Seizo Monoi
Seizo Monoi stared at the trademark seal of Hinode Supreme on the empty beer can that Handa had left behind. Crushing it with his hand and tossing it into the wastebasket, he passed through the curtain and returned to the living room of his home.
His daughter Mitsuko had clearly been waiting to launch into him. “All you care about is horseracing!” she shouted. Her tone was sharp—as if each consonant was catching on a hook—and it made Monoi’s ears buzz. Just like her late mother, his daughter had always been strong-minded, but at least when she was a girl, she had not spoken to him like this, he thought to himself.
She was probably just irritated because their conversation had been interrupted by a string of customers. This whole time, at least half an hour, Mitsuko had remained standing, her back to a pillar, claiming that her skirt would crease if she sat on the tatami floor. Her mother Yoshie had also been a rather stylish woman who cut a fine figure for someone born in the early twentieth century, but standing before him now, Mitsuko could not have seemed like more of a stranger to him. When he thought about it, the only time he’d held her in his arms was when she was in preschool. By the time she started elementary school she had already matured into a precocious, miniature version of Yoshie; as a teenager she was practically Yoshie’s twin; and by the time she enrolled at the women’s college she’d attended, she existed in a completely separate world that Monoi could no longer reach. When she was a college student and he had cautioned her about wearing flashy clothes when out with her male friends, she rebuffed him by saying, “Don’t be jealous,” while his wife remarked, “Mitsuko has high ambitions. Unlike you.”
Monoi was indeed perplexed by the way his manner of thinking and living seemed unfit for the modern era and, shrinking away, his sidelined existence became that of a nonentity who did no more than watch the two striving women in his life. His daughter joined a large insurance company straight out of college, and not even a year had gone by when she announced that she was getting married. Since she had said her fiancé was a dentist, Monoi had intended to arrange a proper wedding, only to be informed that she planned to enter her name in her fiancé’s family register and move into his apartment as soon as the next day. He eventually invited her fiancé’s family for a formal gathering at a hotel in the city, and the whole matter was put to rest after that.
No doubt a dentist made an incredibly good living. Monoi gathered as much from his occasional encounters with his daughter. She would frequent places like the spa and the gym to refine her figure, have her hair done at the beauty salon every three days, and even when just dropping by her father’s home, she would wear haute couture suits that cost a million yen. Normally, were she not in mourning, she would be further decked out in diamond jewelry the size of tiger beans. Before his grandson’s demise, she’d rarely ever stopped by anyway, but since the funeral, whenever she appeared in these ensembles on some errand, Monoi had trouble knowing where to look, and he simply cast his gaze downward in discomfort.
If her so-called high ambitions were ultimately to lead a life of affluence and to adorn herself in luxury, there was no question her father never could have provided that for her. Being forced to look upon such wealth, which she paraded in front of him as if out of spite, Monoi couldn’t help but feel that his entire life was being denied.
In 1947, Monoi had come out to Tokyo after being released by the foundry in Hachinohe in Tohoku. For a year and a half he had pulled a junkman’s cart around Ueno, until he managed to get a job as a lathe operator at a small factory in Nishi-Kojiya in the Ota district, where he slept in a corner of the factory floor. One thing led to another and he ended up marrying Yoshie, who had a four-year-old child in tow, and amid her incessant complaining that they had no money, he made it to age sixty, frugally shaving away steel day after day in the factory. To send his daughter to college on a machinist’s pay required rather considerable effort, so he worked overtime every night and got by with a meager allowance for himself, just enough for a pack of Peace cigarettes each day and two or three hundred-yen horseracing tickets every Sunday. Back then he used to seriously consider how his death would at least generate some life-insurance money. When he was fifty he sold off their house in Nishi-Rokugo and spent all his savings to buy a pharmacy that had been run by a distant relative of Yoshie’s, but the pharmacy turned out to be a shell that had been used as collateral on a loan—they had basically been swindled. Unable to complain about a relative, though, he now worked desperately to pay off the loan. He wondered how all these things appeared in his daughter’s eyes.
It was not something he was ever conscious of now, but Mitsuko was Yoshie’s daughter from a previous marriage, so she and Monoi were not related by blood. When he and Yoshie got married, he was too busy making ends meet to have a child, but by the time he could afford to have one Yoshie was already past forty-five, and the doctor said she could no longer give birth.
He wouldn’t dare say he was good at living, but he did harbor a mild affection for the life that resulted from his working the way he had. Though if it were to be compared with the good fortune and resourcefulness of others, Monoi had no words to defend it—his modest confidence and pride would all but disappear. Even as he contemplated that Mitsuko must be on edge, having just lost her son, Monoi cast his gaze down out of longtime habit, and could not bring himself to look his daughter in the face. To grow old was to lose patience.
And so Monoi crept back into the warmth of the kotatsu, sitting at the low table with its inbuilt heater, his back hunched as he sipped from his mug of tea, which had turned cold.
“Are you listening?!” Mitsuko’s shrill voice hailed down upon his head.
“I’m listening,” Monoi mumbled, moving only his lips.
Mitsuko had arrived unexpectedly half an hour ago, and abruptly launched into the story of how the police had been to see her husband, Hatano. Unable to accept that their son, Takayuki, had been rejected by Hinode Beer, Hatano had apparently sent a few accusatory letters to Hinode. As a result, Hinode filed a complaint against him with the police, and it was on the verge of becoming a criminal case.
Whatever had happened, sending harassing letters to a company was so far out of the ordinary that if Hatano, who had always seemed so conscientious, had actually done such a thing, Monoi figured he must have had a compelling reason. But as he listened further, Monoi understood there was much more to this complicated story. His grandson had had a girlfriend whom he intended to marry, but the engagement was suddenly broken off because her parents objected. Could the shock from this have caused Takayuki to have an accident? His girlfriend’s parents were not explicit, but wasn’t it likely that the reason for their objection was where Hatano’s birthplace was registered? Mitsuko relayed all this. Then the conversation took a sudden leap. “It’s because you were so irresponsible, Dad,” she reproached.
