“What do you think?” he asked.
“He sounds like a good man.”
He nodded in agreement.
“I think so, too. I’m sure that when things fell apart, all kinds of thoughts went through his head. He probably despised my parents and felt disillusioned by my sister’s betrayal. Looking back, after three years, he could see that things had gone the way they needed to go. But he knew that realization wasn’t enough. If he never apologized, my sister’s heart would never be able to heal. He couldn’t be sure she hadn’t taken all the blame upon herself for double-crossing him, the man she loved. So he finally wrote this letter. When I read it, I understood where he was coming from and gave it to my sister. We had no reason to tell our parents.”
Harumi returned the letter to its envelope. “And your sister kept this with her.”
“Seems that way. When I found this in her desk after she died, my heart skipped a beat. I realized she had been single all her life because her bond to him was never truly severed. She never loved another man. Instead, she devoted everything to Marumitsuen. But why do you think she built the building here? My family had no connection to this place. My sister never told me, but my theory is that it’s close to his hometown. It’s not like I know his exact address, but based on conversations I’ve had, I’ve narrowed it down to this area.”
Harumi nodded solemnly and sighed with admiration. She thought it was a shame they couldn’t have wound up together, but she was envious of Akiko for being able to love one man so endlessly.
“She promised me she’d pull some strings up in the sky and make sure we were taken care of. I wonder if she’s watching over him, too. Mind you, if he’s still alive.” His face was serious.
“Yeah, I wonder,” Harumi said, being polite.
There was one thing she was stuck on. The man’s name. Yuji Namiya. How many Namiyas could there be?
In her correspondence with Mr. Namiya, she had never learned his first name. But according to Shizuko, he was pretty far along in years by 1980. It wasn’t out of the question that he was the same age as the man in Mr. Minazuki’s story.
“Something the matter?” he asked her.
“No, no, I’m fine. Thanks.” Harumi waved her hand in front of her face.
“So anyway, I figured, hey, my sister put her heart and soul into this place to keep it going; the least we can do is rebuild it,” he concluded.
“I think that’s a noble mission. You have my full support.” Harumi gave him back the letter.
She saw the script on the envelope again. Ms. Akiko Minazuki. The hand was conspicuously different from what she had seen in the letters she received from the Namiya General Store.
It must have been a bizarre coincidence.
Harumi decided not to ruminate on it anymore.
8
Seconds after Harumi woke up, she sneezed magnificently. Shivering, she yanked the terry-cloth blanket up over her shoulders. The air-conditioning was on full blast. The night before had been so hot that she had clicked it down a few degrees colder than usual, but she forgot to turn it back before going to sleep. Her most recent read was abandoned by her pillow. Her lamp was still on from the night before.
Her clock said it was a few minutes before seven. Her alarm was set to ring then, but she almost never let it. Most days, she woke before it and switched it off.
Today was no different. She reached to click it off and rolled out of bed in a smooth motion. Rays from the summer sun sliced through her curtains. It was going to be a hot one.
She used the bathroom and went to the sink to wash up. She stood in front of the large mirror, surprised by her own reflection. She’d felt a certain lightness in her body that made her feel as if she were back in her twenties, but the face she saw in the mirror belonged to a woman at fifty-one.
Harumi looked quizzically at her reflection. She figured it had been the dream that made her body feel this way. She had a gauzy, evanescent recollection of having dreamed of being young again. And Mr. Minazuki, the director of Marumitsuen, was in the dream, too.
Since she had an inkling of what had inspired that dream, it wasn’t really that bizarre. What was unfortunate was that she couldn’t remember it in detail.
She looked at her face and nodded. The modest wrinkles and the slackness of her skin were a matter of course. Proof she’d seized the reins in life. Nothing to be ashamed of.
She washed her face and did her makeup, then checked a few things on her tablet over breakfast. She had bought herself a sandwich and a vegetable juice the night before. She couldn’t remember the last time she cooked. Evenings, she generally ate out.
Once she was ready, she left for work, same time as always. Her car was a domestic hybrid, compact and manageable. She was sick of foreign luxury cars, which she found unnecessarily big. She drove herself to the office in Roppongi, arriving a little after half past eight.
She parked her car in the garage of the ten-story building of her office and headed toward the elevator.
“Ms. Muto, Ms. Muto!” a man’s voice wailed.
She turned and saw a chubby man in a gray polo waddling after her. His face was familiar, but she couldn’t place him.
“Ms. Muto, please, I beg of you, give us one more chance at the Sweets Pavilion.”
“Sweets? …Oh.” This man was the president of a confectionary company specializing in manju, a floury Japanese bun filled with bean paste.
“Give us another month. Is that in any way possible? We’ll prove we have what it takes.” He bowed too deeply. His thin hair was plastered across his scalp in black bands like a barcode. His head had a sheen not unlike the confectionary glimmer of one of his company’s chestnut manju.
