball as a source of community.

The chief inspector specifically wanted me to include stories of fans in the US and groups that I knew had come together. I have an entire section about social media, fan blogs and their rivalries. I talk about winning, and losing, and how it affects people throughout their normal day. Given my pedigree, I feel it’s almost required that I write about See the PEBA, and my time with Don-o, and when I do that I mention how I see that same relationship between Yuni Ichihara and Diaki Matsui, two people of different worlds today that sprung from the common background of baseball and community, and who will always share that bond. Always. No matter what happens.

I tell about my time with Yuni, and I mention DK.

I talk about my experience in Japan, and how I couldn’t imagine baseball in Japan at all before coming here, and how, now that I’ve been here, I couldn’t imagine baseball without Japan.

I use the merger as the backdrop, of course.

The moves will shred some bonds,I say. But those bonds will heal because the real bond, the true connection, is always between people. People who love the game. People you love and the people who love you. And that is important because that means you can always come home. It means you are always safe. It means that as long as there is the game, there is always next year, and that as long as there are us strange people with a flare and a passion for the game that will not go out, the game will always be here.

Always.

That is the deal the game makes.

Create me, and I will give you back to yourself.

When I finish this story, I will look back in it and realize that I will not need to change a single word. It is a story that flows from my fingertips from the moment I sit down. No messy thinking, no structuring, no annoying starts and stops. I don’t hit a single block that turns me inside out, or causes me to worry about the flow not winding up where I’m envisioning it. This story comes to me in a single, steady flow that winds up on the page like some kind of magic.

I build toward the end that Ichihara has requested, but the end I would have come to if he had just left me alone to write the piece anyway.

It’s Don-o and the tree, of course. I end my piece about baseball and fans and connection with the image of my best friend standing under a tree in his Hawaiian shirt, watching a baseball game behind a pair of dark glasses.

I end by telling the world that I’m happy for him.

And I am. I really am.

Just like it should always be.

By the time I finish, I know who Ichihara is targeting with this piece.

I probably knew it somewhere in my subconscious earlier, but it only surfaces when hit the ‘period’ key for the last sentence in the piece.

He’s talking to Don-o.

He’s telling him to come in.

He’s telling him it’s okay.

He’s trying to give me back my friend.

I find myself angry. It’s not Ichihara’s place to step into what Don-o and I have, or had, or whatever. But then I see Yuni’s face again, beaming with light in the Eggo-Meggo, and I realize that, no, Yuni Ichihara is not talking to Don-o. Or, that, yes, he’s talking to Don-o, but Don-o is not his only audience. He is talking to the world, he is talking to the people in Dayton, and Amsterdam, and Havana, people who will be gaining teams, and people in PEBA cities, and people in places with only schoolboy teams.

And, I realize only then, that Chief Inspector Yuni Ichihara is talking to me.