“I’ve thought about it long and hard over this last month. Everything is definitely Hatano’s fault. It’s a crime of conscience that he hid his birthplace. His wife and his son were completely in the dark, and the reason why suddenly one day we’re faced with this is because Hatano never gave us the explanation he owed us. But go back even further—when a daughter says she’s going to marry someone, every parent knows to check out the other family. But you didn’t do anything.”
“What’s the big deal about his birthplace . . . ?”
“What’s the big deal?! It’s common sense!”
“But didn’t you marry Hatano because you loved him . . . ?”
“That’s why I’m saying you’re an irresponsible father! No matter who he is, if your daughter tells you that she’s going to marry a man, it’s the parent’s obligation to investigate his family!”
“There’s no such obligation in this world.”
“Maybe not in the countryside of Tohoku, but in Tokyo there is! You’re right—I was stupid. A handsome and rich dentist, whose mother’s side of the family were physicians in Kamakura. He had a bevy of girlfriends from top universities, so why did Hatano marry someone like me? It was stupid of me not to figure it out. Do you know how humiliated I am right now, Dad?”
Switch the man’s and woman’s positions, and he had heard the same argument more than enough times from Yoshie, Monoi thought to himself. The proud graduate of a girl’s high school, Yoshie had bid farewell to her first husband, an editor for a literary magazine who had studied literature at Waseda University, sending him off to the front less than six months after they were married. And with a mere postcard notifying her of his death in the war, the newlywed bride became a widow, the newborn Mitsuko in her arms. As she’d told Monoi every chance she got, the reason she had decided to marry him when they met, while she was working as a waitress in Shinjuku toward the end of the war, was because she was burdened with a young daughter and had no hope of marrying anyone decent. In a better world, who would take a half-blind, small-town factory worker as a husband by choice? she used to say.
“Do you know how humiliated I am, Dad? I worked hard to raise Takayuki. And he grew up to be such a wonderful boy, much better than I deserve. And now this happens, before his time—all because of his father’s birthplace!”
“Now, hold on a minute . . .”
“I don’t want to make a stupid fuss over a birthplace either! But it’s because I didn’t know that I couldn’t explain anything to Takayuki. If I had been able to educate and prepare him properly, no matter what the girl’s parents might have said, he would have handled it in a more appropriate way. It’s Hatano’s fault for hiding it. And it’s your fault for not stopping me from marrying a man who hid where he was from!”
Mitsuko started to wail, her voice quavering. Monoi could not avoid looking at her in this state. Even Monoi could see that Mitsuko was suffering in her own way, and with no one else to talk to, she had no choice but to take out her indignation on her father. It made no difference how many millions of yen her outfit cost, the person standing with her back to the pillar crying was, after all, his daughter.
“Why don’t you sit down—” Monoi started to say, but Mitsuko suddenly exclaimed, “Dad!” Her tone was even more fierce. “Don’t you get it? I’ve been deceived!”
“You’ve been husband and wife for more than twenty years, why start accusing him of deceiving you? There’s nothing you can do but work together as a couple and—”
“If I could do that, I wouldn’t be here! Hatano is crazy! I swear he’s lost it, his eyes look weird!”
Why does Mitsuko have to speak in such an ear-splitting tone? I’m her father, but even I’ve had enough, Monoi thought. Then he vaguely remembered hearing Hatano’s voice when he had called out of the blue late one night early that month. He had sounded distracted, having lost his son, but there had been nothing strange that could be detected from the tenor of his voice.
Mitsuko’s voice pitched even higher. “Hatano told me he’s going to the Shinagawa Police Department tomorrow. They’ll take a statement from him, and who knows what will happen after that, but his reputation is over, you know. And yet that man, he has no reaction whatsoever. His eyes look weird. I’m telling you—Takayuki meant more to him than I ever did!”
“I don’t think you need to worry much about the police—”
“What are you talking about?! Who on earth wants to go to a dentist who gets called in by the police? Rumors spread fast!”
“Nothing’s official yet—”
“Don’t act like this isn’t your problem. This issue involves you too, Dad!”
An issue that involved him. It took some time for him to ruminate on what this meant. He knew that he wasn’t entirely uninvolved, but he thought that its effect on him was so small as to be negligible.
Atop a chest of drawers, within an old picture frame, a faded family portrait looked out at them. In 1949, he had rented a small, six-mat apartment near the factory and set up house with Yoshie—the photo was taken to commemorate this event. Mitsuko was four and as cute as ever, and in the picture her new father was holding her hand. The twenty-four-year-old man, who had acquired a beautiful wife and daughter in one fell swoop, looked like a typical country bumpkin, wearing a nervous expression and puffing out his chest. Monoi had framed the photo, and for the past forty-one years, it had been like an ethereal presence in the living room. He had no idea how the two women in his life felt about it, but Monoi himself knew that he had looked to this photograph at various points throughout his life, and now he gazed at it again from the kotatsu.
If he were a man with ten times the guts and that much less patience, he might have murdered his wife and daughter and killed himself along with them. Monoi used to think about this when he looked at the photo, and the thought alone was enough for him just to keep working. In the period just after the war, his marriage to Yoshie was among countless half-hearted marriages between many men and women with no choice but to shack up under the same roof in order to survive. But even still, if they only had money, no doubt they each could have been more at peace. What Monoi regretted was that, for the simple lack of money, he had lived a life untouched by quiet spiritual satisfaction.
Looking back, he had always been haunted by the anxieties of daily life that were naturally ingrained in him, and whenever money became tight, that anxiety transformed into a sharp needle of fear that attacked him. Since he arrived in Tokyo, where it was all he could do to survive, the society around him continued to change at an astonishing speed, and with his meager income that never seemed to rise, he had the constant feeling that he was gradually being left behind. There was no solace at home, with Yoshie calling him worthless every time she opened her mouth, so he had never had the experience of feeling completely at ease. As he grew older, the raw emotions of anxiety and restlessness rusted away, but it wasn’t as if this set his mind at peace. In the five years since Yoshie’s death, his life had ostensibly grown quiet, with no ups and downs, but he felt that the balance between the positives and negatives over his sixty-five years had been too absurd to call what he had now fulfillment.
