Shuhei Handa
Shuhei Handa got off the train at Shimbamba Station and thought to himself, I must’ve stepped on something. Skipping the hassle of removing his shoe to check what it might be, he kept walking to Shinagawa Police Department and had run up only a few stairs when a grinding pain finally shot through his right big toe. Handa moved aside to the wall, took off his right shoe, and flipped it over.
A shard of glass had pierced the worn-down rubber sole of his shoe. Handa stared at it for two seconds—his first thought was that it would cost him ten thousand yen to buy a new pair of shoes. Then he saw the bloodstain at the toe of his sock and smirked. Plus another five hundred. He gave himself a little self-diagnosis: desperation has made me quite generous lately. He seriously considered taking this opportunity to buy himself a pair from Gucci or Bally as, still standing on one foot, he tried to dislodge the deeply embedded glass with his fingertip.
While he stood there, he heard light footsteps coming up the stairs and a voice say, “Excuse me,” in passing. Handa lifted only his gaze and saw stark white sneakers on a man’s feet running up the stairs.
It was the young assistant police inspector assigned to Investigation Headquarters from Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. His name was Goda or something like that. In contrast with his unobtrusive suit and trench coat, the man’s obviously lightweight and comfortable-looking white sneakers were so bright they made Handa blink. He was at a momentary loss—loafers from Gucci or Bally suddenly paled in comparison. Did wearing sneakers with a suit mean that the guy was simply tasteless, or that he had tremendous self-confidence? I don’t like it either way, Handa thought as a shiver ran down his spine.
Tossing aside the glass shard he had finally managed to remove and putting back on his shoe, Handa stood on both feet again. The action caused him to look up, and he realized that the sneaker guy who had just run up the stairs was standing on the second-floor landing, looking down at him. As if momentarily lost in a void, the man’s colorless eyes focused above Handa’s head for a second or so, rebuffing Handa’s scrutiny. Then, just as abruptly as he had stopped to linger, the man disappeared.
The incident was fleeting, and Handa ascended the rest of the stairs, unable to make sense of it. In such slivers of time when the rhythm of his day was disrupted, Handa always liked to indulge in a certain daydream. Were he not to, the sliver would rupture into a deep fissure, which could transform into a torrent of anger that might destroy him. To keep this from happening, he had subconsciously equipped himself with this self-defense mechanism, a reverie that always involved him catching the Investigation top brass off guard by beating them to the punch.
In the dream, he raises his hand slowly at an investigation meeting. Confronting the wannabe-bureaucrat showoffs from MPD with definitive evidence, he says, “The prime suspect is So-and-So.” Just as the room is thrown into tumult, the top brass start whispering among themselves in a state of confusion. He’d probably piss himself from such pleasure, such giddy satisfaction that particular moment would give him.
He shuddered at the mere thought, it was so dark and obscure, but Handa convinced himself of this final twist in his horrible diversion by telling himself that every last one of the forty thousand cops at the MPD lived in a constant state of gloom, always on the verge of dying in a fit of indignation.
Handa played out such innocuous daydreams several times a day, but now, as he briefly gave himself over to his habitual fantasy, a dull agitation began to whirl inside his head. The sensation felt exactly like a washing machine full of dirty laundry, lumbering through a cycle with its heavy load. Yet for the past two weeks or so, since the start of the month, his daydream no longer seemed so groundless. He had been trailing a number of possible suspects on his own, without permission from Investigation Headquarters. He had no physical evidence yet, but if even one of his hunches proved correct, the day when he might pull the rug out from under those MPD bastards was not just a distant dream.
Handa pondered this as, at ten minutes to eight, he reached the door of the meeting room located on the second floor of headquarters, but before he could open it, a colleague from the Criminal Investigation Division came up behind him and said, “Chief wants you upstairs.”
It didn’t amount to a foreboding, but Handa felt his irritability mounting. The wound from the shard of glass in his right foot suddenly began to throb. On his way up the stairs to the third floor, he removed his shoe again and looked at his right big toe. He touched it and confirmed that his black sock was slick with blood. As he was fumbling along, a certain thought slowly occurred to him, flickering behind his brow. Right, must be about my extracurricular investigations. But then immediately, instead of the panic of being driven to the edge of a cliff, the usual daydream came surging in as if to compensate.
Today marked the hundredth day since, at the height of summer, the corpse of a man with his head beaten in had been found in the bushes of a park behind a school in Higashi-Shinagawa. The victim was a senile seventy-six-year-old who liked to wander, a resident of a special care nursing home located just inside Minami-Shinagawa, about one kilometer from the crime scene. Around ten in the morning on August tenth, children who had come to play in the park found his corpse. After receiving the call, Handa—as an officer in CID—had run to the scene from the Shinagawa Police Department, which was not far away. The body had already been there for about half a day in the August heat, and showed significant livor mortis.
The neighborhood around the crime scene was dense with businesses and long-standing residences, creating a labyrinth of one-way alleys. The streets were practically deserted at night so there were no eyewitnesses; they were unable to recover any helpful footprints from the pavement where the corpse was found, nor a weapon. There were no signs of struggle on the victim’s clothing, and no articles left at the scene that might belong to the perpetrator.
