Tanabe missed the last train by ninety seconds. He knew the figure because he had counted it.
He was a careful man. For thirty-one years he had kept the books of a paper wholesaler in Kanda, and in thirty-one years he had never rounded a number up. He rounded down, or he did not round. His wife said he would haggle with a vending machine if it could answer.
It was the night of the company’s year-end party, and the winter bonus had been paid that morning. The midnight train for Takao was the last that stopped at Kokubunji. A taxi home would have cost nine thousand yen, and more with the night surcharge. Tanabe did not take taxis. He decided to walk about until the first train, which costs nothing, and that is how he came to be in Kabukicho at one in the morning with his briefcase and an umbrella.
The touts did not trouble him. “Izakaya? Karaoke? One hour, three thousand.” He had never in his life followed a man who called out a price in the street. Until midnight the loudspeakers on the lamp-posts had been saying the same thing.
The man in the grey kimono did not call out. He stood at the head of a stairway going down, beside a board that named a tenant for every floor of the building, from the fifth to the first basement. Under the first basement the board showed only a small dark drop.
“You have been right all year,” the man said, as Tanabe passed. He said it quietly, the way a bank teller reads back a figure. “Come down and look at something that agrees with you. The first drop costs nothing.”
Tanabe liked things that cost nothing. He counted the steps, since he counted everything. There were twenty-six, running down like a column of figures to a total, and at the bottom of the column hung a curtain with one drop painted on it.
He smelled cedar. Under the cedar there was something older.
Inside it was almost dark. Nine or ten men in suits sat on low benches without speaking, their ties loosened, each with a black lacquer paddle in his lap, the way men hold their hats at a funeral. Under the only lamp, the man in grey set a white dish in front of each of them, tipped a small bottle over each dish, and let one drop fall.
“This is the tasting,” he said. “Lot seven. A saishikomi, from Yanai. It is brewed twice: the second time in its own shoyu instead of brine, because once was not enough for somebody. Four winters in cedar, in the twelfth vat.”
Then he bent a little toward Tanabe, and lowered his voice.
“And a kitchen. You will know which.”
The drop did not spread. It sat on the porcelain, black in the middle and red at the rim, like the last coal in a stove. Tanabe looked into it as he looked into everything, for the mistake. There was a kitchen in it. It was small and brown. A kettle stood on the stove, and a rice merchant’s calendar hung by the door. It was his grandmother’s, in the house in Ome that was sold in 1979.
He tasted it. It tasted the way that kitchen had smelled. He could have sworn to it in front of a tax inspector.
“Nobody is poured a second drop,” the man in grey said, and the dishes were taken away. “The bottle is the second drop. We begin, as always, with a sensible number.”
Night 1 · Bid!
¥3,000Tanabe
Three thousand yen was a fair price for a hundred and eighty millilitres of anything. He raised the paddle an exact and modest distance.
¥5,000the second bench
He looked at the second bench. A heavy man sat there with his eyes on the place where his dish had been. So he had been shown something too.
It was not that Tanabe wanted the bottle. It was that five thousand was wrong. The lot was worth three thousand or it was worth nothing. He had priced it himself, and a figure once entered is not corrected by a stranger.
¥8,000Tanabe
¥20,000the second bench
¥64,000Tanabe
At sixty-four thousand he noticed that he had stopped working out the price in reams of A4, which he had been doing.
¥100,000the second bench
A round number. Somebody had rounded up. Tanabe felt it like a hand on his collar.
¥310,000Tanabe
The heavy man laid his paddle on the bench and did not pick it up again.
¥1,000,000by the pillar
“One million,” the man in grey said gently, “by the pillar.”
Nobody was by the pillar. Tanabe saw that quite clearly. There was the pillar, and the lamp, and the bottle. He understood that he could put the paddle down, climb twenty-six steps, and be on the first train with nothing to enter in any book.
“Thirty-one years of rounding down,” the man in grey said. He did not seem to be speaking to anyone. “All of that went somewhere, Tanabe-san. It is still owed to you.”
Tanabe had not given his name.
There was one figure he knew by heart that day, because he had checked the slip three times. “One million, four hundred and seventy-nine thousand, six hundred,” he heard himself say. It was the winter bonus, after tax. And then, because it was untidy: “Call it one million four hundred and eighty.”
¥1,480,000Tanabe
The mallet came down once on its cedar block, a small dry sound. Along the benches somebody breathed out the name they have for the man in grey. Shoyuken.
He took the first train, with a hundred and eighty millilitres of shoyu in his breast pocket, where his pen usually went. The four hundred yen were the first money he had ever given away.
In the morning he entered it in the household ledger. He wrote the date and the amount, and under item, after some thought, he wrote seasoning.
Then he checked the column twice. It was correct.