Monoi found himself unable to worry as he used to about his daughter, who had led a separate life for a long time already. Now, it was all too clear that he preferred to devote the remainder of his own life to himself, rather than to his daughter.
With no way of knowing what her old father was thinking, Mitsuko continued to speak in her shrill voice.
“I’m so humiliated. That man—he thinks that since he married me begrudgingly, as long as he keeps me in luxury, his duty is done. Not once did he ever approve of a social climber like me. I knew it all too well, but once Takayuki was born, I couldn’t leave. I’ve endured it all this time—twenty-three years!”
“What’s the point of telling me this now, after all these years?”
“Of course you’d say that. You’ve never been one to take responsibility for anything,” Mitsuko said as she blew her nose into a handkerchief and ran her hand through her coiffed hair. “I’m divorcing him,” she said, her tone suddenly changing. “I’m sure for twenty-three years, our marriage has also been quite a disappointment for Hatano.”
“But what will you live on if you divorce him—”
“I’ll make sure Hatano gives me half of everything. Besides, our vacation home in Oiso is under my name, so I can sell that off and do what I want. I won’t be a burden to anyone.”
“Don’t say such a thing—”
Just then, the store’s bell jingled again.
“There you go. Another one of your horseracing friends,” Mitsuko spat out the words, and grabbed the handbag at her feet. “I’m going on a trip for the next two or three days. If the police ask anything, tell them I’m not here.”
“Mitsuko, wait—”
Monoi crawled out of the kotatsu and tried to chase after her, but before he could Mitusko had stormed out through the back door, slamming it behind her with a force that could have broken the wooden door.
“Monoi-san.” The voice that called out from the store did not belong to a horseracing buddy but to a neighbor. When Monoi poked his head into the pharmacy, the owner of a dairy shop down the block called to him across the display shelf of detergent. “Sorry to bother you so late. My grandson’s complaining of a toothache.”
“A cavity? Is it swollen?” Despite Monoi’s weariness, his response tumbled out by rote. No matter what happened, he thought, this was the only voice he was equipped with—and his only way of speaking with it.
“I think it’s a cavity, but he won’t stop crying.”
“Do you have some cotton balls at home? I’ll give you some ointment, so try putting that on it. If that doesn’t work, it means it’s infected. You’ll have to take him to the dentist.”
Monoi gave him the ointment, and the shop owner thanked him as he paid and left. “Take care,” Monoi said as he saw him out. As he closed the glass door, which was still rattling in the wind, he detected a trace of Mitsuko’s perfume in the air of the cramped store. And her cutting voice seemed to still echo around him.
If he’d had the means, he would have chosen to be alone a long time ago, Monoi tried to tell himself in vain. As he did so, one by one, a number of bitter disappointments that he hated to even think of began to flutter through his mind yet again. There was the time when he had to buy a long-sleeved kimono for Mitsuko’s coming-of-age ceremony. It just so happened that was the year the factory had a slump and there were no bonuses to hand out, so he had gone from credit union to credit union in a mad rush, but after he had finally scrambled together the hundred-thousand yen to pay for a kimono and obi sash—it was such a cheap garment, even Monoi could see that it wasn’t pretty—in the end his daughter had worn a Western-style dress to the ceremony. That kimono was eventually sold off to a pawnshop, without Mitsuko ever even slipping her arm through its sleeves. He could still recall the yellow butterfly pattern of that kimono.
There were other things too. When Mitsuko was in elementary school, the day of her field trip Yoshie happened to be in bed with a cold so Monoi, straight from a night shift, struggled to prepare a bento for her lunch, but when his daughter left for school, the bento he had worked so hard to make was still sitting on the dining table. At the time, Monoi tried frantically to figure out why, finally realizing that the cloth in which he had wrapped the bento box reeked of machine oil—he could only laugh to himself.
Thinking about it as he shoved the display shelf aside to close the store, he realized no one had ever told him about Parent’s Day at school, and Monoi couldn’t remember ever attending one. For a sixty-five-year-old man, digging up memories of the past was pointless—a waste of the time he had left. But it may have been old age that stirred up memories of this, that, and the other, and he just needed to make an effort to shake them off. Why should he worry what Hatano and Mitsuko were thinking or what they were going to do about their marriage?
Monoi went outside the store and started to lower the shutters. As he did so, a car came from the direction of Sangyo Road, and no sooner had it stopped in front of the pharmacy than a hoarse voice called out from the driver’s seat window, “Monoi, big brother!”
It was indeed a night that seemed to bring out all sorts, one after another. The man, big as a tank, got out of a Mercedes-Benz and shouted cheerfully, “It’s too early for bedtime.” He was the son of the owner of the Kanemoto Foundry in Hachinohe, where Monoi worked half a century ago. The snot-nosed kid who used to tag along after him and call him “big brother” had come to Tokyo thirty years earlier after languishing for some time because of his family’s bankruptcy. Now, he managed a respectable mid-sized business, his own ironworks near Ichihara in Chiba, and from time to time he paid a friendly visit to Monoi.
Yoshiya Kanemoto was usually liquored up whenever he came to see Monoi. A smile now broke across his gleaming, bright-red face as he casually pushed a fancy box of expensive foreign liquor toward Monoi.
“Jus’ got back from Manila yesterday. I planned to stop by earlier, but hell, I got to drinking,” he said, laughing.
“Bet you had fun getting into trouble over there, eh?”
“Aw, don’t say that. I have clients to entertain. It’s all right.”
Monoi glanced at the two men sitting in the back seat of the Mercedes. They may have been associates from the metal industry, though he had known for a time that Kanemoto had ties to corporate underlings of a particular vein, and Monoi offered a few words of warning again that night. “It’s not all right.”