On the victim’s head there was a laceration above the right auricle, which appeared to have been made by a blunt weapon with a relatively large surface of impact. Since there was no evidence of a struggle, at first it was suspected that the crime had been committed by an acquaintance, but when Handa saw the crime scene, his immediate thought was, Practice swing with a baseball bat or a golf club. Handa did not play golf, but to relieve stress he often went to a park in his neighborhood to swing a bat or a bamboo sword. He always made sure there was nobody around him before he started swinging, but once in a while a child would dart out from nowhere and give him a scare. Perhaps his hunch sprang from this habit.
From the results of a detailed analysis of the crime scene, it was known that, based on bloodstains and bits of skin and clothing fibers recovered from the pavement, the victim had been struck in the head, then—with both hands holding his right auricle—he had been thrust down diagonally, falling on his side, after which he was dragged for about one meter and laid down in the bushes. The temporal bone where he had apparently been struck with a heavy blunt weapon suffered a depressed fracture, and from the cut on his scalp, they recovered a piece of film coated with traces of carbon resin. Judging from the victim’s height and angle of the active surface of the fracture, the presumed weapon was either a driver or 2- or 3-wood golf club with a heavy carbon head that had been swung diagonally from below—and based on the paint chip, it could even be narrowed down to two or three brands. Handa’s intuition had been correct.
The investigation began during the hottest part of summer, and Handa too had been dispatched from his precinct to Investigation Headquarters; for days he had canvassed the immediate vicinity of the crime scene on foot. An investigation could not move forward unless it could be backed up with the goods.
Early on in the initial investigation, he learned that the victim had no debt or savings to his name, and given his age, it was unlikely a crime of passion, so the investigation could reasonably be narrowed down to two possibilities: a grudge attack or a random crime. The victim’s wanderings were just that—they had no fixed course—and although the nursing home had filed a missing person report on the ninth, the day before the crime, it was unclear even when he had disappeared from the facility. A few witnesses had been in the vicinity of the building, but the time and location of these sightings were all different, and when pieced together, one could only surmise that the victim had been roaming about a five-hundred-meter radius of the facility until early evening.
What was more, the victim’s social circle was particularly limited; he had no friends at the nursing home and was not in correspondence with anyone outside of it. No one in either of his two sons’ families had visited the home for years. The family members had no motive, and their whereabouts before and after the estimated time on the day of the crime had all been confirmed. Under these circumstances, it seemed unrealistic to imagine the profile of a suspect who held such a hardened grudge against the victim that they had attacked him and bashed in his skull with a golf club.
On the other hand, following the theory that someone happened to be taking a practice swing in the park with a driver, the first step was to determine whether someone may have been near the crime scene with an object of appropriate length, or whether there was someone who regularly practiced swinging in the park. This process had to begin along the road that led to the crime scene, gradually expanding outward and checking off the thousands of businesses and residences one by one.
Reports had started to filter in little by little during the investigation meetings that took place each morning and evening. However, hardly any strayed from a variant of: “So-and-so keeps a driver in his locker at the office. On the day of the crime he was at work.” Everyone kept any further information to themselves so that nothing seemed clear, no matter how many of these reports came in. As a result, it was impossible for the lowest-ranking investigators to gain any perspective on where to focus their search. There was no evidence to be found in the area where Handa’s team had been assigned—not even anything worth hiding—and as the autumn equinox came and went, that was still the case. To be sure, the area within a two-kilometer radius of the crime scene had been divided into six sections, and the eastern section assigned to Handa’s team consisted largely of landfill in Higashi-Shinagawa with Shibaura canal in between, as well as the southern half of the Shinagawa wharf on the opposite shore.
On the wharf, there was only a container terminal, a thermal power plant, and oil storage tanks. The landfill in Higashi-Shinagawa, on the other hand, was occupied by three warehouse companies, the storage facility of a trading company, two buildings that housed, respectively, the Toyo Suisan seafood corporation and the fishing industry union, three municipal housing complexes, and finally, a facility under construction, a vacant lot, and the Tennozu baseball field. Handa spent all day long wandering back and forth along roads where only trucks passed, peering into trash cans, writing down the license plate number of every car that occasionally drove by, learning the faces of all the residents of the housing complexes—he even tracked down about a dozen of them who practiced their golf swings—but that was it. And yet, every morning and evening at the investigation meetings, his nature as a detective made him listen keenly in spite of himself, hoping that something good might turn up.
It was early October when Handa decided to stray from the landfill industrial zone. One Sunday, in the empty lot in front of the housing complex within his designated area, Handa came across a resident, with whom he had a nodding acquaintance, happily swinging a driver. “That must be brand new. How nice,” Handa said, and as he soon grew bored of listening to the guy’s long-winded explanation of the firmness of the shaft and the angle of the loft and whatnot, an idea suddenly flashed in his mind: a pawnshop. The suspect would have gotten rid of the golf club once it had been used as a weapon, but a driver was expensive to begin with, and if the thing had cost him a hundred thousand yen, all the more likely that he would dispose of it not in the garbage but at a pawnshop.
