Lady Joker, Volume 1 Read online

  “I live in a vile time in history. I was struck by this thought when I received my draft papers and I realized I would rather run away. My parents and siblings, they said if I didn’t go to war like everyone else, they would lose face in the village. But when I told them I couldn’t do it, that I would do anything else for them but I could never become a soldier of the Imperial Army, in the end my mother said she would call the military police, my father said he would sacrifice his own life to beg forgiveness from the people of his village, and my extended family had the audacity to show up at our house yelling and threatening me with bamboo spears. When I saw all that, I asked myself how much more vile we could possibly be. The only reason people say you are less than human for not being willing to shoulder a gun for the emperor is because they are scared of being ostracized by the entire village, of being treated even more horribly than before. So everyone’s howling like scared dogs and preying on one another. It’s vile that the memory of starvation is so ingrained into our daily lives, which consist only of working, eating, and sleeping. It’s vile that we can’t be rational. In that sense I think the entire country of Japan is vile. Having said that, if I had run away my parents and siblings would have been the ones to be ostracized and left to starve to death, so I eventually went to war, but there’s nothing more pathetic than the poor going off to invade a poorer country. I should have known this better than anyone else, but they told me I’d be killed if I didn’t kill first, so I became a killing machine—I can hardly stand being human any more. You might object to me saying this, Okamura, but I think those of us who survived to see the end of the war have been chosen by heaven to live on carrying the burden of these vile sins.

  Although I live in a vile time in history, I also feel as if I am seeing the faint light of the dawn of a new generation. To tell you the truth, I cannot contain this hope welling up inside of me. It is a hazy glow, but I’ve never felt like this before. If you believe that a new era is something you create yourself rather than something you wait for, then we can make short work of that damn prime minister of ours, Shigeru Yoshida. The top officials of the liberation committee talk about all kinds of things, but more than a democratic revolution or anything like that, just being alive here and now makes me itch with happiness . . . or is it fear? I am happy that I can talk like this with you, Okamura. Even if it is only my imagination, I feel so refreshed—as if the dirt that is embedded in my body will be washed away. The way I see it, if a rice plant that has been curled and twisted by the cold for hundreds of years can start growing again, then I think that time is now. Personally, I would rather be a stalk of wheat that stands upright when it ripens rather than rice that bows its head.”

  Noguchi had faltered now and then as he spoke. Having finished, he eventually joined an acquaintance he had been waiting for and left. But he left me with these parting words: “Oh, speaking of which, that Hinode beer sure was delicious. That amber color itself is enchanting, and that popping sound of the carbonation is like music. I believe that beautiful, delicious, and pleasing things save us from vileness. That’s what I learned from the beer. Too bad I didn’t learn it from the company, Hinode.”

  Whatever Noguchi said, I don’t doubt he was one of the employees who shared that brief dream at Hinode.

  So, has the “the faint light of the dawn of a new generation” of which Noguchi spoke really arrived? Is it that I am blind to it, or have I alone been left behind, standing still? Noguchi spoke of a new generation—his cheeks red, his body aquiver—but how on earth had he attained such vitality? While I remain stunned with this vague emptiness within me, where had he gained the strength to shoulder this vile history and to set out on his own, brimming with such joy for life?

  Or, perhaps the “the faint light of the dawn of a new generation” is nothing but a momentary delusion of his, and he has already awoken from it by now. Or did he simply speak of his hope for his own sake? I do not know which is the case.

