Seizo Monoi
It was raining for the first time in almost three weeks at Tokyo Racecourse in Fuchu. The rain fell harder in the afternoon, and by the time the ninth race began, the cluster of umbrellas gathered near the finish line began to scatter one by one. On a day like this, the hundred thousand or so people huddled together in the grandstand got so thoroughly drenched that water could practically be wrung out from the crowd.
Rising above the low hum that filled the second level of the grandstands, a heavy groaning sounded from time to time, like air seeping out of a broken exhaust pipe. A girl sitting on a bench, contorting her upper body and twisting her neck about while shaking from side to side, was gasping out her breath, forming an indistinct word composed only of vowels: “Aaaa, ooo.” It was the girl’s way of saying “Start.”
Sitting on the girl’s right side, the man accompanying her looked up. He blinked his heavy eyelids and muttered, “Be quiet,” but the girl, contorting her mouth and shaking her head up and down vigorously to express the joy of having had her feelings understood, let out a hoarse scream.
A single strand of rope was wrapped around the girl’s waist, and it was tied to the bench. The girl was well over twelve years old, but because her neck and upper body were unstable, she had to be tied to the bench to prevent her from falling over. That day the girl also gave off a sour smell of blood, and every time she moved the stench permeated the air around her. The man accompanying the girl sat next to her, seemingly unaware of this, as she continued to wobble her neck and groan, until he lowered his head to doze off again.
Say, where did I leave my umbrella? Seizo Monoi suddenly wondered and, taking his eyes off his newspaper, looked at his feet beneath the bench. Without adjusting his reading glasses, he scanned the blurry concrete floor before picking up his black umbrella, which was being trampled by the canvas shoes of the girl sitting next to him. A wet and withered piece of newspaper was stuck to the cloth of the umbrella. His eyes caught the words “Superior Quality, 100 Years in the Making. Hinode Lager” in an ad printed on the page before he shook it off.
Beside him, the girl had begun stamping her feet again and wringing from her throat her version of the word, “Start, start!” It was the beginning of the ninth race, a six-furlong race for three-year-old colts and fillies. As Monoi raised his head to witness the start of the race he had not bet on, he wondered if the smell of blood wafting from the girl was only in his imagination. He unconsciously turned his neck so that the right half of his face was positioned toward the racecourse. He had suffered an accident as a child that had cost him most of the vision in his left eye when he came of age and now, in his late sixties, that side had gone completely dark.
The overcast weather darkened the racecourse, and the horses that took off from across the infield looked as if they were swimming into a stormy sea with jockeys in tow. In November the turf track still bore shades of green, but perhaps from the color of the rain or the sky, the entire course was dulled to an inky darkness, and the dirt track to the inside of the one on which the horses now ran looked like a black sash, frothy with mud. A live feed of the ground’s surface was displayed on the jumbotron located directly across from the grandstand.
Monoi was looking at the dirt track because the next race—the tenth, and the one he planned to bet on—would be run on this course. As was always the case, imagining the weight of the horses’ hooves, he was consumed by an inexplicable restlessness that made his insides leap. After all this time, the sight of the horses—kicking off dirt as their rumps were whipped and veins stood out on their throats—still filled Monoi with wonder. The horses, he thought to himself, couldn’t contain the latent excitement that rose within them as they felt the menace and the relentlessness of the earth and the weight of every step of their four legs. They must have been born to feel this way—no animal on earth would run just for being struck by the crop.
The 1,400-meter race on the turf track went on while Monoi was pondering this, and just as the pacemaker and the stalker neared the finish line side by side like conjoined dumplings, the favorite, Inter Mirage, came storming from the rear, causing the crowd in the stands to roar for a moment. However, as the frontrunner shot to the finish line, the clamor dissipated into a sigh that was soon engulfed by the sound of the rain thundering down on the roof.
Monoi folded the newspaper with the tenth race’s details in his lap and, looking up at the electronic scoreboard, which was visible from the second-floor seats, checked the ninth race’s placings out of amusement. Ever Smile, a horse he had seen win in his debut on the 14th last month, had placed fourth today, two and a half lengths back. Thinking that was probably as good as he could do, Monoi murmured to himself that Ever Smile was still a three-year-old colt after all. The horse wasn’t a particular favorite of his, but the day after the race last month was when his grandchild—his daughter’s son, who was about to turn twenty-two—had been killed in an accident on the Shuto Expressway, so it surfaced in his mind briefly. That same moment, large drops of rain started to pelt down on the racecourse again, distracting Monoi. An ever-widening pool of water had formed on the surface of the dirt track, visible beyond. The next race would be like running through a muddy rice paddy.
