Chapter 9

Saturday the twenty-third of September was the autumn equinox, a public holiday, and for the first time that year the heat had begun to loosen its grip on Saitama. Along the banks of the Arakawa, the red spider lilies had come into flower overnight, as they did every year around the equinox, in crimson clusters on bare green stalks. By the time the sun went down, the air had a dry edge to it that nobody in the city had felt since May.

In Eichiro's house in Sakura Ward, the smell of old cedar was losing its quiet battle with the smell of two starched uniforms drying on a hanger by the veranda. Eichiro had come home at half past eight from a day of two weddings and a company's thirtieth-anniversary dinner. He was sitting at the low table with his tie pulled loose and his shoes off, rubbing his temples with the flat of both hands. Tomoya sat across from him, staring at the wall. He had spent the afternoon at the warehouse with a tape measure, marking out the concrete pad where the roaster would stand, and his mind was already working through the following day.

A sharp knock rattled the sliding door.

Tomoya rose and opened it. Ryuhei Matsuda stood on the step with the porch light on his face. The grey construction uniform was gone. In its place was a polyester suit of no particular colour, pressed with the care of a man who owned exactly one. A thick manila folder was clutched against his chest like a shield.

'I handed in my notice to the site office an hour ago,' he said. He did not say hello. 'The foreman asked if I'd lost my mind. I said I'd never had a clearer one.'

Tomoya stepped aside to let him in and led him through to the living room. Eichiro looked up. He had met many odd people in thirty years of hotels and restaurants, but he had never been introduced to a man who looked as though he'd rehearsed his entrance.

'Mr Eichiro,' Tomoya said, gesturing to the guest cushion, 'this is Matsuda Ryuhei. He's going to be general manager at Origin.'

Eichiro opened his mouth. Then he glanced at Tomoya, and something in his face closed again, gently, like a door he had decided not to open. He had begun to notice that there were questions he preferred not to ask. 'Matsuda-san,' he said instead, and bowed. 'Please. Sit.'

Ryuhei knelt on the cushion, put the folder on the lacquer and opened it. Inside was a stack of graph paper covered edge to edge in small, upright handwriting, with columns of figures, flow charts and arrows in three colours of ballpoint. He turned the first sheet round and slid it across.

'For ten years I ran purchasing and logistics for a restaurant group with fifty outlets across central Tokyo,' he said. 'Roughly two billion yen of food and drink a year. I've set out how I'd run the roastery. Where the green beans come from, how many days of stock we hold, how the deliveries are routed. It's only a first draft.'

Eichiro picked up the page and began reading it the way he read banquet orders, with his lips moving slightly. By the second sheet, they had stopped. The ordering model was a thing of beauty. It was a dense little machine of reorder points and safety stocks and delivery windows, built on nothing but a pencil and an unfashionable amount of common sense. It was the work of someone who had been starved of anything to organise and had spent fourteen months of hauling bricks organising it in his head.

He set the papers down carefully, as if they might bruise.

'Matsuda-san,' he said, and his voice had changed. It had the courtesy of a man speaking to an equal. 'What would you do with the café itself? Say it's two years from now and the tech park is built. What does a person walk into?'

Ryuhei straightened his shoulders. 'A third place.'

Eichiro tilted his head.

'A sociologist coined it, and Starbucks has been selling it to Japan for ten years,' Ryuhei said. He tapped one finger on the lacquer. 'A salaryman has two places in his life. The office, where he's watched, and the flat, where he's tired. Starbucks sells a third. A comfortable seat, a sweet drink and nobody asking anything of you. But they sell it mostly to women and students. Doutor sells speed to men on their way to work. Nobody sells a third place to the engineers. A man who sits at a screen all day wants somewhere he can sit at a different screen. Wireless that works, power at every seat, a corner where nobody looks over his shoulder. We give him that, and in a year it's the place he thinks of when he thinks of not being at work.'

'It will be mostly concrete and black paint,' Eichiro said. 'It's hardly comfortable.'

'Then we add a few deep chairs along the walls and a few rugs over the concrete. Soft where people sit, hard where they walk.' For a moment, something like a smile touched the corner of Ryuhei's mouth. 'I've been told rugs do wonders for sound.'

