Sugamo, known as the town that boasts the liveliest shopping street in all Japan.
Just how many people know that its proper name is “Sugamo Jizō-dōri Shopping Street” is anyone’s guess; summer or winter, this arcade hangs thick with the scent and the heat of the passing crowds, overwhelming anyone who sets eyes on it for the first time.
The neighborhood’s shops had grown more cosmopolitan of late, and yet the cast of the arcade was still, in the main, made up of seasoned old hands with dramatically animated active faces—crumpled like laundry left too long undried—who could tell the ever-shuffling jumble of old and new storefronts apart down to the inch, even when a name slipped their mind now and then.
“Well now, Masa, lovely weather again today.”
The neighborhood’s veteran ladies and gentlemen could pick out an acquaintance and hail them with ease, even in the thick of the bustling throng.
Even after living out a span of life so long that anything not held up close blurred before their eyes, and voices simply would not reach them unless they cocked an ear to listen, they never once mistook a face they knew.
All the more so when the person in question had long been counted a local notable.
“Ah, ah…”
The man this well-built, active-faced lady—got up in sunglasses and a T-shirt emblazoned with an enormous, in-your-face lion—had hailed answered by swaying his unfocused, sunken eyes, the words slipping out of him as though exhaled.
“My, there’s a real crowd out today, isn’t there. And on a weekday, no less…”
All the while the “Lion Head” lady reeled off one idle topic after another, the man she called Masa—in a blue-striped polo shirt and gray slacks, sweat beading at his brow—kept blinking hard now and again, working his steps forward as if in search of something.
Yet, at odds with the desperation on Masa’s face, his polished leather shoes, agleam in the summer sun, made only halting progress.
“…So many faces I don’t know these days. Why—Masa, are you even listening?”
No sooner had she given the huge bat-winged parasol—which shut out the sunlight and its ultraviolet alike—a sharp tilt than displeasure twisted across the face of the lady who had been firing off her words like bullets, a displeasure her sun-shading glasses could not quite hide.
Robbed now of even that token scrap of shade, Masa’s face seemed to grow more strained still.
“Now, now, no need to fret so…”
Just as the lady’s hand went to pat Masa on the shoulder, a figure came shoving its way in between them.
“Ow-ow-ow! What’s the matter with you?!”
With the fury of a lioness indeed, the lady rounded on the one who had barged so roughly into her.
“Bumping into folks and not so much as a word of apolo—”
But the moment she took in the figure’s getup, the lady’s words dwindled away to nothing.
“…Hah?”
The one who turned, his shoulders squared and aggressive, wore sunglasses as well.
Only, his lenses were no sun-drinking black but a garishly reflective mirror finish—set, what’s more, in teardrop frames of the sort you’d expect out of some retro yakuza flick.
For clothes he sported a matching tracksuit with the sheen of silver plating, utterly heedless of the stares around him, the whole getup finished off with a pair of wooden geta that clacked out a jaunty beat.
He was a man the Eastern dragon coursing up his sleeve suited all too well—stubble-jawed, with a dangerous glint in his eye.
“The hell you want, hag?”
Having picked entirely the wrong person to snap at, the lady—without even the composure now to right her askew butterfly glasses—was thoroughly rattled by the thuggish man lumbering toward her with a heavy sway.
With so many eyes about in the crowd it was hard to imagine the man would actually try anything, but there was no doubt he’d draw a storm of reproach for it.
“You looking to pick a fight with me, huh? Oi, geezer, out of the way—”
The man closed in on the lady—and there, square in his path, stood Masa.
The hairy man’s arm stretched out toward Masa.
Masa’s broad-set shoulders, surely powerful once, had worn thin with the years; they looked in no state to withstand so rough a contact.
It was the instant the man seemed about to send Masa flying.
“…Huh?”
The bony fist—every finger but the ring finger crowded with skull rings—stopped dead, never reaching Masa.
The arm of the man, his voice gone shrill, was clamped tight in a hand broad as a catcher’s mitt, its five fingers splayed wide.
“That’s dangerous, mister.”
A temperate voice came raining down over the man’s head, and with it a shadow.
For all the sheer expanse of the shadow bearing down on him, the voice carried no great volume; a tenor-ish voice with youth still in it, it was almost cheerful.
