The man stepped over the tigers lying dead on the ground and inspected the bodies of the two hunters, checking each torn neck for a pulse.

“Shame,” he said, a queer smile on his lips. “They were good men.”

Miyoung stood on the path, watching him. The side of his face was starting to swell from where he’d hit the rock, when the second tiger attacked him. Miyoung dropped her mother’s jige backpack to the ground and looked at the dead cat.

No… she thought. Not him…

The man turned his attention to the body of the first tiger. He lifted its paws, rubbed dirt off its pads with his thumbs, ran a finger along its pink and black gums, checked its teeth.

“You’re probably wondering why you saved me,” he said to Miyoung, looking up at her. “A young girl like you, saving a grown man like me.”

“I…don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t want…”

“More killing?”

She nodded.

He offered a sympathetic look. “But it didn’t work out as you’d planned.”

“No.”

He moved to the back of the first tiger and ran his fingers along its spine. Then he braced his shoulder against it and flipped it over. He removed the curved knife from his belt and started sharpening it on a whetting stone.

“I need to go,” Miyoung said. She reached for her mother’s jige.

The man looked up. “Not yet. Stay.”

He made his incision near the mouth and cut down across the neck, the forelegs, and the belly. Miyoung watched. When the man finished, he unhooked a canteen from one of the dead hunters and drank. Then he took a pair of pliers from his pocket and walked over to the second tiger.

The man squatted in front of the head and wiggled out two of the smaller incisors, then held them up to the sun. He walked over to Miyoung. “One for you, one for me,” he said, handing her one of the teeth. “Let this be a reminder. There are always ways to balance the playing field.”

Miyoung smelled the odor of rusty metal, from the blood on the tooth or from the man himself. She took the tooth. The man walked back to the second tiger.

Miyoung backed away. She didn’t bother reaching for her mother’s jige this time.

“Don’t go yet,” the man said. He was whetting his knife on the stone again.

Miyoung stopped backing up.

“I told you, I want you to see what it takes to get ahead in this world. No cheating, just because you’re a young girl.”

Not him. “Plea—” The word lodged in her throat.

“You’re never too young for life lessons,” the man said. He squatted down in front of the second tiger and began to cut.

The morning began on a sour note. I was skip-hitch-hobbling through the crowds of shoppers and lollygaggers in Asakusa’s Nakamise district, on my way to meet a friend for lunch, when my reconstructed knee started thumping out its usual bassline of pain. This lemon knee was the by-product of a tussle three years prior with the wheels of an ambulance: I’d been minding my own business near the service entrance of Chicago’s Municipal Tuberculosis Sanatorium, trilby in hand, only to wind up getting cold-cocked by said ambulance careening down the drive.

I snuck a few extra nips of laudanum from a phial I kept in my jacket pocket. I’d grown partial to opium tincture ever since my incident with the ambulance: for months afterwards, the doctors at Chicago’s Mercy Hospital had fed me with morphine so regularly that, after my release, I continued the habit. And so it was that I found myself in Tokyo, on September 1st, 1923, limping through a city whose clocks would jolt to a stop at precisely 11:58 that same morning.

The fellow I was meeting was the folklorist Sato Kiyoshi. There had been…well…an incident two days prior, and Sato wanted to talk with me, presumably to discuss it. Yes, yes. I’d been out of line, I admit it. I’d bloody well ruined his lecture at Ueno Park, shouting like a madman amongst that crowd of Korean nationals. But I had no desire to talk about it with him, or to hear his views on how old J. K. Wozniak should conduct himself at a public lecture. Still, Sato was due to catch a train back to Kobe in a few hours, and I didn’t know when I’d get to see him again.

It was hot for September. The city had been set to parboil, and I was stewing in my jacket—an olive-green Norfolk, herringbone tweed, single-breasted. The shops of the Nakamise flowed down each side of the street towards Senso-ji Temple. Decorative balloons bobbed from awnings. A poster read “Modern Inventions of the West” and sported pictures of razory gadgets that could carve vegetables into flower shapes. The district was packed with the usual Saturday-morning crowd: merchants sing-songing their goods under umbrellas; overworked salarymen in yukatas and woolen suits; lady shoppers in silky kimonos, mincing along the sidewalks in wooden clogs.

