HERE ARE THE BARE FACTS: Tuesday, April 17, 2007. Tetsuya Shiroo, described by news reports as a “senior member of the Yamaguchi-gumi” (aka, Yakuza) shoots Nagasaki mayor Itcho Ito twice in the back while Ito waits for a train at JR Nagasaki Station. Though immediately rushed to hospital, Mr. Ito dies early the next morning from his injuries. There’s talk of an insurance payout dispute and related banalities as being motives. Perhaps.

For a certain flavor of the imagination (a flavor I’m happily cursed with) it’s almost impossible not to think about the noirish, gangster film possibilities of the almost certainly tangled story behind this cold-blooded murder. The kind of story a younger John Woo in his A Better Tomorrow phase might have committed to the silver screen. But Woo’s busy working on The Battle of Red Cliff and Raymond Chandler’s dead so that leaves a hack like me to reinterpret “The Case of the Mobster and the Mayor.” Here goes…

The scene: Nagasaki Junshin campus.

That’s where I was, sitting on a bench watching the girls walk past when my damn cell phone rang. I try to keep the thing off but these days it’s impossible—people expect to reach you everywhere and anytime. That makes me unhappy. I sullenly answered the phone. It was Ishihara with bad news. Itcho Ito was shot and probably dying. A big deal flathead named Shiroo had plugged him, right in the back, while Ito stood at the train station.

My afternoon reverie, which had barely started, was officially over.

Mayor Ito was a good guy, a solid citizen, the kind of man who’d listen to you drone on and on about your kids with a never fading smile plastered to his sincere face. “He’s our angel” a Nagasaki venerable told me beneath a too blue sky as the cops examined the crime scene.

Sure.

But even angels have enemies. Enemies like Shiroo Tetsuya: a veteran shadow man, a Triad boss, a well-placed Yak.

Mr. Shiroo didn’t know and didn’t care how many babies Ito kissed, how many candles he lit on A-Bomb remembrance day, how many anti-nuke speeches he gave. All Shiroo knew was business: what helped and what got in the way.

Unfortunately for the angelic Mayor Ito, Mr. Shiroo apparently woke that morning and decided the good Mayor was unacceptably in the way. Something had to be done.

Nothing a bullet couldn’t fix though. Bullets fix everything for men like Mr. Shiroo. •

Contributing editor Dwayne Monroe’s first attempt at noir was a 9th grade history report: “Lincoln settled uneasily into his theater seat…he could always smell trouble and the night reeked of it like a saloon girl’s heavy mixture of sweat, bourbon and cheap perfume…” He got an A+ and a reprimand.