The Secrets of the Pachinko Girl, page 1
part #3 of Tokyo Faces Series
The Secrets
of the
Pachinko Girl
by Vann Chow
Tokyo Faces Series
Book I: The Pachinko Girl
Book II: The Kiss of the Pachinko Girl
Book III: The Secrets of the Pachinko Girl
Book IV: The Revenge of the Pachinko Girl
Copyright © 2016-2018 by Vann Chow
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
“There is a lot more to gain in hell.”
Japanese proverb
Table of Contents
Tokyo Faces Series
Prologue
1. The Man with Blue Eyes
2. The Ryokan
3. Like Mother, Unlike Daughter
4. The Suicide Room
5. The Boss's Call
6. Public Relations
7. An Oversight
8. Psychiatric Ward
9. Stitches
10. Case Files
11. Dearest Sundays
12. Apology
13. The Girl Who Studied Philosophy
14. Book Reading
15. Blood Everywhere
16. Bomb Threat
17. Dead Cat
18. A Neglected Enemy
19. Rap Music
20. Laboratory
21. Passwords
22. Clinical Trial
23. Umeko's Kitchen
24. The Marukoma Onsen Ryokan
25. A Warm Embrace
26. The White Room
27. A New Life Ahead
28. White Board
29. An Invitation from Tokyo
30. Duck for Dinner
31. Find A Way
32. Fish Bones
33. Spiteful
34. Hypothesis
35. Leaving It All Behind
36. Marriage and Divorce
37. Business Card
38. A Trip of No Return
39. Samples
40. A New Job
41. Tomorrow
42. Confession
43. Escaped
44. The Informant
45. Zadig
46. Lifesaver
47. Fat Gado
48. The Tale
49. Morinokaze
50. Whiskey
51. Keiyo Expressway
52. Dosojin
53. Ph.D.
Thank you!
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Prologue
Present Day
Monks chanted monotonously Buddhist scriptures on the side of the hall when Andy entered. He bowed his head deeply at the young man and the older woman at the front of the funeral hall and left a small pocket of obituary gift money to them.
It was the third funeral of a coworker he had been to since he started working in Japan. All these men died the most unpredictably during regular workdays. Of course, there was nothing regular about a work day in a Japanese corporation. The Japanese claims the number one position in average numbers of working hours in the world. In addition to the job itself, endless unpaid hours of socializing with coworkers or clients in order to network yourself onto safe grounds in case of any political rift at upper level at the office, and the intolerably long and unpleasant long commute to and from work, they take yet another chunk of personal time from a typical Japanese salarymen and women. One in five died of overwork in Japan. He wondered if his turn was just around the corner as he looked at the humongous multi-layered shrine in front of him decorated with a lot of gold plated objects and many species of white flowers.
"Come over here," Mr. Haneda, a colleague from the Finance department he came along with waved him over so he could join him at the line to the praying table. "Bow deeply when you're at the front," he advised. Andy nodded. — As interesting as it had been when he was invited to pay respect to a deceased coworker a couple of years ago at a local funeral, he did not particularly enjoy it nor did he wish for repeats. After all, behind whose portraits were on the shrine being mourned at were people he used to see day in and day out at work. They were not retirees that had enjoyed at least a couple of years of pleasant retirement lives with their grandchildren nor had they had time to do anything for themselves, really. They were men of working age that died of sudden causes. One of them had a heart attack at the karaoke bar while entertaining a client, after having too many a drink over the years. One of them drove into oncoming traffic after a long day at work after he pulled three all-nighters in a row at the office for an urgent project. This man, Mr. Sagawa, the Vice President of Finance at Daike Japan — still unable to afford a car and the gas to drive to work from his home outside of Tokyo city — fell asleep on the JR train on his way to the office a few mornings ago and never woke up again.
Andy bowed as deep as his back unaccustomed to bowing allowed when it was his turn. Loud clanks of high heels hitting the marble floor of the funeral hall reverberated in the space. Between the gaps of his body and his left arm, Andy spotted the source of the sound. It was Mrs. Ito, the Chief Human Resource Officer of Daike, and daughter-in-law of the cousin of the company's founder. Mrs. Ito, an older woman who was at least sixty, Andy gathered, wore a black long-sleeves suit as of customary for women of her age. Andy straightened himself and was led away by Mr. Haneda to make room for the lady. She clasped her palms together and bowed in front of the portrait of the deceased with her eyes closed. Then she went over to speak to the son and the widow of Mr. Sagawa, no doubt lauding his loyalty in all his years of service to the company until the moment of his death. She whispered something to the ears of her secretary and her secretary gave the widow an envelope. It made the widow cried uncontrollably. In sharp contrast to her, Mrs. Ito appeared almost chillingly calm, as if it was the most usual thing in her role as the Chief Human Resource Officer to be attending funerals of the employees on behalf of the company. It made Andy cringed.
