3

Seizo Monoi

“Monoi-san, shaved ice!” From inside the store, the lady pharmacist called out to him. “Strawberry or melon syrup—which do you want?”

Her loud voice flew past Monoi’s head and evaporated in the scorching sunlight as he watered down the sidewalk.

“None for me. You go on ahead,” Monoi called back after a moment, then looked down at the morning glories beneath the woven reed shade. In the intense heat of the summer they were having, the flowers were only about three centimeters wide, and though they bloomed early each morning, by the time he opened the store at nine, they were already wilted and drooping. Whenever he saw the morning glories bearing up under the blazing sunshine, their vines creeping limply outward, Monoi could not help but wonder if the plant, not long for this world, was satisfied with its life, and before he knew it he would be muttering to himself before the morning glories.

The lady pharmacist, picking at her hundred-yen shaved ice, popped her head out from the store and remarked, “If you keep staring at those wilty flowers, the bluesbug will get you.”

Reasoning that it was best to avoid the heat of the day, she always visited the shopping district before ten in the morning and brought back things like shaved ice and kudzu mochi. She would consume these sweets and then still manage to polish off two servings of somen noodles for lunch.

“Now, you’ll get heatstroke if you stand out in the sun like that. Come inside and have some barley tea. I’m going to cook somen noodles for lunch soon.”

“I don’t need any lunch today. I’ll have a little ochazuke before I head over to Akigawa.”

“But you just went there yesterday. And in this heat—you sure are odd.”

“You’ll understand when you get to be my age.”

“I’ll be sixty soon myself, but who wants to think about what’s ahead?” The lady pharmacist spoke with a mouthful of shaved ice, then went back inside. He could hear the television in the living room at the back of the store; a broadcast of the high school baseball tournament was playing. Monoi tipped his bucket over to pour the remaining water onto the asphalt and realized that it was in fact only yesterday when he last went to Akigawa.

Monoi did not have the blues—he just had a lot on his mind. Several matters had presented themselves each of which needed to be addressed, and lacking specific feelings about any of them, he simply divided his day at random, based on his physical strength, so that he could tackle them one by one. Watering the sidewalk repeatedly, tending to the morning glories, lunching on somen noodles, visiting Seiji Okamura at the special care nursing home in Akigawa every other day—all of these followed the same rhythm.

Monoi returned to the living room and sat down before the family Buddhist altar. He rang the small bell, joined his hands in prayer, and then put away the bowl of white rice he had offered that morning. There were so many departed souls—his wife, Yoshie; his grandson, Takayuki; his son-in-law, Hatano; the grandparents and parents from his ancestral village—all of whom had to make do with sharing a single bowl as an offering. But when he thought about it, it was strange that his older brother Seiji Okamura was not among them. A man whom he heard had died forty years ago was still alive, while the ones who should still be alive had passed away.

Pouring barley tea over the same bowl of cold rice he had removed from the altar, he took out some pickled gourd and eggplant and ate a simple lunch while ruminating on the reason he meant to visit the nursing home in Akigawa two days in a row.

Three months had passed since Seiji’s existence had been confirmed at the beginning of May, but a few days ago, Monoi had started to think about taking Seiji into his home. There was no way he could nurture familial feelings toward a man with whom he had been accidentally reunited just three months ago, but when he considered that Seiji was, after all, his biological older brother, he felt it was his duty to care for him, and a part of him thought that, by taking care of Seiji, he might be able to spend the rest of his own life in peace. So long as he had time to be irritated by the hopelessness laid bare by the steady advance of old age, there was no question it was better for him to keep moving and do something useful instead, which is to say, it was more for himself than for Seiji. Nevertheless, considering how old they both were made him hesitate, and then he would waver between thinking he ought to do it with what strength he still had left and thinking it was already too late, so it was not something he could act on easily.

As he delayed his decision day after day, the height of summer arrived and Seiji’s body was visibly weakened—yesterday he even refused the beer he used to sip through a straw. And he only had a bite of the watermelon Monoi had brought with him. Seiji had basically been bedridden the entire time, so his loss of appetite was not such a concern, but his fragile state yesterday gnawed at Monoi a bit, and as soon as he woke up that morning he felt the need to visit him again.

With Seiji’s progressive dementia, was it physically possible to take the man into his home? And even if the conditions were right, would Monoi really go through with it? The decision was Monoi’s alone to make—no one was pressuring him—but even as he slurped his ochazuke, he felt that there wasn’t much time left.

Monoi packed an overnight bag with a collared summer shirt he had bought on sale in the shopping district, freshly laundered underwear and a towel, among other items. As for himself, he changed into a fresh shirt, put on a hat to shade him from the sun, and, after asking the lady pharmacist to water the morning glories in the evening, he got on the bus bound for Kamata from the stop in front of his store.

Seiji Okamura had entered the nursing home in the suburbs of Akigawa in 1990. He had been seventy-five years old at the time, and the extent of what was discovered during the private detective’s investigation was this: from 1950 to 1953 he had worked as a substitute teacher at a private high school in the Suginami district; after quitting for some reason that had to do with the school’s circumstances, he had wandered from job to job: a small printing company, a warehouse company, and a food wholesaler, among others. Apparently he had spent the last ten years in the Sumida district, where he had been the live-in super at a company dormitory. The investigation had stalled because after he left his teaching position, Seiji stopped using his real name and did not update his certificate of residence, either—thanks to this, Monoi ended up paying the detective agency close to three hundred thousand yen.

It seemed Seiji had still frequented hospitals; in 1985, the police, called to the scene by a neighbor, detained him at Tokyo Metropolitan Bokuto Hospital, and after returning to his own room at the company dormitory, Seiji had apparently thrown a few hundred books out the window. Afterward, he did stints in Tokyo Metropolitan Matsuzawa Hospital and Tokyo Musashino Hospital, and four years had passed since he finally arrived at the nursing home in Akigawa, through the assistance of the welfare office. Up until the previous year he had been able to go on walks alone, but when Monoi found him this past May, he was practically bedridden, lying in one of the beds in a six-person room. He was a small man and so emaciated that Monoi thought he might be able to pick him up by himself. The hair on his shaven head, which had started to grow out a little, was stark white. Monoi could no longer recall the face of the man he had met several times in Hachinohe long ago, and perhaps it was his wrinkles, or maybe it was his expression, but when he first saw Seiji, it was as though he were looking at a complete stranger.

“Seiji-san. It’s Seizo Monoi. Seizo from Herai.”

Seiji had replied, nodding repeatedly, “Oh yes, yes. Seizo-san. It’s you, Seizo-san.” But though his gaze was fixed on Monoi, there was no movement or reaction in his eyes, and Monoi could not tell if he truly recognized him as Seizo Monoi from the village of Herai. The situation was still much the same.

According to the nursing home staff, Seiji’s dementia, or perhaps pseudo-dementia, was worsening, and he had mildly impaired awareness and progressive paralysis—even though he could manage to state his own name and today’s date, he did not seem to know where he was, where he used to be, where he had worked, where he was born, or the names of his family members. No matter what was in his head, the man lying there in his pajamas was so quiet—more like an object than a living being. Aside from the smell of his diapers he hardly had any body odor, and even the indications of his gender and vestiges of the most basic, commonplace human sorrow had long since disappeared. Most of the elderly patients in his room were in a similar state, but the extent to which Seiji had withered was astonishing to Monoi—he was so bone-dry and light that seeing him was almost refreshing. Oh, I don’t mind coming here—it had been that stillness that first made Monoi realize this.

When he visited every other day, Monoi always called out to him, “Seiji-san. It’s me, Seizo from Herai.” Gradually, Seiji began to reply, “Oh, Seizo-san. Hello there,” but that was it. When Monoi lifted a spoon to him he opened his mouth, when he offered beer through a straw he drank it, and when he changed him into a shirt and pants and took him outside in a wheelchair, he calmly complied. When Monoi had hospitalized his wife, Yoshie, he had fed her with a spoon and changed her diapers, but something about his looking after Seiji made him think that he was doing it to make up for not tending to his parents on their deathbeds.

In the time he had been coming to the nursing home, Monoi spoke about a lot of things to Seiji, who never said a word. He talked mostly about his memories of Herai and Hachinohe, but once he got going, the long-buried and sundry details surfaced one after another, their limitlessness surprising even him. The year Monoi became an apprentice at the Kanemoto Foundry, Seiji was already working for Hinode, but that summer he returned home for the Bon festival and he came to visit him at the foundry. Monoi felt no brotherly connection with Seiji, this person dressed in a fine suit who removed his hat at the door of the foundry and bowed to the factory manager, saying politely in greeting, “Thank you for taking care of Seizo.” He felt anxious when Seiji then called him over and asked, “How are you? Everything fine with you?” Seiji’s face had been kind, but his manner of speaking was always a little stilted, and although they were related by blood, Monoi had had the sense that Seiji, as the older brother, was trying to patch the void between two people who had not grown up together, and the awkwardness they felt at having nothing in common.

At the time, Seiji had given Monoi some pocket money, just a few yen, and left him with a clichéd encouragement: “We use castings for the equipment in the beer factory too. Manufacturing is a respectable job, so you work hard, all right?”

