Lady Joker, Volume 1

by Kaoru Takamura

  Work at the foundry ended around sundown, but after that, there was still the daily maintenance of the cupola to attend to. By then, the hustle and bustle of the day had subsided and the pitch-dark port became a refuge for the sea breeze, the lights of the Dalian-bound cargo ships anchored offshore began to sway like lanterns in the streets at night, and the vortex of the wind soon came surging all the way up to the foundry, rattling the tin roof. As he scraped off the oxide residue that clung to the firebricks inside the cupola, the silence of the night penetrated deep into the core of his mind until he would finally look up and see fluffy snowflakes falling down through the gap in the roof, falling on the tracks of the Hachinohe Line that ran just behind the foundry, falling on the bus route—the same snow that was falling on the mountain village an hour’s bus ride from the foundry. In the summer, what fell through the gap in the roof were moths and beetles.

  Hachinohe in summer, from the meadows in the town center to the fields that spread out toward the mountains along the bus route, burst into a stifling, uniform green. On the morning when he returned to the village for the Obon holiday, he would take out his only good clothes—a white shirt and pants and a pair of socks—don a straw hat atop his freshly shorn head and, carrying the cloth-wrapped parcel of dried squid and fish that the missus had prepared for him, he set off from the foundry.

  Perhaps it was the summer of 1941 when, on the bus ride back home, Monoi saw Komako, the mare that his family in the village had reared on loan, being led away by a horse dealer. The landowner had finally decided to abandon Komako, who was too old to foal. Komako had come to the family the year Monoi was born, and he and the mare had lived under the same roof ever since. In 1937, when his eldest brother, Sei’ichi, was conscripted, he had begged the family to keep the mare until he returned home, but since that time the mare had had stillbirths and difficult labors. From the window of the bus as Monoi watched the mare being taken away, he was suddenly overwhelmed by an emotion that made his entire body tremble, as if quivering from hunger pangs, and he had stared, wide-eyed. A mare that could not give birth could only be taken to the slaughter, and he futilely thought anew how neither the person who would turn Komako into meat and eat her nor the person who would get money from selling her was a tenant farmer like his family. Watching Komako, drooping her thoughtful head and swinging it gently from side to side as she was led through the lush green fields along the bus route, made him suddenly wonder whether there was any future for him at all. Long after that, Monoi would recall this question time and again.

  During the war, the foundry became a designated factory of the Japan Industrial Patriotic Association and they made the bodies of hand grenades, but the real enemy was his own body, wasted away by malnutrition. Burdened with a listlessness that made him feel as if he were carrying sandbags on his back, he paid no attention to the state of the war. But charge material and fuel became harder to come by, and before he knew it, the large fishing boats were mobilized into a transport convoy and disappeared. The auction at the fish market was discontinued under regulation, and the number of cargo ships entering the three-thousand-ton quay grew fewer by the day, replaced in the port by long lines of female students on their way to and from work on the construction of a gun battery on Kabushima.

  In the spring of 1945, all the men who remained in the neighborhood disappeared as they were organized into the combined brigade of the Hachinohe defense, and the only ones left at the foundry were the owner Kanemoto and Monoi, with his impaired eye. The cupola was rusted, and the shelves for work in progress and the raw material storage area were empty. Day after day went by with only air-raid drills and volunteer construction work to keep them busy and it may have been, in a sense, an oddly peaceful time during which there was no need to look for meaning in life. In August, at the height of summer, the pumpkins that Monoi had grown in a field near the foundry were ten centimeters in diameter, and the spider lilies that poked out here and there among them were bright red. Yet again that year, the rice in the nearby paddies did not bear fruit.

  He was twenty when the war came to an end, the world Monoi saw around him made him think of a castle that had collapsed overnight, a swarm of ants scattering from the wreckage. Resourceful worker ants—those who had used their wits and fattened themselves up before the ruin—were no longer around. Meanwhile, for the less resourceful forager ants, there was still only the endless cycle of each day’s desperate struggle to acquire enough food.

  In reality, even six months or a year after the end of the war, goods such as pig iron and scrap steel never appeared on the market, and the foundry remained at a standstill. The owner Kanemoto had not been clever enough to squirrel away goods during the war, so they had no reserves with which to survive off the black market. The demobilized factory workers left one by one, and by the summer of 1946, the owner and Monoi were again the only two left, and all that remained of the foundry were a bucket full of burnt coke dregs and a small heap of casting scraps from hot-water spouts and the like. While the owner went out looking for work and materials, Monoi tended the vegetable garden with the missus, and he managed to find work as a day laborer at the port, so there was just enough to feed himself and the Kanemoto family, but his hope that it would all turn around soon diminished by the day. In its place, a feeling began to take hold that nothing more could be done, neither about himself nor the factory.

  And then, in late autumn 1947, the foundry owner called him into his office, where he took out a large bottle of beer from the safe, set it on his desk, and said, “This mighta gone bad, but have a drink?” It wasn’t a regulation bottle or rationed goods—it was a real Hinode beer with its trademark seal of a golden Chinese phoenix taking flight. He must have stashed it somehow before the wartime beer distribution became controlled. He did as he was told, taking a sip from the glass of that old beer, and then the owner asked Monoi to resign because he wanted to close out the factory. It was as if his ten years of loyal service had just evaporated with the froth of beer, but there was no one to blame—Monoi knew full well that it was simply the way of the times. Just as he knew that no good would come of reproaching him, Monoi did nothing other than hang his head.