  But I do know that Katsuichi Noguchi is Japanese, just like the middle-aged lady cleaning my hospital room right now, the children causing a racket out in the hallway, and the woman who looks like a hostess walking by below my window just now—and myself in this hospital. We are all Japanese just the same, ants silently carrying on our daily lives, our individual progress making up the vision of this country. In such a country there is a man who sees “a ray of light coming through,” a man who is still complaining long after he has left his company, the ghost of a former politician of the Imperial Rule turned democrat, another democrat who touts revolution while busying himself with internal conflicts, and if you look down below there are black-marketeers and thieves possessed by demons; the sharp-eyed unemployed men and street urchins, strident laborers, entrepreneurs hoarding vast amounts of raw materials, or perhaps in the country there are farmers stockpiling rice and potatoes, land owners listening for the sound of their financial ruin approaching, and impoverished peasants who never had anything to lose—the disparate lives of all these ants came together to form this vision of Japan, a vision that is bustling on one hand and yet somehow despairing and more chaotic than before.

  Not long from now, there will come a day when Japanese people will enjoy a glass of beer like before, but when that day comes where will I be and what will I see, what will have happened to those black and broken fingernails of Katsuichi Noguchi, what will the village of Herai look like? In my state, I am incapable of envisioning a single one of these things. When that time comes, what will I be thinking as I gaze at the logo of Hinode Lager Beer, and what would those forty former employees who left the company this past February think, and what would Katsuichi Noguchi and those three men from the buraku village fired from the Kyoto factory think? Only G-d knows.

  June 1947

  Seiji Okamura

  PART ONE

  1990

  The Men

  1

  Seizo Monoi

  It was raining for the first time in almost three weeks at Tokyo Racecourse in Fuchu. The rain fell harder in the afternoon, and by the time the ninth race began, the cluster of umbrellas gathered near the finish line began to scatter one by one. On a day like this, the hundred thousand or so people huddled together in the grandstand got so thoroughly drenched that water could practically be wrung out from the crowd.

  Rising above the low hum that filled the second level of the grandstands, a heavy groaning sounded from time to time, like air seeping out of a broken exhaust pipe. A girl sitting on a bench, contorting her upper body and twisting her neck about while shaking from side to side, was gasping out her breath, forming an indistinct word composed only of vowels: “Aaaa, ooo.” It was the girl’s way of saying “Start.”

  Sitting on the girl’s right side, the man accompanying her looked up. He blinked his heavy eyelids and muttered, “Be quiet,” but the girl, contorting her mouth and shaking her head up and down vigorously to express the joy of having had her feelings understood, let out a hoarse scream.

  A single strand of rope was wrapped around the girl’s waist, and it was tied to the bench. The girl was well over twelve years old, but because her neck and upper body were unstable, she had to be tied to the bench to prevent her from falling over. That day the girl also gave off a sour smell of blood, and every time she moved the stench permeated the air around her. The man accompanying the girl sat next to her, seemingly unaware of this, as she continued to wobble her neck and groan, until he lowered his head to doze off again.

  Say, where did I leave my umbrella? Seizo Monoi suddenly wondered and, taking his eyes off his newspaper, looked at his feet beneath the bench. Without adjusting his reading glasses, he scanned the blurry concrete floor before picking up his black umbrella, which was being trampled by the canvas shoes of the girl sitting next to him. A wet and withered piece of newspaper was stuck to the cloth of the umbrella. His eyes caught the words “Superior Quality, 100 Years in the Making. Hinode Lager” in an ad
printed on the page before he shook it off.

  Beside him, the girl had begun stamping her feet again and wringing from her throat her version of the word, “Start, start!” It was the beginning of the ninth race, a six-furlong race for three-year-old colts and fillies. As Monoi raised his head to witness the start of the race he had not bet on, he wondered if the smell of blood wafting from the girl was only in his imagination. He unconsciously turned his neck so that the right half of his face was positioned toward the racecourse. He had suffered an accident as a child that had cost him most of the vision in his left eye when he came of age and now, in his late sixties, that side had gone completely dark.

  The overcast weather darkened the racecourse, and the horses that took off from across the infield looked as if they were swimming into a stormy sea with jockeys in tow. In November the turf track still bore shades of green, but perhaps from the color of the rain or the sky, the entire course was dulled to an inky darkness, and the dirt track to the inside of the one on which the horses now ran looked like a black sash, frothy with mud. A live feed of the ground’s surface was displayed on the jumbotron located directly across from the grandstand.