And yet, somewhere in it, like tempered steel, it brooked no argument.
“Masahiro, why don’t we take a little rest?”
In that steel voice brimming with tenderness, the owner of the shadow enfolded Masahiro’s shoulder in a hand easily twice the size of a grown man’s.
The gesture was startlingly smooth, and gentle enough that even a passerby could tell.
“H-hey… y-you…”
The man, long since left to himself, gaped with his nicotine-yellowed teeth and gazed up at the owner of the shadow.
Before long, perhaps realizing he was being ignored, he opened his mouth to save face.
But the words came broken and halting.
“Was there something?”
“Eeek…!”
The owner of the shadow, close at Masahiro’s side, turned quietly; the voice that answered so dutifully was, as ever, mild.
And yet the instant he laid eyes on that owner of the shadow, the thuggish man let out a pitiful shriek; even had he chanced upon a ghost in the middle of the street, no one would cower the way that man did.
As though he’d looked upon a demon’s face, the man in the silver tracksuit shrank up and went bolting off.
“…Same as ever, aren’t you, big fella.”
Settling her sunglasses back into place, the lady let out a sigh that was half admiration, half exasperation.
From behind the slanted lenses her deep-set eyes followed the two backs, one large and one small, as they walked off through the blazing heat toward a nearby eave.
Takeo Otogao was, above all, tall, and well-built with it; being fond of sport besides, he had grown by his teens into a young man of muscle and sinew rare among Japanese.
What’s more, Otogao threw himself into the martial arts, drilling karate, judo, aikido, classical combat forms, and the rest of it into his body.
Not, of course, that anyone had put him up to it, nor that he’d been born into some family of fighters.
It was simply that growing stronger thrilled him beyond bearing, and tempering himself suited his nature.
For all his soldier’s build, at his core Otogao was honest and easygoing—or so those around him saw him.
In truth, he brimmed as well with the cheek and rebellious streak that any teenager carries.
Even so strong and guileless a young rascal had his one insecurity. His face.
“…That’s why I let him have it. ‘Where do you think you’re looking!’ just like that.”
Under the eaves of a tile-roofed teahouse hung with a maroon noren curtain, dropping her parasol—vaster than the world’s largest bat—into the umbrella stand with a thunk, the lady in that lion-face T-shirt was working her mouth, looking thoroughly put out.
She mopped her brow with a pale-pink handkerchief drawn from a snakeskin-print bag; the sunglasses she kept on.
“Even someone who couldn’t see would never pull a stunt like that. Oh—no offense meant, big fella.”
The lady fanned away with that too-small scrap of cloth.
She gave the broad back in the plain T-shirt a light tap, and apologized.
“Not at all, not at all.”
The owner of that broad back, Otogao, answered in a cheerful voice.
Even as he dipped his head, his narrow, ever-smiling eyes stayed fixed with concern on the polo shirt seated beside him.
“Masahiro, here’s some cold tea.”
Otogao held out a glass to Masahiro, perched on the bench.
Faced with the clear green drink, ice bobbing in it, Masahiro’s expression was strained still.
“Still, that idiot went white as a sheet and bolted, didn’t he. Hahaha! The face on him! You wouldn’t pull a face like that even up against a demon.”
Recalling the punk, the lady let out a cackle; that her own color had been no better apparently escaped her memory.
The lion’s face, too big by half for the shade of the eaves, shook with hearty mirth.
“Right enough…,” Otogao murmured, going along with her, even as his narrow, ruler-straight eyes took in the whole scene in an instant.
“Here, please—if you’d like.”
For the lady, whose laughter still would not settle, Otogao rose and gave up his seat; there was not a wasted motion in the giant’s movement, and in a blink the bench stood empty.
As Otogao slipped past right in front of her, the lady, hardly startled, formed a little knife-hand and bobbed it up and down.
“Oh—much obliged.”
Coming around to face Masahiro, Otogao bent his grizzly-sized frame and brought his eyes level with those of his shallow-breathing companion.
His thick back, bathed in the direct sun, spread dark with sweat stains.
“It’s still a little way to your home, so won’t you have something to drink, Masahiro?”
Down that furrowed forehead of his the waterfall of sweat would not let up.
