By the Grace of the Gods (LN) - Volume 6 - Chapter SS1

Extra Story: An Acquaintance of an Acquaintance and Takebayashi’s Bad Habit

~Tabuchi’s Side~

“Excuse me.”

“Oh, hello, Landlady. This way, please.”

I didn’t know why I was here.

“It’s been awfully cold lately. Hm? Aren’t you Tabuchi?”

“Oh, yes, hello.”

“What? Did this person ask you to come too?”

“No, Tabuchi just happened to run into me. Isn’t that right, Tabuchi?”

“Yes...”

After I missed my train stop and fled from the young video producer, I ended up here. To sum it all up, it was a pretty idiotic series of events. I happened to encounter Urami, who invited me up to this room.

“You seem pretty tired,” Urami said. “I was going to ask the landlady for her story, but I was wondering if you’d like to give me your story too.”

“Well, I can understand why you wouldn’t be too chipper,” the landlady said. “Do you mind, Tabuchi? He’s a reporter from some magazine.”

After we entered this room and he introduced himself again, I learned that Urami was a reporter for the magazine that had published the most articles exposing my company’s scandals. He was the writer of those articles, in fact. Normally, I wouldn’t want to needlessly answer questions for a reporter. But this wasn’t a normal time.

“Sure, why not,” I said. “Seems like the company is going to hold an official interview tonight anyway, so there’s no use hiding anything now.” But I didn’t have the energy to get out of my chair.

“I probably can’t guarantee you have nothing to worry about, but let me tell you this,” Urami said. “You can just talk to me off the record. I would appreciate it if you gave me material I could write about, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope for that. But as I’ve pursued this story, I’ve become more curious about what kind of person Takebayashi was. I’m mostly here right now for personal reasons.”

“If Tabuchi is for it, then I’m open to talking,” the landlady said.

“So what do you want to ask about?” I asked.

“Just tell me anything, really. About how Takebayashi was in his day-to-day life, or about memories with him, anything of that sort. Oh, I’ll get some drinks and something to eat while we talk.”

Urami grabbed a few cans of beer and a convenience store bag full of snacks from the kitchen. I ended up accepting his request, but I didn’t even know what to talk about.

“By the way, were you close with Takebayashi, Urami?” I asked.

“Oh, not as much as you two, I don’t think. I did live next door, so I’ve met him, but I always get home at different times due to my job. I think I first met him when I moved in. I saw him outside the door, and he welcomed me to the building. I believe he had also cooked too much dinner and given me a whole bunch of his spare curry. Later on, I would come home from work and sometimes see a plastic container full of food hanging from my doorknob, and I would return the favor with souvenirs from places I went to for work. I hardly ever met him in person, but we did have that kind of relationship.”

That reminded me of something. Takebayashi would sometimes bring pastries from different tourist sites to work for no particular occasion. He always said they were given to him, so maybe those came from Urami. He even brought home-cooked food sometimes. That was especially nice to have when I began to live alone.

“I got food from him too,” the landlady said. “He gave me a recipe for croquettes, and in return I taught him a recipe for stew.”

“Yeah, you only partly mash the potatoes. It makes the croquettes nice and thick.”

“You know about it too, Tabuchi? My son’s taken quite a liking to them. We used to buy croquettes from the butcher in the neighborhood, but now we make them at home.”

Now that we found a shared story to talk about, and we had some alcohol in us, we felt closer with one another and the pace of the conversation picked up.

“So, you knew Takebayashi longer than either of us, right, Landlady?”

“I suppose so. More than ten years, I think. I met him a while back. He was still young at the time, and he moved in with his mom.”

“Huh. What was he like back then?”

“Well, he looked younger. Other than that, he didn’t change much over time. He was just a bit gloomy, if I had to say.”

That was hard to imagine. At work and elsewhere, Takebayashi always said that he was doing fine.

“At the time, he’d fought these convenience store muggers and caused quite a stir. The weekly magazines were calling him a killer and saying what he did was unjustified, so he tried to escape them by moving here. You didn’t know that?”

“I remember hearing that something happened to him, but I don’t know much about it. Is that what happened? I don’t remember any news like that.”

“Well, you’re still young, Tabuchi. You were probably a kid at the time. I was on edge around him myself for a while. I planned to evict him if he ever caused trouble. But he turned out to be an ordinary young man helping his mother as he looked for a job. Now that I think back on him, I’m ashamed that I bought into the news so much. He eventually got past the negative rumors and found a job, but then his mother passed away. Takebayashi was a good man, but he had no luck at all,” the landlady muttered.

I had to agree. It seemed like misfortune had followed him wherever he went.

“Unlucky?”

“Urami? Is something wrong?”

“Well, as I’ve investigated Takebayashi, I’ve discovered a lot of strange things that surrounded him. The incident with the muggers, for example, I learned about shortly after finding his body. I asked my coworkers who had connections within the police force to look into that incident, and they confirmed that Takebayashi stopped some muggers, it was reported on the news, and he was held in custody by the police, but they couldn’t confirm much about why any of this happened.”