  Monoi was looking at the dirt track because the next race—the tenth, and the one he planned to bet on—would be run on this course. As was always the case, imagining the weight of the horses’ hooves, he was consumed by an inexplicable restlessness that made his insides leap. After all this time, the sight of the horses—kicking off dirt as their rumps were whipped and veins stood out on their throats—still filled Monoi with wonder. The horses, he thought to himself, couldn’t contain the latent excitement that rose within them as they felt the menace and the relentlessness of the earth and the weight of every step of their four legs. They must have been born to feel this way—no animal on earth would run just for being struck by the crop.

  The 1,400-meter race on the turf track went on while Monoi was pondering this, and just as the pacemaker and the stalker neared the finish line side by side like conjoined dumplings, the favorite, Inter Mirage, came storming from the rear, causing the crowd in the stands to roar for a moment. However, as the frontrunner shot to the finish line, the clamor dissipated into a sigh that was soon engulfed by the sound of the rain thundering down on the roof.

  Monoi folded the newspaper with the tenth race’s details in his lap and, looking up at the electronic scoreboard, which was visible from the second-floor seats, checked the ninth race’s placings out of amusement. Ever Smile, a horse he had seen win in his debut on the 14th last month, had placed fourth today, two and a half lengths back. Thinking that was probably as good as he could do, Monoi murmured to himself that Ever Smile was still a three-year-old colt after all. The horse wasn’t a particular favorite of his, but the day after the race last month was when his grandchild—his daughter’s son, who was about to turn twenty-two—had been killed in an accident on the Shuto Expressway, so it surfaced in his mind briefly. That same moment, large drops of rain started to pelt down on the racecourse again, distracting Monoi. An ever-widening pool of water had formed on the surface of the dirt track, visible beyond. The next race would be like running through a muddy rice paddy.

  It would be impossible to decide on a horse for the tenth race without seeing the ones entered, up close in the paddock. The horses gathering now were used to a dirt track, but not a single one of them had a record of performing well in sloppy conditions like today. None of the horses had a marked difference in weight either. If it were to be a race among horses of similar standing and appearance, all the more reason why it would not do to pick one without seeing the nature of the horse just before the start. He reached this conclusion easily, but the truth of the matter was that he couldn’t be sure. Only the horses knew the answer.

  As soon as Monoi decided to head over to the paddock, however, the stats of the horses competing in the eleventh race flashed across the projection screen in front of the finish line. He had yet to decide if he would bet on the eleventh race, but just in case, he took a minute or so to jot down the weights of the horses in the margin of his newspaper. Then, as he swiveled to his right on the bench, the wobbling head of the girl he had forgotten about there for the moment suddenly swung around and leaned toward him. The girl, slightly squinting up at Monoi, grunted, “Eennhh, eennhh.”

  Perhaps the girl had said, “Wind.” When Monoi turned back to the racecourse, the rain draping over the grass was blowing at a diagonal. It looked as if someone had pulled an ink-black curtain across the ground.

  “Oh, you’re right. The wind.”

  Monoi gave a half-hearted response to the girl’s words and patted the small head he had grown accustomed to over the last six years. The smell of blood rose again. Monoi thought subconsciously, the scent of a mare’s urine.

  Propelled by a slight, rootless irritation, Monoi called over the girl’s head to the man accompanying her. “Nunokawa-san. Are you going to bet next?”

  The man he had called out to raised his head and turned his eyes toward the newspaper he had hardly glanced at even though he had been there since morning. He shook his head and responded, “Sixteen hundred in bad conditions? I don’t need that.”

  “Inter Erimo will race. His first since he’s been upped in class.”

  “Erimo’s too stiff. You like him, don’t you, Monoi? He’s not for me though.”

