As he considered these things, in another corner of his mind his thoughts seesawed at the realization that he was at a crossroads in his life. He knew better than anyone that he had always been a cog that did not quite mesh with the machine of the police organization, and that this time, he would need to give serious thought to whether or not he could adapt himself to the order and values of the police organization. Would he remain on the force and find a way to forge ahead somehow, or would he resign and become someone new entirely?
The option of quitting the police force failed to ring true, but the notion of such an alternative gave him room to breathe. Rather than going up to the CI room, Goda went out the back door of the police department and pedaled away on his bicycle. The darkness of the Omori neighborhood that night—past nine o’clock, the lights in the office buildings were already dimmed—looked like the sea onto which he would be setting out alone. There was nothing visible, no point for which to set his course, having just been cast away from Investigation Headquarters, but when he thought about it, this was a chance to set out toward new horizons he had been so desperate to know more about. The sea was sure to be bountiful, with unfamiliar things awaiting him—the prospect allowed him to feel a modest sense of liberation.
Goda crossed the road in front of the Denny’s restaurant and had gone about a hundred meters along the Dai-Ichi Keihin highway when he noticed a man climbing out of a taxi about ten meters ahead of him. Goda braked unconsciously, stopping his bicycle by the edge of the sidewalk. It was Noriaki Anzai, his colleague whom he had not seen in nearly a month—but he wondered why Anzai had gotten out of the taxi a hundred meters away from the police department. Preoccupied by this simple suspicion, Goda waited for him to approach before calling out, “Anzai-san.”
“Oh, it’s you,” Anzai said as he turned toward Goda, his face barely registering surprise. Anzai’s flat, fifty-year-old face was as guileless as they come, and yet tonight his greasy, exhausted complexion seemed tinged with excitement—almost like he was possessed. But a passing conversation on the street at night was not enough for Goda to be certain of this.
“I’ve been so busy lately. Tonight’s the first chance I’ve had to pick up the spare umbrella I keep at the department.”
“Where are you working out of these days?”
“Kabuto-cho. It’s outside my beat, so it’s as if I’ve been banished.”
“Are you looking into Hinode’s stock?”
“I can’t even be sure myself. I just pick up whatever evidence I’m ordered to get. How about you?”
“Still on the Nissan Homy.”
“This must just be what investigation is all about. It feels like guerilla warfare but I have no clue where the frontline is.”
Anzai walked off with those parting words, and Goda started peddling again as well, but a moment or two later it occurred to him that someone might have put Anzai in that taxi. It could have been a journalist, a stockbroker, or a gangster. Back when he had run into Anzai in the lavatory at the department, Goda had thought to himself that sooner or later Anzai, with his loose tongue, could be an easy mark, and perhaps his premonition had come to pass.
However, for the time being Goda would not have to bear witness to his senior colleague’s going off course. Nor would he need to serve as an outlet for Deputy Chief Inspector Dohi to vent his grievances, or have to put up with his colleagues like Osanai from Burglary and Saito from Organized Crime, with whom he didn’t see eye to eye. He wouldn’t have to look at the messy desks in the CI office. These thoughts gave him another taste of liberation.
After returning home, Goda took his violin and went to the park as usual. That night, on a whim, he brought his instruction book with him and played octaves—which were challenging for him—and practiced arpeggios. His bow control left something to be desired—every so often the strings emitted a noise that sounded like a chorus of frogs—but for about an hour he was absorbed in his playing, though the whole time his mind threatened to take flight. There seemed to be something he was forgetting, something lacking, something else he ought to be thinking about, or not thinking about.
Goda found himself staring at the figures crossing the park, which made him wonder when was the last time Kano had stopped by. Had it been Tuesday, or Wednesday? Was it last week when he mentioned that he had bought a car?
Goda went back home and dialed a number—it was rare for him to initiate the call. When Yusuke Kano, at his official residence for public prosecutors, realized it was his former brother-in-law on the line, he asked, “What’s the occasion?” as if slightly on guard.
