Nishio’s work was the boards by the doors.
Most buildings in Shinjuku have one. It stands at the street door and names a tenant for every floor, from the top down. Nishio was an assistant manager in the signage section of a property management company in Nishi-Shinjuku that looks after other people’s buildings, and for twenty-nine years he had kept two hundred and twelve of those boards correct.
He walked them with a clipboard and a pen with a fine nib, and he checked every line against its lease. A bar on a fifth floor could change its name three times in a year, and three times in that year the board would say so, because of Nishio. He could see a wrong character from across a street. In twenty-nine years he had never left a line on a board blank.
He was fifty-one. Since the spring the company had used free desks. A man sat wherever there was room, and the name plates had gone into the lockers. Nishio’s was in his. He had looked at it once, in the summer, to see that it was still there.
He lived alone, in one room in Nakano, and had for twenty-six years. Beside the door of the room was a small brass frame for the tenant’s name. It had been empty on the day he moved in. He had always meant to fill it. The post came anyway.
On that same day he had opened an account at the post office, and into it, every summer and every winter, he had put the same part of his bonus. He had never taken anything out. He thought of the account as the door. It held three million eight hundred and sixty-two thousand yen, which a man at the bank had told him was enough, now, for the deposit on a small flat of his own, in a building whose board Nishio would not be in charge of.
Every second Sunday he took the Takasaki line to a care home in Kumagaya, where his mother had lived for three years. She was well looked after. The home had put her name on her door, on her cup, on her slippers and on each drawer of her cupboard, in a neat round hand. When he was a boy she had done that herself, for everything in the house: the tins, the drawers, his indoor shoes, his school bag. She called him Shigeo now, which had been his father’s name, and asked whether he had eaten. He said that he had.
In October a letter came from head office. From April, every line on every board was to carry a business name that matched a registration. A board was a public document, the letter said. It could not say anything that could not be shown.
Nishio knew at once which board could not.
It was on a building in Kabukicho, a few lanes behind the red gate, where the signs begin to run out. Its board named a bar on the fifth floor, a bar on the fourth, a nail salon on the third, an office on the second, a noodle shop on the first and a mahjong parlour in the first basement. Under the first basement it showed one small dark drop, and no name.
Nishio had photographed that board once a year for eleven years. The drop had always been there. The lease file said that the building stood on ground its owner did not own, and that the second basement was “the landowner’s”. The landowner’s name was a line on the form that nobody had ever filled in.
The manager of the mahjong parlour told him, without being asked, that the second basement opened only after the last train.
So on a Thursday in November Nishio worked late. Between eight in the evening and half past twelve he checked thirty-one boards in Kabukicho, and corrected four. At fifty-three minutes past twelve the last train left Shinjuku without him, as he had known it would. A taxi to Nakano would have been paid for out of the door. He walked back into the street with his clipboard.
He went in under the red gate, and the men at the doors called out to him before he reached them. “Izakaya? Karaoke? One hour, three thousand.” “Sir. No table charge.” Nishio did not answer. Most of them were standing under boards he had corrected. The loudspeakers on the lamp-posts, which tell people not to follow anyone who speaks to them, had stopped at midnight. At the head of the lane the cash machine in the convenience store was the brightest thing in sight, and two doors along a pawnbroker still had his light on.
He turned off the bright road, and off the next. The bulbs hung on wires here, and the air-conditioners dripped onto the asphalt from their brackets. There was the building, and there was the board, and there, under the mahjong parlour, was the drop. Nishio took the cap off his pen.
A man in a grey kimono was standing at the head of the stairway beside the board, with his hands in his sleeves. He had not called out. Nishio had not seen him arrive.
“Excuse me,” Nishio said. “I am from the management company. I need the name of the business on the second basement, for the board.”
“It has never had a name, Nishio-san,” said the man in grey.
Nishio looked down at his own chest. His company badge was in his pocket, with its face turned in.
“Come down and see what there is instead,” he said. “The first drop costs nothing.”
Nishio wrote “B2” on his clipboard, and after it a question mark. It was, after all, one of his buildings. He went down.
