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

we would need to meet with him again in person, so on the eleventh I instructed human resources to contact him—”

“And?”

“When I asked Tsukamoto about it earlier, they had contacted neither his home nor his university. He said they only contacted the university on the twelfth to let them know his application had been rejected. When I pressed Tsukamoto about what exactly happened, he said that Kurata had apparently instructed human resources not to bother any more with this student. Then I asked Kurata about it—” Shirai paused to take a breath. Then he came out with it slowly. “This whole thing traces back to a problem with Sugihara’s daughter.”

“You mean Takeo Sugihara?”

“Yes.”

This past June, in a staff reshuffling, Takeo Sughihara had been appointed deputy general manager of the beer division and a board member. Twenty-five years ago, Sugihara had married Shiroyama’s younger sister, so their daughter was his niece. Naturally, Sugihara fell into line with Shiroyama and Kurata.

Unable to immediately grasp the situation, it took a moment for Shiroyama’s shock to form. Shirai continued in a clerical tone, ignoring Shiroyama’s confusion. Shirai was like a blowfish, Shiroyama had often thought. Shirai the blowfish never suffered from autotoxemia, always saying the reasonable thing in a coherent manner, but now and then the people around him would fall victim to his poison.

“Shiroyama-san. I will only speak of the facts here. Your niece had been dating Hatano at University of Tokyo, and apparently she told her father that she wanted to marry him after graduation. When a parent hears such a thing from his daughter, well, he’s going to look into the young man’s background, isn’t he? The result was, there was an issue with the father’s family register, so Sugihara told his daughter he wouldn’t allow it—this is the story that Kurata forced out of Sugihara the other day.”

Hearing this much, Shiroyama finally felt his heart quickening, but the reality of the situation still had not hit home. During the past thirty-one years, his work or the mention of it had never carried over into his personal life—not even once—and his mind now experienced a dull confusion for the first time.

He had seen his younger sister over the summer during the Obon holiday, the festival of the dead, but the last time he saw his niece’s face had probably been at New Year’s. His niece had worn a kimono, which had been made specially for her coming-of-age ceremony, and his sense of admiration that she had grown into quite a young lady quickly dissipated when she put out her hands and, with an obsequious bow of her head, asked, “Uncle, my New Year’s money?” It did not matter that she was a University of Tokyo student—in Shiroyama’s eyes, she was still just a girl. Speaking of which, at the beginning of fall, hadn’t Sugihara himself mentioned that she would either go on to graduate school or study abroad? As he vaguely recalled these things, Shiroyama calmly examined each facet of the story, one by one.

When did Sugihara speak to his daughter about her boyfriend? And at that time, did he say anything to her about Hatano’s buraku connections? Did she then tell this young man—Hatano—about it? And if so, when? Until these things became clear, the cause and effect of Hatano’s leaving during the second interview on October tenth remained uncertain.

Shirai continued, ignoring Shiroyama’s prolonged silence. “Shiroyama-san. Whatever the reason Hatano decided to leave before the completion of his second interview, I think it’s best for Hinode not to get involved. There was no blunder on the company’s part, at least not in terms of the screening process, so there is no need to say more about it.”

“I’d like to know—was Sugihara at the second interview or not?”

“He was not. If Sugihara and the student in question had come face to face at the interview, it would have complicated matters, but since they did not—no matter what transpired personally—we should deem this occurrence as unrelated to the company.”

“Then why did Kurata go to the trouble of instructing human resources to quash things?”

“That has to do with an extortionist,” Shirai answered simply.

This cleared away one of Shiroyama’s suspicions, and the pieces fell into place.

“You mean the story was leaked . . .”

“It seems that way. Since Hatano disappeared from the site of the interview, human resources had a lot to handle that day and was distracted.”

“What have been the extortionist’s exact moves?”

“On the night of the second interview, Kurata received a strange call at home from someone who wouldn’t give his name. The caller mentioned the name of a certain individual, and that this person has a connection with Seiji Okamura, who is a distant relative of Hatano.”

Shiroyama looked down at the name “Seiji Okamura” on the first page of the transcript of the anonymous tape.

“And who is this individual?”

“Yoshinori Toda. The tape does not mention him by name, but it refers to him. He’s the man who was fired from our Kyoto factory in 1946 for inciting a dispute. I’ve looked him up—he now works as a freelance writer, and he’s been digging around about Chunichi Mutual Savings Bank.”

In his mind, Shiroyama was able to make some sense of the story. Someone who had heard about Hatano’s second interview deduced that the incident was relatively unusual, quickly fished around the student’s family history, somehow found the name Seiji Okamura among his relatives and, while he was at it, uncovered Okamura’s erstwhile connection to this writer Toda, which he determined could be of use.

“In any case, I assume Kurata warned human resources against saying anything sheerly to avoid trouble, but in the interest of maintaining consistency, what he did was not very good,” said Shirai, arriving at his first conclusion. Shirai’s method was to stick pins, one by one, into those surrounding him, as a means of securing his own logically coherent path. Just now, he had stabbed a pin into Kurata’s wings over his handling of the matter within human resources,