“I got home a little early tonight.”
“I played golf today. Set a new record. Lost half a dozen balls.”
It had been a year since Kano had taken up golf, influenced by his superior at the special investigative division, but every time he mentioned it, he announced he had established a “new record,” and showed no sign of giving up. These days, having made his way through the organization and with a transfer to the High Public Prosecutor’s Office on the horizon, Kano was enjoying a moment of promising stability. Had Goda been in his position, he would have either applied himself a little more to practicing or left his relationship with his superior out of it from the start. But for some strange reason the sound of Kano’s voice on the other end of the line made any desire to quibble over work matters vanish, instead transporting him to somewhere out of time and place.
“Did you buy a new car?”
“I decided on a Volkswagen Golf after all. I couldn’t justify buying a sedan just to be able to fit a golf bag in it. Anyway, do you have any time to get together with someone?” Kano asked.
Goda remembered that Kano had previously mentioned a reporter from Toho News. Perhaps that was what had been nagging at him.
“I’m free Sunday afternoon,” Goda replied.
“You mean the seventh? What about Investigation Headquarters?”
“They gave me a day off.”
“You don’t say. Well then, why don’t we meet up with him in the afternoon, and then go get something good to eat that evening.”
“I’d prefer to go for a drink.”
“I see. All right. I’ll get in touch with the guy and call you back.”
After finishing this trivial conversation, there were only a few things left for Goda to do. As he listened to the sea breeze outside his door, he washed his sneakers, then downed 150 grams of whisky and fell asleep flipping through the May issue of Nikkei Science.
久保晴久 Haruhisa Kubo
Around the same time, Haruhisa Kubo slid forward on his knees across the tatami mat. It was time to apply pressure to his source. “So.”
The assistant police inspector from the first Mobile CI unit of the Kamata sub-unit, his face flushed after three cups of sake, grinned and pretended to dodge Kubo’s approach. “Don’t come so close,” he said, laughing.
“Hey, look me in the eye,” Kubo said. “I’m being serious tonight. This is for real. Hinode’s perps are definitely making their move.”
“If they were, our unit would be the first to know, but so far—”
“Well, they’ll make a move soon. I’m sure of it. And when they do, you let me know before anyone else. All right? Please?” Kubo inched toward his source again, saké bottle in hand, and filled his cup. “I’m counting on you.” Kubo felt like a snapping turtle hanging tightly to his source, knowing full well his eyes looked desperate, yet he was powerless until that crucial, unforeseeable moment. “Come on, drink up. Then let’s go for karaoke!”
Kubo tipped the saké bottle even more, and the karaoke-loving assistant police inspector finally came around, saying, “Sounds like a plan.”
根来史彰 Fumiaki Negoro
In the early hours of Sunday, May 7th, the last day of the Golden Week holiday, Fumiaki Negoro returned to the ryokan operated by a
n old acquaintance near the Tsukiji Hongan-ji Temple, having submitted the morning edition of the paper at half past one in the morning. Choosing at random one of the books from a five-volume collection of Simone Weil’s work—the only items he had brought from home—he slipped between the covers of the futon. When he had discovered these books during his student days, they would have filled half of his list of “the Ten Books to Bring to a Deserted Island,” and still, a quarter century later, he had not hesitated to choose the same five books as companions in his hideout. The volumes included a miscellany of letters, philosophical discourse, and original work by a woman who, in the midst of the rising tide of communism that swept through 1930s Europe, had contemplated the meaning of labor, revolution, and religion. There were many things about Marxist theory that Negoro found unacceptable, but he never failed to be moved by the author’s tremendous vitality, faith, passion, kindness, fragility, and vulnerability, the beauty that overflowed from every single word and every single line on the page, and, struck by the sheer magnificence of the human capacity for thought, he would be filled with joy to be alive. It did not matter which page he opened to—whether a story about a labor strike or a meditation on God—he would read a few pages as though they were a letter written directly to him and, refreshed by the author’s earnest observations, he would express gratitude to a woman who had died half a century ago, close the book, and go to sleep.
