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

was discovered during the private detective’s investigation was this: from 1950 to 1953 he had worked as a substitute teacher at a private high school in the Suginami district; after quitting for some reason that had to do with the school’s circumstances, he had wandered from job to job: a small printing company, a warehouse company, and a food wholesaler, among others. Apparently he had spent the last ten years in the Sumida district, where he had been the live-in super at a company dormitory. The investigation had stalled because after he left his teaching position, Seiji stopped using his real name and did not update his certificate of residence, either—thanks to this, Monoi ended up paying the detective agency close to three hundred thousand yen.

It seemed Seiji had still frequented hospitals; in 1985, the police, called to the scene by a neighbor, detained him at Tokyo Metropolitan Bokuto Hospital, and after returning to his own room at the company dormitory, Seiji had apparently thrown a few hundred books out the window. Afterward, he did stints in Tokyo Metropolitan Matsuzawa Hospital and Tokyo Musashino Hospital, and four years had passed since he finally arrived at the nursing home in Akigawa, through the assistance of the welfare office. Up until the previous year he had been able to go on walks alone, but when Monoi found him this past May, he was practically bedridden, lying in one of the beds in a six-person room. He was a small man and so emaciated that Monoi thought he might be able to pick him up by himself. The hair on his shaven head, which had started to grow out a little, was stark white. Monoi could no longer recall the face of the man he had met several times in Hachinohe long ago, and perhaps it was his wrinkles, or maybe it was his expression, but when he first saw Seiji, it was as though he were looking at a complete stranger.

“Seiji-san. It’s Seizo Monoi. Seizo from Herai.”

Seiji had replied, nodding repeatedly, “Oh yes, yes. Seizo-san. It’s you, Seizo-san.” But though his gaze was fixed on Monoi, there was no movement or reaction in his eyes, and Monoi could not tell if he truly recognized him as Seizo Monoi from the village of Herai. The situation was still much the same.

According to the nursing home staff, Seiji’s dementia, or perhaps pseudo-dementia, was worsening, and he had mildly impaired awareness and progressive paralysis—even though he could manage to state his own name and today’s date, he did not seem to know where he was, where he used to be, where he had worked, where he was born, or the names of his family members. No matter what was in his head, the man lying there in his pajamas was so quiet—more like an object than a living being. Aside from the smell of his diapers he hardly had any body odor, and even the indications of his gender and vestiges of the most basic, commonplace human sorrow had long since disappeared. Most of the elderly patients in his room were in a similar state, but the extent to which Seiji had withered was astonishing to Monoi—he was so bone-dry and light that seeing him was almost refreshing. Oh, I don’t mind coming here—it had been that stillness that first made Monoi realize this.

When he visited every other day, Monoi always called out to him, “Seiji-san. It’s me, Seizo from Herai.” Gradually, Seiji began to reply, “Oh, Seizo-san. Hello there,” but that was it. When Monoi lifted a spoon to him he opened his mouth, when he offered beer through a straw he drank it, and when he changed him into a shirt and pants and took him outside in a wheelchair, he calmly complied. When Monoi had hospitalized his wife, Yoshie, he had fed her with a spoon and changed her diapers, but something about his looking after Seiji made him think that he was doing it to make up for not tending to his parents on their deathbeds.

In the time he had been coming to the nursing home, Monoi spoke about a lot of things to Seiji, who never said a word. He talked mostly about his memories of Herai and Hachinohe, but once he got going, the long-buried and sundry details surfaced one after another, their limitlessness surprising even him. The year Monoi became an apprentice at the Kanemoto Foundry, Seiji was already working for Hinode, but that summer he returned home for the Bon festival and he came to visit him at the foundry. Monoi felt no brotherly connection with Seiji, this person dressed in a fine suit who removed his hat at the door of the foundry and bowed to the factory manager, saying politely in greeting, “Thank you for taking care of Seizo.” He felt anxious when Seiji then called him over and asked, “How are you? Everything fine with you?” Seiji’s face had been kind, but his manner of speaking was always a little stilted, and although they were related by blood, Monoi had had the sense that Seiji, as the older brother, was trying to patch the void between two people who had not grown up together, and the awkwardness they felt at having nothing in common.

At the time, Seiji had given Monoi some pocket money, just a few yen, and left him with a clichéd encouragement: “We use castings for the equipment in the beer factory too. Manufacturing is a respectable job, so you work hard, all right?”

In the Okamura Merchants family, his second wife had given birth to a boy who would be the heir, and this might have been why Seiji did not return to Hachinohe very often. The next time they saw each other was in 1942, when he came home after being drafted. The owner of the Kanemoto Foundry, having heard a rumor of Seiji’s conscription, urged Monoi to go see his older brother Okamura before he left for the front. Still