  Nunokawa gave Monoi his trademark faint smile and held firm. He was a man who only bet on the main race and safely chose the first or second favorite, so he never won big but never lost a lot of money either. He demonstrated no partiality toward a particular horse, and anyway, he barely even looked at the newspaper racing columns. He came with his daughter to the same second-floor seats in front of the finish line every Sunday not so much for his own enjoyment but because his daughter liked horses. Once he had installed his charge in her seat, he usually nodded off or stared blankly at nothing.

  Nunokawa was still a young man. He could not have been much past thirty, a fact that was obvious from the incomparable luster of his skin. When Monoi first met him six years ago, the sight of this tall figure—easily over six feet—slouching on the bench had instantly reminded Monoi, despite his rather paltry knowledge of art, of a Rodin sculpture. When Nunokawa told him he had served as a member of the First Airborne Brigade of the Self-Defense Force stationed at Narashino, Monoi thought it was no wonder, with such an impressive stature. Nunokawa had a melancholy look in his eyes, but Monoi made the clichéd assumption that being the parent of a disabled child must be quite difficult at such a young age. Nevertheless, Nunokawa’s crude and awkward manner of speaking and the honesty in his expression, which clouded over with frustration now and then, made Monoi feel a sense of affinity with and fondness for him. As far as affinity went, however, aside from the fact that Monoi himself had a disability in one eye and was also taciturn and awkward, they had nothing specific in common. Because having a disabled daughter required a good deal of money, for several years now Nunokawa had worked as a truck driver for a large transportation company. He spent six days a week going back and forth relentlessly between Tokyo and Kansai in a ten-ton truck.

  “Erimo will run on the dirt track.” Monoi said this almost to himself as he got up from the bench to walk to the paddock. Once he walked down the stairs and reached the lines in front of the parimutuel betting windows on the first floor, he realized that he had once again forgotten the umbrella he had just retrieved, but it wasn’t enough to detain him. His forgetfulness progressed every day like a painless gum disease; until the day his teeth fell out, there was time enough to rot.

  Just in front of the paddock, there was a man seated by a pillar in an alleyway where drifting trash had collected. The sight of him caused Monoi to pause in his tracks. The man, in his mid-twenties, sat cross-legged with his young body bent awkwardly forward, his face buried in the newspaper that he held open with both hands. Monoi always encountered him in this sam
e exact spot, and every time the man was intently studying his newspaper in a similar posture.

  “Yo-chan.”

  Monoi called to the young man, who acknowledged him by briefly raising his eyes from the newspaper before dropping his gaze again.

  The man’s name was Yokichi Matsudo, but everyone called him Yo-chan. He worked at the local factory in the neighborhood where Monoi lived. On the day of the funeral for Monoi’s grandson—who knows how he’d heard about it—Yo-chan brought over a condolence offering of three thousand yen tucked into a business envelope. When it came to horseracing, he was a Sunday regular like Nunokawa, but Yo-chan always bought up three or four of the Saturday horseracing papers as well as the evening newspaper, and would spend the whole night grappling with the racing columns in his cramped apartment. Right up to the start of the races, he would still be staring intently at the newspaper, which he held ten centimeters before his face, trying to predict their outcomes, until he could no longer tell what was what and a blue vein stood out on his temple. It was always the same routine with Yo-chan.

  Monoi spoke gingerly to the lowered head. “You betting next?”

  “Only on the eleventh race today. Got no money.”

  “Which one?”

  “Diana—maybe. I’m not sure.” Yo-chan nervously folded his newspapers with his dirty black fingernails and, tucking a worn-down red pencil into the pages, said to himself, “It’s gotta be Diana,” and further mumbled, “Will three come first, or will it be four . . .”

  Suddenly, a man who had been sitting shoulder to shoulder with Yo-chan got up and began to walk away. He was around thirty or so, with an unremarkable appearance from the neck up, but then Monoi couldn’t help noticing the flashy vertical striped jacket he wore over a purple shirt, and his white loafers with the heels crushed down. Yo-chan’s gaze was also drawn to the man and he responded, “An acquaintance.”