We shook hands and left the coffee shop. Richard headed toward Shimbashi Station. I found myself watching him walk off for some reason. It was probably a kind of longing. For the ring in his suitcase.
I gazed at the jeweler’s back, silently praying that he would get the job done.
My first two weeks as a second-year college student went by with terrifying speed. The cherry trees had bloomed and dropped their blossoms, and I’d swapped my light coat for a hoodie. Everyone in my prep course was already talking about the summer jobs they had lined up.
The Ginza coffee shop I was called to this time was behind the Wako clock tower. The walls were the color and texture of a chocolate bar, and the way the space was lit was very stylish. It was the middle of the day on a weekday, so there weren’t very many customers.
Richard had arrived early. I apologized for making him wait and took a seat across from him. “So, what did the report come up with?”
“Some rather unusual findings.” Richard started by returning the pink sapphire to me. His expression was serious. “I must ask, are you certain this ring came from your grandmother? You wouldn’t happen to know anything unusual about its history, would you?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
Richard’s expression didn’t change as he continued, “Are you aware that this ring might be stolen?”
I looked up at the ceiling the moment I heard him say it. I sighed before looking back at Richard. He was beautiful as ever, even with a frown on his face. He looked like he wanted to call me baffling. I supposed my reaction was pretty unusual.
I couldn’t stop smiling. I felt so happy. It was a huge weight off my shoulders.
“You’re… You’re amazing! You really are a jeweler! That’s just incredible!”
“Keep your voice down.”
He shot me an icy glare, and I shut my mouth. I’d let myself get a little too excited. Richard was silent as a forest as his marvelously colored eyes gazed at me. Beautiful things had a mysterious power, one strong enough to strike a person dumb and render them unable to transgress. It reminded me of how I used to feel compelled to put my hands together in prayer every time I walked past the temple near my house, despite not even knowing what denomination it belonged to. Richard had that quality, and so did the ring.
“Do you have an explanation for this?”
“I should apologize for lying to you. The part about my grandmother insisting it was a fake was something I made up to justify having you take a look at it. Everything else I told you was true. It is a piece that belonged to my grandmother, and it is stolen. It’s a long story, though. I don’t want to bore you.”
“Why do you think I’m here?”
I thanked him and bowed my head. This time Richard ordered mineral water, and I ordered a café au lait. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get through the whole story before we finished our drinks.
“Well, the story starts when my grandmother was living in Tokyo for some reason or other. To be clear, this would have been about fifty years ago.”
My grandmother’s name was Hatsu Kanou. She lived in Tokyo, and she worked as a pickpocket. She was born before the war and married a veteran after it ended. He’d barely escaped the South Pacific with his life, losing his home and family in the war. Everything he knew burned down in the air raids. It was an awful story, but probably a tragically common one back then. My grandmother was no different.
She and her husband thought they could support each other through their shared pain and move forward with their lives, but her husband suffered from what we’d now call PTSD, which drove him to drink and hit his wife. He kept finding work and getting fired, over and over, and they had no relatives to fall back on. His military pension was their only lifeline. Before she had my mother, she gave birth to two boys, but neither of them lived very long.
My grandmother put up with this for a long time, but when her daughter was born, she decided it was time to do something about it. I think she did it all for her. She washed her hands of the dead-end marriage and moved to Tokyo alone with her child. Unfortunately, she couldn’t find work she could do while raising a child. They continued to struggle for meals, and as they were just barely scraping by, my grandmother made another decision.
She decided to become a thief.
She might have always been good with her hands, but her pickpocketing abilities were sublime. She started out working on bus routes but graduated to working the Yamanote line. She’d even earned herself a nickname from the police: Slippery Hatsu, because she was so talented that she could slip your wallet out of your pocket without you even noticing. She only targeted affluent men, typically only took watches and cash, and wouldn’t even empty wallets out, usually leaving about twenty percent of their contents behind.
My grandmother used that money to raise my mother. She was a generous person and would share her bounty with others in need. She didn’t fear the yakuza, either. She had her principles. You might even call it an art.
