Lady Joker, Volume 1

by Kaoru Takamura

  Monoi lowered the rest of the shutters, locked up, and with his short work coat still on, he got on his bike and began pedaling toward Sangyo Road.

  He rode slowly on the deserted sidewalk and, after passing over two pedestrian bridges, he turned east into a backstreet just beyond the Minami-Kojiya bus stop. When Monoi had first arrived in 1948, the row of telephone poles that lined the dusty Sangyo Road had extended far into the distance. The barracks of small factories, reverberating with the bustling sounds of lathes and grinders, had stood amidst the wooden-fenced traditional minka houses and the vacant lots and fields where the sea breeze wafted through. Not long after, large factory buildings rose up along the Tama and Ebitori Rivers, while further inland, the factories grew gradually smaller in scale and closer together, forming a maze-like district where a penny-candy shop stood next to an ironworks. During the period of rapid economic growth after the war, buildings for small businesses replaced the barracks, cheaply-made ready-built homes took over where the minka houses had been, and condominiums filled in the vacant lots, but the scent of the air that filled Monoi’s nostrils had barely changed. At night, when the exhaust and dust had dissipated, the smell that seemed to seep from the roads and the walls of these buildings was still that of oil and rust.

  Thanks to the recent economic boom, the windows were still lit in the relatively larger factory buildings on this block in Higashi-Kojiya. From the smaller factories, light that escaped from under doors facing the alleyways and the sound of machine tools indicated where work was still going on. Down one of the backstreets, Monoi looked up at one of the second-floor windows of a two-story stucco apartment building and, checking that it was dark, he parked his bicycle in front of the factory next door. A faint light filtered out from under the sliding door that read Ota Manufacturing, but there was no sound of machines.

  “Are you there?” Monoi called as he opened the sliding door, and from the back of the workshop, Yokichi Matsudo, “Yo-chan” as he was called, turned to face him.

  Among the eight thousand small factories in the Ota district, Ota Manufacturing was mid-size, employing ten workers to make high-precision dies for plastic products. Within the less than thirty-five hundred square feet of the long, narrow building, there were two late-model NC lathes, two copy lathes, two universal milling machines, one vertical milling machine, two drill presses, and one slotter, used to carve out molds for all sorts of plastic products—from space rocket parts to children’s toys—out of black steel charge, accurate to one thousandth of a millimeter. In Monoi’s time, they had been armed with a single lathe or a milling machine set up with an indexing head, but had tackled everything from milling cams for automobiles to machining grooves in shafts to gear cutting. But the production efficiency and range of products handled had changed entirely. For instance, when Monoi saw the die in progress that was set by the front entrance, he had no idea what kind of mold it was.

  The workshop was dim, and Yo-chan sat beneath a single naked bulb that illuminated the work desk in the back. On the cluttered desk, he had lined up a colorful array of canned soft drinks amid the horseracing newspapers.

  “Cold out tonight!” Monoi called to him, and this time Yo-chan turned only his face to him, dropping his eyes to his own hands without a word. He held a micrometer in his right hand, in his left, a piece of soldering wire.

  After measuring the diameter of the solder with the micrometer, Yo-chan reached his right hand toward the tool drawer on top of the desk and started looking for a drill bit for the drill press. Monoi momentarily wondered what he was up to. His eye caught sight of Yo-chan’s left hand as he placed the solder on the desk. His thickly bandaged index and middle fingers were too short. There was nothing beyond the first joints. In shock, Monoi grabbed Yo-chan’s left hand, and with no change in expression, Yo-chan said simply, “An accident.”

  “When?”

  “The eighth.”

  “Was it the lathe?”

  “Uh-uh. A coworker was carrying a die. The guy’s hand slipped, and it dropped right on my hand.” As Yo-chan said this, he gestured lightly with his chin at a shelf in the front where some kind of die big enough to fill a grown man’s arms sat. That thing fell on your fingers? Monoi thought, speechless.

