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

down the locally caught sea bream. Kubo snuck a glimpse at his wristwatch, calculating the time left before his deadline for the morning edition and how long it would take to get back to the kisha club. “Well then, Takeuchi-san, Kitagawa-san. Shall we move on to the hot pot?” he said.

“Great idea. It’s still the season for hot pot when it’s this cold out,” Kitagawa replied.

Kubo called for the server, and soon a large plate of marbled Kobe beef and a pot brimming with hot water were set up on the low table. Kubo also ordered warmed saké for Takeuchi, and another beer per Kitagawa’s request. As for himself, Kubo finally emptied his glass of beer, washing down two slices of sashimi as a way to warm up his stomach for the hot pot ahead.

Now that the preparations had been made, it was time for round two. Kubo expertly slipped the ingredients into the pot, which he then offered to his guests as each item was cooked, all the while pouring more saké and beer, taking bites himself, and engaging in random, innocuous conversation. He knew the topic most likely to entice his companions was gossip inside the police force. Second most popular were tidbits and anecdotes that his sources wouldn’t know about the latest incidents emblazoning the front pages. Next up, the families of present company. Kubo wove all of these together, churning the conversation, making sure to lean in and listen whenever his associates were inspired to share.

That evening, Takeuchi grumbled about the case he was working on, leaking that it was about to be taken over by the District Prosecutor due to its involvement with the investigation of two bankrupt credit unions. Kitagawa, for his part, was more reserved since this was his first time meeting Kubo, but he was relaxed enough to laugh at himself when he explained that, since being transferred from CID to Crime Prevention, he was now creating slogans for an anti-sexual harassment campaign—“Look right, look left—be aware on the streets after dark” and “Threats to women are right before your eyes.”

The secret meeting ended before ten in the evening, and after putting the two men in their respective taxis with prepaid vouchers, Kubo climbed into his own hired car, which had been waiting for him. His belly was pleasantly full after two glasses of beer, hot pot, and the zosui porridge that followed, but his mind felt foggy, and he was uncertain whether it was from calm or confusion. Should he take the bait and go after the insinuations of discrimination that seemed to have trailed Hinode Beer since right after the war? Was it worthwhile to investigate the apparent fact that corporate extortionists had pressured Hinode back in 1990? And should he reconsider the assumption that the current abduction case had no ties to such underworld dealings? He remembered what Kitagawa had said: Other newspapers might already be onto the story.

“Oh, the cherry blossoms have started to bloom. See over there?”

Kubo heard the driver’s voice, and he glanced out the car window, but the blossoms on the trees failed to catch his attention. For now, he wanted to get a better handle on Hinode’s troubles from 1990. He took out his cell phone and, without a second to waste, started calling his sources.

根来史彰　Fumiaki Negoro

When Takeshi Kikuchi called back as promised, the sun was just beginning to set and Fumiaki Negoro was waking up from a nap. Even though his mind was still cloudy with sleep, Negoro immediately recognized Kikuchi’s distinctively gruff manner of speaking. I’d know that voice anywhere, he thought.

“Negoro-san? The case you mentioned,” Kikuchi said. “I looked up Toda’s full name. Are you ready? It’s Yoshinori Toda. Born 1916 in Saitama prefecture. He’s seventy-nine now.” Negoro thanked him, and Kikuchi retorted, “I don’t see the payoff in looking into an old geezer like him.” With that nebulous and enigmatic comment, he hung up.

A newspaper reporter never used words like “payoff” when it came to leads—it seemed to Negoro that a journalist who had been active until a few years ago wouldn’t utter them so casually. Even setting aside Kikuchi’s intentions for the moment, Negoro’s internal alarm kept flashing. His newspaperman’s curiosity had been piqued.

The notes he had just taken read, Born 1916, Saitama prefecture. First Negoro called the Hachioji bureau and left a message to page a reporter named Yabe and have him call Negoro. Yabe had called the main office that very morning about a lawsuit that had occurred in Saitama prefecture in 1940.

Then, while he waited for Yabe to call back, Negoro went to the archives and cracked open the bound compact editions of the newspaper from the years 1946 and 1947. He flipped through the pages, written with the old Japanese characters, from the period in which there was hardly a day when the word “dispute” did not appear in the headlines. He was looking for any mention of Hinode. At the same time, he also pulled out from the stacks any books on the history of the labor movement and materials about the National Federation of Beer Industry Workers Union. There was no record—either before or after the General Strike on February 1, 1947—of any large-scale labor-management conflicts at any of the beer companies that would have been worth reporting on in the pages of the national papers. The reality was that in those days beer companies had no time for labor disputes. Under the direction of GHQ, the Act for the Elimination of Excessive Concentration of Economic Power—or the Deconcentration Law, as it was called—was being deliberated in the Diet, and every beer company was facing an existential crisis: the establishment of said law meant that all major corporations, starting with Hinode, were poised to be split up and reorganized. Even when he finally found a mention of Hinode Beer, it was a minor, below-the-fold article from November 1947 about the unsworn witness questioning in the Lower House, during which Hinode Beer’s president