Lady Joker, Volume 1 Kaoru Takamura (ereader ebook .TXT) 📖

members, none of whom have anything to do with the incident in question. I’m sure the three papers are well aware of what they have done, so I will say no more.”

But his next words came as a surprise to the various reporters present, beginning with Haruhisa Kubo.

“Having said that, I know that I cannot keep you from writing about it, so with permission from Hinode, we will now distribute a transcript of said tape from 1990 to each newspaper. Nothing has been omitted from the original tape. However, the names of individuals have been redacted to protect their privacy.”

This was an unexpected initiative for the police to take. Murmurs rose within the cramped office of the chief inspector as members of the Public Information Division distributed sheaves of photocopied pages to each company. As Kubo received his own set—twenty pages on A4 paper—he saw that the first line on the top page read, Hinode Beer Company, Kanagawa Factory, To Whom It May Concern. This was followed by the body of the letter, which began with, I, Seiji Okamura, am one of the forty employees who resigned from the Kanagawa factory of Hinode at the end of this past February. Today, with ever so many things on my mind . . . The last page was dated June 1947.

Given that the perpetrators’ memo declaring that they had kidnapped Hinode’s president had yet to be made public, the police’s largess in sharing the letter indicated that it was a meaningless document irrelevant to the main story of the incident. Yet Kubo’s sensors were triggered by how quickly the police had responded. What was behind their reaction? What was their intention?

“This is for each of you to read the letter and decide for yourselves if a mysterious tape is worth all the fuss,” Kanzaki went on, his tone brusque. “Now, the former Hinode employee who wrote the letter and his colleague from the segregated buraku community to whom he refers in the letter have both passed away. We have been unable to confirm that this letter in fact arrived at Hinode’s Kanagawa factory in 1947. No documents related to the matter still exist on Hinode’s end, nor have any former employees who might recall the matter with the letter been found.”

Kubo waited for Kanzaki to finish, then immediately raised his hand. “Please tell us the reason for the disclosure of the letter today.”

“Investigation Headquarters decided they would like to protect the individuals affected from further harm due to excessive coverage of the matter. As you’ll see when you read the letter, it makes references to a segregated buraku community, so those included in any reporting will inevitably suffer damages both tangible and intangible. It could even potentially cause a new threat. Therefore, I hereby request that no further mention of this matter be made, as it is unrelated to the incident in question.”

“The newspapers may not mention it again, but disclosing materials like this might only make the tabloids go on the offensive?” Kubo ventured.

“We don’t believe there is anything of interest to the tabloids here.”

Kubo sincerely doubted that was true—he suspected this may be a calculated move by Kanzaki to indirectly shake up Hinode, whose executives remained tightlipped. Or, perhaps it was a last-ditch strategy to gain some kind of advantage by leaking the letter.

While Kubo mulled this over, reporters from other papers took the opportunity to hurl their own questions.

“You say there are no problems with the investigation, but there’s talk that the letter was circulated by extortionists,” came the angry riposte from a reporter whose paper had splashed the headline mystery tape across their morning edition.

“We have not found evidence that anything like that is true,” Chief Kanzaki replied evasively.

“An extortionist and a pseudo-anti-discrimination organization were shaking down Hinode, isn’t that right?”

“Hinode filed a complaint in 1990 after receiving a tape from an unidentified sender that slandered the company.”

“The tape from 1990 and the recent kidnapping of Hinode’s president are unrelated. That’s what you’ve decided and that’s why you’ve released the letter?”

“It means that this is not the police’s concern.”

As he listened to this futile exchange, Kubo asked himself what he should do. Even if the document was meaningless, could he simply disregard a tape from 1990 that had caused enough of a dustup to lead to a complaint? Kubo shifted his gaze to the twenty-page copy in his hand and, before long, he became absorbed by the litany of unfamiliar names and places.

The author of the letter appeared to have been born and raised on a poor farm in the Tohoku region. I was born in 1915 in the village of Herai in Aomori prefecture. My family home was in the Tamodai district of that same village. In addition to working as tenant farmers on about an acre of land, my family kept a broodmare offered on loan by the landowner . . . As he read the opening passage of the confession, Kubo, who had been born in 1963, felt his head fill with questions.

4

Kyosuke Shiroyama

Friday, April 28th. Kyosuke Shiroyama began the thirty-sixth day since the incident by answering a phone call from Seigo Kurata. “My apologies for calling so early,” Kurata said. “You can expect to receive a call from Iida Shokai, regarding the contract from the other day.”

These pre-determined code words notified him that the criminals had made contact. It was the best they could manage, given that the police had installed recording devices on the landline at Shiroyama’s home. But the code offered no details about when, where, how, or the nature of the contact that had been received.

Over the last month, Shiroyama had never wavered in his conviction that the criminals would follow through on their word to make contact before Golden Week. The fear that some unexpected contingency would arise had been ever-present, but the board of directors had already resolved that, when the time came, they would assent to the criminals’ demand, so at least he knew that there