The door was a bar’s door, no wider than a man, and the stair behind it went down, not up, steep and narrow and boxed in wood, the middle of every tread worn pale. He counted the steps, because he counted things. Thirteen to a landing, where the mahjong parlour kept its door shut and the tiles could be heard through it. Thirteen more. There was no exit sign. He made a note. At the bottom hung a curtain with one drop painted on it. Behind it was a smell of cedar, and under the cedar something older.
He put the curtain aside and stopped.
He had expected a room the size of its door. It was a cellar, and he could not see the end of it. One lamp hung in the middle. It lit four benches, a pillar, a block of cedar and, behind the lamp, a long shelf of small bottles, with a wooden tag hanging from every neck. Past the light the floor went on into the dark and did not come back. Down here there was no board at all.
And it was loud. Nine or ten men in suits sat on the benches, and every one of them was talking: to the man beside him, across the man beside him, and to the man in grey, who was already among them with a bottle in one hand and a stack of small white dishes in the other. A heavy man on the second bench was arguing with his neighbour about an island. A man in a wet coat kept saying “six winters” the way a man repeats a figure he means to remember. Somebody laughed. Overhead the tiles went on.
By the door stood a rack of paddles in black lacquer, with no numbers on them. Nishio found that he was holding one. He did not remember taking it. He sat where there was room, on the third bench, beside a man of about fifty who was turning a key ring over in his fingers. Three of the things on the ring were gold, and were not keys. On the last bench, by the door, where the draught came down the stairs, an old man sat by himself with his hands folded. Nobody sat near him.
“This is the tasting,” said the man in grey, and the benches went on talking.
He set a dish in front of every man. It was small and white, thick in the glaze, no wider than a palm, and in its floor were painted three blue rings round a white centre. Beside each dish he laid a small spoon and a cup of water. Then he held the bottle high and let one drop fall into each, into the middle of the rings, and laid a little lid of cedar over the dish before he went on to the next. Nishio had never seen anyone pour like that. Wherever the man in grey went, the talk fell away in front of him and came back behind him.
“Lot six,” he said as he went, not loudly, and the men leaned in to hear him. “A koikuchi. The ordinary dark one. Four bottles of shoyu in five in this country are koikuchi, and nobody has ever looked at one.”
He lifted a lid for the heavy man, and laid it back.
“Soybeans and wheat, about the same of each. Salt, and water. And a mould, which does the work. The beans are steamed and the wheat is roasted and cracked, and the mould is sown on them, and in three days it is koji. The koji goes into brine, and the two together are the mash. In a month or two the mash foams and turns red. After that it is only time, and a vat, and a man who waits.”
“Where?” said the heavy man.
“Shodoshima,” said the man in grey. “An island in the Inland Sea. A quarter of all the wooden vats left in Japan are on it.”
The heavy man said that Noda was older, and the man beside him said he was wrong, and they were away again.
“The house is Yamaroku,” the man in grey went on, at the next bench. “You will know it, or you will know somebody who does. Its master builds his own vats, of cedar from Yoshino bound with bamboo, because there was only one workshop left in Japan that still built them. The house sells a koikuchi called kikubishio: black soybeans from Tamba, about two years in the cedar. Anyone may buy it.” He lifted a lid and laid it back. “This is not that. This is vat one, the first they built for themselves, and its first brew. It has had six winters. Three hundred millilitres.”
He came to Nishio last. He lifted the cedar lid and bent close.
“And a bowl of rice,” he said, low. “You will know whose hand.”
“Hold it to the lamp,” said the man beside Nishio, the one with the key ring. “Then tilt it.”
Nishio held it to the lamp. The drop sat in the middle of the rings, black, a full stop on a white page. He tilted the dish, and the drop ran thin across its floor. Where it was thin it was not black at all. It was red, and then orange, and then amber, and the white between the rings took its colour, and the blue rings went dark under it one after another, like lines being struck through.
“It takes in the blue,” the man in grey said, from the next bench, “and lets the red through. Every shoyu you have ever eaten was red. Nobody looks.”
Nishio looked.