It would be impossible to decide on a horse for the tenth race without seeing the ones entered, up close in the paddock. The horses gathering now were used to a dirt track, but not a single one of them had a record of performing well in sloppy conditions like today. None of the horses had a marked difference in weight either. If it were to be a race among horses of similar standing and appearance, all the more reason why it would not do to pick one without seeing the nature of the horse just before the start. He reached this conclusion easily, but the truth of the matter was that he couldn’t be sure. Only the horses knew the answer.
As soon as Monoi decided to head over to the paddock, however, the stats of the horses competing in the eleventh race flashed across the projection screen in front of the finish line. He had yet to decide if he would bet on the eleventh race, but just in case, he took a minute or so to jot down the weights of the horses in the margin of his newspaper. Then, as he swiveled to his right on the bench, the wobbling head of the girl he had forgotten about there for the moment suddenly swung around and leaned toward him. The girl, slightly squinting up at Monoi, grunted, “Eennhh, eennhh.”
Perhaps the girl had said, “Wind.” When Monoi turned back to the racecourse, the rain draping over the grass was blowing at a diagonal. It looked as if someone had pulled an ink-black curtain across the ground.
“Oh, you’re right. The wind.”
Monoi gave a half-hearted response to the girl’s words and patted the small head he had grown accustomed to over the last six years. The smell of blood rose again. Monoi thought subconsciously, the scent of a mare’s urine.
Propelled by a slight, rootless irritation, Monoi called over the girl’s head to the man accompanying her. “Nunokawa-san. Are you going to bet next?”
The man he had called out to raised his head and turned his eyes toward the newspaper he had hardly glanced at even though he had been there since morning. He shook his head and responded, “Sixteen hundred in bad conditions? I don’t need that.”
“Inter Erimo will race. His first since he’s been upped in class.”
“Erimo’s too stiff. You like him, don’t you, Monoi? He’s not for me though.”
Nunokawa gave Monoi his trademark faint smile and held firm. He was a man who only bet on the main race and safely chose the first or second favorite, so he never won big but never lost a lot of money either. He demonstrated no partiality toward a particular horse, and anyway, he barely even looked at the newspaper racing columns. He came with his daughter to the same second-floor seats in front of the finish line every Sunday not so much for his own enjoyment but because his daughter liked horses. Once he had installed his charge in her seat, he usually nodded off or stared blankly at nothing.
Nunokawa was still a young man. He could not have been much past thirty, a fact that was obvious from the incomparable luster of his skin. When Monoi first met him six years ago, the sight of this tall figure—easily over six feet—slouching on the bench had instantly reminded Monoi, despite his rather paltry knowledge of art, of a Rodin sculpture. When Nunokawa told him he had served as a member of the First Airborne Brigade of the Self-Defense Force stationed at Narashino, Monoi thought it was no wonder, with such an impressive stature. Nunokawa had a melancholy look in his eyes, but Monoi made the clichéd assumption that being the parent of a disabled child must be quite difficult at such a young age. Nevertheless, Nunokawa’s crude and awkward manner of speaking and the honesty in his expression, which clouded over with frustration now and then, made Monoi feel a sense of affinity with and fondness for him. As far as affinity went, however, aside from the fact that Monoi himself had a disability in one eye and was also taciturn and awkward, they had nothing specific in common. Because having a disabled daughter required a good deal of money, for several years now Nunokawa had worked as a truck driver for a large transportation company. He spent six days a week going back and forth relentlessly between Tokyo and Kansai in a ten-ton truck.
“Erimo will run on the dirt track.” Monoi said this almost to himself as he got up from the bench to walk to the paddock. Once he walked down the stairs and reached the lines in front of the parimutuel betting windows on the first floor, he realized that he had once again forgotten the umbrella he had just retrieved, but it wasn’t enough to detain him. His forgetfulness progressed every day like a painless gum disease; until the day his teeth fell out, there was time enough to rot.
