Hiroyuki Hatano
Hiroyuki Hatano strained his ears. The phone was ringing. Sounds that he wouldn’t have noticed before while he was working now registered in his hearing often. The pitter-patter of a child’s feet in the waiting room. Then the sound of a man coughing.
Hatano was preparing a lower molar for a root canal procedure, trying to gain access into each curved canal of the molar’s roots. The sensation of the reamer blade striking the canal walls made his fingers jittery. Is that where it’s getting caught? He swapped the instrument for a K-type file—one with a differently shaped blade—inserted it into the canal and, using the superfine tip, began to file the canal into the proper shape. As he shaved away the dental pulp, the file began to glide smoothly up and down, all the way to the apex.
The phone rang again. The receptionist answered immediately, but the ringing was replaced by the sound of her low murmuring. Last month, he had taken a weeklong break after the sudden death of his son, who had been about to turn twenty-two. Although it had already been two weeks since Hatano reopened his office, there had been a backlog of over five hundred patients, and the phone still rang all day long with people calling to reschedule their appointments.
Holding the small file between his thumb and index finger, he pushed the blade further as he moved it up and down. Just as his fingertip sensed that he was only one or two tenths of a millimeter away from the apex, a dry snap sounded at the end of the file he held in his hand. The patient, her mouth held open, yelped.
Had he broken the file, or inadvertently pushed the sealer beyond the apex? Hatano knew the answer. In the next moment, he automatically picked up the X-ray photo and held it up to the halogen lamp above his head, but this was all a pose, just a diversion from his momentary confusion. Before the procedure, he had meticulously examined where and at what millimeter he would drill a hole, measured the rubber stoppers on the cutting instruments, and confirmed the position of the canals.
“Owww . . .” The grimacing female patient let out a cloying complaint.
“Hang on a little longer.” Hatano responded in a brisk tone that was neither harsh nor kind, and prompted the patient to open her mouth again. Hatano would be forty-seven, but just as his body, sculpted into shape by more than twenty years of tennis, had not changed over the years, his manner toward patients remained exactly the same as the day he opened his dental practice. The impression he gave could be described as a gentle coldness and, peering from above the mask that covered half his face, his eyes hardly even paused on the patient’s face as his gaze darted back and forth between the patient’s chart and oral cavity. And the face that looked out from his mask showed no trace of a man who had recently lost his only son.
Hatano looked closely into the patient’s mouth. In the chamber of the molar from which he needed to remove the pulp, he had prepared a proper access with his dental drill. With twenty years of experience in dentistry, he had confidence in his drilling skills, and in fact, the problem was not with the size or shape of the opening. Perhaps the opening had offset the angle necessary for his reamer to find the proper glide path through the root canal, or he had made a simple mistake when calculating the working length. As he thought about this, his eyes fell on the instrument tray by his hand, and the No. 30 file he had just been using. The rubber stopper, which he thought he had placed firmly at a right angle when he first adjusted the working length, was now slanted diagonally.
In that instant—before he could even register his own shock at the sight—Hatano averted his eyes. He thought someone else might have seen him, but the female assistant working across from him was looking away, still holding the suction in the patient’s mouth. His other assistant, taking a break from sterilizing instruments, was busy grooming her nails. Hatano threw the file with the crooked rubber stopper into the sharps container and picked up a new one.
All he had to do was pass through the opening in the canal again. If he overfilled the canal, or pushed sealer beyond the apex, she might be in pain for a while, but as long as it did not cause any inflammation, there was nothing to do but leave it alone. If he had perforated the canal wall, he would have to repair this before he restored the tooth. Pondering what had happened with the self-reproach that always bubbled up inside him at a time like this, Hatano resumed filing and refocused his attention on the sensation at his fingertips.
An infant was crying in the waiting room. The man coughed again. The phone rang.
Once he had finally passed the No. 30 file through the opening, he stepped up to the next sized file, No. 40, and had just begun enlarging the root canal when the receptionist popped her head in from the other side of the partition. She looked as she often did when she was unhappy about something. “Telephone.”
“Who is it?”
“Someone named Nishimura.”
“Ask for the number, please.”
“He said he’ll wait.”
“Never mind. Just ask for his number.”
The receptionist retreated. Hatano exchanged the file for the reamer and began removing the pulp. Each time he pulled out the reamer, he wiped the dark red tissue that clung to the blade onto a piece of gauze.
Even now, despite the precise, mechanical movement of his fingers, Hatano noticed that he was a bit distracted by the immovable fog that had filled the space just behind his brow since the death of his son. The fog had formed into an indeterminate mass, so that he could no longer distinguish his despair from his doubts, and he felt as though only a tiny tremor could make it explode. And who is this Nishimura, anyway?
He finished cleaning and sterilizing the root canals, irrigating them with sodium hypochlorite. He called to his assistant to prepare the sealer, and inserted the gutta-percha into the canal before the temporary filling. Then he asked his assistant for the sealer but it did not arrive immediately. I told you to prepare it, he thought. Hatano put out his hand and waited three seconds. He took the ZOE cement that appeared on a glass slab, filled the pulp chamber with it, pushed it down, and, with the same hand, turned off the halogen lamp.
“We’ll see how it goes for a while. It’s just a temporary filling, so be careful when you chew. If you feel pain, give us a call.” As he spoke these words to the patient, Hatano was already washing his hands at the sink. The only thing on his mind was the two minutes he had lost because he had to redo the root canal preparation. He wiped his hands, and even while he was filling out the patient’s chart, he locked eyes with the receptionist who had popped in her head again through the partition.
“Doctor, telephone.”
“Switch it over.”
In the mere twenty seconds it took him to finish what he was writing on the patient’s chart and stand up, his next patient was already seated in the examination chair. With a quick glance at the fully occupied waiting room on the other side of the partition, Hatano retreated to his small break room and closed the door.
“Dr. Hatano?” A man’s voice addressed him through the receiver. “My name is Nishimura.”
“Nishimura who?”
“I’m with the BLL.”
