The facility occupied the ground floor of a gray commercial building hemmed in by rusting fire escapes and choked with high-tension wires that clung to the structure’s façade like rotting vegetation. Across from it was a parking lot crowded by Mercedeses with darkened windows and high-performance tires, the status symbols of the country’s elite and of its criminals, each aping the other, comfortably sharing the pleasures of the night in Roppongi’s tawdry demimonde. The street itself was illuminated only by the indifferent glow of a single arched lamplight, its base festooned with flyers advertising the area’s innumerable sexual services, in the shadows of its own luminescence looking like the elongated neck of some antediluvian bird shedding diseased and curling feathers.

The shades were drawn behind the club’s plate-glass windows, but I spotted the yakuza’s anodized aluminum Harley-Davidson V-Rod parked in front, surrounded by commuter bicycles like a shark amidst pilot fish. Just past the windows was the entrance to the building. I tried the door, but it was locked.

I backed up a few steps to the club windows and tapped on the glass. A moment later the lights went off inside. Nice, I thought. He had cut the lights so he could peek through the shades without being seen from outside. I waited, knowing he was watching me and checking the street.

The lights went back on, and a moment later the yakuza appeared in the entranceway to the building. He was wearing gray sweatpants and a black cutaway A-shirt, along with the obligatory weightlifting gloves. Obviously in the middle of a workout.