Just in front of the paddock, there was a man seated by a pillar in an alleyway where drifting trash had collected. The sight of him caused Monoi to pause in his tracks. The man, in his mid-twenties, sat cross-legged with his young body bent awkwardly forward, his face buried in the newspaper that he held open with both hands. Monoi always encountered him in this same exact spot, and every time the man was intently studying his newspaper in a similar posture.
“Yo-chan.”
Monoi called to the young man, who acknowledged him by briefly raising his eyes from the newspaper before dropping his gaze again.
The man’s name was Yokichi Matsudo, but everyone called him Yo-chan. He worked at the local factory in the neighborhood where Monoi lived. On the day of the funeral for Monoi’s grandson—who knows how he’d heard about it—Yo-chan brought over a condolence offering of three thousand yen tucked into a business envelope. When it came to horseracing, he was a Sunday regular like Nunokawa, but Yo-chan always bought up three or four of the Saturday horseracing papers as well as the evening newspaper, and would spend the whole night grappling with the racing columns in his cramped apartment. Right up to the start of the races, he would still be staring intently at the newspaper, which he held ten centimeters before his face, trying to predict their outcomes, until he could no longer tell what was what and a blue vein stood out on his temple. It was always the same routine with Yo-chan.
Monoi spoke gingerly to the lowered head. “You betting next?”
“Only on the eleventh race today. Got no money.”
“Which one?”
“Diana—maybe. I’m not sure.” Yo-chan nervously folded his newspapers with his dirty black fingernails and, tucking a worn-down red pencil into the pages, said to himself, “It’s gotta be Diana,” and further mumbled, “Will three come first, or will it be four . . .”
Suddenly, a man who had been sitting shoulder to shoulder with Yo-chan got up and began to walk away. He was around thirty or so, with an unremarkable appearance from the neck up, but then Monoi couldn’t help noticing the flashy vertical striped jacket he wore over a purple shirt, and his white loafers with the heels crushed down. Yo-chan’s gaze was also drawn to the man and he responded, “An acquaintance.”
“Who is he?” Monoi asked.
“A guy from the credit union who comes to the factory.”
“Huh.”
“He’s a Zainichi Korean. Always pissed off on Sundays.”
As Yo-chan said this he flashed his teeth a little, his shoulders shaking as he laughed without a sound.
In that moment Monoi failed to make out Yo-chan’s spurt of words, but he assumed it was because of his bad hearing and didn’t bother asking him to repeat what he had said. After all, Yo-chan was as young as Monoi’s grandson, and everything about him—from his outlook on things to the way he used his chopsticks—only caused Monoi to feel ill at ease. It had been the same with his grandson who died on the 15th. In any case, the way Monoi saw it, the man walking away seemed to belong to that particular vein of shady underworld connections, though he had no clue as to why he had gotten such an impression.
“Diana might be a win,” Monoi said, bringing the conversation back around.
“Middle odds at best. Not a dark horse,” Yo-chan corrected him soberly, though his face was already buried again in his newspaper.
Monoi spoke to his profile. “Come by my house tomorrow. We’ll go out for sushi.” With that, he walked away.
Monoi had lingered long enough talking with Yo-chan that there was already a battery of umbrellas around the paddock. He stepped into the rain and peered at the paddock through a gap in the crowd, but after realizing that he couldn’t see, he gave up and decided to watch the horses on the various monitors that were around the betting windows. In just a short time he was drenched, so he returned to the shelter of the building and stood beneath a monitor in the crowded passageway. The screen only showed one horse at a time; here was horse number four, a jockey astride him. He was a six-year-old stretch runner who had always run in the nine-million-yen class but, as if himself aware that he had been losing his edge lately in the homestretch, he walked with a heavy, drooping gait. Then came horse number five. He had a lucid expression, seeming fully matured at four years old, and he pulled against his reins and bared his teeth as if he wanted to say something. Next came horse number six.
The rain had not let up. One could practically make out every single raindrop that fell on the horses. Since their bodies were covered entirely by hair, getting wet meant their own body weight would be more of a burden. Infected by the languid mood of the horses, Monoi’s focus started to drift away from the race.