What caught Hatano’s attention was not the abbreviation for the Buraku Liberation League but the slight weariness with which the man said, “I’m with . . .” His voice carried the tone of a relatively seasoned yakuza. But then Hatano immediately second-guessed himself. In downtown Kobe, where he’d lived until he was four years old, the officers at the police box near the house where he was born used to speak with the same languid inflection.
“What is this about?”
“The other day, a letter arrived at the human resources department of Hinode Beer. It listed the Tokyo chapter of the BLL as the sender, but apparently no one at that chapter has any knowledge or record of it.”
As Hatano listened, he pondered idly: Who is this, where did he get this information from, and what is he trying to threaten me with? While he understood what the caller was implying, since the sudden death of his son, everything around him had lost the sense of reality, so that it felt as if he was listening to a distant voice on the radio. Indeed, only a few days ago, he himself had sent a letter to Hinode Beer claiming to be from the Buraku Liberation League, but he could no longer even recall the experience of writing such a letter.
“What do you want?”
“Doctor. You know there are such things as defamation and obstruction of business?”
“Please tell me what this is about.”
“We at the Tokyo chapter have also previously made demands on Hinode to improve their business practices, so we are fully aware what kind of company they are. But you, doctor, are a stranger to us. We don’t owe you anything that would account for you using our name without permission. How about we talk this over in person?”
“If that’s the case, I will state my apology in writing.”
“Don’t get me wrong, doctor. We just want to be useful to you. Consider it solidarity among comrades burdened with the same suffering.”
“You won’t raise your voice. You won’t put up libelous ads or distribute leaflets. If you can promise me these two things we can meet. I have patients to see so please come to my home at nine tonight.”
“Then we’ll see you later.”
After setting down the receiver, Hatano muttered to himself, “To hell with the BLL,” without even realizing that the words had spilled out of him. At the same time, he shivered with a dull pain that spread through his whole body. Hatano then promptly banished from his consciousness this physical reaction to the phone call. Out of habit, he checked his reflection in the mirror to make sure there were no traces of medicine or bloodstains on his white coat before adjusting his collar.
I guess that’s what you call forgery, he thought. He had sent a query to Hinode Beer using the name of an organization with which he had absolutely no connection, so he had gotten what he deserved. Paying some amount in damages would be inevitable. Standing before the mirror, making these matter-of-fact decisions, Hatano’s consciousness drifted in a world that had lost all color, as it had these last three weeks, and soon the only thing he could be sure of was the unfamiliar, fuzzy sensation of the fog settled behind his brow.
The actual time Hatano had spent taking the call amounted to no more than two minutes or so. Returning to the examination room, he automatically washed his hands, and without so much as a glance at the patient’s face, he apologized for the wait and quickly scanned the patient’s chart. The letters “fist” were scrawled across the page. Cleansing a fistula from an infected root canal. The second time today, he thought.
“How’s the pain?” he asked the patient as he peered into the oral cavity and began to remove the temporary filling. The phone call was no longer on his mind. Instead, the image of his son’s head as he was laid out in the hospital’s morgue was stuck behind his eyes and refused to move. Except that it was not so much a head as a mass of crumpled flesh.
The last patient left a little after eight in the evening, and Hatano locked up the office himself and returned to his fifth-floor apartment in the same building. The day after the funeral, his wife had fled to their vacation home in Oiso. Although she returned every now and then for a change of clothes, she left things in disarray like a bandit, taking only what she needed at the time. The apartment, now occupied by a single man, was hopelessly messy. In the pitch dark, Hatano first stepped on a mountain of newspaper, then on what felt like a cushion, until his hands fumbled around in the darkness and he finally managed to turn on a lamp. Next he washed his hands out of habit, without even glancing at his face in the bathroom mirror. He then returned to the living room and, once he had settled down on the sofa with a bottle of whisky and a glass in hand, there was nothing but the long night ahead.
Just as it had been for the last three weeks, the only thing fixed behind his brow was the image of his son’s face, expanding and shrinking in turns, like an abscess building up the pressure in his blood vessels. The expression on his son’s face grew stranger to him with each passing day—rather than on the verge of saying something, the face merely stared at him. Hatano gazed back, occasionally wondering just whose face this was, and though he tried to jog back his memory to when the face was still familiar to him, he always failed. This pattern had repeated itself ever since the day of the accident.
Three weeks ago, on October 15th, the phone call had come from the police after eleven o’clock at night. Through a clamor of voices on the other end of the line, a voice informed him that his son had been involved in a car accident, and before Hatano could even take a breath, the words that he had suffered a cardiac arrest followed. Hatano and his wife rushed to the Saiseikai Central Hospital in Mita, where a member of the ambulance crew told them that their son had died instantly, along with a whispered warning: “It’s best that your wife does not see the body.” His son had crashed into a wall near the Hamazakibashi junction of the Shuto Expressway’s Haneda Route at a speed of 100 kilometers per hour. The car was totaled; his son’s head had smashed through the front windshield and was mangled to the point where it looked like nothing more than a mound of dark red meat—were it not for the black hair he would not have recognized it as a human head. Under such circumstances, it was impossible for Hatano, as a parent, to comprehend that this was his son, Takayuki.
And as a parent, his first question was what his son was doing speeding along the Haneda Route at 100 kilometers per hour so late at night. Hatano had bought a Volkswagen Golf for him three years ago on the condition that he would take it back if his son was ever caught speeding. Takayuki enjoyed driving it, but he wasn’t enough of a car lover to go for long drives every weekend. At the time of his death, his son had been spending his nights at the laboratory at the pharmaceutical department of his university, preparing his graduate thesis, so the Volkswagen had remained in the parking lot of their apartment building since before the summer, and even during the few times Takayuki had returned home for his recruitment exams with Hinode Beer, he had only turned on its engine to let it run.
