Lady Joker, Volume 1

by Kaoru Takamura

  The phone rang again. The receptionist answered immediately, but the ringing was replaced by the sound of her low murmuring. Last month, he had taken a weeklong break after the sudden death of his son, who had been about to turn twenty-two. Although it had already been two weeks since Hatano reopened his office, there had been a backlog of over five hundred patients, and the phone still rang all day long with people calling to reschedule their appointments.

  Holding the small file between his thumb and index finger, he pushed the blade further as he moved it up and down. Just as his fingertip sensed that he was only one or two tenths of a millimeter away from the apex, a dry snap sounded at the end of the file he held in his hand. The patient, her mouth held open, yelped.

  Had he broken the file, or inadvertently pushed the sealer beyond the apex? Hatano knew the answer. In the next moment, he automatically picked up the X-ray photo and held it up to the halogen lamp above his head, but this was all a pose, just a diversion from his momentary confusion. Before the procedure, he had meticulously examined where and at what millimeter he would drill a hole, measured the rubber stoppers on the cutting instruments, and confirmed the position of the canals.

  “Owww . . .” The grimacing female patient let out a cloying complaint.

  “Hang on a little longer.” Hatano responded in a brisk tone that was neither harsh nor kind, and prompted the patient to open her mouth again. Hatano would be forty-seven, but just as his body, sculpted into shape by more than twenty years of tennis, had not changed over the years, his manner toward patients remained exactly the same as the day he opened his dental practice. The impression he gave could be described as a gentle coldness and, peering from above the mask that covered half his face, his eyes hardly even paused on the patient’s face as his gaze darted back and forth between the patient’s chart and oral cavity. And the face that looked out from his mask showed no trace of a man who had recently lost his only son.

  Hatano looked closely into the patient’s mouth. In the chamber of the molar from which he needed to remove the pulp, he had prepared a proper access with his dental drill. With twenty years of experience in dentistry, he had confidence in his drilling skills, and in fact, the problem was not with the size or shape of the opening. Perhaps the opening had offset the angle necessary for his reamer to find the proper glide path through the root canal, or he had made a simple mistake when calculating the working length. As he thought about this, his eyes fell on the instrument tray by his hand, and the No. 30 file he had just been using. The rubber stopper, which he thought he had placed firmly at a right angle when he first adjusted the working length, was now slanted diagonally.

  In that instant—before he could even register his own shock at the sight—Hatano averted his eyes. He thought someone else might have seen him, but the female assistant working across from him was looking away, still holding the suction in the patient’s mouth. His other assistant, taking a break from sterilizing instruments, was busy grooming her nails. Hatano threw the file with the crooked rubber stopper into the sharps container and picked up a new one.

  All he had to do was pass through the opening in the canal again. If he overfilled the canal, or pushed sealer beyond the apex, she might be in pain for a while, but as long as it did not cause any inflammation, there was nothing to do but leave it alone. If he had perforated the canal wall, he would have to repair this before he restored the tooth. Pondering what had happened with the self-reproach that always bubbled up inside him at a time like this, Hatano resumed filing and refocused his attention on the sensation at his fingertips.

  An infant was crying in the waiting room. The man coughed again. The phone rang.

  Once he had finally passed the No. 30 file through the opening, he stepped up to the next sized file, No. 40, and had just begun enlarging the root canal when the receptionist popped her head in from the other side of the partition. She looked as she often did when she was unhappy about something. “Telephone.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Someone named Nishimura.”

  “Ask for the number, please.”

  “He said he’ll wait.”

  “Never mind. Just ask for his number.”

  The receptionist retreated. Hatano exchanged the file for the reamer and began removing the pulp. Each time he pulled out the reamer, he wiped the dark red tissue that clung to the blade onto a piece of gauze.