  “I got an X-ray right away at the hospital. The bones were crushed. Before they could operate, the fingers got all swollen and turned purple,” Yo-chan said matter-of-factly.

  “Can you move your fingers?”

  “More or less.”

  “What about the guy who dropped the die?”

  “He quit.”

  “You didn’t report it to the police?”

  “I’ll get workers’ comp. As long as I have three fingers left, I can work.”

  Yo-chan was a man who only ever spoke this way. His instincts and emotions were sunk deep below the skin, never surfacing in any perceptible form. His features had barely changed since he started working in this factory after graduating high school seven years ago. His face was pale from spending all day long inside the factory where the sun never shone, but even still, the flesh was gone below his cheekbones, sharpening them even further, and his jawline was as slender as a teenager’s. Now that face looked all the more vulnerable in the murky light.

  “Did your boss by any chance tell you to keep the accident under wraps?” Monoi tried asking again.

  “I was the one who told him to forget about it,” Yo-chan said, not even lifting his face.

  “Why?”

  “Because whatever.” Yo-chan rummaged through the drill bits arranged by size inside the tool drawer and then asked, “Do you see a one point four?”

  “A regular cutter?” Monoi asked. Shifting his reading glasses, he reached into the drawer, found the small plastic case that held the 1.4-millimeter bits, and handed it to him. Yo-chan took out a twist drill bit that was as fine as a sewing needle from the case, spun his seat around, and set it into the spindle of the hand-feed drill press behind him. Then, he grabbed one of the aluminum juice cans that were lined up on the desk, turned it upside down, and placed it on the drill press’s round worktable.

  “What are you doing boring a hole in the bottom of a juice can?” Monoi asked, to which there was no immediate response. Yo-chan used the hand-feed to place the tip of the drill on the bottom of the can and pulled down the handle. A fine powder of aluminum scattered about, and within a second a hole appeared from which orange juice dribbled out.

  Yo-chan moved the can with the hole to the work desk, and wiped away the spilled juice with a dark towel. He set that aside, and then began to file the end of the soldering wire. As he watched, Monoi figured out for himself that Yo-chan was trying to insert the end of the sharpened solder into the hole he had just made in order to seal it back up.

  “I had been reading tomorrow’s racing column, but my fingers hurt and I couldn’t sit still,” Yo-chan murmured as he continued to sharpen the soldering wire. “And there’s something that pisses me off, too.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The ends of my fingers they cut off at the hospital—I thought they were going to give them to me after the surgery, but they just threw them away. Those were part of me, and when I think about how they threw them out in the garbage, it’s unbearable.”

  And if they had given him the severed fingers, what would he have done with them? Monoi wondered. “I guess so,” he mumbled, but he had no idea of the private despair Yo-chan might be feeling about losing his fingers because of someone else’s mistake.

  Monoi took two glasses from the sink in a corner of the workshop and placed them on the work desk. He opened the gift box of foreign liquor, took out an ornate bottle that seemed like Scotch, and poured a little into each glass. While he did this, Yo-chan furrowed his brows as he held the end of the soldering wire with pliers and tried to jab it into the hole in the juice can.

  “The hole is too small,
” Monoi told him. “How thick is the solder?”

  “One point six.”

  “Then the hole must be one point five,” Monoi looked for the case of 1.5-millimeter drill bits in the tool drawer and placed it by Yo-chan’s hand. As he did so, Yo-chan took a swig of the whisky that Monoi had poured and whispered, “Ah, that’s good,” grinning for the first time.

  For Monoi, though, whisky neat was too strong, and as soon as it touched his lips his face screwed up involuntarily. Yo-chan must have noticed, because he got up from his seat and brought over a cup of water from the sink without a word. He also produced a space heater from somewhere and placed it at Monoi’s feet. Monoi added some water to the whisky and paused to catch his breath. The space heater warmed his feet too.

