Lady Joker, Volume 1

by Kaoru Takamura

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Nothing.”

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