It was not something he was ever conscious of now, but Mitsuko was Yoshie’s daughter from a previous marriage, so she and Monoi were not related by blood. When he and Yoshie got married, he was too busy making ends meet to have a child, but by the time he could afford to have one Yoshie was already past forty-five, and the doctor said she could no longer give birth.
He wouldn’t dare say he was good at living, but he did harbor a mild affection for the life that resulted from his working the way he had. Though if it were to be compared with the good fortune and resourcefulness of others, Monoi had no words to defend it—his modest confidence and pride would all but disappear. Even as he contemplated that Mitsuko must be on edge, having just lost her son, Monoi cast his gaze down out of longtime habit, and could not bring himself to look his daughter in the face. To grow old was to lose patience.
And so Monoi crept back into the warmth of the kotatsu, sitting at the low table with its inbuilt heater, his back hunched as he sipped from his mug of tea, which had turned cold.
“Are you listening?!” Mitsuko’s shrill voice hailed down upon his head.
“I’m listening,” Monoi mumbled, moving only his lips.
Mitsuko had arrived unexpectedly half an hour ago, and abruptly launched into the story of how the police had been to see her husband, Hatano. Unable to accept that their son, Takayuki, had been rejected by Hinode Beer, Hatano had apparently sent a few accusatory letters to Hinode. As a result, Hinode filed a complaint against him with the police, and it was on the verge of becoming a criminal case.
Whatever had happened, sending harassing letters to a company was so far out of the ordinary that if Hatano, who had always seemed so conscientious, had actually done such a thing, Monoi figured he must have had a compelling reason. But as he listened further, Monoi understood there was much more to this complicated story. His grandson had had a girlfriend whom he intended to marry, but the engagement was suddenly broken off because her parents objected. Could the shock from this have caused Takayuki to have an accident? His girlfriend’s parents were not explicit, but wasn’t it likely that the reason for their objection was where Hatano’s birthplace was registered? Mitsuko relayed all this. Then the conversation took a sudden leap. “It’s because you were so irresponsible, Dad,” she reproached.
“I’ve thought about it long and hard over this last month. Everything is definitely Hatano’s fault. It’s a crime of conscience that he hid his birthplace. His wife and his son were completely in the dark, and the reason why suddenly one day we’re faced with this is because Hatano never gave us the explanation he owed us. But go back even further—when a daughter says she’s going to marry someone, every parent knows to check out the other family. But you didn’t do anything.”
“What’s the big deal about his birthplace . . . ?”
“What’s the big deal?! It’s common sense!”
“But didn’t you marry Hatano because you loved him . . . ?”
“That’s why I’m saying you’re an irresponsible father! No matter who he is, if your daughter tells you that she’s going to marry a man, it’s the parent’s obligation to investigate his family!”
“There’s no such obligation in this world.”
“Maybe not in the countryside of Tohoku, but in Tokyo there is! You’re right—I was stupid. A handsome and rich dentist, whose mother’s side of the family were physicians in Kamakura. He had a bevy of girlfriends from top universities, so why did Hatano marry someone like me? It was stupid of me not to figure it out. Do you know how humiliated I am right now, Dad?”
Switch the man’s and woman’s positions, and he had heard the same argument more than enough times from Yoshie, Monoi thought to himself. The proud graduate of a girl’s high school, Yoshie had bid farewell to her first husband, an editor for a literary magazine who had studied literature at Waseda University, sending him off to the front less than six months after they were married. And with a mere postcard notifying her of his death in the war, the newlywed bride became a widow, the newborn Mitsuko in her arms. As she’d told Monoi every chance she got, the reason she had decided to marry him when they met, while she was working as a waitress in Shinjuku toward the end of the war, was because she was burdened with a young daughter and had no hope of marrying anyone decent. In a better world, who would take a half-blind, small-town factory worker as a husband by choice? she used to say.
“Do you know how humiliated I am, Dad? I worked hard to raise Takayuki. And he grew up to be such a wonderful boy, much better than I deserve. And now this happens, before his time—all because of his father’s birthplace!”
“Now, hold on a minute . . .”
“I don’t want to make a stupid fuss over a birthplace either! But it’s because I didn’t know that I couldn’t explain anything to Takayuki. If I had been able to educate and prepare him properly, no matter what the girl’s parents might have said, he would have handled it in a more appropriate way. It’s Hatano’s fault for hiding it. And it’s your fault for not stopping me from marrying a man who hid where he was from!”
Mitsuko started to wail, her voice quavering. Monoi could not avoid looking at her in this state. Even Monoi could see that Mitsuko was suffering in her own way, and with no one else to talk to, she had no choice but to take out her indignation on her father. It made no difference how many millions of yen her outfit cost, the person standing with her back to the pillar crying was, after all, his daughter.
“Why don’t you sit down—” Monoi started to say, but Mitsuko suddenly exclaimed, “Dad!” Her tone was even more fierce. “Don’t you get it? I’ve been deceived!”
“You’ve been husband and wife for more than twenty years, why start accusing him of deceiving you? There’s nothing you can do but work together as a couple and—”
“If I could do that, I wouldn’t be here! Hatano is crazy! I swear he’s lost it, his eyes look weird!”