But Otogao’s breathing was as unhurried as his words.
And so he waited, still and patient, for a reply that might or might not come.
“Ah… uh…”
Masahiro’s eyes would not stray from a single point ahead of him.
Even so, Otogao read the message those sunken sockets sent out.
“Here—it’s green tea.”
Having named the drink for him, he brought the glass, small enough to vanish into his palm, close to Masahiro’s lips.
Eyes that scarcely seemed open guided the hand, unerringly, to those cracked lips.
“Haaah! No machine could ever do this—not like this.”
As Masahiro wet his throat without spilling a single drop, the lady voiced her thoughts, nodding over and over.
Cocking her head, the lion-print woman shifted the pink handkerchief to her right hand and kept up the fanning.
“Hot, though, isn’t it… Back when I was small it was never like this. I’ll melt clean away, I will. Believe it or not, I’m a delicate thing—as a girl, on the way home from school…”
The lady’s words picked up speed once more.
The cries of distant cicadas, like a backing score, chased after the past she was laying bare.
“It’s all right—take your time with it, now.”
Having drained the green tea in one go, Masahiro opened and closed his lips as though wanting more; if anything, his expression seemed to have softened.
“…I’ll go and fetch you a refill.”
Peering into the bottom of the glass, Otogao touched Masahiro’s shoulder and rose to his feet.
“Teyah—!”
A sleeve of the training gi flared, and a scarred fist drew back.
He must have meant it for a feint, spirit and all, but the way his eyes hunted for a target gave the whole thing away.
Matching the other’s breathing, he let the tension drain out of himself.
“Hah!”
The lure of victory tugged a smirk across the pimpled face.
The cocked arm drove straight for the jaw; should it land, it was a trained, mighty arm that would leave far worse than a fracture behind.
But his scheme was plain as day.
“Wha—!”
Drawing the fist in to the very last, he pulled his face back by a hair; the wind of it grazed a jaw blue with new-sprouting stubble.
His gaze met the other’s wide-flung eyes.
They were eyes that had grasped their own defeat.
“Tah—!”
Into the half-turned body he drove a spinning kick; the ugly sensation of it biting into a soft flank came back through his leg.
“That’s the match!”
The referee’s hand went up like a signal flag.
The groan of the one sprawled facedown on the tatami would not leave his ears.
“Take, I honestly didn’t think you’d dodge that one.”
Rubbing his flank, a buddy, now changed into a tracksuit, slung an arm across his shoulder.
“You’re too easy to read, Tomoyuki. All that pointless hollering—and, up you go!”
Take—Takeo Otogao, that is—took Tomoyuki’s arm as though to accept the embrace.
And then, without so much as a stance, he hauled him up over his back and slammed him down.
“Ngh—! Wait—hey, man, I’m still injured here—”
“Well, can’t be helped.”
Otogao reached a hand down to Tomoyuki, laid out flat on the ground.
“Gotcha!”
To drag Otogao down with him, Tomoyuki seized the arm.
So far, so good.
Just as he’d schemed, hauled hard by Tomoyuki, the giant frame lurched.
“…Whoa—?!”
But that Otogao would lock in a hold from there—even Tomoyuki can’t have seen it coming; instead it was his own leg that got taken.
“Too soft!”
Locked up tight, Tomoyuki lay plastered to the asphalt; watching him slap the ground in desperation with a choked “Agh—!” Otogao’s eyes shone bright as a boy’s.
“You two! Get on home already!”
A roar came flying from the dojo doorway at Otogao and Tomoyuki as they horsed around.
“Uh-oh—! Let’s move, Tomoyuki!”
Charging in at a speed you’d never credit to a man in geta was the dojo master himself, gi and sunglasses and all, looking every inch the part.
From eyes that flashed back the low western sun, he looked fit to loose a beam of pure light.
“Nngh… I won’t let your sacrifice go to waste, Tomoyuki!”
At this rate he’d be overtaken—so Otogao concluded in a flash, gauging the distance by eye.
And the plan he hit upon was to sacrifice his comrade.
“Wah—! T-Take—”
Swept off his feet, Tomoyuki tumbled onto the asphalt once again.
