by Mike Cooper
A DEATH IN UENO
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
A DEATH IN UENO
The tiny restaurant opened directly onto Tokyo’s central fish market, a low step the only barrier to the slurry of melted ice, blood, and waste spilling across the concrete. Two hours before dawn Tsukiji was in full cry, crowded by hundreds of men in cheap rubber boots pushing handtrucks, hauling crates, arguing over prices. Earlier the restaurant’s dozen seats had been filled by workers gulping ramen before the boats began to arrive; later it would be beer and grilled fish from the day’s catch. Now, with the market at its busiest, the restaurant was almost deserted, as Sakonju had expected.
The only other diner was a muscular man in twill who stood as Sakonju ducked under the restaurant’s low entrance.
“Hattori,” the man introduced himself. “Obliged.”
Sakonju nodded and sat, signaling for tea from the matron, who brought over a cup and disappeared back into the rear.
“Sorry about the time,” said Hattori. “I’ve gotten up at midnight for twenty-one years. I forget that other people don’t.”
“I’m nearby,” Sakonju said. He looked at the deep lines in Hattori’s weatherbeaten face. “You probably haven’t been sleeping much at all lately.”
After a moment Hattori nodded. “Yes. Ever since the call came, last Thursday.” He shook his head abruptly. “I mean, since I heard. I was on the boat, out for a two-week trip north, and the radio wasn’t working, so they couldn’t reach me for almost ten days. By the time I got back, they’d already cremated him.”
“You go out alone?”
“Yes.” Hattori’s hands were nicked and scarred, heavily callused. “My brother came a few times, long ago, but that didn’t last.”
“Were you close?”
“No.” Pain etched Hattori’s voice, and he looked away. “No, and now I regret that more than anything. He got caught up in gambling when we were young, and then it was drugs, and alcohol, and after he didn’t have anyplace to live we lost touch completely. I mean, now and then he’d call, and sometimes I’d be home to answer. Once a year or so I tried to help, but he always refused.”
“And how did he die?”
“He was beaten,” said Hattori. “With a concrete brick, the police said.” He was silent a moment. “They found him at a construction site.” He pulled a thin, crumpled tear sheet from his pocket and flattened it neatly. “This is all I have: a receipt from the city crematorium. They couldn’t reach me, and he was a pauper, so they just . . . finished up.”
Sakonju sipped his cooling tea and waited a while, listening to the cacophony echoing through the market outside. A forklift barreled past, leaving diesel stench in its wake.
“What do you want from me?” he asked.
“The police don’t seem to care who killed him. Just another homeless guy, good riddance.”
“Did they give you anything else, any other information at all?”
“They said they had a name - Jinguji, someone my brother apparently knew, but that was it, they couldn’t find him. Like I said, they didn’t seem to be trying hard.”
He looked at the wooden chopsticks in his hand, and suddenly clenched his fist, snapping them in two and dropping the pieces to the floor. “I asked around. You’re an investigator, you can help me find the murderer. People say you’re good.”
“Maybe.” Sakonju considered Hattori’s set face. “I’m not sure I understand, though. You said you weren’t close to your brother . . .” He let the question hang, and Hattori didn’t answer for a time.
“Our mother died the day after I was born,” he said eventually. “Our father’s sister looked after us while he was on the boat, weeks at a time. We’d see him two or three times a month. It was hard . . . he disappeared in a typhoon when I was sixteen. A Maritime Agency cutter found the boat, they figured he’d been washed overboard.”
Sakonju waited. After a moment Hattori continued.
“My brother was older, but I inherited the boat. He’d already been getting into trouble, my father must have thought he couldn’t handle it.” He broke off. “Over the years, the more he drifted away, the more I blamed myself.”
“How can I say this?”Sakonju was still watching Hattori’s face. “Nothing you do will bring him back. It’s over for him.”
“Of course.” He hesitated, tried to explain. “I have to know that at the end, I finally did the right thing.”
“Why?”
“I owe it to him - and myself.” He was staring at the table. “This is for me.”
“All right.” Sakonju nodded, like he’d come to a decision.
Hattori looked up. “So you can help me find the killer?”
“Thirty thousand yen per day,” said Sakonju. “But I usually work alone.”
“Fine.” Hattori refolded the receipt and placed it carefully back into his pocket, buttoning down the flap. “I’ve spent most of my life on the ocean, by myself,” he said. “I know how to wait.”
***
Dusk found Sakonju in Ueno, Tokyo’s northeast commuter hub, a rambling station surrounded by dilapidated office blocks and soft-porn houses. Heavy traffic crawled along the wet, neon-lit streets. He started in Ueno Park, notorious for the hundreds of homeless men usually huddled on its benches and walks, but the cold November drizzle had driven most of them elsewhere.
