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

an anonymous sender, and the company filed a complaint for defamation and obstruction of business without naming a suspect. Immediately after the letter was received, said organization that had allegedly sent the first letter, responding to inquiries from Hinode’s main office and the police, had denied any involvement in the matter. The cassette tape was later revealed to have been an audio recording of the text of a letter written in “June 1947” by a “former Hinode employee” and sent to “Hinode Beer’s Kanagawa factory.” Among other things, how the letter ended up in the hands of the person who made the recording and their motivation to record it remained a mystery. Each newspaper concluded their report in the same manner: “Investigation headquarters is aware of the situation and has been conducting questioning of relevant persons connected to the case.”

Kubo perfunctorily jotted down “June 1947,” “former Hinode employee,” and “Kanagawa factory” in his notepad. The tip-off call that Negoro, the reserve chief, had mentioned crossed his mind, but for the time being his thoughts were swimming with more immediate suspicions. Did those three papers have a transcript of the tape? If so, where did they get it? From the police, or the family of the dentist from Setagaya? Was there a way for him to get his hands on a copy?

A call came through on the direct line from the news room. It was the overnight slot editor from the Metro section. “You let quite a bombshell slip away, didn’t you? What’s all this about a tape from 1990?”

Kubo cursed him under his breath and replied, “I’m busy right now,” then hung up the phone.

Kuriyama, wearing only his undershirt, descended from the top bunk bed in the nook. “How are the morning pages?” he asked. Then, his eyes still bleary with sleep, he picked up the fax sheets. “Oh, shit. The other papers really went for it, huh? But the chief was the one who told us yesterday to hold this story.”

“True, but I still gotta let him know,” Kubo replied. He fed the same pages back into the fax machine and sent them over to Chief Sugano’s home. Then he gave him a ring. Sugano would know what a pre-dawn phone call from the office signified.

“Hello. It’s Kubo. Sorry to wake you, but I’ve just sent over the fax. We’ve been scooped.”

“Yeah, I’m looking at them now . . .” Sugano paused for a few seconds before continuing. “My opinion hasn’t changed. Don’t worry about it.”

“But how will we do a follow-up story?”

“We won’t refer to it in the main article. We’ll discuss internally what to do with it on the Metro page. I’ll talk to you later.”

Sugano hung up the phone with a brusqueness that showed no concern for the caller. Kubo knew that Sugano couldn’t reprimand him for not reporting a story that he himself had instructed him to withhold, but the chief’s peremptory tone was still frustrating for whoever was on the receiving end. No doubt Sugano had his own justifications for why they didn’t need to write about this story yet, but he might have considered that this placed frontline reporters like Kubo in an uncomfortable position.

“What did the chief say?” Kuriyama asked.

“He said we don’t need a follow-up on the front page.”

“Even so, we can’t afford not to at least try to get a transcript of the tape, right? In any case, I’m going to get a bit more sleep. Today’s going to be another long day.”

Kuriyama quickly returned to the bunk bed. Compelled solely by the urge to get in at least another hour of sleep, Kubo lay back down on the sofa, the alarm clock set to 5:00 a.m. in one hand.

Kubo knew he had a tendency to be cocky, but as a reporter well into his thirties, he felt he’d been doing this long enough that, if they weren’t going to need a follow-up, he at least deserved to know why. Perhaps Chief Sugano, having worked in the field for far too long, no longer had the patience to explain every last thing to his subordinates. He reigned over this tiny nook with peace-keeping tactics that involved holding back his opinions and never revealing himself, skirting the main issue and simply barking out orders. With someone like that as a boss, Kubo always felt thwarted, as if he were being restrained by an unseen force, and from time to time he found himself on the verge of exploding.

As of last night Kubo had had no intention of writing the article either, but he certainly would have had there been any corroborating evidence. Regardless of whether or not there was any connection to the Hinode president’s kidnapping, it was obvious that they should write about it. The possibility of discrimination during the employee hiring process and the involvement of corporate extortionists who may have attempted to take advantage of the situation was of no small social significance, and what’s more, it was impossible that a letter addressed to Hinode from right after the war would surface and be transformed into a tape of its own accord. Wasn’t the existence of the tape newsworthy enough? If he were chief, he would definitely order reporters to find backup and write the story. These thoughts caused another wave of defeat to loom over yet another day, and he felt a rumble in his stomach that he knew would only be satisfied by binge eating.

城山恭介　Kyosuke Shiroyama

For the first time in many years, the Shiroyama family slept in the same room, their three sets of futon quilts laid out on the tatami floor next to one another. Though his wife and son slept soundly, barely stirring until dawn, Shiroyama lay awake in panic most of the night, seized by hallucinations that he was still captive inside the hideout. Soothed by the sight of his family at rest, he was able to fall back asleep, only for his eyes to pop open again and again as an inexorable