Tomoya had been listening in silence. He knocked his knuckles once on the table.

'The flasks and the third place are both built for black coffee,' he said. 'Black coffee has a ceiling. A man drinks two cups a day, and whatever we charge, that is as much as he'll spend. How do we reach the people who don't want it?'

Ryuhei did not hesitate. 'We don't sell coffee. We sell choice.' He pulled a blank sheet from the folder and began to draw. 'Syrups: vanilla, caramel, hazelnut. Soya and low-fat milk, extra shots, extra hot. Every one of those is a price. Twenty yen of syrup lets us charge eighty more. The customer thinks he's built himself a drink. What he's done is pay for the privilege of making our margin bigger.'

'And the afternoon?' said Tomoya. 'Coffee dies after two.'

'Sugar.' Ryuhei leaned in. 'Ice-blended drinks, whipped cream, chocolate sauce. Starbucks calls them Frappuccinos, and they're the most profitable thing on its menu by a distance. They pull in the people who find espresso too bitter and anyone under thirty. By three o'clock the place isn't a morning stop any more. It's somewhere to go.'

'And on the wall,' Tomoya said, 'we sell the brand. Mugs, steel tumblers, bags of our own roasted beans. Everyone who leaves is carrying an advertisement.' He let a beat of silence pass before he gave the last piece. 'And a prepaid card. Companies buy them in bulk as gifts and as a way to give their staff a little something without going through payroll. We take the money before a single cup is poured.'

'There's a catch,' Ryuhei said at once. 'The Prepaid Card Act. Once the unspent balance on our cards goes over ten million yen, we have to put half of it on deposit at the Legal Affairs Bureau, and we have to report twice a year. It isn't free money. It's half-free.' He looked at Tomoya, and for the first time his face showed something that might have been respect. 'But half-free is still a great deal more than nothing.'

Eichiro sat back and let out a long breath.

In twenty minutes, a nineteen-year-old and a blacklisted purchasing manager had drawn the whole architecture of a business on the back of some graph paper. It was a business that did not merely sell coffee. It collected the money before it was spent, lived on the margin between what a drink cost to make and what a man would pay to feel looked after, and fastened itself to a workforce that did not yet exist. The café was no longer simply a cover for other things. It had become an engine in its own right.

Tomoya took a document from his bag and laid it in front of Ryuhei. It was a single-page employment contract, printed at the Lawson on Friday. 'Your terms, as agreed. The salary is twice what you earned in Ginza. And the clause I mentioned is article fourteen.'

Ryuhei read it. Eichiro, reading over the edge of the table, saw the figure first. It was one million two hundred thousand yen a month. He made a small noise, like a man swallowing a bone. Then he read article fourteen: The employee shall not be required to certify, sign or submit any figure he believes to be inaccurate.

He looked at Tomoya. Tomoya looked back at him, quite calmly.

Eichiro signed as representative director, took the hanko from his waistcoat pocket and pressed it down. The red seal shone for a moment in the lamplight. Ryuhei signed below it, and his hand shook very slightly. Then he took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and, without seeming to know he was doing it, began to wipe a ring left by Eichiro's mug off the lacquer, in long, straight strokes. Eichiro watched him and smiled for the first time that evening.

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On Monday morning the old press works was loud with other people's money.

On the far side of a plywood partition, which Ryuhei had put up and painted black on Sunday afternoon, a forklift whined and reversed. Arata's men were clearing the annex for the first of Mitronix's forty containers, which were due at the end of the week. Outside, the diggers on the building site next door were already working. They made a heavy, rolling rumble that came through the corrugated walls like the sea.

In the front room, Tomoya and Ryuhei walked the bare concrete with a tape measure and a fat stick of white chalk. The velvet curtains hung folded on their rack in the corner. Ryuhei dragged the chalk across the floor with a surgeon's patience, marking out the place for the roaster's burner and cooling tray, the ventilation hood, the line where customers would queue and the line where they must not. He measured the distance from the counter to the door three times, and counted out loud the number of paces it took a man in a hurry. Every second he could save a barista, he said, was worth about three hundred thousand yen a year.