“The police found him at Ueno last year,” Hattori had said that morning. “Picked him up on a sweep, then they called me. But he was released before I saw him.” His body had been found in a half-finished new building not far away.
Soaked through, Sakonju decided that further searching outside was pointless. He returned to the station and shook off the damp amid a rushing flow of suits and umbrellas.
A maze of tunnels, connecting at odd angles and ramping up and down, led to the various subway lines. Along the periphery, traffic thinned out, and the city’s destitute appeared, sleeping in corridor alcoves, seated with their plastic bags, muttering to the walls or staring into space. Eventually he found the permanent encampments, neat rows of cardboard shelters along a wide corridor near the Asakusa Line. Under the stuttering fluorescents people had lashed together old boxes and plastic fiber to create a subterranean shantytown, low walls for privacy and a bit of protection.
Behind a large concrete pillar he came across several older men seated on the floor. Small bottles of vending machine sake and shochu liquor stood half-empty between them. They were arguing about baseball - the same discussion that could be heard among countless groups of salarymen in their bars, between workers off-shift, across the counters of ramen stalls.
“Hattori? The fellow who was killed, sure, we knew him, he was around sometimes.” They were drunk, unsurprised at Sakonju’s questions. “Nice guy.”
“Where did he stay?”
Shrugs. One drank off his jar. “Try Tatsu- I used to see him and Hattori together.”
“Down there,” said another, gesturing vaguely. “Doesn’t come this way much lately.” He snickered through missing teeth. “Too good for us, I guess.”
“How about someone called Jinguji?”
The man stopped smiling and looked away. He mumbled a negative while the others shook their heads, their boisterousness evaporating.
“Jinguji?” Sakonju asked again.
“Nothing to do with us,” said one finally, his face closed.
Sakonju knew the conversation was over. He gave them a few thousand-yen notes and walked on.
He found Tatsu thirty minutes and several inquiries later, curled up behind three walls about a meter high and built from waxed cardboard crates which, from the smell, had contained onions and burdock. He was wrapped in a green blanket, watching a handheld TV, s
mall earphones connected by a looping soundcord. Several plastic and nylon bags held his possessions. He jumped when Sakonju prodded his side.
“Yes, yes, I’m sorry . . .” he hurriedly pulled off the earphones and hid the TV away, patting at several bags and then focusing. “Not police, are you?”
“Hardly.” Sakonju squatted beside him. “A friend of yours was killed a couple weeks back, barely a kilometer from here.”
“Hattori?” Tatsu pushed himself to a seated position. “Terrible. But not really my friend.”
“Know him well?”
“He was . . . you know.” He tapped the inside of his left forearm with his right thumb.
“Drugs.” Sakonju said it flatly.
“Maybe.” His breath smelled of shochu. “You can’t trust a guy like that.”
“When did you see him last?”
Tatsu looked at him blankly. “A few weeks ago?”
Sakonju said nothing for a moment. “How about Jinguji?”
A look of fear crossed Tatsu’s face. “Jinguji . . .” His voice trailed off.
“Who is he?”
Tatsu swallowed hard. “Big guy, mean-looking, started showing up at the callouts a few months ago. Hattori and him got together, seemed like.”
“What do you mean, got together?”
“You’d see them talking, Hattori would do him errands, like. Carry packages, maybe.”
“Where can I find him?”
Tatsu opened one hand and pushed away the question. “I don’t know. Around. Don’t ask me.”
***
Sakonju returned at five a.m. the next morning, walking in the damp false dawn through deserted streets on the far side of Ueno park. The callout took place at the head of an alley off Kototoi Avenue. Two dozen men milled in the cold, a few smoking, most raggedly dressed - old canvas jackets, worn split-toe boots. Some had come from the hostels, others from the station or other kips in backstreets and empty buildings. They talked to pass the time, waiting with a quiet dignity that had surprised Sakonju when he first encountered it.
The crowd looked him over then kept their distance, regarding him warily, conversation dying away. After a few minutes Sakonju recognized a man with his lunch in a neatly tied furoshiki and a laborer’s towel wrapped around his neck, a passing acquaintance from previous work that had taken him through this particular strata of Japan’s collapsing economy.
The man nodded back. “They think you’re with the company,” he said.
“Like what, an accountant?”
The man smiled. “Not exactly.”
A pair of trucks pulled up, flatbeds with open rails and canvas tops, their headlights fuzzy in the pre-dawn mist. Four men in buzz cuts and leather jackets swung down from the cabs and looked over the laborers, who were assembling themselves into a more organized pair of lines.
“Demolition,” said one of the drivers, clearly the leader. He was wearing mirrored sunglasses despite the near-dark. “In Saitama. But we only need ten of you.” He began to sort and bully the men into the truck beds.