I could use a pick-me-up, he thought to himself. At times like this, it was best to simply let go and sink five thousand yen or so in a single race on the horse he had initially chosen, and if he happened to win it would be all good. If not, all he could do was apply himself better in the next race. Monoi never had much attachment to the bets he made, and perhaps that was why both his interest and his money had lasted for more than thirty years. “Erimo is next,” he said to himself, and though he had not intended to, he moved through the crowded passageway to see the horses warm up on the main track. A throng of men, unable to go out onto the field by the main track due to the rain, had already gathered by the exit from the grandstand, and Monoi could barely get a clear view by craning his neck. There, he waited for the horses moving in from the paddocks to line up, and from a distance he stared at the almost otherworldly movements of the horses’ legs for more than ten minutes. He turned to the clock as he thought to himself that it all came down to potential.
Only fifteen minutes left until the start of the race. He had a few bets he had been tasked with by an acquaintance, so he hurried to the ticket windows. There was no sign of Yo-chan at the foot of the pillar where Monoi had seen him before—where had he gone off to? Gathered in front of the betting windows all he could see was a long line of heads jostling each other. As he stood there being pushed and shoving back over the course of ten minutes, habit induced his excitement and made him think, “Yes, Erimo it is.” When he reached the window, he slammed down five thousand-yen bills and heard himself shout, “Number two to win!” He grabbed the ticket that appeared and quickly pushed forward three more thousand-yen bills and barked, “One-two. One-five. Two-five!” These were for his friend. As he came back out to the passageway with the tickets in hand, the bell signaling the two-minute cutoff before the start rang above his head, followed by the reverberating sound as the chain of ticket windows closed.
On his way to the second floor of the grandstand and with the fanfare as the horses entered the starting gate ringing in his ears, Monoi ran into Nunokawa, who was clutching his daughter under the arm with one hand while carrying a folding wheelchair in the other as he ran down the steps.
“She messed her pants,” Nunokawa mumbled and gestured with his chin at the girl.
When Monoi’s eyes fell upon the girl, he saw that a stain had spread over the crotch of her blue pants. Aha, he thought to himself, troubled by the sudden image of a mare’s ass that came to mind again.
“First time?” he asked.
“I think so . . . No, I don’t know.”
“What is your wife doing today?”
“Shopping. I think she’s probably home by now.”
The two men awkwardly lowered their voices beside the girl, who groaned, “Ah, ah, ahh,” as if to say something, throwing her arms and legs around, her neck wobbling. She was in a foul mood. Nunokawa looked down at her blankly as if his mind had gone off far away, then in the next moment, a blue vein at his temple quivered as his expression registered extreme irritation. However, each expression was gone almost as soon as it appeared.
“She’s a lady now,” he let out roughly.
If she had gotten her period, the girl had indeed become a lady, starting today. Thinking that was one way to look at it, Monoi muttered in agreement but could not find the right words.
“I could place you a bet for the eleventh race,” Monoi finally said.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Nunokawa replied, “Ten thousand yen for Lady-something-or-other to win.”
Monoi again puzzled over how he should respond. “There are two horses with the name Lady.”
“Then five thousand yen each.”
“Better make it a place bet.”
“That’s none of your concern.”
With the hand that was holding his daughter, Nunokawa struggled to fish out a ten-thousand-yen bill from his wallet and hand it over. Then, for the first time in the six years that Monoi had known him, he left without a parting word. Flanked by his daughter in one arm and the wheelchair under the other, he disappeared into the crowd of people in the passageway.
Monoi, on the other hand, ran up the stairs and wedged himself into the crowd of people that was now packed as far back as the passageway. He craned his neck, turning the right half of his face toward the track. The tenth race had taken off from the south side, the eight horses dancing into the sea of rain.
The black sash of the dirt track stretched out before them. The horizontal line of horses edged back and forth as if cutting into a sand dune and, in the blink of an eye, they approached the third turn, the competition still neck and neck. Far beyond the mist, the colorful helmets of the jockeys blurred into one another and wavered. In the second block, Erimo’s black cap appeared to have started a little behind. The horses were now breaking into three groups as they ran past the screen in front of the finish line. The rumble of hooves on the ground grew closer. Erimo was still in last place.