Handa spurred his partner, a police sergeant named Kimura, to join him and, starting from their base in Shinagawa, together they began checking out pawnshops. Handa had no particular expectations; he simply figured it was better than napping on the baseball field. Detectives often went around to pawnshops in search of stolen goods, so he had his fair share of contacts. It started out mostly as a way to kill time, but in mid-October, he almost ran into two detectives from MPD at a pawnshop within the Meguro precinct where he used to work and, after learning that this was in fact where they were focusing their efforts, he grew even more fired up about his rogue mission. He reconsidered every person they had identified so far as owning golf clubs, he paid closer attention on his pawnshop visits, and he decided to select a number of people who either worked at one of the businesses or lived in housing near the crime scene and began to trail them.
Then the following month, he narrowed down his targets even further and shadowed them for two weeks. One was a man who lived in Fuchu and used to go to the driving range every Saturday but around summertime had stopped all of a sudden. One man was a resident of Higashi-Shinagawa Public Housing No. 4 who had quit his job some time after the crime and now worked for a different company. Yet another was a self-employed businessman who replaced his full set of golf clubs shortly after the crime. The names of each of these men were now written in Handa’s pocket notebook.
And today was Saturday, November 17th. They found out that I’ve gone off course, Handa thought to himself again vacantly. He had no memory of whether he had considered the consequences when he decided to go rogue, knowing all along that he would eventually get caught. Most likely he hadn’t thought about anything at all.
The fact that he had been discovered at this point in time clearly meant that somebody had ratted him out, but he had not even processed this yet. There was someone out there who had pulled the rug out from under him before he could outwit anyone. He had been done in. Before a bud could even sprout, his seed had been plucked and trampled underfoot. He had been defeated. He kept all such thoughts at bay—for were he to acknowledge them, he would shatter into a million pieces.
Since the workday had not begun, there were only a handful of people from the white-collar crime and burglary units in CID, and another few from records and forensics. If you were to take away everything colorful in a public school teacher’s lounge—the plastic desktop files and flower vases—and instead run it through a mousy filter and pipe in a hushed and chilled silence, you would be left with the CI office of the precinct police department.
Handa had grown up in company housing for an ironworks in Kamaishi, and when he graduated from university in Tokyo, he did not care where he worked as long as the place saw daylight. He applied to several private companies, but when he learned that all the available positions were technical and would have him working in a factory, he figured he would be better off in the police force so he became an officer. After he signed on, though, he realized that only MPD headquarters in Sakuradamon enjoyed a certain bland brightness, while the other bureaus were so bleak and damp that mushrooms could grow.
A superintendent named Miyoshi sat at the chief’s desk in front of a window with the blinds drawn even though it was morning. Standing next to him was an inspector acting as deputy chief; both had a glassy, dreary look, their eyes like the tightly closed shells of dead clams. When Handa came in, the deputy chief motioned to him like a customer in a restaurant calling over a waiter, and Handa obediently walked over and stood before the desk.
“Starting today, you no longer report to the second-floor Investigation headquarters,” said the deputy chief. “You know why, don’t you?”
Handa thought about this as best he could, and for the time being, decided to go with, “No, I don’t.”
The dead clam thundered, “You idiot!” His bellow reverberated off the steel desks and lockers, rushing over the heads of his colleagues who were holding their breath and pretending not to notice, and bounced up against Handa’s back.
“I know where and what you’ve been up to these past six weeks.” This time Miyoshi spoke. “Would you argue that you’ve haven’t infringed on someone else’s turf, while neglecting your own duties?”
The deputy chief started shouting again, spraying spittle. “This deviancy is inexcusable!”
It wasn’t that he couldn’t explain himself; rather, in the police force, the very act of explaining was unacceptable. Handa knew on a gut level that the police way was to agree with the higher-ups when they told you something was black, and then to agree again when they told you it was white. Each time he uttered such token “yeses” he lost another shred of dignity. Of course he was pretty used to this by now, but lately Handa had the feeling that a new and unfamiliar identity was forming within him.
Handa succeeded in controlling his immediate fury by passively observing this other self, head hung low as a shower of reprimands rained down.
“Don’t do it again,” Superintendent Miyoshi said tersely.
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry,” said Handa, bowing once.
“From today on, you’ll be in charge of a different case, under the command of Inspector Takahashi.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’ll be all.”
Handa bowed once more. Superintendent Miyoshi stood up and left the room to attend the investigation meeting. Handa watched him go, picturing the word “subservient” on his back, dangling like a worn-out doormat. Miyoshi was nothing more than a figurehead at these meetings, sitting with the department chief in the top-brass seats in front of the blackboard, keeping quiet and sitting still before the head of the first unit of Violent Crime who had deigned to be there from MPD.
As soon as Miyoshi was gone, Inspector Takahashi from the White Collar Crime Unit, to whom Handa was reporting as of today, called out to him.
“Handa. Wait for me downstairs. I’ll be right there.”
“What’s the case, sir?”
“Defamation and obstruction of business.”
The charges didn’t register with him. All Handa could think as he bowed and left the room was, So that’s it for me as a violent-crime detective.
But once he was out in the hallway, his innate obstinacy kicked in, and he couldn’t stop wondering why he had strayed from his assigned territory. When the pawnshop idea occurred to him that day, it had merely been the stimulus. He knew that for a long time now, something inside him was ready to burst.
