Then, in his daze, Shiroyama’s mind flashed on an image of the lively crowd at the launch party for the new product—he could hear the voices of the executives lined up in the conference room of the main office discussing whether they should set the interim dividend that would be announced at the shareholder meeting to six or seven yen, and he called out futilely, I’m here! Hey, I’m right here! Tears came to his eyes again.
Following such confusion, a fresh ache spread throughout his entire body, and the pain jolted Shiroyama fully awake. As he slowly regained his powers of judgment, at last he attempted to discern just what had happened to him. He couldn’t move his mouth at all, it felt as if something like duct tape was plastered across it; he was blindfolded, and against his ears and cheeks he could feel the coarseness of a sack over his entire head. Through the sack, his face, tilted downward, was pressed up against a rough-textured material like a vinyl sheet, beneath which was a hard surface that smelled of gasoline and rattled and rumbled as it jostled up and down. At last Shiroyama was able to draw a single conclusion: he was inside a moving car.
His hands were tied behind his back, his ankles were bound too—his knees were slightly bent, but there was constant pressure against his back, knees, and the top of his head, and he could tell he was in a terribly confined space, presumably the floor of the backseat of the car. Placed over the upper half of his prone body was something fairly heavy, and after considering it for some time, Shiroyama figured it must be a cardboard box or a bag containing a quilt.
There was something resting on his ankles and knees as well, but rather than a box or a stone or some other inanimate object, it was the shoes on someone’s feet. If Shiroyama tried to shift around, they pressed down on him with greater force. Someone was sitting in the backseat, and had placed his or her feet on top of Shiroyama’s legs as he lay across the floor of the backseat. The only noise he could hear was the roar of the engine—indeed, he didn’t hear any voices at all.
Hoping to alleviate the pain in his joints, Shiroyama moved his body a few centimeters at a time, which completely exhausted him. His mind grew duller by the minute, as if a fog had been draped over it, and a single word—kidnapping—floated up, then vanished, only to appear again, while another word—death—drifted hazily around it. He was shocked to realize that he had never even been able to fathom what was, in fact, happening to him here and now, and as he rationalized that he was only human, he succumbed again and again to a sense of utter apathy.
His thoughts grew fuzzy while his body still prickled with pain. The car suddenly pitched, which snapped his mind awake. Unable to do anything about his body’s bouncing in sync with the vehicle, Shiroyama pondered futilely where the car might be going, and what time it must be. However, this did not go on for very long, because the vibration stopped, the reverberating engine cut off, and the journey came to an end.
Immediately, he sensed people moving in the front and back seats, and heard the sound of the front and back doors opening. He was suddenly relieved of the pressure—the heavy object on top of him had been removed—and dragged out of the car. Shiroyama was hoisted from under the arms, then his body was suspended in the air before being heaved over someone’s shoulder.
Cold air stung his skin, slipping past his collar and the cuffs of his sleeves. The air was still, and even as several pairs of feet trampled over the ground, the only sound was a faint squeaking. Then, he heard the low rustling of tree branches or leaves, and as he was being carried Shiroyama felt something cold fall down the nape of his neck. Snow, Shiroyama thought with his head upside-down. We’re in the snow-covered mountains.
He was not carried very far. The crunching of snow underfoot soon shifted to footsteps on something solid like stone, and there was also the faint sound of a hinge. Still held aloft, Shiroyama felt his shoes being yanked off, and after being carried a few steps further, he was set down. He did not detect the grassy smell of tatami, but the texture that registered on his body was that of a tatami mat.
He sensed two or perhaps three people moving around him, and within a few minutes of being set down on the tatami floor, Shiroyama was lifted from under his arms and by his legs and placed on top of what felt like a futon, forced to lie down, then immediately covered up by blankets and quilts.
Then, for the first time during his ordeal, Shiroyama heard the voice of a man, directly above his head. “We won’t hurt you. When nature calls—and only then—sit up. Other than that, stay in this position.”
The voice was impersonal, and neither particularly high- nor low-pitched. It had an unnatural, perhaps intentionally slow tempo, with neither an accent nor intonation. Would they really not harm him? Would they spare his life? Shiroyama held his breath as he waited to hear the next words, but the voice said no more, and as he waited and waited his body grew stiff and numb. Then he heard the faint sound of a car engine starting somewhere in the distance, and once it receded, all sound ceased. He could tell that someone was keeping watch nearby, but no one made a noise, there was no smell of cigarette smoke or anything else.
The futon and blankets were a little damp, and smelled of mold and camphor mothballs. He didn’t have the wherewithal to feel repulsed by this—his nerves were primarily absorbed with the pain in his bound wrists, and the ache in the pit of his stomach, where he must have been struck when they first took him away; for the next while, Shiroyama fought against his mind, which was refusing to think, and his senses, which threatened to fall into a torpor.
Shiroyama’s mind refused to consider any matters related to the kidnapping. His family, who must be awake with worry at this very moment. His company, panic-stricken that their president had been kidnapped. The ransom, and threats that would accompany such demands. The collateral damage he had no way of imagining. The sacrifices the company would have to make to remedy the situation. All of these simply blended together.
