Chapter 10

At eleven minutes past ten on Tuesday morning, the Joetsu Shinkansen slid out of Ōmiya Station and began to climb north. It was a double-decker Max with a long blunt nose, half empty at that hour. The cranes and condominium blocks of Saitama fell away behind it, and the Arakawa flashed once in the sun. Beyond Takasaki the line ran straight at a wall of mountains, and the city dissolved into rice paddies, orchards and low green ridges with cloud hanging on their shoulders. Somewhere past Jōmō-Kōgen the train plunged into the long tunnel that every Japanese schoolchild knew from a famous novel. It was twenty-two kilometres of darkness, with no snow at the far end. It was only the last week of September, and the mountains of Niigata came out into the light still green.

Ryuhei Matsuda sat in seat 12A on the upper deck with a canvas backpack wedged between his feet and a paper cup of trolley coffee on the fold-down table. The coffee was terrible. It was thin and scorched, and it had been sitting on a hotplate since Tokyo. He drank all of it, slowly, out of professional habit, and worked out in his head what each cup cost the railway and what it sold for. The sums were a pleasure. It was the first time in fourteen months that anything had been.

He wore a clean unbranded shirt and charcoal trousers, and a tan jacket he had bought that Sunday at a Uniqlo because it made him look like a tired man on leave. In his breast pocket was a leather notebook and a silver pen. He had not owned either for over a year. Before the notebook, there had been a knife-edge crease in every pair of his trousers, a place at a table in Ginza, and a signature that moved two billion yen a year around fifty kitchens without a single late delivery. After that came fourteen months of bricks and cement, and a head so starved of anything to organise that he had taken to working out the concrete deliveries on napkins, just to feel his mind move.

He had not once said the name of the company that had put him there, not even to himself. He could still see the president's face across the desk, smooth and reasonable, asking him to initial a figure he knew to be false.

Now he worked for a boy of nineteen. He did not understand the boy and had stopped trying to, but he understood what the boy did with a problem. Tomoya picked it up, found the one place where it was weak and leaned on it. In all his years in Ginza, Ryuhei had met three men who could do that, and he had been afraid of two of them.

He rested a hand on the backpack. Inside it, in a bank envelope, lay eight hundred thousand yen in used notes. Eichiro had drawn them from the company account that morning and entered them in the ledger as travel and negotiation expenses, because Tomoya had said that every yen of it was to be declared. Eichiro had come to the platform himself, in his hotel suit, and pressed the envelope into Ryuhei's hands with both of his, as if handing over a sleeping baby. 'Look after it,' he had said. 'And look after yourself.' It was the kindest thing anyone had said to Ryuhei in a year, and he had not known where to look.

The plan had changed on the way. Tomoya had said the night sleeper from Ueno, the Hokuriku. But Ryuhei read timetables the way other men read novels, and he had seen at once that the sleeper would put him in Kanazawa at dawn with no one awake to talk to. It would also cost him a night's sleep, and a man negotiating with a stranger needed his wits about him. He had sent a short text from the platform. Going by day. Bed in Kanazawa tonight, Mattō tomorrow morning. Fresher. The reply had come in two letters: OK.

He opened the notebook and uncapped the pen.

The line to Echigo-Yuzawa took an hour and ten minutes, not the half hour he had pencilled in the margin, and he crossed it out. From there, a quarter of an hour on the platform. Then the Hakutaka, the limited express that ran through the Hokuhoku Line's long tunnels and out along the coast of the Japan Sea, three and a half hours to Kanazawa. A little under five hours in all. He wrote the timings in a neat column, and below them, in smaller figures, the arithmetic of what he was going to do when he got there.

He had spent two evenings with the Agricultural Land Act and a borrowed commentary. The law was a wall, but he had learnt that every wall has a gate. Under Article 3, any transfer of rights in farmland needed the permission of the local Agricultural Committee, and permission went only to farmers, or to agricultural production corporations controlled by farmers. A company from Saitama that applied would be refused within the week. But nothing in the Act forbade a company to lend money to a farmer. Nothing forbade it to take a mortgage over land he owned, because a mortgage was not ownership. Nor was there any bar on taking an assignment of money the government might one day owe him. There was even a corner of the law that let outsiders hold a quarter of the votes in a farm corporation.

