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

an irresponsible father! No matter who he is, if your daughter tells you that she’s going to marry a man, it’s the parent’s obligation to investigate his family!”

“There’s no such obligation in this world.”

“Maybe not in the countryside of Tohoku, but in Tokyo there is! You’re right—I was stupid. A handsome and rich dentist, whose mother’s side of the family were physicians in Kamakura. He had a bevy of girlfriends from top universities, so why did Hatano marry someone like me? It was stupid of me not to figure it out. Do you know how humiliated I am right now, Dad?”

Switch the man’s and woman’s positions, and he had heard the same argument more than enough times from Yoshie, Monoi thought to himself. The proud graduate of a girl’s high school, Yoshie had bid farewell to her first husband, an editor for a literary magazine who had studied literature at Waseda University, sending him off to the front less than six months after they were married. And with a mere postcard notifying her of his death in the war, the newlywed bride became a widow, the newborn Mitsuko in her arms. As she’d told Monoi every chance she got, the reason she had decided to marry him when they met, while she was working as a waitress in Shinjuku toward the end of the war, was because she was burdened with a young daughter and had no hope of marrying anyone decent. In a better world, who would take a half-blind, small-town factory worker as a husband by choice? she used to say.

“Do you know how humiliated I am, Dad? I worked hard to raise Takayuki. And he grew up to be such a wonderful boy, much better than I deserve. And now this happens, before his time—all because of his father’s birthplace!”

“Now, hold on a minute . . .”

“I don’t want to make a stupid fuss over a birthplace either! But it’s because I didn’t know that I couldn’t explain anything to Takayuki. If I had been able to educate and prepare him properly, no matter what the girl’s parents might have said, he would have handled it in a more appropriate way. It’s Hatano’s fault for hiding it. And it’s your fault for not stopping me from marrying a man who hid where he was from!”

Mitsuko started to wail, her voice quavering. Monoi could not avoid looking at her in this state. Even Monoi could see that Mitsuko was suffering in her own way, and with no one else to talk to, she had no choice but to take out her indignation on her father. It made no difference how many millions of yen her outfit cost, the person standing with her back to the pillar crying was, after all, his daughter.

“Why don’t you sit down—” Monoi started to say, but Mitsuko suddenly exclaimed, “Dad!” Her tone was even more fierce. “Don’t you get it? I’ve been deceived!”

“You’ve been husband and wife for more than twenty years, why start accusing him of deceiving you? There’s nothing you can do but work together as a couple and—”

“If I could do that, I wouldn’t be here! Hatano is crazy! I swear he’s lost it, his eyes look weird!”

Why does Mitsuko have to speak in such an ear-splitting tone? I’m her father, but even I’ve had enough, Monoi thought. Then he vaguely remembered hearing Hatano’s voice when he had called out of the blue late one night early that month. He had sounded distracted, having lost his son, but there had been nothing strange that could be detected from the tenor of his voice.

Mitsuko’s voice pitched even higher. “Hatano told me he’s going to the Shinagawa Police Department tomorrow. They’ll take a statement from him, and who knows what will happen after that, but his reputation is over, you know. And yet that man, he has no reaction whatsoever. His eyes look weird. I’m telling you—Takayuki meant more to him than I ever did!”

“I don’t think you need to worry much about the police—”

“What are you talking about?! Who on earth wants to go to a dentist who gets called in by the police? Rumors spread fast!”

“Nothing’s official yet—”

“Don’t act like this isn’t your problem. This issue involves you too, Dad!”

An issue that involved him. It took some time for him to ruminate on what this meant. He knew that he wasn’t entirely uninvolved, but he thought that its effect on him was so small as to be negligible.

Atop a chest of drawers, within an old picture frame, a faded family portrait looked out at them. In 1949, he had rented a small, six-mat apartment near the factory and set up house with Yoshie—the photo was taken to commemorate this event. Mitsuko was four and as cute as ever, and in the picture her new father was holding her hand. The twenty-four-year-old man, who had acquired a beautiful wife and daughter in one fell swoop, looked like a typical country bumpkin, wearing a nervous expression and puffing out his chest. Monoi had framed the photo, and for the past forty-one years, it had been like an ethereal presence in the living room. He had no idea how the two women in his life felt about it, but Monoi himself knew that he had looked to this photograph at various points throughout his life, and now he gazed at it again from the kotatsu.

If he were a man with ten times the guts and that much less patience, he might have murdered his wife and daughter and killed himself along with them. Monoi used to think about this when he looked at the photo, and the thought alone was enough for him just to keep working. In the period just after the war, his marriage to Yoshie was among countless half-hearted marriages between many men and women with no choice but to shack up under the same roof in order to survive. But even still, if they only had money, no doubt