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

house, his act seemed considerably different in substance and meaning from Monoi’s own eruption forty-three years ago, and he could only admonish him not to do it again.

He made his way back on his bicycle, with nothing but the cold wind left on Sangyo Road, and though his body was now awake, reminiscences of the wind and snow and the sound of the grass in his hometown were still bursting forth, little by little, from somewhere within him. Three days after leaving the foundry in Hachinohe, Monoi had packed the 1.8 liters of rice that his parents had scrambled together in his bag and boarded an Ueno-bound train at Aomori Station. Monoi remembered being crammed inside the train overflowing with passengers carrying black market rice and potatoes, and though he had felt desperate and anxious, he was at the same time steeped in a buoyant sense of freedom. It was similar to the feeling he had experienced on the day he left home for the first time at the age of twelve to become an apprentice in Hachinohe, accompanied by his father and rocked about in the bus. It made no difference to him whether it was a bus or a train, as long as the road led him somewhere far away, whatever might lie beyond.

But it had been forty-three years since that day. He had eaten thousands of cups of rice and shit them out just as many times, but where the hell had he escaped to? Whenever he would think about it, the more than half a century’s worth of time always collapsed into a hollow, and the wind swept through his entire body. The quiet conclusion that he had not escaped anywhere had occurred to Monoi a while ago, but now that he had reached a point in his life when there was no longer time to start anew, the void in which he found himself was quite possibly even deeper than the one in his hometown.

Any liquid, no matter how complex, would surely break apart if it continued to spin in an endless centrifuge for over half a century. And the components that were now scattered about included the earthen floor of the house in which he was raised in the village of Herai, the millet fields, smoke from the burning charcoal, the deeply lined faces of his mother and father, Komako’s drooped head, dried radish, all sorts of images of the foundry in Hachinohe, the chill of the Pacific wind and the green smell of grass that clung to each of these memories, and finally his own solitary body in which all of these resided. Aware of the unbearable weight of still not knowing if he had a future, Monoi arrived at the Haneda intersection where he turned into the shopping district.

It happened that moment. A motorcycle was parked in front of the pharmacy, and a patrol officer he recognized from the nearby police box turned to face him.

“Oh, Monoi-san,” the officer said, raising his hand in greeting. “I just got a call from the Seijo Police Department. Is Mitsuko Hatano your daughter? Can you get in touch with her? If not, would you mind coming with me?”

“What about my daughter?”

“No, it’s her husband.”

“Hiroyuki Hatano?”

“He jumped into the tracks of the Odakyu Line. They say he died instantly.”

Monoi, suddenly unable to recall the face that went with the name, responded, “I see.” Then he said, “Thank you for your trouble,” and bowed his head. Perhaps sensing something peculiar about his reaction, the officer looked at him dubiously, seemingly taken aback. He told Monoi the name of the hospital, and left it to Monoi to contact his daughter.

“Well, then . . . Thank you,” the officer said and straddled his motorcycle.

After the officer had driven away down the alley, the trademark seal of Hinode Beer shone from the vending machine of the liquor shop kitty-corner to him. It felt all the more bizarre that the same seal of a golden Chinese phoenix that he had seen forty-three years ago in the foundry in Hachinohe should be there now. I never had a future. I didn’t escape anywhere after all.

PART TWO

1994

The Night Before

1

Seizo Monoi

Sunday morning, Monoi retrieved the newspaper and saw the headline on the front page, criminal investigation of ogura group imminent. He scanned the article and set down the paper, and just as he had found the scallions and deep-fried tofu in the refrigerator and started the miso soup, a call came in from Shuhei Handa, who asked, “Did you read the article about Ogura?”

This was the third investigation into Ogura. This time, the investigation centered on Kimihiro Arai, a representative of Takemitsu, a group of corporate raiders that had bought up shares of Ogura Transport between 1986 and 1989. Arai was suspected of extortion for demanding that Ogura buy back his shares shortly after he had become a board member at Ogura Transport in early 1990. Arai had already been arrested and charged two years earlier in a separate suspected extortion case against Ogura.

According to the article, the decision by the District Public Prosecutor’s Office to move forward with a third investigation was prompted by the fact that, when the situation first came to light in 1991, charges had not been filed against Ogura’s management, who were suspected of aggravated breach of trust for agreeing to the buyback of Takemitsu’s shares, and now that the statute of limitations on said case had expired, an inquiry into defendant Arai had been deemed essential for identifying the flow of money behind Ogura’s series of suspicious activities. The article further stated that this latest investigation into Ogura would be carried out amid the stalled investigation of the so-called “S. Memo” scandal, which dated back to 1990, when Ogura’s main bank, the former Chunichi Mutual Savings Bank (absorbed and merged into Toei Bank in 1991), had fallen into financial difficulties and an influential politician from the Liberal Democratic Party had apparently promised to support its plan