Lady Joker, Volume 1, Kaoru Takamura [best affordable ebook reader TXT] 📗

attention was not the abbreviation for the Buraku Liberation League but the slight weariness with which the man said, “I’m with . . .” His voice carried the tone of a relatively seasoned yakuza. But then Hatano immediately second-guessed himself. In downtown Kobe, where he’d lived until he was four years old, the officers at the police box near the house where he was born used to speak with the same languid inflection.

“What is this about?”

“The other day, a letter arrived at the human resources department of Hinode Beer. It listed the Tokyo chapter of the BLL as the sender, but apparently no one at that chapter has any knowledge or record of it.”

As Hatano listened, he pondered idly: Who is this, where did he get this information from, and what is he trying to threaten me with? While he understood what the caller was implying, since the sudden death of his son, everything around him had lost the sense of reality, so that it felt as if he was listening to a distant voice on the radio. Indeed, only a few days ago, he himself had sent a letter to Hinode Beer claiming to be from the Buraku Liberation League, but he could no longer even recall the experience of writing such a letter.

“What do you want?”

“Doctor. You know there are such things as defamation and obstruction of business?”

“Please tell me what this is about.”

“We at the Tokyo chapter have also previously made demands on Hinode to improve their business practices, so we are fully aware what kind of company they are. But you, doctor, are a stranger to us. We don’t owe you anything that would account for you using our name without permission. How about we talk this over in person?”

“If that’s the case, I will state my apology in writing.”

“Don’t get me wrong, doctor. We just want to be useful to you. Consider it solidarity among comrades burdened with the same suffering.”

“You won’t raise your voice. You won’t put up libelous ads or distribute leaflets. If you can promise me these two things we can meet. I have patients to see so please come to my home at nine tonight.”

“Then we’ll see you later.”

After setting down the receiver, Hatano muttered to himself, “To hell with the BLL,” without even realizing that the words had spilled out of him. At the same time, he shivered with a dull pain that spread through his whole body. Hatano then promptly banished from his consciousness this physical reaction to the phone call. Out of habit, he checked his reflection in the mirror to make sure there were no traces of medicine or bloodstains on his white coat before adjusting his collar.

I guess that’s what you call forgery, he thought. He had sent a query to Hinode Beer using the name of an organization with which he had absolutely no connection, so he had gotten what he deserved. Paying some amount in damages would be inevitable. Standing before the mirror, making these matter-of-fact decisions, Hatano’s consciousness drifted in a world that had lost all color, as it had these last three weeks, and soon the only thing he could be sure of was the unfamiliar, fuzzy sensation of the fog settled behind his brow.

The actual time Hatano had spent taking the call amounted to no more than two minutes or so. Returning to the examination room, he automatically washed his hands, and without so much as a glance at the patient’s face, he apologized for the wait and quickly scanned the patient’s chart. The letters “fist” were scrawled across the page. Cleansing a fistula from an infected root canal. The second time today, he thought.

“How’s the pain?” he asked the patient as he peered into the oral cavity and began to remove the temporary filling. The phone call was no longer on his mind. Instead, the image of his son’s head as he was laid out in the hospital’s morgue was stuck behind his eyes and refused to move. Except that it was not so much a head as a mass of crumpled flesh.

The last patient left a little after eight in the evening, and Hatano locked up the office himself and returned to his fifth-floor apartment in the same building. The day after the funeral, his wife had fled to their vacation home in Oiso. Although she returned every now and then for a change of clothes, she left things in disarray like a bandit, taking only what she needed at the time. The apartment, now occupied by a single man, was hopelessly messy. In the pitch dark, Hatano first stepped on a mountain of newspaper, then on what felt like a cushion, until his hands fumbled around in the darkness and he finally managed to turn on a lamp. Next he washed his hands out of habit, without even glancing at his face in the bathroom mirror. He then returned to the living room and, once he had settled down on the sofa with a bottle of whisky and a glass in hand, there was nothing but the long night ahead.

Just as it had been for the last three weeks, the only thing fixed behind his brow was the image of his son’s face, expanding and shrinking in turns, like an abscess building up the pressure in his blood vessels. The expression on his son’s face grew stranger to him with each passing day—rather than on the verge of saying something, the face merely stared at him. Hatano gazed back, occasionally wondering just whose face this was, and though he tried to jog back his memory to when the face was still familiar to him, he always failed. This pattern had repeated itself ever since the day of the accident.

Three weeks ago, on October 15th, the phone call had come from the police after eleven o’clock at night. Through a clamor of voices on the other end of the line, a voice informed him that his son had