“Are you forgetting our agreement? If a shop ranks lowest in the polls for two consecutive months, we reserve the right to ask them to leave. It’s in the contract.”
“I understand that. That’s why I’m here, begging you, to hold off for just one month.”
“That won’t be possible,” retorted Harumi. “We’ve already secured another vendor.”
She sauntered off.
“But maybe you could…” He would not relent. “We’ll show you we can do it. I’m confident we can. Give us a chance. If we pull out now, our business is done for. Just give us one more chance.”
Alerted to the disturbance, a security guard came over. “What seems to be the trouble?”
“This man has no business here. Kick him out.”
The color of the guard’s face changed. “Understood.”
“No, wait, I have business here. We’re business partners! Ms. Muto, wait, Ms. Muto!”
She could hear him whining until she entered the elevator lobby, and the doors closed.
The offices of Little Dog Inc. occupied the fifth and sixth floors of the building. The company had moved here nine years ago from their old office in Shinjuku. Her office was on the sixth floor.
She checked a few more things on her computer and settled in for the day. Her in-box was full of useless messages. Her spam filter was supposed to automatically sift out the trash, but there were still plenty of emails that were essentially pointless.
Responding to a handful of messages took her until past nine. She picked up the receiver and dialed an extension. The person on the other line picked up right away.
“Good morning.” It was Mr. Sotojima, the executive director.
“Could you come up for a moment?”
“Absolutely.”
Sotojima was there a minute later. He was wearing a short-sleeve button-up. Just like last year, they were cutting back on the air-conditioning.
Harumi told him about her encounter in the parking lot.
“That old guy? The rep was saying he talked her ear off, too. I didn’t think he’d try to appeal directly to you.”
“What do you mean? You told me you talked it over with them and they agreed to pack up.”
“I was under that impression, too, but I guess he ca
n’t let go. It sounds like their main location isn’t doing well. Things are looking pretty bad for them.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, but we’re a business, too.”
“You’re absolutely right. It’s none of our concern,” Sotojima replied coolly.
Two years back, a developer who was renovating a shopping mall on the coast contacted Harumi’s company with a project. They had an event space and wanted to make better use of it. The original idea had been to use it for small concerts and the like, but it wasn’t being used effectively.
They did some research and analysis, and they proposed turning the space into a mecca of sorts for confectionary companies. All the sweets shops and cafés scattered throughout the mall would centralize, and the rest of the space would be filled out with satellite shops of vendors from throughout Japan. This was the idea behind the Sweets Pavilion. To date, there were thirty shops and counting.
Thanks to an aggressive campaign of ads in women’s magazines and television commercials, the project had been a great success. Any shop who gained a reputation here could expect to experience a huge boost in sales at its original location.
But they couldn’t just set things up and walk away. If you don’t change it up, people get bored. The most important thing is to garner repeat customers. Which is why they periodically changed the lineup of shops. They polled visitors at the food court and warned shops if their results were consistently unfavorable. On occasion, they asked a business to leave. This kept everyone on edge month to month. Every neighboring store was a rival.
That president of the manju store had his main shop in her hometown. When they were putting Sweets Pavilion together, she invited him to join on the belief that “home comes first.” They were thrilled to participate. But their bestselling product was a fairly nondescript chestnut manju, a knob of sweet dough with a sweeter center. It wasn’t good enough. In recent surveys, their shop had consistently come in last place. They were setting a poor standard for the other shops. Pity wasn’t part of the equation. That was what made this business hard.
“And what about that 3-D anime?” Harumi asked. “Can we use it?”
Sotojima grimaced.
“I saw the demo reel. At a tech level, it’s not there yet. It won’t look good on a tiny smartphone. They said they’re going to make a beta version. I’d wait till then to see it.”
“That’s fine; I was only curious.” Harumi smiled. “Thanks. That should be good for today. Do you have any updates?”
“No, I’ve already emailed you about anything pressing. There was one other thing, though.” Sotojima gave her a meaningful look. “About that children’s home.”
“That’s an independent venture. It has nothing to do with the company.”
“I know, but that’s because I work for you. From the outside, it won’t necessarily look that way.”
“Did something come up?”
Sotojima worked his lips. “It appears someone contacted us about it, asking what our company plans to do with the building.”
Harumi frowned and scratched the roots of her bangs.
“Crap. How’d it come to this?”
“Being president makes you an easy target. Even when you’re doing something normal, it won’t look that way. Please keep that in mind.”
“Is that some kind of snide remark?”
“Not at all. I’m being realistic,” said Sotojima with aplomb.
“Okay. That’s all.”
“Excuse me.” With that, he left the room.
Harumi got up and stood by the window. They were only on the sixth floor. It wasn’t so high up. They’d had the option to move into a higher set of units, but Harumi passed. She didn’t want to get overly self-confident. But when she looked outside at the cityscape, it still reminded her how far she’d come.
The events of the past twenty years washed over her. She knew that it was more important than ever for a business to keep up with the times. Sometimes that meant the whole world had to be turned upside down.