Shortly after the start of the investigation, headquarters had presumed that the suspect had walked into and out of the park where the crime had taken place. This was because there was nowhere to park a car in the surrounding alleys. If the suspect either lived or worked near the scene, there was a certain distance he could have walked. Say that distance could be covered in at most five minutes, and there were a limited number of residences and businesses within the designated area. At the very least, that line of thinking made it clear early on that there would be no suspicious persons in the eastern section assigned to Handa. Even just hypothetically, it was not impossible that the suspect might have occasionally gone to the large park on the landfill to take practice swings, but what it came down to was that the entire district to the east of the crime scene, including the landfill, had always been outside the scope of the investigation, and Handa’s team, assigned to investigate that very area, had been ignored from the onset.
His team never had anything to report at the morning and evening meetings, and as soon as Handa started to speak, “We, uh—” the head of the seventh unit from MPD who led the meeting would often interrupt with, “Next,” and move on. Another time, Handa had run into a sergeant from the same seventh unit at the entrance to the police department, and who knew what the guy was thinking as he muttered in disgust, “You guys get an afternoon nap, don’t you?” The truth was, Handa had just inadvertently let out a yawn.
It was all because of those futile weeks. Handa concluded as much for now, but there was no guarantee that those fruitless days would not lead to still more fruitless years. More than any immediate remorse, Handa was conscious of the muck that was spreading around his feet and seized by a sense of powerlessness—that by just standing there he would sink even further. This is worse than usual, he thought. Even the usual daydream that would come to him at a time like this seemed dead and gone.
Just as Handa had started to descend the stairs, he saw the investigators who had come out from the meeting room on the second-floor landing. As usual, the meeting must have ended in a matter of minutes. The investigators were just about to disperse down the stairs, paired off to their respective assigned districts. Among them, Handa saw his colleague Kimura, who had been his partner up until yesterday.
Taking care not to run into the group, Handa stopped partway down the stairs and waited for them to leave. Standing there, he caught sight of one of the men about to descend from the landing below, and Handa knew it was fate that he could also see the white sneakers on the man’s feet.
He felt as though something had suddenly bubbled up inside him with a force that he himself could not contain—Handa stormed down the stairs, running a few steps past the second-floor landing, and reached out a hand. He grabbed the shoulder of the assistant Police Inspector Goda or whatever his name was, shouting, “Hey!” as the man turned around.
“Hey, you. You were looking at me before. What was that about? Why were you staring at me?”
The assistant police inspector, who looked to be around thirty or so, set his narrow, reptilian eyes, which brimmed with iciness, on Handa’s face. Then, as if the words being spoken to him had finally reached his ears, he brushed aside Handa’s hand and said simply, “I heard a sound.”
The shard of glass that had pierced his shoe. The tiny sound it had made as he threw it away. This was just the sort of inexplicable discrepancy that Handa found bewildering, and it made him dizzy, as if he had been struck twice just to drive home the point. He now lost the conviction that this assistant police inspector had actually been looking at him, yet without knowing what he was doing, he was swept along by physiological excitement that was amplified in the blink of an eye.
“So what? Why were you looking at me?”
His arm and cry shot out before he was even aware. Handa grabbed the assistant police inspector, only to be pulled off by his fellow officers, one of whom snapped “idiot” while shoving him aside. The inspector himself, who had barely furrowed his brow, turned swiftly on his heel and descended the stairs.
In the span of a few seconds as Handa watched him leave, he was unable to even remember just what had set him off; he was only aware of the heavy muck around his feet dragging him down further. I’m the only one mired in this crap.
The only sound in the now-empty stairway hall was his own labored breathing. His toes felt slippery inside the blood-soaked sock in his shoe. Just as Handa went to remove his shoe once again, Inspector Takahashi came down the stairs, briefcase in hand, and so he lowered his foot.
“Hey, so we’re going to the main office of the BLL’s Tokyo chapter now, and then to a dentist’s in Seijo. Here is the letter outlining the charges. Hinode Beer is the accuser. The accused is unspecified.”
The inspector’s businesslike tone inevitably pulled Handa back to his duties, and he accepted the three-page document thrust at him. Scanning it quickly, he learned that Hinode Beer had recently received a letter written under an assumed name and a cassette tape from an unidentified sender, and was requesting that the sender be appropriately punished for undermining their credibility and obstructing their business. As he singled out the words, “Buraku Liberation League, Tokyo Chapter,” Handa felt the muck around his feet steadily pulling him down further. He felt the world around him darken, as if he alone were under a sky so dark that made it hard to believe it was morning for everyone else.
“A segregated buraku community?”
“Oh, what we’re dealing with is a pseudo anti-discrimination association. Hey, let’s get a cup of coffee before we head out. I’ll show you the transcript of the tape.”
“The dentist is the pseudo anti-discrimination association?”
“The dentist appears to be the sender of the tape. The department chief ordered us to see if he will consent to an interview, to hear his side of the story.”
Without any of this making sense to him, Handa replied, “Understood.” He exited the police department, following behind Takahashi, who wore the mien of a judicial scrivener in a country village or a notary public office’s administrator. It was quarter past eight in the morning.
