Lady Joker, Volume 1

by Kaoru Takamura

  “I don’t see how this nonsense relates to myself or my son.”

  “You call this nonsense? Of course, Hinode’s current management has abandoned their preferential treatment of particular universities, and they’ve been actively hiring foreigners and people with disabilities, so I’m sure outwardly they seem like an enlightened, liberal company. However, that’s different from the problem with your son. Just when they are getting nervous about the whole Ogura issue, to receive a letter like this is . . .”

  Nishimura waved the thick bundle of paper even more energetically before Hatano’s eyes. But it was still a letter written by a complete stranger whose name he had never heard of, and the talk of some transportation company and this bank seemed even more remote.

  “I told you, I don’t know any man named Okamura.”

  “Tell that to Seiji Okamura. Believe me, there’s no human resources manager who wouldn’t be troubled by a letter like this.”

  “Did Hinode’s representative say something about this letter to my son?”

  “The answer to that question is this: however Hinode dealt with your son, so long as this letter is addressed to Hinode—never mind that it’s from forty-three years ago—Hinode can’t just say they don’t know anything about it. You get what I’m saying?”

  “I don’t.”

  Hatano shook his head, and for the first time Nishimura contorted his mouth a little into a faint smirk, but his eyes still did not move. “A well-bred man like you, doctor, doesn’t stand a chance against a corporation, no matter how you try. Before sending two half-hearted letters to Hinode, I might have suggested you hire a lawyer.”

  “Where did you see the first letter?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Did someone from Hinode call you about the second letter?”

  “Well, you’re free to presume whatever you like. In any case, a business has the right to defend itself. At a time like this they would never think of hiring the relative of a man like Seiji Okamura—no matter how distantly related. Even if it’s a one-in-a-million chance, your son could be Seiji Okamura’s heir. The company would never take on such a risk. As you will understand when you read this letter, Okamura-san clearly criticizes a company called Hinode. Even if it is by coincidence, he also refers to the journalist who is poking around Ogura Transport, a company at the center of this whole mess. That’s it right there—you’re out.”

  “Are you a Hinode spy?”

  “Why would you say that? I’m only taking the time to tell you all this so that you don’t misdirect your anger. Besides, there’ll be trouble if you go on using the BLL’s name.”

  “If there is a right direction, I’d like you to tell me.”

  “As I said before, whatever the reason your son decided to leave in the middle of his second interview with Hinode, Hinode has a lot of stories they would rather not have dug up. That’s where this letter comes in.”

  Nishimura placed the sheaf of paper on the table for the first time and pushed it toward Hatano.

  “It’s a copy, but it’s yours to keep. At this time Hinode would no doubt react sensitively to a letter of this nature. I suggest you do as you please. But, I ask you to keep the source of this letter confidential.” The words were barely out of his mouth before Nishimura and his silent companion stood up from the sofa.

  “How much?”

  At Hatano’s question, Nishimura’s eyes flickered like a dark blade, as if he had been waiting for just this moment.

  “I could have you write us a check for ten or twenty million yen right here, you know? But I’m afraid we’re not in the business of taking money from amateurs. More importantly, you’re a rich man, doctor, so I’m sure you play around a bit with stocks. If you own any Hinode stock, I suggest you sell it in the near future. I promise you this: Hinode stock will plummet very soon.”

  As Nishimura said these last words, the look of a seasoned yakuza flashed across his face, and then he left with his associate.

  For a long time, Hatano stared at the thick bundle of paper on the table. The photocopy itself was new, but it looked as if the original document had been repeatedly duplicated using a blueprint process, and perhaps because the original letter was written in pencil, the letters were blurry and rubbed away so that he had to hold it up close in order to decipher them. At the top, the letter read: Hinode Beer Company, Kanagawa Factory. To Whom It May Concern.

  With grim determination, Hatano began flipping through the pages. One, two, ten, twenty, thirty-one pages of stationery covered with thin, meticulous characters. On the thirty-first and last page was the date, June 1947, and the signature of Seiji Okamura.

