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

had established a “new record,” and showed no sign of giving up. These days, having made his way through the organization and with a transfer to the High Public Prosecutor’s Office on the horizon, Kano was enjoying a moment of promising stability. Had Goda been in his position, he would have either applied himself a little more to practicing or left his relationship with his superior out of it from the start. But for some strange reason the sound of Kano’s voice on the other end of the line made any desire to quibble over work matters vanish, instead transporting him to somewhere out of time and place.

“Did you buy a new car?”

“I decided on a Volkswagen Golf after all. I couldn’t justify buying a sedan just to be able to fit a golf bag in it. Anyway, do you have any time to get together with someone?” Kano asked.

Goda remembered that Kano had previously mentioned a reporter from Toho News. Perhaps that was what had been nagging at him.

“I’m free Sunday afternoon,” Goda replied.

“You mean the seventh? What about Investigation Headquarters?”

“They gave me a day off.”

“You don’t say. Well then, why don’t we meet up with him in the afternoon, and then go get something good to eat that evening.”

“I’d prefer to go for a drink.”

“I see. All right. I’ll get in touch with the guy and call you back.”

After finishing this trivial conversation, there were only a few things left for Goda to do. As he listened to the sea breeze outside his door, he washed his sneakers, then downed 150 grams of whisky and fell asleep flipping through the May issue of Nikkei Science.

久保晴久　Haruhisa Kubo

Around the same time, Haruhisa Kubo slid forward on his knees across the tatami mat. It was time to apply pressure to his source. “So.”

The assistant police inspector from the first Mobile CI unit of the Kamata sub-unit, his face flushed after three cups of sake, grinned and pretended to dodge Kubo’s approach. “Don’t come so close,” he said, laughing.

“Hey, look me in the eye,” Kubo said. “I’m being serious tonight. This is for real. Hinode’s perps are definitely making their move.”

“If they were, our unit would be the first to know, but so far—”

“Well, they’ll make a move soon. I’m sure of it. And when they do, you let me know before anyone else. All right? Please?” Kubo inched toward his source again, saké bottle in hand, and filled his cup. “I’m counting on you.” Kubo felt like a snapping turtle hanging tightly to his source, knowing full well his eyes looked desperate, yet he was powerless until that crucial, unforeseeable moment. “Come on, drink up. Then let’s go for karaoke!”

Kubo tipped the saké bottle even more, and the karaoke-loving assistant police inspector finally came around, saying, “Sounds like a plan.”

根来史彰　Fumiaki Negoro

In the early hours of Sunday, May 7th, the last day of the Golden Week holiday, Fumiaki Negoro returned to the ryokan operated by an old acquaintance near the Tsukiji Hongan-ji Temple, having submitted the morning edition of the paper at half past one in the morning. Choosing at random one of the books from a five-volume collection of Simone Weil’s work—the only items he had brought from home—he slipped between the covers of the futon. When he had discovered these books during his student days, they would have filled half of his list of “the Ten Books to Bring to a Deserted Island,” and still, a quarter century later, he had not hesitated to choose the same five books as companions in his hideout. The volumes included a miscellany of letters, philosophical discourse, and original work by a woman who, in the midst of the rising tide of communism that swept through 1930s Europe, had contemplated the meaning of labor, revolution, and religion. There were many things about Marxist theory that Negoro found unacceptable, but he never failed to be moved by the author’s tremendous vitality, faith, passion, kindness, fragility, and vulnerability, the beauty that overflowed from every single word and every single line on the page, and, struck by the sheer magnificence of the human capacity for thought, he would be filled with joy to be alive. It did not matter which page he opened to—whether a story about a labor strike or a meditation on God—he would read a few pages as though they were a letter written directly to him and, refreshed by the author’s earnest observations, he would express gratitude to a woman who had died half a century ago, close the book, and go to sleep.

When he got up, it was already past ten in the morning. Although he had intended to check out of the inn that day, he could not be bothered so instead he told the innkeeper he would stay another week, giving her the forty thousand yen in advance along with his laundry, and he left to get his hair cut.

Freshly coiffed, Negoro got on the nearly empty train on the Keihin-Tohoku line before noon, then transferred in Kamata to the Mekama line, which he took to Tamagawa-en. He strolled the two kilometers or so along the bank of the Tama River, dense with the early summer greenery. Perhaps it was from basking so abruptly in the sunlight, but he could not recall any of the articles he had submitted just half a day earlier. Even the practical inconvenience of being displaced from his home had dulled to the same level as his constant backache, and with each step, he felt as if the present moment was losing its meaning. Then he remembered how Simone Weil had warned against the human tendency to sink into insensibility. Ah, but my dear Simone, he murmured to himself, there is practically no one starving in this country, and our serenity is like water warmed by the sun, the result of lives spent without ever knowing hunger.

In a society in which no one was starving, news articles did not induce any pain. Nowadays, there