The last time Hatano saw his son was Thursday, October 4th, more than a week before the accident, the day his son came home for his first interview with Hinode. His son had been his usual self, and that night as they sat around the dinner table as a family, when Hatano asked how the interview had gone, his son sounded fairly confident as he said something to the effect of, “Companies have a lot more vitality than universities.” He spoke enthusiastically of how, once he was hired, he would continue his research on immunization at the lab in Hinode’s pharmaceutical business department, which had seen significant growth recently. Through the eyes of a parent, from his studies to his sound health to his good looks, Takayuki was above average in all respects, but since he had not known much hardship in life, Hatano felt it would be better for him to stay in graduate school than go to work for a major corporation, but that wasn’t enough reason to dare to refute the wishes of his grown son. He also figured that his son must have his own reasons for wanting to apply exclusively to Hinode Beer, so he had let the question pass without pressing it further.
Then, Hatano himself left for a business trip from the eighth to the tenth, a dental surgery conference in Kyoto. According to his wife, his son had his second interview with Hinode Beer on the tenth, and after returning home briefly, he told his mother he had to go back to the lab to work on an experiment and left.
His wife would later say that there wasn’t anything different about their son at the time, but on the sixteenth—the day of the wake—Hatano heard a story he would never have imagined from another student in his son’s pharmaceutical chemistry seminar. It was revealed to him that on the evening of the tenth, his son, who was supposed to have returned to the lab, called there to say he was sick, and that he had been absent from the seminar since the eleventh. Hatano felt utterly bewildered, as if, in addition to the accident on the Shuto Expressway, he had glimpsed another side of his son. And after the funeral on the seventeenth, he found, among the mail that had not been opened since the day of the accident, a letter from Hinode Beer.
The envelope, postmarked on Saturday the thirteenth and delivered on Monday the fifteenth, was strangely thin. Inside, there was a single sheet of stationery that read, “We regret to inform you that we have rejected your application,” and so on. For a University of Tokyo student with a glowing letter of recommendation from his seminar professor, impeccable grades, no trace of ideological bias—on the science track no less—normally a rejection would have been unthinkable. The next day Hatano went to see the professor who had written the recommendation; he too seemed mystified, and told Hatano that on Friday the twelfth he received a courtesy call from Hinode informing him about the rejection. According to them, his son had scored nearly perfectly on his written exam, and although his first interview had gone smoothly, in the middle of his second interview he had apparently told them he did not feel well and had left, never to return.
Well then, had his son truly fallen ill? Was it true that he left the interview? Assuming his son had lied, there must have been a reason why he needed to make up an excuse to get out of the interview, but what the hell could that have been? Was his son at fault, or did the blame fall on Hinode? As a parent Hatano considered many different possibilities, but common sense forced him to conclude that the fault lay with his son. In between Takayuki’s first interview on October 4th and his second interview October 10th, therefore, something drastic must have happened to his son.
Hatano called every student in his son’s seminar, checked the phone records at home, looked at the passbook for the bank account where he deposited and his son withdrew his allowance, and searched everywhere in his son’s desk and closet, poring over his letters, notebooks, and belongings. As for his son’s expenditures, in June he purchased a fishing reel for his sea fishing trip, in July he spent five thousand yen for a party given by his lab, and in August and September there was a receipt for eight thousand yen for photocopying, and another receipt for twenty-six thousand yen for some books he had purchased. Until October 10th, there was no record of him missing his lab or seminar. His letters consisted only of a few greeting cards from a former high school classmate who was a particularly good correspondent. His notebooks were filled with lecture notes, with nary a doodle. Just in case, he also checked the communication record on his son’s PC, but aside from accessing his lab’s computer, there were no other addresses.
So then, what else is left? Hatano considered the possibility of a girlfriend. Although he had never mentioned it to his parents, his son’s seminar friend informed him that his son seemed to have dated a few female students during his first two years, while he was at the College of Arts and Sciences on the Komaba Campus, and had continued seeing one of them until the summer of this year. But for a science student who spent his nights at the lab, there were limits to having a relationship, and considering his son’s personality, it was hard to imagine that his involvement with someone would have affected such an important business interview. In any case, could this female student he was only seeing until this summer really have been considered his girlfriend? Hatano scrutinized the register of funeral attendees, but none of the female names seemed to be likely prospects.
And so he ruled out each and every possibility in the twenty-two-year-old university student’s small circle—including family, university, friends, fishing buddies, and so on—Hatano’s suspicion deepening all the while that there was something else going on in his son’s life. The only thing left was Hinode Beer. For whatever reason, his son had actively sought to join this company, and yet decided to leave in the middle of his second interview. Perhaps then he felt like he couldn’t even show his face at the lab, considering that his professor had written a recommendation for him.
The name of the company at the source of all this was branded on Hatano’s brain, he couldn’t get it out of his mind. Even so, what sort of problem could there be? Hinode was a trillion-yen business that ranked among the twenty most profitable firms in Japan. During their corporate recruiting process, was it really possible that the company had made the kind of blunder that would force an applicant to abandon the process mid-interview?
And then suddenly, a voice had arisen from deep within his gut that told him: yes. If he was trying to imagine the company’s point of view, there was just one issue to consider.
Until the age of four, Hatano’s permanent address had been in a district within the city of Kobe that included a number of segregated buraku communities, and that was where his father had been born. He knew that such matters no longer caused a stir in Japan, and he knew full well how unlikely it would be for a company to look up the lineage of an applicant’s parents during the screening process for new employees, but once he had latched onto this thought, Hatano’s mind began to circle around it. This world to which he had had no connection for more than forty years now had not come looking for him, but rather, he had called it forth on his own. With no sense of reality, he started to follow the scent of his memory, and without feeling any actual pain, he begin to think: discrimination. Though it was nothing more than a linguistic concept without substance, he continued to cradle it in his arms until it gradually grew warm and began to give off an odor, and the odor further expanded the concept, until an even stronger smell of something rotten began to rise.
It was at this time that Hatano wrote his first letter to Hinode Beer. Suddenly, almost as soon as he had picked up his fountain pen, he began to write as if on auto pilot: I have an issue with the way that my son, Takayuki Hatano, was evaluated during your screening process for new employees, and as a bereaved parent, I am deeply anguished.