Why does Mitsuko have to speak in such an ear-splitting tone? I’m her father, but even I’ve had enough, Monoi thought. Then he vaguely remembered hearing Hatano’s voice when he had called out of the blue late one night early that month. He had sounded distracted, having lost his son, but there had been nothing strange that could be detected from the tenor of his voice.
Mitsuko’s voice pitched even higher. “Hatano told me he’s going to the Shinagawa Police Department tomorrow. They’ll take a statement from him, and who knows what will happen after that, but his reputation is over, you know. And yet that man, he has no reaction whatsoever. His eyes look weird. I’m telling you—Takayuki meant more to him than I ever did!”
“I don’t think you need to worry much about the police—”
“What are you talking about?! Who on earth wants to go to a dentist who gets called in by the police? Rumors spread fast!”
“Nothing’s official yet—”
“Don’t act like this isn’t your problem. This issue involves you too, Dad!”
An issue that involved him. It took some time for him to ruminate on what this meant. He knew that he wasn’t entirely uninvolved, but he thought that its effect on him was so small as to be negligible.
Atop a chest of drawers, within an old picture frame, a faded family portrait looked out at them. In 1949, he had rented a small, six-mat apartment near the factory and set up house with Yoshie—the photo was taken to commemorate this event. Mitsuko was four and as cute as ever, and in the picture her new father was holding her hand. The twenty-four-year-old man, who had acquired a beautiful wife and daughter in one fell swoop, looked like a typical country bumpkin, wearing a nervous expression and puffing out his chest. Monoi had framed the photo, and for the past forty-one years, it had been like an ethereal presence in the living room. He had no idea how the two women in his life felt about it, but Monoi himself knew that he had looked to this photograph at various points throughout his life, and now he gazed at it again fro
m the kotatsu.
If he were a man with ten times the guts and that much less patience, he might have murdered his wife and daughter and killed himself along with them. Monoi used to think about this when he looked at the photo, and the thought alone was enough for him just to keep working. In the period just after the war, his marriage to Yoshie was among countless half-hearted marriages between many men and women with no choice but to shack up under the same roof in order to survive. But even still, if they only had money, no doubt they each could have been more at peace. What Monoi regretted was that, for the simple lack of money, he had lived a life untouched by quiet spiritual satisfaction.
Looking back, he had always been haunted by the anxieties of daily life that were naturally ingrained in him, and whenever money became tight, that anxiety transformed into a sharp needle of fear that attacked him. Since he arrived in Tokyo, where it was all he could do to survive, the society around him continued to change at an astonishing speed, and with his meager income that never seemed to rise, he had the constant feeling that he was gradually being left behind. There was no solace at home, with Yoshie calling him worthless every time she opened her mouth, so he had never had the experience of feeling completely at ease. As he grew older, the raw emotions of anxiety and restlessness rusted away, but it wasn’t as if this set his mind at peace. In the five years since Yoshie’s death, his life had ostensibly grown quiet, with no ups and downs, but he felt that the balance between the positives and negatives over his sixty-five years had been too absurd to call what he had now fulfillment.
Monoi found himself unable to worry as he used to about his daughter, who had led a separate life for a long time already. Now, it was all too clear that he preferred to devote the remainder of his own life to himself, rather than to his daughter.
With no way of knowing what her old father was thinking, Mitsuko continued to speak in her shrill voice.
“I’m so humiliated. That man—he thinks that since he married me begrudgingly, as long as he keeps me in luxury, his duty is done. Not once did he ever approve of a social climber like me. I knew it all too well, but once Takayuki was born, I couldn’t leave. I’ve endured it all this time—twenty-three years!”
“What’s the point of telling me this now, after all these years?”
“Of course you’d say that. You’ve never been one to take responsibility for anything,” Mitsuko said as she blew her nose into a handkerchief and ran her hand through her coiffed hair. “I’m divorcing him,” she said, her tone suddenly changing. “I’m sure for twenty-three years, our marriage has also been quite a disappointment for Hatano.”
“But what will you live on if you divorce him—”
“I’ll make sure Hatano gives me half of everything. Besides, our vacation home in Oiso is under my name, so I can sell that off and do what I want. I won’t be a burden to anyone.”
“Don’t say such a thing—”
Just then, the store’s bell jingled again.
“There you go. Another one of your horseracing friends,” Mitsuko spat out the words, and grabbed the handbag at her feet. “I’m going on a trip for the next two or three days. If the police ask anything, tell them I’m not here.”
“Mitsuko, wait—”
Monoi crawled out of the kotatsu and tried to chase after her, but before he could Mitusko had stormed out through the back door, slamming it behind her with a force that could have broken the wooden door.
“Monoi-san.” The voice that called out from the store did not belong to a horseracing buddy but to a neighbor. When Monoi poked his head into the pharmacy, the owner of a dairy shop down the block called to him across the display shelf of detergent. “Sorry to bother you so late. My grandson’s complaining of a toothache.”