Another personality existed within Handa, a personality that had been trained and disciplined in the police force. This character hissed persistently in his ear, They won’t get away with this. Just watch. Handa spent half his day listening to this voice, testing his patience, as if he were staring fixedly at a fishing bobber on the surface of a pond that didn’t move an inch.
The truth was, when he had been given the transcription of the letter from the tape to look over that morning at the coffee shop, he only registered the shapes of the letters on the pages, and then at the BLL’s office, nothing lingered in his ears other than the obviously annoyed tone of the full-time staffer who came out to meet with them. To begin with, despite the fact that a complete stranger had sent, in the form of a tape recording, a letter addressed to Hinode’s Kanagawa factory originally written back in 1947, the company did not even acknowledge in the content of their official complaint that this very letter may have been lost or stolen. On the other hand, it was unlikely that the accused stood to gain anything by sending an incoherent letter or a tape to Hinode. As far as Handa was concerned, this must simply be a case in which both sides were making claims against a mistaken opponent.
Apparently, Hinode had received another letter that the dentist had sent—one with a signature—and after filing their complaint, the police department had verified the fingerprints on the signed letter, the letter sent under an assumed name, and the tape—all of which Hinode submitted voluntarily—and since they matched up, all three items were determined to be the work of the dentist. But Handa, who only ever handled violent crimes and robbery, could not fathom why, even at the discretion of both parties, they had to deal with such a trifling case where the motive remained unclear.
Wondering if his own sensors were haywire or if the world had gone insane, at one in the afternoon Handa found himself with Inspector Takahashi in the residential neighborhood of Seijo. Standing in front of a luxury apartment building near the Seijo Gakuen School playing fields and looking up at the structure with its bijou roof terrace that would have made cat burglars drool, the only thought that surfaced in Handa’s mind was, ’Bout a hundred million yen.
The dental office was located among two or three boutiques that jutted out from the ground floor of the building, and there was nothing particularly eye-catching about its unexpectedly old-fashioned and plain nameplate that read, “Hatano Dental Clinic,” or the glass door of its entrance. Eyeing the sign on the door—afternoon appointments from 2 p.m.—Takahashi made a call from a nearby pay phone and announced that the dentist would meet them at home before they ascended the elevator to the residences on the fifth floor.
When Handa saw the man named Hatano, his first impression was, to put it simply, a butterfly in a specimen box. The outward appearance was perfect, yet it was nothing more than a still life that would shatter at the slightest touch. Truth was, the man’s appearance—combining the nonchalance of an unsullied, sheltered son of a good family who had grown straight into middle-age, the coldness of a man who seemed to be made up of only a high IQ, and a melancholy that betrayed hints of a rather complicated thought process—was hushed over, and there was an emptiness to him that seemed to stem from more than just the fact that he had lost a son. And there was a slightly unusual twitchiness to the way his eyes moved.
Nevertheless, it was clear that his life had disintegrated, his vast, luxurious living room strewn about with discarded clothes and permeated by the mustiness of a space long deprived of fresh air and the sour stench of alcohol. Hatano sat down on a sofa at the center of this room, and the first words out of his mouth were, “It was my mistake.”
According to the account that began to spill forth from Hatano, he had been wrong to suspect that there had been any kind of discriminatory action by Hinode Beer against his son, who had taken the company’s recruitment exam, and the fact of the matter was that his son had become mentally and physically unstable from the shock of the opposition from the parents of a school friend he had been dating, saying it was too soon for them to marry. Hatano spoke in a clear and coherent manner, as if he was talking about someone else, and there was no detectable amplitude in his emotions whatsoever.
“Then, are you saying that you’ve calmed down now that the parents of your son’s girlfriend came to pay their respects?” Inspector Takahashi prodded, but Hatano made no response.
Takahashi went on to explain that Hinode had filed a complaint on the basis of defamation and obstruction of business, and that, formally, participation in this investigation was voluntary, so Hatano did not have to talk about anything he did not wish to. The expression on Hatano’s face, though, made it hard to tell whether he was even listening.
The inspector assumed a businesslike manner toward the dentist and began to ask the necessary questions. First, regarding the contents of the tape, did he or did he not make a tape recording of a letter addressed to Hinode’s Kanagawa factory from a man named Seiji Okamura in 1947? The letter had no rightful business being in Hatano’s possession, so how did he obtain it?
Hatano told them that he received the letter from two men who had paid him a visit on the night of November 5th. One of them identified himself as so-and-so Nishimura, an executive committee member of the Tokyo chapter of the BLL, but since he had thrown away his business card, he could not remember his name precisely.
“Could you describe the features of this Nishimura?”
“He was about a hundred and sixty-five centimeters tall. Medium build. Around fifty years old. Dark complexion. He had thin fingers. A mole about ten millimeters in diameter on his right jaw.”
Hatano listed the characteristics robotically, and Takahashi recorded them in his notebook.
“And, what did Nishimura want?”
“I had used the BLL name in my second letter, so he came to ask me about that. As for the issue of my son’s being rejected during Hinode’s screening process for new employees, Nishimura said something about how Hinode had their own reasons and then, suggesting that it could be useful, he left behind a copy of the letter.”
