Lady Joker, Volume 1

by Kaoru Takamura

  First published in Japanese under the title Redi jōkā (レディ・ジョーカー)

  Copyright © 1997 by Kaoru Takamura

  English translation copyright © 2021 by Marie Iida and Allison Markin Powell

  This English language edition is published in arrangement with

  Shinchosha Publishing Co., Ltd. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either

  are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

  to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events,

  or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First English translation published in 2021 by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  227 W 17th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Takamura, Kaoru, author.

  Powell, Allison Markin, translator. | Iida, Marie, translator.

  Title: Lady Joker / Kaoru Takamura ; translated from the Japanese by

  Marie Iida and Allison Markin Powell. Other titles: Redi joka. English

  Description: New York : Soho Crime, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020032998

  ISBN 978-1-61695-701-8

  eISBN 978-1-61695-702-5

  Classification: LCC PL862.A42295 R4313 2021 | DDC 895.63/5—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032998

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Dramatis Personae

  岡村清二　Seiji Okamura

  Former employee of Hinode Beer

  物井清三　Seizo Monoi

  Pharmacy owner; Seiji Okamura’s younger brother

  半田修平　Shuhei Handa

  Police Sergeant working in Criminal Investigation, Violent Crime Unit at Shinagawa and later Kamata Police Department; Monoi’s friend and fellow horseracing fan

  高克己　Katsumi Koh

  Credit union employee; Monoi’s friend and fellow horseracing fan

  布川淳一　Jun’ichi Nunokawa

  Truck driver; Monoi’s friend and fellow

  horseracing fan

  松戸陽吉　Yokichi Matsudo

  AKA Yo-chan; lathe operator; Monoi’s friend and fellow horseracing fan

  レディ　Lady

  Jun’ichi Nunokawa’s daughter

  城山恭介　Kyosuke Shiroyama

  President and CEO of Hinode Beer

  倉田誠吾　Seigo Kurata

  General Manager of Beer Division and Vice President of Hinode Beer

  白井誠一　Sei’ichi Shirai

  General Manager of Business Development and

  Vice President of Hinode Beer

  杉原武郎　Takeo Sugihara

  Deputy Manager of Beer Division and Director of Hinode Beer; Kyosuke Shiroyama’s brother-in-law

  野崎孝子　Takako Nozaki

  Kyosuke Shiroyama’s secretary

  秦野浩之　Hiroyuki Hatano

  Dentist

  秦野美津子　Mitsuko Hatano

  Hiroyuki’s wife; Seizo Monoi’s daughter

  秦野孝之　Takayuki Hatano

  Hiroyuki and Mitsuko’s son

  杉原佳子　Yoshiko Sugihara

  Takayuki Hatano’s girlfriend; Takeo Sugihara’s daughter

  西村真一　Shin’ichi Nishimura

  Corporate underling of the Seiwakai,

  a large crime syndicate; extortionist

  田丸善三　Zenzo Tamaru

  Advisor to the Okada Association, a group of corporate extortionists

  菊池武史　Takeshi Kikuchi

  Representative of GSC, Ltd., an investment management company; former Metro desk reporter for Toho News’ Osaka bureau

  久保晴久　Haruhisa Kubo

  Metro desk reporter for Toho News, Tokyo bureau,

  in charge of Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department (MPD)’s First Investigation Division

  根来史彰　Fumiaki Negoro

  Metro desk reserve chief at large for Toho News, Tokyo bureau

  菅野哲夫　Tetsuo Sugano

  Metro desk chief for Toho News, Tokyo bureau,

  in charge of MPD

  神埼秀嗣　Hidetsugu Kanzaki

  Head of MPD’s First Investigation Division

  平瀬悟　Satoru Hirase

  MPD, First Investigation Division. First Special Investigation Team, Second Unit. Assistant Police Inspector.

  合田雄一郎　Yuichiro Goda

  MPD, First Investigation Division. Third Violent Crime Investigation Team, Seventh Unit. Later joins Criminal Investigation Division, Violent Crime Unit at Omori Police Department. Assistant Police Inspector.

  安西憲明　Noriaki Anzai

  Omori Police Department, Criminal Investigation Division, White Collar Crime Unit.

  Assistant Police Inspector.

  加納祐介　Yusuke Kano

  Public prosecutor in the special investigative department

  of Tokyo District Public Prosecutor’s Office;

  Yuichiro Goda’s former brother-in-law

  1947—Confidential Document

  Meeting Minutes (addendum)

  Regarding the item of this past June 10th, in which an employee from general affairs, who opened and read a letter addressed to our company at the Kanagawa factory determined that the letter, being incomprehensible in its argument and unclear in its purpose, contains baseless accounts that affect the honor of our company, and as such at the meeting of the board of directors it was considered how said letter should be handled, and a conclusion was reached that it required no special response.