In the Okamura Merchants family, his second wife had given birth to a boy who would be the heir, and this might have been why Seiji did not return to Hachinohe very often. The next time they saw each other was in 1942, when he came home after being drafted. The owner of the Kanemoto Foundry, having heard a rumor of Seiji’s conscription, urged Monoi to go see his older brother Okamura before he left for the front. Still in his work clothes, Monoi quickly set out for Hon-Hachinohe Station, but by the time he arrived the scene at the station was teeming with small flags waving the conscripts off, and over the shoulders of the crowd gathered, he saw Seiji standing there, a sash across his chest with a message wishing him enduring fortune in battle. As Monoi stared at his older brother, the smallest and palest of the five or six men being sent to the front, Seiji noticed him and gave him a small smile, so he returned the gesture with a shy grin. That day, after the train had left, in the dispersing crowd he saw the figures of his parents who had come all the way from their village in Herai, but his mother kept her head bowed the entire time as if to avoid notice.

As Monoi told such stories, he could not tell from Seiji’s aspect whether he was listening to any of it—his expression did not change much. But one day, Monoi asked him, “Do you know Hinode Beer?” After a few minutes, as if suddenly remembering something, Seiji responded, “Hinode’s beer sure was good.” In the anonymous taped recording of the letter that Seiji had allegedly written back in 1947, he had repeated, several times, “Hinode’s beer sure was good,” and just now he had spoken those same words in a reflective tone, as if that very memory had returned to him. And yet, when Monoi followed up with the question, “Do you remember the Kanagawa factory?” there was no further reply.

Every time Monoi visited Seiji, he now brought a can of Hinode beer and let Seiji drink it through a straw. Yesterday, he had not drunk the beer, but when Monoi pulled off the tab and set the can on the table, Seiji had stared at it for a long time. It was a can of Hinode Lager, the label bearing the same golden Chinese phoenix taking flight from half a century ago. Seiji’s gaze was fixed on it for so long that Monoi felt compelled to ask, “The Hinode label makes you feel nostalgic, huh?” but after a while Seiji only mumbled, “Hinode’s beer sure was good.”

Monoi got off the train at Akigawa Station on the Itsukaichi Line and, after buying a can of beer and the soft adzuki bean jelly that Seiji liked at a shop in front of the station, he got on the bus. After they made their way up the Takiyama Highway along the river for about fifteen minutes, the Ryokufuen Care Home appeared beside the rolling hills of Nishi-Tama Cemetery.

From the bus stop it was about a five-minute walk uphill, and by the time Monoi made it to the entrance of the nursing home he was soaked in sweat. As he stood there for a moment mopping his brow, the bright voice of a female staff member called out to him from the pass-through window of the administrative office. “Well, look who’s here! I wonder if Okamura-san is up. It’s nap time right now.” Here, both residents and visitors—as long as they were senior citizens—were addressed as if they were barely in preschool. Monoi never got used to this, but instead of feeling annoyed, the subservient words, “Oh, that’s very kind of you, thank you,” sprang from his lips and his body bent forward to bow of its own accord. Monoi bowed two or three times toward the window before he changed into a pair of slippers, and headed toward the building where all the bedridden elderlies were housed together.

Sure enough, at two o’clock in the afternoon the majority of the residents were napping, so there was no recreation or entertainment, or staff making rounds. The sultry air from outside meandered in through the screened windows and over the linoleum floor, so clean it was rather bleak, and somewhere wind chimes were ringing. The doors to the rooms had all been left open. Monoi craned his neck to peer into one of them.

Seiji was at the far end of the row of six beds. He was lying face up, his head on a pillow, his eyes wide open, in this spot that, around this time of the afternoon, was always bathed in western sunlight. Before he could even call out his usual greeting of “Seiji-san!” Monoi froze, staring at his face. Time seemed to stop altogether and Monoi dazedly recalled the faces of dead cattle and horses he had seen being carted away along the bus route in his village so long ago.

Seiji’s half-open mouth was contorted into a split and twisted shape, his eyes glaring up at the ceiling were rolled back, his taut cheeks were sunken beneath the cheekbones. Seiji Okamura was no longer there—all that remained was a carcass, its expression no different from the corpse of one of those animals. A jumble of memories flickered behind Monoi’s eyelids—the sparkling dust rising from the bus route, the smell of the grass, the cicadas’ song, and the bulging eyes of the carcasses atop the cart.

Taking a deep breath, Monoi realized that his plan to take Seiji home to spend the rest of his life in peace had been eclipsed, and then the vast, intangible question—What is the meaning of one’s life?—flashed in his mind. The notion that, in death, human beings and livestock were all the same had also struck him when Yoshie had died. Just before she passed away, Yoshie woke up from her coma and gave a tormented cry, contorting her mouth like Seiji’s and widening her eyes in a hideous stare.

Monoi pushed the red emergency call button, and was forced to wait several minutes for someone to finally arrive. The wind chimes continued to ring. None of the elderlies in the room made a sound—one of them slowly waved a fan up and down as he gazed at Monoi and the dead man. The other four residents, lying in their respective beds, did not move a muscle, and one of them emitted a low snore. Then the doctor and a staff member came in, and after going through the motions of checking the patient’s pupils and taking his pulse, the doctor said, “Well, it was his time,” while the female staff member remarked to no one in particular, “I’m so glad he went peacefully.”

Monoi, still staring at the stiffening corpse, found himself in the midst of a whirlpool of indescribable emotions that welled up from who knew where. The sight of the body before him triggered a cascade of images, indistinguishable from one another—the many animal corpses he had seen in his childhood, Komako drooping her head as she was led away by the horse dealer, Yoshie’s unsightly death face—and even though he felt no personal grief, it was as if suddenly, with a shrill roar, all the parts of his life were being stirred up and drawn toward that corpse. Amid the cacophony, he heard his own voice whisper, This is the extent of being human, and This will be you tomorrow, but when the noise eventually subsided, alongside the sense of emptiness that descended upon him, Monoi heard a different voice: I will avenge you, Seiji-san.

Monoi unconsciously strained his ears to hear it. He knew it was the voice of the same fiend he had heard that once, half a century ago. This time, it was with a quite different and surprising sense of calm that he listened to this voice and acknowledged it as evil.

“Hinode Beer,” Monoi mumbled to himself, and the sound of his own voice snapped him back to the present. Once he emerged from the tunnel of emptiness, the only things that remained in Monoi’s mind were the look in Komako’s eyes and the idea that Hinode Beer should pay for Seiji’s half-century of despair. Monoi felt a slight chagrin as he took another look at the idea that had just occurred to him, but whatever hesitation and doubt ordinarily that would have accompanied it must have already been eliminated by the fiend who had taken hold of him for the first time in fifty years. While the nursing home staff was cleansing Seiji’s dead body, Monoi turned over this idea in his head, so that even afterward, he never once felt troubled by the various matters that needed to be settled following the death of a family member.

Monoi called Okamura Merchants in Hachinohe from the pay phone at the nursing home, but the current owner gave an evasive response, obviously annoyed. Back in May, when Monoi had notified him of Seiji’s existence, he had sounded much the same, so this was not a surprise. The owner eventually told him, “We can’t be there right now, so if you could take care of things, we’ll pay the expenses.” According to the nursing home staff, the city would foot the bill for a simple cremation that included a wake and sutra chanting, so Monoi asked them to arrange for the temple to give Seiji a short posthumous Buddhist name, just five characters long, and told them that a more elaborate funeral was not required.

By early evening, Seiji had been dressed in white, laid out in a coffin, and placed in the wake room. His grimace had been fixed to resemble a sleeping face and his eyes had been closed, but there was no one besides Monoi to say farewell. The soft adzuki bean jelly and can of beer that Monoi had brought for Seiji were transformed into offerings and had been placed next to the chrysanthemums and incense that the nursing home had supplied. A Buddhist monk came from some temple, bringing with him a memorial tablet of plain wood, upon which was written in ink a generic posthumous Buddhist name: “Seishorenkoji.” After the monk had chanted sutras for about fifteen minutes, Monoi handed him one hundred and fifty thousand yen wrapped in paper. He had run out to the bank in front of Akigawa Station to withdraw the money, as a nursing home staff member had whispered to him, “Thirty thousand yen per letter should suffice.” When Yoshie died, it had cost him four hundred thousand yen for an eight-letter name, so it was a bargain this time.

It was past seven in the evening by the time these affairs had concluded, so instead of going home to Haneda only to come back the next morning for the cremation, Monoi decided to keep vigil at the nursing home that night. When he called the lady pharmacist, she peppered him with nosy questions—When did he die? How old was he? What will you wear to the funeral?—and hounded him that since it was family, for the sake of appearances he should at least close shop during the mourning period, until Monoi finally told her, “Then go ahead and take the day off tomorrow,” and quickly hung up the phone, only to realize, Ah, the morning glories will wither and die.

Next, he made three more calls. The first one was to Ota Manufacturing in Higashi-Kojiya. Between the recession and the fact that it was almost the Obon holiday, the factory wouldn’t have been running, but Yo-chan always lingered there alone until the wee hours, because he said it was cooler than in his apartment. Sure enough, Yo-chan answered the phone. When Monoi asked him what he was doing, he replied simply, “TV.”

