Min Lee - Pachinko

“Ah, the kaiju has been defeated!” Solomon shouted, and jumped on top of Haruki.

“It’s very good to see you again,” Mozasu said to Hansu. “This is my friend Haruki Totoyama.”

“ Hajimemashite . Totoyama desu .”

Solomon resumed his pose.

“Have mercy, Ultraman. Kaiju Toto must say hello to your grandmother.”

“It’s good to see you,” Sunja said.

“Thank you for having me.”

Solomon moved in between Sunja and Haruki.

“ Kaiju Toto!”

“ Hai !” Haruki bellowed.

“Papa bought me a new Ultraman yesterday.”

“Lucky, lucky,” Haruki said, sounding envious.

“I’ll show you. C’mon!” Solomon pulled on Haruki, and the grown man hurtled dramatically toward Solomon’s room.

Hansu kept a file on every person in Sunja’s life. He knew all about Detective Haruki Totoyama, the elder son of a seamstress who owned a uniform manufacturer in Osaka. He had no father and a younger brother who was mentally disabled. Haruki was a homosexual who was engaged to an older woman who worked for his mother. In spite of his relative youth, Haruki was highly regarded in his precinct.

The dinner table talk was happy and relaxed.

“Why can’t you move to Yokohama and live with us?” Solomon asked Haruki.

“Hmm. Tempting, nee ? Then I can play Ultraman every day. Soooo . But, Soro-chan, my mother and brother live in Osaka. I think I’m supposed to live there, too.”

“Oh,” Solomon sighed. “I didn’t know you had a brother. Is he older or younger?”

“Younger.”

“I’d like to meet him,” Solomon said. “We could be friends.”

“ Soo nee , but he’s very shy.”

Solomon nodded.

“Grandma is shy, too.”

Sunja shook her head, and Mozasu smiled.

“I wish you could move here with your brother,” Solomon said quietly.

Haruki nodded. Before Solomon was born, he had not been very interested in children. From a young age, having a handicapped brother had made him wary of the responsibilities of caring for another person.

“My girlfriend Ayame prefers Tokyo over Osaka. Perhaps she would be happier here, too,” Haruki said.

“Maybe you can move here when you get married,” Solomon said.

Mozasu laughed. “ Soo nee .”

Hansu sat up straighter.

“The Yokohama chief of police is a friend. Please let me know if I can be of service if you’d like to transfer,” Hansu said, making an offer he could realize. He took out his business card and handed it to the young officer, and Haruki received it with two hands and a small bow of the head.

Mozasu raised his eyebrows.

Sunja, who had been quiet, continued to observe Hansu. Naturally, she was suspicious of his help. Hansu was not an ordinary person, and he was capable of actions she could neither see nor understand.

Nagano, January 1969

A maze of filing cabinets and metal desks created a warren of office workers in the business offices of Cosmos Pachinko. In the thicket of furniture, Risa Iwamura, the head filing clerk, was not very noticeable. By any conventional measure, Risa was, in fact, appealing in her face and form. However, she possessed a distant manner, preventing ease or intimacy with those around her. It was as if the young woman were turning down her lights to minimize any possibility of attraction or notice. She dressed soberly in white blouses and inexpensive black poly skirts requiring little maintenance; she wore the black leather shoes of an old woman. In the winter, one of her two gray wool cardigans graced her thin shoulders like a cape — her only ornament, an inexpensive silvertone wristwatch, which she consulted often, though she never seemed to have anywhere to go. When she performed her tasks, Risa needed little guidance; she anticipated the needs of her employers faultlessly and executed the tasks without any reminders.

For nearly seven years, Noa had been living in Nagano, passing as a Japanese called Nobuo Ban. He had worked assiduously for the owner of Cosmos Pachinko and had settled into a small, invisible life. He was a valued employee, and the owner left him alone. The only thing that the owner brought up every January when he gave Noa his bonus and New Year’s lecture was marriage: A man of his age and position should have his own home and children. Noa had been the head of the business offices ever since Takano, the man who had hired him, had moved to Nagoya to run the multiple Cosmos businesses there. Nevertheless, Noa continued to live in the pachinko parlor dorms and took his meals regularly in the pachinko staff cafeteria. Although he had already paid Hansu back for the Waseda tuition and board, Noa still sent money to his mother each month. He spent almost nothing on himself beyond what was absolutely necessary.

After this year’s New Year’s lecture, Noa thought deeply about his boss’s advice. He had been aware of Risa. Although she never spoke of it, everyone knew that she came from a middle-class family with a sad scandal.

When Risa was fourteen or so, her father, a beloved doctor at the local clinic, had dispensed improper medication to two patients during the flu season, resulting in their deaths. Shortly thereafter, the doctor took his own life, rendering his family both destitute and tainted. Risa was effectively unmarriageable, since a suicide in a family could indicate mental illness in her blood; even worse, her father was perceived to have done something so shameful that he felt that he needed to die. The relatives did not come to the funeral, and they no longer called on Risa and her mother. Risa’s mother never recovered from the shock and no longer left the house even to run errands. After Risa completed secondary school, Takano, a former patient of Risa’s father, hired her to do clerical work.

Noa had noticed her beautiful handwriting on the files even before he noticed her. It was possible that he was in love with the way she wrote the number two — her parallel lines expressing a kind of free movement inside the invisible box that contained the ideograph’s strokes. If Risa wrote even an ordinary description on an invoice, Noa would pause to read it again, not because of what it said, but because he could detect that there was a kind of dancing spirit in the hand that wrote such elegant letters.

When Noa asked her to dinner one winter evening, she replied, in shock, “ Maji ?” Among the file clerks, Nobuo Ban was a fascinating topic of discussion, but after so many years, with so little change in his behavior, the interested girls had long since given up. It took two dinners, perhaps even less time than that, for Risa to fall in love with Noa, and the two intensely private young people married that winter.

On their wedding night, Risa was frightened.

“Will it hurt?”

“You can tell me to stop. I’d rather hurt myself than hurt you, my wife.”

Neither had realized the loneliness each had lived with for such a long time until the loneliness was interrupted by genuine affection.

When Risa got pregnant, she quit her job and stayed home and raised her family with as much competence as she had run the file rooms of a successful pachinko business. First, she had twin girls; then a year later, Risa gave birth to a boy; then a year after that, another girl.

Every month, Noa traveled for work for two days, but otherwise he kept to a kind of reliable schedule that made it possible to work six days a week for Cosmos and raise his family attentively. Curiously, he did not drink or go out to clubs, even to entertain the police or to be entertained by pachinko machine salesmen. Noa was honest, precise, and could handle any level of business complication from taxes to machine licenses. Moreover, he was not greedy. The owner of Cosmos respected that Noa avoided mizu shobai . Naturally, Risa was grateful; it was easy to lose the affections of a husband to an ambitious bar hostess.