So, as of today, February 21, 2007 Ichiro hints that he may leave the Mariners, the Seattle team that is majority-owned by Nintendo.

February 21, 2007 is also the 21st anniversary of the release of the Legend of Zelda, the game that announced to the world what Nintendo—then a small Japanese business that had dabbled in playing cards, taxis, and love hotels—was on earth to do. (There’s a whole other weird backstory, about how Nintendo was founded in the 1800s to manufacture playing cards that were introduced to Japan by a Portuguese sailor in the 1500s and then banned but became popular in yakuza-run gambling parlors, meaning Nintendo has its roots in organized crime.)

For my friends in 1986—at least the ones whose parents bought Nintendo systems—Princess Zelda, whose rescue was the goal of the game, became an early sex object. We were all around 8 or 9, most of us didn’t even know what sex was, but we knew that we were trying to rescue a beautiful, beautiful woman who looked like this (that’s her on the left):

Nintendo introduced us to longing for women. It’s fitting then that the president of Nintendo in 1986 (the company’s third president since its founding in 1889) once tried to make his fortune by owning love hotels, those cartoon-bright no-tell motels where couples go to have sex (and, occasionally, tourists go for a cheap night’s sleep):

Nintendo pretends to be a company about toys, about youth—but their roots are in crime and sex and everything they touch leads to fruitless yearning: the yearning for pixilated princesses, the yearning for a winning baseball team, the yearning for a Japanese baseball star, our municipal hero, who is delicately threatening to leave us.