In the dialect of their hometown, Kanemoto reassured him that there was nothing to worry about, simply feigning ignorance. The sight of this fifty-year-old man, who bore no trace of the shy child from long ago, made Monoi feel more bewildered now than anything else.
“Well, I’ll come by again. Don’t catch a cold, big brother.”
With that, Kanemoto cheerily got back in his car and turned back the way he’d come. From the window of the retreating car, an unfamiliar man of that particular vein—without a doubt from the shady underworld—glanced at Monoi. His face was somber, with a large mole on his jaw.
Monoi considered the gift of foreign liquor in his hands for a moment, and then placed the box in the basket of his bicycle. Although his plans had been thrown off by his daughter’s coming by, he finally had time to set out on a visit he had been meaning to make all evening.
The person he wanted to see was one of his horseracing buddies who lived in the service apartment of a small factory in Higashi-Kojiya, about a ten-minute bicycle ride from the pharmacy. Typically he would drop by the pharmacy every so often, but he hadn’t recently, and last Sunday he hadn’t been at the Tokyo Racecourse in Fuchu, so Monoi hadn’t seen him for two weeks—since the fourth of this month. The guy barely had any friends or acquaintances, so assuming he was still alive and kicking, about this time of night he would have his head buried in horseracing newspapers in preparation for tomorrow’s races.
Monoi lowered the rest of the shutters, locked up, and with his short work coat still on, he got on his bike and began pedaling toward Sangyo Road.
He rode slowly on the deserted sidewalk and, after passing over two pedestrian bridges, he turned east into a backstreet just beyond the Minami-Kojiya bus stop. When Monoi had first arrived in 1948, the row of telephone poles that lined the dusty Sangyo Road had extended far into the distance. The barracks of small factories, reverberating with the bustling sounds of lathes and grinders, had stood amidst the wooden-fenced traditional minka houses and the vacant lots and fields where the sea breeze wafted through. Not long after, large factory buildings rose up along the Tama and Ebitori Rivers, while further inland, the factories grew gradually smaller in scale and closer together, forming a maze-like district where a penny-candy shop stood next to an ironworks. During the period of rapid economic growth after the war, buildings for small businesses replaced the barracks, cheaply-made ready-built homes took over where the minka houses had been, and condominiums filled in the vacant lots, but the scent of the air that filled Monoi’s nostrils had barely changed. At night, when the exhaust and dust had dissipated, the smell that seemed to seep from the roads and the walls of these buildings was still that of oil and rust.
Thanks to the recent economic boom, the windows were still lit in the relatively larger factory buildings on this block in Higashi-Kojiya. From the smaller factories, light that escaped from under doors facing the alleyways and the sound of machine tools indicated where work was still going on. Down one of the backstreets, Monoi looked up at one of the second-floor windows of a two-story stucco apartment building and, checking that it was dark, he parked his bicycle in front of the factory next door. A faint light filtered out from under the sliding door that read Ota Manufacturing, but there was no sound of machines.
“Are you there?” Monoi called as he opened the sliding door, and from the back of the workshop, Yokichi Matsudo, “Yo-chan” as he was called, turned to face him.
Among the eight thousand small factories in the Ota district, Ota Manufacturing was mid-size, employing ten workers to make high-precision dies for plastic products. Within the less than thirty-five hundred square feet of the long, narrow building, there were two late-model NC lathes, two copy lathes, two universal milling machines, one vertical milling machine, two drill presses, and one slotter, used to carve out molds for all sorts of plastic products—from space rocket parts to children’s toys—out of black steel charge, accurate to one thousandth of a millimeter. In Monoi’s time, they had been armed with a single lathe or a milling machine set up with an indexing head, but had tackled everything from milling cams for automobiles to machining grooves in shafts to gear cutting. But the production efficiency and range of products handled had changed entirely. For instance, when Monoi saw the die in progress that was set by the front entrance, he had no idea what kind of mold it was.
The workshop was dim, and Yo-chan sat beneath a single naked bulb that illuminated the work desk in the back. On the cluttered desk, he had lined up a colorful array of canned soft drinks amid the horseracing newspapers.
“Cold out tonight!” Monoi called to him, and this time Yo-chan turned only his face to him, dropping his eyes to his own hands without a word. He held a micrometer in his right hand, in his left, a piece of soldering wire.
After measuring the diameter of the solder with the micrometer, Yo-chan reached his right hand toward the tool drawer on top of the desk and started looking for a drill bit for the drill press. Monoi momentarily wondered what he was up to. His eye caught sight of Yo-chan’s left hand as he placed the solder on the desk. His thickly bandaged index and middle fingers were too short. There was nothing beyond the first joints. In shock, Monoi grabbed Yo-chan’s left hand, and with no change in expression, Yo-chan said simply, “An accident.”
“When?”
“The eighth.”
“Was it the lathe?”
“Uh-uh. A coworker was carrying a die. The guy’s hand slipped, and it dropped right on my hand.” As Yo-chan said this, he gestured lightly with his chin at a shelf in the front where some kind of die big enough to fill a grown man’s arms sat. That thing fell on your fingers? Monoi thought, speechless.
“I got an X-ray right away at the hospital. The bones were crushed. Before they could operate, the fingers got all swollen and turned purple,” Yo-chan said matter-of-factly.
“Can you move your fingers?”
“More or less.”
“What about the guy who dropped the die?”
“He quit.”
“You didn’t report it to the police?”
“I’ll get workers’ comp. As long as I have three fingers left, I can work.”
Yo-chan was a man who only ever spoke this way. His instincts and emotions were sunk deep below the skin, never surfacing in any perceptible form. His features had barely changed since he started working in this factory after graduating high school seven years ago. His face was pale from spending all day long inside the factory where the sun never shone, but even still, the flesh was gone below his cheekbones, sharpening them even further, and his jawline was as slender as a teenager’s. Now that face looked all the more vulnerable in the murky light.