At six that morning, he had carried the first forty-three flasks to the scaffolding himself. Forty-three of Arata's men had taken one, and he had come back with forty-three empty cups' worth of names in a notebook.

At a quarter to eleven, the steel door in the partition screeched open.

Arata Kensuke stepped through it in a slate-grey suit, with the unhurried stride of a man inspecting his own property. He had come to check the annex before the lorries arrived, and he had walked through the connecting door without knocking because, as far as he was concerned, it was his. His eyes ran over the room. They took in the chalk lines, the paint swatches taped to the wall in four shades of black, the new oak counter and the La Marzocco under its spotlight, and the stack of matt-black flasks with a white O on the side. A look of faint amusement crossed his face.

Then he saw Tomoya, and the amusement stopped.

Tomoya had known the moment would come, and he had spent most of Sunday working out what to do with it. He bowed. 'Good morning, Mr Arata.'

Arata's face did a slow, ugly sum. 'You,' he said. 'The boy from the Grand Imperial. Hisa.'

'Yes, sir. It's a small world.'

'What in God's name are you doing here?'

'Mr Eichiro, my manager in food and beverage, holds the lease on this building,' Tomoya said. His voice was mild and a little embarrassed, the voice of a junior who has been caught doing a favour for his boss. 'He took me in after my grandfather died. I help him on my days off. It's his company. I'm only the younger partner.'

'A hotel manager and his waiter.' Arata gave a short laugh. 'And between you, you took four million yen off my firm in key money.'

'That was Mr Eichiro's negotiation, sir. I only carried the flasks.'

'Ah. The flasks.' Arata picked one up and turned it in his hand. 'Half my site has been walking about with these for a week. My site manager tells me the men have stopped queueing at the vending machine at ten o'clock. They stand at the scaffolding with a cup in their hand, like it's a ceremony.' He weighed the flask. 'That was clever.' He nodded at Ryuhei, who had straightened with the chalk in his hand. 'And this is?'

'Director of Operations,' Tomoya said, with a small bow. Ryuhei bowed too, stiffly, and said nothing.

Arata had the instincts of a predator, and he did the sum without being asked. A café of the only decent coffee within a kilometre, set next to his site. A workforce that would, within two years, number in the thousands, with money in their pockets and nowhere to spend it. And a quiet little firm run by a boy and a hotel manager, who had stumbled into the one place where every man would have to come past. He smiled and took a gold money clip from his jacket, tossing it in his palm.

'I'll take thirty per cent of Origin Coffee,' he said. 'Three million yen. Here and now. Think of it as a favour to a neighbour.'

'Origin is closed to outside shareholders, Mr Arata.'

The smile faltered.

Tomoya moved at once, before the man could recover his footing. 'But as it happens, my partner and I have been drafting the next stage. Coffee takes the mornings. A few thousand engineers will also need somewhere to eat lunch in thirty minutes, and somewhere to sit in the evening that isn't a bar. We're looking at commercial land in the district for a bistro and a quick-service restaurant.'

Something shifted behind Arata's eyes. A man who fed the workforce had a hand in their wages, and a man who sold them their lunch had a hand in their daily routine. Tomoya could see him calculating.

This was the moment. He let the warmth drain from his face and looked at the developer steadily.

'Of course, it would need prime land,' he said. 'And I did hear that the Malaysians have tied up most of your liquid capital for the Misono project. Do you actually have commercial property free to put behind something this size?'

It was a clean blow. Arata's jaw tightened.

Tied up? His mind flared, loud with a pride so naked it was almost childish. I own half the commercial land in Saitama and not one parcel has my name on it. The Malaysians are a rounding error.

The thought arrived with the whole of its weight behind it. A sharp heat flared behind Tomoya's eyes, and the warehouse went out.

He was in a small, windowless room whose walls were lined with steel lockers, and the air was cold and dry and tasted faintly of metal. It was the strongroom of a bank branch, the kind where customers rented a locker for their share certificates and title deeds. A single steel table stood in the centre, under a flat white light, and on it lay a stack of cardboard folders. Tomoya felt the thud of a heart that wasn't his own, and the satisfied warmth of a man looking at something he had built. Arata was turning the folders one by one with the tips of his fingers. Each carried a typed label on its cover. Tomoya read them as they passed, one after another, and burned each into his memory before the next appeared. Kitamoto Shōji. Musashi Heights Y.K. Daiichi Tochi Riyō. Sakuragaoka Kensetsu. Fourteen companies, each with a registered address in Urawa or Kawagoe. Under every cover lay a stack of registry extracts and title certificates. Sixty-three parcels in all, from a car park beside Ōmiya Station to a row of shop frontages on the Nakasendō, and an old school ground in Kita Ward.

