Lady Joker, Volume 1

are all Japanese just the same, ants silently carrying on our daily lives, our individual progress making up the vision of this country. In such a country there is a man who sees “a ray of light coming through,” a man who is still complaining long after he has left his company, the ghost of a former politician of the Imperial Rule turned democrat, another democrat who touts revolution while busying himself with internal conflicts, and if you look down below there are black-marketeers and thieves possessed by demons; the sharp-eyed unemployed men and street urchins, strident laborers, entrepreneurs hoarding vast amounts of raw materials, or perhaps in the country there are farmers stockpiling rice and potatoes, land owners listening for the sound of their financial ruin approaching, and impoverished peasants who never had anything to lose—the disparate lives of all these ants came together to form this vision of Japan, a vision that is bustling on one hand and yet somehow despairing and more chaotic than before.

Not long from now, there will come a day when Japanese people will enjoy a glass of beer like before, but when that day comes where will I be and what will I see, what will have happened to those black and broken fingernails of Katsuichi Noguchi, what will the village of Herai look like? In my state, I am incapable of envisioning a single one of these things. When that time comes, what will I be thinking as I gaze at the logo of Hinode Lager Beer, and what would those forty former employees who left the company this past February think, and what would Katsuichi Noguchi and those three men from the buraku village fired from the Kyoto factory think? Only G-d knows.

June 1947

Seiji Okamura

PART ONE

1990

The Men

1

Seizo Monoi

It was raining for the first time in almost three weeks at Tokyo Racecourse in Fuchu. The rain fell harder in the afternoon, and by the time the ninth race began, the cluster of umbrellas gathered near the finish line began to scatter one by one. On a day like this, the hundred thousand or so people huddled together in the grandstand got so thoroughly drenched that water could practically be wrung out from the crowd.

Rising above the low hum that filled the second level of the grandstands, a heavy groaning sounded from time to time, like air seeping out of a broken exhaust pipe. A girl sitting on a bench, contorting her upper body and twisting her neck about while shaking from side to side, was gasping out her breath, forming an indistinct word composed only of vowels: “Aaaa, ooo.” It was the girl’s way of saying “Start.”

Sitting on the girl’s right side, the man accompanying her looked up. He blinked his heavy eyelids and muttered, “Be quiet,” but the girl, contorting her mouth and shaking her head up and down vigorously to express the joy of having had her feelings understood, let out a hoarse scream.

A single strand of rope was wrapped around the girl’s waist, and it was tied to the bench. The girl was well over twelve years old, but because her neck and upper body were unstable, she had to be tied to the bench to prevent her from falling over. That day the girl also gave off a sour smell of blood, and every time she moved the stench permeated the air around her. The man accompanying the girl sat next to her, seemingly unaware of this, as she continued to wobble her neck and groan, until he lowered his head to doze off again.

Say, where did I leave my umbrella? Seizo Monoi suddenly wondered and, taking his eyes off his newspaper, looked at his feet beneath the bench. Without adjusting his reading glasses, he scanned the blurry concrete floor before picking up his black umbrella, which was being trampled by the canvas shoes of the girl sitting next to him. A wet and withered piece of newspaper was stuck to the cloth of the umbrella. His eyes caught the words “Superior Quality, 100 Years in the Making. Hinode Lager” in an ad printed on the page before he shook it off.

Beside him, the girl had begun stamping her feet again and wringing from her throat her version of the word, “Start, start!” It was the beginning of the ninth race, a six-furlong race for three-year-old colts and fillies. As Monoi raised his head to witness the start of the race he had not bet on, he wondered if the smell of blood wafting from the girl was only in his imagination. He unconsciously turned his neck so that the right half of his face was positioned toward the racecourse. He had suffered an accident as a child that had cost him most of the vision in his left eye when he came of age and now, in his late sixties, that side had gone completely dark.

The overcast weather darkened the racecourse, and the horses that took off from across the infield looked as if they were swimming into a stormy sea with jockeys in tow. In November the turf track still bore shades of green, but perhaps from the color of the rain or the sky, the entire course was dulled to an inky darkness, and the dirt track to the inside of the one on which the horses now ran looked like a black sash, frothy with mud. A live feed of the ground’s surface was displayed on the jumbotron located directly across from the grandstand.

Monoi was looking at the dirt track because the next race—the tenth, and the one he planned to bet on—would be run on this course. As was always the case, imagining the weight of the horses’ hooves, he was consumed by an inexplicable restlessness that made his insides leap. After all this time, the sight of the horses—kicking off dirt as their rumps were whipped and veins stood out on their throats—still filled Monoi with wonder. The horses, he