As Sakonju stepped forward two of the toughs glanced over, then moved to intercept him.
“Looking for work, friend?” asked one.
Sakonju examined him. “No,” he said. “I wonder if you’ve seen Jinguji-san lately?”
Overhearing, Sakonju’s acquaintance looked back in surprise, considered the situation, then abruptly turned and faded away. Activity and conversation ceased as the buzz cuts turned their attention to Sakonju, who flexed his hands once then stood waiting, relaxed.
“No,” said the leader. “Haven’t run into him lately.”
“When was the last time?”
His sunglasses were perfectly still. “You with him?”
“Does it matter?”
“Let me explain,” he said softly. “We’re a company in the construction business. Legitimate. We pay our taxes, on time, just like any downtown kacho. We treat everyone fairly - do an honest day’s work, you get an honest day’s pay. Jinguji . . . Jinguji doesn’t seem to understand that. He wants to disrupt our harmony.”
“I appreciate harmony,” said Sakonju.
“Who are you, then?”
Sakonju glanced around, and decided he’d learned enough. “No one who wants to haul rocks all day,” he said.
“Then perhaps you’d best be on your way.” As the tension eased he jerked his head, and warily the toughs began to chivvy the laborers into the trucks again.
Around the corner Sakonju’s acquaintance drifted out of the shadows.
“You know Jinguji?” he said.
“No.”
“He began showing up a couple months ago. Hard worker - but then he began to talk more, once people were willing to listen.”
Sakonju nodded. “He’s organizing, isn’t he?”
“No, not really. Or maybe, not yet. Just talking, explaining. Lots of these guys, they don’t really know how they ended up here, breaking their backs and barely getting by. Jinguji has a way of making it all clear.”
“What do you think?”
“I enjoy his company.” Around the block they could hear the trucks start up, and the man paused, listening until they’d driven away. He turned back to Sakonju and smiled thinly. “You want to know where he lives?”
***
The boarding house was a ramshackle wooden building that had been thrown up right after the war, temporary housing in use about six decades longer than planned. Rusty buckets under the gutter drains spilled water onto cracked paving blocks around the entryway. Stooping, Sakonju pulled off his boots and slid open the inner door, referring to the scrawled slip his acquaintance had provided. It was still early, even darker now that the sullen rain had begun again, and snoring and hacking could be heard along the narrow corridor.
He knocked at Jinguji’s door, waited a few minutes, and then forced the lock. A cheap latch bolt, it gave easily, and he quickly slid the door shut behind him.
The room was tiny, only three and a half mats - perhaps two meters square - and his search took barely ten minutes. A cardboard mailing box held a few changes of clothing: faded work shirts and black pants, some thin socks. A futon was rolled neatly in the corner, with three blankets folded on top. Some newspapers and manga were piled by the door, and a small appointment book lay nearby with some pens. The entries were brief, seeming to relate to various construction jobs.
Behind the clothing box, plugged into the wall, Sakonju found a small power adapter, but it wasn’t connected to anything. He frowned at the electrical cord, then sat back and studied the room again, mentally quartering the space and eyeing each section in turn. After a few minutes, he nodded to himself and reached under the low kotatsu table, which was just high enough to accommodate the legs of someone seated on the tatami. He quickly found the slim box clipped to its underside, and a moment later he’d freed the laptop and opened it on the table.
***
“So what was in it?” Hattori asked, ignoring his bowl of soba.
“Don’t know. It was passworded, and the few simple tricks I have weren’t good enough.” Sakonju showed him a floppy disk. “A client taught me how to get some crack routines off the Internet, but I don’t really know what I’m doing.”
“Then you didn’t learn anything.”
“No,” said Sakonju. “The fact that he had the computer was enough. He’s definitely not a simple laborer, and I doubt he’s selling drugs.”
“Why are others afraid of him?”
“They’re not afraid of him, they’re afraid of what he might bring.”Sakonju finished off his curry rice. “The yakuza run most of the day labor. Now that times are hard, the jobs are more scarce, and if you want to work you can’t afford to annoy them. Someone like Jinguji is a huge annoyance . . . they’d come down on him hard.”
“Who is he working for?”
“No one. Or everyone, he’d probably say. I imagine he’s connected with one of the radical unions, but how closely - it’s hard to s
ay.”
“If my brother took up with Jinguji . . .”
Sakonju cut him off. “We don’t know. Nothing but speculation until we find him.”
Hattori made an impatient sound, then finally turned his attention to his noodles.
“Was your brother an addict?” Sakonju asked.
“Drugs? No, I don’t think so. Used them for a while, but drinking seemed to be the real problem.”
“Did the police mention it? Needles in his pockets, like that?”
“No.”