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

Among the eight thousand small factories in the Ota district, Ota Manufacturing was mid-size, employing ten workers to make high-precision dies for plastic products. Within the less than thirty-five hundred square feet of the long, narrow building, there were two late-model NC lathes, two copy lathes, two universal milling machines, one vertical milling machine, two drill presses, and one slotter, used to carve out molds for all sorts of plastic products—from space rocket parts to children’s toys—out of black steel charge, accurate to one thousandth of a millimeter. In Monoi’s time, they had been armed with a single lathe or a milling machine set up with an indexing head, but had tackled everything from milling cams for automobiles to machining grooves in shafts to gear cutting. But the production efficiency and range of products handled had changed entirely. For instance, when Monoi saw the die in progress that was set by the front entrance, he had no idea what kind of mold it was.

The workshop was dim, and Yo-chan sat beneath a single naked bulb that illuminated the work desk in the back. On the cluttered desk, he had lined up a colorful array of canned soft drinks amid the horseracing newspapers.

“Cold out tonight!” Monoi called to him, and this time Yo-chan turned only his face to him, dropping his eyes to his own hands without a word. He held a micrometer in his right hand, in his left, a piece of soldering wire.

After measuring the diameter of the solder with the micrometer, Yo-chan reached his right hand toward the tool drawer on top of the desk and started looking for a drill bit for the drill press. Monoi momentarily wondered what he was up to. His eye caught sight of Yo-chan’s left hand as he placed the solder on the desk. His thickly bandaged index and middle fingers were too short. There was nothing beyond the first joints. In shock, Monoi grabbed Yo-chan’s left hand, and with no change in expression, Yo-chan said simply, “An accident.”

“When?”

“The eighth.”

“Was it the lathe?”

“Uh-uh. A coworker was carrying a die. The guy’s hand slipped, and it dropped right on my hand.” As Yo-chan said this, he gestured lightly with his chin at a shelf in the front where some kind of die big enough to fill a grown man’s arms sat. That thing fell on your fingers? Monoi thought, speechless.

“I got an X-ray right away at the hospital. The bones were crushed. Before they could operate, the fingers got all swollen and turned purple,” Yo-chan said matter-of-factly.

“Can you move your fingers?”

“More or less.”

“What about the guy who dropped the die?”

“He quit.”

“You didn’t report it to the police?”

“I’ll get workers’ comp. As long as I have three fingers left, I can work.”

Yo-chan was a man who only ever spoke this way. His instincts and emotions were sunk deep below the skin, never surfacing in any perceptible form. His features had barely changed since he started working in this factory after graduating high school seven years ago. His face was pale from spending all day long inside the factory where the sun never shone, but even still, the flesh was gone below his cheekbones, sharpening them even further, and his jawline was as slender as a teenager’s. Now that face looked all the more vulnerable in the murky light.

“Did your boss by any chance tell you to keep the accident under wraps?” Monoi tried asking again.

“I was the one who told him to forget about it,” Yo-chan said, not even lifting his face.

“Why?”

“Because whatever.” Yo-chan rummaged through the drill bits arranged by size inside the tool drawer and then asked, “Do you see a one point four?”

“A regular cutter?” Monoi asked. Shifting his reading glasses, he reached into the drawer, found the small plastic case that held the 1.4-millimeter bits, and handed it to him. Yo-chan took out a twist drill bit that was as fine as a sewing needle from the case, spun his seat around, and set it into the spindle of the hand-feed drill press behind him. Then, he grabbed one of the aluminum juice cans that were lined up on the desk, turned it upside down, and placed it on the drill press’s round worktable.

“What are you doing boring a hole in the bottom of a juice can?” Monoi asked, to which there was no immediate response. Yo-chan used the hand-feed to place the tip of the drill on the bottom of the can and pulled down the handle. A fine powder of aluminum scattered about, and within a second a hole appeared from which orange juice dribbled out.

Yo-chan moved the can with the hole to the work desk, and wiped away the spilled juice with a dark towel. He set that aside, and then began to file the end of the soldering wire. As he watched, Monoi figured out for himself that Yo-chan was trying to insert the end of the sharpened solder into the hole he had just made in order to seal it back up.

“I had been reading tomorrow’s racing column, but my fingers hurt and I couldn’t sit still,” Yo-chan murmured as he continued to sharpen the soldering wire. “And there’s something that pisses me off, too.”

“What’s that?”

“The ends of my fingers they cut off at the hospital—I thought they were going to give them to me after the surgery, but they just threw them away. Those were part of me, and when I think about how they threw them out in the garbage, it’s unbearable.”

And if they had given him the severed fingers, what would he have done with them? Monoi wondered. “I guess so,” he mumbled, but he had no idea of the private despair Yo-chan might be feeling about losing his fingers because of someone else’s mistake.

Monoi took two glasses from the sink in a corner of the workshop and placed them on the work desk. He opened the gift box of foreign liquor, took out an ornate bottle that seemed