  Regarding the “Communist Party member” referenced in the letter, Director of General Affairs Kuwata reported that, after consulting with the Shinagawa Police Department as a precautionary measure, he received a response that no such individual had been found.

  Kuwata will approve the disposal of the letter.

  August 1, 1947

  Recorded in meeting room of Shinagawa temporary office, Tokyo main office

  (Recorded by Hamada)

  Hinode Beer Company, Kanagawa Factory, To Whom It May Concern:

  I, Seiji Okamura, am one of the forty employees who resigned from the Kanagawa factory of Hinode at the end of this past February. Today, as I am currently confined to my sickbed and can hardly sit up or stand, and with ever so many things on my mind, I have decided to write this letter.

  First, what must be made clear is the true intention and the trajectory of how a person who has already left the company has come to address you in this manner.

  Recently, I heard from a certain individual to the effect that the Kanagawa branch of the Hinode labor union encouraged my resignation on the grounds of my medical ailment and need for rest only as a pretense when in fact they had been instructed to do so by the police. The branch was apparently advised that, “Since on last December 15th Okamura was seen with a former colleague somewhere in the Shiba district of Tokyo, such a subversive element should be made to resign quickly.” The person who conveyed this information to me was a man who was hospitalized in the surgical ward for appendicitis, a self-proclaimed Communist Party member by the name of Eiji Kono, but I do not know whether this is true or not.

  Seeing that I am indee
d ill at the present moment, I realize that even if such an event did not take place, the day of my resignation would have come sooner or later. Thus, whereas the “issue of last December 15th” can no longer have any effect whatsoever on my life, on the other hand when I think about the identity of my aforementioned “former colleague,” I am overcome with deep confusion and trepidation. My “former colleague,” that is to say Katsuichi Noguchi, himself resigned from the Kanagawa factory in 1942, but in the case of Noguchi, I know that his resignation took place with an unspeakable amount of disappointment and indignation, and that various circumstances transpired before and after.

  The reason I string together such abstract words is that, although I do not claim to wholly understand what is in Noguchi’s heart, today it occurred to me that in certain ways he and I share a great deal in common. First, we are both human beings; second, we are not political animals; and third, we are absolutely destitute. I write this because it is my earnest wish to tell you. It is not because Noguchi told me to do so. I write simply so that this poor soul, who still cannot fathom why he was born into this world, may end his life in peace in the coming days.

  Here, I will briefly describe where a person such as I was born, how I was raised, and how I find myself where I am. Memories of my home have recently been welling up inside me as if to stir my entire being, but in contrast to my feelings, the lackluster words that surface make me sound rather detached. Perhaps my sense of reason bottles them up to keep me from losing my mind.

  I was born in 1915 in the village of Herai in Aomori prefecture. My family home was in the Tamodai district of that same village. In addition to working as tenant farmers on about an acre of land, my family kept a broodmare offered on loan by the landowner. Since it was difficult to feed a family of eight by these means alone, my parents also assisted charcoal burners, though they were not part of the district’s Kita-Kawame union of charcoal burners. The reason for this was that in my family there was no money to purchase lumber for burning coal nor the luxury to hire men to help with logging.

  As is well known, the Tohoku region suffers from poor harvests once every three years or so, but the years 1931, 1934, and 1935 were especially hard hit with severe, continuous famine. Out of the four children in my family my elder brother did not attend school and, being the second eldest son, before I reached school age I was adopted by the family who operated Okamura Merchants Wholesale Seafood in Hachinohe, while my younger sister, at fourteen and not even halfway through her studies at Kawadai Secondary School, was employed at the Fuji Spinning Mill in Kawasaki. And my younger brother, who had a minor disability in his left eye, became an apprentice at the Kanemoto Foundry in Hachinohe when he was twelve. The truth was, since my birth family never owned any paddy fields in the first place, I doubt our situation would have been very different whether there was a famine or not.

  Furthermore, my older brother was drafted in 1937. He was assigned to the 108th Division and was killed in the Shanxi province of China in May of 1939. When his draft papers had arrived, my birth family was impoverished because of the stillbirth of a colt for the second year in a row, but I heard that before leaving for war, my brother asked them not to part with the mare until his return. I can only narrate these things through hearsay, of course, since by that time I belonged to a different family.

  Although I have always been scrawny in stature and was never a very active child, in the Okamura family I was cherished as their heir. However, life does not work out so easily. After the sudden passing of my adoptive mother, Ikuko Okamura, in 1929, my adoptive father, Yaichiro, remarried and immediately had a son, and there was no longer a place for me. Nevertheless, thanks to this turn of events I was given permission to focus on my education, which I liked very much. After graduating from Hachinohe Middle School and Daini High School, I enrolled in the department of science at Tohoku Imperial University, and during the time I was living in Sendai, the destitution of my birth home was already a distant memory.

