“It sounds like Takemitsu’s Arai railroaded them into giving in to his demand, but I guess neither Ogura nor Chunichi could do anything because he had the dirt on them.”
“What dirt? Whether it’s Ogura or Chunichi Mutual Savings, they tried their hand in the underworld, and when the time was right, they sucked out as much honey as they could. Same for Tamaru. And Takemitsu, too. Talk about dirt—they all had something on each other. It was a give-and-take so that no one would have to suffer a huge loss, they saved face for one another. At the same time, those guys are playing a serious game of who traps whom first.”
“In their world, extortion is considered a serious game, huh?”
“If you’re talking about Arai, all it shows is that he failed to do enough behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Right about now, I’m sure Tamaru—through a lawyer—is getting hold of Arai in jail and demanding that he take care of the mess he’s made.”
After a short pause, Handa grumbled, “Well, you sure know a lot about this.”
Without letting on how he took this summation, Koh replied in a drawl, “I grew up breathing that kind of air.”
Perhaps Handa couldn’t find the right words to respond, or maybe he had lost interest, but instead of a reply, he slapped the back of the bench with his newspaper and their conversation ended there.
Down on the racecourse, the horses in the sixth race had finished their presentation in the paddock, and could already be seen warming up. It was now past noon, and though just a little while ago the girl had not wanted any more to eat now she said she was hungry again, so Monoi delivered a piece of the cream bun to her mouth. Nunokawa, still staring out at the tracks with sleepy eyes, did not even look at his daughter. Instead it was Yo-chan who, as usual, had gone to buy some milk for the girl. Inexplicably, Yo-chan took surprisingly good care of her.
As Monoi’s gaze alternated between the four-year-old horses with their carefree limbs moving beneath the tranquil, overcast spring sky and the drooling mouth of the girl, his mind wandered back to Ogura and the former Chunichi Mutual Savings, and he pondered just who, if any, of those involved had taken a loss. Even though they had basically been swallowed up, it wasn’t as if the individual employees at either the former Chunichi or Ogura had incurred any debt, nor had they lost their jobs. Even for the two former Chunichi executives—it was more like they had drawn the short end of the stick—neither they nor their families were going to end up on the street. When money circulated, it meant that debt had to circulate somewhere as well, but still, the amount they were dealing with was so large, it seemed unthinkable that just one person would have to pay the price in the end. When Monoi finally realized that not one of them had ended up losing his shirt, he felt dispirited.
In that moment, as he suddenly remembered the image of the mare Komako that had been sold off half a century ago, a certain thought went through his mind. It was as Koh had said, one couldn’t make money without circulating it, but the money circulated by those who had already made their fortunes—where did it come from in the first place? From the hands of Monoi’s father and mother as they carried sacks of charcoal in his village, from his own hands that kept the cupola burning, from the hands of his older sister who worked as a factory girl, from the hands of Seiji Okamura as he made the beer—wasn’t the money born of these hands? And yet, into these hands came only barely enough money to eat, while the rest became someone else’s wealth. Not only that, but just as Komako, the last resource of an impoverished family, had been taken away by the landowner, and just as the bucket of casting scraps left behind in the vacant Kanemoto Foundry had been carried off by the debt collector, there was no doubt that a fortune had been amassed from every last drop wrung from the have-nots and the guileless. Indeed, Monoi knew it was too late to realize this now, but as it revived the dormant sense of stagnation that had saturated his entire life, he felt all the more dispirited.
Half a century after the war, he compared the sense of entrapment of this one little ant that had failed to escape to how he had felt just after the war ended, that sense of shivering in total darkness. The very space and time in which he existed were contracting with each moment, as if that time and space were running out, a feeling akin to impatience. The mild yet puzzling bouts of frustration he experienced daily, the way he became lost in thought like this, and the abstraction he unconsciously fell into as he pondered these many things—all of it made him feel jittery, a sort of relentless torment.