Ten days later, a businesslike reply arrived from Hinode’s human resources department, stating that the screening process had been impartially conducted, and even then the thinness of the single-page typewritten letter had provoked a strong reaction in Hatano. The stink of discrimination became even more pungent, and as it continued to intensify, he immediately sent out a second letter. This time, instead of his own name he assumed the name of the Tokyo chapter of the Buraku Liberation League, typing out the words on different stationery. He did not think much about his language. And then, on November 2nd he dropped off the letter at the Shinagawa post office . . .
No, hold on. He had sent the letter on the second. It would have arrived at Hinode on the third. But the third was a holiday so the offices were closed. The fourth was a Sunday. So then, the day the person in charge of mail in the human resources department opened the letter would have been Monday the fifth—which was today. This afternoon’s call from that Nishimura would mean that Hinode had opened the letter this morning, then immediately judged its content and contacted the BLL. That was a startlingly swift response from the company. The rotting stench emanating from Hinode Beer was stronger than ever. It was like a tooth secretly decaying beneath the white resin with which it had been beautifully restored. Like the anaerobic bacteria decomposing the pulp, melting it into putrid, dark red mash—what else could this be other than the rot hiding deep within the trillion-yen corporation?
Hatano allowed the involuntary twitching of his facial muscle to work his mouth into a sneer. He continued to drink for a while longer, until nine o’clock came around. The doorbell rang and, getting up from the sofa and slowly making his way to the front hall, he opened the door. He saw the faces of two men.
“I’m Nishimura. I called earlier.”
The dark-skinned man who introduced himself in the doorway looked to be about fifty years old. On the right side of his jaw, punctuating a smooth, expressionless face with otherwise unmemorable features, was a mole about ten millimeters in diameter. That mole was what Hatano saw first, and more than anything else about the man’s appearance, it left a lasting impression. The second man was about forty with an unimpressive countenance and somber eyes. They both wore plain off-the-rack suits, gave off a strong smell of hair product, and beneath the too-short hem of their slacks, casually showed off their expensive Armani and Gucci shoes. Hatano, however, was of no mind to judge what this hodge-podge signified.
“We won’t take too much of your time.”
As the man who called himself Nishimura spoke, Hatano stared at his face with its peculiar lack of emotion, his eyes scarcely moving as he spoke, and wondered what type of man he was—he really had no idea. The two men sat down on the sofa without so much as a glance at the disorderly apartment, each of them placing their respective business cards on the table and sliding them toward Hatano with a single finger. Both bore the title, “Buraku Liberation League, Tokyo Chapter, Executive Committee.”
“What line of work are you in?” Hatano asked.
Relaxing only his mouth, Nishimura responded, “Shrewd eye. I should have known you’d ask, doctor,” and presented another card. It read, “Look, Inc., Managing Director.”
“What kind of company is this?”
“Manufacture and wholesale of women’s shoes. Since you were born in Kobe, doctor, you probably know it. We are based there.”
Hatano looked at the delicate fingertips of Nishimura’s hand, which he had placed on his knee. Recalling from his youth seeing the hands of the people working in Kobe’s small factories, and then thinking of the Armani shoes Nishimura had just taken off on the concrete floor of his entryway, he thought, No way. Nishimura may or may not have been a shoemaker, but Hatano nevertheless recognized the feeling that was slowly being restored within his own skin. At the same time he was aware of the sort of tediousness exhibited by self-proclaimed activists whose motivation had been reduced over time to a fixation on being descendants of a segregated buraku community. Even as he tried to decipher all this, Hatano’s interest in Nishimura’s identity had already waned.
“What do you want?”
“First, regarding the recent loss of your son, no doubt you are quite disheartened. I want you to know that we fully understand that.”
“I’d like you to get to the point quickly. If I’ve caused you trouble, I’ll pay what I need to pay.”
Nishimura paused briefly before continuing. “Even wearing a lion’s pelt, a fox is still a fox,” he said. “By the way, doctor, your mother seems to be doing well.”
“If you have something to say, make it quick.”
“I hear these days hospitals with fewer than a hundred beds are all having trouble managing, but privately run clinics, on the other hand, are going strong as long as they have the trust of the local community. Business also seems to be flourishing at your mother’s practice in Kamakura.”
“This doesn’t involve my mother. Please tell me what you want.”
“Why don’t we start by you taking off that lion’s pelt? Doctor, you shouldn’t forget the circumstances under which you and your mother left Kobe in 1947. Not that I’m suggesting you engage in class warfare.”
The man’s implication was clear. During the war, Hatano’s mother, a doctor and the second daughter of a wealthy physician’s family in Kamakura, had taken a post as at the central municipal hospital in the faraway city of Kobe, where she fell in love with a patient. The awkwardness of this talk of the distant past tumbling unexpectedly from the mouth of a stranger had the converse effect of numbing Hatano’s surprise.
The man with whom his mother had become infatuated—Hatano’s father—had been temporarily conscripted to work in the Kobe steel mill, and though he was handsome enough to call to mind a Japanese Rudolph Valentino, because it was wartime and because he came from a district where there were many segregated buraku communities, Hatano was born out of wedlock. After the war, Hatano’s parents were finally legally married, but his father had become caught up in the swell of the rising democratic movement and transformed into a passionate buraku liberation activist. Meanwhile his mother, a young lady brought up in comfort, was held up as a poster child for the adage that there was no sin greater than ignorance. Dragged day after day to liberation committee gatherings and drowning in leaflets, it wasn’t long before she called it quits. Ultimately, the marriage did not last five years, and with a suitcase in one hand and her small son in the other, his mother fled back home to Kamakura on a jam-packed Tokaido Line night train. Hatano could still faintly recall the crowded cars of that slow-moving train.
“I don’t remember anything about Kobe,” Hatano responded simply.
“Even if you have forgotten, doctor, people like to poke around for all sorts of old wounds. I’m sure this business with Hinode comes down to just that as well. It’s too bad for you, doctor, but that’s the way of the world.”