I passed an acrobat balancing on a ball—a young girl in a ragged kimono—and suffered an opium hallucination: the Jintan Mints character on the billboard above her was espousing the medicinal properties of his mints. “They not only aid digestion,” he said, “they sweeten the breath!” I stopped in front of the girl and saluted him; he was a colonel after all, decked out in a tailcoat, tasseled epaulets, and sash. “Indeed!” I shouted in Japanese, and then explained that I’d used his product on numerous occasions and considered them the crème de la crème of digestive mints. The acrobat, still on her ball, looked at me as if I were some kind of a fruitcake. I was.

Then a voice ping-ponged inside my head, bouncing between the left and right eardrums.   Addict! I heard the voice as clearly as if its owner were standing beside me—J. Walter Bevins, head of the University of Chicago’s bloated Sociology Department, just as I’d overheard him say to my colleagues (those brown-nosers) at the university’s Quadrangle Club a week before my departure for Japan. “Poppy goofer,” he’d called me. “A real do-nothing.” And then a raising of their brandy glasses, and the club’s stale air crackling with laughter.

“Says you!” I shouted in front of the girl acrobat, this time in English.

“Ehh?” she said.

I squinted at her. She looked different. Older, familiar. Less Japanese, more Gypsy.

“Kizzy?” I said, again in English. “Is that you, my love?”

The girl nearly rolled off her ball. I peered harder into her face. No. Just a girl. Nothing like my fiancée at all. Kizzy was…she was gone. I knew that.

“Sorry,” I said in Japanese, staring at my kangaroo-leather shoes. I shook my head, embarrassed, then moved on, angry at myself for my outburst, wondering why the hell I still responded out loud to hallucinations and voices after suffering them daily for three years. I should have been able to see them coming a mile off by now, but I had a faulty sniffer when it came to that.

Onward. I ducked a vendor whirling a lasso of colored rice cakes and bumped into someone’s shoulder, a man with a shaved head. He didn’t stop to apologize, which I thought strange for a Japanese. As I passed into the theater district, a tangle of Korean protestors shuffled past—college radicals, anxious to slip out of the straitjacket of Japanese rule in their country. Ever since Japan’s bold decision in 1910 to annex its Korean neighbors, the streets of Seoul—and more recently Tokyo—had been plagued with discord and protests. Not just from Koreans but from Japanese too, like my friend Sato. His indignation over what he deemed an unjust occupation was so thorough that he and some lawyer friends had embarked on a pipe-dream of suing the Japanese Imperial Government.

I crossed the street at the next intersection, and as I did so I noticed that the jacket pocket holding my laudanum phial was flat. Where was that hard, glassy lump?

My blood highballed. I checked inside the pocket. Nothing but a furry kiss of lining. I patted down my other pockets. Empty. My laudanum phial was gone. The man I’d bumped into must have picked my pocket. I looked back at the crowd behind me, but I’d passed him a while ago. He was long gone.

A phrase to which my Uncle Jedrzej, back in Poland, had always been partial came to mind: utknąłem w ogórku—the proverbial pickle. I usually dosed myself with laudanum at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The extra nips I’d taken earlier would last me a bit beyond my usual noon dose, but any extended delay would result in trouble. I could already feel the catch at the back of my throat, the rush of ants speeding under my skin.

I toyed with the notion of going to a Western druggist’s—there were a few nearby—but without a doctor’s prescription I’d be turned away at the door. And I had to be careful. Getting caught in Japan with an opium derivative bought you seven years of R & R on the slabby shores of Kosuge Penitentiary before you even stepped foot into a courtroom.

I considered returning to my hotel for the reserve phial I kept tucked behind my bathroom vent. But that would have torpedoed my lunch date with Sato. Clearly I needed to procure a new batch on the fly. My usual dealer was a no-go—he operated near my hotel and was only available in the evenings. The Yoshiwara district, however, was abundant with riff-raff and only a few blocks away. A dealer I’d once encountered there, always recognizable by his pork-pie hat and purple sandals, employed a runner who could probably procure laudanum in minutes.

