Stories of the salarymen who went down a stairway in Kabukicho for one drop of shoyu, were shown their dreams in it, and paid far too much for the bottle.
| The house | The Shoyukan, the shoyu hall. It is on the second basement floor of a building in Kabukicho, in Shinjuku: down twenty-six steps, behind a curtain with one drop painted on it. Shoyu is what the rest of the world calls soy sauce. It is not called that here. |
| The man | The Shoyuken. In English he would be the Soy Sauce Fist. He wears a grey kimono, he has never been heard to raise his voice or to lower a price, and he can show a man his dream in one drop. |
| The night | A tasting, and then an auction. At the tasting each man is poured one drop on a white dish, and is told what is in it. Nobody is poured a second. The bottle is the second drop. |
| The lots | Shoyu, sold the way old wine is sold: by the kind and the town, the vat and the winters it has had in cedar, one small bottle at a time. |
| The hours | After the last train. The lamp is lit when the trains stop, and put out before the first one runs. |
What a man ought to know before he goes down the stairs. It has not been shown to help.
Men whose work is to know exactly what a thing is: a name on a board, an evening, a number, a litre. Each went down the stairs certain that he was the one man in the room who could not be sold anything. And the man in grey, who knows better than any of them.
A man who keeps the names on other people’s buildings goes down to find out why one floor has none.
Opens at ¥6,000.
A day and a night with the man in grey: the landlord by day, the Shoyuken by night, and once, a long time ago, a young man on the benches.
Opens at ¥8,000.
A man who has arranged every evening for twenty-two years lets the last train go, and is told that tonight somebody has ordered for him.
Opens at ¥4,000.
A careful man misses the last train by ninety seconds, and is shown a kitchen in one drop of shoyu.
Opens at ¥3,000.
A man whose company makes four hundred thousand litres of shoyu a day goes downstairs to laugh at three hundred millilitres of it.
Opens at ¥10,000.
One buys for a living. One was showing a younger man how it is done. Both went home pleased.
A trading-house man who has never paid an asking price meets a seller who will not argue.
Opens at ¥20,000.
A section chief takes his junior down the stairs to show him how a man handles a room.
Opens at ¥5,000.
Most men go down the stairs once. This barrel is for the other kind, and for what it has cost them.
Kondo has been married three times and divorced three times, and all three wives gave the same reason.
Opens at ¥6,000.
He sits on the last bench, by the door, and in twenty years nobody has seen him raise a paddle.
Opens at ¥8,000.
The hall in the old times, when the Shoyuken stood among the great powers of Japan.
A samurai who has hidden his face under a basket for eleven years is brought down the stair on the night the one in black comes to the house.
Opens at 1 ryō.
On the last night of the old calendar, a Dutch engineer in the new government’s service goes to find out why one piece of ground in Tokyo has a drop of ink where its owner’s name should be.
Opens at ¥1.
Single pages to come back to, between nights.
The five kinds the hall sells, how to read a label and a drop, and what each has cost a man.
How a night goes, from the street to the first train, and every move the Shoyuken has.
9 tales in 3 barrels, 2 Forgotten Legends, and 2 guides.
Every tale here is made up, and so are the hall and the man who keeps it. Kabukicho is real, and so are the kinds of shoyu and the towns they come from.