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

he had run into just a few minutes earlier, the smoke and soot from the nearby factory—all of it had been erased from this face. Handa could only stare, deeply wounded by the sight of a face like this, and in that moment, his ears barely registered any sound. He recognized the music as something-or-other by Mozart, which he had heard from time to time at the coffee shop near his department, but whether the music was performed well or whether the players were in sync didn’t even reach his consciousness.

Handa was simply aware of the crucial distance between these two worlds separated by a single pane of glass, and for no reason at all he felt his skin prickle as he stood there stuporously. What he saw here was a spectacular absurdity, or perhaps the design of this world was fundamentally flawed. He considered this, but the truth was before he could give it any thought his knees began to buckle and, as if he were about to tumble into a fissure in the ground split by his own two feet, he walked away, reeling in despondency.

He passed back through the alley, and once he had reached Kanpachi, at last he felt the blood rushing back to his brain, which had started to work again dully. If their plan were to proceed as it now stood, a Special Investigation headquarters would be set up not in Shinagawa where Hinode Beer was located, but in the Omori Police Department, the precinct that covered the home of Hinode’s president in Sanno Ni-chome within its jurisdiction. Handa pondered the fact that if Goda were working in Omori now, it was inevitable that sooner or later they would meet again.

So, I will soon force a bitter medicine down that man’s throat. I will see that man turn blue in the face.

Handa thought—Yes, I’ve finally found that “something.” He never would have expected that “something”—so much bigger than the fantasies he had nurtured in the police force—to have arisen from a police inspector he had not seen for four years, but such was fate. As the vast haze of hatred and gloom—neither of which still held any meaning for him—suddenly started to coalesce around the man who had crossed his path, Handa tasted a fresh, hitherto unknown emotion. When it was the police force or a corporation, and there was no individual face to witness in agony, he might only attain an abstract sense of self-satisfaction, but now he knew that, more than anything, he would enjoy the sight of someone suffering right before his eyes. It wouldn’t be long until, inside the small office of the local police department where he had been demoted, that goody-two-shoes with his clear-eyed face would be sobbing, mired in defeat, frustration, and humiliation.

Upon each brick of the plan of attack that he had been constructing up to now, he applied the flesh and blood of this man named Goda, and feeling the plan beginning to pulse with a vivacity as real as something touching his own skin, Handa became euphoric. This is it, he thought. The reason I will commit this crime is because I yearn for this sensation.

PART THREE

Spring 1995

The Incident

1

Yuichiro Goda

On Monday, March 20, five thousand people were affected by a poisonous gas terror attack on the Tokyo subway during morning rush hour. The incident, widely rumored to be the work of a new religious sect, had occurred outside Yuichiro Goda’s precinct, but a comprehensive inspection of chemical agent manufacturers began the following day throughout the entire metropolitan area, including the Omori Police Department where he worked, and he ended his shift on Friday, March 24, after yet another day spent pounding the pavement.

Returning to his apartment in Yashio after nine in the evening, he grabbed his violin and immediately went back out. Playing every day—even when he only had half an hour to spare—had become a minor rhythm in his life over the past year since he had been transferred to the precinct police department. Why it had ended up being the violin rather than, say, jogging or bamboo sword practice remained a mystery, one that he had not even tried to solve. He only knew that what he truly wanted was not so much a routine in his life as time in which to think about nothing at all.

On a bench in Yashio Park near his home, Goda started by practicing his fingering, in accordance with the instruction manual on the Maia Bang method and as he had done thousand of times since he was a child. The part of his brain that was listening to each note was not his auditory cortex but most definitely the part that controlled his reflexes near the cerebellum, and as usual, before long his mind emptied for a brief respite. He was convinced that he didn’t do this out of necessity—this fact alone was what mattered—yet he was aware once again of his effort to turn himself into a machine. His own body was much more honest, however, and his fingers were soon too cold to keep moving, forcing him to put down his violin and rub his hands together. If it was this cold here, he thought, up in the mountains the heavy snow of early spring must be falling.

A lone man in a duster coat walked across the park, which had turned desolate after dark. Thinking it could be his old friend Yusuke Kano, Goda briefly followed the figure with his eyes.

Eight years had already passed since Goda divorced Kano’s younger sister, Kiyoko, but Kano, who worked as a prosecutor in the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor’s Office, was unable to reconcile his own delicate position as Goda’s former brother-in-law the way he managed to organize the documents in his office at work everyday. Even now, whenever the mood would strike, he dropped by Goda’s apartment in Yashio, which was closer to his office than his government employee housing in Setagaya, and after