From his breast pocket, Nishimura took out a sheaf of paper and gently waved it at Hatano. The bundle was slightly smaller than letter-paper size and looked to be about twenty or thirty pages thick, but for the time being it remained in the man’s hand and was not presented to Hatano.
“Your wife’s maiden name was Okamura, wasn’t it? Do you have a relationship with her family?”
“Barely.”
“Does the name Seiji Okamura sound familiar?”
“No.”
“He would have been your wife’s uncle.”
“My wife’s maiden name is Monoi.”
“Seiji Monoi was adopted and became Okamura. I’m sure you’ve heard the name Okamura at least.”
“No. I hardly see anyone from the Monoi side of the family.”
“I guess this is what they call an amazing coincidence, because it turns out that Seiji Okamura also used to work for Hinode’s research lab. He was a graduate of Tohoku Imperial University and seems to have been quite accomplished. He started working for Hinode in 1937 and left in 1947, but the letter he wrote to Hinode just after he resigned from the company still exists. This is it, right here.”
“Why would you have a letter addressed to Hinode?”
“As for its source, well, let’s just say Hinode lost track of it forty-three years ago. Now, what’s crucial about the contents . . .” Nishimura said and slowly waved the sheaf of paper in his hand. “How can I put this? Okamura himself may not have had an ulterior motive, but from the company’s perspective, the nature of this letter is not something they can simply ignore. Depending on how you read it, it can be interpreted as libel or blackmail.”
Who was this relative of his wife he had never heard of? This stranger who worked for Hinode half a century ago and sent them a threatening letter? Deep within Hatano’s mind, now loosened and relaxed from the whisky, new and unaccustomed thoughts began to percolate.
“In the letter Okamura-san refers to four of his colleagues at the company. All four of them were from a segregated buraku community. One of them left the company of his own accord while the other three were wrongfully terminated, but the liberation committee at the time had researched the case and there’s a record of them submitting a claim to Hinode—so what Okamura-san writes is true. Anyhow, Hinode, learning from the experience of being justly suspected of wrongdoing, henceforth became especially sensitive to problems of this nature.”
Hatano stared absent-mindedly at the man’s lips as they continued to move. With each passing moment, his words seemed to lose their meaning and disintegrate, as Hatano felt his memories of the buraku village—memories that had been brewing in his own head for the past five days—gradually becoming meaningless as well. At the end of the long and dark tunnel of prejudice in which the history of this country was created, people still used the barriers that remained in some places as an excuse—but what did they really want? If the barriers were taken away, these same people were likely to denounce the widespread ignorance and indifference outside the tunnel, then proceed to erect a new barrier so that they could stubbornly cling to defending their reason for existence. Equality and prejudice—wasn’t the role of each of them, complementing the other, simply to guarantee this small sector of humanity their raison d’être? On the other hand, his twenty-two-year-old son had no connection to any such conversation about equality or discrimination, nor did he play any part in the world that they were discussing . . .
Hatano poured more whisky into his glass and continued to gulp it down. It seemed to him that Nishimura’s languid drawl shouldn’t be considered critical or threatening. It sounded more and more like static noise that had nothing to do with himself or his son, and it was only the alcohol that gave him the strength—barely—to keep listening.
Meanwhile, Nishimura continued to run his mouth. “By the way, Hinode has another delicate external matter pending. Have you read today’s Nikkei?”
Nishimura’s companion took out two photocopied pages from the breast pocket of his suit and placed them on the table. Both of them were non-boldface newspaper articles from below the fold in the business and financial columns. One read, “Chunichi Mutual Savings Seeks Bank for Settlement Approval,” while the other was titled, “Ogura Transport Announces Management Changes.”
“I’m sure you’ve at least heard the name Ogura Transport. They are a major player in land transportation. Chunichi Mutual Savings is the Ogura Group’s leading bank. These two articles are related. You know the old proverb, ‘When the wind blows, the coopers prosper’? One event can have an unexpected effect on another. What’s more, Hinode is also connected . . .”
Hatano glanced over the articles to stave off his lassitude. During an inspection by the Bank of Japan, several obscure points were discovered in the management of Chunichi Mutual Savings Bank. Of their ¥850-billion loan balance, ¥280 billion had insufficient security. They were suspected of dispersing loans to avoid hitting the maximum allowable real estate loans and broker loans, and the investigation by the Ministry of Finance was ongoing, the article said. Meanwhile, Ogura Transport suffered a ¥50-billion stock loss and, seeing as they would likely be in the red this quarter, current management would take responsibility and step down. Having reading as much, Hatano tossed back the copies.
“First, Chunichi Mutual Savings Bank. They’ve got a hefty trillion yen in total deposits. According to our sources, we know that half of their total loans, meaning five hundred billion, is irrecoverable, but their biggest problem is that the few city banks that are their biggest shareholders are standing ready to take over their hundred branches. First thing next year, they will announce their absorption and merger. After all, the major city banks and the finance ministry have been plotting together to make sure this will happen.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
“Now, just listen. As for Ogura Transport, the stock blunder that’s mentioned in the article is just a front. In reality, a certain group of corporate raiders has bought up the majority of Ogura stock on the market, and now they are demanding that Ogura and its main bank, Chunichi Mutual Savings Bank, buy back the stocks they’ve snapped up. In short, the corporate raiders have something on both Ogura and Chunichi that makes them unable to refuse the demand. For example, there’s a twelve-billion-yen loan that Chunichi has made to Ogura Development, a subsidiary of Ogura, in the guise of a land purchase. From what we’ve heard, three billion of that has disappeared into politico pockets. In any case, the story is that the nonbank that has funded the group of corporate raiders that’s driving Ogura into a corner is said to be affiliated with a certain major player in those city banks that have tried to take over Chunichi.”
“I’d like you to get to the point.”
“This is the point. Early next year that certain city bank that will have absorbed Chunichi will set out to save Ogura. At that time, Hinode Distribution, currently a designated shareholder in Ogura, will also send their members to Ogura’s board of directors. This is the scenario that’s been planned out. Hinode Distribution is of course Hinode’s subsidiary. And that same city bank is Hinode’s main bank. What do you think? That’s corporate society for you.”