“A cavity? Is it swollen?” Despite Monoi’s weariness, his response tumbled out by rote. No matter what happened, he thought, this was the only voice he was equipped with—and his only way of speaking with it.
“I think it’s a cavity, but he won’t stop crying.”
“Do you have some cotton balls at home? I’ll give you some ointment, so try putting that on it. If that doesn’t work, it means it’s infected. You’ll have to take him to the dentist.”
Monoi gave him the ointment, and the shop owner thanked him as he paid and left. “Take care,” Monoi said as he saw him out. As he closed the glass door, which was still rattling in the wind, he detected a trace of Mitsuko’s perfume in the air of the cramped store. And her cutting voice seemed to still echo around him.
If he’d had the means, he would have chosen to be alone a long time ago, Monoi tried to tell himself in vain. As he did so, one by one, a number of bitter disappointments that he hated to even think of began to flutter through his mind yet again. There was the time when he had to buy a long-sleeved kimono for Mitsuko’s coming-of-age ceremony. It just so happened that was the year the factory had a slump and there were no bonuses to hand out, so he had gone from credit union to credit union in a mad rush, but after he had finally scrambled together the hundred-thousand yen to pay for a kimono and obi sash—it was such a cheap garment, even Monoi could see that it wasn’t pretty—in the end his daughter had worn a Western-style dress to the ceremony. That kimono was eventually sold off to a pawnshop, without Mitsuko ever even slipping her arm through its sleeves. He could still recall the yellow butterfly pattern of that kimono.
There were other things too. When Mitsuko was in elementary school, the day of her field trip Yoshie happened to be in bed with a cold so Monoi, straight from a night shift, struggled to prepare a bento for her lunch, but when his daughter left for school, the bento he had worked so hard to make was still sitting on the dining table. At the time, Monoi tried frantically to figure out why, finally realizing that the cloth in which he had wrapped the bento box reeked of machine oil—he could only laugh to himself.
Thinking about it as he shoved the display shelf aside to close the store, he realized no one had ever told him about Parent’s Day at school, and Monoi couldn’t remember ever attending one. For a sixty-five-year-old man, digging up memories of the past was pointless—a waste of the time he had left. But it may have been old age that stirred up memories of this, that, and the other, and he just needed to make an effort to shake them off. Why should he worry what Hatano and Mitsuko were thinking or what they were going to do about their marriage?
Monoi went outside the store and started to lower the shutters. As he did so, a car came from the direction of Sangyo Road, and no sooner had it stopped in front of the pharmacy than a hoarse voice called out from the driver’s seat window, “Monoi, big brother!”
It was indeed a night that seemed to bring out all sorts, one after another. The man, big as a tank, got out of a Mercedes-Benz and shouted cheerfully, “It’s too early for bedtime.” He was the son of the owner of the Kanemoto Foundry in Hachinohe, where Monoi worked half a century ago. The snot-nosed kid who used to tag along after him and call him “big brother” had come to Tokyo thirty years earlier after languishing for some time because of his family’s bankruptcy. Now, he managed a respectable mid-sized business, his own ironworks near Ichihara in Chiba, and from time to time he paid a friendly visit to Monoi.
Yoshiya Kanemoto was usually liquored up whenever he came to see Monoi. A smile now broke across his gleaming, bright-red face as he casually pushed a fancy box of expensive foreign liquor toward Monoi.
“Jus’ got back from Manila yesterday. I planned to stop by earlier, but hell, I got to drinking,” he said, laughing.
“Bet you had fun getting into trouble over there, eh?”
“Aw, don’t say that. I have clients to entertain. It’s all right.”
Monoi glanced at the two men sitting in the back seat of the Mercedes. They may have been associates from the metal industry, though he had known for a time that Kanemoto had ties to corporate underlings of a particular vein, and Monoi o
ffered a few words of warning again that night. “It’s not all right.”
In the dialect of their hometown, Kanemoto reassured him that there was nothing to worry about, simply feigning ignorance. The sight of this fifty-year-old man, who bore no trace of the shy child from long ago, made Monoi feel more bewildered now than anything else.
“Well, I’ll come by again. Don’t catch a cold, big brother.”
With that, Kanemoto cheerily got back in his car and turned back the way he’d come. From the window of the retreating car, an unfamiliar man of that particular vein—without a doubt from the shady underworld—glanced at Monoi. His face was somber, with a large mole on his jaw.
Monoi considered the gift of foreign liquor in his hands for a moment, and then placed the box in the basket of his bicycle. Although his plans had been thrown off by his daughter’s coming by, he finally had time to set out on a visit he had been meaning to make all evening.
The person he wanted to see was one of his horseracing buddies who lived in the service apartment of a small factory in Higashi-Kojiya, about a ten-minute bicycle ride from the pharmacy. Typically he would drop by the pharmacy every so often, but he hadn’t recently, and last Sunday he hadn’t been at the Tokyo Racecourse in Fuchu, so Monoi hadn’t seen him for two weeks—since the fourth of this month. The guy barely had any friends or acquaintances, so assuming he was still alive and kicking, about this time of night he would have his head buried in horseracing newspapers in preparation for tomorrow’s races.
Lady Joker, Volume 1 Page 15