  Even now, despite the precise, mechanical movement of his fingers, Hatano noticed that he was a bit distracted by the immovable fog that had filled the space just behind his brow since the death of his son. The fog had formed into an indeterminate mass, so that he could no longer distinguish his despair from his doubts, and he felt as though only a tiny tremor could make it explode. And who is this Nishimura, anyway?

  He finished cleaning and sterilizing the root canals, irrigating them with sodium hypochlorite. He called to his assistant to prepare the sealer, and inserted the gutta-percha into the canal before the temporary filling. Then he asked his assistant for the sealer but it did not arrive immediately. I told you to prepare it, he thought. Hatano put out his hand and waited three seconds. He took the ZOE cement that appeared on a glass slab, filled the pulp chamber with it, pushed it down, and, with the same hand, turned off the halogen lamp.

  “We’ll see how it goes for a while. It’s just a temporary filling, so be careful when you chew. If you feel pain, give us a call.” As he spoke these words to the patient, Hatano was already washing his hands at the sink. The only thing on his mind was the two minutes he had lost because he had to redo the root canal preparation. He wiped his hands, and even while he was filling out the patient’s chart, he locked eyes with the receptionist who had popped in her head again through the partition.

  “Doctor, telephone.”

  “Switch it over.”

  In the mere twenty seconds it took him to finish what he was writing on the patient’s chart and stand up, his next patient was already seated in the examination chair. With a quick glance at the fully occupied waiting room on the other side of the partition, Hatano retreated to his small break room and closed the door.

  “Dr. Hatano?” A man’s voice addressed him through the receiver. “My name is Nishimura.”

  “Nishimura who?”

  “I’m with the BLL.”

  What caught Hatano’s attention was not the abbreviation for the Buraku Liberation League but the slight weariness with which the man said, “I’m with . . .” His voice carried the tone of a relatively seasoned yakuza. But then Hatano immediately second-guessed himself. In downtown Kobe, where he’d lived until he was four years old, the officers at the police box near the house where he was born used to speak with the same languid inflection.

  “What is this about?”

  “The other day, a letter arrived at the human resources department of Hinode Beer. It listed the Tokyo chapter of the BLL as the sender, but apparently no one at that chapter has any knowledge or record of it.”

  As Hatano listened, he pondered idly: Who is this, where did he get this information from, and what is he trying to threaten me with? While he understood what the caller was implying, since the sudden death of his son, everything around him had lost the sense of reality, so that it felt as if he was listening to a distant voice on the radio. Indeed, only a few days ago, he himself had sent a letter to Hinode Beer claiming to be from the Buraku Liberation League, but he could no longer even recall the experience of writing such a letter.

  “What do you want?”

  “Doctor. You know there are such things as defamation and obstruction of business?”

  “Please tell me what this is about.”

  “We at the Tokyo chapter have also previously made demands on Hinode to improve their business practices, so we are fully aware what kind of company they are. But you, doctor, are a stranger to us. We don’t owe you anything that would account
for you using our name without permission. How about we talk this over in person?”

  “If that’s the case, I will state my apology in writing.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, doctor. We just want to be useful to you. Consider it solidarity among comrades burdened with the same suffering.”

  “You won’t raise your voice. You won’t put up libelous ads or distribute leaflets. If you can promise me these two things we can meet. I have patients to see so please come to my home at nine tonight.”

  “Then we’ll see you later.”

  After setting down the receiver, Hatano muttered to himself, “To hell with the BLL,” without even realizing that the words had spilled out of him. At the same time, he shivered with a dull pain that spread through his whole body. Hatano then promptly banished from his consciousness this physical reaction to the phone call. Out of habit, he checked his reflection in the mirror to make sure there were no traces of medicine or bloodstains on his white coat before adjusting his collar.

  I guess that’s what you call forgery, he thought. He had sent a query to Hinode Beer using the name of an organization with which he had absolutely no connection, so he had gotten what he deserved. Paying some amount in damages would be inevitable. Standing before the mirror, making these matter-of-fact decisions, Hatano’s consciousness drifted in a world that had lost all color, as it had these last three weeks, and soon the only thing he could be sure of was the unfamiliar, fuzzy sensation of the fog settled behind his brow.