Monoi wiped Lady’s mouth with the towel—she was drooling and smacking her lips as she ate the cream bun. His hand reached out to her automatically, but to be honest, at the same time he could not help feeling repulsed by the sight of her shirt collar covered in drool and breadcrumbs. Next to her, Nunokawa, silent and still, kept his eyes on the racecourse, while behind him Koh took the conversation in a completely different direction.
“Can’t you move some money into fixed deposits this month? A hundred thousand yen would do,” he said to Handa, trying to get a modest deal out of him.
Beside them, Yo-chan held out a carton of fruit-flavored milk he had just come back with, saying, “Here you go.”
Monoi helped the girl drink the milk through a straw, which she clenched with her teeth as she squealed with delight. At home, she was never given anything sweet since fixing cavities was such an ordeal, so the only-on-Sunday cream bun and fruit-flavored milk were her favorite treats.
Nunokawa, finally looking more like himself again, lifted his head. Just as he seemed to cast a glance at his daughter, his gaze passed over her head and settled on the three men sitting behind them.
“Hey, Koh-san. Where would you say the real money is in this country?” Nunokawa suddenly asked.
“City banks, major securities companies, life insurance companies, a sector of the large corporations, religious organizations. Why do you ask?”
“As I drive all day along the Tomei Expressway between Tokyo and Nagoya, I like to kill time wondering which one I’d take down, if I could. Like you said, all you need to look for is a flash point, right?” Nunokawa had turned to face forward again, and he muttered as if he was talking to himself.
“If that’s the case, then it’s manufacturers you want,” Koh responded without missing a beat.
“Why manufacturers?” It was Handa who asked this.
“Companies that make things understand the value of money. Manufacturing begins with calculating the cost of a single rivet or screw. Once the product has been created, they have to sell them one by one for a specific price. With a gross profit of two or three percent—it’s backbreaking work.”
“So?”
“Because they understand the importance of money, they suffer the most when it is milked out of them.”
“That would be heartless,” Handa said, laughing.
As he listened to the idle chatter, it occurred to Monoi that he himself held various deep-seated grudges against manufacturers in general. The foundry in Hachinohe where he had become an apprentice at the age of twelve; Hinode Beer, where Seiji Okamura had worked half a century ago, the same company his grandson had recently tried to join; and the factory in Nishi-Kojiya that was once his workplace for a quarter-century. The reason these grudges still smoldered deep within his gut was unclear to him—it wasn’t as if he had particularly strong feelings about each company, yet certainly the hue of his own life spent observing these various entities in their respective heydays had been somber, devoid of color.
Behind him, Yo-chan mumbled, “What would you do if you got their money?” and then fell silent again.
“Manufacturers, huh?” Handa said to himself, and he too fell silent. The fanfare as the horses entered the starting gate sounded, and Lady let out a joyous scream from atop the bench.
The four-year-old colts and fillies started off the 1,400-meter race on the backstretch of the turf track. For the fewer than ninety seconds he
observed the race, wondering which one would pull out ahead, Monoi’s mind was blank.
The horses’ legs stood out in bright relief as they ran on the spring turf. As the front line of the pack’s progression shifted forward and backward freely, the eleven horses rounded the far turn, advancing and retreating by a nose. Two front runners had slipped ahead. Another horse closed in on them from the outside. And in that flash of a moment, when Monoi narrowed his eyes and wondered if this horse would overtake them, he thought he saw the horse’s legs stumble, then the jockey was suspended in the air before careening sideways. The streak of the jockey’s green helmet. The number seven on the saddlecloth of the horse that had lost its rider.
A cry issued from the girl’s throat, and her head and arms began to whirl violently. The movement of the spectators’ rising from their seats in the grandstand formed a tsunami. The crowd roared as the pack of horses crossed the finish line, then stirred and shook with excitement as the stretcher was rushed out.
