Morita arranged things. That was his work, and it was also what he did when he was not at work, and nobody who knew him could have said where the one stopped and the other began.
He was forty-six, a deputy manager in the general affairs section of a company in Shinagawa that keeps other companies’ lifts running. General affairs sees to everything the other sections do not think about: the chairs, the name cards, the envelope at a funeral, the gift when a man retires, the room, the course, the bill. Morita had seen to all of it for twenty-two years. In twenty-two years nobody had asked him what he would like, because by the time anyone thought to, he had already arranged it.
He had a wife in Funabashi, a daughter at a university in Sendai, a flat whose loan would be paid when he was sixty-eight, and a doctor who told him every spring that there was nothing wrong with him. There was nothing wrong with him.
The year-end party was on a Friday: forty-one people, a course at five thousand yen a head, two hours. He sat at the end of the table nearest the door, where the organiser sits, ordered the drinks, and laughed at the general manager’s story at the place where the general manager stopped for the laugh. At the end he collected the cash, counted it twice, found it three thousand yen short, and paid the three thousand himself. He always did.
The second party was karaoke. He did not sing. He sat by the door with the coats, and at twenty past twelve he sent the young ones to the east exit and the older ones to the taxi rank, paid the bill, and put the receipt with the others in his breast pocket. Then he walked to the station alone.
The last train for Chiba stood at the platform with its doors open. Morita looked at it. The doors closed and it went. He had not got on. He could not have said why, and there was nobody there to ask him.
He walked back up into the street. The big screen by the east exit, the one with the cat on it, went dark as he passed under it, the way it does at one. He went in under the red gate, because it was there, and because a man who is not going home has to be somewhere.
He read the lane the way he read a quotation. No table charge, in English, on a card in a window, which meant that there was one. The men at the doors called out before he reached them. “Izakaya? Karaoke? One hour, three thousand.” “Sir. No table charge.” Morita had arranged too many evenings to be told the price of one in the street.
He turned off the bright road, and then off the next one, and the signs began to run out: bulbs on wires instead of neon, air-conditioners on brackets dripping onto the asphalt, a convenience store at the head of the lane with its cash machine lit like an altar. The lane was wet, though it had not rained. Everything in Kabukicho is wet at one in the morning.
The man in the grey kimono did not call out.
He stood at the head of a stairway going down, with his hands in his sleeves, beside a board that named a tenant for every floor of the building, from a bar on the fifth to a mahjong parlour in the first basement. Under the first basement the board showed one small dark drop, and no name.
“You have ordered for everybody,” the man said, as Morita passed. He said it quietly, the way a good head waiter tells you that your table is ready. “Come down. Tonight it has been ordered for you. The first drop costs nothing.”
Morita stopped. Nobody had ordered for him since he was a boy.
The door was a bar’s door, no wider than a man. Behind it the stair went down, not up, barely wider than his shoulders, steep, boxed in wood, the middle of each tread worn pale. Thirteen steps to a landing, where the mahjong parlour kept its door shut and the tiles could be heard through it. Thirteen more. At the bottom hung a curtain with one drop painted on it. He smelled cedar, and under the cedar something older, and he put the curtain aside.
He had expected a room with six stools. It was a cellar, and he could not see the end of it.
One lamp hung in the middle of it. It lit four benches, a pillar, a long shelf with bottles on it and a wooden tag on every bottle, and a floor that went on past the light and did not come back. Nine or ten men in suits sat on the benches like men in a boat on a lake. Their faces were white in the lamp, the white of men who have been under office lights since eight in the morning and have not yet been to bed. Each had a black lacquer paddle in his lap, and so, he found, did Morita. He did not remember taking it from the rack by the door.
He had expected silence, too, the way a man expects silence in a temple. It was a market.
The man in grey was going along the benches with a small bottle in one hand and a stack of white dishes in the other, talking low and steadily of a town and a vat and a flood and a winter, and the men were talking back to him and to each other and across him. A heavy man on the second bench was arguing with the man beside him about a town in Chiba. A man in a wet coat was saying the word “winters” over and over, the way a man says a figure he means to remember. On the last bench, by the door, where the draught came down the stairs, an old man sat with his hands folded and said nothing to anyone, and nobody sat near him.
Morita sat where there was room, on the third bench, beside a man who was turning a key ring over in his fingers. Three of the rings on it were not keys.
The man in grey set a white dish in front of each man and poured. He held the bottle high and let one drop fall, and it landed in the middle of every dish. Morita had watched a thousand waiters pour. He had never seen anyone pour like that. Wherever the man in grey was, the talk went quiet in front of him and rose again behind him, like water round the bow of a boat, and he never once raised his voice. When he spoke, the man he spoke to leaned in.