  The actual time Hatano had spent taking the call amounted to no more than two minutes or so. Returning to the examination room, he automatically washed his hands, and without so much as a glance at the patient’s face, he apologized for the wait and quickly scanned the patient’s chart. The letters “fist” were scrawled across the page. Cleansing a fistula from an infected root canal. The second time today, he thought.

  “How’s the pain?” he asked the patient as he peered into the oral cavity and began to remove the temporary filling. The phone call was no longer on his mind. Instead, the image of his son’s head as he was laid out in the hospital’s morgue was stuck behind his eyes and refused to move. Except that it was not so much a head as a mass of crumpled flesh.

  The last patient left a little after eight in the evening, and Hatano locked up the office himself and returned to his fifth-floor apartment in the same building. The day after the funeral, his wife had fled to their vacation home in Oiso. Although she returned every now and then for a change of clothes, she left things in disarray like a bandit, taking only what she needed at the time. The apartment, now occupied by a single man, was hopelessly messy. In the pitch dark, Hatano first stepped on a mountain of newspaper, then on what felt like a cushion, until his hands fumbled around in the darkness and he finally managed to turn on a lamp. Next he washed his hands out of habit, without even glancing at his face in the bathroom mirror. He then returned to the living room and, once he had settled down on the sofa with a bottle of whisky and a glass in hand, there was nothing but the long night ahead.

  Just as it had been for the last three weeks, the only thing fixed behind his brow was the image of his son’s face, expanding and shrinking in turns, like an abscess building up the pressure in his blood vessels. The expression on his son’s face grew stranger to him with each passing day—rather than on the verge of saying something, the face merely stared at him. Hatano gazed back, occasionally wondering just whose face this was, and though he tried to jog back his memory to when the face was still familiar to him, he always failed. This pattern had repeated itself ever since the day of the accident.

  Three weeks ago, on October 15th, the phone call had come from the police after eleven o’clock at night. Through a clamor of voices on the other end of the line, a voice informed him that his son had been involved in a car accident, and before Hatano could even take a breath, the words that he had suffered a cardiac arrest followed. Hatano and his wife rushed to the Saiseikai Central Hospital in Mita, where a member of the ambulance crew told them that their son had died instantly, along with a whispered warning: “It’s best that your wife does not see the body.” His son had crashed into a wall near the Hamazakibashi junction of the Shuto Expressway’s Haneda Route at a speed of 100 kilometers per hour. The car was totaled; his son’s head had smashed through the front windshield and was mangled to the point where it looked like nothing more than a mound of dark red meat—were it not for the black hair he would not have recognized it as a human head. Under such circumstances, it was impossible for Hatano, as a parent, to comprehend that this was his son, Takayuki.

  And as a parent, his first question was what his son was doing speeding along the Haneda Route at 100 kilometers per hour so late at night. Hatano had bought a Volkswagen Golf for him three years ago on the condition that he would take it back if his son was ever caught speeding. Takayuki enjoyed driving it, but he wasn’t enough of a car lover to go for long drives every weekend. At the time of his death, his son had been spending his nights at the laboratory at the pharmaceutical department of his university, preparing his graduate thesis, so the Volkswagen had remained in the parking lot of their apartment building since before the summer, and even during the few times Takayuki had returned home for his recruitment exams with Hinode Beer, he had only turned on its engine to let it run.