When he got up, it was already past ten in the morning. Although he had intended to check out of the inn that day, he could not be bothered so instead he told the innkeeper he would stay another week, giving her the forty thousand yen in advance along with his laundry, and he left to get his hair cut.
Freshly coiffed, Negoro got on the nearly empty train on the Keihin-Tohoku line before noon, then transferred in Kamata to the Mekama line, which he took to Tamagawa-en. He strolled the two kilometers or so along the bank of the Tama River, dense with the early summer greenery. Perhaps it was from basking so abruptly in the sunlight, but he could not recall any of the articles he had submitted just half a day earlier. Even the practical inconvenience of being displaced from his home had dulled to the same level as his constant backache, and with each step, he felt as if the present moment was losing its meaning. Then he remembered how Simone Weil had warned against the human tendency to sink into insensibility. Ah, but my dear Simone, he murmured to himself, there is practically no one starving in this country, and our serenity is like water warmed by the sun, the result of lives spent without ever knowing hunger.
In a society in which no one was starving, news articles did not induce any pain. Nowadays, there were no common concerns under which people could hoist a flag, no universal idea or framework to unite all mankind. What did exist was nothing more than small groupings of people with their everyday lives, inconsequential systems, and automated motions of production and consumption. Even on the day when six thousand people perished in a single earthquake, or when five thousand people suffered injuries or death after poisonous gas was unleashed in the subway, this embankment of the Tama River had still been filled with people jogging or playing tennis. And yet if people were admonished not to allow themselves to sink into such serene insensibility, then each and every one of them would be forced to engage in a lonely mental battle against the self.
Negoro’s thoughts turned to his own self. The creeps who had squeezed money out of backroom deals in the Ogura-Chunichi scandal and now those who were trying to shake down Hinode Beer were strangers who meant nothing to him so long as he had enough to eat, but—he told himself—perhaps his ongoing pursuit of them was, in some small way, a means of preventing his own descent into insensibility.
Negoro had arranged to meet up with Yusuke Kano from the special investigative department at the Tokyo District Prosecutor’s Office and Kano’s former brother-in-law. They were waiting for him under a leafy cherry blossom tree along the embankment. Kano, unaware of Negoro’s life on the run, had considerately chosen a spot within easy walking distance from Negoro’s apartment. Negoro had to admit that the shady spot, warmed by the sunlight filtering through the trees and commanding a panoramic view of the verdant riverbed, was indeed inviting.
After Kano called to say that he’d be bringing his former brother-in-law, Negoro had called Kubo at the MPD kisha club, just in case, to ask if Investigation Headquarters was taking the day off on Sunday, to which Kubo had responded—his voice sounding strained over the phone—not as far as he knew. Kubo was so certain that the perpetrators were making their move, his entire body was poised like a seismometer, at the height of desperation to grasp onto anyone somehow related to the investigation. If what Kubo said was correct, the appearance of a detective who had supposedly been at Investigation Headquarters up until yesterday now enjoying a picnic along the Tama riverbank on a Sunday afternoon did raise a flag.
The two men had gotten to their feet. Both had on crisp casual wear perfect for a day off—cotton pants and sweaters with sneakers—and each of them held a half-finished bottle of red wine.
Kano’s former brother-in-law approached Negoro, speaking first. “Hello. I’m Goda. Great to see you again.” Negoro had only met Goda once, briefly, three years ago, but he looked rather different from the image Negoro retained in his memory. Even Goda’s polite manners and composure were like that of another person. I see. Demoted to the local precinct and handed a little life lesson, Negoro thought. Or did Goda’s expression belie that he had equipped himself with an even tougher shell than before? No, Negoro scrutinized him again. Rather than a tougher exterior, Goda was now fully contained within a larger shell. That’s one way for a man to get around in the world.