Monoi explained the reason he was calling. “I’d like to meet with Katsumi Koh. Can you get in touch with him?”

Without even asking what it was about, Yo-chan replied, “I’ll give you his cell phone number,” and read the number to him.

“So, what are you doing over the Bon holiday?”

“Nothing.”

“I’ll come by tomorrow night for a little bit, if you don’t mind. Do you want anything?” Monoi asked, and Yo-chan immediately replied, “A new brain.”

Next, Monoi tried calling the number he had just been given. Around this time in the summer, the only time Monoi would bump into Koh was on the occasional Sunday at a WINS off-track betting site in the city, and so with no idea where he might be or what he might be doing, Monoi heard him answer the phone, “Hello, Kowa Credit Union. This is Koh.” His voice was stiff and businesslike, quite different from what it sounded like at the racecourse.

“Sorry to disturb you. This is Monoi from the pharmacy,” he said.

“Oh, of course,” Koh replied, shifting into his salesman tone. “How can I help you?”

“Koh. That story I heard you talking about back in April at the racecourse in Fuchu. This old man has decided to give it some serious thought.”

“What story?”

“The one about milking money out of a big corporation.”

With that, Monoi hung up the phone. Then, he made his third call. This was also to a cell phone and he had no way to know the person’s whereabouts, but there was a ten-to-one chance he wouldn’t be tied up with work. When, as expected, he answered, “Handa speaking,” Monoi heard the background noise of a pachinko parlor.

“Seiji Okamura died today. This old man has a lot on his mind, but—here’s the question, Handa-san. Do you have any interest in squeezing money out of Hinode Beer?”

Amid the jingling of the pachinko machines Handa shouted back, “What? What did you say?”

“Back in April at Fuchu—you and Katsumi Koh were talking about it. We could do it just like you said. Why don’t we shake down Hinode Beer?”

Once Monoi repeated himself, Handa paused before answering and, for several seconds, there was only the noise of the pachinko balls clinking as they fell. Handa finally replied, “You do realize I’m a police detective?”

“Yes, of course.”

Monoi replaced the receiver. Despite having just concocted this plan, his first thought had been that—whatever the plan entailed—he was nothing on his own and he would need conspirators to carry it out. As he considered those in his circle, the faces of Koh and Handa were the first to surface in his mind—not because they had been the ones discussing how to extort a company. Monoi had a certain intuition when it came to judging a person’s character. Both Koh and Handa, if they were to go through with something, would do it as a crime of conscience. Monoi had intuited this aspect of their characters.

After making the necessary calls with a clerical efficiency that surprised even himself, Monoi returned to the wake room, where he sipped the to-go cup of saké he had bought that evening near the train station and smoked a cigarette. There was no trace of the sudden vicissitudes of emotion that immediately followed his discovery of Seiji’s body, and even though he had been ruminating on how to go after Hinode Beer, he showed no sign of any significant change that had occurred within him.

His discovery of Seiji’s corpse had dragged Monoi into a dark tunnel, and in reality, emerging from that tunnel and arriving at Hinode Beer was not such a leap for Monoi; rather, it underscored the very uncertainty of life. After all, in this fleeting world where suddenly one day a wealthy dentist jumps in front of a train, or a brilliant scholar who graduated from Tohoku Imperial University dies in a nursing home with no one to bear witness, it was hardly a surprise for a former lathe operator who was about to turn seventy to now, out of the blue, come up with the idea of blackmailing a major corporation.

To avenge Seiji—this most seemingly plausible rationalization had quickly paled, and when he surveyed the scene anew, there was nothing other than that the money was there for the taking. In fact, Monoi couldn’t help but think he was destined to bring this about. However many years ago it was, he had contemplated the way of this world, with those who amassed their fortunes on one side and those whose diligent efforts supplied the capital for such wealth on the other, and yet, here he was, never having experienced any particular kind of awakening. The thought of giving in to the fiend seemed to suit him.

“Now that I think about it, Seiji-san, you were never one to talk about laborers’ rights or anything like that, were you? It seems I too lack the mind for such things, but then again I can’t resign myself to working like an animal.”

Monoi spoke to the coffin this way, and pulled open the lid of another to-go cup of saké.

“Where am I trying to go, I’m not quite sure myself, but no matter where I end up, all I have to worry about is myself. I no longer need the Shinto gods or Buddha. That’s what I think, anyhow.”

Monoi took off his shoes and settled into the sofa, working on his second cold saké. Now that Seiji had been placed in the coffin, his face as it was had begun to recede, as had the fact that until just half a day ago Monoi had intended to take custody of Seiji—that too had drifted away—and Monoi was once again engulfed by that familiar sense of hopelessness, pulled along by the current of time that turned murkier as it washed over him. And yet, thanks to the fiend enshrined deep within his belly, perhaps he felt a twinge of heat, as if there were a tumor growing inside him.

As he dozed off, leaving a bit of his saké unfinished, Monoi recalled the faces of his grandparents and parents and siblings back in Herai, sifting through them in his mind one by one as if turning the pages of a photo album. Strangely, even though until now he had always thought that everyone in his family—Seiji Okamura included—had the same indistinguishable, quiet mien, when he looked more closely, each face was imbued with its own severity, melancholy, or even a slight hostility, giving the overall impression of petty riffraff.

And as he turned another page in his memory, among the small-jawed, inverted triangular faces peculiar to Monoi’s family, there he was—Seizo at about seventeen or eighteen years of age—with his one good eye that shone with a particular slyness. That face appeared in a commemorative photo that had been taken at the foundry in Hachinohe. Monoi stared at it, and realized with a bit of surprise, Even back then, I can already see a glimpse of the fiend.

The following morning, Monoi had Seiji cremated at the city crematory and, carrying the urn with his remains and the memorial tablet both wrapped in a cloth, he returned to Haneda shortly past two in the afternoon. On the glass door of the pharmacy, across the notice that the lady pharmacist had posted to announce the store’s temporary closing, the words In Mourning were written messily and ostentatiously. Before doing anything else, Monoi gave a bucketful of water to the wilted morning glories. Then he went inside, where he set the urn and the tablet atop the altar. He burned some incense, struck the gong, and joined his hands together in prayer. He gazed at the small altar, so crammed that it resembled the corner of the hearth in his birth home in Herai, where the seven members of his family had slept on top of one another.

Since he had only dozed a little the night before, Monoi took a nap for about an hour, after which there was a relentless stream of neighbors who came by, saying, “Who else passed away?” and “Let me pay my respects.” Monoi received them in his usual way, offering beers and glasses of cold saké, but with so much on his mind, he hardly listened to the nostalgic reminiscences of the old fogies with nothing better to do.

In the early evening, the owner of a neighborhood eatery came to pay his respects, so Monoi ordered two sets of grilled eel over rice, and by the time he found the right moment to slip away from the pharmacy on his bicycle, it was just after six. The sun had yet to go down. The steel door of Ota Manufacturing had been left open, though there was a closed for obon holiday notice taped on it. He found Yo-chan hunched over beside the work desk at the far end of the room, apparently sanding something with a file. When Monoi peered down at Yo-chan’s hands, he saw that he was beveling the edge of his cutting tool’s blade and the corners of a chip breaker. It was detailed handiwork that measured no more than 0.05 millimeters long. Monoi had taught Yo-chan how to do this ten years ago, recommending that he do it whenever he had spare time in order to avoid getting nicks on the tool blades, but back in the day when he had been swamped with work at the factory, the truth was that Monoi rarely kept up with it himself.

“Koh came by around noon,” Yo-chan said without even looking up. “He wanted to know what I think about you.” His shoulders wobbled a little as he snickered.

“And what did you say?” Monoi asked him, but whether Yo-chan never had any intention of responding or he had already forgotten that he had been the one to start this conversation just now, he just kept silent, moving the whetstone with his oil-covered hands. Even though work had slowed in the recession, Yo-chan was still at the factory at least twelve hours a day, and when he had no jobs to do he sharpened tools and milling cutters one by one, so that the equipment here was almost insufferably shiny.

“Go and wash your hands. Let’s eat this eel.”

“I’ll go buy some beer.”

Yo-chan went out and was back in about three minutes, setting three cans of Hinode Supreme and two to-go cups of saké on the work desk. Monoi laid out the bento boxes of grilled eel, still nice and warm, on the desk and the two of them toasted—Monoi with the saké and Yo-chan with the beer—and began to eat. Outside the open door of the factory, the early evening breeze had finally started to cool down.

Monoi still wondered just what Koh had said to Yo-chan, having apparently come sniffing around so soon after receiving his call last night.

“What did you tell Koh about this old man?” Monoi asked him again.

With a mouthful of rice, Yo-chan replied, “I said you’re between good and evil.”

“You’re probably right. Who do you consider a good person then?”

“The lady who cooked the meals at my institution, I guess.”

“Oh?”

“After we aged out of the institution, she would send each of us a postcard like clockwork every year, but it seems she passed away last month.”