“Did your boss by any chance tell you to keep the accident under wraps?” Monoi tried asking again.
“I was the one who told him to forget about it,” Yo-chan said, not even lifting his face.
“Why?”
“Because whatever.” Yo-chan rummaged through the drill bits arranged by size inside the tool drawer and then asked, “Do you see a one point four?”
“A regular cutter?” Monoi asked. Shifting his reading glasses, he reached into the drawer, found the small plastic case that held the 1.4-millimeter bits, and handed it to him. Yo-chan took out a twist drill bit that was as fine as a sewing needle from the case, spun his seat around, and set it into the spindle of the hand-feed drill press behind him. Then, he grabbed one of the aluminum juice cans that were lined up on the desk, turned it upside down, and placed it on the drill press’s round worktable.
“What are you doing boring a hole in the bottom of a juice can?” Monoi asked, to which there was no immediate response. Yo-chan used the hand-feed to place the tip of the drill on the bottom of the can and pulled down the handle. A fine powder of aluminum scattered about, and within a second a hole appeared from which orange juice dribbled out.
Yo-chan moved the can with the hole to the work desk, and wiped away the spilled juice with a dark towel. He set that aside, and then began to file the end of the soldering wire. As he watched, Monoi figured out for himself that Yo-chan was trying to insert the end of the sharpened solder into the hole he had just made in order to seal it back up.
“I had been reading tomorrow’s racing column, but my fingers hurt and I couldn’t sit still,” Yo-chan murmured as he continued to sharpen the soldering wire. “And there’s something that pisses me off, too.”
“What’s that?”
“The ends of my fingers they cut off at the hospital—I thought they were going to give them to me after the surgery, but they just threw them away. Those were part of me, and when I think about how they threw them out in the garbage, it’s unbearable.”
And if they had given him the severed fingers, what would he have done with them? Monoi wondered. “I guess so,” he mumbled, but he had no idea of the private despair Yo-chan might be feeling about losing his fingers because of someone else’s mistake.
Monoi took two glasses from the sink in a corner of the workshop and placed them on the work desk. He opened the gift box of foreign liquor, took out an ornate bottle that seemed like Scotch, and poured a little into each glass. While he did this, Yo-chan furrowed his brows as he held the end of the soldering wire with pliers and tried to jab it into the hole in the juice can.
“The hole is too small,” Monoi told him. “How thick is the solder?”
“One point six.”
“Then the hole must be one point five,” Monoi looked for the case of 1.5-millimeter drill bits in the tool drawer and placed it by Yo-chan’s hand. As he did so, Yo-chan took a swig of the whisky that Monoi had poured and whispered, “Ah, that’s good,” grinning for the first time.
For Monoi, though, whisky neat was too strong, and as soon as it touched his lips his face screwed up involuntarily. Yo-chan must have noticed, because he got up from his seat and brought over a cup of water from the sink without a word. He also produced a space heater from somewhere and placed it at Monoi’s feet. Monoi added some water to the whisky and paused to catch his breath. The space heater warmed his feet too.
Meanwhile, Yo-chan enlarged the hole in the can with the 1.5-millimeter drill bit and once again began pushing the end of the solder into it. This time the solder went in smoothly and, after wiping the plug he had made with the solder again with the towel, he smeared instant adhesive all around it. Then he snipped off the remainder of the solder with a pair of scissors, filed down the head, and after he had sandpapered it some more, he held up the bottom of the can for Monoi to see.
“Well?”
“Let’s see,” Monoi said. If the slight unevenness on the surface could be mended with a thin layer of putty and then coated with paint the same color as the aluminum can, it could be finished to a degree that would make the hole imperceptible to a layman’s eyes—that was Monoi’s opinion. No, if the objective was to fill in the hole that he made, instead of using a drill press that carved the hole cleanly, it would be better to pierce the can with a scriber or something to give a slight breadth to the edge of the hole, which would expand the joint area of the solder that was supposed to act as a plug. If it were up to me, that’s what I would do, Monoi thought.
“What are you going to do with that?” Monoi asked.
“I’ll put sand or something in the can of juice and make the nurses at the hospital drink it. As payback for throwing away my fingers.”
“You should present it to them with a decorative noshi gift tag that says, ‘Give me back my fingers,’” Monoi chimed in, and Yo-chan laughed a little, perhaps feeling better, and left it at that.
“More importantly, your fingers. Do they still hurt?”
“A little.”
Yo-chan set down the aluminum can, and pulled toward him the horseracing newspaper that had been left open. As he did so, some kind of thin booklet slipped out from beneath the newspapers. He picked it up—it was a color-printed pamphlet that said PC-98 Series.
“You buying a PC?”
“If there’s a cheap one. We’re entering the era when horseracing odds will all be computerized. That’s what Koh says.”
“Koh?”
“Katsumi Koh. The one from the credit union.”
“Oh, the one with the flashy suit . . .”
“He usually looks normal. Though not so normal inside his head.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“If he could, he says, he’d be someone different every day. A salaryman on Monday, a business owner on Tuesday, a gangster on Wednesday, a regular Japanese on Thursday, and a Zainichi Korean on Friday.”
Yo-chan relayed this without much interest, lazily resting both elbows on the newspaper as he hung his head. Monoi, for his part, had no hypothesis to offer about this credit union fellow. Despite the flashy attire of the man he had seen earlier this month at Fuchu, Monoi’s general impression had been based on how the guy carried himself and the look in his eyes—there was nothing specific to say about it, except that the guy seemed to belong to that particular vein of the shadowy underworld.
“You guys talk often?” Monoi asked.
Yo-chan, his nose still buried in his newspaper, answered, “Sometimes.” The columns for races ten and eleven tomorrow, the 18th, were already scrawled over with red pencil. Race eleven was a 2,500-meter GII handicap turf race. Yo-chan had drawn two circles around Foro Romano, a fifty-two-kilogram lightweight.
“You always hope for a lucky break, Yo-chan.”
“His workout times are good. I want this one to make the pace and hold the lead.”