  Seiji Okamura. After ruminating on the name he had never even heard before, Hatano put down the letter for the time being and grabbed the telephone receiver. He dialed the number of their vacation house in Oiso, and after about a dozen rings, he heard his wife’s curt “Yes?” as if she already knew the only person it could be on the other end of the line.

  “Do you know a man named Seiji Okamura?”

  “Who?”

  “Seiji Okamura. He’s one of your father’s brothers.”

  “My father’s last name is Monoi. Don’t be stupid.”

  He was unaffected by the abrupt phone conversation. After setting the receiver down, Hatano brought out a dictionary from his study and began to handle each page of the letter again as he would a stack of patient charts. He looked up the reading of each arcane character he was unsure about in the dictionary and meticulously noted the proper reading in the margin.

  The author of the letter began with the words, “I, Seiji Okamura . . .” and first explained how someone who had left the company came to write a letter to that very company. There was mention of a man named Noguchi who had also left Hinode for some reason before the war, and of how Okamura’s relationship with this Noguchi caused him to fall under the scrutiny of the police and the company—allusions that made Hatano, the son of a liberation committee activist, perk up with recognition.

  Okamura proceeded to talk about his birthplace, revealing the geographical features of a village that was apparently near Hachinohe in Aomori prefecture, the lifestyle during the early Showa era in the 1920s, his family structure, and the whereabouts of his brothers and sisters. According to the letter, Okamura was the second oldest of four siblings, and he had one older brother and a younger sister and brother. The eldest son died in the war, so his younger brother—the one with the disability in his left eye who became an apprentice at the foundry in Hachinohe at the age of twelve—must be Hatano’s wife’s father, Seizo Monoi. As he continued to read, Hatano tried to picture the man’s face. Hatano had seen him three weeks ago at his son’s funeral, but his mind had been far away at the time, so between that and the fact that he had had very little contact with him previously, Monoi’s face was blurred in his mind, his features indistinct.

  According to the letter, Okamura was adopted into a wealthy merchant family, and after graduating from Tohoku Imperial University without any difficulty, he joined the research lab of Hinode’s Kanagawa factory, was conscripted to the front just like everyone else, and later demobilized and sent home. In his life immediately after the war, Okamura diffidently and somewhat feebly called himself a “laborer.” Hatano did not know what it felt like to identify as such, but he could at least understand that at the time the letter was written, the position of a “laborer” was in direct confrontation with that of a capitalist. Then again, Okamura seemed more like a forerunner of the era of union-management cooperation that began in the early 1960s, more than a dozen years after the letter was written, one who should have been welcomed by those company men, and so he was quite different from the “laborers” that Hatano remembered. Hatano could faintly recall the general strike of February 1, 1947, but in his memory his father appeared with a white headband around his head, going off to libe
ration committee meetings and canvassing door-to-door day after day, shouting and yelling in a way that made him seem like a stranger.

  Meanwhile, Okamura had written with startling naïveté about his interaction with this man Noguchi from a segregated buraku community whom he had met at the Kanagawa factory before the war. Okamura seemed at that point to have finally learned about the existence of discrimination for the first time, yet he still languished in the realm of confusion—even the part where he questioned how Hinode’s Kyoto factory wrongfully terminated those other three employees from the segregated buraku community was far from what could be called criticism against the company. If anything, until the very end, Okamura seemed to consider Noguchi and the others “Hinode employees” just like himself, even going on about how moved he was by the brilliant life force of Noguchi, whom he encountered again in Tokyo in late 1946. His perspective, which seemed to empathize deeply with the human condition, could not be more different than that of an activist.