  But that night, Monoi had an unexpected, once-in-a-lifetime experience. In the middle of the night, before he even realized what he was doing, he had somehow managed to pull the fuel oil out of the cupola’s ventilator and carry it in a bucket to the main house, gripping an iron poker in his other hand. At that moment, as chance would have it, his stomach started to hurt—a bout of diarrhea from the old beer—forcing him to run to the toilet where he finally came to his senses. Had he not ended up in the toilet, he had been about to beat to death all four members of the Kanemoto family and set the factory on fire.

  Monoi shuddered at this violence that had come from out of nowhere, and he was left speechless. He had always thought of himself as mild-mannered, but the realization that within him resided a fiend who could do something so unpredictable was so startling that it upended his entire twenty-two years, and for the time being at least, the extreme poverty and enduring hunger of yesterday vanished. Still shivering, he wept and told himself over and over again that he was a horrible man and—with great remorse for his parents—regretted that he had ever been born.

  Monoi convinced himself that this had been the first and last time such a thing would happen, that he would never do it again, but once his fit of passion had subsided, the profound lethargy that followed felt all the more intense. And in that moment, as he gazed out at the brightening sky through the small window in the toilet, for the first time ever he considered his own life, and he wondered if he was no better than a horse or an ox. In that moment he also reflected upon the hopelessness and destitution that had seeped into every aspect of his life, from his beginnings on the sooty earthen floor of his village home all the way to the present.

  Early that morning, when he left the factory with his belongings wrapped in
a single cloth, the youngest son of the Kanemoto family, Yoshiya, came running after him calling, “Big brother! Big brother!” but Monoi did not respond. That day, the tracks of the Hachinohe Line that ran along the coast and the bus route beside it were lightly dusted with snow, and the grass was still lush and green. As Monoi walked, he pictured himself as Komako as she was led away along the village bus route, and he continued to ask himself whether he had any future.

  Right, so that was Hinode Beer . . .

  His stomach fluttered at the resurrection of this taste from the distant past, and Monoi came back to himself. He pushed away the newspapers that were crumpled beneath his elbow, and took another sip of lukewarm whisky.

  It had been a long time since he’d last recalled the fiend he had become just that once, forty-three years ago, and even after all this time he shuddered anew with repulsion, and he took another sip of his whisky.

  Yo-chan’s head still hovered twenty centimeters above the newspapers, but he was no longer looking at the racing column. Seeming to stare through the five uneven fingers of his left hand that lay atop the papers, his gaze appeared neither blank nor focused. Yo-chan would at times become lost in a trance like this, but his face looked so colorless and transparent that there was something ghastly in his utter lack of expression.

  “Yo-chan, what happened?” Monoi asked gently.

  “I . . . I set a fire this morning.” Yo-chan spoke in a voice as monotone as ever.

  “Where?”

  “The house of the guy who dropped the die on my hand.”

  “You set his house on fire?”

  “I had planned to call him outside and punch him. But then that seemed like too much work.” As Yo-chan went on mumbling, he stared at his left hand that he held out before his eyes, which remained as colorless as before.

  “A human body . . . They throw away the fingers they chop off in the garbage, right? And when you die they’ll burn you all up in a gas furnace. So it’s not even worth a punch,” Yo-chan said to himself.

  “What do you mean by worth?”

  “Like a hundred or a thousand yen. Everything has a price.”

  “If that’s true, there’s no worth to a human mind, either.”

  Monoi thought Yo-chan hadn’t been listening—after Monoi’s response, Yo-chan’s head had again hovered above the newspaper—but after a while he mumbled, “I wish I could scrape out the contents of my mind, and instead fill it with sand or something. With smooth, pure-white sand . . .”

  Yo-chan had grown up in an institution, and it had been seven years since he graduated vocational high school and started working. Even though he earned more now than salarymen his age, he wished to fill his mind with sand—Monoi could not understand just what exactly this guy was thinking. Perhaps this was what the young people meant by “snapped,” but even so there was something exceptionally cold, unfeeling, and dangerous about the way Yo-chan had snapped.

  Come to think of it, even though they were about the same age, he doubted that his grandson Takayuki—blessed with everything from a wealthy home and loving parents to a promising future—would ever have thought of filling his own head with sand, no matter what. As he pondered this, he looked over again at Yo-chan’s small head bent over the newspaper.

  “So that house, how much did it burn?”

  “Just under the eaves at the front door.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, in any case, don’t you dare do it again.”

  Monoi lightly patted the silent young man’s shoulder, and got up from the stool. Although Yo-chan had set fire to someone’s house, his act seemed considerably different in substance and meaning from Monoi’s own eruption forty-three years ago, and he could only admonish him not to do it again.

