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

closet, poring over his letters, notebooks, and belongings. As for his son’s expenditures, in June he purchased a fishing reel for his sea fishing trip, in July he spent five thousand yen for a party given by his lab, and in August and September there was a receipt for eight thousand yen for photocopying, and another receipt for twenty-six thousand yen for some books he had purchased. Until October 10th, there was no record of him missing his lab or seminar. His letters consisted only of a few greeting cards from a former high school classmate who was a particularly good correspondent. His notebooks were filled with lecture notes, with nary a doodle. Just in case, he also checked the communication record on his son’s PC, but aside from accessing his lab’s computer, there were no other addresses.

So then, what else is left? Hatano considered the possibility of a girlfriend. Although he had never mentioned it to his parents, his son’s seminar friend informed him that his son seemed to have dated a few female students during his first two years, while he was at the College of Arts and Sciences on the Komaba Campus, and had continued seeing one of them until the summer of this year. But for a science student who spent his nights at the lab, there were limits to having a relationship, and considering his son’s personality, it was hard to imagine that his involvement with someone would have affected such an important business interview. In any case, could this female student he was only seeing until this summer really have been considered his girlfriend? Hatano scrutinized the register of funeral attendees, but none of the female names seemed to be likely prospects.

And so he ruled out each and every possibility in the twenty-two-year-old university student’s small circle—including family, university, friends, fishing buddies, and so on—Hatano’s suspicion deepening all the while that there was something else going on in his son’s life. The only thing left was Hinode Beer. For whatever reason, his son had actively sought to join this company, and yet decided to leave in the middle of his second interview. Perhaps then he felt like he couldn’t even show his face at the lab, considering that his professor had written a recommendation for him.

The name of the company at the source of all this was branded on Hatano’s brain, he couldn’t get it out of his mind. Even so, what sort of problem could there be? Hinode was a trillion-yen business that ranked among the twenty most profitable firms in Japan. During their corporate recruiting process, was it really possible that the company had made the kind of blunder that would force an applicant to abandon the process mid-interview?

And then suddenly, a voice had arisen from deep within his gut that told him: yes. If he was trying to imagine the company’s point of view, there was just one issue to consider.

Until the age of four, Hatano’s permanent address had been in a district within the city of Kobe that included a number of segregated buraku communities, and that was where his father had been born. He knew that such matters no longer caused a stir in Japan, and he knew full well how unlikely it would be for a company to look up the lineage of an applicant’s parents during the screening process for new employees, but once he had latched onto this thought, Hatano’s mind began to circle around it. This world to which he had had no connection for more than forty years now had not come looking for him, but rather, he had called it forth on his own. With no sense of reality, he started to follow the scent of his memory, and without feeling any actual pain, he begin to think: discrimination. Though it was nothing more than a linguistic concept without substance, he continued to cradle it in his arms until it gradually grew warm and began to give off an odor, and the odor further expanded the concept, until an even stronger smell of something rotten began to rise.

It was at this time that Hatano wrote his first letter to Hinode Beer. Suddenly, almost as soon as he had picked up his fountain pen, he began to write as if on auto pilot: I have an issue with the way that my son, Takayuki Hatano, was evaluated during your screening process for new employees, and as a bereaved parent, I am deeply anguished.

Ten days later, a businesslike reply arrived from Hinode’s human resources department, stating that the screening process had been impartially conducted, and even then the thinness of the single-page typewritten letter had provoked a strong reaction in Hatano. The stink of discrimination became even more pungent, and as it continued to intensify, he immediately sent out a second letter. This time, instead of his own name he assumed the name of the Tokyo chapter of the Buraku Liberation League, typing out the words on different stationery. He did not think much about his language. And then, on November 2nd he dropped off the letter at the Shinagawa post office . . .

No, hold on. He had sent the letter on the second. It would have arrived at Hinode on the third. But the third was a holiday so the offices were closed. The fourth was a Sunday. So then, the day the person in charge of mail in the human resources department opened the letter would have been Monday the fifth—which was today. This afternoon’s call from that Nishimura would mean that Hinode had opened the letter this morning, then immediately judged its content and contacted the BLL. That was a startlingly swift response from the company. The rotting stench emanating from Hinode Beer was stronger than ever. It was like a tooth secretly decaying beneath the white resin with which it had been beautifully restored. Like the anaerobic bacteria decomposing the pulp, melting it into putrid, dark red mash—what else could