Not one of them is mine. Let the tax office look all it likes.

The strongroom thinned and vanished.

Tomoya stood in the front room of the old press works, with the smell of chalk dust and cold concrete in his nose. Ryuhei's chalk was still in his hand. The forklift was still whining on the far side of the partition. Barely a breath had passed.

Arata was no mid-level developer. He had spread himself across the city like water under a door, and he had done it entirely out of sight. Tomoya now held fourteen names that did not appear in any newspaper. Every company in Japan had to be registered at the Legal Affairs Bureau, and any member of the public could ask for a copy of any register. All he needed was to know whose to ask for.

His face warmed again, as smoothly as a door swinging open. 'If the land and the capital are there, Mr Arata, then we have the operating plan. Come here on Saturday. Four o'clock. We'll lay the figures out and talk about a joint venture, with you as the principal investor.'

Arata's mind was filling with numbers. He nodded without seeming to notice he was doing it. 'I'll have my secretary clear Saturday afternoon.' He put the money clip back in his pocket, took one last look at the chalk lines and strode out through the partition. The steel door boomed shut behind him.

Ryuhei waited until the footsteps had died away. Then he moved to Tomoya's side and dropped his voice. 'Boss. Is it wise to let a man like that in? Someone who owns that much will try to swallow the whole operation.'

'He isn't a shark,' said Tomoya, watching the door. The warmth had gone from his face. 'He's a bridge. Origin Coffee is the foundation. If we want a larger business, in property, in hospitality, in anything that needs land, we need his deeds and his friends. So we bring him close.' He turned. 'And then we bleed him from the inside.'

He clapped Ryuhei once on the shoulder. They spent the next three hours fixing the position of the acoustic panels and the delivery routes. At two o'clock, Tomoya wiped the chalk off his hands, went into the little back office and changed into his white shirt and bow tie. He was late for the three o'clock shift, and he had never been late.

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The Executive Lounge that evening was talking about the same man.

Tomorrow the Diet would vote, and Abe Shinzō, who had won the party presidency on Wednesday by a landslide, would become prime minister. Two bankers at table 3 were arguing about which of Koizumi's ministers would survive the new cabinet. A man in the corner had put twenty thousand yen on the number of women in it. Beyond the windows, Tokyo was turning from blue to violet, and a pianist at the far end of the room was working her way through something slow and smoky.

Tomoya stood in the shadow of the pillar by table 12 with a silver tray against his chest, and let his eyes travel across the room. They stopped at a corner booth.

The man sitting there was about forty-five, in a plain charcoal suit and thin gold-rimmed glasses, with the stillness of someone who had spent twenty years inside a very large organisation. He wore a Seiko, not a Rolex. He had ordered nothing but a glass of Hibiki on the rocks and had not yet touched it. On the seat beside him lay a briefcase with a combination lock, and on his knee, held at an angle that kept it from the room, was a thick ring binder. A folded map stuck out of the top of it, and a single printed line on the cover said in small capitals, For internal use only.

Miss Ishida had seated him alone and moved away, and from the way she had done it, Tomoya understood that the booking had come from higher up. The reservation sheet read Nakano Daiki. Railway Bureau, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. Guest to follow.

He took the whisky across on the tray. As he came up to the booth, he turned slightly so that the lamp caught the brass badge on his chest. 'Your Hibiki, sir. Hisa will be looking after you this evening.'

Nakano glanced at the badge, then at the boy. 'Thank you, Hisa-kun,' he said, in a dry, precise voice, and went back to his binder.

He had said the name. They had spoken. Tomoya withdrew into the shadow beside the bar and turned his attention on the back of the man's neat grey head.