The white was rice. It was a bowl of white rice on a table in a kitchen in Kumagaya, and the red across it was a word. Somebody had written it on the rice in shoyu with the end of a chopstick. It was his name. Not the family name, which was on the lease and the bank book and the bills. The other one, which only she had used. She wrote it slowly, a sound at a time, and said each sound aloud as she wrote it, in a neat round hand. He was six. It was the morning of his first day at school. There was only one bowl on the table, and she had written his name on it all the same.
He brought the dish to his nose, because the old man on the last bench was doing the same. Cedar. Something like toast. Something sweet, like the candyfloss at a shrine fair.
He drank a little of the water. It was the warmth of the room. Then he took the drop up on the tip of the small spoon, all of it, and put it on his tongue.
It tasted the way his name had sounded in that kitchen.
“Nobody is poured a second drop,” the man in grey said, and the dishes were gone, lids and spoons and cups with them. Nishio did not see who took them. “The bottle is the second drop.”
The talk stopped, all of it, at once. Nobody had called for quiet. The tiles went on overhead and were the only sound in the world. The bottle went onto the block of cedar under the lamp, and beside it lay a small mallet.
“We begin, as always, with a sensible number.”
Night 1 · Bid!
¥6,000Nishio
His hand had gone up. It had gone up the height a hand goes up in a meeting when a motion needs a seconder. Six thousand yen was what the company charged a building to change two lines on a board.
¥10,000a man near the lamp
¥25,000Nishio
He had not decided to bid again. He found that he had.
¥80,000the second bench
The heavy man, the one who had said that Noda was older. Nishio did not look at him. He was looking at the bottle.
¥150,000Nishio
¥400,000the man in the wet coat
The coat was dripping on the floor. Four hundred thousand yen was nearly three years of the door.
¥700,000Nishio
Along the benches the faces still in it had gone white in the lamp. The wet coat’s had. Nishio supposed his own had too. His hands were cold. His heart was going like a stamp coming down on a stack of forms, and he could not have said whether that was fear, or the other thing. The wet coat bowed a little from the waist, and sat back.
¥3,000,000by the pillar
“Three million,” the man in grey said gently. “By the pillar.”
There was nobody by the pillar. Nishio did not look. Nobody had told him that it would be poor manners. He knew it the way he knew a wrong character on a board: before he could have said what was wrong with it. In twenty-nine years he had never let a line go unchecked. He let that one go.
“She used the end of the chopstick, Nishio-san,” the man in grey said. “Not the point.”
There was the door. It had been the door for twenty-six years.
“Three million eight hundred and sixty-two thousand,” said Nishio.
¥3,862,000Nishio
The mallet came down once on the cedar, a small dry sound. Along the benches the men said one word together, quietly, the way a class answers when the register is read. Shoyuken.
The bottle was wrapped in paper and put in a box of plain wood, and the box in a bag, and the bag was free. On the lid of the box somebody had written his name in brush. Nishio read it twice. It was correct.
He paid by transfer from the door, there on the bench, with his telephone. Four hundred and seventeen yen were left in it. Behind him a man on the second bench said “On the book”, and somewhere in the dark a page was turned.
The man in grey asked whether he would take the bottle home, or leave it on the shelf. Nishio looked at the shelf. There were a hundred bottles on it, or more, each with a wooden tag at its neck and a name on the tag, all in the one hand, and not a mistake among them. He read them the way he read a board, from the top down.
“Home,” he said.
He took the first train, at four thirty-one, with the bag on his knees and the clipboard under the bag. On the clipboard it still said B2, and a question mark.
In Nakano he cooked rice. He put it in a bowl, dipped the end of a chopstick in the bottle, and wrote his name on the rice, slowly, a sound at a time. Where the shoyu was thin it was red. He ate it standing at the counter.
It tasted of shoyu. It was very good shoyu.
He put the box on the shelf by the door, beside the brass frame, with the lid facing out.
On the Monday he filed the board for the building in Kabukicho as correct, and put it on his list for the Tuesday, and for the Wednesday. He has checked it every night since. It has not changed.