When I asked him to explain what he meant, he looked distressed and just said he meant what he meant.

“The documentation from the time was thrown out because it was an old incident, officers who were involved in the case have since passed away, and such. Whenever they got close to any clues, they were out of reach. My coworkers said maybe he was arrested by mistake, so they tried to cover up the evidence. But I’m sure they were joking, of course. Meanwhile, I’ve uncovered countless scandals from his company. It’s all been so easy that it’s almost strange.”

I didn’t know the specifics of what a magazine reporter’s job was, but I could think of something strange myself. “There were a lot of things like that around Takebayashi,” I said.

“Such as?”

“Trains would stop while he was riding them, and when he tried to use a taxi, it’d get stuck in traffic. Things like that happened all the time. I heard about this from people who were at the company longer than me, though.”

This was a story from before I joined the company. It was by no means a big company, but back then they were receiving requests from overseas and receiving employees from countries with rapid growth in information technology. Takebayashi had a lot of stamina, so he was the one who often did the international travel. He had to take planes for this, but there was constant trouble with the planes he bought tickets for. It wasn’t so bad when the flights were just late or canceled, but often the issues began after the planes took off.

“The planes never crashed or anything, but the planes he rode had belly landings three to five times in two years. I was told to never get on a plane with Takebayashi.”

“I do remember a few years ago when an airline company drew a lot of negative attention for the frequent issues their planes got into.”

“There are more stories like that surrounding Takebayashi too. When he had a part-time job in high school, those businesses would have mass layoffs or go bankrupt or so forth, so he lost his job just when he learned what to do.”

“Yes, a strange amount of bad luck surrounded him,” the landlady agreed.

Now that I thought about it, it was almost like Takebayashi was cursed.

“Well, sometimes he had it coming.”

“What do you mean? Can you tell me about that?”

“Well, sometimes people can be stupidly honest, you know. I think you can imagine that. Takebayashi was a good person, but I think he brought some things on himself,” I said.

Whenever there were employees who seemed sick, he would do their work for them. He would do the same when somebody wanted to take the day off for a wedding anniversary or other such events. The deadlines for this work were clearly unreasonable, but he pushed himself to meet them with his superhuman stamina and focus. He said he’d be fine because he was strong, every single time. He did several times more work than everyone else.

“Maybe this is rude to say, but I don’t think Takebayashi was that incredible at the job, or much of a genius or anything. He just never got tired, so he could work efficiently nonstop.”

Takebayashi wasn’t lying, for better or worse. He really did have enough stamina, and even when much of the company caught the flu, he was fine. For all the work he took upon himself, he didn’t look any more fatigued than everyone else, and we took advantage of him. Maybe he didn’t realize it himself, but I think he was doing more than he could take.

“Mind if I have another beer?”

“Go ahead.”

I opened another can and poured the cold nectar down my throat. My next words came from the depths of my stomach. “He always just said he’d be fine. Not just when it came to work, but when we were drinking too.”

Some people in our department would flake out after a single cup of beer. That wasn’t true of me, but I couldn’t hold my liquor too well either. But when the boss was making us drink, Takebayashi would drink for us. And when any violence came about, he was the one who took the brunt of it.

“This is also something I just heard from older employees, but our company technically has a labor union, albeit in name only.”

Our company claimed to be ethical on the surface by presenting this labor union, but it was controlled by people with strong ties to the CEO and executives. They never did anything to help employees and had no right to hold negotiations. But if someone did ask them to negotiate, they would report to the upper brass, and depending on what they asked for, the employee who made the request could be punished for reasons claimed to be unrelated. They didn’t exist to help workers, but as a trap for dissatisfied employees.

Takebayashi knew it was a trap, but still asked for improved conditions. From what I heard, his coworkers at the time were breaking down from overwork. They didn’t dare to say anything, so he took it upon himself to speak for them, whether it was a trap or not. And of course, he said that he was fine with whatever became of him.

“He didn’t get fired in the end, but conditions obviously didn’t improve, and they sort of made an example of him. The boss and others who were around at the time would call him a traitor. Takebayashi was shrewd in some ways, but clumsy in others. He cared about others, but not so much about himself.”

Both at work and in my private life, he helped a lot. That went for everyone in our department.

“But he could have lived his life a bit more carefully.”

“Yes! Landlady, that’s absolutely right. He was durable in both body and mind, he could tolerate minor problems, he would push himself to climb over every wall in his way even when he could have walked around them, that’s just how he was. Well, the clients I inherited from him say that’s why they trusted him, though.”

“I see,” Urami said, bringing more beer.

Maybe it was because he was a magazine reporter, but he knew how to get people talking. Each time I answered a question, it felt like a weight was lifted from me. These two were mostly strangers, but I just wanted to keep telling stories. It was just like when I would tell Takebayashi about my own issues.