As much as he loved Japan, he did not want to die here, not like Mr. Sagawa, or anyone that went before him for the love of their jobs. He wanted to get up and ran away, but Mr. Haneda spotted him wriggling uneasily on the hard wooden chair and put his hand on his shoulders to stop him from twitching and making a fool of himself in such a solemn circumstance. "Stay still," Mr. Haneda advised kindly as any seasoned Japanese man would to a young, inexperienced American who did not grow up in the same culture. Andy let out a soft sigh and wiped the cold sweats off his face with his palms.
Three days have passed since Carson Smith, his mentor and best pal at Daike had disappeared along with Misa Hayami without a trace after a car accident that occurred in Sapporo. The detective Itsuki Miyazaki in charge of the case said that he recalled distinctively firing his gun at Smith before he could run away. One of his bullets definitely hit him and he could not have gone far. How he, injured, could have escaped together with the girl without a trace was unknown to him. His companions, including another colleague at Daike, Mr. Ryuuji Tanaka from the Arts department said he was knocked unconscious as soon as their car crashed into the river and did not recall anything after that. A policewoman, Narumi Suzuki also on the scene insisted that Smith was actually trying to rescue them all and accused Detective Miyazaki of wrongfully using his weapon and reckless driving. Both the detective and the policewoman were suspended from their jobs until internal investigation completed.
"Where the eff are you, Cars?" Andy asked no one in particular under his breath. He had no intention of attending any more funeral of his coworkers for as long as he was in Japan. Mr. Haneda who sat next to him elbowed him to keep quiet during the wake.
1. The Man with Blue Eyes
Three Years Ago
"Sit down there," Sergey said to the high school girl standing sheepishly in front of him, "and take off your top."
Misa sat at the spot he pointed at gingerly and felt a chill down her spine. It was in the dead of winter when she first met Sergey, the French man who loved making movies that suddenly made her life so much more exciting. Misa had never shown herself to any man, but she was not someone to refuse a request so simple she could hardly find an excuse to. Besides, she had taken a liking to the French young man and his irresistible foreign accent that reminded her of...hope.
A hint of awkwardness lingered in the air as she stood motionless on the same spot she occupied in the hotel room until Sergey asked again, this time he said 'please' and smiled at her clumsiness. She smiled back.
Did all 'first time' have to be so awkward?
Sergey had come up to her as she was walking home down the snow-covered road. On that faithful day, there was a record-breaking amount of snowfall in that part of town. Having lived on one of the snow-covered peaks all her life, she knew immediately that walking was the better option. And it was on the shortcut homeward through the woods that Misa spotted Sergey and his crew, their utility vehicle loaded with what appeared to be filming equipment stuck on the road and buried slowly by a layer of ever-thickening snow. One man from the crew had a large, rusty shovel with him and he was shoveling snow and rocky ices away from under the right front wheel to the tunes of curse words made by another man from the group. His distinctive Tokyian accent betrayed the group's city origin. In side the car, sat Sergey, a foreigner looking every bit as one — blue eyes, dirty blonde hair and deep wrinkles that were more decorative than age-telling. Misa stopped walking, mesmerized, and observed the group. They hardly ever get visitors from the 'outside' in this part of town. Most tourists stuck around the Shikotsu Lake.
After about five minutes, Sergey climbed out of the car, frustrated at the lack of progress in his crew's effort to extricate their car from the icy jam, and he spotted a high school girl stood idling by, watching them. That was Misa.
Sergey introduced himself and explained that he had come here to look for good spots for to make movies. Good fortune has it that someone from Tokyo hired him all the way from France and paid him a lot of money to make a series of movies just the way he wanted, and he wanted them to be perfect now that he had the chance of a lifetime. Misa did not understand half of what he was saying, but she stood there and listened anyway to a foreigner with the story to tell.
It appeared that the crew had lost their way. Maps were utterly useless when all signs of traffic infrastructures were covered with a layer of snow. Misa told them she knows the way, very well in fact, around the mountains. In she climbed on their car when the way was cleared and helped them navigate safely back to their hotel near the lake. By the time they reached the hotel, Sergey had become smitten with this Japanese school girl he chanced upon. An idea formed in his mind and he was convinced that Misa might just be the girl he needed for his movie, a girl from the country-side with a simple look and modest character, everything that spoke 'Japanese' to him.
When the crewmen took to their own rooms, Sergey had talked her into coming up with him to the hotel room with the prospect of starring in a movie.
"I'll film you," Sergey informed her.
Misa nodded, "I understand."
It was not unheard of, stories of young girls her age sleeping with older men, usually in exchange for a small financial reward. A lot of girls from the cities did it, she was told by her friends. It's a national social problem, the Education Minster declared on the television.
Misa felt proud. She would be the first one among her friends to do it.
She fumbled for the ends of her t-shirt printed with a sleeping panda cartoon and pulled it up slowly over her head with trembling hands. Having spotted her uneasiness, Sergey walked over from behind the running video recorder to help her with it. He took care not to obstruct the view of the lens with his camera as he settled down behind Misa and extended his hands to undo the hook that kept Misa's pink with white polka dots cotton bra in place over her young breasts. Misa didn't know how she was supposed to feel but she supposed a 'thank you' would be due.
