The man in grey sleeps in the afternoon, in a small room on the roof of a building in Kabukicho.
He owns the building. He owns the ground it stands on, and in this country the ground a man owns goes down under it as far as it goes, and up over it as far as it goes. So he owns the air the little room is standing in, too, and the noise of the street that comes up through it.
The room has no number. The board by the street door names a tenant for every floor, from a bar on the fifth down to a mahjong parlour in the first basement, and under the first basement it shows one small dark drop. It does not show the roof. The tenants call him ōya-san, the landlord, when they call him anything. Most of them have never seen him by daylight.
Nobody agrees how old he is. Under the lamp the benches put him at anything from fifty to seventy. He is not tall. His hair is cut close and has gone the grey of his kimono, so that across a room he is all one colour. His face is still, the way a face goes still when it has been listened to for a long time. His hands are long and very clean, and the tips of the first two fingers of the right one are stained the colour of weak tea, the way a dyer’s are stained blue. He has never been seen to eat. He has never been heard to raise his voice, or to lower a price, and nobody has ever seen him make a fist.
By day he hardly speaks. When he has to, the first sound will not always come. By night it always does.
At four in the afternoon he goes down through his building to the mahjong parlour in the first basement, which is his tenant, and sits in on one game at the back table, where the men from the black cars play. He plays for money. He does not talk at the table; he points. He loses, steadily, more than a man should lose who plays as well as he does, and they let him go on losing, and they all stand when he gets up. The men who collect from every other door in the lane do not collect from his.
Every spring the tax office writes to the landowner. Every spring it is paid, in cash, at the counter, by a man in grey whom nobody at the counter can describe afterwards.
That November the fair was on at Hanazono Shrine, at the edge of the district, where men buy bamboo rakes for luck in business. The custom is to beat the stallholder down, and then pay him the first price anyway, as a gift. The man in grey did not beat anyone down. He pointed at a rake, paid the first price, and then put the same again on the counter. The stallholders clapped for him, as they clap for every man who buys, and went on clapping after he had gone.
He lights the lamp at one, after the last train.
Before he lights it he sets out the dishes on the cedar block, a stack of them, small and white and thick in the glaze, each with three blue rings painted round the white of its floor. He pours one drop of water into the first, from the height of his shoulder, without looking down, and it lands in the middle of the rings. Then he wipes it dry. He has done that every night for thirty-five years.
He learned it in his first year. He had come down the stairs himself once, a young man from an office in Hamamatsucho who could not get to the end of a sentence. A man in a grey kimono had said one thing to him at the head of the stairs, and in the drop he had been shown a room gone quiet, waiting for him to speak. He had bid everything he had, and his father’s watch, and it was still not enough. He had tried to say “On the book”, and the first sound had not come.
“No,” the man in grey had said. “You will work it off.”
So for a year he poured water. One drop at a time, from the height of his shoulder, into the white centre of a ringed dish, ten thousand times and then ten thousand more, until it landed in the middle every time and he no longer had to look.
In the second year the old man gave him shoyu, and the lamp.
“The eye first,” the old man said. “Then the nose. The tongue last, and the tongue is the least of them.”
He poured a shallow layer into a dish and held it to the lamp, and showed the young man what the rings were for. Against the white a shoyu shows its true colour. The rings show through it as dark circles, and the white between them takes the colour, orange or amber or red. A pale shoyu lets the rings show. A dark one hides them. A cloudy one shows at once. Then you bring the same dish to your nose, and only after that do you take a little on the tongue, with water first to clear the mouth. You pour each one fresh, and you cover the dish between looks, because open shoyu changes colour while you are looking at it.
“That is how the trade does it,” the old man said. “Every judge in the country looks first and smells second. At the competition the first round is the eye and the nose alone. Most of what a judge decides, he decides before he tastes. Most of what a man pays for has reached him before he tastes.”
The young man tasted fifty shoyu that year, and before he tasted each one he gave it a mark from one to five, one the best, as the judges do, from the eye and the nose alone. By the end of the year his mark was the same before he tasted as after.
In the third year the old man made him stand at the head of the stairs every night and say nothing to anybody. In the fourth he let him say one thing. He was to say it low. It was to be true of the man he said it to, and it was to stop before it said too much.
The stammer did not come down the stairs with him. It never had.
There was a book. The old man showed him the first pages once. They had no names on them, only drops, in brush, a page of them for each night, more pages than anyone could count. Every man in grey had kept it. Nobody knew who had begun it. The block of cedar under the lamp had been planed flat again by every one of them, until it was the height of a hand.
One morning, after the mallet, the old man walked past the lamp into the dark at the far end of the cellar, where the floor goes on and does not come back. He did not come back either. The grey kimono was folded on the cedar block. It fitted.
The hall has a name that is on no board: the Shoyukan. Kan is a hall given over to one thing. The man in grey has a name as well, though it is not the one he was born with. The benches call him the Shoyuken.
What it means, the benches have never agreed. Shimada, on the last bench, who has come down every night the lamp has been lit for twenty years, says it is shoyūken: ownership, the word on a deed, the right to a thing and to everything above it and under it. He owns the ground, Shimada says. Every floor of this building stands on his name. Kondo, on the third bench, says it is the shoyu fist, and that you have only to watch the man pour to know it. Shimada says that nobody has ever seen him make a fist. Kondo says that is the point. They have had the same argument for twenty years, in whispers, on the stairs. The two words are almost the same word, and the man in grey has never said which is his.