This isn’t a story from some far-off land. This was Tokyo in the 1960s. I’m sure when most people think of that time, they think of the 1964 Olympics and movies set in the “good old days.” But those “good old days” came with a price, like the rampant industrial disasters of the era. Everyone was poor, and so everyone was scrambling to make it big. With the majority of people so focused on winning the race, they had no time left over to think about things in detail, leaving nothing but destruction and those who couldn’t keep up in their wake.
My grandmother was one of the people left behind. One of the people crowded out of the post-war prosperity. Left to fend for herself on the outskirts of society.
One spring evening, while my grandmother was scouting out marks, she noticed a young woman waiting alone for a train. She was a well-dressed and probably well-off woman who had to be close to twenty. She seemed a little out of place somehow, and had a ring on the ring finger of her left hand. The brilliant pink stone glimmered when she brushed her hair out of her face. It was beautiful, almost like it was infused with the essence of the clouds in the twilight sky.
In that moment, that woman didn’t seem like a creature who occupied the same plane of existence to my grandmother. She looked almost like an angel who had unsteadily descended the stairs from heaven out of curiosity about the mortal world.
My grandmother followed her onto the train. And before the Yamanote line made it to the next station, she had made the ring hers.
Normally, my grandmother wouldn’t hold on to the items she stole but would turn them into cash immediately. But for that one night, she put that ring on her own finger and admired it. It was an age when only the rich could afford wedding rings. The barely seventy square foot apartment in the bad part of town that she lived in with her daughter had a single bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling, and it always flickered. She had been so far removed from the world of the fashionable for a long time.
The next morning, my grandmother still didn’t sell the ring for cash. Instead, she hid it in her rice bin. That afternoon, a train suddenly stopped while my grandmother was working. There was a huge commotion. When she asked a savvy friend what was going on, they knew immediately. The answer took my grandmother’s breath away.
A woman had thrown herself onto the tracks. A young woman from a good family.
She had lost her engagement ring and tried to atone for her carelessness with her own life. My grandmother’s friend chuckled and quipped, “What era does she think she’s living in?” But my grandmother didn’t even smile.
The source of all the commotion was a relative of the girl, who’d rushed in and was currently down on their hands and knees. The girl had survived, just barely, but was seriously injured.
My grandmother ran home almost immediately, apparently thinking she ought to return the ring. But before she made it home, a police officer caught up to her and arrested her. She had no defense to speak of, since she still had her spoils for the day in her pocket.
Instead of a ring, my grandmother’s hands were adorned with a pair of handcuffs. She was going to prison. Her sentence was five years, which was high for a pickpocket, but her “earnings” were far too high for her to get a pass for being a single mother. They probably wanted to make an example of her, too.
When she finally got out of the women’s prison, my grandmother was in her forties. Her daughter, Hiromi, was in elementary school. The other children had nicknamed her “outlaw” since everyone knew why her mother was absent and the people looking after her were her mother’s “colleagues.”
Hiromi hated her mother more than anything in the world.
My grandmother’s old colleagues had a present for her when she got home. When she unwrapped it, inside the paper she found a ring with a pink gem in the middle. It was the one thing the police never found. I had to wonder how she felt when she got that ring back.
As time went on, Hiromi graduated school and became a nurse. She got married and moved from Tokyo to Saitama, finally getting what she wanted—to be away from home and to have a new name. Maybe that was the only reason she wanted to get married in the first place. Unfortunately, her first husband, my father, turned out to be a wife-beater. She divorced him not long after giving birth to me.
But my mother was stubborn. She never went home, though she continued sending my grandmother money to live off of. When she was in her mid-forties, she married her second husband and my new father, Mr. Nakata. He spent the last decade developing oil fields in Indonesia with a drilling equipment company. Their house is in Machida now, on the border of Tokyo and Kanagawa.
Hiromi continued to live apart from her mother. Things only started to change when I was in eighth grade. My grandmother’s landlord had contacted my mother to let her know my grandmother had been acting odd lately. Thinking back, that was probably when her dementia started. Apparently, she was wandering around at night, cooking at all hours, and talking to herself in a loud voice, among other things.