I can’t think about it now, I’m too tired tonight. Shiroyama told himself, and in the deepening warmth of the bed, he closed his eyes.
He knew that it was dawn from the clear resonance of a bird’s sharp cry. It seemed freezing outside—his ears sticking out from the quilt were stiff with cold. There were still no voices or other sounds, and in his vulnerable state just after waking, as he tried to sit up he wondered if someone was keeping watch, when hands shot out from somewhere to grab him and lift him up.
“I’ll untie you while you go to the bathroom, so don’t lift your hands.”
This voice was different from the first voice he had heard last night—this one definitely sounded younger. However, both voices spoke in a measured, deliberate tone that was almost brazenly calm.
Led by the arm, Shiroyama was taken a few steps. He sensed a door opening, and as he was pulled by the wrists his hands touched the edge of the toilet, to show him where it was. The lookout stood right behind him, not saying a word. With hands shriveled from the cold and humiliation, Shiroyama did his business. Amid the cold rising off the toilet and the stench around it, he heard his own urine trickle down softly.
Once he was back on the tatami, the same man asked, “Do you want something to drink?”
Shiroyama nodded, and from a short distance away the voice from the previous night warned, “If you make any noise, I’ll kill you,” then he felt a cotton work glove on his cheek as the duct tape was ripped off. Immediately the area around his mouth felt better. However, the muscles in his face had gone numb from being restrained and he had lost almost all feeling—he could barely sense the gentle, cool air, and he couldn’t have made a sound if he had wanted to. His throat was dry, and the inside of his mouth was sticky from being closed the whole night long.
In the next moment, a paper carton was placed in his hand. A straw was inserted, and Shiroyama brought it to his lips and took a sip. It was oolong tea. When the first mouthful of cold liquid reached his throat, his body trembled as every nerve that had been in crisis m
ode all night relaxed, and tears pooled in his eyes under the cloth blindfold. He drank deeply on the second sip, and in a moment Shiroyama had emptied the two-hundred-milliliter carton. Feeling his voice return, he couldn’t keep himself from mumbling, “Are you after money?” His voice was withered and hoarse, and barely audible.
“You’ll find out soon enough.” The reply came from that short distance away, and no other words followed. Instead, he heard a light sound as the man who seemed close by tore a thin film or cellophane, and then Shiroyama felt something else being placed in his hands.
“Breakfast,” the man said.
He brought it close to his mouth and smelled seaweed—Shiroyama guessed that it was a store-bought rice ball. He wasn’t hungry, and he couldn’t figure out how his mind, which stubbornly refused to work, had made any decisions, but Shiroyama did as he was told and bit into the lump. The rice grains caught once, twice in his throat, but still he managed to get them down to where they needed to settle. Once he finished, he was surprised to have been able to eat it all, but right away his hands were bound behind his back again, new duct tape was placed over his mouth, he was forced to lie down again and he was covered with a quilt.
The hours of sleeping and waking, only to sleep and awake again, had begun. He drifted restlessly before dozing off, and upon waking he grew restless again. At first, he heard the hum of a small motor interspersed with the crinkling of static. He contemplated just what the noise could be, and convincing himself as he listened to it that one of the men was using an electric shaver. When the shaver noise ceased after a while, a faint jingling started up from that short distance away from where he lay—the sound seemed to belong to a Walkman. But the men made no other sound, they didn’t even speak to each other.
The bird he had heard that morning had only let out that solitary cry—the world outside had returned to complete silence. He was used to hearing the low-frequency noise of cars passing by on the streets and the hum of buildings’ air conditioning units, and such stillness bore down on his eardrums oppressively. There was no sign of any movement at all—not even the branches on the trees or the wind—nothing. As he continued to drift in and out of wakefulness, he grew less certain that when he had heard the cry of the bird it had been morning, and he soon lost all sense of time.
Driven by his biological needs, Shiroyama did his business every few hours, and each time the restraints on his hands were undone and then bound again, and he was given cartons of fruit-flavored milk, orange juice, or oolong tea. Other than the rice ball, he was given bean-jam buns, cream buns, canned pork and beans, matchbox-size blocks of processed cheese, bananas, and mandarin oranges.
Whenever the duct tape was taken off so that he could eat and drink, Shiroyama had the opportunity to speak up, a little at a time. Twice he asked them, “Are you after money?” and also, “How much do you want?” but neither question received a response. Nor was there a reply to his questions of “Where am I?” and “When will this end?” However, when he asked, “What day is it now, and what time?” a mechanical reply came back to him: “March twenty-fifth. 10:24 p.m.” Shiroyama shivered from the joy of obtaining these sought-after, impersonal words, yet at the same time, he was dismayed to learn that a whole day had gone by, and he was dumbfounded as he suddenly recalled, in excruciating detail, the frail shoulders of his wife as she stood at the front door of his home in Sanno the previous morning, and the color of the cardigan she had worn.