The dojo master, leaping to clear Tomoyuki, caught a geta on his pupil and went down in spectacular style.
“TAKEO OTOGAOOO!”
The resentful voices of master and disciple went echoing into the sunset.
A long shadow made its dashing getaway, swaying as if for the sheer fun of it.
“…Chiemi?”
Otogao, swinging his arms fore and back in brisk, well-tempoed form, was on the point of passing by, then eased his pace and doubled back.
On the sidewalk opposite, no more than a curbstone to it, a woman with a plastic shopping bag in each hand was climbing the slope.
The apron-clad figure, bent at the waist, made slow going of it.
“Come to think of it, Chiemi took that spill on the stairs a while back, didn’t she…”
Chiemi lived alone in Otogao’s neighborhood.
Meeting morning and evening as they did, she and Otogao often fell to talking, too.
And when she had collapsed at home and dropped out of sight, it was Otogao who, sensing something amiss, found Chiemi lying there—alongside the local officer.
Otogao broke into a trot and hurried over to Chiemi, still dragging her foot.
“Chiemi, good evening.”
“Why, hello! Takeo—on your way back from practice?”
Otogao called out in his usual gentle tone.
At the shadow looming over her, Chiemi, not the least bit startled, returned a good-natured smile.
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Aren’t you something. No losses again today, I’ll wager?”
“Ah… well, more or less.”
Otogao scratched his close-shaven head.
Chiemi, it seemed, could read what Otogao was about without a word from him.
“Here, I’ll take those.”
Half to cover his embarrassment, Otogao reached for the shopping bags.
“Thank you, Takeo. That’s a real help,” Chiemi said, and readily left them to him.
“…So then that damn old geezer—er, the master, he came chasing after me, y’know.”
“Did he really?!”
Chiemi listened to Otogao’s tale of escape as though it were some hit action picture, reacting with a “My!” and an “Oh dear me.” That careless “geezer” had slipped out again, and when Otogao smacked his own face out of habit, that too drew a little giggle from her.
Bag and all—a good five daikon radishes poking out of it—the active face smiled up at her porter as he went through such antics.
“That’s just it! Honest, the man’s terrifying, I swear.”
“My, your master does sound strict.”
Her eyes lit by the evening sun, Chiemi nodded.
In truth the dojo master soared well past anything you’d file under “strict,” but Otogao chose not to say so.
“He really is something, honest.”
Even Otogao thought Chiemi’s reactions a touch overdone.
Still, an audience whose face shifted so readily made the telling a pleasure in its own right.
And since he got to be of use into the bargain, no wonder he’d taken a liking to hauling the groceries.
“Tring-tring…”
A bicycle bell drifted past Otogao and Chiemi as they walked side by side.
Around these parts it was a thoroughly ordinary greeting.
“…Ah.”
Nor was it any rare thing for a police officer in a navy uniform and peaked cap to offer that “bell greeting.”
Only, the officer whose eyes met his for that split second was one Otogao had never seen before.
And Otogao’s instinct sensed a fierce hostility.
“What’s the matter?”
“…Did the local officer get switched?”
“Mm, just the other day. Remember? Fumishige told us he was getting transferred, didn’t he?”
“Was he, now…”
Otogao had never gone so far as to land himself in police custody, but a good telling-off he had weathered more times than he could count.
The former local officer—mild-mannered, and yet a very demon when his temper flared, for all that he looked nothing like a fighting man. Recalling the countless little ways the man had looked out for him, Otogao felt a pang of loneliness.
Sergeant Fumishige had judged a person not by their looks but by their conduct. He’d held no prejudice against a fierce-faced judo-club boy, either. To Otogao, that had meant a great deal.
Just when had he been transferred? As Otogao rummaged back through his memory, sure enough, the squeal of a brake sounded.
“Hey—you there.”
An officer came up on the pair from behind at a half-trot. The rank insignia on his left breast bore a single gold line. A patrolman.
Swallowing the urge to click his tongue, Otogao turned around with a lazy slouch.
“’Sup. What is it?”
By Otogao’s own reckoning, this counted as being downright friendly. For a man who threw you a look of suspicion the instant your eyes met, courtesy was surplus to requirements.
But the patrolman, of better-than-average build though he was, found his voice turning harsh at the villainous face gazing down at him from on high.