Monoi checked the racing column in his newspaper and confirmed the name of number seven’s jockey—Shibata. He was from Aomori, the same prefecture as Monoi’s hometown, and he had been riding horses for as long as Monoi had been attending the races, more than twenty years. He was not a flamboyant rider, but Monoi was rather fond of the way he drove his horse, a style that conveyed his grit and passion. The jockey was always careful at the start of the race, but he had misjudged it today and Monoi felt regret as he watched Shibata being carried away on the stretcher.
The buzz in the grandstand refused to settle down, and Koh said, as if just now thinking of it, “If we’re talking about a manufacturer, go for something big. Toyota, Nippon Steel, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries . . .” He continued to list names.
“I’d pick Sony or Hinode,” said Handa. “Back when I was at the Shinagawa Police Department, I would always stare out at their buildings from Shimbamba Station. At night, they looked like fortresses of light.”
Now that Handa mentioned it, Monoi recalled having seen the nightscape of those two companies’ headquarters. He gave the rest of the fruit-flavored milk to the girl, who was still fretting beside him. The milk was already turning lukewarm, and the girl had crumpled down the end of the straw with her teeth. In spite of this, one sip of the sweet milk calmed her down a little, and she spat out a word that meant “yum.”
Not long after this, Nunokawa thrust out a ten-thousand-yen bill. “Mind if I go take a quick nap? Watch Lady for me. I’ll be back by two.” Without waiting for an answer, he stood up and walked away—he practically fled. Monoi and the three men behind him watched Nunokawa go. None of them uttered a word, they just looked at one another.
In that moment, as Monoi watched the retreating figure of Nunokawa, who must have felt a spasmodic need to get away from his daughter even for a little while, he sensed in him a bottomless gloom, but as an outsider Monoi had no right to say anything about it. Shifting his thoughts, he turned to Yo-chan behind him and asked, “Isn’t there a wheelchair-accessible bathroom here?”
“I’ll go look for one,” Yo-chan replied and nimbly got up from his seat.
Yo-chan returned after about five minutes to announce that he had found a bathroom, and he added, “I just heard on the radio. The managing director of Toei Bank, Yamashita or something, apparently he was shot and killed in front of his home.”
This time, it was Handa’s turn to rise immediately from the bench. Saying there might be an emergency deployment, Handa too disappeared.
2
Kyosuke Shiroyama
From the regular tee of the 184-yard par-three seventh hole, his shot barely missed the pond in front of the green, and he tensed up for a moment. Right after seeing the ball fly off, he realized to his dismay that he had sliced it, but he put off dissecting why he had done so and, telling the string of players behind him with a sheepish grin, “I’ll see you up there,” Kyosuke Shiroyama quickly moved on, chasing after his ball.
Hinode’s Kantō regional competition took place every spring and fall at the Matsuo Golf Club in Chiba and was renowned for its huge turnout. Each time, fifty representatives from among all the distributors in the Kantō area were selected fairly, in a rotating order, from the main offices, branch offices, and sales offices, regardless of their size. From Hinode, in addition to the chairman, the president, two vice-presidents, four board members, and the sales manager and deputy manager of the beer division’s main office, sales managers and representatives from their five regional offices and two branch offices in the Kantō area were also invited, totaling twenty-four members. From Hinode’s subsidiaries and affiliated companies, another ten representatives were selected, again in fair turn. It was a successful event with eighty-four in attendance, all told.
Similar regional golf competitions occurred in conjunction throughout Japan in Hokkaido, Tohoku, Hokuriku, Chubu, Kinki, Chugoku, Shikoku, and Kyushu, and for the past twenty years, this traditional event had been a proud display both within and outside the company of the solidity of Hinode’s unique network of production, distribution, and sales. However, now that same network also seemed to symbolize a lumbering Gulliver, and Shiroyama knew that he would like to put an end to the event within the next few years, but in the same way that sundry unresolved items accumulated into a mountain, overturning tradition was always a Herculean task.