With two horses taking the lead, the remaining six rounded into the fourth turn, only a nose or a neck between them, and entered into the five-hundred-meter homestretch. The cheers that erupted from within the grandstand swelled into giant waves. The eight horses were now edging back and forth in a frenzy as Inter Erimo came surging up on the far outside. Erimo was quickly gaining. Will he pull it out? Will he? Monoi wondered as his own neck stretched forward. He watched as Kita Sunline at the top broke away, followed by Saint Squeeze half a length back, and then Erimo, another half-length behind. The cheers and roars of a hundred thousand or so people spilled over, the losing tickets scattered at once into the air, and the tenth race was over.
The quinella bet was set at 1-5. One of the tickets Monoi had purchased for a friend had won, but looking at the odds, the winnings would be just enough for a cup of coffee. Erimo had not been able to take the lead but, judging from this demonstration of the power of his hind legs, Monoi figured it would be more than worthwhile to continue betting on him. He also wondered why this time, as Erimo charged forward, the exclamation that ordinarily sprang from his lips had not risen up; he assumed his grandson’s death still cast a pall over his mood. Engulfed by the crowd of people for the first time in three weeks, neither his body nor his mind felt back to normal yet.
Monoi gave up on running out to the paddocks as they prepared for the eleventh race and instead lit up a cigarette in the grandstand, where people were already quickly dwindling. The front-row bench where Nunokawa and his daughter had been sitting was completely empty now. On top of it was the solitary umbrella he had forgotten, and the pages of a discarded newspaper were littered everywhere as the rain beat down upon them. Picking up the umbrella, he saw that a losing ticket was stuck to its fabric. As he swatted it away with his hand, suddenly the phrase “Superior Quality, 100 Years in the Making. Hinode Lager” flitted through his mind.
Now, where have I seen those words? he wondered, but could not remember. Superior Quality, 100 Years in the Making. Hinode Lager. A television commercial, a Viennese waltz playing over the backdrop of a photograph of an old beer hall from the Meiji or Taisho era, the tagline appearing in gold letters. The version that aired during the height of summer displayed fireworks over the Sumida River with the words Summer in Japan. Hinode Lager.
Ever since his grandson’s funeral, he felt as if a small object had lodged itself in the blood vessels of his already forgetful brain, and one thing or another would cause it to rumble around in there—he knew now this must be why. Right before the accident, his grandson Takayuki had finished a second round of interviews with Hinode, and had only to wait to receive his employment offer for the following spring. Monoi had heard about it from his daughter and son-in-law at the funeral.
He had married away his only daughter, or rather, she had run off on her own to be with a young dentist in Setagaya, and aside from coming to show him their infant son just after he was born, the couple never stepped foot in her parental home. The few times Monoi saw his grandchild were when he had taken him to Ueno Zoo or Toshima Amusement Park when the boy was young, and after that he sent off a congratulatory gift whenever his daughter called to report that he had gotten into Keio Preschool, then Azabu Middle School, then Tokyo University, and so on. He had figured it was about time for his grandson to graduate from university, but what would happen after that was beyond the scope of Monoi’s concern. Even when he had heard about Hinode Beer, the only vague image he had was of a “large company” that had been around for a while, and Monoi himself rarely drank beer.
Right, it was Hinode. He reminded himself that if Takayuki were still alive, he would start working for Hinode next spring. But when he tried to recall the face of a grandson whose voice he had barely heard in years, his mind came up blank. Monoi had another relative who’d also worked for Hinode before the war, but he had been adopted by another family before Monoi was born.
Nevertheless, the death of someone younger than oneself was a sad thing. When he thought about it, ever since his grandson died, his nerves had bothered him and he couldn’t relax; he constantly found himself dwelling on his past or pondering the remaining years of his life—which at this point barely merited much worry—and often before he even realized it, he found himself lost in abstraction. Five years ago when his wife had passed away, it wasn’t like this at all. Maybe because he himself was five years younger then . . .