“…You there—is this lady family of yours?”
“Huh?”—but the word had scarcely left Otogao’s mouth before Chiemi, at his side, cut in, pitching her voice loud.
“Good evening, Officer Masahiro. This young man lives just near my—”
Drawing up her small frame, Chiemi spoke on Otogao’s behalf. The patrolman seemed to be listening, and yet his eyes never left Otogao.
That the man wouldn’t spare Chiemi so much as a glance had already brought Otogao near his boiling point. The plastic bags in both his hands creaked and strained.
“Right, well—suppose you come along with me to the station for now. So then—your name?”
Drawing a notebook from his uniform pocket, Officer Masahiro jotted something down.
“What? Officer, this young man is—”
“Madam, youth crime has been on the rise of late, you understand. No need to speak up for him here.”
At the patrolman—clicking his ballpoint pen, talking in that clipped, official manner—Chiemi could only open and close her mouth.
Had Otogao been on his own, he’d have had every confidence in talking a freshly posted officer round.
But Chiemi was here.
Little as he liked it, he couldn’t go putting Chiemi to any more trouble.
“All right. Just let me drop these bags at Chiemi’s place, and I’ll be right back—”
“No.”
“…Huh?”
This time the irritation showed plain on his face, and in his voice.
“You mean to run, don’t you. It’s written all over you. And this ‘Chiemi,’ is it—she’ll be coming along with us as well.”
Officer Masahiro tucked his notebook away and reached a hand out toward Chiemi.
In that instant, the last thread of Otogao’s patience snapped.
“It’s a good kilometer to the police box! You mean to make Chiemi walk the whole way?!”
The patrolman knit his brows in open distaste, but did at least turn his eyes to Chiemi’s leg.
True, Chiemi’s leg was bad, but it wasn’t as though she wore a cast. You’d know it well enough from watching how she carried her weight, given a moment’s care—but the patrolman had no such inclination.
“Did you do this to her? In that case, carry her on your bac—”
The rest of the patrolman’s words never reached Otogao’s ears.
“Don’t you screw with me!”
Otogao’s roar tore off through the darkening residential streets. Not a soul spared a thought for the vegetables tumbling from the shopping bags. Far, far off, a crow cried out.
“I’m telling you I’ll come along, aren’t I?! What more do you want?!”
Hot-blooded though he was, Otogao wasn’t so lost to self-control as to actually swing at a man.
But at the sheer force of him, Chiemi let out a scream and clung to Otogao’s hand.
“Takeo!”
Chiemi’s hands were trembling. She was frightened.
Being stopped by a policeman, and the sight of someone squaring up to a policeman to make a complaint—both alike were simply terrifying to Chiemi.
“Chiemi…”
With Chiemi clinging to him there, Otogao’s anger, too, drained away.
“Well, then…”
“Shall we have you come along, then—Takeo?”
Officer Masahiro’s eyes, as though he’d been biding his time for just this, held a color the very opposite of summer.
“…Masahiro?”
Cold green tea in hand, Otogao came back under the eaves and stopped short.
There was no one on the bench.
The lady in the lion T-shirt was gone as well, though her outsized parasol still stood propped where she’d left it.
“Where could they have got to…?”
Masahiro couldn’t get far. Otogao had felt his presence the whole while, so it wasn’t as though someone had carried him off; anything against Masahiro’s own will, and Otogao would have known it at once from the very air.
As Otogao stepped out onto the street and cast about, a voice there was no mistaking reached his ears.
“…Well now, is that the one you fancy? Lovely, I’m sure—only, a touch loud, don’t you think?”
Some twenty meters off, at the storefront of a souvenir shop, stood two figures.
There in the full sun, fluttering her handkerchief fast enough to leave an afterimage as she held forth on this and that, was the animal-print lady—and Masahiro, hunting for something on a spinning rack.
“Um…”
No sooner had Otogao hurried over than the handkerchief lady was first to speak.
“Oh, big fella, sorry about that. Had you worried, didn’t we? Both me and Masa gone—thought we’d been spirited away, did you? Well, I am a delicate little darling, after all.”
The lady hugged herself fondly. On her brow, sweat had beaded, mingled with her foundation.