I checked my Cortébert pocket watch, a graduation gift decades earlier from my dear mother and father (may they rest in peace). It was 11:15. Just enough time to hoof it to the red-light district and back before meeting Sato at Kamiya Bar.

I headed across the street and beelined it towards the Yoshiwara, my mind circling back to Sato. Was he really upset with me? In my defence, I’d been certain she was there—Kizzy, my fiancée, on stage with him at Ueno Park as he delivered his lecture. Had she been juggling shrunken heads? Yes! Authentic Jibaroan tsantsas from the Rio Upano, eyes and lips threaded shut with chambira fibers, skin anointed with charcoal ash. She was smoking a Fatima as she juggled, a brand of Turkish cigarette she loved. I could smell its scent of charred flowers. And she was pregnant, of course, though she wasn’t showing much. That’s how I always remembered Kizzy before she… And then there was Sato, droning into the microphone about moral justice and Korean independence, blah, blah, blah. What had I shouted to Kizzy? Yes, something to the effect of “Those heads are sublime, my love!”

But Kizzy on stage, the heads, the cigarette…they had all been an hallucination.

A flock of boys selling newspapers accosted me, fluttering their papers in my face and forcing me to detour down an alley. Upon my exit, a passing jalopy sprayed me with scat. I paused for a moment to get my bearings, and was about to move on when the steel-on-steel wheeze of an approaching streetcar caught my attention.

“Woz!” someone shouted. A man in a straw boater was calling to me from one of the streetcar’s windows. Before I could realize who it was, he reappeared on the street, ankling it towards me, a top-heavy grin inflating one side of his face. Sato himself.

“Even in a city of two million,” he said in English as he approached, “you gaijin stick out like flies in rice.”

Sato Kiyoshi had filled many roles for me over the years: interpreter, translator, research assistant, dealer of rare artifacts, bridge to Japan’s world of academia. By now, after nearly twenty years of friendship, his role had evolved into one I cherished more than any other—primary drinking chum and confidant. The preeminent folklorist in the country, Sato had scoured Japan several times over, rooting out as many folktales of underdogs and uprisings that he could find. He’d never met a bully he didn’t hate, and he’d spent a good portion of his life heading civic councils and political organizations aiming to lift up the downtrodden. Hence his involvement in the Korean independence movement. He’d come to Tokyo that week to give a series of talks against the occupation, on the tail end of a lecture tour in Seoul where he’d wound up spending two days in prison before getting sent home.

“You’re early,” I said.

“I was on my way to the bar and spotted you gimping about.”

“I’m afraid I have a pressing engagement in the Yoshiwara before lunch,” I said, and suggested we meet at the bar afterwards.

“Don’t be foolish. I’ll join you for the walk.”

So we made our way together through the crowd, towards the Yoshiwara. Several times Sato removed his boater to sponge his brow with the sleeve of his sports jacket. We chatted about incidentals. Sato’s English, which he always delivered in a granite monotone, was nearly flawless. As for my Japanese, despite the fact that I’d spent half my twenties studying under the tutelage of one Professor Tobias Frew (pioneering scholar of the language), Sato had always criticized it: I had a tic of intoning Japanese words with English inflections, a habit he likened to flinging the words off ski jumps.

“How’s your Fuji book coming?” he asked.

A wash of hot lava flooded my stomach. My book—my catastrophe of a book. The reason I’d come to Japan five months earlier. “Breaking new ground any day now,” I lied.

Sato nodded, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. He unfolded a pocket knife and started cleaning his cuticles with it. He was having trouble looking me in the eye. Probably still bent out of shape over the other day. What audacity! Jumping me on the street like that, only to cower like a frightened rabbit. But he had a point, didn’t he? I’d been out of line…

I decided to change tack to see if I could soften him a bit. Sato and his wife had been trying for their eighth child for over a year now. I asked if they’d made any progress.

