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

discernable emotion or inflection, and managed to communicate only one or two of the hundred things he could have said.

“Yes, it sure is.”

“By the way, I talked with Handa-san. I want in.”

“What’s your motive?”

“Do I need one?”

“Not necessarily, but I’m sure you’ve been thinking about a lot of things, too.”

“I just want to come to terms with my life.”

“What for?”

“I’m sure you can tell by looking at my life.”

“Your life? You’re a skillful driver, you earn six, seven hundred thousand yen a month, your wife is sick, and your daughter has a disability. So what? There are countless other lives just like yours.”

Monoi worried that Nunokawa might take offense and hang up the phone, but the line was still connected. Instead, he heard a guttural “Ah”—more like a yelp than a sigh—that seemed to have erupted from deep within Nunokawa’s body, and then, silence resumed. On the other end of the line, the crack of a baseball hitting a bat followed by children’s voices cheering and laughter resounded.

There was no rhyme or reason, it was not about happiness or the lack thereof—just that each person led their own fragile life. Nunokawa had said all along that his daughter would stay in a facility until she turned eighteen, but he had no idea how he would take care of her when she was in her thirties and forties. Even if there were plenty of other parents who took care of children with disabilities, as long as the person in question—Nunokawa himself—said he couldn’t do it, perhaps the impossible remained impossible.

Handa had said there was a possibility that Nunokawa might vanish, and Monoi guessed that could be what he meant by “coming to terms with his life.” Which was all the more reason Monoi needed to question him further. If he were to join them out of self-destruction, it could cause trouble for all of them.

“Nunokawa-san. Take your wife on a nice trip to a hot spring spa or wherever. We’re not going to pull this off today or tomorrow, so there’s no rush to give me an answer.”

“So long as the joker that I drew isn’t going anywhere, my answer’s not gonna change.”

“By ‘joker,’ do you mean Lady?”

“Who else would it be? Out of a thousand babies, there are only one or two jokers, and my wife and I, we drew one of them. Is there any other way to say it?”

A child born with a disability, a child who dies after crashing into the wall of the Shuto Expressway at 100 km per hour, Seiji Okamura, who suffered from mental illness, and Monoi himself, transformed into a fiend in his old age—of all the fates that fell down from the heavens, in the eyes of a parent, at least, Monoi could not deny that “joker” was a fitting description.

“Then she’s a Lady Joker,” Monoi said, and as if a levee had broken, laughter erupted from Nunokawa, which went on for a while, and then he hung up the phone.

As if she had been waiting for his long phone call to be over, the lady pharmacist shouted from the store, “Shall I cut up some watermelon?”

“A slice for the altar, please!” Monoi yelled back.

Before long, she came into the living room with three slices of watermelon on a tray. “Here we are,” she said. She sat down on the tatami floor and remarked, “That was a long call.”

“When your hearing starts to go, you have to ask them to repeat everything.”

“Your hearing’s starting to go, Monoi-san?”

“Your voice is loud, so I hear you just fine.”

Monoi offered a slice of watermelon for the altar, struck the gong, and joined his hands together. Seiji’s urn and memorial tablet had been left as they were—since the wake, there was still no word from Okamura Merchants in Hachinohe. If he didn’t hear from them before the equinoctial week, Monoi planned to bury Seiji in his family plot in Herai.

After polishing off the slice of watermelon that the pharmacist had bought on sale in the shopping district, Monoi stood up to water the sidewalk as he did every evening. She had gone out to the storefront before him, and had been chatting idly for nearly five minutes with a housewife from the neighborhood, giggling gaily. The housewife had been their customer for going on ten years. She always purchased the same stomach remedy and multi-symptom cold medicine, and now and then she would buy whatever she had forgotten to pick up at the supermarket—cough drops, bug spray, mosquito coils, talcum powder, cleanser, toilet paper, and so on.

The other patrons of Monoi Pharmacy were more or less the same. Under the management of an owner with no business acumen, the pharmacist did a good job; she recommended brands with high rebates for the customers, wangled beer coupons and gift certificates from the distributors’ sales reps and cashed them in at the voucher exchange shop, handing him his share: “Here’s your take for the day. Fifty-fifty.”

The profits from a small pharmacy on the outskirts of the city were negligible, but even after deducting the pharmacist’s pay and various other expenses, Monoi still brought in three million yen a year, give or take, and this combined with his pension was enough for a single man of sixty-nine to go on living comfortably.

The housewife, seeing Monoi come into the store, called out affably, “Oh, hello there. I’ve been wondering about you since I saw the notice that you were in mourning.”

“Yes. When you get to be my age, all you do is send people off,” Monoi gave a noncommittal response along with a shy smile, and after lowering his bowed head two or three times like a turtle, he walked outside.

Beneath the woven reed shade, the seedpods at the ends of the shriveled morning glories’ stems were beginning to swell. Monoi subconsciously tilted the right side of his face toward them, and stared at the seedpods with his good right eye. Making a note in his mental calendar to remove