  Meanwhile, Yo-chan enlarged the hole in the can with the 1.5-millimeter drill bit and once again began pushing the end of the solder into it. This time the solder went in smoothly and, after wiping the plug he had made with the solder again with the towel, he smeared instant adhesive all around it. Then he snipped off the remainder of the solder with a pair of scissors, filed down the head, and after he had sandpapered it some more, he held up the bottom of the can for Monoi to see.

  “Well?”

  “Let’s see,” Monoi said. If the slight unevenness on the surface could be mended with a thin layer of putty and then coated with paint the same color as the aluminum can, it could be finished to a degree that would make the hole imperceptible to a layman’s eyes—that was Monoi’s opinion. No, if the objective was to fill in the hole that he made, instead of using a drill press that carved the hole cleanly, it would be better to pierce the can with a scriber or something to give a slight breadth to the edge of the hole, which would expand the joint area of the solder that was supposed to act as a plug. If it were up to me, that’s what I would do, Monoi thought.

  “What are you going to do with that?” Monoi asked.

  “I’ll put sand or something in the can of juice and make the nurses at the hospital drink it. As payback for throwing away my fingers.”

  “You should present it to them with a decorative noshi gift tag that says, ‘Give me back my fingers,’” Monoi chimed in, and Yo-chan laughed a little, perhaps feeling better, and left it at that.

  “More importantly, your fingers. Do they still hurt?”

  “A little.”

  Yo-chan set down the aluminum can, and pulled toward him the horseracing newspaper that had been left open. As he did so, some kind of thin booklet slipped out from beneath the newspapers. He picked it up—it was a color-printed pamphlet that said PC-98 Series.

  “You buying a PC?”

  “If there’s a cheap one. We’re entering the era when horseracing odds will all be computerized. That’s what Koh says.”

  “Koh?”

  “Katsumi Koh. The one from the credit union.”

  “Oh, the one with the flashy suit . . .”

  “He usually looks normal. Though not so normal inside his head.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “If he could, he says, he’d be someone different every day. A salaryman on Monday, a business owner on Tuesday, a gangster on Wednesday, a regular Japanese on Thursday, and a Zainichi Korean on Friday.”

  Yo-chan relayed this without much interest, lazily resting both elbows on the newspaper as he hung his head. Monoi, for his part, had no hypothesis to offer about this credit union fellow. Despite the flashy attire of the man he had seen earlier this month at Fuchu, Monoi’s general impression had been based on how the guy carried himself and the look in his eyes—there was nothing specific to say about it, except that the guy seemed to belong to that particular vein of the shadowy underworld.

  “You guys talk often?” Monoi asked.

  Yo-chan, his nose still buried in his newspaper, answered, “Sometimes.” The columns for races ten and eleven tomorrow, the 18th, were already scrawled over with red pencil. Race eleven was a 2,500-meter GII handicap turf race. Yo-chan had drawn two circles around Foro Romano, a fifty-two-kilogram lightweight.

  “You always hope for a lucky break, Yo-chan.”

  “His workout times are good. I want this one to make the pace and hold the lead.”

  “I think Romano will tire out a bit. The favorite Genève Symboli will break away, and it’ll come down to who goes after him . . .”

  “You betting on Symboli, Monoi-san?”

  “I’m going all-or-nothing on Saint Bid. He did well in the Tenno Sho.”

  “Yeah, I have a feeling he’ll finish fast . . .” Yo-chan’s red pencil traced the circle already drawn around Saint Bid, and he went on muttering to himself. “For the second half of the race, it’ll come down to whether he can keep up with the horses in sixth, seventh, and eighth place . . .”

  It was already near midnight, and Monoi’s eyelids had started to feel heavy as he listened to Yo-chan’s mumbling fade in and out. The late night hours always went like this, his companion a young man with enough stamina to go until morning once he got started on the horse columns. Anyway Monoi knew that if he were to go to bed at this hour, he would still awaken before dawn, get up to use the toilet and then, unable to fall back asleep, he would instead be yawning until noon the next day. Since he was up now, it was better for his health to stay up a little longer, and sleep soundly until morning.