He began to write.

A loan, to clear the farmer's debts, secured on the farmer's own land. A second loan, to fund the farmer's purchases from his neighbours, secured on the land he bought. Conditional contracts with every owner, so that no price was paid until the Committee had given its permission. And, last, an assignment, registered and notarised, of any compensation the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism might one day pay for the land, in repayment of the loans. Every clause was lawful. Together they made a net, and in time the net would draw the money in. It would not strip the old man of anything he owned today. It would only take what the government had not yet decided to give him.

He read it through twice. It was clean work, as good as anything he had done in Ginza. He noticed with a small, cold surprise that he was enjoying it.

Outside the window, the mountains of Niigata went by in long, bright streaks of emerald, and a newsagent's paper left on the seat beside him said that Abe Shinzō would be elected prime minister by lunchtime. Ryuhei folded it and put it in the rack. The country was changing hands before his eyes, and he was going to Ishikawa to buy a farmer.

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On Wednesday morning, the old press works rang with other people's machines.

The Probat arrived at nine, on the back of a flatbed lorry from Yokohama, wrapped in plastic like a giant's luggage. It was a squat, dark-green steel drum on four legs, with a hopper on top and a cooling tray on the side, and it weighed over a tonne. The importer had sent two engineers and a forklift. Tomoya stood in the yard in a pair of borrowed overalls with a clipboard, watching them ease the thing down the ramp and across the cracked concrete toward the roller shutter. He had signed the receipt in the name of Origin Holdings and written site manager beneath it, which was true for the week, since Ryuhei was in Ishikawa. He had been awake since five.

Next door, behind a temporary fence topped with orange netting, Arata's lot was a roaring pit. Concrete lorries queued along the lane with their drums turning, and a gang in white helmets was pouring a slab for what a sign on the fence called the container yard. It was for the Mitronix equipment, forty boxes of it, due off the ships at Yokohama in nine days. The air smelled of wet cement, diesel and hot tarmac. Tomoya found that he had stopped hearing it.

A man in a navy suit and a white hard hat came across the gap between the two sites. He had a clipboard tucked under one arm and the look of someone who had been told to inspect the neighbours and was not sure why. He stopped at the edge of the yard and surveyed the Probat, the engineers and the new black-painted front of the building, and his eyebrows rose slightly at the size of what was going in.

Tomoya put the clipboard down, took a cold bottle of green tea from the cooler by the door, and walked over.

'Good morning. Welcome to Origin Coffee.' He bowed and held the bottle out in both hands. 'Hisa Tomoya. I'm the site manager this week. Is there anything I can help you with? The lane's blocked by the lorry. I'm sorry about that.'

The man took the bottle and cracked the cap. He wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist, and Tomoya saw that the hat had left a red line across it. 'Matsumoto. Development manager.' He took a long drink. 'We're doing the groundwork for the container yard next door. Today's the slab. I'm only here to count lorries and tell people not to stand in the wet bit.' He looked up at the building. 'A coffee shop? Out here?'

'And a roastery, in time. There's nothing else for a kilometre. We thought we'd get there first.'

'Brave.' Matsumoto grinned. 'Or stupid.'

'Both, probably, sir.' Tomoya smiled with him. He had his name now, and the man had his. They had spoken. He let a quiet moment pass, the sort men filled when they were comfortable, and then said, in the tone of a young man thinking aloud, 'What I can't work out is where all those engineers are going to live. Misono's twenty-five minutes from Ōmiya on a good day, and the Saikyō Line's already crammed to the doors. They'd go mad on that train every morning.'

Matsumoto laughed shortly. 'You're not the first to ask.' He took another swig of tea. 'That's somebody else's department.'

He said it lightly. But as he said it, Tomoya heard something else under the words, a flick of private satisfaction, quick as a fish turning in a pool.

Somebody else's department. That's rich. It's the whole department.

The thought had risen on its own. Tomoya held his attention on the man's weathered face, kept his own as blank as paper, and the warehouse went out.

He stood at the head of a long table in a glass-walled room on the thirty-second floor of a tower. Through the window the whole of Tokyo lay below in the afternoon haze. Seven men sat along the table's sides, in dark three-piece suits, and the senior of them, a heavy man with a grey moustache, wore the lapel badge of a trust bank. Tomoya could feel his own hands. They were not his own. They were square, with a wedding ring and a pen-callus on the middle finger, and they were unrolling a sheet of blueprint paper across the polished wood, weighing down the corners with ashtrays.

