Handa succeeded in controlling his immediate fury by passively observing this other self, head hung low as a shower of reprimands rained down.
“Don’t do it again,” Superintendent Miyoshi said tersely.
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry,” said Handa, bowing once.
“From today on, you’ll be in charge of a different case, under the command of Inspector Takahashi.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’ll be all.”
Handa bowed once more. Superintendent Miyoshi stood up and left the room to attend the investigation meeting. Handa watched him go, picturing the word “subservient” on his back, dangling like a worn-out doormat. Miyoshi was nothing more than a figurehead at these meetings, sitting with the department chief in the top-brass seats in front of the blackboard, keeping quiet and sitting still before the head of the first unit of Violent Crime who had deigned to be there from MPD.
As soon as Miyoshi was gone, Inspector Takahashi from the White Collar Crime Unit, to whom Handa was reporting as of today, called out to him.
“Handa. Wait for me downstairs. I’ll be right there.”
“What’s the case, sir?”
“Defamation and obstruction of business.”
The charges didn’t register with him. All Handa could think as he bowed and left the room was, So that’s it for me as a violent-crime detective.
But once he was out in the hallway, his innate obstinacy kicked in, and he couldn’t stop wondering why he had strayed from his assigned territory. When the pawnshop idea occurred to him that day, it had merely been the stimulus. He knew that for a long time now, something inside him was ready to burst.
Shortly after the start of the investigation, headquarters had presumed that the suspect had walked into and out of the park where the crime had taken place. This was because there was nowhere to park a car in the surrounding alleys. If the suspect either lived or worked near the scene, there was a certain distance he could have walked. Say that distance could be covered in at most five minutes, and there were a limited number of residences and businesses within the designated area. At the very least, that line of thinking made it clear early on that there would be no suspicious persons in the eastern section assigned to Handa. Even just hypothetically, it was not impossible that the suspect might have occasionally gone to the large park on the landfill to take practice swings, but what it came down to was that the entire district to the east of the crime scene, including the landfill, had always been outside the scope of the investigation, and Handa’s team, assigned to investigate that very area, had been ignored from the onset.
His team never had anything to report at the morning and evening meetings, and as soon as Handa started to speak, “We, uh—” the head of the seventh unit from MPD who led the meeting would often interrupt with, “Next,” and move on. Another time, Handa had run into a sergeant from the same seventh unit at the entrance to the police department, and who knew what the guy was thinking as he muttered in disgust, “You guys get an afternoon nap, don’t you?” The truth was, Handa had just inadvertently let out a yawn.
It was all because of those futile weeks. Handa concluded as much for now, but there was no guarantee that those fruitless days would not lead to still more fruitless years. More than any immediate remorse, Handa was conscious of the muck that was spreading around his feet and seized by a sense of powerlessness—that by just standing there he would sink even further. This is worse than usual, he thought. Even the usual daydream that would come to him at a time like this seemed dead and gone.
Just as Handa had started to descend the stairs, he saw the investigators who had come out from the meeting room on the second-floor landing. As usual, the meeting must have ended in a matter of minutes. The investigators were just about to disperse down the stairs, paired off to their respective assigned districts. Among them, Handa saw his colleague Kimura, who had been his partner up until yesterday.
Taking care not to run into the group, Handa stopped partway down the stairs and waited for them to leave. Standing there, he caught sight of one of the men about to descend from the landing below, and Handa knew it was fate that he could also see the white sneakers on the man’s feet.
He felt as though something had suddenly bubbled up inside him with a force that he himself could not contain—Handa stormed down the stairs, running a few steps past the second-floor landing, and reached out a hand. He grabbed the shoulder of the assistant Police Inspector Goda or whatever his name was, shouting, “Hey!” as the man turned around.
“Hey, you. You were looking at me before. What was that about? Why were you staring at me?”
The assistant police inspector, who looked to be around thirty or so, set his narrow, reptilian eyes, which brimmed with iciness, on Handa’s face. Then, as if the words being spoken to him had finally reached his ears, he brushed aside Handa’s hand and said simply, “I heard a sound.”
The shard of glass that had pierced his shoe. The tiny sound it had made as he threw it away. This was just the sort of inexplicable discrepancy that Handa found bewildering, and it made him dizzy, as if he had been struck twice just to drive home the point. He now lost the conviction that this assistant police inspector had actually been looking at him, yet without knowing what he was doing, he was swept along by physiological excitement that was amplified in the blink of an eye.
“So what? Why were you looking at me?”
His arm and cry shot out before he was even aware. Handa grabbed the assistant police inspector, only to be pulled off by his fellow officers, one of whom snapped “idiot” while shoving him aside. The inspector himself, who had barely furrowed his brow, turned swiftly on his heel and descended the stairs.
In the span of a few seconds as Handa watched him leave, he was unable to even remember just what had set him off; he was only aware of the heavy muck around his feet dragging him down further. I’m the only one mired in this crap.
