Sakai bought soybeans. He bought them sixty thousand tonnes at a time, in ships, from men in Chicago and Santos who did not like him. That afternoon he had taken four dollars a tonne off a Brazilian by not answering the telephone for six hours. At one in the morning he was walking through Kabukicho, away from his own section’s party, with the feeling of a hand that has closed on a coin.
“Sir. One hour, three thousand yen.” “Sir. No table charge.”
He did not turn his head. Sakai had never bought anything from a man who wanted to sell it.
The man in the grey kimono, at the head of his stairway, wanted nothing. He looked at Sakai the way a customs officer looks at a crate, and then he looked away. In Sakai’s experience, anything that nobody was selling was worth a look.
“There is a tasting,” the man said, when he had been made to speak. “Then an auction. You would not care for it. There is no negotiating at an auction.”
Sakai went down the twenty-six steps two at a time.
A dark room. Benches. Men in suits. Under the lamp the man in grey held up a bottle of white stoneware, squat, with a short neck, and a word fired into its shoulder in blue. JAPANSCHZOYA.
“This is the tasting. Lot three. A koikuchi, the ordinary kind, from Choshi: soybeans and wheat, half and half, two winters in the eighth vat. The bottle is older. The Dutch carried bottles like it out of Nagasaki by the thousand, when theirs were the only ships from Europe. It was among the first things this country sold across the sea. I thought of your trade.”
One drop on a white dish. It was dark, with a red edge.
“And in it,” he said, lower, “the one you have not made yet.”
Sakai looked. There was a table in the drop. On the far side of it sat a man with his hands flat on the wood, who had given up everything, and was smiling, and did not know it. On the near side sat Sakai. He had given up nothing at all. He had been trying to get to that table for twenty years.
He tasted it. Salt, mostly.
“Nobody is poured a second drop. We open at twenty thousand yen.”
Sakai almost felt sorry for him. You never name your number first.
“Two thousand,” he said pleasantly.
The man in grey said nothing. The benches said nothing. Somewhere overhead the tiles of a mahjong game were being washed.
In any negotiation, the one who speaks first after a number loses. Sakai taught it to the new graduates every April. He counted to nine.
“Twenty,” he said.
Night 3 · Bid!
¥20,000Sakai
Nobody else lifted a paddle. The mallet rose. It was too easy. Nobody had ever sold Sakai anything this easily who was not robbing him.
“Wait. Twenty, and a second drop.”
Silence.
“Sixty, and a second drop.”
¥60,000Sakai
“Nobody is poured a second drop,” said the man in grey.
“A hundred and fifty. With a certificate of origin.”
¥150,000Sakai
Nothing. A bench creaked, in what Sakai chose to hear as respect.
He understood the position now. This was a seller who would not move on terms, which meant that the terms were the price. Fine. He had broken harder men than this before lunch. He would give his terms up one at a time, and see what each silence cost.
It cost four hundred and fifty thousand to stop asking for delivery to Marunouchi.
¥600,000Sakai
It cost six hundred thousand more to let go of the certificate.
¥1,200,000Sakai
At three million three hundred thousand yen he had one condition left, and he held on to it with both hands.
“Three million three. Payment at ninety days.”
The man in grey considered this for some time. It was the first thing he had considered all evening.
“Ninety days,” he said. “Agreed.”
¥3,300,000Sakai, at ninety days
The mallet came down, and the benches said his name for it. Shoyuken. Sakai sat back. He had never in his life paid an asking price, and he had not paid one tonight. There had been no asking price. He had named every number himself, and he had won terms.
It was explained to him on the stairs, by a man with three wedding rings on his key ring, that the house gives everybody ninety days.
The bottle stands on a shelf in an office in Marunouchi, above the palace moat. Visitors ask what he paid for it.
“I got him down,” Sakai says, “from nothing.”
The first of the ninety days was a Tuesday.