Twelve hours and forty minutes after being stuffed into economy class on a British Airways flight from Heathrow to Haneda, I finally arrived in Japan.
After crossing the boarding bridge and arriving inside the terminal, I stretched to loosen up my body, which had stiffened from the long flight. My scapulae cracked.
A long line of Japanese people returning home had formed at the immigration inspection booth. I passed by them without stopping, queuing for foreigner immigration.
Ahead of me was a financier from the UK who had started talking business over the phone before even entering the country, a pair of mothers wearing hijabs while pleasantly chatting in Arabic with children in tow, and a young Indian man who didn’t glance up from the video on his tablet for even a moment. When at last all of them had been processed, my turn came. The immigration inspector looked at me, then made a slightly dubious expression.
“Hello,” I said to the man, handing him my passport. The name on it read Taiga Andou-Garrett. Nationality: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Essentially, it meant I was Japanese-British.
“What’s the purpose of your visit?” he asked me in English.
“On my way home,” I responded in Japanese, grinning like an idiot. “I was born in Japan.”
At that, the inspector finally switched to Japanese as well. “Where in Japan?”
“Kawasaki.”
The inspector flipped through my passport’s pages, a complex look on his face. He scanned me up and down a couple of times, not hiding the suspicion in his eyes. Objectively speaking, I probably did look dubious. My features didn’t betray any immediate ethnicity, and everyone told me that I was terrible at giving an insincere-but-friendly Japanese smile.
“You’ve certainly been around, haven’t you?”
“Yes, on work.”
“What do you do?”
“Military.”
“What?”
“I used to be a soldier. Just resigned recently, though.”
The inspector still seemed to have his doubts, but eventually, he stamped the passport and gave it back to me with an unamused gaze.
“Thank you,” I said, bowing my head slightly before taking my passport and heading past immigration. I got nervous at passport control every time, despite not having anything in particular to hide. I’d entered other countries aside from Japan and the UK with false identification during operations before, and I thought of those experiences even when I went somewhere with the proper paperwork. I wouldn’t need to give immigration a carefully doctored profile for myself anymore. I’d simply come back to the country where I was born and raised.
Now, most passengers would be waiting a little while for their luggage to come around on the turnstile, but all I had was my rucksack. I passed the baggage-claim area and went through an automatic one-way door leading to the entrance lobby.
Immediately, a crowd of people holding up welcome signs written in multiple languages—OKAERINASAI, HUANYING GUANGLIN, WELCOME TO JAPAN—all focused their eyes on me for a moment before realizing I wasn’t who they were here for and looking away. Without drawing anyone’s attention, I joined the crowd of people moving every which way through the lobby.
There was nobody to greet me upon my return. I hadn’t lied about going home, but that didn’t mean I had any relatives. My stay was more of a grave visitation. It had been a long time since I was last in Japan; I’d returned once ten years ago for my mother’s funeral. The terminal was a lot tidier than I remembered it being. It seemed to me there were more foreigners, too—me being one of them now.
Wondering whether to take the train, monorail, bus, or taxi home, I headed for the food court. I had to fortify myself with some food first.
At a window-side seat, I ate a bowl of tsukimi—egg-yolk-topped—tempura soba and watched the passenger jets taxi down the runway one by one.
After finishing the noodles, I sipped at some black tea I’d bought at another stall. The stuff had become a staple of mine since being thrown into the British Army at sixteen. Amazingly, I’d seldom had any while I lived in Japan, but now, after a military life of twenty years, I was all but addicted. Those guys really did drink this stuff anywhere. In tanks, in the jungles of Southeast Asia, in the deserts of Arabia… I’d consumed it right alongside them, too, to the point where I could say without much doubt that black tea composed a significant portion of the molecules making up my body.
It was two PM. No one was waiting for me, but I wanted to get to Kawasaki before dusk. Once the sun set, the temple gates would be closed.
After that, I had no plan. My resigning from the military, an institution I’d spent most of my life in, had been a turning point. Thus, I figured visiting my homeland was a fair first step since I hadn’t done so in a while.
Well, I’m here now, so maybe I’ll go on a sightseeing trip around Japan.
I did have the savings for it. Plenty of time, too. I was unemployed, after all.
Yet even that wasn’t something I was gung ho over. I only came to it by process of elimination. In truth, I wanted to work, to have a job somewhere that made use of my skills.
As I continued sipping my now-lukewarm tea, I perked up.
Someone was watching me.
Pretty much anyone who had been through a good amount of training would agree that people like us knew when we were being watched. We could sense their presence, feel the weight of eyes glued to our backs. Detecting such a thing was even easier when the watcher meant us harm. And the gaze on me was filled to the brim with murderous intent.
I held my smartphone to my ear, pretending to be on a phone call as I glanced over to the mirrored wall. I’d initially chosen a seat where I’d be able to watch my own back. For an instant, I saw a hooded figure in black among the throngs going back and forth; they abruptly crouched. It was a casual gesture, one easily explained as them tying a shoelace. Still, after waiting a bit, I recognized that this person in black didn’t get back up. I’d found my observer.
Continuing my feigned conversation, I got up from my seat and started walking. I didn’t know who they were, but that hostility could only mean one thing. Someone was after me. Trying to kill me, a former SAS soldier.