Misono Garden Residence. It was lettered in blue along the top. Six hundred and twelve units, in two eighteen-storey towers. Underneath, a site plan showed a rectangle labelled former Misono Citizens' Hall in the middle, an old concrete box from 1971 that the city had put up for sale by public tender. Beside it, a street ran off to the station, and beyond the street sat a smaller shape, grey, with a note in the margin in a different hand: former Marusan Plaza (not included).

The man with the moustache spoke. 'The tender closes on the sixth. If the city awards it to you, as we expect, the committee will sign the commitment line for fourteen billion the same week.'

Matsumoto's thoughts moved easily. They were a developer's thoughts, unhurried and sure, and they swept past the table to the grey shape on the plan.

And the plaza. A dead supermarket, owned by a bankrupt, listed for court auction in November. No one will bid on a derelict arcade. We will, once the Hall's signed, at the floor price. When the first tower opens, two thousand people will walk past it every morning on their way to the station, and every one of them will want a coffee, a cashpoint and a dry-cleaner. Dirt today. In three years, the best frontage in Misono.

The glass room dissolved.

Tomoya stood in the yard with the clatter of the forklift in his ears and the stink of wet cement in his nose. Matsumoto was screwing the cap back on the bottle. Barely a breath had passed.

'Well,' the man said, 'when your engineers need a break, send them over to us. Or the other way round. I've a hundred and forty men on that slab who'd kill for a decent cup.'

'You'll get one,' Tomoya said, bowing. 'And a flask to take home, if you want one. We deliver to the site every morning from six.'

Matsumoto laughed again, nodded and set off across the gap, his boots leaving prints in the wet. Tomoya watched him go.

The plaza was nothing at all, a grey square on a map, but a firm with fourteen billion yen behind it would buy it for the price of the dirt, and when it was built, the plaza would be worth ten times that. Whoever owned it first would be sitting on the best corner in the district. Matsumoto's firm planned to bid at the floor price in November, thinking nobody else would.

He would have to bid higher.

He went back inside and found the engineers waiting for him with the Probat sitting in the middle of the floor like a green steel egg.

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Three hundred and fifty kilometres to the west, on the other side of the mountains, the sky over the Hakusan plain was a low, heavy grey.

It was the kind of morning that smells of rain before the rain arrives. The air was thick with wet earth and cut stalks, and the paddies that ran away to the foothills had turned the colour of old brass. The harvest was a week from its peak. On the far horizon, behind a belt of cloud, a long white ridge stood faintly against the sky. That was Mount Hakusan, with the first dusting of autumn on it. Between the ridge and the road, two hundred and eighty thousand square metres of rice and silence lay waiting.

Ryuhei paid off the taxi at the end of a dirt track and stood for a moment with the backpack on one shoulder, looking at the land. It was flat, wet and ordinary, and in a year it might be worth four times what it was today. Then he turned up the collar of the tan jacket and set off along the bank of an irrigation ditch.

Three hundred metres out, a lone figure was bent over a vegetable plot at the edge of a paddy, working a hoe. He was an old man in a faded blue work jacket and rubber boots, his back curved at an angle that looked painful even from a distance, and he drove the iron blade into the heavy soil with the slow, regular rhythm of someone who had stopped counting the strokes. There was no one else in the field. There was no one else in the next field, either, or the one beyond. A combine harvester stood abandoned under a tarpaulin at the side of the track, with weeds growing round its wheels.

Ryuhei stopped at the edge of the ditch and called out in the open, easy voice of a man with nowhere to be. 'Good morning! Sorry to disturb you. I'm on leave from an office job in Tokyo. I only came to look at the countryside.'

The old man paused and leant on the handle of the hoe. He wiped his face with a grey rag and looked the visitor up and down with mild, unhurried curiosity. His eyes were small and sharp in a face like a walnut.

'It's beautiful country,' Ryuhei went on, stepping a little closer. 'But it looks like hard work for one man. Are your neighbours taking the morning off?'

