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

stuffed inside their suit pockets, all the while making out as if what they were doing was well within the realm of their profession as a reporter. The man on phone was only nominally a slot editor; during the day he lurked at the service counters of local back-alley brokerage houses and the coffee shops near the stock exchange, and at night he could be found in Ginza. He was so deep into stocks that even during a half-hour meeting he was never without an earpiece in one ear and a phone within reach. Negoro had heard that, sure enough, after dancing on the edge for so long, the guy was a few hundred million in the hole and had lost his apartment. The over-the-counter stocks he had convinced Negoro to invest his bonus in back in the summer of ’89, saying “this one’s a sure thing,” weren’t worth the paper they were printed on.

“More importantly, I can’t get through to Hamazaki,” Negoro said.

“I hear he’s in Singapore.”

“What about Shinoda?”

“Last time I saw him was in Kayabacho late last year. He said he was going to start up a seminar soon, but since I haven’t heard anything about him settling his debt underground, he must still be on the run.”

“So who’s left in the Ezaki group?”

“Probably just Takuji Yasui and Kazumi Koshino. A few guys might come back in later this year and start it back up, but with the market in shambles like this it’s tough—”

“You’re right. How would you be able to come back from this?”

“I’m only saying that the share price is about to bottom out, so this is the last chance if you were up for anything. But even if you went all in, trading is so light there’s no way to make any real capital.”

“I’m glad you’re aware of that. You know Yasui’s contact?”

“I haven’t seen him lately. Why don’t you poke around in Ginza or Shimbashi? What are you digging around for anyway? You’re not getting into corporate raiding now, are you?”

“This has nothing to do with that. I’ll talk to you later.”

Negoro hung up, staring at the rush hour traffic along Uchibori-dori as he replaced the phone. As always, the voice over the phone was as muddy as the banks of the sewage canal or the back streets of Kabuto-cho. The moroseness couldn’t be blamed on the bursting of the bubble and the subsequent recession; it had been the same when the service counter of every brokerage was overflowing with money.

The short call gave Negoro a rough idea of how his sources in the investors’ group were doing these days. He never had any intention of asking the slot editor at a trade paper about background on Takeshi Kikuchi and his company, GSC, Ltd. Negoro didn’t know how the mention of a former Toho reporter might be picked up as gossip. If he wanted to ask, he’d try for Yasui or Koshino.

When he left the phone booth, it was exactly six in the evening. He knew from experience it was a little too early to head to Shimbashi or Ginza, so he decided to take care of another source first. With his slightly stooped shoulders hunched forward, Negoro ambled over the Chidori-ga-fuchi moat on feet that did not carry him as swiftly as they had before his accident. The dank smell of the stagnant water rose to meet him. Now that it was dark, Kitanomaru Park was empty, and the edgy officers on patrol kept a watchful eye on Negoro, a middle-aged man tottering under the dark shadows of the trees surrounding the Imperial Palace.

Half an hour later Negoro arrived in the neighborhood of Kanda. He went up the staircase of one of the small buildings that lined the intricate back alleys of Uchi-Kanda. There was an iron door with a shingle on it, and when he opened it and stepped inside a female clerk at a steel desk looked up and gave him a friendly smile.

“Oh, you’re from Toho—” she said. “The director isn’t in right now.”

“Oh, I see. Does Professor Matsuda come around here these days?”

“Yes, nearly every day. He doesn’t seem to be writing much lately. He was here until just a while ago. He drank two cups of tea and told us everything that was wrong with our new titles. He said since he was out he might as well go have some soba on his way home. You know the noodle shop near the foreign language school? They’ve got the specials today. Oh, come on in. I’ll make some tea.”

“No, don’t trouble yourself. I’ll just take one of these press releases with me. Please tell the director I’ll stop by again.”

The list of new books published by the small press, which had only four employees, was a single sheet of pulp paper with typed words and phrases such as human rights, the Constitution of Japan, and democracy. Glancing at the titles of books he had no interest in reading, he stuffed the page in his pocket. As he did so, a certain long-forgotten sense of discomfort crept over him, and Negoro felt somewhat on edge.

Various configurations without origin, logic, or necessity—such notions as the emperor, democracy, discrimination, and so on—now seemed to Negoro to have mingled with car exhaust and the racket from karaoke bars, drifting through the current era like invisible fluff. While the dazzling light from the JR train streaked by above, and further beyond in the night sky a billboard with an electronic ticker flashed with news of the volatile sixteen-thousand-yen swing in share prices on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and the ransom demand of six hundred million in the kidnapping of Hinode Beer’s president, that fluff settled in drifts beneath the elevated bridges, shuffled and stirred underfoot by the passing crowds. In that moment, Negoro felt an increasingly useless irritation toward the fluff of democracy. There was no doubt that democracy still existed, but in reality, as a system it had neither progressed nor