The only sound in the now-empty stairway hall was his own labored breathing. His toes felt slippery inside the blood-soaked sock in his shoe. Just as Handa went to remove his shoe once again, Inspector Takahashi came down the stairs, briefcase in hand, and so he lowered his foot.
“Hey, so we’re going to the main office of the BLL’s Tokyo chapter now, and then to a dentist’s in Seijo. Here is the letter outlining the charges. Hinode Beer is the accuser. The accused is unspecified.”
The inspector’s businesslike tone inevitably pulled Handa back to his duties, and he accepted the three-page document thrust at him. Scanning it quickly, he learned that Hinode Beer had recently received a letter written under an assumed name and a cassette tape from an unidentified sender, and was requesting that the sender be appropriately punished for undermining their credibility and obstructing their business. As he singled out the words, “Buraku Liberation League, Tokyo Chapter,” Handa felt the muck around his feet steadily pulling him down further. He felt the world around him darken, as if he alone were under a sky so dark that made it hard to believe it was morning for everyone else.
“A segregated buraku community?”
“Oh, what we’re dealing with is a pseudo anti-discrimination association. Hey, let’s get a cup of coffee before we head out. I’ll show you the transcript of the tape.”
“The dentist is the pseudo anti-discrimination association?”
“The dentist appears to be the sender of the tape. The department chief ordered us to see if he will consent to an interview, to hear his side of the story.”
Without any of this making sense to him, Handa replied, “Understood.” He exited the police department, following behind Takahashi, who wore the mien of a judicial scrivener in a country village or a notary public office’s administrator. It was quarter past eight in the morning.
Another personality existed within Handa, a personality that had been trained and disciplined in the police f
orce. This character hissed persistently in his ear, They won’t get away with this. Just watch. Handa spent half his day listening to this voice, testing his patience, as if he were staring fixedly at a fishing bobber on the surface of a pond that didn’t move an inch.
The truth was, when he had been given the transcription of the letter from the tape to look over that morning at the coffee shop, he only registered the shapes of the letters on the pages, and then at the BLL’s office, nothing lingered in his ears other than the obviously annoyed tone of the full-time staffer who came out to meet with them. To begin with, despite the fact that a complete stranger had sent, in the form of a tape recording, a letter addressed to Hinode’s Kanagawa factory originally written back in 1947, the company did not even acknowledge in the content of their official complaint that this very letter may have been lost or stolen. On the other hand, it was unlikely that the accused stood to gain anything by sending an incoherent letter or a tape to Hinode. As far as Handa was concerned, this must simply be a case in which both sides were making claims against a mistaken opponent.
Apparently, Hinode had received another letter that the dentist had sent—one with a signature—and after filing their complaint, the police department had verified the fingerprints on the signed letter, the letter sent under an assumed name, and the tape—all of which Hinode submitted voluntarily—and since they matched up, all three items were determined to be the work of the dentist. But Handa, who only ever handled violent crimes and robbery, could not fathom why, even at the discretion of both parties, they had to deal with such a trifling case where the motive remained unclear.
Wondering if his own sensors were haywire or if the world had gone insane, at one in the afternoon Handa found himself with Inspector Takahashi in the residential neighborhood of Seijo. Standing in front of a luxury apartment building near the Seijo Gakuen School playing fields and looking up at the structure with its bijou roof terrace that would have made cat burglars drool, the only thought that surfaced in Handa’s mind was, ’Bout a hundred million yen.
The dental office was located among two or three boutiques that jutted out from the ground floor of the building, and there was nothing particularly eye-catching about its unexpectedly old-fashioned and plain nameplate that read, “Hatano Dental Clinic,” or the glass door of its entrance. Eyeing the sign on the door—afternoon appointments from 2 p.m.—Takahashi made a call from a nearby pay phone and announced that the dentist would meet them at home before they ascended the elevator to the residences on the fifth floor.
When Handa saw the man named Hatano, his first impression was, to put it simply, a butterfly in a specimen box. The outward appearance was perfect, yet it was nothing more than a still life that would shatter at the slightest touch. Truth was, the man’s appearance—combining the nonchalance of an unsullied, sheltered son of a good family who had grown straight into middle-age, the coldness of a man who seemed to be made up of only a high IQ, and a melancholy that betrayed hints of a rather complicated thought process—was hushed over, and there was an emptiness to him that seemed to stem from more than just the fact that he had lost a son. And there was a slightly unusual twitchiness to the way his eyes moved.
Nevertheless, it was clear that his life had disintegrated, his vast, luxurious living room strewn about with discarded clothes and permeated by the mustiness of a space long deprived of fresh air and the sour stench of alcohol. Hatano sat down on a sofa at the center of this room, and the first words out of his mouth were, “It was my mistake.”
According to the account that began to spill forth from Hatano, he had been wrong to suspect that there had been any kind of discriminatory action by Hinode Beer against his son, who had taken the company’s recruitment exam, and the fact of the matter was that his son had become mentally and physically unstable from the shock of the opposition from the parents of a school friend he had been dating, saying it was too soon for them to marry. Hatano spoke in a clear and coherent manner, as if he was talking about someone else, and there was no detectable amplitude in his emotions whatsoever.