It was the first time anyone had taken any interest in Misa, really. Misa had barely taken any interest in herself most of the time when she was growing up. She had always been the ugly duckling, the green leaf to her best friend's rose.
As her bra dropped to the lap on top of her tartan patterned school skirt, she looked for the first time in her life with intense curiosity at her own breasts.
"They are beautiful," Sergey whispered in her ears and he cupped them tightly in the seats of his hands. Then he squeezed them together and it made Misa's sensitive breasts tingled. After all, they were still growing. The blood vessels under her skin were particularly enlarged to supply nutrients to this part of the body. Misa did not know if this was supposed to hurt like it did, but she did not make a sound.
"And imagine," Sergey said, "I've found you just like that, on the side of the road, like a wild flower waiting to be plucked. Life is full of wonderful surprise, isn't it?"
2. The Ryokan
Present Day
How far could a wounded man and a measly girl go in a freezing winter night?
The answer was not very far, but that was apparently far enough to get away from their exhausted pursuers from the city. They had only managed to reach the bottom of the Shokobetsu Mountain by holding onto a piece of floating metal on the water that must have been a sign once upon a time and rafted themselves downstream the Ishikari River, a river that branched off of the Chitose River they fell into. They went as far as they could go until the cold of the freezing water was so unbearable they had to pull over and search for a shelter for the night. Having been to the town of Ishikari many times with her grandfather delivering meat supplies when she was young, Misa quickly found the onsen hotel in the city and sneaked in through the back door of the kitchen where her grandfather would usually enter to drop off his goods.
They did not know exactly what time it was, but it was late, and there was nobody in sight.
Their bodies were completely drenched and water from the rivers was dripping everywhere they stepped, but that was not a problem at all. The floor of the kitchen had been completely flooded for cleaning the next morning. Misa held Smith's hand and veered him to the staff lockers.
"There will be clean clothes over there," Misa whispered to Smith.
"How'd you know where everything is?"
"My grandfather's meat supply company used to deliver here, and my mother," she sifted through all the lockers and eventually found where the spare employee uniforms were stored, "she worked in a couple of different Ryokan's when I was young. This is one of them. There aren't that many places for employment for the country people." She smiled and unfolded the largest uniform she could find and handed it to Smith. She herself slipped out of her wet clothes and changed into a uniform. Smith tried to follow suit, but he could barely lift up his arm. The bullet from Miyazaki's gun had dangerously grazed the top of the skin on his upper arm. It did not cause any internal damage, luckily, but it still bled a lot and gave him substantial pain when he tried to use the muscle of his arm.
"Can you grab me the bottle of cooking alcohol over there?" Smith pointed at the bottle on top of the grill with his unwounded arm. When Misa obtained it, he instructed her to pour it over his wound.
"Chikuso....!" Smith cursed as the sting of alcohol from the nerves of his arm reached his brain. Hearing Smith cursed like a real Japanese, she giggled.
"Damnit, it stings." Smith shook his head violently to shake off the painful feeling. Misa wrapped his wound with a clean, dry towel that was lying in a pile inside the locker.
When she was done, she grabbed the sleeve of the uniform dangling off of his back and helped Smith wear it.
Smith said, "we could stay here for a few hours, until someone comes here and then we'll have to go." Smith was beginning to doubt his spontaneous decision to run away with Misa. "Maybe we should have stayed behind."
"Miyazaki was trying to kill you," Misa reminded him, "even after you've saved his life."
"It's absurd that he tried to shoot me in the water. I went back into the water to get Tanaka...he couldn't have known that." He put his hand over his mouth and felt the moisture in his beard. "Jeeze, I hope Tanaka's alright..." Involuntarily he shook his head from side to side, unable to believe that the images of what happened tonight in his mind.
"Tanaka's not a good guy," Misa looked at Smith in the eyes and said. "If it wasn't because of him poking his nose into everybody's business, none of this would have happened. — Do you know who got Tatsu in jail? An 'old friend' of Tatsu from the Yakuza who called himself Corrie. And guess what? He was Miyzaki's snitch. He was told to explicitly offer the job of a runner to Tatsu so that Miyazaki could catch him with the stash in our house just a day later, before he could actually sell anything to high school kids. And if you haven't found out yet, Miyazaki and Tanaka are friends."
"Some friends they were..." Smith was still hung up on the fact that Miyazaki opened fire at him. Things got out of hand pretty quickly back there.
"He must believe that you are somehow a threat," Misa surmised. She had a point. That would be the only reason why Miyazaki couldn't wait until at least Smith came back up the water with Tanaka. "He believed that you will run, or swim away."
As it turned out, they did. What choice did they have when a mad man was blasting rounds of bullets at them? Thank goodness for the murky water and the darkness of the night which gave them the opportunity to sneak away.
