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

in his work clothes, Monoi quickly set out for Hon-Hachinohe Station, but by the time he arrived the scene at the station was teeming with small flags waving the conscripts off, and over the shoulders of the crowd gathered, he saw Seiji standing there, a sash across his chest with a message wishing him enduring fortune in battle. As Monoi stared at his older brother, the smallest and palest of the five or six men being sent to the front, Seiji noticed him and gave him a small smile, so he returned the gesture with a shy grin. That day, after the train had left, in the dispersing crowd he saw the figures of his parents who had come all the way from their village in Herai, but his mother kept her head bowed the entire time as if to avoid notice.

As Monoi told such stories, he could not tell from Seiji’s aspect whether he was listening to any of it—his expression did not change much. But one day, Monoi asked him, “Do you know Hinode Beer?” After a few minutes, as if suddenly remembering something, Seiji responded, “Hinode’s beer sure was good.” In the anonymous taped recording of the letter that Seiji had allegedly written back in 1947, he had repeated, several times, “Hinode’s beer sure was good,” and just now he had spoken those same words in a reflective tone, as if that very memory had returned to him. And yet, when Monoi followed up with the question, “Do you remember the Kanagawa factory?” there was no further reply.

Every time Monoi visited Seiji, he now brought a can of Hinode beer and let Seiji drink it through a straw. Yesterday, he had not drunk the beer, but when Monoi pulled off the tab and set the can on the table, Seiji had stared at it for a long time. It was a can of Hinode Lager, the label bearing the same golden Chinese phoenix taking flight from half a century ago. Seiji’s gaze was fixed on it for so long that Monoi felt compelled to ask, “The Hinode label makes you feel nostalgic, huh?” but after a while Seiji only mumbled, “Hinode’s beer sure was good.”

Monoi got off the train at Akigawa Station on the Itsukaichi Line and, after buying a can of beer and the soft adzuki bean jelly that Seiji liked at a shop in front of the station, he got on the bus. After they made their way up the Takiyama Highway along the river for about fifteen minutes, the Ryokufuen Care Home appeared beside the rolling hills of Nishi-Tama Cemetery.

From the bus stop it was about a five-minute walk uphill, and by the time Monoi made it to the entrance of the nursing home he was soaked in sweat. As he stood there for a moment mopping his brow, the bright voice of a female staff member called out to him from the pass-through window of the administrative office. “Well, look who’s here! I wonder if Okamura-san is up. It’s nap time right now.” Here, both residents and visitors—as long as they were senior citizens—were addressed as if they were barely in preschool. Monoi never got used to this, but instead of feeling annoyed, the subservient words, “Oh, that’s very kind of you, thank you,” sprang from his lips and his body bent forward to bow of its own accord. Monoi bowed two or three times toward the window before he changed into a pair of slippers, and headed toward the building where all the bedridden elderlies were housed together.

Sure enough, at two o’clock in the afternoon the majority of the residents were napping, so there was no recreation or entertainment, or staff making rounds. The sultry air from outside meandered in through the screened windows and over the linoleum floor, so clean it was rather bleak, and somewhere wind chimes were ringing. The doors to the rooms had all been left open. Monoi craned his neck to peer into one of them.

Seiji was at the far end of the row of six beds. He was lying face up, his head on a pillow, his eyes wide open, in this spot that, around this time of the afternoon, was always bathed in western sunlight. Before he could even call out his usual greeting of “Seiji-san!” Monoi froze, staring at his face. Time seemed to stop altogether and Monoi dazedly recalled the faces of dead cattle and horses he had seen being carted away along the bus route in his village so long ago.

Seiji’s half-open mouth was contorted into a split and twisted shape, his eyes glaring up at the ceiling were rolled back, his taut cheeks were sunken beneath the cheekbones. Seiji Okamura was no longer there—all that remained was a carcass, its expression no different from the corpse of one of those animals. A jumble of memories flickered behind Monoi’s eyelids—the sparkling dust rising from the bus route, the smell of the grass, the cicadas’ song, and the bulging eyes of the carcasses atop the cart.

Taking a deep breath, Monoi realized that his plan to take Seiji home to spend the rest of his life in peace had been eclipsed, and then the vast, intangible question—What is the meaning of one’s life?—flashed in his mind. The notion that, in death, human beings and livestock were all the same had also struck him when Yoshie had died. Just before she passed away, Yoshie woke up from her coma and gave a tormented cry, contorting her mouth like Seiji’s and widening her eyes in a hideous stare.

Monoi pushed the red emergency call button, and was forced to wait several minutes for someone to finally arrive. The wind chimes continued to ring. None of the elderlies in the room made a sound—one of them slowly waved a fan up and down as he gazed at Monoi and the dead man. The other four residents, lying in their respective beds, did not move a muscle, and one