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

Negoro took a closer look at this tiny article. The Deconcentration Law had personal relevance to him. Negoro was born in 1950 and, as early as he could remember, his father had worked in the personnel department at Fuji Iron & Steel. In fact, his father had barely managed to transfer to Fuji Iron & Steel from Japan Iron & Steel, which had been split up into four entities three years after the Deconcentration Law was approved in December 1947. Twenty years later his father would transfer again, this time to Nippon Steel Corporation, the result of a merger between Fuji Iron & Steel and Yawata Iron & Steel, where he remained until retirement. His father was now seventy-eight and fading into dementia, but memories from the turbulent years right after the war—a bewildered clerical worker with no discernable resources and a pregnant wife, wondering if every day would be his last on the job—were indelibly etched in his mind. The baby in his wife’s womb at the time was Negoro himself.

After the law was established, Hinode was of course included in the list of more than 300 firms designated by the Holding Company Liquidity Committee to be split up, but when it came down to it, due to the political climate abroad at the time—the birth of the People’s Republic of China, and the deteriorating relationship between the US and the Soviet Union—the standards of application for the Deconcentration Law were significantly eased, for fear of inviting a decline in Japan’s power. In the end, the number of companies that were split up was closer to a dozen. Hinode was not among them.

According to the reference materials, Hinode Beer had ridden out the postwar years, when the tumult of domestic industry and civic life was at its peak, in a state wartime-regulation-induced near-hibernation, and thus managed to avoid being split up thanks to the shifting situation in world affairs, not even shuttering any of their factories. When wartime regulation lifted and the country entered the age of free-market competition, Hinode was already riding the wave of the now-recovering industrial economy. All in all, the company had prevailed throughout its relatively fortuitous history. As Negoro contemplated Hinode’s progress, it seemed to him that the company had given little to no cause for its employees to incite a labor movement—no unrest about their employment or livelihood—but that made the existence of the flag-waving, dismissed Hinode employee Yoshinori Toda all the more peculiar. Negoro concluded that he would need to do more research on him.

By the time Yabe finally responded to the page Negoro had left with the Hachioji bureau, car headlights were lining up in early evening traffic along Uchibori-dori.

“Listen, about Hinode’s acquisition of the factory site in Saitama—would you mind digging up as many names as you can of land owners, tenant farmers, or any residents involved in that lawsuit?”

“You have a hunch along that line?” Yabe asked skeptically. It was a long-distance call—he was still out on assignment.

“There’s this guy from a segregated buraku community in Saitama prefecture who was at Hinode’s factory during the war. Back then, there was a pretty high bar to land a job at Hinode—even in one of their factories. If what I’ve heard is true, perhaps the guy is involved somehow. I’m sorry I don’t have more for you to go on.”

“What’s his name?” Yabe asked, suddenly curious.

“Yoshinori Toda. Born in 1916.”

Shortly before six in the evening, Negoro passed by the table where the slot editors from each section were gathered for an editorial meeting ahead of the bulldog edition. When Tabe looked up at him, Negoro signaled with his eyes that he was stepping out, and then he left the news room. It had been almost a year since he had left the company building when the evening was so young, and he was only doing so now because his boss had ordered him to get background information on the tip-off. As the automatic doors closed behind him, he felt like a monkey released from its cage—his nostrils flared in response to the welcome air, and his steps felt light.

Negoro went to a phone booth near the building to place several calls he hadn’t been able to make from his desk in the Metro section. He flipped open an old notebook and began to dial. The first four phone numbers he called resulted in a message saying that the numbers were no longer in use, but that was about what he expected.

The fifth number he called was to the third-floor editorial office of a securities industry news company, a building that stood along the bank of a sewage canal near the Tokyo Stock Exchange in Kabuto-cho. At those kinds of papers, after the markets closed at three, reporters scrambled to submit their stories for the final edition of the next morning’s paper by around four, and the early edition had already shipped by five—at this hour, the editorial department would be nearly empty. However, Negoro knew that right about now there would be a man lying on the sofa in a corner of the room, a book in one hand and a can of beer and rice crackers in the other.

“It’s Negoro from Toho News,” he announced when the call connected.

“It’s too early to pay your condolences,” the man shot back. “Though if the share price dips below fifteen thousand yen, I’m going to jump out this window here. But it looks like it’ll hold up for a while. So, I need you to sit tight a little longer about your money.”

“Never mind that. Consider it your funeral offering,” Negoro responded.

Five or six years ago—the end of the bubble era, shortly before the Ogura-Chunichi scandal came to light—the man had given Negoro a way into an investors’ group. In those days—when times were flush—he and many of his fellow employees in the securities industry news played the market, pooling cash and walking around with million-yen wads