“I’m just a dentist.”
“To speak plainly, if anyone were to make a peep about the situation with Ogura, it would immediately trigger a secret investigation by law enforcement. That’s what this is all about. There is already a talk that a journalist based in Osaka is sniffing around. Bringing charges of financial crime is tough as it is, and with politicians involved, who knows what will happen next. Oh, and by the way, that journalist also makes an appearance in this letter too. I mentioned before—he’s one of the three who had been wrongfully terminated by Hinode long ago. Though the letter doesn’t mention him by name.”
“I don’t see how this nonsense relates to myself or my son.”
“You call this nonsense? Of course, Hinode’s current management has abandoned their preferential treatment of particular universities, and they’ve been actively hiring foreigners and people with disabilities, so I’m sure outwardly they seem like an enlightened, liberal company. However, that’s different from the problem with your son. Just when they are getting nervous about the whole Ogura issue, to receive a letter like this is . . .”
Nishimura waved the thick bundle of paper even more energetically before Hatano’s eyes. But it was still a letter written by a complete stranger whose name he had never heard of, and the talk of some transportation company and this bank seemed even more remote.
“I told you, I don’t know any man named Okamura.”
“Tell that to Seiji Okamura. Believe me, there’s no human resources manager who wouldn’t be troubled by a letter like this.”
“Did Hinode’s representative say something about this letter to my son?”
“The answer to that question is this: however Hinode dealt with your son, so long as this letter is addressed to Hinode—never mind that it’s from forty-three years ago—Hinode can’t just say they don’t know anything about it. You get what I’m saying?”
“I don’t.”
Hatano shook his head, and for the first time Nishimura contorted his mouth a little into a faint smirk, but his eyes still did not move. “A well-bred man like you, doctor, doesn’t stand a chance against a corporation, no matter how you try. Before sending two half-hearted letters to Hinode, I might have suggested you hire a lawyer.”
“Where did you see the first letter?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Did someone from Hinode call you about the second letter?”
“Well, you’re free to presume whatever you like. In any case, a business has the right to defend itself. At a time like this they would never think of hiring the relative of a man like Seiji Okamura—no matter how distantly related. Even if it’s a one-in-a-million chance, your son could be Seiji Okamura’s heir. The company would never take on such a risk. As you will understand when you read this letter, Okamura-san clearly criticizes a company called Hinode. Even if it is by coincidence, he also refers to the journalist who is poking around Ogura Transport, a company at the center of this whole mess. That’s it right there—you’re out.”
“Are you a Hinode spy?”
“Why would you say that? I’m only taking the time to tell you all this so that you don’t misdirect your anger. Besides, there’ll be trouble if you go on using the BLL’s name.”
“If there is a right direction, I’d like you to tell me.”
“As I said before, whatever the reason your son decided to leave in the middle of his second interview with Hinode, Hinode has a lot of stories they would rather not have dug up. That’s where this letter comes in.”
Nishimura placed the sheaf of paper on the table for the first time and pushed it toward Hatano.
“It’s a copy, but it’s yours to keep. At this time Hinode would no doubt react sensitively to a letter of this nature. I suggest you do as you please. But, I ask you to keep the source of this letter confidential.” The words were barely out of his mouth before Nishimura and his silent companion stood up from the sofa.
“How much?”
At Hatano’s question, Nishimura’s eyes flickered like a dark blade, as if he had been waiting for just this moment.
“I could have you write us a check for ten or twenty million yen right here, you know? But I’m afraid we’re not in the business of taking money from amateurs. More importantly, you’re a rich man, doctor, so I’m sure you play around a bit with stocks. If you own any Hinode stock, I suggest you sell it in the near future. I promise you this: Hinode stock will plummet very soon.”
As Nishimura said these last words, the look of a seasoned yakuza flashed across his face, and then he left with his associate.
For a long time, Hatano stared at the thick bundle of paper on the table. The photocopy itself was new, but it looked as if the original document had been repeatedly duplicated using a blueprint process, and perhaps because the original letter was written in pencil, the letters were blurry and rubbed away so that he had to hold it up close in order to decipher them. At the top, the letter read: Hinode Beer Company, Kanagawa Factory. To Whom It May Concern.
With grim determination, Hatano began flipping through the pages. One, two, ten, twenty, thirty-one pages of stationery covered with thin, meticulous characters. On the thirty-first and last page was the date, June 1947, and the signature of Seiji Okamura.
Seiji Okamura. After ruminating on the name he had never even heard before, Hatano put down the letter for the time being and grabbed the telephone receiver. He dialed the number of their vacation house in Oiso, and after about a dozen rings, he heard his wife’s curt “Yes?” as if she already knew the only person it could be on the other end of the line.
“Do you know a man named Seiji Okamura?”
“Who?”
“Seiji Okamura. He’s one of your father’s brothers.”
“My father’s last name is Monoi. Don’t be stupid.”
He was unaffected by the abrupt phone conversation. After setting the receiver down, Hatano brought out a dictionary from his study and began to handle each page of the letter again as he would a stack of patient charts. He looked up the reading of each arcane character he was unsure about in the dictionary and meticulously noted the proper reading in the margin.
The author of the letter began with the words, “I, Seiji Okamura . . .” and first explained how someone who had left the company came to write a letter to that very company. There was mention of a man named Noguchi who had also left Hinode for some reason before the war, and of how Okamura’s relationship with this Noguchi caused him to fall under the scrutiny of the police and the company—allusions that made Hatano, the son of a liberation committee activist, perk up with recognition.
Okamura proceeded to talk about his birthplace, revealing the geographical features of a village that was apparently near Hachinohe in Aomori prefecture, the lifestyle during the early Showa era in the 1920s, his family structure, and the whereabouts of his brothers and sisters. According to the letter, Okamura was the second oldest of four siblings, and he had one older brother and a younger sister and brother. The eldest son died in the war, so his younger brother—the one with the disability in his left eye who became an apprentice at the foundry in Hachinohe at the age of twelve—must be Hatano’s wife’s father, Seizo Monoi. As he continued to read, Hatano tried to picture the man’s face. Hatano had seen him three weeks ago at his son’s funeral, but his mind had been far away at the time, so between that and the fact that he had had very little contact with him previously, Monoi’s face was blurred in his mind, his features indistinct.