“Did he mention specifically what Hinode’s reasons might be?”
“He said something about the financial situation of a company called Ogura Transport and its main bank. I told him I didn’t understand.”
“Was that bank by any chance Chunichi Mutual Savings?”
“I think so, yes.”
“What specifically did he say about it?
“Something about bad loans and bypass loans. I don’t remember exactly.”
“How did Nishimura say those issues are related to Hinode’s screening process for new employees?”
“Seiji Okamura refers to a person in his letter, someone who happens to be investigating the problems with Ogura Transport. He was apparently one of three men from a segregated buraku community who were fired from Hinode’s Kyoto factory in 1946.”
Takahashi’s hand continued to move rapidly across his notebook pages. Handa sat idly next to him.
“By the way, doctor, did you believe all along that the person you were speaking with was from the BLL?”
“No.”
“Then, what did you make of this person who assumed a false identity and talked to you about the economy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Some guy whom you’ve never met pretended he was from the BLL and brought up a story about your son out of the blue, right? Didn’t you think that was suspicious?”
“No, not really. When it comes to buraku and discrimination, whether it’s fact or fiction, it’s not uncommon for the conversation to take off on its own in ways you wouldn’t expect.”
“By the way, did Nishimura say anything about the source of the letter?”
“No. I asked but he didn’t respond.”
“Did Nishimura demand money for the letter?”
“No.”
“Do you still have the letter?”
“After I recorded the tape, on the morning of the sixth, I threw it in the trash.”
After this exchange, Takahashi’s inquiry turned to Hatano’s intention in sending the tape to Hinode. Hatano replied that, as he pored over the letter written by this man Seiji Okamura some forty-three years ago, he developed a certain sympathy toward the man, and he felt compelled to say something to Hinode on Okamura’s behalf. There was no specific reason involving his son, and the story that he was motivated by nothing other than his vague aversion toward the corporation Hinode seemed at once plausible and implausible.
“How do you feel about sending the tape now?”
“I think it was pointless.”
“Do you regret it?”
“I wouldn’t do it again. Even if Hinode were at fault about my son, I have no interest in questioning them any further.”
The conversation proceeded swiftly, without any hitches, to reach a conclusion, and Takahashi slapped his knee lightly.
“Well then. We would like for you to issue a voluntary written statement based on what you just said, so would you come to the Shinagawa Police Department tomorrow? From there, we will confirm with Hinode whether they intend to withdraw the charges.”
“I will take responsibility for what I’ve done.”
“No, no. There’s no need for that. Following procedure, we will issue a statement, but since your cooperation is voluntary, the signature and seal are up to you. More importantly, I feel it’s best that you maintain a record of the details about this Nishimura person visiting you.”
Sitting next to the inspector, for a fleeting moment Handa wondered why he would suggest this, but Hatano himself did not inquire further, he simply replied, “I’ll come by tomorrow.”
Takahashi acknowledged him and stood up, so Handa followed. Hatano gave no other response, and since he made no move to show them out, the two took leave on their own, but as they opened the front door, they ran into a woman standing just outside. The woman asked them who they were in a sharp voice.
Handa fumbled for a reply while Takahashi succinctly responded and followed up with a question. “We’re from the Shinagawa Police Department. Are you Dr. Hatano’s wife?”
“What’s wrong?” the woman asked, rooted to the spot. “Did my husband do something?”
“No, no. We just came to ask him a few questions. No need to worry.”
Takahashi had barely finished speaking when the woman rushed past them, with such force it seemed she might crash into the front door, before disappearing inside.
On the elevator ride down, Takahashi muttered, as if just now remembering it, “Her suit was Valentino, seven hundred thousand yen. Her Hermès Kelly bag, eight hundred thousand.”
The surface of Handa’s mind tried to recall the appearance of the woman they had just encountered, but his only impression was that of a woman in her forties, with a garish visage that showed no signs of aging, sporting what seemed like a freshly-set coiffure. He did notice that she was put together in a chic black ensemble from head to toe, but the labels were beyond his ken.
“By the way, does this case really require a written statement?” Handa inquired.
Takahashi immediately replied, “You don’t know who Shin’ichi Nishimura is?”
“You know him by name?”
“Of course I do. There’s only one Nishimura with a centimeter-wide mole on his chin. He’s a second-generation Zainichi Korean, and his real name is Hoyeol Kim. He’s been on the list of corporate extortionists for ten years.”
So here was the target of the White Collar Crime Unit. The knowledge finally generated a small ripple on the pond within Handa’s head, but not one big enough to cause his bobber to move. He merely responded, “I’m sorry I wasn’t aware.”
Takahashi looked suddenly irked, as if he hadn’t realized he was working with someone so stupid, and he started walking ahead. Handa followed him sluggishly.
“Where are we going now?”
“To a loan shark’s. We need more info on Nishimura. Listen. This Nishimura has nothing whatsoever to do with the BLL. Nor is he associated with Hinode. But this man used the BLL’s name to get to a dentist he had never met before, and for no charge he handed over an internal document from Hinode that who knows where he got. If this doesn’t smell fishy, I don’t know what does.”
“I see.”
So this is my life from here on, Handa thought.