  No, it was utterly different . . . Hatano murmured to himself. The same day in late 1946, when Okamura said he had run into Noguchi at Hamamatsucho train station in Tokyo, Hatano’s father would have also gone there to attend the liberation committee’s national convention, which was held nearby in Shiba. For the first time in his life Hatano tried earnestly to picture that distant day. By then, his father bore no trace of the handsome young man his mother had fallen for so passionately. In the eyes of the triumphant man who walked along the platform of Hamamatsucho Station—nostrils flaring, his flushed face now almost indistinguishable from the other activists who had also absorbed the lessons of socialist textbooks—the sight of a man like Okamura, his head hanging down and deep in self-reflection, would not have even registered. The same would have gone for that guy Noguchi—Okamura would not even recognize him once they had parted ways and Noguchi went to join the convention, donning the look of an activist. No, Seiji Okamura was unlike any of his contemporaries.

  When it came down to it, this Okamura was but one of the many former employees who, though one day they were encouraged to resign and indeed left Hinode, still couldn’t cut their ties to the company. What’s more, the poverty of his family, the company, the war, his illness—all of it was simply reduced to his personal experience, not once did he try to place himself in the context of society or history. For this reason, the writer himself could only barely make out the miserable workings of his life that were apparent to the reader of the letter. And, in contrast to the hundred million Japanese people of his generation who frantically struggled to survive each day, he was nothing but a pallid, highbrow man who had been left behind by the changing times. When Hatano sketched this vague portrait of the author of the letter in his mind, he was shocked to realize that his own perspective fell on the side of the activists like his father and Noguchi. This was something he never would have imagined. It stood to reason that the blood of those born in the segregated buraku communities and socialists coursed through his veins, while the blood of this aimless Okamura flowed through his wife’s. What a joke!

  But wait. Didn’t this also mean that this Okamura’s blood ran through his dead son’s veins too? Faced with a glimpse of discrimination for the first time in his life, had Takayuki been simply confounded, lacking any opinion about society whatsoever? And then, swept up by external forces, did he lose his way, his solitary thoughts languishing in confusion, until he sped off in his car and crashed to his death?

  No, hold on. Perhaps Hatano himself was the one who resembled this pathetic invalid Seiji Okamura. Despite the location of his birth in Kobe, he himself held no such historical or societal opinions, and even after losing his son, when he first recognized all this to be “discrimination,” he had kept his distance, and then the ineptitude with which he had sent those libelous letters, not even knowing his own intentions—were his actions not exactly like Okamura’s . . . ?

  Hatano set down the sheaf of pages and turned it over. Starting afresh, he emptied his mind and, one by one, reexamined each new piece of information that had come his way during these past few hours.

  First, there was the fact that a letter addressed to Hinode from forty-three years ago, which had been copied repeatedly, still remained in the hands of a stranger. The existence of this version of the letter, which the company never would have released, could only indicate either sinister intent or criminal behavior.

  Next was the question of whether or not this issue with Noguchi and the three wrongfully terminated employees in the letter still held any significance. If Nishimura, who claimed to be associated with the BLL, was right and Hinode still considered one of those three men to be persona non grata, that would mean that the contents of the letter were still very relevant.

  Furthermore, had Hinode truly hesitated to hire Hatano’s son because of this letter? Nishimura had implicitly advised him to use this letter from the past to blackmail Hinode, but what Hinode had actually done to his son had yet to be established.

  And finally, where and from whom did Nishimura hear about the two letters Hatano had sent to Hinode, or the fact that his son left in the middle of his second interview? Nishimura’s business card said he was an executive of the Tokyo chapter of the BLL, but he had not made a single claim for the BLL itself. He wasn’t that kind of associate. There was no shortage of people out there who claimed to be a part of an organization for social integration or working to end discrimination against burakumin—the caste of descendants of segregated communities—but that wasn’t it, either. Just who was he? Where did he come from, and what had he come here for?

  Hatano mulled this over for about five minutes, but ultimately failed to reach any conclusion. After all, for Hatano, whose world consisted only of universities, academic conferences, dental societies, and tennis, five minutes was enough to ponder one thing or another, and once he was at an impasse there was nothing else to do. His apathy resurgent, Hatano glanced once again at the bundle of paper and now wondered what could have happened to Seiji Okamura, a man whose blood may have coursed through Takayuki’s veins.