“I think Romano will tire out a bit. The favorite Genève Symboli will break away, and it’ll come down to who goes after him . . .”
“You betting on Symboli, Monoi-san?”
“I’m going all-or-nothing on Saint Bid. He did well in the Tenno Sho.”
“Yeah, I have a feeling he’ll finish fast . . .” Yo-chan’s red pencil traced the circle already drawn around Saint Bid, and he went on muttering to himself. “For the second half of the race, it’ll come down to whether he can keep up with the horses in sixth, seventh, and eighth place . . .”
It was already near midnight, and Monoi’s eyelids had started to feel heavy as he listened to Yo-chan’s mumbling fade in and out. The late night hours always went like this, his companion a young man with enough stamina to go until morning once he got started on the horse columns. Anyway Monoi knew that if he were to go to bed at this hour, he would still awaken before dawn, get up to use the toilet and then, unable to fall back asleep, he would instead be yawning until noon the next day. Since he was up now, it was better for his health to stay up a little longer, and sleep soundly until morning.
The late autumn sea breeze that blew across the tin roof of the factory made a sharp, high-pitched sound. To Monoi’s ears, that sound carried with it the exact color and shape of the whitecaps in the vast ocean that lay beyond Haneda Airport. Meanwhile, beneath his lowered eyelids, the nichrome wire glowing red inside the space heater at his feet transformed into a single flame that grew bigger and bigger, and just as he thought it had turned into a blaze of coke burning in a furnace, Monoi found himself fumbling, half asleep, through images of the foundry in his hometown from fifty years ago.
This factory melted down pig iron, scrap steel, and casting scraps in a cupola furnace, casting these into molds to make engine parts and cable drums for fishing boats.
The structure was about 10,000 feet square, its walls and roof made of corrugated metal, with the ground left as sandy soil. The roof rose higher above where the cupola was installed, and there was a gap to let the heat out, from which soot and dust mingled with sparks escaped along with a foul odor. When rain and snow fell through the gap in the roof, it would land on the two five-ton cupolas inside and cause steam to pop and hiss while the ventilator groaned. Beneath all this, the outdated cupolas shuddered as they blazed on, always sounding as if they were about to burst apart.
His job as a twelve-year-old apprentice factory hand had included carting in a fresh supply of coke split that was used to adjust the burn rate of the furnace. By the time he was fourteen, he had been appointed the task of shoveling the coke as instructed into the charging door of the furnace, and by sixteen, he had learned to check the heat level on his own by sight. Stoking the cupola was a battle against time, and if there was even slightly too much or too little blast air, the coke bed would burn too hot or result in incomplete combustion. If the coke and the charge were not packed in just right, it lowered the thermal efficiency and the temperature of the molten metal would drop. Whether the furnace was burning properly could not be detected until the melted iron started to drip down. Then, giving off a pale yellow light, the fifteen-hundred-degree molten metal would flow down the tap hole, and the more experienced workers collected it in ladles and poured it into one after another of the molds lined up on the bare ground.
The castings were heavy, as were the castings alloyed with silica sand and the scrap steel used as metal charge. The factory workers all had muscular upper bodies, and the skin of their palms was darker and thicker than a charcoal burner’s.
By the time Monoi became an apprentice in 1937, the port of Hachinohe, where the foundry was located, was already crowded with the large roofs of the municipal fish markets and refrigeration plants, and behind the hundreds of fishing boats lined along the quay were the shipyards and the ironworks and the foundries—all day long, the alleyways clamored with the sound of hammers from the shipyards and sparks from the lathes, horse-drawn wagons carrying fish and the cries of the migrant fishermen coming and going. On mornings when tuna were hauled ashore, he was awakened by the frenzied atmosphere of the auction, and if there was a good catch of sardine or saury, then he would be woken up by the splintered cries of black-tailed gulls flocking around the minnows. Soon after, when the three-thousand-ton quay that stretched out like a desert was erected right next to the fishing port, the large cargo ships laden with ore and grain as they approached the quay were visible from the foundry windows that were always left open, and along with the shouts of the longshoremen, the smoke and steam spouting from the freight trains as they came in on the service tracks beside the quay reached all the way to the workshop.
The charging door of the cupola was set as high as the roof of a two-story building, so that when he was up on the ladder, from time to time through the window he could just make out over the rooftop of a warehouse the tips of the small flags sending off the procession of conscripted soldiers as they marched along the roadway behind the factory. Then, passing outside the window every day around noon was the cart of the junkman who made the rounds of the foundries gathering scrap iron, and the man would always call out sleepily, “Hey there! Hey there!” In the early evenings, a peddler woman appeared at the back door, and the foundry owner’s wife would buy whale meat or dried herring from her. On days when the woman did not come by, their dinner would be cold radish or cabbage soup with sardines.
Work at the foundry ended around sundown, but after that, there was still the daily maintenance of the cupola to attend to. By then, the hustle and bustle of the day had subsided and the pitch-dark port became a refuge for the sea breeze, the lights of the Dalian-bound cargo ships anchored offshore began to sway like lanterns in the streets at night, and the vortex of the wind soon came surging all the way up to the foundry, rattling the tin roof. As he scraped off the oxide residue that clung to the firebricks inside the cupola, the silence of the night penetrated deep into the core of his mind until he would finally look up and see fluffy snowflakes falling down through the gap in the roof, falling on the tracks of the Hachinohe Line that ran just behind the foundry, falling on the bus route—the same snow that was falling on the mountain village an hour’s bus ride from the foundry. In the summer, what fell through the gap in the roof were moths and beetles.
Hachinohe in summer, from the meadows in the town center to the fields that spread out toward the mountains along the bus route, burst into a stifling, uniform green. On the morning when he returned to the village for the Obon holiday, he would take out his only good clothes—a white shirt and pants and a pair of socks—don a straw hat atop his freshly shorn head and, carrying the cloth-wrapped parcel of dried squid and fish that the missus had prepared for him, he set off from the foundry.