Yo-chan took out a postcard from the pocket of his workpants and showed it to Monoi. The postcard had arrived the day before, judging by its postmark. It was an invitation to a memorial that would be held at the institution, and the woman, whose last name was Kimura, had apparently died at the age of sixty-nine. Monoi didn’t know what to think about this good person, a stranger who had died at the same age that he was, and he had even less insight into the mentality of the young man who was faithfully carrying around the postcard.

Returning the postcard, Monoi said, “Actually, my elder brother passed away yesterday. I cremated him just this morning.”

Yo-chan’s chopsticks stopped moving at this news. He stared at Monoi.

“Don’t worry, he was adopted into another family when I was young, I can hardly even remember his face anymore,” Monoi quickly added.

After a while, Yo-chan said, “Koh’s grandmother has cervical cancer. She only has a few days left, apparently.” After another long pause, he murmured as if the thought had suddenly occurred to him, “Nothing but funerals lately.”

Now that Yo-chan mentioned it, Monoi agreed that, indeed, this summer had seen many deaths. “Did Koh say anything else?”

“Said he’ll come by tonight after work. He wants to discuss something with you.”

“Is that so?”

If that was true, Monoi thought, Koh’s response came a little too quick for an ordinary employee of a local credit union. On another hand, he had always known that Koh’s job with the credit union was only temporary or a cover of some sort, so there was no reason to be surprised. What mattered was which face Koh would expose from behind his cover in response to Monoi’s provocation to “squeeze money out of a corporation.” Monoi had to know what, if anything, Koh had said to Yo-chan.

Anxious to find out, Monoi said slyly, “Say, what would you do if you had money?”

“I would buy a large burial plot, pay off the fees for permanent use, and build a solid tomb. I don’t know who my ancestors are, so I don’t have a family gravesite,” Yo-chan replied. His expression remained as inscrutable as ever, and Monoi could not tell if he was serious or not.

“All you want is a grave?”

“If you mean something you can buy with money, then yes.”

“Maybe I’m too old to understand what you’re saying.”

“What about you, Monoi-san? What would you do if you had money?”

“I don’t know. I already have a grave . . .”

“You can spend all your money on horseracing.”

“I suppose so.”

While he picked at the grains of rice stuck to the side of the bento box, Yo-chan breezily cut to the heart of the matter as if he were making small talk. “You’re taking money from a big corporation, right? I heard from Koh.”

“I’m just thinking about it, that’s all.”

“But why now?”

“There’s no deep meaning behind it. It’s just that, as an old man, my life happens to have brought me to this.”

“I was shocked,” Yo-chan said after a brief pause, then turned on the television above the work desk. As the cheap set took its time to grow bright, the sound of the merry voices of talk-show celebrities blared out, one octave higher than normal.

Yo-chan stared at the people convulsing with laughter on the screen, his eyes hardly moving at all, while Monoi shifted his reading glasses as he surveyed the faces, which seemed indistinguishable from one another.

“Is this the comedy duo Downtown?”

“No, Tunnels.”

“Same difference.”

“Monoi-san. Are you really taking money from a company?”

“I’ll decide after I discuss it with Koh.”

“Are you quitting horseracing?”

“No. This old man’s life won’t change at all, I don’t think.”

“I guess I have no imagination.”

Monoi knew that Yo-chan meant that he couldn’t understand because he had no imagination. Once he had cleared away the bento boxes and the empty cans, Yo-chan returned to sharpening his cutting tools, leaving the TV on.

Meanwhile, Monoi thought about how, when this idea about a corporation first came to him, he had not given any thought to Yo-chan’s existence, and he felt a little dismayed by the many trivial details that had eluded his initial calculation. It was irresponsible of Koh to leak the story to Yo-chan so quickly; Monoi had forgotten that if he were going to do anything, there would be a mountain of issues—including gossip—that he needed to take care of first. Then again, considering that this was not something a good person would undertake in the first place, he decided that the wellbeing of others was beyond his concern.

“Yo-chan. This is my own personal matter.”

“I’m not gonna tell anyone.” His head was bent over the whetstone. “Anyway, when Koh gets here, okay if I listen?”

“What for?”

“I want in.”

“You’ll ruin your life.”

Yo-chan, pretending not to hear, did not reply. After a while, as if he had suddenly remembered it, he asked what was the proper message to write on the decorative noshi gift tag when sending an offering to the surviving family members for the first Obon holiday after someone’s death. Monoi instructed him to write the characters for goku—a sacrifice.

When Katsumi Koh came by it was past nine in the evening. He was clad in a suit and carrying an attaché case, and it was obvious he was on his way home from work. His appearance was entirely different from that of the man they saw at the racecourse, but with his mumbled, “Damn, it’s hot,” and the way he yanked off his necktie as he walked in, he had assumed the same inscrutable façade of the Koh they knew.

“Monoi-san, when you called yesterday I was in a meeting.” After giving this excuse, Koh downed the beer that Yo-chan handed him and, taking out the bag of rice crackers he kept in the drawer of Yo-chan’s work desk, he said, “I can’t eat much during the summertime,” and popped a handful of the rice crackers in his mouth. Watching him, Monoi had the sense that this really was Koh’s lifestyle, and since nothing about him suggested he normally went out drinking around Ginza, it seemed to him that Koh wasn’t kidding when he said he usually spent his nights fiddling with his computer or reading a book. Tonight, Koh had arrived true to form, with his salaryman face on. Monoi wondered if this meant that Koh had heard his talk of corporate extortion with his businessman’s ear.

“I called you out of the blue, it must have been a surprise,” Monoi said.

“Not really. Compared to what we money lenders do everyday, shaking down a company is nothing,” Koh said bluntly. He looked every bit as nonchalant as his remark indicated.

“Huh. Is that so?”

“As long as you don’t give a damn about the morality, it’s best to go straight to stealing the money. That way everything will match up for accounting.”

Monoi remembered now that he had heard Koh himself say a number of times how, until an incident like a bank run forces them to suspend operations, a financial institution never knows their final income and expenditure. If the borrower of a hundred-million-yen loan were to struggle with their financing and run into problems paying interest, the financial institution would simply give them an additional loan equivalent to the amount of interest owed, thereby increasing the total loan amount. Then finally, if the borrower were to fall behind on their principal payment, the institution would typically resort to seizing collateral property, but now that collateral value had depreciated due to the fall of land prices, instead of settling accounts the institution would switch the loan over to their affiliated non-bank. In this way, over a hundred million yen the loaner-borrower relationship would be diversified or bypassed again and again without anyone chalking it up as a loss and it would continue to circulate until eventually someone took the fall.

A financial institution could not make money unless it loaned money. When times were flush, city banks funded credit unions and others with a few hundred billion yen, and in the case of Kowa Credit Union, where Koh worked, even now 40 percent of their deposits were tied in some way to city banks. In return, credit unions gave loans to corporations that were introduced to them by city banks, so that the city banks that made the original deposit were sure to profit through interest. Meanwhile the credit unions built up their figures by increasing the number of loans made with deposits from the city banks. In this way, from the outside it would seem that the calculations for credits and debits matched up in all the account books, but according to Koh it was only the numbers that matched up.

As Koh talked about all this, he seemed somehow removed from any sense of guilt—rather than seeming negligent, Monoi was once again reminded of Koh’s pervasive and utter indifference to society. This indifference coated all of Koh’s words like a tasteless and odorless poison, and Monoi suspected that the shadowy aura that Koh exhibited every Sunday also stemmed, in large part, from this cold-blooded indifference.

At any rate, Koh had said flatly that he wasn’t surprised by Monoi’s plan, but neither was Monoi surprised by his reaction. If Koh were the kind of person who tormented himself over the deceitfulness of financial institutions, Monoi would never have approached him with such an idea.

“Anyway, how’s your Kowa Credit Union doing these days?” Monoi asked.

“The city banks are starting to withdraw their deposits.”

“Oh?”

“So in order to fill those gaps, we are trying to round up large fixed deposits from the general public. We’re now offering four point two percent interest for a year-long fixed deposit of ten million yen or more. Double the interest of the city banks. That’s what yesterday’s meeting was about, too. Scatter the four point two percent bait, they said.”

“Four point two is pretty amazing.”

“After adding the acquisition cost to the official discount rate, we just barely make a profit at two point five. If we set the interest above that limit, we only go deeper in the red the more deposits we acquire. But they still want us to do it.”

After explaining all this, Koh handed Yo-chan two thousand-yen notes and asked him to go get some more beer, then slipped a Dunhill cigarette in his mouth. Since the first time Monoi met him, Koh’s brand of choice had always been Dunhill. His lighter was Cartier. Monoi knew the names of these foreign brands because of the wristwatches and handbags that his daughter Mitsuko wore. At first he had thought the name Cartier sounded like the Japanese for “minor wisdom,” which made him tilt his head quizzically, and then when he heard how much they cost he could only sigh. Despite Koh’s cloak of indifference, he clearly earned a comfortable salary. Monoi could only surmise—from the side of Koh that he was seeing tonight—that the man’s sense of guilt toward his clients and distaste for the kind of work he did were reaching a sort of haphazard accumulation.

“Anyway, about what I said on the phone yesterday . . .” Monoi started.

“I said I wasn’t surprised, but I don’t know what you expect me to do.”

“This isn’t really the reason, but yesterday, my elder brother, who was about to turn seventy-nine, died at his nursing home.”

