“You mean you come to report Hachi-nī for breakin’ the rules?”
“Yeah.”
“I was sent by Hachi-nī,” said Someya wearily.
Hashimoto nodded sympathetically.
“It’s a pain, ain’t it? I don’t like makin’ accusations!” he said.
“Want me to do it for you?” asked Someya.
“Would you?” said Hashimoto, suddenly cheering up. “But you’re on his side…”
“It don’t matter,” said Someya. “But you can give me that!”
“This?” said Hashimoto holding up the large bottle of Kubota sake in his hand. “Yoshi-nī asked me to give it to shenshei.”
“He’s got style, Yoshi-nī, no question!” said Someya. “Why don’t the two of us go in together and share it with shenshei?” he said, downing an imaginary cup.
“I wish they’d kept quiet about the vote-buying and just given me the drink,” said Dad after Someya and Hashimoto had gone home. His face flushed, he tipped the Kubota bottle over his glass and shook it. Nothing came out.
“Selling your vote is against the law,” I told Keiji. “Mr. Yoshida told us in our social studies class.” Keiji was trying to make the most of his TV time, nervous that Mitsugu Azamui would come over soon. But the program had just reached a commercial break, so he looked up.
Dad sighed. “Mr. Yoshida, huh? Again… Well, he’s right. But everyone does it around here, so there’s no point in making a fuss. What good is there in trying to get each other into trouble?”
“But selling your vote is a crime,” I said.
“Yeah, a crime!” said Keiji, coming over next to me. “A crime!”
“Everyone does it,” said Dad, going into the kitchen. “I must have a word with Mr. Yoshida…”
“Everyone?” I said. “Mitsugu Azamui doesn’t.”
At 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
