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

of them emitted a low snore. Then the doctor and a staff member came in, and after going through the motions of checking the patient’s pupils and taking his pulse, the doctor said, “Well, it was his time,” while the female staff member remarked to no one in particular, “I’m so glad he went peacefully.”

Monoi, still staring at the stiffening corpse, found himself in the midst of a whirlpool of indescribable emotions that welled up from who knew where. The sight of the body before him triggered a cascade of images, indistinguishable from one another—the many animal corpses he had seen in his childhood, Komako drooping her head as she was led away by the horse dealer, Yoshie’s unsightly death face—and even though he felt no personal grief, it was as if suddenly, with a shrill roar, all the parts of his life were being stirred up and drawn toward that corpse. Amid the cacophony, he heard his own voice whisper, This is the extent of being human, and This will be you tomorrow, but when the noise eventually subsided, alongside the sense of emptiness that descended upon him, Monoi heard a different voice: I will avenge you, Seiji-san.

Monoi unconsciously strained his ears to hear it. He knew it was the voice of the same fiend he had heard that once, half a century ago. This time, it was with a quite different and surprising sense of calm that he listened to this voice and acknowledged it as evil.

“Hinode Beer,” Monoi mumbled to himself, and the sound of his own voice snapped him back to the present. Once he emerged from the tunnel of emptiness, the only things that remained in Monoi’s mind were the look in Komako’s eyes and the idea that Hinode Beer should pay for Seiji’s half-century of despair. Monoi felt a slight chagrin as he took another look at the idea that had just occurred to him, but whatever hesitation and doubt ordinarily that would have accompanied it must have already been eliminated by the fiend who had taken hold of him for the first time in fifty years. While the nursing home staff was cleansing Seiji’s dead body, Monoi turned over this idea in his head, so that even afterward, he never once felt troubled by the various matters that needed to be settled following the death of a family member.

Monoi called Okamura Merchants in Hachinohe from the pay phone at the nursing home, but the current owner gave an evasive response, obviously annoyed. Back in May, when Monoi had notified him of Seiji’s existence, he had sounded much the same, so this was not a surprise. The owner eventually told him, “We can’t be there right now, so if you could take care of things, we’ll pay the expenses.” According to the nursing home staff, the city would foot the bill for a simple cremation that included a wake and sutra chanting, so Monoi asked them to arrange for the temple to give Seiji a short posthumous Buddhist name, just five characters long, and told them that a more elaborate funeral was not required.

By early evening, Seiji had been dressed in white, laid out in a coffin, and placed in the wake room. His grimace had been fixed to resemble a sleeping face and his eyes had been closed, but there was no one besides Monoi to say farewell. The soft adzuki bean jelly and can of beer that Monoi had brought for Seiji were transformed into offerings and had been placed next to the chrysanthemums and incense that the nursing home had supplied. A Buddhist monk came from some temple, bringing with him a memorial tablet of plain wood, upon which was written in ink a generic posthumous Buddhist name: “Seishorenkoji.” After the monk had chanted sutras for about fifteen minutes, Monoi handed him one hundred and fifty thousand yen wrapped in paper. He had run out to the bank in front of Akigawa Station to withdraw the money, as a nursing home staff member had whispered to him, “Thirty thousand yen per letter should suffice.” When Yoshie died, it had cost him four hundred thousand yen for an eight-letter name, so it was a bargain this time.

It was past seven in the evening by the time these affairs had concluded, so instead of going home to Haneda only to come back the next morning for the cremation, Monoi decided to keep vigil at the nursing home that night. When he called the lady pharmacist, she peppered him with nosy questions—When did he die? How old was he? What will you wear to the funeral?—and hounded him that since it was family, for the sake of appearances he should at least close shop during the mourning period, until Monoi finally told her, “Then go ahead and take the day off tomorrow,” and quickly hung up the phone, only to realize, Ah, the morning glories will wither and die.

Next, he made three more calls. The first one was to Ota Manufacturing in Higashi-Kojiya. Between the recession and the fact that it was almost the Obon holiday, the factory wouldn’t have been running, but Yo-chan always lingered there alone until the wee hours, because he said it was cooler than in his apartment. Sure enough, Yo-chan answered the phone. When Monoi asked him what he was doing, he replied simply, “TV.”

Monoi explained the reason he was calling. “I’d like to meet with Katsumi Koh. Can you get in touch with him?”

Without even asking what it was about, Yo-chan replied, “I’ll give you his cell phone number,” and read the number to him.

“So, what are you doing over the Bon holiday?”

“Nothing.”

“I’ll come by tomorrow night for a little bit, if you don’t mind. Do you want anything?” Monoi asked, and Yo-chan immediately replied, “A new brain.”

Next, Monoi tried calling the number he had just been given. Around this time in the summer, the only time Monoi would bump into Koh was on the occasional Sunday at