Monoi gave an equally concise and ambiguous explanation of his relationship with Seiji Okamura; how Seiji used to work for Hinode Beer; how he was forced to resign during the turbulent postwar years; and how after drifting from job to job, he finally died of dementia. All it amounted to, he said, was the story of a single, unfortunate life—nothing more.

Koh fiddled with the empty beer can on the desk to pass the time while he listened to Monoi, but spoke up as soon as he had finished. “The more determined the corporation, the greater the number of people they cast away, used up and discarded, in order to survive—that’s for sure,” he said. “That’s how they have so much capital saved up,” he added. “But Monoi-san, it’s not like you’re in need of money. Why would you want to extort a corporation?” he asked.

“All I can say is that my sixty-nine years’ worth of life has led me to this point,” Monoi replied, choosing his words. “The reason I approached you is because I wanted to hear the opinion of someone who is well versed in the financial affairs of a corporation. If you say it’s impossible, I’ll just have to reconsider.”

“When attacked on a matter that concerns their reputation and credibility—unless it’s an exorbitant amount—a company will generally pay up. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible.”

“How about Hinode Beer?”

“Hinode, hmm . . .” Koh said, and he stared for a little while at the smoke rising from the cigarette between his fingers. His expression looked as if he were calculating something in his mind. Then, he replied simply, “It’s not bad,” and tossed another handful of rice crackers into his mouth.

“What do you mean by not bad?” Monoi asked.

“The stock price of food and beverage companies fluctuates comparatively easily. Unlike the machinery or the metal industries, their business is directly connected to the consumer, so a threat packs an extra punch for them.”

Monoi tried to listen carefully, though he had a hard time imagining where Koh was coming from, and what he was talking about. Perhaps this was because day after day in the financial world, Koh was exposed to situations that came perilously close to extortion, or perhaps because, when it concerned his family business, that air he had talked about breathing was shared by those in the shadowy underworld—but in any case, the enigma that was the true Katsumi Koh was peeking out from beneath his veneer of an ordinary salaryman.

And yet, the person who occasionally stopped by the factory, setting his rice crackers on the desk alongside a can of beer, teaching Yo-chan how to use a computer, and laughing as they played TV games together—he was also Katsumi Koh. Even now, his eyes seemed far from wicked. In fact, he seemed as defenseless as a child with no ulterior motives, his legs sprawled out lazily, having let his guard down somewhat.

One side was dangerous, the other was harmless. Put both sides together and, when it came down to it, Monoi did not know what kind of man Koh would be. But Monoi’s plan to extort money from a corporation itself was so far outside of ordinary—in that sense he and Koh were equally menacing.

“Say, Koh. How would you feel about coming up with a plan that ensures we’ll get the money?”

“Drawing up a plan is the same thing as executing it,” Koh said, laughing. His expression turned serious once again. “Before we get to that, I’d like to know your true motive, Monoi-san.”

A reasonable request, Monoi thought. “You may laugh, but this old man just wants to see those who made a fortune suffer. Lately, I’ve been thinking about this more and more. I was born into a family of tenant farmers in Aomori, and the memories have come flooding back . . .”

Koh, listening quietly, stared straight into Monoi’s eyes for the first time that evening. Then he said, “I wouldn’t laugh. I’m a Zainichi, after all.”

Yo-chan returned, and set out the beer and sake he had brought back on the work desk. He had said he wanted to listen, and he feigned ignorance as he sat at the end of the work desk and returned to the task of sharpening his cutting tool. Koh merely glanced at him without saying anything.

Monoi was in no hurry to force a decision from Koh, so instead he went off on a tangent. “By the way, Koh. What would you like to do if you had money?”

“Me?”

Koh stopped, the new can of beer in his hand frozen in midair, and once again he glanced briefly at Monoi. Up close, Monoi stared back at Koh’s single-lidded eyes, the whites showing beneath the iris, and realized that, over these last three and a half years, he had never looked carefully into his face. But there was no distinguishable expression in Koh’s eyes as he returned Monoi’s gaze, and like the sliding fusuma door to an inner drawing room that opens briefly only to close again immediately, he looked away.

“My family operates the kind of business where money comes rolling in everyday, ten or twenty million yen at a time, you know? I’ve never had to wonder what I would do if I had money. Why would I, when money is the only thing I’ve got enough to rot.”

“I wouldn’t know, I’ve never experienced anything like that.”

“But my folks are different. After the war, they worked twenty hours a day making moonshine and working in the black market until they saved up enough money to start their own business.”

“I see . . .”

“For some reason I don’t see eye to eye with them, so I’ve always worked outside the family. I guess I don’t really know myself.”

Koh stopped speaking abruptly, even though he had been the one to bring his family up—either he wasn’t sure how to explain it concisely or he had lost interest in talking about it. Monoi wasn’t quite sure what Koh was trying to say, but that night he could feel it in his bones, that ill will he had sensed Koh harbored for his people and that he was unable to distance himself from.

“Actually, my grandma is about to die,” Koh said, his tone changing suddenly. He gave a belch that transformed into a big yawn. When he opened his mouth wide, he revealed his beautifully set teeth—a mark of his parents’ thorough attention since he was young. Monoi took notice of such a thing because when he himself had been in the prime of his working life, he had not had the means to fuss over such details, and as a result his daughter Mitsuko’s teeth were riddled with cavities, for which she had held a deep grudge ever since.

“Yes, so I’ve heard. Yo-chan told me.”

“My grandma is the one who controls the bulk of our real estate. The family business uses it and pays rent, but when my grandma dies, her estate will be divided among six brothers, including my dad. All of his brothers are gunning for the right to control the company, so it’s a hell of a situation. True story.”

“Huh.”

“I’m in the finance world, after all. I can’t just cut ties with the family business, but it’s not as if I’m in the Chongryon—you know, the General Association of Korean Residents—and I don’t have any Zainichi relationships either. So it’s getting to be a crucial stage for me too . . . which brings me back to Monoi-san’s plan.”

After a long detour, the conversation had returned to its starting point. Monoi could not immediately grasp how the “crucial stage” that Koh mentioned tied into squeezing money out of a corporation.

“You mean about my plan to extort money from Hinode Beer?”

“Let’s make a deal,” Koh said, leaning forward a bit. His gaze was languid, as if he were still feeling the effects of his recent yawn, but the words that came out of his mouth next were far from languid—they were purely business. “If you’re serious, Monoi-san, I will take on the responsibility of coming up with a surefire plan to get the money. You will have my full cooperation. In exchange, if it’s Hinode Beer you’re going after, the surefire plan we take will have an impact on their stock price. How does that sound as a condition?”

“I’m not sure I understand . . .”

“I’d like to help an acquaintance of mine profit from his Hinode stock. In exchange, I will ensure that your plan will succeed. Of course, the stock will be sold through a securities company.”

“Are you talking about the underworld?”

“It has to do with speculation. To make a long story short, I have a plan that will protect my parents’ company from my relatives.”

Despite what Koh said, it was apparent to Monoi that if there was no shady underworld connection at all, Koh would have no need to confirm anything with him in the first place. Monoi would be obliged to consider the pros and cons of adding an extra layer to his initial plan, but for the time being he responded, “All right, I’ll think about it.”

“Don’t repeat what I just said,” Koh added tersely, and for a brief moment Monoi thought that he saw a flash in Koh’s eyes that did not belong to an ordinary salaryman. Before he could dwell on it Koh was back to his usual self, calling out, “Hey, Yo-chan, let’s go to Makuhari next week,” to which Yo-chan responded, “Sure,” without even raising his eyes from the work desk.

“What’s in Makuhari?” Monoi asked.

“An expo of the newest video game software.”

Koh wrapped a rubber band around the opening of his rice cracker bag and put it back in the drawer of the work desk. Then, turning toward Monoi again, he said, “You know, in a situation like this, Handa would be useful.”

“But he’s a cop.”

“Precisely. You can’t pass up the chance to use a cop when committing a crime. Besides, I know for sure he’ll come in on it.”

“Why do you think so?”

“A sixth sense. Last week I saw him at WINS, the off-track betting parlor, and he looked like a fresh mackerel that was already rotting from the inside. Like he was itching to do something—I’m sure of it.”

As Koh rose from his seat, his jacket and briefcase in his hands, Monoi said, “When it comes to doing anything with this old man, you’ll have to go without your underground ties.”

After a second, Koh burst out laughing, but as he turned to leave, he resumed the stoop of an exhausted businessman.

Once Koh was gone, Yo-chan actually lifted his head to speak, from his corner of the work desk. “You can say that, Monoi-san, but Koh is a man of the underworld.”

“I know that,” Monoi responded.

“Trust Koh, or give up on Hinode Beer. It’s up to you, Monoi-san. If you do this, I will too. If I go on living like this, I’ll die of boredom.”

Yo-chan promptly delivered his simple and definitive conclusion, then he pulled a newspaper specializing in horseracing out from under whatever was on the desk, and bent his head low over it.

The next day, Shuhei Handa was the one who called Monoi to say he would stop by after work. Handa appeared at the pharmacy a little before 9 in the evening, and as soon as he opened the glass door he started talking. “That guy Nunokawa. This morning, he called the department saying his wife had set her futon on fire, and what should he do . . .”