“I’m afraid my wife and I have run aground this time,” he said.

“Well, we’re getting ourselves into one war after another these days. There’s a lot of mischief out there, waiting to pounce. Adding more children to the mix may not be the best idea.”

“Your outlook doesn’t surprise me, professor. Conservative, out-dated. You’re old before your time.”

“We’re the same age, my good man! Forty-six.”

“Curmudgeonly, befuddled, aloof, out of joint…” Sato was mumbling to himself now. “Over-the-hill…a bit senile, really…” He bugged his eyes at me. “And you don’t look your best these days. Ha!”

That last comment stung. I smirked to show it hadn’t. “Yes, yes. Very funny. That all may be so, but it doesn’t change my point. Stocking the world’s cellars with more and more children, these days at least, is bad practice.”

“On the contrary, my elderly friend. We need to stock the cellars with as many good people as we can, to outweigh all that misery in the world. We need to tip the scales, Woz, if we’re to have any hope of avoiding chaos. ”

Hope. The word gave me acid reflux. Sato’s head was so crowded with gooey platitudes like this, you could practically spot their sugary run-off oozing from his pores.

We kept moving. Gunshots echoed from the shooting galleries behind the theaters. Several unfamiliar voices in my head (I didn’t always know them) started harassing me with comments: how Sato would take me to task at any moment, how I was a marked man, etc.

Finally he looked at me. “Professor, there’s something I wanted to speak to you about.”

Here it was. I tried to keep him off balance. “What’s the latest with your case against the government?” I asked.

“Case? Ah, well, it seems we’ve made little progress.”

“I’m not surprised, suing Imperial Japan itself. Makes David and Goliath seem like a playground skirmish. Do you really think lawsuits and lectures on the moral flaws of the occupation will make a difference?”

Sato’s cheeks flushed. “Some fights are worth fighting, no matter the odds. You’d understand that if you stopped wallowing in self-pity and paid attention to what was going on.”

Self-pity? What was he on about now? Continue deflecting, I thought. I cleared my throat. “Meddling in issues that don’t concern me wouldn’t do anybody any good. I’ll leave the Orient to solve its own problems, thank you very much.”

Sato batted the air as if my comment were a mosquito, then drove his pocket knife into another cuticle. We walked on in silence. I thought of Kizzy, of how she would have loved Tokyo: the crowds, the colors, the noises, the strange vegetation of shanty homes and buildings growing out of one another. Down the street, a vendor of the ghastly fermented natto bean trumpeted his horn. Nearby, a man assailed us with the health properties of his snake-oil tonic.

“Professor,” Sato said. He was having trouble looking me in the eye again. “Woz. I need to tell you—”

Here it was. I couldn’t avoid it any longer. “Look,” I interjected, “I wasn’t feeling well that day. I admit it—”

“Kyoto Imperial University is looking to open a Department of Anthropology.”

“—and anyway, that lot of Koreans were rather unruly, don’t you think? I wasn’t the only one—”

“They want an American to head the department. Someone with Western views and experience. Your name came up.”

“—and who’s to say I was any more unruly than…eh? Department of Anthropology?”

“Yes. Kyoto Imperial. They want you to head it. They asked me what I thought, and whether I felt you’d be the right candidate for the job.”

Zing! Sato! The man had connections everywhere. He knew I’d been looking for a way to extend my stay in Japan, perhaps even to move here long-term. My tenure at U of C had been fraught with trouble, not least because of that reptile Bevins, whose hegemonic Department of Sociology had been siphoning funding and prestige from my Anthropology Department for years. Starting my own program in a country where anthropology was a new science would be the fulfillment of a dream. I’d be in charge of bringing modern anthropology to the Orient.

I stopped walking, placed a hand on Sato’s shoulder, and locked eyes with him. “I’ll do it,” I said, solemnly.

A streetcar clattered past, kicking up tornadoes of dust.

“But,” Sato said, “you’ll need to stop whatever it is you’re doing to yourself.”