The moment he looked up at the leaden sky above the residential street, out of a years-long habit, a second daydream slipped through Handa’s mind. It was another simple fantasy, in which one day out of the blue he slams down an envelope with the words Letter of Resignation onto his boss’s desk. But the image soon faded feebly, without giving him much pleasure. At this point there was not a single circumstance that would make Handa’s resignation matter to anyone. There was no reason for his boss, the police department, or MPD to be surprised, or for any of them to turn blue in the face trying to convince him to retract his decision. It was not as if anyone would fear or regret his resignation.
Handa accompanied Inspector Takahashi until dark as he made the rounds to several loan sharks in Shinjuku as well as the offices of a few financial brokers, after which they returned to the department, where Takahashi outlined Shin’ichi Nishimura’s profile and modus operandi, then he ordered Handa to review each of the briefing points for the interview with Hiroyuki Hatano, set to take place tomorrow, the 18th. Nishimura currently worked as an errand man for several corporate underlings of a large crime syndicate called the Seiwakai. Among those in Seiwakai’s employ was an influential underground financial group known as Okada Association, and the issue was whether Nishimura was somehow connected to this Okada group, and so on. Handa finally understood that, quite simply, for Investigation unit two, who handled financial incidents, Hinode’s complaint letter was nothing but a fortuitous excuse.
When he finally left the department just before nine that night, he saw that the light in the second-floor window where homicide was located still shone brightly, but the indignation it roused was somewhat dulled. Diagonally ahead on his way to Shimbamba Station, the glimmering office buildings of Hinode Beer and Sony rose into the night sky above Kita-Shinagawa. Like stars fallen to earth, their beauty never ceased to amaze him.
Handa gazed up at the cluster of gleaming high-rises. Although he knew that each one was populated by workers who wore out their shoes trying to make an extra yen, he still felt nothing in common with them and, faced with another wave of alienation, he looked away.
On his walk to the station, that other self—like a devil on Handa’s shoulder—blustered, Just watch, I’ll quit soon enough. Chastened, Handa wondered, How many years have I been saying that? The reality was that he had no choice but to go on working tomorrow and the next day, gaining back his self-respect and confidence only in his dreams. No matter how fed up he claimed to be, the thought of getting a new job at a security company where he’d end up directing traffic at some construction site practically made him want to die from anger.
Handa got on the still crowded train, stood in silence gripping the strap, and got off at Kojiya Station. Weaving through the tiny shopping district around the station where only the neon signs of the pachinko parlor blinked away, he came out on Kanpachi-dori Avenue and headed in the direction of Haneda Airport. He had not walked more than a minute or so when the road lined with only businesses and old machiya houses began to feel deserted, and there were no more lights beckoning passersby. Commuters rushed home as if chased by the sea breeze, briskly disappearing down back streets, and at the corner before a small rail crossing, Handa too slipped into an alley in the neighborhood of Haginaka.
He lived in tower two of the Daini Haginaka Apartments on the west side of Haginaka Park, and though he arrived there soon enough, Handa stood in the alley and hesitated for a few seconds. The lights were on in the top-floor window of the five-story building. Inside, his wife, who usually came home around nine, would be doing laundry and tearing open the packages of prepared food she brought home as a late supper for herself and her husband from the Ito-Yokado supermarket where she worked. Sashimi and simmered greens. Braised burdock root with carrots. Since he made it a rule not to drink at home, there was not a single can of beer in the refrigerator. Standing there, all Handa could think about was a beer, so he decided to keep going past his building.
Intending to make a detour until ten or so—another thirty or forty minutes—Handa went along the alley that continued toward Haneda Airport. Within minutes he arrived at Sangyo Road, beyond which was the district called Haneda. During the day choked with exhaust from cars heading to the airport, and at night untouched by the lights from the neighboring airport, the neighborhood was pierced by the overpass of the Shuto Expressway running above the densely packed rooftops of machiya houses that modestly overlapped one another. There was a small shopping district along the other side of the road under the overpass. In the evening most of the stores were closed, but there were still a few lights on here and there—a soba eatery, a cheap Chinese restaurant, a liquor shop.
First Handa bought a can of beer from a vending machine at the liquor shop by the overpass. He pulled the tab open right there, and sipped a mouthful of freezing cold beer. The pharmacy kitty-corner to where he stood was still open. Without any neon, the signage of the store was obscured by the nighttime shadows, but there, on the glass door where the curtains were pulled shut and illuminated from inside, was the name Monoi Pharmacy.
As Handa gulped down another mouthful of beer by the side of the road, the glass door of the pharmacy opened and a man came out. Handa recognized his horseracing buddy, the ex-army man, who that night had a ten-centimeter-wide bandage wrapped around his head. He also noticed Handa, and he paused wearily to mutter, in place of a greeting, “Look at this mess.”
“Were you in an accident?” Handa asked.
“Yesterday. On the Tomei Expressway,” Jun’ichi Nunokawa answered. “The fucking ten-ton trailer in front of me suddenly swerved out of its lane. The minute I hit my brakes, a ten-car pileup. My truck is a fucking wreck.”
“You’re lucky it wasn’t any worse.”