“What?” Monoi couldn’t help but gasp in response.

“I called his local precinct in Tsukiji, and they said a small fire did break out at Nippo Transport’s employee dormitory in Kachidoki, but they said it was from smoking in bed. I told Nunokawa to keep his mouth shut. Told him to take her to a hospital instead.”

Handa spoke practically nonstop. Pushing aside the display shelf of detergent and toilet paper that had been brought in from outside for the night, he made his way into the store.

“Come on in,” Monoi called to him anyhow.

Nunokawa had seemed pretty desperate since around springtime, but given his complicated situation as the parent of a disabled child, there was nothing that Monoi and the others—fellow horseracing fans and nothing more—could do for him. Monoi wondered briefly who would look after Lady if her mother spent time in the hospital, but it was a pointless concern.

“If the firefighters hosed down the house, there must be an awful mess to clean up.” Monoi finally found a few words to say.

“I went to help him this afternoon,” Handa replied. “Not just the futon—everything from the tatami floors to the furniture is a total loss.”

“Well, it was good of you to go to the trouble.”

“I was off-duty this afternoon anyway.”

As he passed through the store and stepped up into the living room, Handa glanced at the plain wooden memorial tablets and urns arranged on the Buddhist altar, and he lit a stick of incense and joined his hands together. Then, after hearing about how Seiji Okamura had died, he said, “The day before yesterday, I was at a funeral too. You remember Takahashi from the Shinagawa Police Department, right? That detective . . .”

“Oh, that guy . . .”

When Hiroyuki Hatano committed suicide, Monoi had visited the local police department in Seijo where a detective had brought him into a separate room and questioned him insistently about Seiji Okamura’s letter. The detective, who came from the Shinagawa Police Department, had asked him at length about Hatano’s last phone call to Monoi and his relation to Seiji, and he also asked in detail about Monoi’s family, where he had worked after moving from Hachinohe to Tokyo, and his own family circumstances—that had been Takahashi. Monoi remembered him as a man in his fifties with a thoroughly unremarkable appearance, save for the strangely haunting light in his eyes.

According to Handa, in 1992 Takahashi had been transferred from Shinagawa to the Koiwa Department’s Police Affairs, and then this spring he had been hospitalized with cancer, and died the day before yesterday. Four years ago, the reason a veteran detective who had exclusively handled white-collar crime had been harassing Monoi about Hatano’s case had something to do with a group of extortionists who were suspected of giving Okamura’s letter to Hatano, and apparently Takahashi had doggedly pursued this thread afterward as well. But due to internal circumstances on the police force, he had been shunted over to Koiwa, and since then had been relegated to his desk everyday, working on administrative tasks in Police Affairs—so for someone who had still been on active duty, Handa said, his funeral was poorly attended. Handa had occasionally gone to visit Takahashi in the hospital, reasoning that the man had once been his superior, if only for a short time.

“The last time I saw him, a week ago, Takahashi asked me to look up the criminal record of a man named Yoshiya Kanemoto. I thought it was just the delirium of a gravely ill person so I paid no attention, but he said Kanemoto is a golf buddy of the extortionist Shin’ichi Nishimura, and that Kanemoto himself stops by the home of Seizo Monoi about once a month.”

“You mean Yoshiya Kanemoto of Kanemoto Foundry?”

“That’s right. You know him, don’t you, Monoi-san?”

“Yoshiya is the son of the owner of the foundry in Hachinohe where I was an apprentice. I used to look after him. Of course this was over half a century ago.”

“What’s your relationship with him these days?”

“He was very attached to me when he was young, so he still comes by to bring me things from time to time. Some foreign liquor, or ginseng or some such.”

“Takahashi said Shin’ichi Nishimura has been to your house with Kanemoto.”

“I don’t know anyone named Nishimura.”

“The man has a one-centimeter mole on the right side of his chin. Try to remember.”

Monoi started to feel a bit foolish as he looked back at Handa, who at some point had assumed the tone and gaze of a detective, but after being prompted, he reluctantly dredged his memory for the face of the man with the mole—the fellow he had occasionally seen in Yoshiya Kanemoto’s Mercedes.

“Yes . . . I’ve seen a man with a mole.”

“That’s Shin’ichi Nishimura. He’s the one who gave Seiji Okamura’s letter to Hatano. That’s quite a man to know, Monoi-san.”

“But I’ve never even spoken to him.”

“I explained it to you four years ago, didn’t I? What the police focused on in the dentist’s case was how, exactly, Nishimura had gotten hold of Seiji Okamura’s letter from forty years ago. You are Seiji Okamura’s younger brother, and on top of that you are associated with Nishimura—no wonder you’re marked. That’s just how this world works.”

Having said as much, Handa finally grabbed the can of beer he must have bought from the vending machine next to the liquor shop across the street and, popping the tab, he took a sip.

Monoi, on the other hand, having been blindsided by such an unexpected story, felt as if he had something caught in his throat. Just last month, Yoshiya Kanemoto had appeared with a cheerful, reddened face and brought him a watermelon; it was hard for him to believe that the police had surveilled even the minute-or-two-long conversation they had standing by his storefront.

“But isn’t the case with the tape Hatano sent to Hinode Beer already closed?”

“Yes. Especially now that the crusading investigator has died.”

Handa seemed to have found Takahashi’s funeral thoroughly infuriating. Without even being prompted, he talked about the service, which had taken place in a small temple in Machida; how neither the deputy chief nor any detectives from the Criminal Investigation Unit offered any words of remembrance about the deceased’s work ethic; and how as they were waiting for the hearse to leave, there had been a lively conversation about a burglary case that had nothing at all to do with Takahashi. Handa was one to talk—he barely knew Takahashi himself, so part of his frustration as one of the mourners was no doubt to substitute for his personal indignation.

“A man’s life is so trivial. No matter how diligently you work, if you don’t rise up in the world, you’re left out of the loop even in death. And if you do manage to get ahead, you’ll be merrily sent off with empty messages of condolence . . .” Handa flashed a rare, wry smile as he spewed such predictable grievances.

“You might be right. You’re better off alone when you die.”

“That’s why they say it’s best to be with an older woman,” Handa said, offering an equally rare quip.

“Your wife, she’s older than you?”

“By ten years. By the time they turn forty-five, they don’t even put on makeup any more.”

Handa gratefully ate the pickled eggplant and cucumber that Monoi had set out to accompany his beer, saying, “These taste so much better than the store-bought stuff.” Monoi sipped his shochu.

“By the way, are Kanemoto’s visits irregular?” Handa resumed his questioning. “Does he show up at night or during the day? Has the pharmacist or your neighbors seen him?”

Monoi told him that Kanemoto visited infrequently, usually late at night after he had been drinking or early Sunday morning on his way to play golf; that when his wife, Yoshie, was still alive, Kanemoto had come into his home two or three times for a drink, but in the last ten years Kanemoto’s lifestyle had shifted so that now he only stopped by in his Mercedes; that they barely even had what would be considered a conversation when they saw each other, and that he didn’t know whether his neighbors had ever seen them together.

“All right. First, you’ve got to end things with Kanemoto. It would look unnatural if you cut him off suddenly, so do it gradually.”

“I understand about Kanemoto. The old man was being careless.”

“I’m only telling this because of what you said to me on the phone the day before yesterday.”

Handa said this without any particular gravity, then opened his second can of beer. Ah, he’s already on board, Monoi thought instinctively, and he felt his mood lifting gently as he topped off his own glass of shochu.

“I don’t mean for it to be a joke, it’s just an idea,” Monoi dove in himself. “This old man has decided to squeeze money out of Hinode Beer. I wouldn’t know what to say if you asked for a motive, but I think in life there’s such a thing as timing.”

“‘The devil made me do it’ is the only explanation for some crimes, but even then there’s always some underlying basis.”

“Soon after the war ended, I came close to murdering the owner of the factory where I worked, and his entire family. That’s the basis. I always tried to live my life quietly, for the most part. But growing old is not so peaceful, you know.”

“You’re the type that gives police the most trouble. Your motive is unclear.” Handa laughed in an uncharacteristically light manner.

“But Handa-san, what about you?”

“Me? I have a habit of fantasizing. Whenever something bad happens, I always try to compensate by running through a fantasy in my mind to save myself. I’ve been doing that for so long and then suddenly, I got your call.”

“Did anything specific happen?”

“No. I can only say that things have been piling up for me, too. But I’m positive that when I entered the working world, I came in through the wrong door. The police force as an organization, my career as a police detective—all of it is too honorable for me.”

The layers of frustration of working in the police force accumulated over time, and during these last ten years, Monoi figured he had seen that frustration surface a fair number of times in Handa’s aspect and manner. Although each individual annoyance was simple, as they piled up they tangled into a complicated, inextricable knot. In Handa’s case, that knot was also interwoven with twisted obsessions, pride, and ambition. One thing Monoi did not know, however, was whether a fiend like the one he had nurtured in himself existed within Handa. When the time came to cross the line, what would be the force that would drive this particular man over it? Monoi could only wonder as he peered into Handa’s face.

