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

display shelf aside to close the store, he realized no one had ever told him about Parent’s Day at school, and Monoi couldn’t remember ever attending one. For a sixty-five-year-old man, digging up memories of the past was pointless—a waste of the time he had left. But it may have been old age that stirred up memories of this, that, and the other, and he just needed to make an effort to shake them off. Why should he worry what Hatano and Mitsuko were thinking or what they were going to do about their marriage?

Monoi went outside the store and started to lower the shutters. As he did so, a car came from the direction of Sangyo Road, and no sooner had it stopped in front of the pharmacy than a hoarse voice called out from the driver’s seat window, “Monoi, big brother!”

It was indeed a night that seemed to bring out all sorts, one after another. The man, big as a tank, got out of a Mercedes-Benz and shouted cheerfully, “It’s too early for bedtime.” He was the son of the owner of the Kanemoto Foundry in Hachinohe, where Monoi worked half a century ago. The snot-nosed kid who used to tag along after him and call him “big brother” had come to Tokyo thirty years earlier after languishing for some time because of his family’s bankruptcy. Now, he managed a respectable mid-sized business, his own ironworks near Ichihara in Chiba, and from time to time he paid a friendly visit to Monoi.

Yoshiya Kanemoto was usually liquored up whenever he came to see Monoi. A smile now broke across his gleaming, bright-red face as he casually pushed a fancy box of expensive foreign liquor toward Monoi.

“Jus’ got back from Manila yesterday. I planned to stop by earlier, but hell, I got to drinking,” he said, laughing.

“Bet you had fun getting into trouble over there, eh?”

“Aw, don’t say that. I have clients to entertain. It’s all right.”

Monoi glanced at the two men sitting in the back seat of the Mercedes. They may have been associates from the metal industry, though he had known for a time that Kanemoto had ties to corporate underlings of a particular vein, and Monoi offered a few words of warning again that night. “It’s not all right.”

In the dialect of their hometown, Kanemoto reassured him that there was nothing to worry about, simply feigning ignorance. The sight of this fifty-year-old man, who bore no trace of the shy child from long ago, made Monoi feel more bewildered now than anything else.

“Well, I’ll come by again. Don’t catch a cold, big brother.”

With that, Kanemoto cheerily got back in his car and turned back the way he’d come. From the window of the retreating car, an unfamiliar man of that particular vein—without a doubt from the shady underworld—glanced at Monoi. His face was somber, with a large mole on his jaw.

Monoi considered the gift of foreign liquor in his hands for a moment, and then placed the box in the basket of his bicycle. Although his plans had been thrown off by his daughter’s coming by, he finally had time to set out on a visit he had been meaning to make all evening.

The person he wanted to see was one of his horseracing buddies who lived in the service apartment of a small factory in Higashi-Kojiya, about a ten-minute bicycle ride from the pharmacy. Typically he would drop by the pharmacy every so often, but he hadn’t recently, and last Sunday he hadn’t been at the Tokyo Racecourse in Fuchu, so Monoi hadn’t seen him for two weeks—since the fourth of this month. The guy barely had any friends or acquaintances, so assuming he was still alive and kicking, about this time of night he would have his head buried in horseracing newspapers in preparation for tomorrow’s races.

Monoi lowered the rest of the shutters, locked up, and with his short work coat still on, he got on his bike and began pedaling toward Sangyo Road.

He rode slowly on the deserted sidewalk and, after passing over two pedestrian bridges, he turned east into a backstreet just beyond the Minami-Kojiya bus stop. When Monoi had first arrived in 1948, the row of telephone poles that lined the dusty Sangyo Road had extended far into the distance. The barracks of small factories, reverberating with the bustling sounds of lathes and grinders, had stood amidst the wooden-fenced traditional minka houses and the vacant lots and fields where the sea breeze wafted through. Not long after, large factory buildings rose up along the Tama and Ebitori Rivers, while further inland, the factories grew gradually smaller in scale and closer together, forming a maze-like district where a penny-candy shop stood next to an ironworks. During the period of rapid economic growth after the war, buildings for small businesses replaced the barracks, cheaply-made ready-built homes took over where the minka houses had been, and condominiums filled in the vacant lots, but the scent of the air that filled Monoi’s nostrils had barely changed. At night, when the exhaust and dust had dissipated, the smell that seemed to seep from the roads and the walls of these buildings was still that of oil and rust.

Thanks to the recent economic boom, the windows were still lit in the relatively larger factory buildings on this block in Higashi-Kojiya. From the smaller factories, light that escaped from under doors facing the alleyways and the sound of machine tools indicated where work was still going on. Down one of the backstreets, Monoi looked up at one of the second-floor windows of a two-story stucco apartment building and, checking that it was dark, he parked his bicycle in front of the factory next door. A faint light filtered out from under the sliding door that read Ota Manufacturing, but there was no sound of machines.

“Are you there?” Monoi called as he opened the sliding door, and from the back of the workshop, Yokichi Matsudo, “Yo-chan” as he was called,