What type of men were his captors? He tried to imagine them over and over, but he simply had no clue. Did they hold a grudge against the company, or against Shiroyama himself? Or was this a farsighted scheme that involved a greater design? Every time his thoughts branched out in search of an answer, they led nowhere—almost as if he had an automatic shutdown mechanism—and he became exhausted from the attempt.
Since he was given food to eat and felt no hunger, and there continued to be no threat to his wellbeing, Shiroyama acclimated mentally and physically to the humiliation, while his initial overwhelming knot of terror from the beginning splintered more specifically into anguish, bewilderment, and doubt. The hours stretched interminably into introspection and delusion, which descended upon him alongside the unbearable silence.
As he lay in the bed, whether awake or asleep, Shiroyama could not escape the feeling of being suffocated, and was forced to excavate the contents of his heart over and over again. His memories of wartime, roused for the first time in decades, were particularly troubling. What ought to have been vividly recollected fear was now a murky thicket, and he could no longer fathom the crux of it. When everyone had been starving, Shiroyama did not go hungry; he did not share in the misery experienced by children who remained in the city, too young to have been evacuated to the countryside. Instead he had hidden in a corner of the air raid shelter, his younger sister in his arms, coolly contemplating the death of his parents, and when he lived to see the end of the war, his family intact and reunited, what remained in his childhood heart was a jumble of unspeakable turmoil and remorse. Shiroyama now realized he had never told anyone about all this.
When his father had nagged him about not going to medical school, the eighteen-year-old Shiroyama told him only that he wasn’t interested, without revealing the truth. As a student at the faculty of law, all of the classmates in his seminar had gone on to take the bar exam, but Shiroyama had known early on that he would not pursue a career in law either. What had that young and green twenty-two-year-old been thinking when he joined the corporate world after graduation? He felt he had no right to become a physician or a lawyer, professions that required a deep affection for humanity, but he figured he could take part in a capitalist economy, making a living by selling things and without having to answer to anyone. The fact that such arrogance had propelled him to take his first step as a member of society was a truth that no one beside himself knew.
Shiroyama was suited to corporate society, where sales were king and pursuit of profit ruled, and his life in business—thanks to the good fortune of coinciding with the period of rapid economic growth after the war, when sales volume practically grew on its own, and then continuing in an era when Hinode Lager was the first choice in beer, product appeal that led to the company’s market dominance—had been smooth sailing for the most part. He had spared no effort in paying visits to loyal clients; toured retail shops, bars, and restaurants with their distributors’ employees; handled everything from incidental tasks to consultations with precision; and in order to keep his pride in check he kept his attention keenly focused on the day-to-day figures—it was a time when, so long as he did all these things, his sales performance would without fail rise above that of his colleagues. His true sales skills, ingenuity, or creativity had never been called into question; he did not possess shrewdness, talent, or even so much as a striking character; and still, sales machine that he was—with no real understanding of the fundamentals of business—he had escalated through the ranks. Though confounded by the harsh reality and at the mercy of human resources and management, before he knew it he was sales manager, branch manager, manager of the beer division, and, finally, president.
To manufacture something, to sell it, to function as a company—what did all these things mean? He was well past forty before he finally began to consider the meaning of product appeal and sales acumen. It was around this time—with the second oil crisis in 1979 and the Plaza Accord of 1985 finally inflicting their tolls, and changes looming for the future of Japan’s economy and society—when he had struggled to envision the prospects for the Japanese beer business, and privately he had started to lose confidence in himself. Yet the reason he could afford to lose himself in such leisurely concerns was precisely because, throughout the late seventies and early eighties, the strong economy and improving quality of civic life had sustained increasing beer sales.
It had been at that particular moment that Shiroyama had decided to reflect upon his personal misgi
vings, which were worthless to the company. When their share of the market had begun to slip as a result of their failure to adapt to shifts in consumer behavior and their late start in both the race for new products and the company’s need for a structural shakeup, what had he done, as head of the beer division? Despite being aware of all the issues that needed to be handled, had he failed to summon the appropriate sense of crisis, being pressured by near-term sales figures and lacking the ability to propel the company forward? When this same man was then promoted to president in a personnel shuffle meant to shore up the beer division, he had sworn to himself that he would ensure shareholders’ profit and employees’ livelihood, now and in the future—such was his straightforward and clear sense of duty and responsibility as manager of the company. Had he not compensated for the creativity and volition he lacked with this notion of duty, he could never have taken on the role of president.
And when he considered what was necessary in order to fulfill his duty of securing the company’s current and future profits, the answer had come to him easily. One solution was the radical reform of their production and distribution lines, as well as of the rigid structure endemic to a large company like Hinode; another solution was to cultivate their key products in order to strengthen their foundation. The future of the beer industry itself had plateaued, and if he hoped to bequeath Hinode’s assets to the next century in which the ongoing contraction of domestic manufacturers was all but guaranteed, there was no choice but to diversify. In order to generate the capital needed to make such diversification a reality, he needed to create one more stable, lucrative product—a keystone as basic as miso or soy sauce. To bring a second Hinode lager out into the world—this had been Shiroyama’s aspiration when he had taken over as president.
Lady Joker, Volume 1 Page 37