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

shot out before he was even aware. Handa grabbed the assistant police inspector, only to be pulled off by his fellow officers, one of whom snapped “idiot” while shoving him aside. The inspector himself, who had barely furrowed his brow, turned swiftly on his heel and descended the stairs.

In the span of a few seconds as Handa watched him leave, he was unable to even remember just what had set him off; he was only aware of the heavy muck around his feet dragging him down further. I’m the only one mired in this crap.

The only sound in the now-empty stairway hall was his own labored breathing. His toes felt slippery inside the blood-soaked sock in his shoe. Just as Handa went to remove his shoe once again, Inspector Takahashi came down the stairs, briefcase in hand, and so he lowered his foot.

“Hey, so we’re going to the main office of the BLL’s Tokyo chapter now, and then to a dentist’s in Seijo. Here is the letter outlining the charges. Hinode Beer is the accuser. The accused is unspecified.”

The inspector’s businesslike tone inevitably pulled Handa back to his duties, and he accepted the three-page document thrust at him. Scanning it quickly, he learned that Hinode Beer had recently received a letter written under an assumed name and a cassette tape from an unidentified sender, and was requesting that the sender be appropriately punished for undermining their credibility and obstructing their business. As he singled out the words, “Buraku Liberation League, Tokyo Chapter,” Handa felt the muck around his feet steadily pulling him down further. He felt the world around him darken, as if he alone were under a sky so dark that made it hard to believe it was morning for everyone else.

“A segregated buraku community?”

“Oh, what we’re dealing with is a pseudo anti-discrimination association. Hey, let’s get a cup of coffee before we head out. I’ll show you the transcript of the tape.”

“The dentist is the pseudo anti-discrimination association?”

“The dentist appears to be the sender of the tape. The department chief ordered us to see if he will consent to an interview, to hear his side of the story.”

Without any of this making sense to him, Handa replied, “Understood.” He exited the police department, following behind Takahashi, who wore the mien of a judicial scrivener in a country village or a notary public office’s administrator. It was quarter past eight in the morning.

Another personality existed within Handa, a personality that had been trained and disciplined in the police force. This character hissed persistently in his ear, They won’t get away with this. Just watch. Handa spent half his day listening to this voice, testing his patience, as if he were staring fixedly at a fishing bobber on the surface of a pond that didn’t move an inch.

The truth was, when he had been given the transcription of the letter from the tape to look over that morning at the coffee shop, he only registered the shapes of the letters on the pages, and then at the BLL’s office, nothing lingered in his ears other than the obviously annoyed tone of the full-time staffer who came out to meet with them. To begin with, despite the fact that a complete stranger had sent, in the form of a tape recording, a letter addressed to Hinode’s Kanagawa factory originally written back in 1947, the company did not even acknowledge in the content of their official complaint that this very letter may have been lost or stolen. On the other hand, it was unlikely that the accused stood to gain anything by sending an incoherent letter or a tape to Hinode. As far as Handa was concerned, this must simply be a case in which both sides were making claims against a mistaken opponent.

Apparently, Hinode had received another letter that the dentist had sent—one with a signature—and after filing their complaint, the police department had verified the fingerprints on the signed letter, the letter sent under an assumed name, and the tape—all of which Hinode submitted voluntarily—and since they matched up, all three items were determined to be the work of the dentist. But Handa, who only ever handled violent crimes and robbery, could not fathom why, even at the discretion of both parties, they had to deal with such a trifling case where the motive remained unclear.

Wondering if his own sensors were haywire or if the world had gone insane, at one in the afternoon Handa found himself with Inspector Takahashi in the residential neighborhood of Seijo. Standing in front of a luxury apartment building near the Seijo Gakuen School playing fields and looking up at the structure with its bijou roof terrace that would have made cat burglars drool, the only thought that surfaced in Handa’s mind was, ’Bout a hundred million yen.

The dental office was located among two or three boutiques that jutted out from the ground floor of the building, and there was nothing particularly eye-catching about its unexpectedly old-fashioned and plain nameplate that read, “Hatano Dental Clinic,” or the glass door of its entrance. Eyeing the sign on the door—afternoon appointments from 2 p.m.—Takahashi made a call from a nearby pay phone and announced that the dentist would meet them at home before they ascended the elevator to the residences on the fifth floor.

When Handa saw the man named Hatano, his first impression was, to put it simply, a butterfly in a specimen box. The outward appearance was perfect, yet it was nothing more than a still life that would shatter at the slightest touch. Truth was, the man’s appearance—combining the nonchalance of an unsullied, sheltered son of a good family who had grown straight into middle-age, the coldness of a man who seemed to be made up of only a high IQ, and a melancholy that betrayed hints of a rather complicated thought process—was hushed over, and there was an emptiness to him that seemed to stem from more than just the fact that he