The health club was also convenient because I wouldn’t have to worry about fingerprints. In Japan, where costumes are a national pastime, a weightlifter wouldn’t pump iron without wearing stylish padded gloves any more than a politician would take a bribe in his underwear. It was a warm early spring for Tokyo, portending, they said, a fine cherry blossom season, and where else but at a gym could a man in gloves have gone unnoticed?

In my business, going unnoticed is half the game. People put out signals-body language, gait, clothes, facial expression, posture, attitude, speech, mannerisms-that can tell you where they’re from, what they do, who they are. Most importantly, do they fit in. Because if you don’t fit in, the target will spot you, and after that you won’t be able to get close enough to do it right. Or the rare uncorrupt cop will spot you, and you’ll have some explaining to do. Or a counter-surveillance team will spot you, and then-congratulations!-the target will be you.

But if you’re attentive, you begin to understand that the identifying signals are a science, not an art. You watch, you imitate, you acquire. Eventually, you can shadow different targets through different societal ecosystems, remaining anonymous in all of them.

Anonymity wasn’t easy for me in Japan when my parentage was a matter of public record and schoolyard taunts. But today, you wouldn’t spot the Caucasian in my face unless someone tipped you off that it was there to be found. My American mother wouldn’t have minded that. She had always wanted me to fit in in Japan, and was glad that my father’s Japanese features had prevailed in that initial genetic struggle for dominance. And the plastic surgery I had undergone when I returned to Japan after my fling with U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam largely completed the job that chance and nature had begun.