The farmer let out a dry, rasping breath. When he spoke, it was in the soft, sing-song dialect of the Kaga plain. 'Too old, most of them. The bones give out. I'm the youngest in the district, and I'm sixty-eight.'

Ryuhei leant on a fence post with his hands in his pockets and asked him about the land. He did it the way a curious traveller would, gently, with no hurry in it. What did he grow? Koshihikari, mostly, and a plot of Hyakumangoku, the old Ishikawa variety, because his father had grown it and the neighbours still bought it. How many hectares? Four and a half, in nine pieces. Did his children help? No. They had gone to Tokyo and Osaka, long ago, and had their own lives. And the old man, who had not had a conversation that lasted more than three sentences since his wife died, began to talk.

His name was Tsuji Gen'ichi. His wife Fusako had been dead three years. In the wet autumn of 2004, the rains had brought down part of the hillside behind the house and cracked the stone footing under the north wall. The roof had begun to leak, then the beams. There had been no money. The co-operative had said that repairs were not covered. A man at the post office had mentioned a finance company in Kanazawa, one that did not ask many questions, and Tsuji had borrowed a million and a half yen.

'Twenty-nine point two per cent,' he said, looking at the mud. 'I didn't understand it. They said it was the normal rate.' His grip tightened on the handle. 'I've paid sixty thousand a month for two years and I owe more than when I started. They tell me it's three million four hundred thousand now. The daughters send what they can, but the girl in Tokyo has a flat the size of a cupboard, and the one in Osaka has a husband out of work.' He gave a small, dry laugh with no pleasure in it. 'The rest of the valley's in the same boat. But they've got sons.'

Ryuhei listened, and his face stayed warm and attentive. Behind it, he was counting.

Twenty-nine point two per cent was the ceiling the lenders had hidden behind for twenty years, above the civil limit of twenty and below the criminal limit set by another law, the grey zone, in the phrase the trade used. He knew how it worked, because he had spent two hours on a train reading about it. Eight months earlier, in January, the Supreme Court had ruled that the lenders could no longer rely on the loophole, except under conditions most of them had never met. Across the country, borrowers were being told that they had overpaid and that the money could be reclaimed. It had been in the Nikkei. It had been on the evening news. It had not reached a man alone on a farm at the edge of the Hakusan plain.

He could say nothing and let the old man's misery do the work for him. The thought crossed his mind and sat there, and he looked at it.

You will never be asked to sign for a figure that isn't true. It had been the one clause in his contract that he had not expected, and he had read it three times.

'It's a disgrace,' he said quietly. 'How this country forgets the men who built it. You give your whole life to the soil, and a finance company bleeds you dry over a roof.' He waited a moment. 'Mr Tsuji, I'm no lawyer. But there was a ruling in January. People in your position may be owed money. It may be that you've already paid back the loan, and more.'

The old man looked up slowly.

'It would take a lawyer and a year,' Ryuhei said. 'I can't promise anything. But I'd find you one, and it wouldn't cost you a yen.'

Tsuji stared at him. Something moved in the walnut face, a thing that had been shut for a long time and was not sure it dared to open.

Ryuhei slid the backpack from his shoulder and unzipped the top, just far enough. In the grey light, the edge of a bank envelope showed, and the rubber-banded corner of a stack of ten-thousand-yen notes.

'I work for a company called Origin Holdings,' he said. 'It's small, and young, and it's based in Saitama. It makes coffee. The owner wants to build a food business, with rice, vegetables and beans, from farms he can trust. We look for farmers the system has failed. We clear your loan today, in full. In return, we go into a partnership. We lend you what you need, and you farm the land, and we help you buy more of what's around you, so that it's worked properly again. You keep the farm. You keep your name on it. And you'd have something to leave your girls that isn't a debt.'

He stepped across the ditch and held out his hand.

He did not mention the Hokuriku Shinkansen. He did not mention the Ministry or the depot, or the unpublished boundary line that ran through the old man's best paddy. He did not mention the assignment that would take, in time, whatever the government paid for the land. He held out a lifeline, and he did not say that it was braided from steel wire.

The farmer looked at the hand for a long time. Behind him, the first heavy drops of rain began to fall on the paddy with a sound like a handful of rice thrown on paper. Then Tsuji Gen'ichi wiped his palm on his jacket and took it.