After finishing his cigarette, Monoi went off to place his friend’s bet for the eleventh race, and again lost himself for a moment as he was swallowed in the crowd around the betting windows. Resigned to being out of sorts that day, he decided not to make his own bet, but once he had the other person’s ticket in hand, he rushed back to the stands to watch the fourteen fillies as they warmed up for the eleventh race. In these thirty or so years, he had never gone home without sitting through the main race. That habit was the only thing creating the rhythm in his gut. Glaring at the racing column, his eyes drifted to the four-legged creatures as they went back and forth at their respective paces on the main course. How about Ayano Roman, fresh off a break? Sweet Diana, the one Yo-chan had bet on, looked good as she sprinted for about two hundred meters and then shook herself off. She might run a good one. As for the two “Ladies”—the first time Nunokawa had ever placed a reckless bet—Monoi saw one ran with her chin up but he lost track of the other one.
Figuring it must be about time for the horses to enter the starting gate, Monoi was surveying the south side of the track when another acquaintance appeared and uttered a brisk “Hello.” The man had a can of oolong tea in one hand as he crouched down in the aisle beside the already fully occupied benches. It was none other than Handa, the person who had asked Monoi to place a bet for him.
Handa was a detective at the precinct in Shinagawa or somewhere like that. Since his work schedule was irregular, these days he rarely showed up at the racecourse. Instead, he would come to Monoi’s drugstore late at night to purchase an energy drink, and while there he would also ask Monoi to place his bets. Monoi had no idea where the man lived, although he had known the guy for a good six or seven years now, just like Nunokawa.
“Thought you were on duty,” Monoi said.
Handa craned his neck to see the last of the horses warming up as he replied, still brusque, “I was in the neighborhood.” In business shoes and a duster coat, he looked clearly out of place in the stands on a Sunday, but Handa seemed to pay this no mind. Perhaps he had a made a big arrest or something at his job; his broad shoulders seem to be dancing a little. Like Nunokawa, Handa was also still a young man.
Monoi handed the tall man the single winning 1-5 ticket from the tenth race, and the three quinella bets for the eleventh race that was about to start. Handa said, “Thanks,” as he stuck out his hand to receive them, his eyes continuously scanning the racecourse now hazy with rain. It just now occurred to Monoi that Handa was also betting on Sweet Diana.
“How are they? That guy and his kid . . .”
As if he had suddenly remembered them, Handa gestured with his chin to the front-row bench where Nunokawa and his daughter had been sitting until about half an hour ago.
“The ex-army guy and his daughter? She became a lady today. They went home a while ago.”
“What do you mean by lady?”
“She got her first period.”
“Huh.”
The matter did not quite seem to register in the detective’s mind, as Handa nodded vacantly and took a sip from the oolong tea in his hand. The can bore Hinode’s trademark seal of a golden Chinese phoenix. Then, after tossing aside the can, Handa stared straight at the racecourse and nothing else.
The horses began to assemble at the starting gate on the south side across from the stands. Monoi craned his neck, gathering the collar of his jacket closer. The rain was relentless, blowing every which way in the wind that strengthened then slackened in turn, creating a leaden maelstrom over the large expanse of the racecourse.
While they waited the few seconds for the gate to open, the wind and rain blew the tickets littering the stands into the air until the white specks obscured the sky. Monoi stretched his neck even farther and looked out into the distance. For an instant, the pale green of the turf track morphed into grassland hazy with large flakes of snow, the tracks of the Hachinohe railway of his birthplace laid across it, a freight train carrying charcoal and lumber running over the tracks and leaving a rumbling sound in its wake. On either side of the railway tracks the grassland stretched out as far as the eye could see, and beyond it to the east was a black shoreline the color of iron sand—once the train disappeared from sight nothing was left but puffy flakes of snow. In the hazy port beyond the tracks, there was dust and soot rising from the tin roof of the foundry. The shipyard and the ironworks. The main roof of the fish market. The squid fishing boats. And farther offshore the freight vessels en route to Dalian. As he squinted, the snowscape from a half century earlier transformed once again to the turf track, and the fourteen horses were dashing into the spray of water.
“Here they come, here they come!”
Slapping Monoi’s knee, Handa leaped to his feet. A horse was driving in from the very back of the pack as they rounded into the fourth turn. Was that Ayano Roman? Monoi also rose from his seat. Sweet Diana was pulling away. Ayano Roman gave chase.
“Go—!”
Handa began to shout. A sound also escaped from Monoi’s lips. In that moment, both Monoi and Handa were one with the horde of a hundred thousand filling the stands.