LITMIR.BIZ

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the mention of Mitsugu Azamui, Keiji looked up uneasily.

      “Well, he’s hardly likely to go and vote, is he?” said Dad, coming back from the kitchen with two cans of beer. “But I suppose if someone offered him money, he’d take it anyway to spend on booze,” he laughed as he pulled the ring on one of the cans. Beer fizzed out.

      Perhaps Dad was right. I couldn’t imagine Mitsugu casting a vote. The only picture that came to my mind was him drunkenly sipping shochu.

      “If he accepted the money, I’d have to arrest him, along with everyone else in the village.” Dad raised his voice and lifted his arms as though about to grab me: “Mitsugu Azamui, you are under arrest on suspicion of corruption and drunkenness!”

      I froze. He veered away and brought his hands down on Keiji instead.

      “Agh!” Keiji shouted and dashed into the kitchen.

      “Hey!” Mom shouted. “Don’t mess around like that! He’ll have an asthma attack!”

      The war between the two electoral camps continued. Even Yoshi-nī and Hachi-nī themselves rang Dad up to demand arrests. In the end, Dad could no longer just smile placidly and hope things would calm down. It was getting difficult to keep both sides happy, and he was constantly being accused of bias.

      “It’s such a pain,” he said to Mom. “There were no elections at all while Yamamoto was here. My timing’s always bad.”

      “Can’t be helped,” she said. Then, with a serious expression on her face she looked up from her magazine. “Do you think I’ve gained weight? It’s all this food we keep being given! I’ll have to exercise more, but there isn’t even a pool here.”

      “There’s the ocean just over there,” said Dad. “But I suppose it’s not that good for swimming, with all the fish feed floating around.”

      “Perhaps I’ll start going to volleyball with Miki,” Mom said with a smile. “Mr. Yoshida’s very handsome. Miki, will you ask him if I can come along?”

      “That’s not funny!” said Dad. “You hear all the time about policemen’s wives having affairs with local men. It wasn’t while he was stationed here, but you know about Yamamoto’s divorce. I don’t want that happening to us.”

      “Well, what about you?” Mom replied with a sharp look. “How do I know you’re not doing anything stupid?”

      “Me? You’ve got to be kidding! There’s all this stuff with the election and the kids shooting rockets at Toshiko-bā’s house. It’s wearing me out!”

      To calm the feuding factions down, Dad thought up a compromise. Each side would choose two people to be arrested. Dad would arrest them under the Public Offices Election Law and put them in jail overnight. Both sides had said that arresting just one person wouldn’t be enough—they were after a whole sweep. But the district had no jail, which meant that anybody he arrested would have to be taken to the town on the other side of the hills. If there were a lot of them, Dad would have to use a minibus, but there only were two vehicles like that in the village—one belonging to Marugi Fisheries, for taking staff to and from the plant, and the other to Abe Construction, for transporting workers to building sites. Under the circumstances, he couldn’t very well borrow either.

      So he decided to use his new Toyota Crown. The official patrol car had been another possibility, and, in the end, he regretted not using it, but he’d thought it would be overdoing things to use a patrol car in what was, after all, really just a mock arrest. Besides, if he was in his own car, he’d be able to go play pachinko afterward without attracting attention. So it seemed a good opportunity to take the new Toyota for a drive. He could only fit four people in the car besides himself, so that was why he settled on two detainees from each side. Mom told us that they were to be Iwaya and Hashimoto from Yoshi-nī’s side and Hidaka and Someya from Hachi-nī’s.

      All four of them had been diagnosed with silicosis. Like Mitsugu Azamui and his hand-arm vibration syndrome, their diagnoses brought them a monthly government benefit, which meant they didn’t have to work. Except for playing pachinko and chatting, none of them had anything in particular to do all day. In fact, they were perfectly happy to be arrested—they saw it as another way of supporting their candidates.

      “It’ll be good to see where the pigs put people,” said Hidaka. “I know plenty about where people put pigs.” His younger son had graduated from the prefecture’s agricultural university and was now a pig farmer on the outskirts of the village.

      Iwaya had two sons working as truck drivers at Marugi Fisheries, and Hashimoto’s wife worked in the office. Before developing silicosis, Hidaka had for years been a manager at Abe Construction. Someya had originally been a fish-farmer. Everyone knew how his business had gone bankrupt before new techniques brought a boom to fish farming in the village. The story was a local legend. He blamed the fishing cooperative for refusing him financing, and of course the chairman of the cooperative, then as now, was Yoshi-nī. But in fact, most people believed—and maybe deep down Someya did too—that Yoshi-nī had actually saved him from much bigger losses. Someya had been like an unsteady surfer, unable to mount a big slow wave curving gently into the bay. If he’d had financing to expand his business, his failure would have been on a truly disastrous scale.

      Though their various circumstances meant they had different allegiances in the election, the four men got along well. They certainly enjoyed being as rude as possible about each other, and used the foulest language, even when children were around. But it was only a bit of theater. After all, they’d all been born in the same small village and had known each other their whole lives. They weren’t suddenly going to start hating each other. Their friendship couldn’t be switched off like a TV. But family relationships were more difficult. When things turned sour there was no way back. You could see that from Yoshi-nī and his sister, Hatsue. The four men all agreed on that uncomfortable fact.

      They arrived very early in the morning. I was leaving for volleyball practice just before 7:30 when I heard voices. They were standing outside the house, chatting.

      “Dad!” I shouted. “They’re here!”

      Dad appeared through the front door in a hurriedly pulled-on pair of track pants, his hair sticking up at the back of his head.

      “You’re very early, gentlemen,” he said, easing down the ski-jump tufts of hair.

      “Shenshei,” said Iwaya, “we thought that if we’re goin’ to town maybe we could um…” He gestured—a turn of his right wrist.

      “Huh?” Dad said, imitating the move. He was still sleepy.

      “Pachinko, shenshei,” said Someya. “Why don’t we play some pachinko?”

      “Ah! Pachinko!” Dad said happily. “Sounds good!”

      Then Mom appeared.

      “How about some tea?” she asked.

      “Great!” they all said. “Thank you!” and trooped into the police office.

      “If only we’d waited until we got to town to go to the pachinko place there,” said Dad.

      They’d gone to the pachinko parlor on the highway this side of the pass. Iwaya and Hidaka had both won 30,000 yen there the previous day and they swore it paid out better than the one in town. Someya agreed, without giving the matter much thought. It had just been remodeled after a change of ownership. “Places like that always give better odds,” he’d said.

      “I should have known we’d be taken for a ride,” Dad groaned.

      “People who forget the past repeat the past,” said Mom coldly. “You shouldn’t have gone at all.”

      Dad sat in red-faced silence.

      When they’d come out of the pachinko place the sun was already down. The western fringes of the hills were turning from indigo to black.

      “We

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