Lady Joker, Volume 1 by Kaoru Takamura (lightest ebook reader .txt) 📕

Driven by his biological needs, Shiroyama did his business every few hours, and each time the restraints on his hands were undone and then bound again, and he was given cartons of fruit-flavored milk, orange juice, or oolong tea. Other than the rice ball, he was given bean-jam buns, cream buns, canned pork and beans, matchbox-size blocks of processed cheese, bananas, and mandarin oranges.

Whenever the duct tape was taken off so that he could eat and drink, Shiroyama had the opportunity to speak up, a little at a time. Twice he asked them, “Are you after money?” and also, “How much do you want?” but neither question received a response. Nor was there a reply to his questions of “Where am I?” and “When will this end?” However, when he asked, “What day is it now, and what time?” a mechanical reply came back to him: “March twenty-fifth. 10:24 p.m.” Shiroyama shivered from the joy of obtaining these sought-after, impersonal words, yet at the same time, he was dismayed to learn that a whole day had gone by, and he was dumbfounded as he suddenly recalled, in excruciating detail, the frail shoulders of his wife as she stood at the front door of his home in Sanno the previous morning, and the color of the cardigan she had worn.

What type of men were his captors? He tried to imagine them over and over, but he simply had no clue. Did they hold a grudge against the company, or against Shiroyama himself? Or was this a farsighted scheme that involved a greater design? Every time his thoughts branched out in search of an answer, they led nowhere—almost as if he had an automatic shutdown mechanism—and he became exhausted from the attempt.

Since he was given food to eat and felt no hunger, and there continued to be no threat to his wellbeing, Shiroyama acclimated mentally and physically to the humiliation, while his initial overwhelming knot of terror from the beginning splintered more specifically into anguish, bewilderment, and doubt. The hours stretched interminably into introspection and delusion, which descended upon him alongside the unbearable silence.

As he lay in the bed, whether awake or asleep, Shiroyama could not escape the feeling of being suffocated, and was forced to excavate the contents of his heart over and over again. His memories of wartime, roused for the first time in decades, were particularly troubling. What ought to have been vividly recollected fear was now a murky thicket, and he could no longer fathom the crux of it. When everyone had been starving, Shiroyama did not go hungry; he did not share in the misery experienced by children who remained in the city, too young to have been evacuated to the countryside. Instead he had hidden in a corner of the air raid shelter, his younger sister in his arms, coolly contemplating the death of his parents, and when he lived to see the end of the war, his family intact and reunited, what remained in his childhood heart was a jumble of unspeakable turmoil and remorse. Shiroyama now realized he had never told anyone about all this.

When his father had nagged him about not going to medical school, the eighteen-year-old Shiroyama told him only that he wasn’t interested, without revealing the truth. As a student at the faculty of law, all of the classmates in his seminar had gone on to take the bar exam, but Shiroyama had known early on that he would not pursue a career in law either. What had that young and green twenty-two-year-old been thinking when he joined the corporate world after graduation? He felt he had no right to become a physician or a lawyer, professions that required a deep affection for humanity, but he figured he could take part in a capitalist economy, making a living by selling things and without having to answer to anyone. The fact that such arrogance had propelled him to take his first step as a member of society was a truth that no one beside himself knew.

Shiroyama was suited to corporate society, where sales were king and pursuit of profit ruled, and his life in business—thanks to the good fortune of coinciding with the period of rapid economic growth after the war, when sales volume practically grew on its own, and then continuing in an era when Hinode Lager was the first choice in beer, product appeal that led to the company’s market dominance—had been smooth sailing for the most part. He had spared no effort in paying visits to loyal clients; toured retail shops, bars, and restaurants with their distributors’ employees; handled everything from incidental tasks to consultations with precision; and in order to keep his pride in check he kept his attention keenly focused on the day-to-day figures—it was a time when, so long as he did all these things, his sales performance would without fail rise above that of his colleagues. His true sales skills, ingenuity, or creativity had never been called into question; he did not possess shrewdness, talent, or even so much as a striking character; and still, sales machine that he was—with no real understanding of the fundamentals of business—he had escalated through the ranks. Though confounded by the harsh reality and at the mercy of human resources and management, before he knew it he was sales manager, branch manager, manager of the beer division, and, finally, president.

To manufacture something, to sell it, to function as a company—what did all these things mean? He was well past forty before he finally began to consider the meaning of product appeal and sales acumen. It was around this time—with the second oil crisis in 1979 and the Plaza Accord of 1985 finally inflicting their tolls, and changes looming for the future of Japan’s economy and society—when he had struggled to envision the prospects for the Japanese beer business, and privately he had started to lose confidence