Both are true.
That night he was at the head of the stairs at a quarter past one, with his hands in his sleeves.
The young man came along the lane with his tie loose and his briefcase held in front of him with both hands. His section had been out for a dinner after a presentation. His section chief had given the presentation. The figures in it were his.
The men at the other doors called out to him. “Izakaya? Karaoke? One hour, three thousand.” He shook his head at each of them and did not answer. The man in grey watched him come, and knew his name, and why he did not answer.
“Take as long as you like, Mizuno-san,” the man in grey said, as he passed. “Nobody down here is in a hurry. The first drop costs nothing.”
The young man stopped. He opened his mouth, and shut it, and went down.
The cellar was loud. Nine or ten men in suits on the benches, all talking. The man in grey went among them with the bottle in one hand and the stack of dishes in the other, and set a dish before every man, and a small spoon and a cup of water beside it, and let one drop fall into each from the height of his shoulder, into the white centre of the rings, and laid a cedar lid over it. He did not look down. He never does.
“Lot eleven,” he said as he went, low, and the men leaned in. “A saishikomi. Brewed twice: the mash is made not with brine but with shoyu, so that everything in it has been through the vat two times. Look before you taste. Hold it to the lamp.”
On the third bench Kondo held his dish to the lamp, and the man beside him did as Kondo did.
“The house is Kamebishi,” the man in grey said, at the next bench, “at Hiketa, in Kagawa, since 1753. It grows its koji on straw mats, by hand, over four days, and says it is the last house in Japan that does. It sells a saishikomi of three years to anyone who asks, and presses one of twenty years only when it is ordered. This is not either of them. This is from a vat older than the house’s papers, and it has had forty winters. One hundred and eighty millilitres.”
“It will be salty,” said the heavy man on the second bench.
“The old ones are saltier than the young,” said the man in grey. “Nobody expects it.”
He came to Mizuno last, and lifted the lid.
“And a room,” he said, low. “They are all waiting.”
Mizuno held the dish to the lamp. The drop sat in the middle of the rings and did not let them through. It was black. He tilted it, and it ran slowly, thickly, across the white, and at its thin edge it was red, then the red of a coal, and the blue rings went under it one at a time and did not come back. He brought the dish to his nose. Brown sugar. Something like dark chocolate. The inside of an old vat. He drank a little of the water, and took the drop up on the tip of the spoon, and put it on his tongue.
The man in grey watched his face, and saw him go into the room.
It was a long table on a high floor, with the city behind the glass. Every face along it was turned to him. Every pen was still. Nobody was looking at the clock, and nobody was hurrying him, and nobody was going to say the rest of the sentence for him. He was speaking.
The man in grey knew that face. He had worn it.
“Nobody is poured a second drop,” he said, and the dishes were gone, lids and spoons and cups. Nobody saw who took them. “The bottle is the second drop.”
The talk stopped all at once. The tiles went on overhead. The bottle went onto the cedar block under the lamp, beside the mallet.
“We begin, as always, with a sensible number.”
Night 2 · Bid!
¥8,000Mizuno
He had raised the paddle. A paddle needs no first sound.
¥15,000a man near the lamp
¥40,000Mizuno
¥90,000the second bench
¥200,000Mizuno
The heavy man laid his paddle across his knees. Mizuno’s face had gone white in the lamp. It was fear, and something that was not fear, and the man in grey watched it the way he has watched a thousand faces go white, and for as long as it lasted he did not hear the tiles.
¥1,800,000by the pillar
“One million eight hundred thousand,” the man in grey said gently. “By the pillar.”
He had taken bids from the pillar for thirty-one years, as the old man had before him. He did not look at it. He never has.
“They will wait, Mizuno-san,” he said.
Mizuno stood up. Nobody stands up to bid, and the benches looked at the floor. He opened his mouth, and the man in grey watched it, and waited, as he had once been waited for.
“Two million one hundred and forty thousand,” said Mizuno. He said it all the way through.
¥2,140,000Mizuno
The mallet came down once on the cedar, a small dry sound. The benches said the word together, quietly, the way a man says a name he has said all his life. Shoyuken.
Mizuno paid by transfer, standing at the block with his telephone. It was everything he had put aside in five years at the company. The house does not give change. The bottle went into paper, and a box, and a bag, and the bag was free, and Mizuno carried it up the twenty-six steps in both arms.
The man in grey wrote the night in the book, in brush, under the night before. Then he put out the lamp and went up through his building to the roof.
From the roof he can see the lights of the station and the first trains going out under them. He sat in the doorway of the little room and filled a thin pipe, and smoked it, once, as he does every morning. The street below was emptying. The men from the black cars were driving home. The loudspeakers on the lamp-posts had been silent since midnight.
On the long shelf behind the lamp there is a bottle with a wooden tag at its neck, and on the tag, in an old man’s brush, is a name nobody has said aloud in thirty-five years. It is the bottle he bid on. He has never opened it.
He knocked out the pipe on the edge of the roof and watched the last of the smoke go. Below him the lane was only a lane.
He slept until three. At four he lost at mahjong. At one he was at the head of the stairs.
The tenants call him the landlord. The benches call him the Shoyuken. He answers to both.