“This is the tasting,” he said, when every dish was poured. “Lot four. A koikuchi, from Noda. The ordinary dark one, which is four bottles in five of all the shoyu in this country, and which nobody has ever looked at. Three winters in cedar, in the seventeenth vat. Three hundred millilitres.”
Then he went along the benches again and bent to each man and said something low, and Morita watched the faces. The heavy man’s mouth came open and stayed open. The man in the wet coat took his glasses off, wiped them, and looked again. A man near the lamp smiled at his dish the way a man smiles at a photograph he has found in a drawer.
The man in grey came to Morita last.
“And a bowl,” he said. “Somebody else has filled it.”
The drop was black in the middle and red at the rim, like the last coal in a stove. There was a bowl in it: a rice bowl with a blue line round the rim, an egg broken over the rice and the shoyu poured on, set down on a kitchen table in Choshi at five in the morning by a pair of hands that smelled of the boat. He was nine. His father had put it down in front of him and sat across the table with nothing in front of himself and watched him eat. The hands were there, in the drop. Nobody had looked at Morita like that in thirty-seven years.
He tasted it. It tasted the way that morning had tasted. He would have signed for it.
“Nobody is poured a second drop,” the man in grey said, and the dishes were taken away. Morita did not see by whom. “The bottle is the second drop.”
The talk stopped, all of it, at once, the way the sound stops when a train goes into a tunnel. Nobody had called for quiet. The tiles went on overhead and were the only sound in the world. The bottle went onto a block of cedar under the lamp, and beside it lay a small mallet.
“We begin, as always, with a sensible number.”
Night 3 · Bid!
¥4,000Morita
Somebody had to begin, and it was always him. Four thousand yen was less than one head at the party. He raised the paddle the small distance you raise a hand to a waiter.
¥7,000a man near the lamp
The man near the lamp had his tie off and wound round his fist. Morita looked along the benches. Every white face was turned to the block.
¥12,000Morita
¥30,000the second bench
The heavy man. Six heads, Morita thought, without meaning to. He knew to the yen what an evening cost, and this was not what it cost.
¥50,000Morita
“The organiser pays the difference,” the man in grey said, to nobody.
The heavy man laid his paddle across his knees and looked at the floor. Ten heads.
¥120,000the man in the wet coat
The coat was dripping onto the floor. One hundred and twenty thousand was the whole of tonight’s party, less the drinks. Morita had settled that bill two hours ago. He could settle it again.
¥200,000Morita
Forty heads. The wet coat bowed a little from the waist, and sat back.
¥600,000by the pillar
“Six hundred thousand,” the man in grey said gently. “By the pillar.”
Morita looked. There was the pillar, and nobody by it. Nobody else had looked, and Morita understood that it was poor manners to, and that he did not know the manners of this room, who had known the manners of every room he had ever been in. He could put the paddle down. Twenty-six steps. The first train for Chiba left at half past four. He had told nobody here his name.
“Twenty-two years of seeing to everyone, Morita-san,” the man in grey said. “And nobody has asked you. I am asking.”
There was an account at the post office in Funabashi, in Morita’s own name, that his wife did not know about. He had opened it in the year he was married and put a little into it every bonus, and in twenty-two years he had never once found anything he wanted to take out of it for. He had checked it that morning, for no reason.
“One million, three hundred and forty thousand,” he said.
¥1,340,000Morita
The mallet came down once on the cedar, a small dry sound. Along the benches the men breathed out a word, quietly, all together, the way a table says itadakimasu when the first dish comes. Shoyuken.
The bottle was wrapped in paper and put in a box, and the box in a bag, and the bag was free. He sat with it on his knees on the first train, the local for Chiba at half past four, with the receipts of the party in his breast pocket above it.
His wife was asleep. He put the box at the back of the cupboard, behind the rice cooker, and sat at the kitchen table until it was light. Then he cooked rice, broke an egg over it, took the bottle out and poured one drop, from a height. It landed in the middle. It tasted of shoyu. He ate the rice and washed the bowl and put it away before his wife got up.
At lunch he went to the cash machine in the convenience store by the office and asked for the balance. The slip said nought. He folded it twice and put it in his breast pocket, where the receipts had been.
That evening his wife asked what the smell was on his coat. He said it was cedar. It was.
On the Monday he began to arrange the new year party. He booked the usual place, for forty, at five thousand a head, with the course to end at eleven, so that everyone would make their trains. Then he rang back and asked them to move it to Kabukicho.