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

making small talk and downing one or two cups of whisky, he would lay out a futon to sleep and then leave in the morning. In their university days Kano and Goda had been mountain climbing partners, but now they were both so busy that the mountains felt like a distant part of their lives, and for the last few years this had been the state of their relationship.

The man walking across the park disappeared in the direction of another apartment tower. Goda put away his violin in its case and stood up. It finally dawned on him that Kano had stopped by only the day before yesterday, and he chided himself for being so spaced out.

Goda returned to his housing complex at 9:45 p.m. and started his laundry. He switched on the television, opened the refrigerator, and after taking out a withered bunch of komatsuna greens and an expired packet of tofu and throwing them in the trash, he set a glass on a platform scale and poured 150 grams of whisky into it, then turned off the lights in the kitchen.

The veranda of his tiny apartment faced east, over the elevated Bayshore Route of the Shuto Expressway, and beyond it the Shinagawa switchyard was steeped in expansive darkness. Among the sounds he could hear were the wind blowing across the landfill, cars speeding over the Shuto Expressway, steel doors opening and closing in a hallway somewhere, and the scattered echoes of children’s cries.

The television that Kano had given him for his birthday last year came with an antenna and a receiver for satellite TV, but since there was a fee for every channel, he had only subscribed to the sports channel and the BBC. Kano had told him he should at least try to keep up his English whenever he didn’t feel like doing anything else, but that wasn’t why he watched it—rather, he would give in to boredom and flip it on, listening halfheartedly to the news from overseas that he could care less about, or watching J-league soccer games so he could make small talk at work.

With his whisky in his left hand, Goda sat down on the tatami floor and gazed at the screen for a while and, pulling a few of the books scattered on the writing desk toward him with his right hand, he debated which one he should crack open. The chapter on “Art of Fugue” from the first volume of Glenn Gould’s collected writings would be his sleeping aid before bed. He would save Discourse on Commercial Transactions for another time. He still could not sing any of the songs in 100 Easy Karaoke Songs, which he had purchased out of a sense of social obligation. Then, his eyes fell on the March issue of Nikkei Science, but when he tried to drag it out the mountain of books came toppling down. He gave up on reading anything and for the moment turned his attention back to the world business report playing on the television, then in the margin of the magazine he jotted down the English word he had just heard, “squabble.” He pulled out a dictionary from the collapsed pile of books and checked the definition, and by the time he opened the magazine and started reading an article entitled, “The Birth and Death of V1974—A Nova in the Constellation Cygnus,” it was exactly 10:20 p.m.

V1974, which had erupted three years ago, was the only nova in the history of astronomy that could be observed from its onset to completion, and this recording had bolstered significant parts of the theory that novae eruptions occurred in a binary system consisting of two stars of dissimilar masses. While reading about the nuclear fusion that involved otherworldly mass, temperature, and speed, Goda’s mind emptied again and he managed to finish off about a third of his glass of whisky.

When he had been transferred to the precinct police department, Goda had considered starting a brand new life—both mentally and physically—but in the end he couldn’t afford to actively study for the certification required for a future job. Instead, he bought a new violin with the money he had been saving up for a car and started playing around with the musical instrument he had not touched since his divorce, but even that remained nothing more than hobby that barely took up an hour of his time. At the end of the day, he often fell into an unthinking void, and he would find himself idly gazing at nothing.

Even now, Goda realized that his mind was empty. After grasping around for something, he thought of Kano, whom he had seen only the day before yesterday, but he quickly thought better of it since Kano was always swamped with work and never seemed to have anything urgent to share with him.

Goda tossed aside the copy of Nikkei Science, and briefly gazed at the television screen again. There was a story about the management of nuclear power plants stemming from the privatization of electric companies in England. He scribbled the word “grid” on the back of the magazine closest to him, and just as he reached for the dictionary, the phone rang.

Lifting the receiver, out of habit he checked the time—10:55 p.m.

It was the officer on duty in his precinct’s Criminal Investigation Division. “About five minutes ago, we got a hundred-ten emergency call about a missing family member.” As he listened, Goda switched off the television with the remote control. “We sent an officer from the police box in front of Omori Station and there seems to be something wrong, so could you go check it out?”

“What’s my partner doing?”

“There was a burglary in Omori-Minami just a while ago, so he’s headed there. I’ll give you the address now, are you ready? It’s Sanno Ni-chome, number sixteen. Single-family home. The missing person is the husband, his name is Kyosuke Shiroyama. The person who made the hundred-ten call is his son, Mitsuaki Shiroyama.”

Goda mechanically wrote down Ni-16,