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

a WINS off-track betting site in the city, and so with no idea where he might be or what he might be doing, Monoi heard him answer the phone, “Hello, Kowa Credit Union. This is Koh.” His voice was stiff and businesslike, quite different from what it sounded like at the racecourse.

“Sorry to disturb you. This is Monoi from the pharmacy,” he said.

“Oh, of course,” Koh replied, shifting into his salesman tone. “How can I help you?”

“Koh. That story I heard you talking about back in April at the racecourse in Fuchu. This old man has decided to give it some serious thought.”

“What story?”

“The one about milking money out of a big corporation.”

With that, Monoi hung up the phone. Then, he made his third call. This was also to a cell phone and he had no way to know the person’s whereabouts, but there was a ten-to-one chance he wouldn’t be tied up with work. When, as expected, he answered, “Handa speaking,” Monoi heard the background noise of a pachinko parlor.

“Seiji Okamura died today. This old man has a lot on his mind, but—here’s the question, Handa-san. Do you have any interest in squeezing money out of Hinode Beer?”

Amid the jingling of the pachinko machines Handa shouted back, “What? What did you say?”

“Back in April at Fuchu—you and Katsumi Koh were talking about it. We could do it just like you said. Why don’t we shake down Hinode Beer?”

Once Monoi repeated himself, Handa paused before answering and, for several seconds, there was only the noise of the pachinko balls clinking as they fell. Handa finally replied, “You do realize I’m a police detective?”

“Yes, of course.”

Monoi replaced the receiver. Despite having just concocted this plan, his first thought had been that—whatever the plan entailed—he was nothing on his own and he would need conspirators to carry it out. As he considered those in his circle, the faces of Koh and Handa were the first to surface in his mind—not because they had been the ones discussing how to extort a company. Monoi had a certain intuition when it came to judging a person’s character. Both Koh and Handa, if they were to go through with something, would do it as a crime of conscience. Monoi had intuited this aspect of their characters.

After making the necessary calls with a clerical efficiency that surprised even himself, Monoi returned to the wake room, where he sipped the to-go cup of saké he had bought that evening near the train station and smoked a cigarette. There was no trace of the sudden vicissitudes of emotion that immediately followed his discovery of Seiji’s body, and even though he had been ruminating on how to go after Hinode Beer, he showed no sign of any significant change that had occurred within him.

His discovery of Seiji’s corpse had dragged Monoi into a dark tunnel, and in reality, emerging from that tunnel and arriving at Hinode Beer was not such a leap for Monoi; rather, it underscored the very uncertainty of life. After all, in this fleeting world where suddenly one day a wealthy dentist jumps in front of a train, or a brilliant scholar who graduated from Tohoku Imperial University dies in a nursing home with no one to bear witness, it was hardly a surprise for a former lathe operator who was about to turn seventy to now, out of the blue, come up with the idea of blackmailing a major corporation.

To avenge Seiji—this most seemingly plausible rationalization had quickly paled, and when he surveyed the scene anew, there was nothing other than that the money was there for the taking. In fact, Monoi couldn’t help but think he was destined to bring this about. However many years ago it was, he had contemplated the way of this world, with those who amassed their fortunes on one side and those whose diligent efforts supplied the capital for such wealth on the other, and yet, here he was, never having experienced any particular kind of awakening. The thought of giving in to the fiend seemed to suit him.

“Now that I think about it, Seiji-san, you were never one to talk about laborers’ rights or anything like that, were you? It seems I too lack the mind for such things, but then again I can’t resign myself to working like an animal.”

Monoi spoke to the coffin this way, and pulled open the lid of another to-go cup of saké.

“Where am I trying to go, I’m not quite sure myself, but no matter where I end up, all I have to worry about is myself. I no longer need the Shinto gods or Buddha. That’s what I think, anyhow.”

Monoi took off his shoes and settled into the sofa, working on his second cold saké. Now that Seiji had been placed in the coffin, his face as it was had begun to recede, as had the fact that until just half a day ago Monoi had intended to take custody of Seiji—that too had drifted away—and Monoi was once again engulfed by that familiar sense of hopelessness, pulled along by the current of time that turned murkier as it washed over him. And yet, thanks to the fiend enshrined deep within his belly, perhaps he felt a twinge of heat, as if there were a tumor growing inside him.

As he dozed off, leaving a bit of his saké unfinished, Monoi recalled the faces of his grandparents and parents and siblings back in Herai, sifting through them in his mind one by one as if turning the pages of a photo album. Strangely, even though until now he had always thought that everyone in his family—Seiji Okamura included—had the same indistinguishable, quiet mien, when he looked more closely, each face was imbued with its own severity, melancholy, or even a slight hostility, giving the overall impression of petty riffraff.

And as he turned another page in his memory, among the small-jawed, inverted triangular faces peculiar to Monoi’s family, there he was—Seizo at