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

quick for an ordinary employee of a local credit union. On another hand, he had always known that Koh’s job with the credit union was only temporary or a cover of some sort, so there was no reason to be surprised. What mattered was which face Koh would expose from behind his cover in response to Monoi’s provocation to “squeeze money out of a corporation.” Monoi had to know what, if anything, Koh had said to Yo-chan.

Anxious to find out, Monoi said slyly, “Say, what would you do if you had money?”

“I would buy a large burial plot, pay off the fees for permanent use, and build a solid tomb. I don’t know who my ancestors are, so I don’t have a family gravesite,” Yo-chan replied. His expression remained as inscrutable as ever, and Monoi could not tell if he was serious or not.

“All you want is a grave?”

“If you mean something you can buy with money, then yes.”

“Maybe I’m too old to understand what you’re saying.”

“What about you, Monoi-san? What would you do if you had money?”

“I don’t know. I already have a grave . . .”

“You can spend all your money on horseracing.”

“I suppose so.”

While he picked at the grains of rice stuck to the side of the bento box, Yo-chan breezily cut to the heart of the matter as if he were making small talk. “You’re taking money from a big corporation, right? I heard from Koh.”

“I’m just thinking about it, that’s all.”

“But why now?”

“There’s no deep meaning behind it. It’s just that, as an old man, my life happens to have brought me to this.”

“I was shocked,” Yo-chan said after a brief pause, then turned on the television above the work desk. As the cheap set took its time to grow bright, the sound of the merry voices of talk-show celebrities blared out, one octave higher than normal.

Yo-chan stared at the people convulsing with laughter on the screen, his eyes hardly moving at all, while Monoi shifted his reading glasses as he surveyed the faces, which seemed indistinguishable from one another.

“Is this the comedy duo Downtown?”

“No, Tunnels.”

“Same difference.”

“Monoi-san. Are you really taking money from a company?”

“I’ll decide after I discuss it with Koh.”

“Are you quitting horseracing?”

“No. This old man’s life won’t change at all, I don’t think.”

“I guess I have no imagination.”

Monoi knew that Yo-chan meant that he couldn’t understand because he had no imagination. Once he had cleared away the bento boxes and the empty cans, Yo-chan returned to sharpening his cutting tools, leaving the TV on.

Meanwhile, Monoi thought about how, when this idea about a corporation first came to him, he had not given any thought to Yo-chan’s existence, and he felt a little dismayed by the many trivial details that had eluded his initial calculation. It was irresponsible of Koh to leak the story to Yo-chan so quickly; Monoi had forgotten that if he were going to do anything, there would be a mountain of issues—including gossip—that he needed to take care of first. Then again, considering that this was not something a good person would undertake in the first place, he decided that the wellbeing of others was beyond his concern.

“Yo-chan. This is my own personal matter.”

“I’m not gonna tell anyone.” His head was bent over the whetstone. “Anyway, when Koh gets here, okay if I listen?”

“What for?”

“I want in.”

“You’ll ruin your life.”

Yo-chan, pretending not to hear, did not reply. After a while, as if he had suddenly remembered it, he asked what was the proper message to write on the decorative noshi gift tag when sending an offering to the surviving family members for the first Obon holiday after someone’s death. Monoi instructed him to write the characters for goku—a sacrifice.

When Katsumi Koh came by it was past nine in the evening. He was clad in a suit and carrying an attaché case, and it was obvious he was on his way home from work. His appearance was entirely different from that of the man they saw at the racecourse, but with his mumbled, “Damn, it’s hot,” and the way he yanked off his necktie as he walked in, he had assumed the same inscrutable façade of the Koh they knew.

“Monoi-san, when you called yesterday I was in a meeting.” After giving this excuse, Koh downed the beer that Yo-chan handed him and, taking out the bag of rice crackers he kept in the drawer of Yo-chan’s work desk, he said, “I can’t eat much during the summertime,” and popped a handful of the rice crackers in his mouth. Watching him, Monoi had the sense that this really was Koh’s lifestyle, and since nothing about him suggested he normally went out drinking around Ginza, it seemed to him that Koh wasn’t kidding when he said he usually spent his nights fiddling with his computer or reading a book. Tonight, Koh had arrived true to form, with his salaryman face on. Monoi wondered if this meant that Koh had heard his talk of corporate extortion with his businessman’s ear.

“I called you out of the blue, it must have been a surprise,” Monoi said.

“Not really. Compared to what we money lenders do everyday, shaking down a company is nothing,” Koh said bluntly. He looked every bit as nonchalant as his remark indicated.

“Huh. Is that so?”

“As long as you don’t give a damn about the morality, it’s best to go straight to stealing the money. That way everything will match up for accounting.”

Monoi remembered now that he had heard Koh himself say a number of times how, until an incident like a bank run forces them to suspend operations, a financial institution never knows their final income and expenditure. If the borrower of a hundred-million-yen loan were to struggle with their financing and run into problems paying interest, the financial institution would simply give them an additional loan equivalent to the amount of interest owed, thereby increasing the total loan amount. Then finally, if the borrower were to fall behind on their principal