Every hall has one. At the Shoyukan he sits on the last bench, by the door, where the draught comes down the stairs.
His name is Shimada. The benches call him the Looker. He is seventy-one. He comes every night that the lamp is lit, and he takes a paddle from the rack like everyone else, and in twenty years nobody has seen him raise it.
New men take him for the house’s man, put there to make the room look fuller. The regulars know better and say nothing. At every tasting the man in grey sets a dish in front of him too, and pours, and tells him nothing, and Shimada looks at his drop until the dishes are taken away.
Here is what the regulars know. Twenty years ago Shimada was a section chief at a printing company in Ichigaya, with a season ticket and a house in Tokorozawa that was nearly his. One night in the rainy season he missed the last train, and a man in a grey kimono said one sentence to him at the head of a stairway. The lot that night was a white shoyu, a shiro, from Hekinan. It is the palest there is, nearly all wheat, the colour of weak tea. He was shown a morning in it, the kind of morning that has nothing printed on it yet. He paid four million eight hundred thousand yen, on the book. That is still the highest price the mallet has fallen on.
He was nine years paying it off. The house went, and then the retirement money. The bottle he kept.
What the new men do not understand about white shoyu is that it does not keep. Open or sealed, it darkens. Within the year it is amber. In five it is brown. Shimada’s bottle stood on a shelf for twenty years, and by the end what was in it was the colour of everything else. The morning had gone out of it by the first autumn.
So he comes to look. He sits through the dark lots with his hands folded. He comes for the two or three nights a year when the man in grey says:
“This is the tasting. Lot one. A shiro, from Hekinan. Three months old.”
One drop on the white dish. You could hardly see it.
Night 6 · Bid!
¥8,000a man in a wet coat
¥30,000the second bench
¥310,000the wet coat
The mallet rose. And at the back of the room, by the door, a paddle went up that had not been up in twenty years. The benches turned. Somebody swore, softly, in admiration.
“Shimada-san,” said the man in grey. “You have nothing to bid with.”
“I have a bottle,” the old man said.
He took it from his coat. He must have been carrying it every night. He held it up to the lamp, and it was as dark as a tamari.
The man in grey looked at it for a long moment.
“The house remembers what it sold that for,” he said.
¥4,800,000Shimada, in kind
The mallet fell. It was the softest anyone had heard it, and the benches said the name very quietly.
He went home with a new white shoyu, pale as tea, sealed, in his coat where the old one had been. He has not opened it. He did not open the last one either. In a year it will be amber. He knows that. He has twenty years of proof.
The old bottle was on the block the next night.
“Lot two,” said the man in grey. “A shiro, twenty years in the glass. There is not another like it in the country. It has waited a long time for someone.”
Shimada watched it go, from the last bench, with his paddle in his lap. He did not think the price was high enough.