Perhaps it was the summer of 1941 when, on the bus ride back home, Monoi saw Komako, the mare that his family in the village had reared on loan, being led away by a horse dealer. The landowner had finally decided to abandon Komako, who was too old to foal. Komako had come to the family the year Monoi was born, and he and the mare had lived under the same roof ever since. In 1937, when his eldest brother, Sei’ichi, was conscripted, he had begged the family to keep the mare until he returned home, but since that time the mare had had stillbirths and difficult labors. From the window of the bus as Monoi watched the mare being taken away, he was suddenly overwhelmed by an emotion that made his entire body tremble, as if quivering from hunger pangs, and he had stared, wide-eyed. A mare that could not give birth could only be taken to the slaughter, and he futilely thought anew how neither the person who would turn Komako into meat and eat her nor the person who would get money from selling her was a tenant farmer like his family. Watching Komako, drooping her thoughtful head and swinging it gently from side to side as she was led through the lush green fields along the bus route, made him suddenly wonder whether there was any future for him at all. Long after that, Monoi would recall this question time and again.
During the war, the foundry became a designated factory of the Japan Industrial Patriotic Association and they made the bodies of hand grenades, but the real enemy was his own body, wasted away by malnutrition. Burdened with a listlessness that made him feel as if he were carrying sandbags on his back, he paid no attention to the state of the war. But charge material and fuel became harder to come by, and before he knew it, the large fishing boats were mobilized into a transport convoy and disappeared. The auction at the fish market was discontinued under regulation, and the number of cargo ships entering the three-thousand-ton quay grew fewer by the day, replaced in the port by long lines of female students on their way to and from work on the construction of a gun battery on Kabushima.
In the spring of 1945, all the men who remained in the neighborhood disappeared as they were organized into the combined brigade of the Hachinohe defense, and the only ones left at the foundry were the owner Kanemoto and Monoi, with his impaired eye. The cupola was rusted, and the shelves for work in progress and the raw material storage area were empty. Day after day went by with only air-raid drills and volunteer construction work to keep them busy and it may have been, in a sense, an oddly peaceful time during which there was no need to look for meaning in life. In August, at the height of summer, the pumpkins that Monoi had grown in a field near the foundry were ten centimeters in diameter, and the spider lilies that poked out here and there among them were bright red. Yet again that year, the rice in the nearby paddies did not bear fruit.
He was twenty when the war came to an end, the world Monoi saw around him made him think of a castle that had collapsed overnight, a swarm of ants scattering from the wreckage. Resourceful worker ants—those who had used their wits and fattened themselves up before the ruin—were no longer around. Meanwhile, for the less resourceful forager ants, there was still only the endless cycle of each day’s desperate struggle to acquire enough food.
In reality, even six months or a year after the end of the war, goods such as pig iron and scrap steel never appeared on the market, and the foundry remained at a standstill. The owner Kanemoto had not been clever enough to squirrel away goods during the war, so they had no reserves with which to survive off the black market. The demobilized factory workers left one by one, and by the summer of 1946, the owner and Monoi were again the only two left, and all that remained of the foundry were a bucket full of burnt coke dregs and a small heap of casting scraps from hot-water spouts and the like. While the owner went out looking for work and materials, Monoi tended the vegetable garden with the missus, and he managed to find work as a day laborer at the port, so there was just enough to feed himself and the Kanemoto family, but his hope that it would all turn around soon diminished by the day. In its place, a feeling began to take hold that nothing more could be done, neither about himself nor the factory.
And then, in late autumn 1947, the foundry owner called him into his office, where he took out a large bottle of beer from the safe, set it on his desk, and said, “This mighta gone bad, but have a drink?” It wasn’t a regulation bottle or rationed goods—it was a real Hinode beer with its trademark seal of a golden Chinese phoenix taking flight. He must have stashed it somehow before the wartime beer distribution became controlled. He did as he was told, taking a sip from the glass of that old beer, and then the owner asked Monoi to resign because he wanted to close out the factory. It was as if his ten years of loyal service had just evaporated with the froth of beer, but there was no one to blame—Monoi knew full well that it was simply the way of the times. Just as he knew that no good would come of reproaching him, Monoi did nothing other than hang his head.
But that night, Monoi had an unexpected, once-in-a-lifetime experience. In the middle of the night, before he even realized what he was doing, he had somehow managed to pull the fuel oil out of the cupola’s ventilator and carry it in a bucket to the main house, gripping an iron poker in his other hand. At that moment, as chance would have it, his stomach started to hurt—a bout of diarrhea from the old beer—forcing him to run to the toilet where he finally came to his senses. Had he not ended up in the toilet, he had been about to beat to death all four members of the Kanemoto family and set the factory on fire.
Monoi shuddered at this violence that had come from out of nowhere, and he was left speechless. He had always thought of himself as mild-mannered, but the realization that within him resided a fiend who could do something so unpredictable was so startling that it upended his entire twenty-two years, and for the time being at least, the extreme poverty and enduring hunger of yesterday vanished. Still shivering, he wept and told himself over and over again that he was a horrible man and—with great remorse for his parents—regretted that he had ever been born.
Monoi convinced himself that this had been the first and last time such a thing would happen, that he would never do it again, but once his fit of passion had subsided, the profound lethargy that followed felt all the more intense. And in that moment, as he gazed out at the brightening sky through the small window in the toilet, for the first time ever he considered his own life, and he wondered if he was no better than a horse or an ox. In that moment he also reflected upon the hopelessness and destitution that had seeped into every aspect of his life, from his beginnings on the sooty earthen floor of his village home all the way to the present.
Early that morning, when he left the factory with his belongings wrapped in a single cloth, the youngest son of the Kanemoto family, Yoshiya, came running after him calling, “Big brother! Big brother!” but Monoi did not respond. That day, the tracks of the Hachinohe Line that ran along the coast and the bus route beside it were lightly dusted with snow, and the grass was still lush and green. As Monoi walked, he pictured himself as Komako as she was led away along the village bus route, and he continued to ask himself whether he had any future.
