The lack of wrist and finger tape interested me. Boxers wear tape to protect their hands. But you get dependent on the tape, and then you don’t know how to hit someone without it. Even Mike Tyson once broke a hand when he hit another fighter bare-handed in a late night brawl. In a real fight, you break your hand, you just lose the fight. If you were fighting for your life, you just lost that, too.

And no judogi. That was also interesting, especially in tradition-loving Japan. Purists will tell you that training with the judogi is more realistic than without, because after all, people rarely fight naked. But modern attire-a T-shirt, for example-is often more like naked than it is like the reinforced, belted gi. Training exclusively in the gi, therefore, while traditional, is not necessarily the height of realism.

All signs that these were serious people.

“You can change in the locker room,” the salt-and-pepper guy told me. “Warm up and you can do some randori. We’ll see why Ishihara-san thought this would be a good place for you.”

I nodded and headed to the locker room. It was a dank space with a floor of dirty gray carpet. Its half-dozen battered metal lockers were positioned on either side of a solid-looking exterior door, secured with a combination lock. I changed into cotton judo pants and a T-shirt, but left the jacket in the bag. Best to blend.

I returned to the main room and stretched. No one seemed to take particular notice of me-except for the dark-complected guy, who watched me while I warmed up.

After about fifteen minutes he walked over to me. “Randori?” he asked, in a tone that was more a challenge than an invitation.

I nodded, averting my eyes from his hard stare. In my mind, our contest was already under way, and I prefer my opponents to underestimate me.

I followed him to the center of the mat, slightly meek, slightly intimidated.

We circled around each other, each looking for an opening. In my peripheral vision I saw that the other men had paused in their workouts and were watching.

I snagged his right arm with my left and dropped under it for a duck-under, a simple and effective entry from my high school wrestling days in America. But he was quick: he dropped his arm, crouched, and cut clockwise, away from my entry. I immediately switched my attack to his left side, but he parried nicely there as well. No problem. I was feinting, feeling for his defenses, not yet showing him what I could do.

I withdrew from attack mode and started to straighten. As I did so, I saw his hips swivel in, caught a blur off the right side of my head. Left hook. Whoa. I shot my right hand into the gap and ducked my head forward. The blow snapped across the back of my head, then instantly retracted.

I took a quick step back. “Kore ga randori nanoka? Bokushingu janaika?” I asked him. Are we doing randori, or boxing? I looked more concerned than I actually was. I’ve done some boxing. Not all of it with gloves.

“This is the way we do randori around here,” he answered, sneering.

“With no rules?” I asked, mock-concerned. “I’m not sure I like that.”

“You don’t like it, don’t train here, judoyaro,” he said, and I heard someone laugh.

I looked around as though unsure of myself, but it was really just a routine check of my surroundings. Adrenaline causes tunnel vision. Experience and a desire to survive ameliorate it. The faces around the tatami radiated amusement, not danger.

“I’m not really used to this kind of thing,” I said.

“Then get off the fucking tatami,” he spat.

I looked around again. It didn’t feel like a setup. If it were, they wouldn’t have been dancing with me one at a time.

“Okay,” I said, scowling to look like a soft guy trying to look like a hard guy. Playing the victim of idiot pride. “We’ll do it your way.”

We squared off again. I logged his feints. He liked to lead with his right foot. His timing was regular-a weakness for which his quickness had probably always compensated.

He liked low kicks. Right foot forward plant, left roundhouse kick, return to defensive stance. I took two such shots to my right thigh. They stung. They didn’t matter.

The right foot came forward again. When it was a few millimeters above the tatami and he was fully committed to planting it, I shot straight in, my right hand hooking his neck from behind, my left hand darting in just behind his right ankle. I used his neck to support my weight, dragging his head down and ruining his balance. I drove through him, my elbow leading the way at his chest. His ankle was blocked and his body had nowhere to go but backward to the tatami.

I kept the ankle as he fell, jerking it northward and spinning clockwise so that I landed facing the same direction he was in. I was straddling his leg and holding the ankle in front of me. In one smooth motion I caught it in my right biceps, wrapped the fingers of my left hand around his toes, and clamped down in opposing directions. His ankle broke with a snap like the sound of a mallet on hard wood. Freed of its moorings, the foot arced savagely to the right. Tendons and ligaments tore loose.

He let out a high scream and tried to use his other leg to kick me away. But the kicks were feeble. His nervous system was overloaded with pain.

I stood up and turned to face him. His face was I’m-going-to-puke green and beaded in oily sweat. He was holding the knee of his ruined leg and looking bug-eyed at the dangling foot at the end of it. He hitched a breath in, then deeper, then let out a long wail.

Ankle injuries hurt. I know. I’ve seen feet lost to land mines.

He sucked in another breath and screamed again. If we’d been alone, I would have broken his neck just to shut him up. I looked around the room, wondering if I was going to have trouble from any of his comrades.

One of them, a tall, long-legged guy with an Adonis physique and peroxide-dyed, close-cropped hair, yelled out, “Oi!” and started to come toward me. Hey!

The salt-and-pepper guy cut in front of him. “Ii kara, ii kara,” he said, pushing Adonis back. That’s enough.

Adonis backed off, but continued to fix me with a hostile stare.

Salt and Pepper turned and walked over to where I was standing. He bore an expression of mild amusement that was not quite a smile.

“Next time, use a little more control when you put in a joint lock,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact.

The dark-complected guy writhed. Adonis and a couple of the others went to help him.

I shrugged. “I would have. But he told me ‘no rules.” ’

“That’s true. He’ll probably be the last guy who suggests that to you.”

I looked at him. “I like this place. You guys seem serious.”

“We are.”

“It’s all right for me to train here?”

“Between four and eight every evening. Most mornings, too, you can work out from eight to noon. There are dues, but we can talk about that another time.”

“You manage the place?”

He smiled. “Something like that.”

“I’m Arai,” I said, with a slight bow.

Someone brought a stretcher. The dark-complected guy was gritting his teeth and whimpering. Someone admonished him, “Urusei na! Gaman shiro!” Shut up! Take the pain!

“Washio,” he said, returning the bow. “And by the way, did you know that Ishihara-san died recently?”

I looked at him. “No, I didn’t.”

He nodded. “An accident at his gym.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Is the gym still open?”

“Some of his associates are running it now.”

“Good. Although I have a feeling that, from now on, I’ll be spending more time here, anyway.”

He grinned. “Yoroshiku.” Looking forward to it.

“Yoroshiku.”

I stuck around for another two hours. Adonis glared at me from time to time but otherwise kept his distance. Murakami never showed.