“Thank you. So you went along with Masahiro—I’m much obliged.”
At Otogao’s bow, the lady gave a breezy flutter of her hand.
“Not at all, not at all. Masa’s eyes are as sharp as ever, I’d say. Off he goes at a dash out of nowhere, and—”
She broke off and pointed toward Masahiro.
Spinning a display rack lined with rows upon rows of keychains round and round, Masahiro stood with his brow drawn tight.
“Masahiro, are you doing some shopping?”
No answer came.
That was nothing new—but there had been no shopping on the day’s plan.
For him to insist on going out on so hot a day, too, was a rare thing for the everyday Masahiro.
As Otogao stepped toward the rack, the lady cut him off with a shooing motion.
“With you standing there, big fella, he can’t see a thing for the shadow, can he? I’ll help Masa pick out his bits and pieces, so—big fella, would you go and fetch my parasol?”
“But…”
Otogao made to press the point.
Just then he noticed the lady stealing glances all around them.
Otogao looked about him too, and grasped the reason.
The handful of customers who’d been dotted about the storefront had drifted off before he knew it, some casting a backward glance at Otogao as they went.
Someone who looked to be the shopkeeper, too, was eyeing their little group warily—wearing the face of a person who’d just laid eyes on a gangster come to shake them down or squeeze them for cash.
“Ah… I see.”
Every last one of them regarded Otogao’s giant frame with mistrust.
Standing over two meters tall, with a fearsome mug that would put a hannya demon-mask to shame, he was, to most people, nothing but a figure of dread.
It was a look Otogao had grown far too used to.
Lower still, Otogao bowed, and thanked her.
“…All right. I’ll be right back.”
“No need to rush, now. Shopping’s my specialty, after all! …Oh—big fella, big fella, might I have that tea there?”
“Oh—ah, go ahead.”
The lady took the green tea, gone lukewarm now, that Otogao had carried straight out from the rest stop.
“Mightn’t do it half so nicely as you, big fella, mind…”
Just when you’d think she meant to drink it herself, the lady held the glass out to Masahiro. But the sunglasses-cocked lady’s hand at feeding was, put it as kindly as you like, clumsiness itself.
The tea dribbled and spilled, drop after drop.
“Oh dear, oh dear—sorry, Masa. Hopeless at this, aren’t I!”
The lady’s words, tumbling out on peals of laughter, spread wide into the clear, bright sky.
“Chiemi, I really am so sorry.”
Into the cry of the cicadas crept the courting song of the crickets.
Before the police box, gone full dark now, Otogao bowed his head deep and long.
“No, no—it’s I who should be sorry. Leaning on your kindness the way I did, Takeo.”
Chiemi hunched her back, rounded now with the years.
“And besides…”
To the man in coveralls standing beside Otogao, too, Chiemi drew her knees together in a bow.
“For your father to come all this way as well—I…”
As Chiemi made to bend at the waist once more, the man in coveralls—quicker even than Otogao—stayed her.
“Now, now—it’s only that my boy was rude, that’s all. Nothing for you to trouble yourself over, Chiemi.”
The man folded his arms and shook his head. Stiff as his manner was, there was an honest, artless air to him—in the ramrod-straight back, in the sun-scorched face that showed up clear beneath the LED light.
Otogao’s father, though not so strapping as his son, had the solid, sturdy build you’d sketch if you set out to draw a veteran of the construction trade.
For a man who’d come rushing over in a fluster, he wore leather shoes rather than work boots—and gray coveralls over the top of them, which made a comical picture, though Otogao was in no mood whatsoever to laugh.
“Right, then—Ms. Chiemi Anno, we’ll see you safely home.”
The one who came over from the police box, all deference, was the new sergeant. Behind him stood Officer Masahiro, his face unreadable. In his hand he carried the plastic shopping bags.
Otogao clenched his fists.
“You’re free to head home now as well, Mr. Otogao. Yes—truly, our sincere apologies.”
The sergeant bobbed his head and lifted off his uniform cap.
Otogao’s father returned the greeting evenly, but with courtesy.
In the end, it was thanks to this sergeant that Otogao was let off without charge.
It was in the thick of Officer Masahiro’s questioning—the man stubbornly refusing to hear a single word of explanation—that the new sergeant came back from his rounds.