“Then, are you saying that you’ve calmed down now that the parents of your son’s girlfriend came to pay their respects?” Inspector Takahashi prodded, but Hatano made no response.
Takahashi went on to explain that Hinode had filed a complaint on the basis of defamation and obstruction of business, and that, formally, participation in this investigation was voluntary, so Hatano did not have to talk about anything he did not wish to. The expression on Hatano’s face, though, made it hard to tell whether he was even listening.
The inspector assumed a businesslike manner toward the dentist and began to ask the necessary questions. First, regarding the contents of the tape, did he or did he not make a tape recording of a letter addressed to Hinode’s Kanagawa factory from a man named Seiji Okamura in 1947? The letter had no rightful business being in Hatano’s possession, so how did he obtain it?
Hatano told them that he received the letter from two men who had paid him a visit on the night of November 5th. One of them identified himself as so-and-so Nishimura, an executive committee member of the Tokyo chapter of the BLL, but since he had thrown away his business card, he could not remember his name precisely.
“Could you describe the features of this Nishimura?”
“He was about a hundred and sixty-five centimeters tall. Medium build. Around fifty years old. Dark complexion. He had thin fingers. A mole about ten millimeters in diameter on his right jaw.”
Hatano listed the characteristics robotically, and Takahashi recorded them in his notebook.
“And, what did Nishimura want?”
“I had used the BLL name in my second letter, so he came to ask me about that. As for the issue of my son’s being rejected during Hinode’s screening process for new employees, Nishimura said something about how Hinode had their own reasons and then, suggesting that it could be useful, he left behind a copy of the letter.”
“Did he mention specifically what Hinode’s reasons might be?”
“He said something about the financial situation of a company called Ogura Transport and its main bank. I told him I didn’t understand.”
“Was that bank by any chance Chunichi Mutual Savings?”
“I think so, yes.”
“What specifically did he say about it?
“Something about bad loans and bypass loans. I don’t remember exactly.”
“How did Nishimura say those issues are related to Hinode’s screening process for new employees?”
“Seiji Okamura refers to a person in his letter, someone who happens to be investigating the problems with Ogura Transport. He was apparently one of three men from a segregated buraku community who were fired from Hinode’s Kyoto factory in 1946.”
Takahashi’s hand continued to move rapidly across his notebook pages. Handa sat idly next to him.
“By the way, doctor, did you believe all along that the person you were speaking with was from the BLL?”
“No.”
“Then, what did you make of this person who assumed a false identity and talked to you about the economy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Some guy whom you’ve never met pretended he was from the BLL and brought up a story about your son out of the blue, right? Didn’t you think that was suspicious?”
“No, not really. When it comes to buraku and discrimination, whether it’s fact or fiction, it’s not uncommon for the conversation to take off on its own in ways you wouldn’t expect.”
“By the way, did Nishimura say anything about the source of the letter?”
“No. I asked but he didn’t respond.”
“Did Nishimura demand money for the letter?”
“No.”
“Do you still have the letter?”
“After I recorded the tape, on the morning of the sixth, I threw it in the trash
.”
After this exchange, Takahashi’s inquiry turned to Hatano’s intention in sending the tape to Hinode. Hatano replied that, as he pored over the letter written by this man Seiji Okamura some forty-three years ago, he developed a certain sympathy toward the man, and he felt compelled to say something to Hinode on Okamura’s behalf. There was no specific reason involving his son, and the story that he was motivated by nothing other than his vague aversion toward the corporation Hinode seemed at once plausible and implausible.
“How do you feel about sending the tape now?”
“I think it was pointless.”
“Do you regret it?”
“I wouldn’t do it again. Even if Hinode were at fault about my son, I have no interest in questioning them any further.”
The conversation proceeded swiftly, without any hitches, to reach a conclusion, and Takahashi slapped his knee lightly.
“Well then. We would like for you to issue a voluntary written statement based on what you just said, so would you come to the Shinagawa Police Department tomorrow? From there, we will confirm with Hinode whether they intend to withdraw the charges.”
“I will take responsibility for what I’ve done.”
“No, no. There’s no need for that. Following procedure, we will issue a statement, but since your cooperation is voluntary, the signature and seal are up to you. More importantly, I feel it’s best that you maintain a record of the details about this Nishimura person visiting you.”
Sitting next to the inspector, for a fleeting moment Handa wondered why he would suggest this, but Hatano himself did not inquire further, he simply replied, “I’ll come by tomorrow.”
Takahashi acknowledged him and stood up, so Handa followed. Hatano gave no other response, and since he made no move to show them out, the two took leave on their own, but as they opened the front door, they ran into a woman standing just outside. The woman asked them who they were in a sharp voice.
Lady Joker, Volume 1 Page 13