  Hatano suddenly sprang up from his seat and went to look for the phone book. He searched for a telephone number he himself had never once called in the past twenty-some years. It wasn’t until he had already picked up the phone and dialed that he glanced at the clock. It was three minutes before midnight. As he wondered if it was too late to be calling, the phone had already started ringing, and someone answered right away.

  “Yes, this is Monoi.” A raspy voice. In the background, there was the sound of the television.

  “I’m sorry to call you so late. This is Hatano.” Once he identified himself, the voice on the other end of the line responded with a note of surprise.

  There was a momentary pause, as if they each needed to picture the face of the other. Even though they were in-laws, prior to the funeral they were barely acquainted with one another. Then Seizo Monoi asked, “Have things settled down for you?”

  “Ah, yes, thank you. I’m surprised you are awake at this hour.”

  “Yes. Well, when you get older, you drift off while watching TV . . .”

  “I’m sorry for the rude question so late at night, but is Seiji Okamura your older brother?”

  “If you mean Seiji Okamura of Okamura Merchants in Hachinohe, then yes.”

  It was Hatano’s turn to be at a loss for words. “The dental association had a social gathering, and a couple of older doctors there were talking about being in the military during the war. One of them mentioned an army buddy by the name of Seiji Okamura, and I thought he may have been a member of the family on your side . . .”

  “I see. And what about Okamura?”

  “When I asked my wife, she said she didn’t know him.”

  “Oh, yes. I have never spoken about him to my daughter. Another family adopted him before I was born, and I myself barely know anything about him. I met him a few times in Hachino
he, but that was over fifty years ago.”

  “Is that right? This older doctor was wondering how Okamura might be doing these days.”

  “My older sister and her husband who take care of the family home in Herai told me he passed away. I think it must be have been in 1952 or ’53.”

  “Oh . . . Well, I guess when you lose your son, you start to wonder about family, even distant relatives. By the way, do you still go to the racetrack?”

  “Uh, yes. I’m ashamed to admit it, but when I’m watching the horses, I can forget about the bad stuff.”

  “If there’s ever a time, I would like it if you could teach me how to place a bet. Well, I’m sorry to have bothered you so late. Please take care of yourself.”

  “Yes. Same to you.”

  After the perfunctory conversation ended and he’d hung up the phone, Hatano was struck with a strange and fleeting sensation. Born from the same womb as Seiji Okamura, and with his voice appropriately hushed for the late hour, Seizo Monoi sounded the way Hatano imagined Okamura himself would sound.

  Holding the thirty-one-page letter bundle in his hand, Hatano left the living room and went into the room his son had occupied until the beginning of summer. The eight-mat space was organized to the point of starkness. There were only drably colored textbooks and a few fishing magazines on the bookshelf. There were no pictures of celebrities on the walls, and when Hatano had gone through the closet a few days ago, he had not found even a single provocative magazine. It was a room of a twenty-two-year-old honor student—too serious, too carefree, too inexperienced—and yet he had hidden away something he could not even tell his parents.

  Hatano sat down at his son’s desk in front of his PC, opened the drawer, and pulled out a Walkman and a brand-new cassette tape still sealed in plastic. He checked the device, which he had used at dental meetings but not anytime recently, to make sure that the power still worked and that the tape was feeding properly. Then he laid the letter bundle on the desk, folded the corner of each page so that they would be easy to turn, and fanned them out in a row. Listening for noise outside the curtained window, he realized that it was past the hour of the last train on the Odakyu line that ran 300 meters south of his home, and that the clamor of the streets around the train station had long dissipated. From time to time he heard sounds of the exhaust from cars on Seijo Street, but he figured that they were not loud enough for the Walkman’s small microphone to pick up.