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On Thursday evening, the Executive Lounge smelled of leather, beeswax and aged malt, and the pianist was playing something soft and slow. The sun was going down behind the Imperial Palace, and the whole of Tokyo beyond the windows had turned the colour of burning copper. At table 3, two bankers were arguing about Abe's cabinet. At table 7, a foreign guest in a crumpled linen jacket was explaining the offside rule to a very polite man from the Ministry of Finance.

Tomoya stood in the shadow of the pillar with his tray against his chest.

At twenty past six, the mahogany doors swung open and Arata Kensuke walked in.

He wore a charcoal suit and a gold watch the size of a small clock, and he had a young woman on his arm. She was in a silk dress and diamond earrings and she was not the one from three weeks ago. She laughed at something he said and glanced round the room as she walked, as people do who like to be looked at. Arata saw Tomoya at the pillar and snapped his fingers, without slowing down.

'Hisa. Postpone Saturday. The meeting on Phase Two. I'm away this weekend. We'll fix a time next week.'

Tomoya bowed. 'Of course, Mr Arata. I hope your journey goes well. Shall I prepare your usual table?'

Arata waved a hand and sank into the leather seat of table 12 with the girl beside him.

Tomoya's stomach turned over as he straightened up. Saturday had been the day that Arata was to put his name to the joint venture and the balance on the Hakusan land would begin to look like money. Each of those had just slipped a week.

Ten minutes later, the doors opened again. Three men came in together. Two were Americans, tall and broad-shouldered, in suits cut for a different climate, with leather briefcases they carried like men who never put them down. The third was Japanese, in his late thirties, slim and alert, with the coiled look of someone whose job was to be the space between two languages. Arata rose, all teeth, shook hands with each of them in turn and sent the girl away with a folded note for a taxi. She pouted and went.

Tomoya carried the Yamazaki over on a silver tray, with four crystal tumblers and a jug of iced water. He poured the first glass for Arata, and as he leant across the table, he let his attention settle on the thick brown neck. Arata had said his name only a minute before. The lounge fell away, and the hum rose, and the voice came up.

It was a torrent. It was loud with arithmetic, projections and percentages, a hundred conversations running at once, and Tomoya waded through it as he would through a flooded street, looking for something solid. A word surfaced, then a place name. Then a shape came out of the noise and held still.

Fukuoka. The Silicon Sea Belt.

He knew the phrase, vaguely. It was what the prefecture called the arc of chip factories and design centres around Hakata Bay, on posters and in newspaper supplements. He had never given it a thought.

These two want a landlord. Arata's mind was almost purring. They've got the money and they've got the tenants, and what they haven't got is a Japanese face to put on the deed. Banks, ward offices, neighbours, nobody asks questions of a Japanese owner. Four towers in Tenjin, one by Hakata Station. I buy, they lease them back for ten years, at a corporate rent. A bank will lend ninety per cent against a ten-year lease from a firm like that. The Malaysians' friend in Putrajaya has opened a door at the ministry, a quiet line between their government and ours that lets things like this skip the queue. It's all downstream of Mitronix. Billions. Software, robots, electronics. I only have to be the man who opens the gate.

Tomoya poured the last of the whisky, stepped back and bowed, and withdrew into the shadows by the bar.

He did not understand most of it. Words swam up in Arata's head that meant nothing to him. He had read wafer and fab in the Nikkei and had no picture of either. But the shape of the thing was plain, and he had read enough on EDINET to know the one piece of arithmetic it turned on. A building let to a famous tenant for ten years was worth more than the same building let for one, because the bank would lend against the rent. If a Tenjin tower paid six per cent and the loan cost two and a half, the owner kept the difference for ten years, and the more certain the tenant, the larger the loan. Arata was not buying buildings. He was buying a stream of rent, with someone else's money, and he was buying it at the very bottom of the market, in a city where a good office still cost a third of what it would in Tokyo.

On the way back through the lounge, Tomoya passed Kaito at the service station polishing a decanter. The head waiter's eyes rested on him for exactly a second and moved on. He had said nothing for three weeks, and Tomoya had begun to wonder what that meant.