  The last time Hatano saw his son was Thursday, October 4th, more than a week before the accident, the day his son came home for his first interview with Hinode. His son had been his usual self, and that night as they sat around the dinner table as a family, when Hatano asked how the interview had gone, his son sounded fairly confident as he said something to the effect of, “Companies have a lot more vitality than universities.” He spoke enthusiastically of how, once he was hired, he would continue his research on immunization at the lab in Hinode’s pharmaceutical business department, which had seen significant growth recently. Through the eyes of a parent, from his studies to his sound health to his good looks, Takayuki was above average in all respects, but since he had not known much hardship in life, Hatano felt it would be better for him to stay in graduate school than go to work for a major corporation, but that wasn’t enough reason to dare to refute the wishes of his grown son. He also figured that his son must have his own reasons for wanting to apply exclusively to Hinode Beer, so he had let the question pass without pressing it further.

  Then, Hatano himself left for a business trip from the eighth to the tenth, a dental surgery conference in Kyoto. According to his wife, his son had his second interview with Hinode Beer on the tenth, and after returning home briefly, he told his mother he had to go back to the lab to work on an experiment and left.

  His wife would later say that there wasn’t anything different about their son at the time, but on the sixteenth—the day of the wake—Hatano heard a story he would never have imagined from another student in his son’s pharmaceutical chemistry seminar. It was revealed to him that on the evening of the tenth, his son, who was supposed to have returned to the lab, called there to say he was sick, and that he had been absent from the seminar since the eleventh. Hatano felt utterly bewildered, as if, in addition to the accident on the Shuto Expressway, he had glimpsed another side of his son. And after the funeral on the seventeenth, he found, among the mail that had not been opened since the day of the accident, a letter from Hinode Beer.

  The envelope, postmarked on Saturday the thirteenth and delivered on Monday the fifteenth, was strangely thin. Inside, there was a single sheet of stationery that read, “We regret to inform you that we have rejected your application,” and so on. For a University of Tokyo student with a glowing letter of recommendation from his seminar professor, impeccable grades, no trace of ideological bias—on the science track no less—normally a rejection would have been unthinkable. The next day Hatano went to see the professor who had written the recommendation; he too seemed mystified, and told Hatano that on Friday the twelfth h
e received a courtesy call from Hinode informing him about the rejection. According to them, his son had scored nearly perfectly on his written exam, and although his first interview had gone smoothly, in the middle of his second interview he had apparently told them he did not feel well and had left, never to return.

  Well then, had his son truly fallen ill? Was it true that he left the interview? Assuming his son had lied, there must have been a reason why he needed to make up an excuse to get out of the interview, but what the hell could that have been? Was his son at fault, or did the blame fall on Hinode? As a parent Hatano considered many different possibilities, but common sense forced him to conclude that the fault lay with his son. In between Takayuki’s first interview on October 4th and his second interview October 10th, therefore, something drastic must have happened to his son.

  Hatano called every student in his son’s seminar, checked the phone records at home, looked at the passbook for the bank account where he deposited and his son withdrew his allowance, and searched everywhere in his son’s desk and closet, poring over his letters, notebooks, and belongings. As for his son’s expenditures, in June he purchased a fishing reel for his sea fishing trip, in July he spent five thousand yen for a party given by his lab, and in August and September there was a receipt for eight thousand yen for photocopying, and another receipt for twenty-six thousand yen for some books he had purchased. Until October 10th, there was no record of him missing his lab or seminar. His letters consisted only of a few greeting cards from a former high school classmate who was a particularly good correspondent. His notebooks were filled with lecture notes, with nary a doodle. Just in case, he also checked the communication record on his son’s PC, but aside from accessing his lab’s computer, there were no other addresses.

  So then, what else is left? Hatano considered the possibility of a girlfriend. Although he had never mentioned it to his parents, his son’s seminar friend informed him that his son seemed to have dated a few female students during his first two years, while he was at the College of Arts and Sciences on the Komaba Campus, and had continued seeing one of them until the summer of this year. But for a science student who spent his nights at the lab, there were limits to having a relationship, and considering his son’s personality, it was hard to imagine that his involvement with someone would have affected such an important business interview. In any case, could this female student he was only seeing until this summer really have been considered his girlfriend? Hatano scrutinized the register of funeral attendees, but none of the female names seemed to be likely prospects.