Otogao had no memory of it, but this egg-headed sergeant had, it was said, met him once before, years ago.
The sergeant explained, on top of that, that the Otogao family were honest folk, strangers to anything criminal; but it was only after he had gone back and forth between Chiemi’s home and Otogao’s to confirm it in person, and had looked back through the police-box records to where Otogao had once been issued a letter of commendation, that Officer Masahiro at last resolved to let Otogao go.
“…That guy’s not buying a word of it, is he… Ow!”
Otogao glared at the patrolman as the man climbed into the patrol car with Chiemi.
The one who cracked him across the back of the head with a helmet, and no mercy about it, was his father.
“‘That guy,’ is it. Talk like that and you’ll get hauled in all over again, Takeo.”
The pain not helping matters, Otogao rubbed his head and rounded on his father.
“What was that for?! When I didn’t even do anything…”
“That’s just how it goes.”
This time knocking the helmet lightly against the elbow of the puzzled Otogao, the father invited his son to walk with him.
“Different sort of bitter than losing a match, isn’t it, Takeo?”
The father drew an old-fashioned paper cigarette from his breast pocket. Snatching that hand aside, Otogao held out the electronic one from the pocket of his coveralls.
“This stuff’s nothing but water…,” the smoker grumbled under his breath, but all the same he set the tip of the little cylinder aglow.
“I couldn’t do a thing. And I dragged Chiemi into it on top of it all.”
“Go and apologize to her tomorrow, why don’t you.”
Glancing at his son, who nodded readily enough, the father breathed out a plume of white smoke.
“…Get stronger, Takeo.”
“Hm?”
An unwonted seriousness came over the face of Otogao’s father. To see him let his breath out so slowly was a thing you scarcely ever saw.
At his father’s manner, Otogao too straightened his spine.
“…I don’t mean the martial arts. That side of you is plenty, I’d say. If anything, it’s more studying I’d like to see out of you, but…”
The father, who by rights had the air of a man handing down a lesson, had somewhere along the way slid into griping at his son. So much for the gravity of the moment.
“What are you on about, old man. Isn’t this the part where you land the big line?”
At Otogao’s prodding, the smoker cleared his throat as though nothing had happened.
“Ahem… The thing is, Takeo—strength that’s only a half-measure, and there’s a limit to what a man can do with it. That’s what I’m getting at.”
Tucking the e-cigarette back into his pocket, the father came to a stop.
A warm wind of that tropical night stroked past the two close-cropped heads.
“First, get strong enough to hold your own two feet. And then, someday, become a great tree—one that folk who can’t hold their own can cling to.”
A hand thickened with more calluses and scars than a man could count clapped the back of that close-cropped head.
“That’s what it is to pay a kindness back.”
Turning his back on his son, the father set off walking.
Precisely because it was a blend of colors, the gray of those coveralls seemed to stand its ground against the dark—and to Otogao, that retreating back looked greater by far than ever.
“…And so, see, I told them I didn’t want it, but there’s just no saying no in the end, is there? Must be my soft heart showing through, I expect.”
In the shade of a parasol like some parabolic dish, the gallant, maned face of the lion rippled across her dynamite of a figure.
Below the magnifying-glass sunglasses her lips ran on fluent as ever; and yet, all the while, under the sun-shade she was making small, ceaseless adjustments so as not to keep every scrap of shadow to herself.
“So then, what was it you ended up buying?”
With half an eye on the small figure beside him, Otogao asked in his easy, unhurried way.
The sun had crossed the southern sky and begun to slant downward.
“Now that’s a secret, that is. You don’t go asking a lady what she’s bought.”
In the hand of the guffawing lady, an ornamental hairpin peeked out from a shopping bag. By the swell of it, she’d plainly bought up a fair bit.
By the time Otogao made his way back to the souvenir shop, Masahiro’s choosing had already come to an end.
The lady had even settled the payment, and when Otogao asked what he owed, she waved him off with a “Call it thanks for chasing off that hoodlum!” and slipped the small parcel into her own shopping bag.
“Well then, this is where I’ll be off.”
Just short of where the Sugamo arcade came to an end, the lady drew to a halt.
