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

the interview, that student continued to be absent, unexcused, from his university seminar, and late on the night of the fifth day after, he was killed in an accident on the Shuto Expressway. Wasn’t the person who sent two separate letters to your company followed by the tape that student’s father? And the father killed himself by jumping in front of a train, late on the night of November seventeenth. Even if it was not the kind of matter to have bothered the president about, I would think it would have presented a significant issue for the reputation of the company.”

As Shiroyama took in each item uttered by the investigator, he realized that the police must have already gone to speak with Hatano’s family. The dead student’s mother would not have forgotten that her son’s girlfriend and her father had come to pay their respects after the funeral. Perhaps she had already revealed her suspicions to the police, and given them all the details. . .

“Shiroyama-san, wasn’t this a case of employment discrimination?”

“Sorry. What did you say?”

“The issue that the deceased dentist was trying to bring to your company’s attention was whether discrimination had been a factor in his son’s employment, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was. But as far as the company was concerned, there was no such awareness. There was no basis for it—neither then nor in the past. We would have liked to have been able to decipher where the student’s father was coming from, but there was a limit to how we were able to act as a company given the way he had sent the letters and the tape.”

“I just want to confirm. What is the exact reason you decided that filing a complaint was the best course of action?”

“We had been moving forward with the project to build a new factory at the time, so we had no choice but to be particularly cautious. In the end we determined it was necessary to take measures against any unfounded attempts at obstruction.”

“So you are familiar with the contents of the tape, for the most part?”

“I am.”

“The intention behind the tape was indeed hard to grasp. The tape seemed to convey the substance of a letter sent by a certain Seiji Okamura to your company’s Kanagawa factory back in 1947. According to Tsukamoto-san, he was able to look up this Seiji Okamura in the student registry of the former Tohoku Imperial University and confirm that he had in fact previously been a Hinode employee. But he was unable to determine whether the letter from 1947 actually existed. Do I have that right?”

“I think that’s what I heard.”

“We are currently looking for employees who worked out of the Kanagawa factory or the main office at that time, but as of now we lack any conclusive evidence that the letter was ever delivered to the factory in 1947. However, hypothetically speaking, if such a letter did exist, it would clearly be considered the possession of Hinode Beer. And judging from the contents of the letter, it’s highly unlikely that this would have been treated lightly within the company back then, so how did you feel about a taped reading of such a letter being sent to your company by someone from the outside?”

“My only recollection from the time is that we discussed how we were unsure of the intention of the sender.”

“You didn’t think the letter had been leaked from within Hinode?”

“I guess when you put it that way . . . But this was something that had happened just after the war ended, and we could not even ascertain the existence of such a letter.”

“Going back in the conversation, did your company conduct a background check on this student, Hatano?”

“No. We don’t do that at Hinode.”

“How about after you received the second letter and the strange tape from the student’s father? What did you do then?”

“Nothing.”

After a brief pause, the investigator muttered, “That can’t be.” Shiroyama, unsure what the investigator meant, held his breath and waited for what he would say next. He expected to hear the name of the student’s girlfriend—his niece—mentioned next, but the conversation grew even more complicated.

“Seiji Okamura is the uncle of the student’s mother, isn’t he?” the investigator asked.

“I heard he is a distant relation.”

“That’s what you heard? Then you do know that Tsukamoto-san, the human resources manager, had conducted a background check anyway?”

“I suppose you’re right. It must have escaped my memory. What of—”

“The student, Takayuki Hatano; his father, the dentist Hiroyuki Hatano; and the letter’s sender, Seiji Okamura—seeing that these people are all related, it wouldn’t be implausible for there to be some kind of confrontation or misunderstanding, but the reality is a little more complex. Hiroyuki Hatano had not even known about Seiji Okamura until shortly before he committed suicide. On November fifth, 1990, the day before Hatano mailed the tape, he had called his estranged wife in the middle of the night and asked if she knew someone by the name of Seiji Okamura. But, as his wife told him, she didn’t. That same night, Hatano also called the home of his wife’s father, who happens to be the younger brother of Seiji Okamura, and asked his father-in-law about him. Hatano’s father-in-law confirmed that Seiji Okamura was in fact his older brother, but that Okamura had been adopted into another family before he was born. Apparently, Hatano’s father-in-law had only met Okamura a handful of times before the war, and had never spoken about him to his family either. In other words, Hiroyuki Hatano had recorded a tape of himself reading the letter written by Seiji Okamura—someone he didn’t know about until that very evening—and sent it off to your company.”

“That man Okamura, is he still alive?”

“He died last summer in a nursing home in Tokyo. Okamura’s younger brother—the father of Hiroyuki Hatano’s wife—had hired a detective agency to track down Okamura’s whereabouts. He had visited him at the nursing home from time to time. Okamura had dementia.”

If the father