“Doing to myself?”

“Woz, you need to get over her. You need to admit she’s gone.”

“Kizzy? Don’t be foolish. She died—what was it—three years ago? There, I said it. I’m not crazy. I know she’s gone.”

“You shouted her name the other day during my lecture, and went on about shrunken heads. You made a fool of yourself and me. You wander around in a stupor most of the time, and you’ve only gotten worse these past months. It’s that poison you drink. It’s a real problem.”

“A little opium tincture? Don’t be silly. A nip here and there to steady the nerves. I can stop any time. The other day was a one-off. A little over-indulgence on my part. I’m embarrassed by the whole affair, to be honest.”

Sato squinted at me, trying to determine if he could take me at my word. He pursed his lips, and I hallucinated that his mouth had transformed into a little boy’s, small and coated with a residue of red candy floss. I hated him at that moment, partly for his assertion that I had a “problem,” and partly because I loathed children. I shook my head, and his lips aged back into those of a middle-aged man.

“This committee,” I said. “They really want me?”

“Yes. I told them I’d give them my opinion next week.”

“Well, you can tell them I’m their man.”

“Does that mean you’ll stop taking opium?”

“Consider it the former habit of J. Wozniak. Quite silly, really, when you think about it.”

Sato was holding something, a business card. He passed it to me, and I read the Japanese characters: Chiba Narcotics Center. Dr. Taniguchi Natsuo. “‘Help,’” I said, reading the last line aloud, “‘for those in trouble.’” I looked up at Sato. “What’s this?”

“It’s a clinic for addicts. The first of its kind in Japan. It adheres to the philosophies of Dr. Louis Butler, the preeminent researcher on narcotics addictions in America. He’s made significant progress in Louisiana, not treating addicts as criminals but addressing the root cause, through something called psychoanalysis. Woz, this clinic can help you.”

“Addicts… I see.” I took the card and pretended to study it more closely.

“If you quit opium, starting today, and commit to going to the clinic, I’ll secure the position for you.”

Quit? Ha! Didn’t Sato know you couldn’t quit opium just like that? “Chiba’s just an hour from my hotel,” I said. “I’ll go there tomorrow.”

“And today?”

I pulled my jacket pockets inside out. “All gone. Couldn’t take a nip if I wanted to, which I don’t. Not anymore.”

Sato studied me for a beat, then nodded. “Good. We’ll need your head screwed on straight if we’re going to bring anthropology to the Far East.”

1923, Japan. A cataclysmic earthquake destroys Tokyo. Thousands are dead. Lawlessness and paranoia grip the region. To make things worse, Japan’s thirteen-year occupation of Korea has fostered a racially charged climate of suspicion against Korean immigrants.

Out of this chaos emerges Józef Kasper Wozniak, an American anthropologist and opium addict, in Japan to conduct research for his book on Mount Fuji. He survives the earthquake and somehow ends up with the infant of a dead Japanese prostitute. Possessing only the scant clue that the baby’s father lives three hundred miles away in Osaka, Wozniak tasks himself with getting her safely to him.

Thus begins a seventy-mile journey along the coastal rail tracks, in search of a working train station. Armed with nothing but a discarded rice sack for a baby carrier and a supply of children’s opium meds to keep his own withdrawal at bay, Wozniak struggles to care for the baby. He eventually crosses paths with Ch’oe Miyoung, an escaped convict from Korea who convinces him they’d be safer traveling together, posing as a family. Miyoung—“allergic” to babies and disturbingly proficient with a knife—has a harrowing story to tell about growing up in Japan-occupied Korea, where, she claims, a relationship with a five-hundred-pound mountain tiger and the enigmatic hunter sent to kill it changed the course of her life.

As the baby’s health deteriorates and Wozniak’s opium meds dwindle, the trio find themselves in the path of a killer and his gang of vigilantes, who are patrolling the coast, hunting and executing Koreans.

Based on true events occurring in the days that followed the Kanto earthquake in 1923, SEA OF CLOUDS explores human nature, the best and the worst of it, when the structures of society crumble.