Drawing the gift-wrapped parcel from her shopping bag, the lady pressed it, offhand, into Masahiro’s hand.
“Masa—here, then. This is for you.”
As she said it, Otogao thought he caught something glinting behind her sunglasses, though he couldn’t have said for certain.
“…Now, be sure you hand it over properly, won’t you.”
The lady bent down as if to whisper it into Masahiro’s ear.
“Th… ank… you…”
The gray eyes wavered as ever, like a wandering firefly’s glow, and for an instant they seemed to meet the lady’s.
“Thank you for everything today, Chieko. And do give my best to Chiemi, too.”
“Not at all, not at all! I’ll pass it on to Chiemi, as well. And you keep at it too, big fella—‘Boss’!”
As Otogao bowed his head so earnestly, the lady gave him a slap about the ribs; then Chieko, rattling away in her native rapid-fire, gave Masahiro’s shoulder a light tap in turn.
“You take care too, now, Masa—I’ll say my goodbyes here. Ohh, it’s hot, so hot… I’ll have myself a beer the moment I’m home.”
Seeing off Chieko’s back as she went swaying and rolling away, Otogao and Masahiro turned in to an old alley in one corner of the shopping district.
“I’m right behind you, all right?”
Touching Masahiro’s back and pressing gently, the two made their way down the back alley.
The old-time passage was scarcely wide enough for a single person to squeeze through. All the more, then, did Otogao have to shoulder his way along, scraping against the walls.
Abruptly, the polo shirt came to a stop.
“Ta… o…”
His hands were fumbling at something.
“…Is something the matter?”
From where Otogao stood, he couldn’t see Masahiro’s face. And much as he wished to peer around at it, even a man of Otogao’s size hadn’t the room to stoop low enough for it.
Just then, Masahiro turned around. Timidly, he looked up at Otogao.
“…H-here… this…”
In that withered hand was clutched the plain wrapping Chieko had handed him.
“For me?”
Otogao asked back before he could help it.
It was the first time he had ever been given a present by Masahiro.
“Mm… birth… day…”
Masahiro smoothed out the creases in the wrapping.
From his lips, haltingly, brokenly, the meaning of the present was being told.
“Masahiro…”
Gazing down at the parcel that sat cupped in his mitt of a hand, Otogao murmured. Understanding settled over that craggy, uneven face of his.
Masahiro had gone out under the blazing sun in order to buy Otogao a birthday present.
Why this year, of all years, even Otogao couldn’t say. His acquaintance with Masahiro went back a long way by now.
But none of that mattered in the slightest.
At the center of that towering frame, the largest heart of all was pounding fiercely.
The tear-ducts of the face that put even hoodlums to flight were coming loose.
“Ngh… ngh…”
Perhaps unsettled by Otogao’s response—the man not stirring an inch—Masahiro opened his mouth. But Otogao didn’t notice.
In the end, with small, shuffling steps, Masahiro turned to face the way ahead once more and started walking again.
“We’re home, everyone.”
Sliding open the latticed door, Otogao let his voice ring out through the house.
Atop the shoe cabinet in the entryway stood row upon row of trophies—every one of them in honor of the policeman of his active-duty days.
“Welcome home, Masahiro, Boss. Hot out there, wasn’t it?”
The one who came hurrying out from the depths of the house to greet the pair of them, apron and all, was Chiemi, Masahiro’s daughter.
“It really is hot… ah—easy does it, Masahiro.”
To Otogao, as he helped Masahiro change out of his shoes, Masahiro’s daughter gave a slow, careful bow.
“Truly, thank you as ever. To go to such lengths, all for my father’s sake…”
“Not at all. It’s my job, after all.”
Otogao returned the bow.
In that gentle bearing of his, there was not the faintest trace of that fearsome look to be felt.
“Now then—shall we make our way to the living room?”
Guiding Masahiro along, Otogao moved on into the house.
“Oh? Takeo.”
The daughter’s eyes came to rest on the wrist of the hand with which Otogao steadied her father’s shoulder.
“Were you wearing a bracelet, now? I don’t recall you having one…”
“Ah, this…”
Otogao’s great hand slowly stroked Masahiro’s back.
“It’s a present—from someone who’s taken very good care of me.”
(End)