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

been involved in a car accident, and before Hatano could even take a breath, the words that he had suffered a cardiac arrest followed. Hatano and his wife rushed to the Saiseikai Central Hospital in Mita, where a member of the ambulance crew told them that their son had died instantly, along with a whispered warning: “It’s best that your wife does not see the body.” His son had crashed into a wall near the Hamazakibashi junction of the Shuto Expressway’s Haneda Route at a speed of 100 kilometers per hour. The car was totaled; his son’s head had smashed through the front windshield and was mangled to the point where it looked like nothing more than a mound of dark red meat—were it not for the black hair he would not have recognized it as a human head. Under such circumstances, it was impossible for Hatano, as a parent, to comprehend that this was his son, Takayuki.

And as a parent, his first question was what his son was doing speeding along the Haneda Route at 100 kilometers per hour so late at night. Hatano had bought a Volkswagen Golf for him three years ago on the condition that he would take it back if his son was ever caught speeding. Takayuki enjoyed driving it, but he wasn’t enough of a car lover to go for long drives every weekend. At the time of his death, his son had been spending his nights at the laboratory at the pharmaceutical department of his university, preparing his graduate thesis, so the Volkswagen had remained in the parking lot of their apartment building since before the summer, and even during the few times Takayuki had returned home for his recruitment exams with Hinode Beer, he had only turned on its engine to let it run.

The last time Hatano saw his son was Thursday, October 4th, more than a week before the accident, the day his son came home for his first interview with Hinode. His son had been his usual self, and that night as they sat around the dinner table as a family, when Hatano asked how the interview had gone, his son sounded fairly confident as he said something to the effect of, “Companies have a lot more vitality than universities.” He spoke enthusiastically of how, once he was hired, he would continue his research on immunization at the lab in Hinode’s pharmaceutical business department, which had seen significant growth recently. Through the eyes of a parent, from his studies to his sound health to his good looks, Takayuki was above average in all respects, but since he had not known much hardship in life, Hatano felt it would be better for him to stay in graduate school than go to work for a major corporation, but that wasn’t enough reason to dare to refute the wishes of his grown son. He also figured that his son must have his own reasons for wanting to apply exclusively to Hinode Beer, so he had let the question pass without pressing it further.

Then, Hatano himself left for a business trip from the eighth to the tenth, a dental surgery conference in Kyoto. According to his wife, his son had his second interview with Hinode Beer on the tenth, and after returning home briefly, he told his mother he had to go back to the lab to work on an experiment and left.

His wife would later say that there wasn’t anything different about their son at the time, but on the sixteenth—the day of the wake—Hatano heard a story he would never have imagined from another student in his son’s pharmaceutical chemistry seminar. It was revealed to him that on the evening of the tenth, his son, who was supposed to have returned to the lab, called there to say he was sick, and that he had been absent from the seminar since the eleventh. Hatano felt utterly bewildered, as if, in addition to the accident on the Shuto Expressway, he had glimpsed another side of his son. And after the funeral on the seventeenth, he found, among the mail that had not been opened since the day of the accident, a letter from Hinode Beer.

The envelope, postmarked on Saturday the thirteenth and delivered on Monday the fifteenth, was strangely thin. Inside, there was a single sheet of stationery that read, “We regret to inform you that we have rejected your application,” and so on. For a University of Tokyo student with a glowing letter of recommendation from his seminar professor, impeccable grades, no trace of ideological bias—on the science track no less—normally a rejection would have been unthinkable. The next day Hatano went to see the professor who had written the recommendation; he too seemed mystified, and told Hatano that on Friday the twelfth he received a courtesy call from Hinode informing him about the rejection. According to them, his son had scored nearly perfectly on his written exam, and although his first interview had gone smoothly, in the middle of his second interview he had apparently told them he did not feel well and had left, never to return.

Well then, had his son truly fallen ill? Was it true that he left the interview? Assuming his son had lied, there must have been a reason why he needed to make up an excuse to get out of the interview, but what the hell could that have been? Was his son at fault, or did the blame fall on Hinode? As a parent Hatano considered many different possibilities, but common sense forced him to conclude that the fault lay with his son. In between Takayuki’s first interview on October 4th and his second interview October 10th, therefore, something drastic must have happened to his son.

Hatano called every student in his son’s seminar, checked the phone records at home, looked at the passbook for the bank account where he deposited and his son withdrew his allowance, and searched everywhere in his son’s desk and