Ogawa knew what a litre of shoyu cost to make. He was one of nine people at the company who knew, and he was not allowed to say.
He could say this much. The company’s tanks were steel and held a hundred thousand litres each. The shoyu came down a pipe as thick as his arm, four hundred thousand litres of it a day, and it was good shoyu, the same on Tuesday as on Monday. That was his whole work. He planned it. When men in bars talked about cedar and winters, he smiled the way an engineer smiles at a horse.
So when a man in a grey kimono said to him, at the head of a stairway in Kabukicho at one in the morning, “You, of all people, should see this,” Ogawa went down for the pleasure of it. He would taste. He would work out the cost on the back of his hand. He would tell them at the plant on Monday.
Twenty-six steps. A curtain with one drop on it. Benches, and men in suits on them who would not look at one another.
“This is the tasting. Lot twelve. A tamari, from Taketoyo. Soybeans and salt, and next to no wheat. Three winters in the third vat, in a town that flooded in the second autumn. The vat stood in water to its hoops, and nobody opened it until the river had gone down.”
One drop on a white dish. It was thick. It did not spread. It stood up.
Ogawa bent over it with the face he kept for suppliers. High solids. Long ageing. In a steel tank he could have had that colour in six months.
“And for you,” said the man in grey, quite low, “a paddle. You will know whose.”
There was a vat in the drop. It was cedar, bound with bamboo, taller than a man, and a plank lay across the top of it. On the plank an old man in split-toed boots was leaning on a long wooden paddle and turning the mash over, slowly, the way you turn a child in its sleep. Ogawa knew the boots. He had been six. The brewery closed the year he was nine, and the vats went for firewood. At twenty-two he had joined the biggest maker he could find, to do what that old man had done, and they had given him a desk.
He tasted it. He did not work anything out.
“Nobody is poured a second drop. The house suggests ten thousand yen.”
Night 2 · Bid!
¥10,000a man in a wet coat
Three hundred millilitres. At the company’s cost that came to twenty-six yen and ten sen. Ogawa raised his paddle to see what it felt like.
¥12,000Ogawa
¥40,000the wet coat
¥90,000Ogawa
¥150,000two men sharing a paddle
He looked at them. Not one of them could have told a mash from a mud bath. He found that he minded. He minded very much that the old man on the plank should go home with a wet coat.
¥400,000Ogawa
The coat sat down.
¥550,000the two men
¥900,000Ogawa
The two men looked at each other and laid the paddle on the bench between them. Then there was only the man in grey, who said nothing, and waited.
“It is yours at nine hundred,” he said mildly. “Of course, you know what it cost to make.”
“I know what it cost,” said Ogawa.
“Then you are the one man here who can tell me what it is worth.”
Ogawa had planned eleven thousand production runs, and nobody had ever asked him that.
¥1,700,000Ogawa
Nobody had bid against him. He raised the paddle again anyway. Nine hundred thousand was a price, and he knew about prices. He went on until he reached a number that had nothing to do with one.
¥2,600,000Ogawa
The mallet fell. Shoyuken, said the benches, as you might say amen.
It is in the third drawer of his desk at the plant, in its crock, tied shut. He has not opened it.
On the Monday he went and stood by the pipe for a while. A foreman asked what he was looking at.
“Nothing,” Ogawa said. That was the trouble. There was nothing in it but shoyu.