Sunao Adelstein

Sunao Adelstein is Jake Adelstein’s wife and a journalist in her own right. Her story in the book moves between an unusually direct courtship, the practical intimacy of their early married life, and the strain caused by Jake’s increasingly consuming work. She does not appear simply as a witness to his career: she listens, questions, argues, accompanies him through a family crisis, and is later remembered by him as a devoted wife and mother whose labor he had not adequately returned.

Identity and Marriage

Sunao was twenty-nine when she met Jake at an event she was covering as a reporter for Nikkei Publications. After several dates, she made the courtship conditional: they could continue seeing each other for three months, but if he was not serious about marriage by then, the relationship would end. Jake agreed to marry her, while asking for a three-year delay before they had children. She accepted, and the engagement followed quickly. Their marriage was registered at Urawa City Hall during Jake’s lunch break, the day before her thirtieth birthday.

Even the paperwork briefly threatened to derail the arrangement. Jake wrote his birth year using the Japanese imperial calendar, as Showa 44, instead of the Western-calendar year 1969. The discrepancy nearly invalidated the marriage that same day, but the problem was resolved after an argument with the officials. The episode gives their accelerated beginning a distinctly practical texture: the commitment was made swiftly, then secured amid the ordinary complications of a municipal form.

By the time Jake returned to the police beat in Tokyo, they had been married for about three years. He had first covered local politics in Saitama Prefecture, then received a posting to the vice squad in Tokyo. Sunao was not pleased that his new assignment placed him amid the city’s adult-entertainment districts, though she was excited about the move to the capital. The contrast captures an early tension in their life together: shared enthusiasm about Jake’s professional advancement coexisted with her understandable unease about what the job would expose him to.

A Reporter’s Work at Home

Sunao’s own reporting career remains visible in small domestic details. After Jake worked through the night on an article, he arrived home at five in the morning to find her still awake in her bathrobe, typing about new trends in Japanese socks. She had prepared a bath and left fried rice ready to be heated. Her care was concrete and unsentimental: she had been working too, yet made room to look after him at the end of his shift.

Jake told her about the evening’s assignment, including his visit to a massage parlor, and expected her to react with anger. Instead, she listened with interest and asked questions as she massaged his shoulders, sometimes pressing her thumb firmly into them. Her response was neither indifference nor a simple endorsement of his conduct. She wanted to know what had happened, and the questioning made their conversation an exchange rather than a passive confession. In a marriage strained by irregular hours and unusual assignments, the scene shows a moment when his work entered the home and was met with attention rather than silence.

The episode also places Sunao beside the emotional performances that define Jake’s professional world. His police reporting required him to cultivate relationships and manage how others responded to him; the nightlife he covered likewise traded in carefully produced intimacy. At home, however, the attention between the couple was not a service bought for an evening. Sunao’s listening and questions belonged to a shared life, even as the demands of that work increasingly made it difficult for Jake to be present within it.

Distance and the Cost of Work

As Jake’s reporting on sexual exploitation intensified, he spent large sums helping women he encountered, including paying for travel and arranging access to abortions. He became less interested in sex and described it as unpleasant, while chronic fatigue compounded his withdrawal. Those changes reached the marriage not as one decisive rupture but through absences and omissions. He was rarely home, called at night to say good night to the children, and often forgot to email Sunao during the day. He stopped talking to her about his work, partly because he thought she was not interested.

The couple argued over his spending on alcohol. Jake concealed that much of his money had instead gone to women he had met through his reporting, fearing Sunao would tell him to stop. In retrospect, he acknowledged that she might have supported him; he had not given her the chance to decide. That admission makes the distance more than a consequence of his schedule. His choice to withhold the truth helped produce the isolation he observed developing between them.

Their sleeping arrangements made that withdrawal tangible. The family shared a tatami living room, putting out futons rather than having a separate bedroom, and the children’s presence already limited their privacy. When Jake came home late, he began sleeping in a back room; even on the rare nights he returned early, he increasingly made excuses to sleep there. He felt better apart and no longer liked being touched while asleep. His own summary of the damage was that when lying becomes part of a job, a person can forget how love is supposed to work. The line links his professional habits to a private failure: the concealment that might serve a reporter’s purposes had become an obstacle to intimacy.

Sekiguchi’s Death and the Family Dispute

The death of Chiaki Sekiguchi brought the conflict between Jake’s work, friendship, and family into the open. On the day before the family was due to return to the United States, while they were eating Chinese food, Sekiguchi’s wife called to say that he had died. Jake wanted to cancel the flight and attend the funeral. Sunao and her mother thought he should go to the wake, if one was being held, and visit the family on a later trip. Jake disagreed: he had known Sekiguchi and his family for almost fourteen years, and the friendship between the organized-crime investigator and the foreign-born reporter had become deeply personal.

Jake proposed that Sunao take the children home without him, while he escorted them to Narita International Airport and arranged for someone in the United States to meet them. Sunao opposed the plan, and the argument became heated. The dispute was not merely about travel arrangements. Jake felt bound by his friendship and by promises made to Sekiguchi; Sunao and her mother-in-law were concerned about the family’s needs as they prepared to leave Japan. The scene shows how an obligation formed over years of friendship collided with the responsibilities of a family traveling together.

After the meal, Jake and Sunao went to her home, then set out together at ten that night for the Sekiguchi family’s home in Konan. They did not speak during the trip. Heavy rain forced the taxi to stop once or twice, and the fare came to almost $250. Jake wore a black suit and borrowed a black tie from Sunao’s mother. He had promised Sekiguchi he would attend his funeral in a proper suit and try to wear matching socks, and he felt that at least an incense offering was owed. Yet the visit to pay respects was not the funeral he had promised to attend; the failure remained one of his lasting regrets. Sunao’s presence on that midnight journey does not erase their disagreement, but it places her beside him in the act of returning to the bereaved family.

Retrospective Place in the Book

In the book’s acknowledgments, Jake describes Sunao as having endured much and raised their children almost single-handedly. He calls her a great wife and a fantastic mother, praises her intelligence and beauty, and wishes he had done things right or that they had worked out better. That retrospective praise stands beside the scenes of secrecy, exhaustion, and argument rather than replacing them. Sunao’s significance lies in that contrast: she is both the person who made ordinary care possible during Jake’s punishing work life and the partner whom he increasingly shut out of it. The book records what he recognizes about her devotion, while leaving his regret unresolved.