The members were divided into In and Out groups, and that day Shiroyama was on the ninth “In” team—his teammates included the president of Tomioka, a major distributor; the president of another major distributor, Iida Shokai; and the president of Sato Transport, an affiliated company.
The competition had started at nine in the morning, and by the time Shiroyama—the fourth player on team nine—had landed his ball on the seventh-hole green, it was past noon. He had nailed his approach shot from the edge of the pond, and the ball had landed two meters in front of the pin, so he thought he could make par. The cup was on a gently rising slope. The president of Sato Transport, who had holed out before him, called out, “Take your time.”
Although Shiroyama’s golf game spanned thirty years, he did not put in much effort, sometimes managing to break a hundred—sometimes not—and he did not have much enthusiasm for it, either. He set his aim squarely on the putting line and putted the ball as usual, and when the ball luckily reached the cup, light applause rose from across the green.
Shiroyama hurried off the green and, swapping his club for a 3-wood for the next hole, began walking with the other three members on his team. “I hope it doesn’t rain,” the president of Sato Transport said, looking up at the overcast sky.
“It should hold up,” Shiroayama replied.
The two distributors were engaged in their own conversation: “Instead of a price hike, there’s a better chance for a price slump,” to which the other replied, “We’ll see what kind of prices the major supermarkets will set.”
They were discussing the outcome of retail prices of alcoholic beverages, which were set for a simultaneous increase on May 1st. The manufacturer’s current suggested retail price of 220 yen for a 350-milliliter can would be raised to 225 yen, but the major supermarkets were strategizing instead to engage in a price war by extending their discount rate even further. There were reports that, depending on the supermarket, the price would be set from as low as 193 yen. Several years ago, the nationwide price of beer had started to collapse in discount liquor stores, but until now supermarkets had held their discounts to a few yen per can. But this time, it appeared certain that a large-scale price reduction of a minimum of ten yen ranging up to twenty yen was about to happen. Although he could hear the two men’s conversation, there was no way for Shiroyama to respond to it offhandedly, so he chose to ignore it and instead turned his gaze to the beautiful undulating green before him.
Shiroyama was fond of the Matsuo golf course, with its thick groves of Japanese cedars and the fairways that seemed to ripple out
from beneath them, each of which were always serenely quiet. No matter where he was on the course, he could look upward and see only the cedar trees rising to the sky above. As he made his way around each of the eighteen holes, he drove the ball into the air from this deep green expanse devoid of anything superfluous. The ball then dropped back down onto the green carpet, and he launched it up again. Prizing the tranquility of these hours, Shiroyama still came here to chase the ball around, but in his four years at the top of a company that sold a trillion and three hundred billion yen worth of beer, the truth was that there had barely been a moment to take a deep breath amidst this sea of green.
During Shiroyama’s thirty-five years of service to the beer industry, things had never been as severe on so many different fronts as they were now. Due in part to last year’s cool summer, the year-over-year aggregate demand for beer had fallen into the negative for the first time in nine years, and last year’s decrease in demand was further confirmation of a declining trend in average spending per customer in the midst of three years of stagnation resulting from the collapse of the bubble economy, as well as of signs that alcohol consumption itself was leveling off.
Meanwhile, if he considered the arena of production, distribution, and sales of alcoholic beverages, first of all, the diversification of sales channels of alcoholic beverages had accelerated considerably as a result of partial revisions in 1989 and 1993 of the guidelines for obtaining a liquor license, and deregulation under the Large-Scale Retail Store Act. The market expansion of discount liquor stores gained even more traction, and now that conditions were increasingly favorable for convenience stores and major supermarkets to venture further into the alcoholic beverage business, the competition within various channels to drive prices down had turned fierce—this was directly connected with the all-around decrease in sales at liquor stores in general—and the entire keiretsu-based conglomerate structure of primary wholesalers, secondary wholesalers, and chain liquor stores that the beer industry had established over its hundred-year history was at this moment in time shaking from its very foundation.
Lady Joker, Volume 1 Page 19
