I met Adachi Masao

I wasn’t sure it was him. He was smoking a cigarette in the yard outside of a café in an old house in Nippori, standing between two women. I didn’t see their faces. I was only looking at him, trying to figure out if I was looking at Adachi Masao.

I wasn’t sure it was him. It couldn’t be. He was standing outside a café in Nippori, waiting to file in to hear a talk by a Vietnamese-American art critic about the legacy of revolutionary art. Why should he be there? He went from Cannes to Beirut. He joined the Japanese Red Army. He was in exile for thirty years. He met in person the people on the posters in the subway.

I might have seen him before. If I had stood in front of Koenji Station, he might have stopped by. If I had been brave enough to stand out there with a banner, he might have rewarded me. If I had taken the train to Osaka that morning to see the screening of Revolution+1, I would have seen him. I might not be as brave as Adachi Masao.

A room on the second story. Low roof. Rows of mismatched folding chairs. The audience was art school students (young women with homemade clothes and keffiyehs and thrifted designer bags, and young men wearing vintage Y’s for men under their army coats), tourists (great big Americans who spoke without accents, too loudly about shopping in Asakusa), and pink-cheeked twentysomething returnees, and a few people who don’t fit into a type I could summarize neatly here.

I browsed the pamphlets about solidarity workshops and Ryukyu independence.

I saw someone I knew. I bought her a cup of tea and a chocolate chip cookie. When she protested, I reminded her that a percentage of the proceeds went to a good cause. A doctor in Gaza. A family in Gaza. I didn’t betray that I had gone there that night not to run into men who might be Adachi Masao, but in the hope that I would see her.

I didn’t say that I had rehearsed on the way there what I might say to the art critic about Còn lại một mình (she organized a retrospective of Nguyễn Hồng Sến films in New York).

I took a seat at the back of the room.

Someone dimmed the lights. Two women at the café counter talked in a mixture of Japanese and English about the repair status of the second-hand refrigerator.

The art critic spoke in a general way about Vietnamese socialist realism. The interpreter was slow to catch up with her. The art critic paused and admitted that she was unaware of Japan’s own response to the war in Vietnam. She asked if anybody could briefly comment on the situation. The man I thought might be Adachi Masao raised his hand. He talked about Beheiren. His accent was correct. The interpreter caught up. He went on too long. The tourists glanced at each other. The man I thought might be Adachi Masao said that the Vietnamese cause gave hope to his generation. He apologized for speaking too long.

The art critic showed slides of her gallery in Ho Chi Minh City and told stories about run-ins with cultural bureaucrats and Communist Party hacks. When she was done, the tourists bought copies of her book.

The man I thought might be Adachi Masao went to stand in front of the café again. I tried to think of what I could say to him. If I told him that I was looking forward to seeing Escape, then, if I was talking to another elderly man interested in radical politics, he would at least know who I had mistaken him for. I wanted to thank him for something—for writing Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, or for becoming some sort of an example, or for his service, or for staying alive long enough for me to see him standing outside a café in Nippori. I wanted to know what he thought—of everything, about what I should do with my life. I wanted to tell him to make one last incomprehensible porno film. But I’m shy, so I greeted him as if he should know me, as if we had met before, paused, gave a bow by squeezing my shoulders forward and ducking my head, and walked back to the station, still not sure it was really him.