Right, so that was Hinode Beer . . .
His stomach fluttered at the resurrection of this taste from the distant past, and Monoi came back to himself. He pushed away the newspapers that were crumpled beneath his elbow, and took another sip of lukewarm whisky.
It had been a long time since he’d last recalled the fiend he had become just that once, forty-three years ago, and even after all this time he shuddered anew with repulsion, and he took another sip of his whisky.
Yo-chan’s head still hovered twenty centimeters above the newspapers, but he was no longer looking at the racing column. Seeming to stare through the five uneven fingers of his left hand that lay atop the papers, his gaze appeared neither blank nor focused. Yo-chan would at times become lost in a trance like this, but his face looked so colorless and transparent that there was something ghastly in his utter lack of expression.
“Yo-chan, what happened?” Monoi asked gently.
“I . . . I set a fire this morning.” Yo-chan spoke in a voice as monotone as ever.
“Where?”
“The house of the guy who dropped the die on my hand.”
“You set his house on fire?”
“I had planned to call him outside and punch him. But then that seemed like too much work.” As Yo-chan went on mumbling, he stared at his left hand that he held out before his eyes, which remained as colorless as before.
“A human body . . . They throw away the fingers they chop off in the garbage, right? And when you die they’ll burn you all up in a gas furnace. So it’s not even worth a punch,” Yo-chan said to himself.
“What do you mean by worth?”
“Like a hundred or a thousand yen. Everything has a price.”
“If that’s true, there’s no worth to a human mind, either.”
Monoi thought Yo-chan hadn’t been listening—after Monoi’s response, Yo-chan’s head had again hovered above the newspaper—but after a while he mumbled, “I wish I could scrape out the contents of my mind, and instead fill it with sand or something. With smooth, pure-white sand . . .”
Yo-chan had grown up in an institution, and it had been seven years since he graduated vocational high school and started working. Even though he earned more now than salarymen his age, he wished to fill his mind with sand—Monoi could not understand just what exactly this guy was thinking. Perhaps this was what the young people meant by “snapped,” but even so there was something exceptionally cold, unfeeling, and dangerous about the way Yo-chan had snapped.
Come to think of it, even though they were about the same age, he doubted that his grandson Takayuki—blessed with everything from a wealthy home and loving parents to a promising future—would ever have thought of filling his own head with sand, no matter what. As he pondered this, he looked over again at Yo-chan’s small head bent over the newspaper.
“So that house, how much did it burn?”
“Just under the eaves at the front door.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Well, in any case, don’t you dare do it again.”
Monoi lightly patted the silent young man’s shoulder, and got up from the stool. Although Yo-chan had set fire to someone’s house, his act seemed considerably different in substance and meaning from Monoi’s own eruption forty-three years ago, and he could only admonish him not to do it again.
He made his way back on his bicycle, with nothing but the cold wind left on Sangyo Road, and though his body was now awake, reminiscences of the wind and snow and the sound of the grass in his hometown were still bursting forth, little by little, from somewhere within him. Three days after leaving the foundry in Hachinohe, Monoi had packed the 1.8 liters of rice that his parents had scrambled together in his bag and boarded an Ueno-bound train at Aomori Station. Monoi remembered being crammed inside the train overflowing with passengers carrying black market rice and potatoes, and though he had felt desperate and anxious, he was at the same time steeped in a buoyant sense of freedom. It was similar to the feeling he had experienced on the day he left home for the first time at the age of twelve to become an apprentice in Hachinohe, accompanied by his father and rocked about in the bus. It made no difference to him whether it was a bus or a train, as long as the road led him somewhere far away, whatever might lie beyond.
But it had been forty-three years since that day. He had eaten thousands of cups of rice and shit them out just as many times, but where the hell had he escaped to? Whenever he would think about it, the more than half a century’s worth of time always collapsed into a hollow, and the wind swept through his entire body. The quiet conclusion that he had not escaped anywhere had occurred to Monoi a while ago, but now that he had reached a point in his life when there was no longer time to start anew, the void in which he found himself was quite possibly even deeper than the one in his hometown.
Any liquid, no matter how complex, would surely break apart if it continued to spin in an endless centrifuge for over half a century. And the components that were now scattered about included the earthen floor of the house in which he was raised in the village of Herai, the millet fields, smoke from the burning charcoal, the deeply lined faces of his mother and father, Komako’s drooped head, dried radish, all sorts of images of the foundry in Hachinohe, the chill of the Pacific wind and the green smell of grass that clung to each of these memories, and finally his own solitary body in which all of these resided. Aware of the unbearable weight of still not knowing if he had a future, Monoi arrived at the Haneda intersection where he turned into the shopping district.
It happened that moment. A motorcycle was parked in front of the pharmacy, and a patrol officer he recognized from the nearby police box turned to face him.
“Oh, Monoi-san,” the officer said, raising his hand in greeting. “I just got a call from the Seijo Police Department. Is Mitsuko Hatano your daughter? Can you get in touch with her? If not, would you mind coming with me?”
“What about my daughter?”
“No, it’s her husband.”
“Hiroyuki Hatano?”
“He jumped into the tracks of the Odakyu Line. They say he died instantly.”
Monoi, suddenly unable to recall the face that went with the name, responded, “I see.” Then he said, “Thank you for your trouble,” and bowed his head. Perhaps sensing something peculiar about his reaction, the officer looked at him dubiously, seemingly taken aback. He told Monoi the name of the hospital, and left it to Monoi to contact his daughter.
“Well, then . . . Thank you,” the officer said and straddled his motorcycle.
After the officer had driven away down the alley, the trademark seal of Hinode Beer shone from the vending machine of the liquor shop kitty-corner to him. It felt all the more bizarre that the same seal of a golden Chinese phoenix that he had seen forty-three years ago in the foundry in Hachinohe should be there now. I never had a future. I didn’t escape anywhere after all.