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

they each could have been more at peace. What Monoi regretted was that, for the simple lack of money, he had lived a life untouched by quiet spiritual satisfaction.

Looking back, he had always been haunted by the anxieties of daily life that were naturally ingrained in him, and whenever money became tight, that anxiety transformed into a sharp needle of fear that attacked him. Since he arrived in Tokyo, where it was all he could do to survive, the society around him continued to change at an astonishing speed, and with his meager income that never seemed to rise, he had the constant feeling that he was gradually being left behind. There was no solace at home, with Yoshie calling him worthless every time she opened her mouth, so he had never had the experience of feeling completely at ease. As he grew older, the raw emotions of anxiety and restlessness rusted away, but it wasn’t as if this set his mind at peace. In the five years since Yoshie’s death, his life had ostensibly grown quiet, with no ups and downs, but he felt that the balance between the positives and negatives over his sixty-five years had been too absurd to call what he had now fulfillment.

Monoi found himself unable to worry as he used to about his daughter, who had led a separate life for a long time already. Now, it was all too clear that he preferred to devote the remainder of his own life to himself, rather than to his daughter.

With no way of knowing what her old father was thinking, Mitsuko continued to speak in her shrill voice.

“I’m so humiliated. That man—he thinks that since he married me begrudgingly, as long as he keeps me in luxury, his duty is done. Not once did he ever approve of a social climber like me. I knew it all too well, but once Takayuki was born, I couldn’t leave. I’ve endured it all this time—twenty-three years!”

“What’s the point of telling me this now, after all these years?”

“Of course you’d say that. You’ve never been one to take responsibility for anything,” Mitsuko said as she blew her nose into a handkerchief and ran her hand through her coiffed hair. “I’m divorcing him,” she said, her tone suddenly changing. “I’m sure for twenty-three years, our marriage has also been quite a disappointment for Hatano.”

“But what will you live on if you divorce him—”

“I’ll make sure Hatano gives me half of everything. Besides, our vacation home in Oiso is under my name, so I can sell that off and do what I want. I won’t be a burden to anyone.”

“Don’t say such a thing—”

Just then, the store’s bell jingled again.

“There you go. Another one of your horseracing friends,” Mitsuko spat out the words, and grabbed the handbag at her feet. “I’m going on a trip for the next two or three days. If the police ask anything, tell them I’m not here.”

“Mitsuko, wait—”

Monoi crawled out of the kotatsu and tried to chase after her, but before he could Mitusko had stormed out through the back door, slamming it behind her with a force that could have broken the wooden door.

“Monoi-san.” The voice that called out from the store did not belong to a horseracing buddy but to a neighbor. When Monoi poked his head into the pharmacy, the owner of a dairy shop down the block called to him across the display shelf of detergent. “Sorry to bother you so late. My grandson’s complaining of a toothache.”

“A cavity? Is it swollen?” Despite Monoi’s weariness, his response tumbled out by rote. No matter what happened, he thought, this was the only voice he was equipped with—and his only way of speaking with it.

“I think it’s a cavity, but he won’t stop crying.”

“Do you have some cotton balls at home? I’ll give you some ointment, so try putting that on it. If that doesn’t work, it means it’s infected. You’ll have to take him to the dentist.”

Monoi gave him the ointment, and the shop owner thanked him as he paid and left. “Take care,” Monoi said as he saw him out. As he closed the glass door, which was still rattling in the wind, he detected a trace of Mitsuko’s perfume in the air of the cramped store. And her cutting voice seemed to still echo around him.

If he’d had the means, he would have chosen to be alone a long time ago, Monoi tried to tell himself in vain. As he did so, one by one, a number of bitter disappointments that he hated to even think of began to flutter through his mind yet again. There was the time when he had to buy a long-sleeved kimono for Mitsuko’s coming-of-age ceremony. It just so happened that was the year the factory had a slump and there were no bonuses to hand out, so he had gone from credit union to credit union in a mad rush, but after he had finally scrambled together the hundred-thousand yen to pay for a kimono and obi sash—it was such a cheap garment, even Monoi could see that it wasn’t pretty—in the end his daughter had worn a Western-style dress to the ceremony. That kimono was eventually sold off to a pawnshop, without Mitsuko ever even slipping her arm through its sleeves. He could still recall the yellow butterfly pattern of that kimono.

There were other things too. When Mitsuko was in elementary school, the day of her field trip Yoshie happened to be in bed with a cold so Monoi, straight from a night shift, struggled to prepare a bento for her lunch, but when his daughter left for school, the bento he had worked so hard to make was still sitting on the dining table. At the time, Monoi tried frantically to figure out why, finally realizing that the cloth in which he had wrapped the bento box reeked of machine oil—he could only laugh to himself.

Thinking about it as he shoved the