The hum rose, thin and electric. What came up out of it was a dull, orderly murmur of figures: budget lines, committee dates, a note to himself to ring somebody's secretary about Thursday, a worry about whether the new minister's office would want the briefing in writing. It was a mind like a filing cabinet. There was nothing in it Tomoya could use. If what he wanted was in there, it was a long way down, and it would have to be called.

He collected an unused napkin from the next table and approached the booth again with the air of a man apologising for existing.

'Excuse me, Mr Nakano. I couldn't help noticing the map. Is that Ishikawa?' He bowed. 'My late grandfather came from there. He was with the national railways for thirty years, on the Hokuriku Line. He used to say the Hokuriku would get its Shinkansen the day after he died, and he was right about that, at least.' He gave a small, self-deprecating smile. 'It's such a quiet part of the country. It's a shame the boom has never found it.'

Nakano went very still.

Quiet. Not for very long.

The thought rose up whole, crisp and satisfied, and the memory it was guarding rose with it. A sharp heat flared behind Tomoya's eyes, and the warm light of the lounge went out.

He was sitting at the end of a long conference table under fluorescent tubes so bright that they hurt. The room smelled of carpet glue and cold tea. Through a high window was the grey face of a government tower in Kasumigaseki. Spread across the table in front of him was a sheet of blueprint paper the size of a tablecloth, held flat at the corners by four heavy glass ashtrays. It showed a wedge of country with a railway line cutting through it and, beside it, a long irregular shape outlined in red. A smaller shape, drawn in blue, lay outside the red. Tomoya felt the smooth, pleased composure of the man whose eyes he was looking through.

Someone older sat at the head of the table, a tired, heavy-set man in shirtsleeves. 'The published boundary is for the public,' he was saying. 'The depot at Hakusan needs the stabling tracks for the Tsuruga extension, and the extension is going to be brought forward. I'd like it kept out of the briefing papers until the prefecture has been told, and the prefecture isn't being told before the second half of November.' He tapped the blue shape. 'Another two hundred and sixty thousand square metres of paddy. We'll have it by agreement. We won't need to go near the Land Expropriation Act.'

Tomoya was reading the appraisal sheet. The agricultural price, at the margin, was a thousand yen a square metre. Under the compensation standards, he saw, the figure would be worked out against the neighbouring housing land, with a deduction for the cost of development, which came to about four thousand.

A wave of private amusement rolled through the memory like warm water. And there isn't a thing any company can do about it. The Agricultural Land Act sees to that. A corporation can't buy a paddy field. Only a farmer can buy farmland, and only a farmer can sell it, and only a farmer will be paid. The farmers will do very nicely, and that, frankly, is only right.

The conference room dissolved.

Mahogany panelling, cigar smoke, the thick carpet under Tomoya's polished shoes. Nakano was looking up at him politely with the napkin held out between them. The pianist had barely reached the end of her phrase.

'A railwayman's grandson,' Nakano said, and for the first time he smiled, a small dry smile. 'That's a good thing to be. Thank you, Hisa-kun.'

Tomoya bowed and withdrew to the bar. He put the napkin down very carefully, because his hands were not entirely steady. A little further down the counter, Kaito was polishing a decanter. His eyes passed over Tomoya for exactly a second and moved on.

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It was nearly midnight when Tomoya reached the warehouse. A single lamp was burning in the little back office. Eichiro and Ryuhei sat on either side of a trestle table covered in route maps, with a pot of cold coffee between them and a pencil behind each man's ear. They were working through the delivery rounds for the site, and from the look of them they had been at it for hours.

Tomoya pulled off his bow tie, dropped it on a chair and went straight to the table.

'Origin Holdings is going into farming,' he said, and laid both hands flat on the wood.

Eichiro put down his pencil. 'Farming.'

'Two hundred and sixty thousand square metres of paddy in Hakusan City, Ishikawa, another twenty thousand in front of it. I'll tell you why, and I won't tell you how I know.' He kept his voice level. 'The Ministry is going to enlarge the rolling stock depot for the Hokuriku Shinkansen. The published boundary isn't the real one. The real one runs over a further two hundred and sixty thousand square metres, which isn't public and won't be until November. The farmers who own it will be paid roughly four times what the land is worth today.'

