“Erimo will run on the dirt track.” Monoi said this almost to himself as he got up from the bench to walk to the paddock. Once he walked down the stairs and reached the lines in front of the parimutuel betting windows on the first floor, he realized that he had once again forgotten the umbrella he had just retrieved, but it wasn’t enough to detain him. His forgetfulness progressed every day like a painless gum disease; until the day his teeth fell out, there was time enough to rot.
Just in front of the paddock, there was a man seated by a pillar in an alleyway where drifting trash had collected. The sight of him caused Monoi to pause in his tracks. The man, in his mid-twenties, sat cross-legged with his young body bent awkwardly forward, his face buried in the newspaper that he held open with both hands. Monoi always encountered him in this same exact spot, and every time the man was intently studying his newspaper in a similar posture.
“Yo-chan.”
Monoi called to the young man, who acknowledged him by briefly raising his eyes from the newspaper before dropping his gaze again.
The man’s name was Yokichi Matsudo, but everyone called him Yo-chan. He worked at the local factory in the neighborhood where Monoi lived. On the day of the funeral for Monoi’s grandson—who knows how he’d heard about it—Yo-chan brought over a condolence offering of three thousand yen tucked into a business envelope. When it came to horseracing, he was a Sunday regular like Nunokawa, but Yo-chan always bought up three or four of the Saturday horseracing papers as well as the evening newspaper, and would spend the whole night grappling with the racing columns in his cramped apartment. Right up to the start of the races, he would still be staring intently at the newspaper, which he held ten centimeters before his face, trying to predict their outcomes, until he could no longer tell what was what and a blue vein stood out on his temple. It was always the same routine with Yo-chan.
Monoi spoke gingerly to the lowered head. “You betting next?”
“Only on the eleventh race today. Got no money.”
“Which one?”
“Diana—maybe. I’m not sure.” Yo-chan nervously folded his newspapers with his dirty black fingernails and, tucking a worn-down red pencil into the pages, said to himself, “It’s gotta be Diana,” and further mumbled, “Will three come first, or will it be four . . .”
Suddenly, a man who had been sitting shoulder to shoulder with Yo-chan got up and began to walk away. He was around thirty or so, with an unremarkable appearance from the neck up, but then Monoi couldn’t help noticing the flashy vertical striped jacket he wore over a purple shirt, and his white loafers with the heels crushed down. Yo-chan’s gaze was also drawn to the man and he responded, “An acquaintance.”
“Who is he?” Monoi asked.
“A guy from the credit union who comes to the factory.”
“Huh.”
“He’s a Zainichi Korean. Always pissed off on Sundays.”
As Yo-chan said this he flashed his teeth a little, his shoulders shaking as he laughed without a sound.
In that moment Monoi failed to make out Yo-chan’s spurt of words, but he assumed it was because of his bad hearing and didn’t bother asking him to repeat what he had said. After all, Yo-chan was as young as Monoi’s grandson, and everything about him—from his outlook on things to the way he used his chopsticks—only caused Monoi to feel ill at ease. It had been the same with his grandson who died on the 15th. In any case, the way Monoi saw it, the man walking away seemed to belong to that particular vein of shady underworld connections, though he had no clue as to why he had gotten such an impression.
“Diana might be a win,” Monoi said, bringing the conversation back around.
“Middle odds at best. Not a dark horse,” Yo-chan corrected him soberly, though his face was already buried again in his newspaper.
Monoi spoke to his profile. “Come by my house tomorrow. We’ll go out for sushi.” With that, he walked away.
Monoi had lingered long enough talking with Yo-chan that there was already a battery of umbrellas around the paddock. He stepped into the rain and peered at the paddock through a gap in the crowd, but after realizing that he couldn’t see, he gave up and decided to watch the horses on the various monitors that were around the betting windows. In just a short time he was drenched, so he returned to the shelter of the building and stood beneath a monitor in the crowded passageway. The screen only showed one horse at a time; here was horse number four, a jockey astride him. He was a six-year-old stretch runner who had always run in the nine-million-yen class but, as if himself aware that he had been losing his edge lately in the homestretch, he walked with a heavy, drooping gait. Then came horse number five. He had a lucid expression, seeming fully matured at four years old, and he pulled against his reins and bared his teeth as if he wanted to say something. Next came horse number six.
The rain had not let up. One could practically make out every single raindrop that fell on the horses. Since their bodies were covered entirely by hair, getting wet meant their own body weight would be more of a burden. Infected by the languid mood of the horses, Monoi’s focus started to drift away from the race.
I could use a pick-me-up, he thought to himself. At times like this, it was best to simply let go and sink five thousand yen or so in a single race on