  As I write this, I realize it may seem as if my life to this point had been rather blessed, but in two ways, this was not the case. First, my body always remembered poverty—the life of a prosperous merchant family never sunk in physically. Second, no matter whether I was in the village of Herai or the town of Hachinohe, to my eyes it all appeared as a frigid scene where the cold wind from the Pacific blew ceaselessly. When I returned to Hachinohe in 1942 after being called to war, activity was bustling all around. The people going to work on the construction of the Takadate airfield marched in line like ants along the bridge over Mabechi River, while on the embankment the factories of Nitto Chemical and Nihon Mineral belched out black smoke day and night, and the sounds of hammering echoed from the dockyards of Samé harbor and the Minato River as ships were hastily built. But neither this Hachinohe nor the briny, idyllic version from the past belonged to me in the first place. Memories of the village may have been stripped away from me once before, but now it is nothing but the gut-wrenching smells and sounds of my family home that return to me. Even just now, as I write this, the smell of the mare’s ass has risen in my throat. It is the smell of dung and urine mixed into straw on the earthen floor.

  I should add that where I come from, humans and horses slept under the same roof. There were no tatami mats—we usually spread straw or woven mats over the dirt floor. A home like this was called a rag house.

  By the way, Herai is a village where countless streams ebb and flow, originating in the mountains of Towada and carving the shape of the river, so it is not as if there are no paddy fields there. The gently sloping mountain terrain where the outline of Mount Hakkoda is visible on clear days is rich with green pastures, and since the late nineteenth century, the vast meadows of an army horse ranch have stretched over the entire forest region of Okuromori. It seems that even my birth family, in my grandfather’s time, managed to put up several horses that were procured for the military in the auction held in Gonohe. Not only was the area known as a breeding ground for horses but there was a union of dairy farmers as well and, if my memory serves me right, in the late 1920s the union operated its own milk processing plant. Moreover, as the foremost producer of charcoal in all of Aomori prefecture, there was a designated cargo platform at Hon-Hachinohe Station, and beside it stood a continuous line of charcoal storage facilities. Even now, sometimes in my dreams I hear the sound of freight cars transporting sacks of charcoal, and it awakens me with a chill.

  I am sensitive to sounds and smells. My doctor says I am suffering a nervous breakdown, but how can I ever escape from the sounds and smells of my birthplace? When I inhale, the various odors sequestered in that dirt floor cling to the hairs in my nostrils the way the cold wind from the Pacific coils around the gritty straw mats, and when I hold my breath, they seep in through every pore of my body. Every smell whirls inside my body—each of them whistling, cracking, and roaring—before settling into my empty stomach and finally growing quiet.

  I’ve spent a thousand nights like that, the hail or sleet just outside the wooden walls battered by the wind, humans and horses alike listening with shallow breath, father and mother weaving the charcoal sacks in silence, children pretending to be soldiers on the paths between rice paddies where day after day the raw grassy smell of the rice that failed to ripen was stifling, the aging mare’s head bent low in a corner of the earthen-floored room, grandfather and grandmother bowing their sooty faces as they stared at the glowing embers tapering off in the hearth. This is the life of horses and cattle with no notion of the future.

  I am simply trying to accurately describe the sounds and smells that make my body tremble, but no matter how many times I repeat these words, I am always defeated in the face of that futile and unchanging past. I battle with absolute silence and barren time, as immovable as the mountains to the south.

  Let us jump to the present. The main point of this letter is that my “former colleague” Katsuichi Noguchi and I are both human being
s. How Noguchi and I are alike does not need to be demonstrated here, but given the fact that both of us were employees of Hinode, perhaps first it would be best to write about what the Kanagawa factory meant to me. Doing so will naturally relate how the “issue of last December 15th” fits into this story.

  These days I suppose I am, from head to toe, what people call a ‘laborer.’ Although I will be the first to admit this, all my life I have been ignorant of worldly affairs, narrow-minded, and dedicated exclusively to my studies and research. During the war I was called an anti-patriot who lacked loyalty and devotion to the country, and when I was conscripted they told me, “Second-class soldiers should act as bullet shields.” Like many of my countrymen in the South Seas I tasted unimaginable trials and tribulations, and even though I managed to survive and return to my country, I was not all that interested in the establishment of basic civil liberties within a democracy. When suffering great need in my daily life, I was the type to think, Oh, as long as I can earn enough to eat, everything will be fine.

  It was for this reason that I only looked on from the sidelines at the various labor disputes that have occurred since last year, and even during the past general strike of February 1st, I ultimately failed to take my place as one of the six million laborers in the country. What I want to emphasize here first is that I was an ordinary citizen with no political beliefs or societal opinions whatsoever, and because of this, perhaps I was only ignorant of the state of oppression that I should have been fighting against while all along I could have been carrying water for the reactionaries. However, the remorse of anyone who falls into this latter group is irrelevant to someone like Katsuichi Noguchi.