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By eleven on Friday night, the warehouse was dark and nearly silent. The diggers next door had been still for hours, and the only sound was the tick of the Probat cooling in the corner and the faint hum of the ThinkPad on the timber table. A pale blue light carved Tomoya's face out of the gloom.

He sat there alone with a cold can of coffee and let the day settle into piles.

The first pile was the plaza. That morning, before his shift, he had stood in the queue at the Saitama Legal Affairs Bureau in Urawa, paid a thousand yen at the counter and come away with a certified copy of the registry for the old Marusan Plaza. It had told him what a man could learn about any piece of land in Japan for the price of a bowl of noodles. The owner was Marusan Stores Co., a supermarket chain that had gone bankrupt in 2003. The land was mortgaged to a bank for a hundred and sixty million yen. And there, in the section for notices, was an entry from August: the district court had opened proceedings to sell it by auction.

He had found the rest on the court's own website. A property sold by auction in Japan had a base price fixed by a valuer, and no bid below eighty per cent of it was allowed. For the plaza, the base price was sixty million, so the lowest bid the court would take was forty-eight. To enter at all, a bidder had to lodge a deposit of twenty per cent of the base price, twelve million yen, on the day he put in his sealed bid, and if he won, he had to find the balance within a month. Bidding closed in the third week of November.

Matsumoto's firm would be there with fourteen billion yen and a bid at the floor. Tomoya would have to be there with something higher.

The second pile was the Fukuoka tower deal, and the third was Hakusan.

He opened Ryuhei's message again, though he knew it by heart. It had come in at half past nine, on the little prepaid phone, in plain text with no flourishes.

Tsuji's debt cleared Wed (3.4m). Lawyer to look at refund. 26 owners signed conditional contracts, 280,000 sqm in total. Deposit 1%, not 5%: 2.8m paid. Other 4% on Committee permission. Co-op debts cleared at completion so they all agreed. Application to Committee on Monday. Am staying one more night to see everyone again.

Tomoya read it with something that he could not put a name to. He had asked for a miracle and been handed one for a fifth of the price. The five per cent he had planned, fourteen million yen, had become two point eight, because Ryuhei had gone through twenty-six households asking each what they most wanted. The answer in every case had been the same, a debt gone, and he had traded that for the right to wait for their money. On Wednesday afternoon, Eichiro had made the transfer to the finance company in Kanazawa, standing at the bank counter with the face of a man giving blood.

He worked the figures down the page. Forty-one million in the account in September. Sixteen in the separate account, for the tax office. Six for the roaster, and the flasks, and a quarter of Ryuhei's wages. Eight hundred thousand for the trip, three point four for the loan and two point eight for the deposits. He drew a line under the total and looked at it.

A little under eight million yen. The deposit for the plaza was twelve.

Behind that, farther off, stood the balance on Hakusan, two hundred and sixty-six million yen, falling due six to eight weeks after the Committee gave its permission. There was only one place that kind of money could come from. And that place had spent the evening buying a round of whisky for two Americans and telling them what a pleasure it would be to open a gate.

He leant back and stared up into the dark rafters.

If Arata signed the Fukuoka leases, his money would set like concrete. It would sit in five towers for ten years behind the walls of a bank, and there would be no joint venture in Saitama, no Phase Two, and nothing to pay for the farmers' land. Origin Holdings would be left holding two hundred and eighty million yen's worth of paddy and no way to pay for it.

Tomoya could not simply bleed Arata in Saitama any more. He would have to be in Fukuoka before Arata was, or find a way to put himself between Arata and the Americans. He did not yet know which buildings were on the list. He knew only that one of them stood by Hakata Station. For that he would have to squeeze the man again, and that meant waiting for Arata to come back from his weekend.

The prepaid phone buzzed on the table and he picked it up. It was Ryuhei again, a single line.

Tsuji says thank you. He cried. I don't know what to do with that.

Tomoya looked at it for a long time.

Somewhere on the Hakusan plain, an old man had gone to bed for the first time in two years without a debt hanging over him. Tomoya found that he did not want to think about the clause that would, in due course, take the money back. He typed three words with his thumb, Do your job, and closed the phone.

He shut the laptop with a quiet click. The warehouse went dark but for the red glow of the Probat's pilot light, and in the silence that followed, he allowed himself one small, tight breath.

The board was set. Now all he needed was the money to play it.