Eichiro's voice cracked as he ran the figures. 'Two hundred and eighty thousand square metres at a thousand yen. That's two hundred and eighty million. Tomoya, we haven't got two hundred and eighty million. We haven't got a tenth of it.'

'Fifteen,' Tomoya said. 'Give or take. I've done the sums. Forty-one million in the account, less sixteen for the tax office, less six for the roaster, less Mr Matsuda's first quarter and the flasks. About fifteen million, and it's all we've got.'

'Then how—'

'We don't pay for it. Not yet. Not all of it.' He pulled a sheet of paper towards him. 'In land deals like these, nobody pays the whole price on signing. A buyer signs a conditional contract with each owner, at an agreed price, subject to the Agricultural Committee's approval of the transfer. He pays five per cent as a deposit, and the balance falls due when the committee gives its permission, usually six to eight weeks later. Five per cent of two hundred and eighty million is fourteen. We can find fourteen.'

'And the other two hundred and sixty-six?' Eichiro asked. His voice was very quiet.

'From Arata.'

Eichiro stared.

'He's coming here on Saturday. He thinks he's investing in a chain of restaurants. By the time the balance is due, he'll have put in more than that.' Tomoya didn't look away. 'And if he refuses, we lose fourteen million yen and everything else we've got. I won't pretend otherwise.'

Eichiro said nothing. He picked up the pencil, put it down again and rubbed his face with both hands. Behind them, the diggers on the other side of the wall had long since stopped, and the night was so quiet that Tomoya could hear the hum of the lamp.

'There's a larger problem,' he said. 'The Agricultural Land Act. A company that isn't an agricultural corporation can't buy farmland. If Origin Holdings sends a transfer application to the Hakusan Agricultural Committee, it'll be refused by the end of the week, and the file will be flagged. The only people who can buy and sell paddy are farmers.'

Ryuhei had been looking at the map of Ishikawa Prefecture pinned to the wall. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and exact.

'Then we don't buy the land, Boss.' He crossed to the map and traced a line across it with one finger. 'We buy the farmer.'

Tomoya waited.

'Every district like that has the same man. Sixty-odd, in debt to the agricultural co-operative, no son to take over the farm. He sits on the irrigation association, and half the valley owes him a favour. He knows who owns which strip, who wants out and who'd sell for a fair price if somebody asked them properly.' Ryuhei turned. 'We find him. Origin lends him what he needs to clear his debts, and sets up a joint farming venture with him. He signs the conditional contracts with his neighbours, in his own name, and applies to the committee as a farmer. When the Ministry buys, the compensation goes to him. And under the loan agreement he signed with us, it comes straight back. With interest. And a share for his trouble.'

'That's a nominee,' Eichiro said. His voice was unsteady. 'You're describing a nominee purchase.'

'It's a loan to a farmer who buys land and is paid by the government,' said Tomoya. 'What he does with his own money afterwards is written into a contract.'

'Is that a legal answer or an honest one?'

Nobody spoke. Ryuhei looked at the floor. Tomoya met Eichiro's eyes and held them.

'It isn't clean,' he said at last. 'I'll tell you that now, so you can't say I didn't. I'd put it near the edge, and I'd take a lawyer's advice before we cross anything. But the men who've been paid to look after that land for twenty years are not going to be hurt. They'll be paid four times what it was worth, and they'd never have been paid it without us.' He paused. 'And you can say no, Mr Eichiro. It's your company, and fifty-one per cent of it is yours.'

Eichiro looked at the map for a very long time. Then he sighed, a long, tired breath that seemed to come up from his feet, and took the pencil from behind his ear.

'And the committee? If they smell a rat?'

'The committee is made of farmers,' said Ryuhei. 'Farmers want their neighbours' debts paid.'

Eichiro said nothing. He began, slowly, to write figures in the margin of the route map, in the neat small hand of a man who had spent thirty years counting the cost of things.

Tomoya turned to Ryuhei, and a slow smile crossed his face, genuine and not at all warm.

'Pack a bag,' he said. 'Take tomorrow night's sleeper from Ueno, the Hokuriku. Be in Mattō for breakfast on Wednesday.' He pointed at the door. 'Find me a desperate farmer. And lock that land up before the Ministry says a single word.'