“Yeah, right—this morning, for example, what do you suppose I was doing? There I am, yawning after a night shift, when I get a call from the head of the unit—it’s six in the morning, and he’s on his way to play golf with the department chief. He left his putter in his locker at the office, and he tells me to bring it to him right away. So I have to carry the putter all the way to Komae, bright and early in the morning.”

“Did you?”

“The asshole who called me, his only concern is ingratiating himself with the chief and the top brass at MPD, but the sleazier they are, the more I enjoy standing at attention before them. I was as courteous as I could be to the bastard. ‘Yes, boss, here I am with your putter,’” Handa said, laughing as he acted out the gesture of bowing his head low. “First of all, I find it hilarious that they have no idea what I’m thinking.”

“Huh.”

“What I mean is, I have twice the patience of an ordinary man. That’s why there are so many opportunities to indulge in my fantasies.”

Ah, now I see. This man copes with reality by exchanging humiliation for masochism and indignation for fantasy, Monoi thought. He reacts to the slightest provocation by society, an organization, or another person, and the pleasure he derives from his masochism and fantasies becomes his daily sustenance—a twisted enough state of being. This was the form taken by the fiend within this particular man. It was quite different from the impulsiveness of the fiend within Monoi, but the important thing was that there was a fiend here as well.

“But my plan to blackmail Hinode Beer is no fantasy, you know.”

“The amount of time it will take to carry out the crime is actually quite short. In contrast, the anticipation leading up to and the excitement after the fact will be more than enough. That’s why I’ll do it.”

“Thinking about it doesn’t cost a thing.”

“The satisfaction I’ll get from knowing that no one around me has any idea what I’m up to—I doubt you can imagine, Monoi-san. The pleasure of playing the innocent at my respectable job as a police officer at MPD when in fact I’m a public enemy . . .”

Handa rolled the words around in his mouth as if he were already savoring the fantasy, then washed them down with his beer. Monoi also swallowed his determination—I’ve got him now.

“So, Handa-san, that means you’re in?”

“Yes.”

“No second thoughts?”

“Nope. By the way, could we ask Nunokawa to join us? While he and I were cleaning up his house after the fire, the bastard kept mumbling to himself. Said he was going to disappear . . .”

“Disappear?”

“Look. It’s none of our business, but if he wants to leave his wife and child and disappear, then it wouldn’t make much difference for him to pull off something crazy before he does. Nunokawa might even change his mind about it all if he got his hands on some money.”

The thought of bringing in Nunokawa, who had Lady to take care of, had never entered Monoi’s mind, and he was unsure of how to respond. There might be some truth to the idea that money could change things for him, but he was at a loss for words as he recalled how, just last week at the WINS in Suidobashi, Lady’s face had looked as she joyfully wobbled her head. In the end, he skirted the issue by replying, “This old man can’t make a decision about such matters.”

“No, ultimately it’s something that Nunokawa has to decide for himself. That guy, in addition to having been trained in the Self-Defense Forces, he’s been deconditioned of thinking for himself. It’s about time he gave some thought to his own intentions, for once.”

Monoi agreed with each of the things that Handa said as he contemplated Nunokawa’s inscrutable profile, so familiar after all their time at the racetrack. Indeed, he had never once witnessed any suggestion of individual will—all the guy ever did was sit patiently in silence. Who would be the one to decide the future and fate of that man and his family?

“I leave Nunokawa up to you, Handa-san.”

“I’ll talk to him. In terms of usefulness, you won’t get a better man. It’s not for nothing he was in the army, you know.”

Handa had already emptied his second can of beer, so Monoi offered him some shochu. “Just one,” Handa said, tilting a glass toward Monoi and politely thanking him before bringing it to his lips.

“By the way, I talked to Koh yesterday,” Monoi said.

“How’s that dude? If you’re aiming for a corporation, you’ve gotta put his craftiness to use.”

“Koh said he would cooperate fully, but it seems like he’s thinking about profiting from the manipulation of Hinode’s stock price. What do you make of that?”

“That sounds like him,” Handa said and laughed softly. “I’m sure he’s planning on hooking up with a corporate raider or a securities man he knows. As long as we make it a condition that it be entirely separate from us, he can do as he likes. Hell, at least it makes his motives clear.”

“Koh said he would keep it separate, but won’t it cause problems if we get entangled with his underworld connections?”

“Quite the opposite, actually. Those guys in the underworld are tight-lipped, so there’d be no need to worry about the plan leaking. What’s more, however they decide to manipulate the stocks, you’ll never see anything out in the open. That’s for sure.”

“If you say so, then this old man has no objection.”

“But it’s impossible for me to forget that Koh’s dad is a leader in the Korean Association. My relationship with Koh will be strictly business. I need you to understand that.”

“I’m sure that’s what Koh expects too. But he mentioned the plan to Yo-chan, and now he wants to be in on it too . . .”

“So it’s just the usual racetrack crew?” Handa said with a shrug. “Amazing. It’s like the tale of Momotaro and his gang.” He laughed again.

“If you want out, now is the time.”

“No, it’s not bad, as far as teams go. In police lingo, we call the geographical and social connections among potential suspects a ‘cross section,’ but we have almost none of that. If there is no cross section, then those conducting the investigation will have a hard time tracking the group of suspects.”

“That means from now on, we’ll have to stop gathering at Fuchu and WINS.”

“That’s for sure. It’s a problem that you and I live near each other, so from now on I won’t come by your pharmacy anymore. You and Yo-chan can keep seeing each other as usual, but let’s tell Koh to stop going to Yo-chan’s factory.”

“Anything else?”

“We all have to declare any financial debts we have.”

According to Handa, shaking down a corporation could take anywhere from a few months to a year including setup time, making it impossible for someone running from debt collectors to keep going. The police would first suspect the crime was financially motivated, and they would start by going through client lists of city financial institutions, especially loan sharks, so if any one of the conspirators was carrying debt, it would be all but impossible to execute the plan.

“Then, at last, we work out the plan,” Handa said.

“I want to make sure we pull it off.”

“So do I.”

Monoi had nothing more to say to Handa. He topped off both of their glasses with shochu and they raised them in a silent toast.

“Speaking of Hinode Beer . . .” Handa said suddenly, as if he had just remembered something. “I think you and Hinode have too many connections—the case with Seiji Okamura’s letter, and the case with your grandson. If Hinode is the target, your name will undoubtedly come up on the list of suspects the police will immediately identify.”

“But this old man can’t think of any company other than Hinode Beer. Besides, I will leave the actual groundwork to you young people—I’ll be right here watering my morning glories, and I have no so-called cross section with any of you either. I have no motive. Even if the police come to question me, I’ll be fine.”

“Let me give it some more thought,” Handa said. Then he mumbled, “Speaking of Hinode Beer . . .” again as he glanced at the family portrait on top of the chest of drawers. After a moment he tapped his own knee once and said, “Right. That’s it.” Handa turned back to face Monoi. “A change of subject, but what was the name of your grandson’s girlfriend? The one whose parents rejected her marrying him because of his background?”

“Her name? Let me see, what was it . . .”

“You told me you heard it from your daughter, Monoi-san. She was his classmate at University of Tokyo . . .”

“. . . Sugihara. That was it. Yoshiko Sugihara.”

“How do you write the characters for Yoshiko?”

“I wouldn’t know that.”

Handa jotted something in his notebook before putting it back in his pocket.

“What about my grandson’s girlfriend?” Monoi asked.

“Oh, just something that Takahashi and I had talked about four years ago. After your grandson passed away, Yoshiko’s parents came to pay their respects at Hatano’s home, right? We were wondering why they didn’t attend the funeral.”

“I’m sure they felt guilty.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure. Besides, even if he was in shock because the marriage was rejected, it’s still hard to believe that’s the only reason an accomplished university student would flee from an important job interview.”

At a certain point Handa’s eyes had once again taken on the look of a detective—they called to mind the flickering needle on some kind of sensor.

“Who knows, it could very well be . . . I’ll check it out and call you with what I find.” With that, Handa peeked at his wristwatch and muttered to himself about how late it was already, then got up from his seat. Making an absent-minded excuse that his wife, who also worked full time, would have dinner waiting for him at home, he left at half past ten.

It was only three days later when Monoi received Handa’s report. Handa called in the evening from a pay phone somewhere with bustling noise in the background. “Jackpot,” he said. “Yoshiko Sugihara’s father is Takeo Sugihara. He’s the deputy manager of the beer division and a board member of Hinode Beer. Takeo Sugihara’s wife, Haruko, is the younger sister of Hinode Beer’s president, Kyosuke Shiroyama. That makes Yoshiko Sugihara the president’s niece. Monoi-san, are you listening to me?”

“You mean, when Hatano sent Hinode the letter and the tape, Hinode was desperate not to leak the scandal of Sugihara’s family, right?”

“Exactly. Hinode is a go,” Handa said. “I don’t mean to take advantage of a scandal like this, but this counts as a wound Hinode will be forced to conceal from the public at any cost. Even if we don’t say a word, Hinode will go on the defensive to protect it themselves. You can’t ask for a better situation than this.”

“But what if the police sniffs out the connection between Sugihara’s daughter and my grandson?”

