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

the froth of beer, but there was no one to blame—Monoi knew full well that it was simply the way of the times. Just as he knew that no good would come of reproaching him, Monoi did nothing other than hang his head.

But that night, Monoi had an unexpected, once-in-a-lifetime experience. In the middle of the night, before he even realized what he was doing, he had somehow managed to pull the fuel oil out of the cupola’s ventilator and carry it in a bucket to the main house, gripping an iron poker in his other hand. At that moment, as chance would have it, his stomach started to hurt—a bout of diarrhea from the old beer—forcing him to run to the toilet where he finally came to his senses. Had he not ended up in the toilet, he had been about to beat to death all four members of the Kanemoto family and set the factory on fire.

Monoi shuddered at this violence that had come from out of nowhere, and he was left speechless. He had always thought of himself as mild-mannered, but the realization that within him resided a fiend who could do something so unpredictable was so startling that it upended his entire twenty-two years, and for the time being at least, the extreme poverty and enduring hunger of yesterday vanished. Still shivering, he wept and told himself over and over again that he was a horrible man and—with great remorse for his parents—regretted that he had ever been born.

Monoi convinced himself that this had been the first and last time such a thing would happen, that he would never do it again, but once his fit of passion had subsided, the profound lethargy that followed felt all the more intense. And in that moment, as he gazed out at the brightening sky through the small window in the toilet, for the first time ever he considered his own life, and he wondered if he was no better than a horse or an ox. In that moment he also reflected upon the hopelessness and destitution that had seeped into every aspect of his life, from his beginnings on the sooty earthen floor of his village home all the way to the present.

Early that morning, when he left the factory with his belongings wrapped in a single cloth, the youngest son of the Kanemoto family, Yoshiya, came running after him calling, “Big brother! Big brother!” but Monoi did not respond. That day, the tracks of the Hachinohe Line that ran along the coast and the bus route beside it were lightly dusted with snow, and the grass was still lush and green. As Monoi walked, he pictured himself as Komako as she was led away along the village bus route, and he continued to ask himself whether he had any future.

Right, so that was Hinode Beer . . .

His stomach fluttered at the resurrection of this taste from the distant past, and Monoi came back to himself. He pushed away the newspapers that were crumpled beneath his elbow, and took another sip of lukewarm whisky.

It had been a long time since he’d last recalled the fiend he had become just that once, forty-three years ago, and even after all this time he shuddered anew with repulsion, and he took another sip of his whisky.

Yo-chan’s head still hovered twenty centimeters above the newspapers, but he was no longer looking at the racing column. Seeming to stare through the five uneven fingers of his left hand that lay atop the papers, his gaze appeared neither blank nor focused. Yo-chan would at times become lost in a trance like this, but his face looked so colorless and transparent that there was something ghastly in his utter lack of expression.

“Yo-chan, what happened?” Monoi asked gently.

“I . . . I set a fire this morning.” Yo-chan spoke in a voice as monotone as ever.

“Where?”

“The house of the guy who dropped the die on my hand.”

“You set his house on fire?”

“I had planned to call him outside and punch him. But then that seemed like too much work.” As Yo-chan went on mumbling, he stared at his left hand that he held out before his eyes, which remained as colorless as before.

“A human body . . . They throw away the fingers they chop off in the garbage, right? And when you die they’ll burn you all up in a gas furnace. So it’s not even worth a punch,” Yo-chan said to himself.

“What do you mean by worth?”

“Like a hundred or a thousand yen. Everything has a price.”

“If that’s true, there’s no worth to a human mind, either.”

Monoi thought Yo-chan hadn’t been listening—after Monoi’s response, Yo-chan’s head had again hovered above the newspaper—but after a while he mumbled, “I wish I could scrape out the contents of my mind, and instead fill it with sand or something. With smooth, pure-white sand . . .”

Yo-chan had grown up in an institution, and it had been seven years since he graduated vocational high school and started working. Even though he earned more now than salarymen his age, he wished to fill his mind with sand—Monoi could not understand just what exactly this guy was thinking. Perhaps this was what the young people meant by “snapped,” but even so there was something exceptionally cold, unfeeling, and dangerous about the way Yo-chan had snapped.

Come to think of it, even though they were about the same age, he doubted that his grandson Takayuki—blessed with everything from a wealthy home and loving parents to a promising future—would ever have thought of filling his own head with sand, no matter what. As he pondered this, he looked over again at Yo-chan’s small head bent over the newspaper.

“So that house, how much did it burn?”

“Just under the eaves at the front door.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Well, in any case, don’t you dare do it again.”

Monoi lightly patted the silent young man’s shoulder, and got up from the stool. Although Yo-chan had set fire to someone’s