  The late autumn sea breeze that blew across the tin roof of the factory made a sharp, high-pitched sound. To Monoi’s ears, that sound carried with it the exact color and shape of the whitecaps in the vast ocean that lay beyond Haneda Airport. Meanwhile, beneath his lowered eyelids, the nichrome wire glowing red inside the space heater at his feet transformed into a single flame that grew bigger and bigger, and just as he thought it had turned into a blaze of coke burning in a furnace, Monoi found himself fumbling, half asleep, through images of the foundry in his hometown from fifty years ago.

  This factory melted down pig iron, scrap steel, and casting scraps in a cupola furnace, casting these into molds to make engine parts and cable drums for fishing boats.

  The structure was about 10,000 feet square, its walls and roof made of corrugated metal, with the ground left as sandy soil. The roof rose higher above where the cupola was installed, and there was a gap to let the heat out, from which soot and dust mingled with sparks escaped along with a foul odor. When rain and snow fell through the gap in the roof, it would land on the two five-ton cupolas inside and cause steam to pop and hiss while the ventilator groaned. Beneath all this, the outdated cupolas shuddered as they blazed on, always sounding as if they were about to burst apart.

  His job as a twelve-year-old apprentice factory hand had included carting in a fresh supply of coke split that was used to adjust the burn rate of the furnace. By the time he was fourteen, he had been appointed the task of shoveling the coke as instructed into the charging door of the furnace, and by sixteen, he had learned to check the heat level on his own by sight. Stoking the cupola was a battle against time, and if there was even slightly too much or too little blast air, the coke bed would burn too hot or result in incomplete combustion. If the coke and the charge were not packed in just right, it lowered the thermal efficiency and the temperature of the molten metal would drop. Whether the furnace was burning properly could not be detected until the melted iron started to drip down. Then, giving off a pale yellow light, the fifteen-hundred-degree molten metal would flow down the tap hole, and the more experienced workers collected it in ladles and poured it into one after another of the molds lined up on the bare ground.

  The castings were heavy, as were the castings alloyed with silica sand and the scrap steel used as metal charge. The factory workers all had muscular upper bodies, and the skin of their palms was darker and thicker than a charcoal burner’s.

  By the time Monoi became an apprentice in 1937, the port of Hachinohe, where the foundry was located, was already crowded with the large ro
ofs of the municipal fish markets and refrigeration plants, and behind the hundreds of fishing boats lined along the quay were the shipyards and the ironworks and the foundries—all day long, the alleyways clamored with the sound of hammers from the shipyards and sparks from the lathes, horse-drawn wagons carrying fish and the cries of the migrant fishermen coming and going. On mornings when tuna were hauled ashore, he was awakened by the frenzied atmosphere of the auction, and if there was a good catch of sardine or saury, then he would be woken up by the splintered cries of black-tailed gulls flocking around the minnows. Soon after, when the three-thousand-ton quay that stretched out like a desert was erected right next to the fishing port, the large cargo ships laden with ore and grain as they approached the quay were visible from the foundry windows that were always left open, and along with the shouts of the longshoremen, the smoke and steam spouting from the freight trains as they came in on the service tracks beside the quay reached all the way to the workshop.

  The charging door of the cupola was set as high as the roof of a two-story building, so that when he was up on the ladder, from time to time through the window he could just make out over the rooftop of a warehouse the tips of the small flags sending off the procession of conscripted soldiers as they marched along the roadway behind the factory. Then, passing outside the window every day around noon was the cart of the junkman who made the rounds of the foundries gathering scrap iron, and the man would always call out sleepily, “Hey there! Hey there!” In the early evenings, a peddler woman appeared at the back door, and the foundry owner’s wife would buy whale meat or dried herring from her. On days when the woman did not come by, their dinner would be cold radish or cabbage soup with sardines.