  He made his way back on his bicycle, with nothing but the cold wind left on Sangyo Road, and though his body was now awake, reminiscences of the wind and snow and the sound of the grass in his hometown were still bursting forth, little by little, from somewhere within him. Three days after leaving the foundry in Hachinohe, Monoi had packed the 1.8 liters of rice that his parents had scrambled together in his bag and boarded an Ueno-bound train at Aomori Station. Monoi remembered being crammed inside the train overflowing with passengers carrying black market rice and potatoes, and though he had felt desperate and anxious, he was at the same time steeped in a buoyant sense of freedom. It was similar to the feeling he had experienced on the day he left home for the first time at the age of twelve to become an apprentice in Hachinohe, accompanied by his father and rocked about in the bus. It made no difference to him whether it was a bus or a train, as long as the road led him somewhere far away, whatever might lie beyond.

  But it had been forty-three years since that day. He had eaten thousands of cups of rice and shit them out just as many times, but where the hell had he escaped to? Whenever he would think about it, the more than half a century’s worth of time always collapsed into a hollow, and the wind swept through his entire body. The quiet conclusion that he had not escaped anywhere had occurred to Monoi a while ago, but now that he had reached a point in his life when there was no longer time to start anew, the void in which he found himself was quite possibly even deeper than the one in his hometown.

  Any liquid, no matter how complex, would surely break apart if it continued to spin in an endless centrifuge for over half a century. And the components that were now scattered about included the earthen floor of the house in which he was raised in the village of Herai, the millet fields, smoke from the burning charcoal, the deeply lined faces of his mother and father, Komako’s drooped head, dried radish, all sorts of images of the foundry in Hachinohe, the chill of the Pacific wind and the green smell of grass that clung to each of these memories, and finally his own solitary body in which all of these resided. Aware of the unbearable weight of still not knowing if he had a future, Monoi arrived at the Haneda intersection where he turned into the shopping district.

  It happened that moment. A motorcycle was parked in front of the pharmacy, and a patrol officer he recognized from the nearby police box turned to face him.

  “Oh, Monoi-san,” the officer said, raising his hand in greeting. “I just got a call from the Seijo Police Department. Is Mitsuko Hatano your daughter? Can you get in touch with her? If not, would you mind coming with me?”

  “What about my daughter?”

  “No, it’s her husband.”

  “Hiroyuki Hatano?”

  “He jumped into the tracks of the Odakyu Line. They say he died instantly.”

  Monoi, suddenly unable to recall the face that went with the name, responded, “I see.” Then he said, “Thank you for your trouble,” and bowed his head. Perhaps sensing something peculiar about his reaction, the officer looked at him dubiously, seemingly taken aback. He told Monoi the name of the hospital, and left it to Monoi to contact his daughter.

  “Well, then . . . Thank you,” the officer said and straddled his motorcycle.

  After the officer had driven away down the alley, the trademark seal of Hinode Beer shone from the vending machine of the liquor shop kitty-corner to him. It felt all the more bizarre that the same seal of a golden Chinese phoenix that he had seen forty-three years ago in the foundry in Hachinohe should be there now. I never had a future. I didn’t escape anywhere after all.

  PART TWO

  1994

  The Night Before

  1

  Seizo Monoi

  Sunday morning, Monoi retrieved the newspaper and saw the headline on the front page, criminal investigation of ogura group imminent. He scanned the article and set down the paper, and just as he had found the scallions and deep-fried tofu in the refrigerator and started the miso soup, a call came in from Shuhei Handa, who asked, “Did you read the article about Ogura?”

  This was the third investigation into Ogura. This time, t
he investigation centered on Kimihiro Arai, a representative of Takemitsu, a group of corporate raiders that had bought up shares of Ogura Transport between 1986 and 1989. Arai was suspected of extortion for demanding that Ogura buy back his shares shortly after he had become a board member at Ogura Transport in early 1990. Arai had already been arrested and charged two years earlier in a separate suspected extortion case against Ogura.

  According to the article, the decision by the District Public Prosecutor’s Office to move forward with a third investigation was prompted by the fact that, when the situation first came to light in 1991, charges had not been filed against Ogura’s management, who were suspected of aggravated breach of trust for agreeing to the buyback of Takemitsu’s shares, and now that the statute of limitations on said case had expired, an inquiry into defendant Arai had been deemed essential for identifying the flow of money behind Ogura’s series of suspicious activities. The article further stated that this latest investigation into Ogura would be carried out amid the stalled investigation of the so-called “S. Memo” scandal, which dated back to 1990, when Ogura’s main bank, the former Chunichi Mutual Savings Bank (absorbed and merged into Toei Bank in 1991), had fallen into financial difficulties and an influential politician from the Liberal Democratic Party had apparently promised to support its plan for rehabilitation. Three billion of a twelve-billion-yen loan that the former Chunichi Mutual Savings group had made to Ogura Development in 1990, in the guise of a land purchase and development of a golf course, was suspected of being in violation of the investment law, and the latest investigation would inevitably have an impact on the outcome of the trial of two suspects arrested and indicted in this case—the former Executive Managing Director Koichi Yasuda and former Company Auditor Tatsuo Sakagami, both of Chunichi Mutual.