According to the letter, Okamura was adopted into a wealthy merchant family, and after graduating from Tohoku Imperial University without any difficulty, he joined the research lab of Hinode’s Kanagawa factory, was conscripted to the front just like everyone else, and later demobilized and sent home. In his life immediately after the war, Okamura diffidently and somewhat feebly called himself a “laborer.” Hatano did not know what it felt like to identify as such, but he could at least understand that at the time the letter was written, the position of a “laborer” was in direct confrontation with that of a capitalist. Then again, Okamura seemed more like a forerunner of the era of union-management cooperation that began in the early 1960s, more than a dozen years after the letter was written, one who should have been welcomed by those company men, and so he was quite different from the “laborers” that Hatano remembered. Hatano could faintly recall the general strike of February 1, 1947, but in his memory his father appeared with a white headband around his head, going off to liberation committee meetings and canvassing door-to-door day after day, shouting and yelling in a way that made him seem like a stranger.
Meanwhile, Okamura had written with startling naïveté about his interaction with this man Noguchi from a segregated buraku community whom he had met at the Kanagawa factory before the war. Okamura seemed at that point to have finally learned about the existence of discrimination for the first time, yet he still languished in the realm of confusion—even the part where he questioned how Hinode’s Kyoto factory wrongfully terminated those other three employees from the segregated buraku community was far from what could be called criticism against the company. If anything, until the very end, Okamura seemed to consider Noguchi and the others “Hinode employees” just like himself, even going on about how moved he was by the brilliant life force of Noguchi, whom he encountered again in Tokyo in late 1946. His perspective, which seemed to empathize deeply with the human condition, could not be more different than that of an activist.
No, it was utterly different . . . Hatano murmured to himself. The same day in late 1946, when Okamura said he had run into Noguchi at Hamamatsucho train station in Tokyo, Hatano’s father would have also gone there to attend the liberation committee’s national convention, which was held nearby in Shiba. For the first time in his life Hatano tried earnestly to picture that distant day. By then, his father bore no trace of the handsome young man his mother had fallen for so passionately. In the eyes of the triumphant man who walked along the platform of Hamamatsucho Station—nostrils flaring, his flushed face now almost indistinguishable from the other activists who had also absorbed the lessons of socialist textbooks—the sight of a man like Okamura, his head hanging down and deep in self-reflection, would not have even registered. The same would have gone for that guy Noguchi—Okamura would not even recognize him once they had parted ways and Noguchi went to join the convention, donning the look of an activist. No, Seiji Okamura was unlike any of his contemporaries.
When it came down to it, this Okamura was but one of the many former employees who, though one day they were encouraged to resign and indeed left Hinode, still couldn’t cut their ties to the company. What’s more, the poverty of his family, the company, the war, his illness—all of it was simply reduced to his personal experience, not once did he try to place himself in the context of society or history. For this reason, the writer himself could only barely make out the miserable workings of his life that were apparent to the reader of the letter. And, in contrast to the hundred million Japanese people of his generation who frantically struggled to survive each day, he was nothing but a pallid, highbrow man who had been left behind by the changing times. When Hatano sketched this vague portrait of the author of the letter in his mind, he was shocked to realize that his own perspective fell on the side of the activists like his father and Noguchi. This was something he never would have imagined. It stood to reason that the blood of those born in the segregated buraku communities and socialists coursed through his veins, while the blood of this aimless Okamura flowed through his wife’s. What a joke!
But wait. Didn’t this also mean that this Okamura’s blood ran through his dead son’s veins too? Faced with a glimpse of discrimination for the first time in his life, had Takayuki been simply confounded, lacking any opinion about society whatsoever? And then, swept up by external forces, did he lose his way, his solitary thoughts languishing in confusion, until he sped off in his car and crashed to his death?
No, hold on. Perhaps Hatano himself was the one who resembled this pathetic invalid Seiji Okamura. Despite the location of his birth in Kobe, he himself held no such historical or societal opinions, and even after losing his son, when he first recognized all this to be “discrimination,” he had kept his distance, and then the ineptitude with which he had sent those libelous letters, not even knowing his own intentions—were his actions not exactly like Okamura’s . . . ?
Hatano set down the sheaf of pages and turned it over. Starting afresh, he emptied his mind and, one by one, reexamined each new piece of information that had come his way during these past few hours.
First, there was the fact that a letter addressed to Hinode from forty-three years ago, which had been copied repeatedly, still remained in the hands of a stranger. The existence of this version of the letter, which the company never would have released, could only indicate either sinister intent or criminal behavior.
Next was the question of whether or not this issue with Noguchi and the three wrongfully terminated employees in the letter still held any significance. If Nishimura, who claimed to be associated with the BLL, was right and Hinode still considered one of those three men to be persona non grata, that would mean that the contents of the letter were still very relevant.
Furthermore, had Hinode truly hesitated to hire Hatano’s son because of this letter? Nishimura had implicitly advised him to use this letter from the past to blackmail Hinode, but what Hinode had actually done to his son had yet to be established.
And finally, where and from whom did Nishimura hear about the two letters Hatano had sent to Hinode, or the fact that his son left in the middle of his second interview? Nishimura’s business card said he was an executive of the Tokyo chapter of the BLL, but he had not made a single claim for the BLL itself. He wasn’t that kind of associate. There was no shortage of people out there who claimed to be a part of an organization for social integration or working to end discrimination against burakumin—the caste of descendants of segregated communities—but that wasn’t it, either. Just who was he? Where did he come from, and what had he come here for?
