Yoshii’s

Yoshii’s is a Zen retreat center joined to a roadside Thai and Japanese restaurant on the coast of Maine. It matters both as a place of refuge and as a point where the book’s private histories and public investigation meet: a circled telephone number leads Lionel Essrog toward it, while its buildings and labor arrangements connect Zen training to a lucrative property-services contract. Its sign promises peace, but the location holds a history shaped by urban visitors, commercial work, and concealed profit.

Setting and Appearance

Yoshii’s stands in Musconguspoint Station, a coastal town whose most conspicuous feature is the large ferry landing for the Muscongus Island Ferry, which makes its circuit twice daily. The complex sits on a hill just beyond the landing and fishing docks. It is not a single building: the restaurant, the largest of three buildings, projects on stilts over a short cliff above the water, while the other two buildings, understood to be the retreat center, stand among evenly spaced pine trees.

The buildings’ colors set them apart from the local visual scheme. Painted toasted-marshmallow brown and seashell pink, they disregard the barn-red and house-white palette associated with Maine. The restaurant advertises itself as Maine’s only Thai and sushi oceanfood emporium. Its sign bears a painted image of Yoshii, smiling bald, with chopsticks and stylized waves around his head. The scene gives the advertised serenity an intentionally conspicuous, commercial form: the retreat and restaurant share one carefully arranged site, but one is a place of practice and the other serves passing diners.

A Pamphlet Becomes a Lead

Lionel learns of Yoshii’s not by following a direct instruction, but by finding its pamphlet while recovering in Kimmery’s apartment. It is tucked into Alan Watts’s The Wisdom of Insecurity as an oversized bookmark. The glossy sheet is folded in thirds; on its reverse, a schematic road map sits beside a telephone number circled in blue ballpoint. The front carries the heading A PLACE OF PEACE and describes a Zen Buddhist retreat center beside a Thai and Japanese restaurant on the southern coast of Maine.

That small printed object gives the investigation a destination. Earlier, Lionel had returned to the office and marked WOMAN, GLASSES, and ULLMAN, DOWNTOWN in his notebook as crucial but still unrevealing clues. His questions also included a building, a doorman’s interference, and the wiretap Frank Minna had left behind. Yoshii’s pamphlet does not answer those questions by itself; it supplies a place to pursue. Its placement inside a book about insecurity and its circled number make it at once a spiritual advertisement and a practical lead.

The search for Fujisaki had already acquired an address. After men pursuing Lionel fled a rental car, he took an abandoned cell phone and found the registration and receipt in the glove compartment. The car was leased to Fujisaki Corporation at 1030 Park Avenue. He called L&L and asked Loomis to investigate the building, its management, and its board, specifically asking whether the name Fujisaki appeared. The Maine pamphlet provides a different kind of clue: not a corporate record, but a route linking the investigation to a retreat center and restaurant.

History of the Retreat

Yoshii’s also belongs to a personal history recounted through the story of a girl who leaves Nantucket for Boston. She attends an art school connected to a museum, drops out after two years, and later takes waitress work while attending yoga classes and Zen meetings. After finding Boston hateful, she visits a retreat center on the Maine coast. The account describes the area as beautiful and, outside the busy summer season, splendidly isolated; it reminds her of the island she misses. She arranges to study at the center full-time and supports herself by waitressing at the seafood restaurant next door, then a traditional Maine lobster pound.

It is there that she meets two brothers, beginning with the older one, who visits the retreat with a friend. Both newcomers are impatient, urban, and marked by hostile humor, but also sincere in their early approach to Zen. The older brother’s stories of Brooklyn, petty mobsters, and comic scams make a distant city vivid to the girl, turning it into a romantic ideal. Yoshii’s therefore enters the narrative not only as a destination Lionel can locate, but as the setting where the brothers’ connection to the place—and to the girl’s imagined Brooklyn—begins.

Work, Money, and Fujisaki

The retreat’s physical upkeep becomes part of a much larger financial arrangement. Wallace explains that his students performed maintenance and service work in the building as part of their training: cleaning and cooking, the kinds of labor they might undertake in a monastery, carried out in another setting. The contract for those services was worth millions. Frank Minna’s brother and Ullman, he says, mostly put the difference into their own pockets. When Lionel adds the doormen to the account, Wallace confirms their place in the arrangement and says Fujisaki sent the giant after Frank and the bookkeeper.

This account changes the meaning of the retreat’s peaceful surface. The students’ work is described as training, yet it also supplies labor for a valuable building-services contract; the distance between spiritual discipline and commercial exploitation is central to the revelation. Yoshii’s is not merely scenery beside the investigation. Its service work helps explain how the interests of Fujisaki, the doormen, Ullman, and the Minna family intersected, and why violence reached Frank and the bookkeeper.

Arrival and Convergence

Lionel arrives at Yoshii’s before lunch service, having driven through coastal villages that seem to him like pages in a calendar. The restaurant’s posted hours say lunch seating begins at twelve-thirty, twenty minutes after his arrival. His Tracer is alone in the lot except for two pickup trucks in staff spaces. He sees no sign of Tony, the giant, or anyone else, and does not want to wait in the open with the feeling of a target on his back. Seeking an advantage, he leaves the parking lot and descends toward the water.

The place’s open coast unsettles him. Below the restaurant deck, with the road and buildings out of sight, he experiences vertigo and a loss of language: waves, sky, trees, and his own presence replace the walls and street patterns that ordinarily help him orient himself. The episode makes the retreat’s remoteness more than a scenic quality. For Lionel, the landscape strips away familiar supports even as the investigation has brought him to a site where its scattered clues begin to cohere.

Later, at the restaurant, the Fujisaki Corporation arrives as a group of six middle-aged Japanese men in fitted black suits, narrow ties, and sunglasses. Their coordinated appearance strikes Lionel as the unity the Minna Men had tried and failed to achieve. The restaurant thus becomes the scene of a sharp contrast: the Minna Men’s aspiration to act as a collective faces the polished, self-possessed presence of the corporation linked to the property and its contract. Yoshii’s promise of a place of peace remains visible in its name and setting, but the location’s narrative force comes from what its orderly surface conceals—and what the investigation finally brings together there.