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

there were talking about being in the military during the war. One of them mentioned an army buddy by the name of Seiji Okamura, and I thought he may have been a member of the family on your side . . .”

“I see. And what about Okamura?”

“When I asked my wife, she said she didn’t know him.”

“Oh, yes. I have never spoken about him to my daughter. Another family adopted him before I was born, and I myself barely know anything about him. I met him a few times in Hachinohe, but that was over fifty years ago.”

“Is that right? This older doctor was wondering how Okamura might be doing these days.”

“My older sister and her husband who take care of the family home in Herai told me he passed away. I think it must be have been in 1952 or ’53.”

“Oh . . . Well, I guess when you lose your son, you start to wonder about family, even distant relatives. By the way, do you still go to the racetrack?”

“Uh, yes. I’m ashamed to admit it, but when I’m watching the horses, I can forget about the bad stuff.”

“If there’s ever a time, I would like it if you could teach me how to place a bet. Well, I’m sorry to have bothered you so late. Please take care of yourself.”

“Yes. Same to you.”

After the perfunctory conversation ended and he’d hung up the phone, Hatano was struck with a strange and fleeting sensation. Born from the same womb as Seiji Okamura, and with his voice appropriately hushed for the late hour, Seizo Monoi sounded the way Hatano imagined Okamura himself would sound.

Holding the thirty-one-page letter bundle in his hand, Hatano left the living room and went into the room his son had occupied until the beginning of summer. The eight-mat space was organized to the point of starkness. There were only drably colored textbooks and a few fishing magazines on the bookshelf. There were no pictures of celebrities on the walls, and when Hatano had gone through the closet a few days ago, he had not found even a single provocative magazine. It was a room of a twenty-two-year-old honor student—too serious, too carefree, too inexperienced—and yet he had hidden away something he could not even tell his parents.

Hatano sat down at his son’s desk in front of his PC, opened the drawer, and pulled out a Walkman and a brand-new cassette tape still sealed in plastic. He checked the device, which he had used at dental meetings but not anytime recently, to make sure that the power still worked and that the tape was feeding properly. Then he laid the letter bundle on the desk, folded the corner of each page so that they would be easy to turn, and fanned them out in a row. Listening for noise outside the curtained window, he realized that it was past the hour of the last train on the Odakyu line that ran 300 meters south of his home, and that the clamor of the streets around the train station had long dissipated. From time to time he heard sounds of the exhaust from cars on Seijo Street, but he figured that they were not loud enough for the Walkman’s small microphone to pick up.

Hatano then looked at the first page of the letter.

Hinode Beer Company, Kanagawa Factory. To Whom It May Concern.

Should he say something before the opening line? He hesitated a moment but, thinking that he owed them no explanation whatsoever, he made up his mind. Hatano hit the record button on the Walkman and, pausing for two seconds, began to read the letter aloud: “Hinode Beer Company, Kanagawa Factory. To whom it may concern.” No, he didn’t just read it; he narrated it on behalf of Seiji Okamura.

“I, Seiji Okamura, am one of the forty employees who have resigned from the Kanagawa factory of Hinode at the end of this past February. Today, as I am currently confined to my sickbed and can hardly sit up or stand . . .”

He figured Okamura had been a man of few words who faltered in his speech. In trying to resurrect such a man forty-three years later, Hatano took on a slightly hesitant tone and spoke quite slowly.

“. . . My ‘former colleague,’ that is to say Katsuichi Noguchi, himself resigned from the Kanagawa factory in 1942, but in the case of Noguchi, I know that his resignation took place with an unspeakable amount of disappointment and indignation, and that various circumstances transpired before and after . . .”

Hatano read straight through to the end without any inflection, as if he were chanting a sutra, and once he had practically filled both sides of the sixty-minute tape, he signed off with the date and name. He inserted the tape into one manila envelope, sealed it, then inserted the package into another manila envelope before sealing that one and affixing enough stamps. He typed up and printed out a label with the address of the human resources department at Hinode’s main office in Kita-Shinagawa, leaving his name and return address blank.

After finishing these tasks, he threw the thirty-one pages into the trash. He then returned to the sofa, put on the CD of the singer Yuming that his son had left behind, and drank until three in the morning.

Early the next morning—the sixth—Hatano woke after sleeping for about three hours, took the envelope and drove his Mercedes-Benz to the Shinagawa post office in Higashi-Oi, where he deposited it into the same mailbox as before. Afterward, he opened his clinic at half past eight and started seeing patients by nine, as usual. By the time noon rolled around he already felt like the tape recording was the work of someone else—not him—and before he knew it, all that remained in the back of his mind was—the same as yesterday—the image of his son’s head, covered with blood.

3

Kyosuke Shiroyama

It took less than twenty minutes to drive directly from his