Jun’ichi Nunokawa paused for two seconds after Handa said this, then spat toward the ground at his feet, “I missed out on dying.”
Missed out on dying? I see—the parent of a disabled child thinks about things like this. Handa tried to imagine, but he could neither empathize nor did he feel compelled to ask any further about it.
“Betting on the horses?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, then. Gotta be going.”
Neither of them asked if the other was going to Fuchu on Sunday, tomorrow. Handa was in no mood to talk, and Nunokawa didn’t seem like he was either. Nunokawa got into a minivan parked on the side of the road. Handa had not noticed until then, but within the vehicle’s dark interior two arms were swimming in the air without making a sound. Nunokawa’s daughter was flopped over on the flatbed, thrashing around. As soon as the engine started, the minivan in the hands of a professional driver glided away like a speed demon, and disappeared along Sangyo Road.
With his can of beer in one hand, Handa rang the bell in front of the pharmacy, opened the glass door, and stuck his head inside. The display shelf of discounted detergent and toilet paper that was placed outside during the day had been brought inside for the night, and it made the tiny store so cramped it was difficult even to step inside. The owner, Monoi, parted the curtain at the back of the store and popped his head through. As soon as he saw it was Handa, he came out, saying, “You’re early tonight,” and pushed the shelf out of the way for him. “There. Come in.”
Although Handa knew that Monoi had lost his grandson last month, the man was impassive and taciturn to begin with, and to the outward eye Handa could not detect anything to suggest he was terribly despondent. His aspect had always been quiet and plain, but since he did not wear his sunglasses at night, his milky, immobile left eye made him look a little peculiar.
An old lady pharmacist tended the store during the day, so as befitting a retired old man, Monoi puttered around the neighborhood, playing shogi at “Elder Haven” and shopping at the supermarket, then coming home in the evening to fix something for himself to eat and to mind the store as he watched TV, before closing up around eleven and going to bed. Sunday was for horseracing. Over the past six or so years of frequenting the pharmacy, Handa had pieced together the way that Monoi whiled away his day. Sometimes when he stopped by the store, Handa would smell something burning on the stove.
“Nunokawa was just here. He has a head wound from an accident,” Monoi started to say.
“I saw him outside,” Handa replied. “He seemed pretty stressed.”
“It’s quite a lot of trouble. He has to submit a written explanation to the company, and the police called him in.”
“I see.”
“If it’ll mean a few days off, an accident isn’t the worst thing. That’s what I tried telling him.”
During this short exchange, Monoi had put on his reading glasses, taken out last Sunday the 11th’s two winning tickets from the drawer of the register, and with a “Here you are,” carefully placed them on the counter. Handa thanked him and took the tickets. The two races he had asked Monoi to bet on had both won. He did not bother asking what the dividends were, it just meant that enough cash for a drink was back in his pocket.
Handa took a swig from his can of beer.
“What about tomorrow’s race?” Monoi asked.
“I didn’t even have time to buy the paper.”
“I have it. You wanna see?”
“No. I’ll pass for tomorrow.”
Just when he took another swig of beer, a woman walked past on the other side of the curtain behind Monoi, causing Handa to pause for a moment with his can in midair. A black suit and the contour of calves in stockings. From the neck up she was hidden by the curtain. That suit, Handa thought, it was the Valentino he had seen earlier at that dentist’s home. Noticing Handa’s gaze, Monoi himself turned around and mumbled, “My daughter’s home for a bit.”
What are the odds? Handa almost said out loud. Of all the people . . . the grandson who had died was the son of that dentist and Monoi’s daughter. But he was struck speechless for only a moment. He could not refer to a case that was still under investigation, of course, and Handa found such a coincidence encountered at the end of the day as cheap as a TV drama, which made him feel alienated all over again. He gave a noncommittal response, “Oh, really?” and finished the rest of his beer. The wind seemed stronger outside, as the glass door facing the street rattled noisily.
“I’ll buy the paper for you before next week’s Japan Cup,” Monoi said.
“I wonder if Oguri Cap will run.”
“I hope so. If he does, I’ll bet on Oguri.”
“Are you going tomorrow, Monoi?”
“I’ve got nothing else to do.”
“Well, sorry to leave you with this but—”
Handa placed the empty can on the counter, said goodnight, and left the store. He heard Monoi pushing the shelf back on the other side of the glass door.
Handa purchased another can of beer at the liquor shop’s vending machine. In front of the intersection on Sangyo Road, he pulled the tab open and took a sip. Crossing the intersection and walking straight down the alley would bring him to his apartment in Haginaka, but his feet would not move and he remained drinking by the side of the road. Before him was the factory wall of Yamamoto Rolling Stock Manufacturing. All along the deserted industrial road were corrugated-metal and concrete fences, a succession of street lamps.
Back then, just what was I hoping for? Handa wondered. To sit at a desk where the sun shone brightly. To make a fairly stable living and lead a respectable life—wasn’t that all? He had become a policeman with a single, pathetically ordinary desire—and what now?
He threw his empty can into the road, where it was swiftly crushed beneath the tires of an oncoming truck with nary a sound. Ah, that’s me, right there. As soon as the thought crossed his mind, that other self grumbled, I’ll show them soon enough, just wait.