Dave Kellerman was fifty years old and had never lived anywhere but Los Angeles. Born at California Hospital Medical Center on Grand Avenue, raised in a stucco bungalow in Echo Park, and was a graphic designer for a mid-sized agency in Culver City for twenty-three years. Divorced at forty-one. His daughter Marisol lived in Portland, and his son Theo lived in Austin, and both of them called him on Sundays. He stood five foot ten, weighed a hundred and ninety pounds, was soft through the middle, had short salt-and-pepper hair, a thick mat of gray-black chest hair, and a flat, unremarkable ass. His cock was four and a half inches long when fully hard, four and a half inches around the shaft, cut, and in fifty years nobody had ever made a fuss about it.

He had liked Japanese things since he was a teenager. He had taken two years of Japanese at Los Angeles City College, still remembered enough to order food and say thank you, watched sumo every basho, and had eaten in Little Tokyo more times than he could count. So in August, when he wanted a weekend away from his own apartment, he did not fly anywhere. He took Friday off, packed a duffel, and booked three nights at a small boutique hotel on the eastern edge of Little Tokyo, where the neighborhood thins out and turns into the Arts District — brick warehouses, breweries, murals, a hotel with twelve rooms and a courtyard full of bamboo.

It was Nisei Week. The festival had run every August since 1934. There was a grand parade, a street fair, a queen coronation, and on Friday night, on East First Street in front of the Buddhist temple, the Bon Odori — the Obon dance- was held in a closed-off lot with a wooden yagura tower in the center, strung with paper lanterns, and a circle of dancers moving around it in slow procession. The air smelled like grilled squid and shaved ice and hot asphalt. Grandmothers danced in yukata. Kids danced in sneakers. A taiko drum group kept time from the tower.

Dave stood at the edge with a plastic cup of beer and watched.

He noticed her in the third row of the circle. She was the only one in a proper kimono instead of a yukata — a komono in deep indigo with a pattern of white morning glories, a cream han-haba obi tied low and flat, zori sandals on bare feet, her hair pulled up into a tight chignon pinned with a kanzashi with a single blue bead. She was tall for a Japanese woman, maybe five foot seven, slender through the shoulders, full through the hips. Her hands moved exactly right, the fan opening and closing on the beat, her wrists loose, her chin level. She knew the choreography cold, and she was watching the older women in the front row to keep the sequence, the way a good dancer does.

She caught him staring somewhere around the fourth song. She held his eyes for a full bar of the music, then looked away and kept dancing.

When the dancing broke, he walked over. Her name was Haruka Tanaka. She was thirty-one, born in Gardena, raised in Torrance, and she had moved to Kyoto six years earlier to study nihon buyo, classical Japanese dance, under a master of the Fujima school. She had earned her natori license — her professional dance name — the year before. She flew back every August for Nisei Week, because her grandmother had danced in the same circle since 1968 and Haruka was not going to be the one to break it.

Her English was perfect and unaccented. His Japanese was clumsy, and she was patient with it. They stood in the lantern light and talked for forty minutes, until the drum group packed up and the lot emptied, and then he asked if she wanted to get dinner.

They walked to an izakaya on Second Street and ate grilled yellowtail collar and cold tofu and pickled cucumber and drank two carafes of warm sake between them. She told him about Kyoto, about her grandmother, about the tendon in her right ankle that had been giving her trouble for a year. He told her about the agency, about his divorce, about his kids. At eleven-thirty he paid the bill and asked if she wanted to come up to his hotel for one more drink. She said yes.

The room was small and warm. He poured two glasses of whiskey from the minibar. She kicked off her zori and stood by the window with her back to him, and he undid the obi for her, which took him four tries, and she laughed at him the whole time. The kimono came open and slid off her shoulders, and underneath she wore nothing but a thin cotton hadajuban, a short under-robe, and no bra and no panties at all.