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

call to action from the Okada Association, a loan is no big deal. I’m sure they gave it to him without even any collateral.”

“So the connection between the founders, Takemura, Toei, and the politicos is Zenzo Tamaru? He’s the one who plotted the scenario?”

“A detective shouldn’t even mention the name Tamaru,” Koh retorted, but Handa was unfazed, and continued to pepper him with amateurish questions.

“Then the corporate raiders, Takemitsu, buying out Ogura Transport’s stocks was also part of the scenario?”

“I’m sure that was different from the main narrative, but in any case, they’re all connected somehow and they’re all floating each other at the right time. Buying out thirty-four-million yen worth of Ogura Transport stocks is no small thing, you know. If the average share price from ’88 to ’89 was twelve hundred yen, that comes out to over forty billion yen. And Toshin Finance, who loaned Takemitsu’s Kimihiro Arai this amount of money, was a subsidiary of Toei Bank.”

“Forty billion . . .”

“That’s the capital. First, Arai drove up the stock to its highest value of nearly nineteen hundred yen through speculation. Then, in exchange for selling the stocks he had bought up, he demanded that Ogura Transport and its main bank Chunichi Mutual Savings buy back the stocks at a relatively cheaper price. The newspapers reported it as sixty-one point two billion, so working backward, that comes out to about eighteen hundred yen per share. A return of twenty billion on forty billion capital—that’s the work of the likes of Takemitsu.”

“It sounds like Takemitsu’s Arai railroaded them into giving in to his demand, but I guess neither Ogura nor Chunichi could do anything because he had the dirt on them.”

“What dirt? Whether it’s Ogura or Chunichi Mutual Savings, they tried their hand in the underworld, and when the time was right, they sucked out as much honey as they could. Same for Tamaru. And Takemitsu, too. Talk about dirt—they all had something on each other. It was a give-and-take so that no one would have to suffer a huge loss, they saved face for one another. At the same time, those guys are playing a serious game of who traps whom first.”

“In their world, extortion is considered a serious game, huh?”

“If you’re talking about Arai, all it shows is that he failed to do enough behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Right about now, I’m sure Tamaru—through a lawyer—is getting hold of Arai in jail and demanding that he take care of the mess he’s made.”

After a short pause, Handa grumbled, “Well, you sure know a lot about this.”

Without letting on how he took this summation, Koh replied in a drawl, “I grew up breathing that kind of air.”

Perhaps Handa couldn’t find the right words to respond, or maybe he had lost interest, but instead of a reply, he slapped the back of the bench with his newspaper and their conversation ended there.

Down on the racecourse, the horses in the sixth race had finished their presentation in the paddock, and could already be seen warming up. It was now past noon, and though just a little while ago the girl had not wanted any more to eat now she said she was hungry again, so Monoi delivered a piece of the cream bun to her mouth. Nunokawa, still staring out at the tracks with sleepy eyes, did not even look at his daughter. Instead it was Yo-chan who, as usual, had gone to buy some milk for the girl. Inexplicably, Yo-chan took surprisingly good care of her.

As Monoi’s gaze alternated between the four-year-old horses with their carefree limbs moving beneath the tranquil, overcast spring sky and the drooling mouth of the girl, his mind wandered back to Ogura and the former Chunichi Mutual Savings, and he pondered just who, if any, of those involved had taken a loss. Even though they had basically been swallowed up, it wasn’t as if the individual employees at either the former Chunichi or Ogura had incurred any debt, nor had they lost their jobs. Even for the two former Chunichi executives—it was more like they had drawn the short end of the stick—neither they nor their families were going to end up on the street. When money circulated, it meant that debt had to circulate somewhere as well, but still, the amount they were dealing with was so large, it seemed unthinkable that just one person would have to pay the price in the end. When Monoi finally realized that not one of them had ended up losing his shirt, he felt dispirited.

In that moment, as he suddenly remembered the image of the mare Komako that had been sold off half a century ago, a certain thought went through his mind. It was as Koh had said, one couldn’t make money without circulating it, but the money circulated by those who had already made their fortunes—where did it come from in the first place? From the hands of Monoi’s father and mother as they carried sacks of charcoal in his village, from his own hands that kept the cupola burning, from the hands of his older sister who worked as a factory girl, from the hands of Seiji Okamura as he made the beer—wasn’t the money born of these hands? And yet, into these hands came only barely enough money to eat, while the rest became someone else’s wealth. Not only that, but just as Komako, the last resource of an impoverished family, had been taken away by the landowner, and just as the bucket of casting scraps left behind in the vacant Kanemoto Foundry had been carried off by the debt collector, there was no doubt that a fortune had been amassed from every last drop wrung from the have-nots and the guileless. Indeed, Monoi knew it was too late to realize this now, but as it revived the dormant sense of stagnation that had saturated his entire life, he felt all the more dispirited.

Half a century after the war, he compared the sense of