Free Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami

But with today's sophistication, who's in a position to throw rocks? Who's going to brave what tear gas? C'mon, that's the way it is. Everything is rigged, tied into that massive capital web, and beyond this web there's another web. Nobody's going anywhere. You throw a rock and it'll come right back at you.
    The reporter had devoted a lot of energy to following the paper trail. Still, despite his outcry—or rather, all the more because of his outcry—the article curiously lacked punch. A rallying cry it wasn't. The guy just didn't seem to realize: Nothing about this was suspect. It was a natural state of affairs. Ordinary, the order of the day, common knowledge. Which is why nobody cared. If huge capital interests obtained information illegally and bought up property, forced a few political decisions, then clinched the deal by having yakuza extort a little shoe store here, maybe beat up the owner of some small-time, end-of-the-line hotel there, so what? That's life, man. The sand of the times keeps running out from under our feet. We're no longer standing where we once stood.
    The reporter had done everything he could. The article was well researched, full of righteous indignation, and hope-lessly untrendy.
    I folded it, slipped it into my pocket, and drank another cup of coffee.
    I thought about the owner of the old Dolphin. Mister Unlucky, shadowed by defeat since birth. No way he could have made the cut for this day and age.
    "Untrendy!" I said out loud.
    A waitress gave me a disturbed look.
    I took a taxi back to the hotel.

8

    From my room I rang up my ex-partner in Tokyo. Some-body I didn't know answered the phone and asked my name, then somebody else came on the line and asked my name, then finally my expartner came to the phone. He seemed busy. It had been close to a year since we'd spoken. Not that I'd been consciously avoiding him; I simply didn't have anything to talk to him about. I'd always liked him, and still did. But the fact was, my ex-partner was for me (and I for him) "foregone territory." Again, not that we'd pushed each other into that position. We'd just gone our own separate ways, and those two paths didn't seem to cross. No more, no less.
    So how's it going? I asked him.
    Well enough, he said.
    I told him I was in Sapporo. He asked me if it was cold.
    Yeah, it's cold, I answered.
    How's work? was my next question.
    Busy, his one-word response.
    Not hitting the bottle too much, I hoped.
    Not lately, he wasn't drinking much these days.
    And was it snowing up here? His turn to ask.
    Not at the moment, I kept the ball in the air.
    We were almost through with our polite toss-and-catch.
    "Listen," I broke in, "I've got a favor to ask." I'd done him one a long while back. Both he and I remembered it. Otherwise, I'm not the type to go asking favors of people.
    "Sure," he said with no formalities.
    "You remember when we worked on that in-house news-letter for that hotel group?" I asked. "Maybe five years ago?"
    "Yeah, I remember."
    "Tell me, is that connection still alive?"
    He gave it a moment's thought. "Can't say it's kicking, but it's alive as far as alive goes. Not impossible to warm it up if necessary."
    "There was one guy who knew a lot about what was going on in the industry. I forget his name. Skinny guy, always wore this funny hat. You think you can get in contact with him?"
    "I think so. What do you want to know?"
    I gave him a brief rundown on the Dolphin scandal arti-cle. He took down the date the piece appeared. Then I told him about the old, tiny Dolphin that was here before the present monster Dolphin and said I'd like to know more about the following things: First, why had the new hotel kept the old Dolphin name? Second, what was the fate of the old owner? And last, were there any recent developments on the scandal front?
    He jotted it all down and read it back to me over the phone.
    "That's it?"
    "That'll do," I said.
    "Probably in a hurry, too, huh?" he asked.
    "Sorry, but—"
    "I'll see