Despite this first impression, once Negoro’s eyes met Goda’s, he found that the nuances contained there were even more inscrutable than before, perhaps now with a bit of emptiness mixed in—a truly subtle feeling, like disillusionment or rawness. Right—in Negoro’s analysis, it was the imbalance between this innocuous outer shell of Goda’s and the volatile look in his eyes that created an irresistible magnetism. When that subtle gaze fixed on someone, they either felt a visceral urge to punch Goda in the face or else they were enchanted by him. It occurred to Negoro for the first time that Kano perhaps fell into this latter category.
Kano, for his part, seemed the type who maintained a certain complexity beneath his disinterested expression. He managed to reconcile the ideal attributes of a prosecutor—he was diligent when it came to interpreting and applying the law and aggressive in forging ahead without fear of losing a case—but did not seem to naïvely espouse social justice and order. Judging by the way he so coolly drew a line between himself and the factions within the special investigative department, he was possibly a genuine free spirit who had mistakenly put himself on the side of the establishment. In this sense, Kano’s reputation among the reporters at the courthouse kisha club—that he never revealed much about himself, a tough nut to crack—was right on the mark.
Negoro knew well enough that once Kano began to speak about books on a personal level, he had a tendency to lose himself in a poet’s reverie inconsistent with his occupation as a prosecutor, or to dish out skepticism with shades of empiricism. Though Kano worked late many nights at the government office and indeed had virtually no personal life, when glimpses of his intimate affection for his younger former brother-in-law appeared in Kano’s inconsequential conversations with Negoro, the façade of public prosecutor fell away. Was Kano unconsciously driven by a possessive male instinct to assume the position of patron? Or did he have a naturally obliging disposition? Was there a secret and accumulated history between Kano and Goda? Or, perhaps it was something more even, the L-word for another man.
Negoro had no idea which of these was the truth, but he did know that none of them had anything to do with him. He looked at the two men and a wry laugh escaped his lips, realizing this had somewhat stirred what little interest he had left in humanity.
�
��If you’ll pardon us, there’s nothing to do but drink on such a fine May holiday,” Kano said as he pulled the cork out of another bottle of wine and handed it to Negoro. “Here you go.”
Negoro joined the two of them on the grass, drinking straight from the bottle himself. As Kano explained, the food hall in the basement of the Takashimaya department store in Futako-Tamagawa had been having a sale—all bottles, two thousand yen—so he had bought three, and then also picked up a freshly baked baguette and cheese, which he and his brother-in-law had been enjoying as lunch while they drank the wine. There was something rather provocative about the indolence and insouciance of the simple act of daytime drinking beneath the shade of a cherry tree, done right in front of the throngs of wholesome folks engaged in sports on the grounds of the riverbed. Besides, it may have been a bargain at two thousand yen a pop, but the rich, full-bodied red was certainly having an effect.
From the beginning, Negoro had been 90 percent sure that he wouldn’t be grilling Kano and Goda for material, but thanks to the wine, the remaining 10 percent uncertainty went quickly by the wayside, and he gave himself over to random and inoffensive conversation instead. They began talking about financial institutions that were certain to collapse by autumn, like Tokyo’s K. and Osaka’s K. and H., which led to a discussion of how, in wake of the financial insecurity, the problem of dealing with bad loans would come to the fore later this year.
“It’ll be the moment of truth for prosecutors,” Negoro said, egging Kano on.
“So you want me to find, among all the loans that went under, the ones I can hold liable for violations of the investment law, prosecute those responsible, and send them home with suspended sentences?” Kano said, laughing evasively.
“But Kano-san, with these tens of trillions in loans, you should be able to hold accountable both the lenders, who neglected to put in the effort to recover the funds, and the borrower, who failed to make an effort to pay back the money.”
Lady Joker, Volume 1 Page 61