Hatano mulled this over for about five minutes, but ultimately failed to reach any conclusion. After all, for Hatano, whose world consisted only of universities, academic conferences, dental societies, and tennis, five minutes was enough to ponder one thing or another, and once he was at an impasse there was nothing else to do. His apathy resurgent, Hatano glanced once again at the bundle of paper and now wondered what could have happened to Seiji Okamura, a man whose blood may have coursed through Takayuki’s veins.
Hatano suddenly sprang up from his seat and went to look for the phone book. He searched for a telephone number he himself had never once called in the past twenty-some years. It wasn’t until he had already picked up the phone and dialed that he glanced at the clock. It was three minutes before midnight. As he wondered if it was too late to be calling, the phone had already started ringing, and someone answered right away.
“Yes, this is Monoi.” A raspy voice. In the background, there was the sound of the television.
“I’m sorry to call you so late. This is Hatano.” Once he identified himself, the voice on the other end of the line responded with a note of surprise.
There was a momentary pause, as if they each needed to picture the face of the other. Even though they were in-laws, prior to the funeral they were barely acquainted with one another. Then Seizo Monoi asked, “Have things settled down for you?”
“Ah, yes, thank you. I’m surprised you are awake at this hour.”
“Yes. Well, when you get older, you drift off while watching TV . . .”
“I’m sorry for the rude question so late at night, but is Seiji Okamura your older brother?”
“If you mean Seiji Okamura of Okamura Merchants in Hachinohe, then yes.”
It was Hatano’s turn to be at a loss for words. “The dental association had a social gathering, and a couple of older doctors there were talking about being in the military during the war. One of them mentioned an army buddy by the name of Seiji Okamura, and I thought he may have been a member of the family on your side . . .”
“I see. And what about Okamura?”
“When I asked my wife, she said she didn’t know him.”
“Oh, yes. I have never spoken about him to my daughter. Another family adopted him before I was born, and I myself barely know anything about him. I met him a few times in Hachinohe, but that was over fifty years ago.”
“Is that right? This older doctor was wondering how Okamura might be doing these days.”
“My older sister and her husband who take care of the family home in Herai told me he passed away. I think it must be have been in 1952 or ’53.”
“Oh . . . Well, I guess when you lose your son, you start to wonder about family, even distant relatives. By the way, do you still go to the racetrack?”
“Uh, yes. I’m ashamed to admit it, but when I’m watching the horses, I can forget about the bad stuff.”
“If there’s ever a time, I would like it if you could teach me how to place a bet. Well, I’m sorry to have bothered you so late. Please take care of yourself.”
“Yes. Same to you.”
After the perfunctory conversation ended and he’d hung up the phone, Hatano was struck with a strange and fleeting sensation. Born from the same womb as Seiji Okamura, and with his voice appropriately hushed for the late hour, Seizo Monoi sounded the way Hatano imagined Okamura himself would sound.
Holding the thirty-one-page letter bundle in his hand, Hatano left the living room and went into the room his son had occupied until the beginning of summer. The eight-mat space was organized to the point of starkness. There were only drably colored textbooks and a few fishing magazines on the bookshelf. There were no pictures of celebrities on the walls, and when Hatano had gone through the closet a few days ago, he had not found even a single provocative magazine. It was a room of a twenty-two-year-old honor student—too serious, too carefree, too inexperienced—and yet he had hidden away something he could not even tell his parents.
Hatano sat down at his son’s desk in front of his PC, opened the drawer, and pulled out a Walkman and a brand-new cassette tape still sealed in plastic. He checked the device, which he had used at dental meetings but not anytime recently, to make sure that the power still worked and that the tape was feeding properly. Then he laid the letter bundle on the desk, folded the corner of each page so that they would be easy to turn, and fanned them out in a row. Listening for noise outside the curtained window, he realized that it was past the hour of the last train on the Odakyu line that ran 300 meters south of his home, and that the clamor of the streets around the train station had long dissipated. From time to time he heard sounds of the exhaust from cars on Seijo Street, but he figured that they were not loud enough for the Walkman’s small microphone to pick up.
Hatano then looked at the first page of the letter.
Hinode Beer Company, Kanagawa Factory. To Whom It May Concern.
Should he say something before the opening line? He hesitated a moment but, thinking that he owed them no explanation whatsoever, he made up his mind. Hatano hit the record button on the Walkman and, pausing for two seconds, began to read the letter aloud: “Hinode Beer Company, Kanagawa Factory. To whom it may concern.” No, he didn’t just read it; he narrated it on behalf of Seiji Okamura.
“I, Seiji Okamura, am one of the forty employees who have resigned from the Kanagawa factory of Hinode at the end of this past February. Today, as I am currently confined to my sickbed and can hardly sit up or stand . . .”
He figured Okamura had been a man of few words who faltered in his speech. In trying to resurrect such a man forty-three years later, Hatano took on a slightly hesitant tone and spoke quite slowly.
“. . . My ‘former colleague,’ that is to say Katsuichi Noguchi, himself resigned from the Kanagawa factory in 1942, but in the case of Noguchi, I know that his resignation took place with an unspeakable amount of disappointment and indignation, and that various circumstances transpired before and after . . .”
Hatano read straight through to the end without any inflection, as if he were chanting a sutra, and once he had practically filled both sides of the sixty-minute tape, he signed off with the date and name. He inserted the tape into one manila envelope, sealed it, then inserted the package into another manila envelope before sealing that one and affixing enough stamps. He typed up and printed out a label with the address of the human resources department at Hinode’s main office in Kita-Shinagawa, leaving his name and return address blank.
After finishing these tasks, he threw the thirty-one pages into the trash. He then returned to the sofa, put on the CD of the singer Yuming that his son had left behind, and drank until three in the morning.
Early the next morning—the sixth—Hatano woke after sleeping for about three hours, took the envelope and drove his Mercedes-Benz to the Shinagawa post office in Higashi-Oi, where he deposited it into the same mailbox as before. Afterward, he opened his clinic at half past eight and started seeing patients by nine, as usual. By the time noon rolled around he already felt like the tape recording was the work of someone else—not him—and before he knew it, all that remained in the back of his mind was—the same as yesterday—the image of his son’s head, covered with blood.