“Hinode won’t let on a thing about that part of the story. And even if the police do sniff it out, it will only lead their investigation down the wrong path. Do you follow me? As long as they consider it a revenge crime, the only suspects they’ll turn up are you and your daughter. Meanwhile, Monoi-san, you’ll just be watering your morning glories and napping in front of the TV, and on Sundays you have the racetrack. No matter where they poke into, they’ll find nothing.”

Even though he was calling from a payphone, Handa chose his words carefully, one by one, apparently paying no mind to the dwindling minutes on his telephone calling card. His tone suggested that, more than explaining it to Monoi, he was trying to convince himself.

As Monoi listened to him on the other end of the phone, once again he allowed the fateful bond he had with this corporation—Hinode—to slowly chafe at him. If it weren’t for this Sugihara person—this Hinode board member—neither his grandson, Takayuki, nor Hiroyuki Hatano would be dead. Or if Hinode as a corporation had even a shred of integrity, Hatano would never have sent them a threatening letter or tape.

“So you’re saying Hinode is a go?”

“Absolutely. Oh, and also, in the Toho Weekly magazine that went on sale yesterday, in their ‘Face of Japan’ feature, there’s a photo of Kyosuke Shiroyama. He’s dressed casually—a classy, simple summer sweater and faded chino pants. He’s even got on a well-worn pair of white Reebok sneakers—this guy has pretty good style. Looks to me like they took the photo on the grounds of a small shrine. I knew I’d seen that landscape somewhere, so I went to confirm it in person, and it was just as I’d thought. You know those stone steps in front of Omori Station? Tenso Shrine is at the top of those steps.”

“Ah, I know it. So the president of Hinode lives in Sanno. Of course, a wealthy residential neighborhood.”

“The address is in Sanno Ni-chome. I looked it up and checked it out myself. An impressive home. A huge yard, dense trees offering cool shade, and a glass greenhouse. No dog.”

Handa spoke as if he were recalling each item one by one in his mind, then he murmured, “A kidnapping might work,” and seemed to snort softly.

As this word—kidnapping—echoed in Monoi’s ears, another thought—ransom—ran through his mind, where the numbing effect of the fiend still prevailed, followed by no moral judgment whatsoever. There was merely the realization that, little by little, their plan was being set into motion.

“Hey, I only just thought of this. Sanno Ni-chome is in the precinct of Omori Police Department—to the north it’s Oi, in Shinagawa. To the south it’s Kamata. All of that is my turf. The emergency deployment instructions over wireless will be leaked straight to me . . . This could get interesting.” Handa let his imagination run wild, then regained an administrative tone. “By the way, I spoke with Nunokawa yesterday. I got a good impression. It’s still the Bon holiday, so he said he would call you tomorrow or the day after. Also, that Yoshiko Sugihara we talked about got married in ’92—now her name is Itoi. I plan on scoping out the situation.”

That was the end of Handa’s phone call.

The telephone call from Jun’ichi Nunokawa came in the following afternoon. He too called from a payphone, and there must have been a playground nearby, because children squealed in the background.

Every year, during the time when the main horseracing tournaments moved to the countryside for July and August, Lady’s usual care facility also went on a summer break, so Nunokawa and his wife were kept busy looking after their daughter. When Monoi heard Nunokawa’s voice over the phone, it dawned on him that now must be that time.

“Yesterday, I put the girl into a special care facility,” Nunokawa said. “This place keeps her there over the weekend. With my wife sick, well, it’s more than I can handle on my own.”

I see, so Lady isn’t at home. Hearing this, Monoi felt a rush of both pity for Lady and relief that Nunokawa had been given a little reprieve. He was at a loss for words. Finally, he replied, “I see.”

Nunokawa also took a long pause. Even though he was the one who had made the call, perhaps he had not sorted out what he intended to say, for that the next thing Monoi heard was an abrupt, “Damn, it’s hot.” Nunokawa’s voice, as usual, bore no discernable emotion or inflection, and managed to communicate only one or two of the hundred things he could have said.

“Yes, it sure is.”

“By the way, I talked with Handa-san. I want in.”

“What’s your motive?”

“Do I need one?”

“Not necessarily, but I’m sure you’ve been thinking about a lot of things, too.”

“I just want to come to terms with my life.”

“What for?”

“I’m sure you can tell by looking at my life.”

“Your life? You’re a skillful driver, you earn six, seven hundred thousand yen a month, your wife is sick, and your daughter has a disability. So what? There are countless other lives just like yours.”

Monoi worried that Nunokawa might take offense and hang up the phone, but the line was still connected. Instead, he heard a guttural “Ah”—more like a yelp than a sigh—that seemed to have erupted from deep within Nunokawa’s body, and then, silence resumed. On the other end of the line, the crack of a baseball hitting a bat followed by children’s voices cheering and laughter resounded.

There was no rhyme or reason, it was not about happiness or the lack thereof—just that each person led their own fragile life. Nunokawa had said all along that his daughter would stay in a facility until she turned eighteen, but he had no idea how he would take care of her when she was in her thirties and forties. Even if there were plenty of other parents who took care of children with disabilities, as long as the person in question—Nunokawa himself—said he couldn’t do it, perhaps the impossible remained impossible.

Handa had said there was a possibility that Nunokawa might vanish, and Monoi guessed that could be what he meant by “coming to terms with his life.” Which was all the more reason Monoi needed to question him further. If he were to join them out of self-destruction, it could cause trouble for all of them.

“Nunokawa-san. Take your wife on a nice trip to a hot spring spa or wherever. We’re not going to pull this off today or tomorrow, so there’s no rush to give me an answer.”

“So long as the joker that I drew isn’t going anywhere, my answer’s not gonna change.”

“By ‘joker,’ do you mean Lady?”

“Who else would it be? Out of a thousand babies, there are only one or two jokers, and my wife and I, we drew one of them. Is there any other way to say it?”

A child born with a disability, a child who dies after crashing into the wall of the Shuto Expressway at 100 km per hour, Seiji Okamura, who suffered from mental illness, and Monoi himself, transformed into a fiend in his old age—of all the fates that fell down from the heavens, in the eyes of a parent, at least, Monoi could not deny that “joker” was a fitting description.

“Then she’s a Lady Joker,” Monoi said, and as if a levee had broken, laughter erupted from Nunokawa, which went on for a while, and then he hung up the phone.

As if she had been waiting for his long phone call to be over, the lady pharmacist shouted from the store, “Shall I cut up some watermelon?”

“A slice for the altar, please!” Monoi yelled back.

Before long, she came into the living room with three slices of watermelon on a tray. “Here we are,” she said. She sat down on the tatami floor and remarked, “That was a long call.”

“When your hearing starts to go, you have to ask them to repeat everything.”

“Your hearing’s starting to go, Monoi-san?”

“Your voice is loud, so I hear you just fine.”

Monoi offered a slice of watermelon for the altar, struck the gong, and joined his hands together. Seiji’s urn and memorial tablet had been left as they were—since the wake, there was still no word from Okamura Merchants in Hachinohe. If he didn’t hear from them before the equinoctial week, Monoi planned to bury Seiji in his family plot in Herai.

After polishing off the slice of watermelon that the pharmacist had bought on sale in the shopping district, Monoi stood up to water the sidewalk as he did every evening. She had gone out to the storefront before him, and had been chatting idly for nearly five minutes with a housewife from the neighborhood, giggling gaily. The housewife had been their customer for going on ten years. She always purchased the same stomach remedy and multi-symptom cold medicine, and now and then she would buy whatever she had forgotten to pick up at the supermarket—cough drops, bug spray, mosquito coils, talcum powder, cleanser, toilet paper, and so on.

The other patrons of Monoi Pharmacy were more or less the same. Under the management of an owner with no business acumen, the pharmacist did a good job; she recommended brands with high rebates for the customers, wangled beer coupons and gift certificates from the distributors’ sales reps and cashed them in at the voucher exchange shop, handing him his share: “Here’s your take for the day. Fifty-fifty.”

The profits from a small pharmacy on the outskirts of the city were negligible, but even after deducting the pharmacist’s pay and various other expenses, Monoi still brought in three million yen a year, give or take, and this combined with his pension was enough for a single man of sixty-nine to go on living comfortably.

The housewife, seeing Monoi come into the store, called out affably, “Oh, hello there. I’ve been wondering about you since I saw the notice that you were in mourning.”

“Yes. When you get to be my age, all you do is send people off,” Monoi gave a noncommittal response along with a shy smile, and after lowering his bowed head two or three times like a turtle, he walked outside.

Beneath the woven reed shade, the seedpods at the ends of the shriveled morning glories’ stems were beginning to swell. Monoi subconsciously tilted the right side of his face toward them, and stared at the seedpods with his good right eye. Making a note in his mental calendar to remove the seeds in a week or so, he suddenly wondered, when these blue morning glories bloomed next year, where would he be and what would he be thinking? Even if he were to get his hands on a large sum of money, for a man who would be seventy, a life of revelry and luxury was utterly unnecessary, and with the most important thing—a sense of peace in his heart—moving ever further away from him, by this time next year, perhaps he would be an even more wretched fiend than he was now.

Monoi contemplated this and, resolving that at least he would no longer live the life of an animal, he murmured to himself, That would be good enough for me.