In March 1990, to pull down absurd real estate costs, the Ministry of Finance imposed restrictions on loans for all financial institutions. This was a hard line, and it was unavoidable. Land had become so expensive that the average family man had given up on owning his own home.
Harumi was not alone in doubting whether such a stratagem would actually pull down the price of land. The media had unanimously declared the directive “a drop in the bucket,” saying nothing would make prices drop overnight.
But these restrictions dealt a body blow to the economy.
The value of stocks in the Japanese market took a downward turn. Then in August, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait caused oil prices to shoot up and spurred a recession.
And eventually, the price of property did begin to fall.
There were still a few pots of gold scattered around. One-off real estate miracles. A lot of people maintained that things would turn around. It wasn’t until 1992 that everyone accepted that the carnival was over.
Harumi had been briefed by her letter from Mr. Namiya and made it out in time. She knew ahead of the game that the era for flipping real estate was over, and she divested from all her investments by 1989—stocks, equity memberships, everything. She had won at Old Maid. Over the course of the Japanese asset price bubble, she had turned a profit of several hundred million yen.
By the time the world had wised up, Harumi was already putting out new feelers. The Namiya General Store had predicted the advent of an information network that would connect personal computers with portable telephones. A cellular phone in every pocket, and a computer in every home. If he was right about this, too, she could not afford to miss out.
Harumi expected that increasing computer connectivity would usher in an era the world had only dreamed of. She did her best to stay informed and up-to-date.
In 1995, as the Internet was beginning to become a fixture of their lives, Harumi hired a handful of tech majors to work for her. She set each of them up with a computer and tasked them with figuring out ways to utilize the Internet. These innovators spent entire days in front of their computers.
Office Little Dog made its first foray into web-related business designing home pages. For starters, they created a website for themselves to advertise their services. The newspaper picked them up for a feature story, and the response was superb: a steady stream of queries from companies and individuals alike who wanted to have their own home pages. This was years before the Internet was universally and constantly accessible, but the recession gave people high hopes for new modes of advertising. Jobs kept rolling in.
In the ensuing years, Office Little Dog was conspicuously successful. Web-based advertising, sales, game distribution, you name it. Everything they touched turned to gold.
At the dawn of the new millennium, Harumi began to think about branching into other areas and founded a consulting department. What motivated her was a message from an acquaintance who ran a restaurant that was unable to turn a profit, barely scraping by.
Harumi was already a federally certified small business management consultant. She assigned dedicated staff to the project and conducted a thorough analysis. Their conclusion was that advertising on its own would not suffice; the business would have to be overhauled and rebuilt on a stronger foundation. This meant a whole new menu and interior.
When the restaurant implemented their suggestions and reopened for business, it experienced unprecedented success. Three months following their reopening, it was hard to even book a table.
Harumi was convinced there was good money in consulting, but she needed to take it all the way. It was easy to pick apart the root cause of poor performance. But to make the business viable, they would need to demonstrate an ability to take drastic measures and yield results. Harumi headhunted talent. At times her team played a proactive role in product development for clients, and at times they recommended heartless layoffs.
Propped up by the twin pillars of their IT an
d consulting departments, the newly dubbed Little Dog Inc. continued to grow. In retrospect, her success was preternatural. Harumi became renowned as an “industry visionary.” This was true to a degree, but without that letter from the Namiya General Store, things never would have gone so well. Which is why she wanted to give back, if she ever had the chance.
And along those lines, she couldn’t forget everything Marumitsuen had done for her.
She heard rumors that their management had fallen into disarray that year. The rumors turned out to be true. In 2003, when Mr. Minazuki died, his eldest son kept the home running on the side, but when his transportation business fell into the red, there was little room for keeping Marumitsuen afloat.
Harumi contacted them as soon as she heard the news. As it turned out, Mr. Minazuki’s eldest son was the director in name only; his vice-director, Mr. Kariya, was the real one running the show. Harumi told him to let her know if there was anything she could do and even offered to invest if necessary.
But he was not enthused. He even made a point of telling her that he preferred not to rely on others.
Frustrated, Harumi tried asking the Minazuki family directly if they would let her take over managing the home, but she got the same dismissive reaction: “Kariya is already taking care of it.”
Harumi did some research on Marumitsuen and discovered that in recent years the number of full-time staff had been halved. In turn, the number of temporary employees with dubious titles was concerningly high. To make matters worse, she found no evidence that any of these people had actually worked there.
She put it all together. Following Mr. Minazuki’s death, the children’s home had become involved in fraudulent activity, most likely false claims for subsidies. She suspected Kariya was the principal offender. No doubt he had refused her offer to help manage the building to keep the truth from coming out.
It became increasingly difficult to look away. She had to do something about what was happening. Harumi began to see herself as the only one who could save Marumitsuen.
9
Harumi acquired this information almost by accident. Punching a search into her newly upgraded smartphone, she stumbled upon a result that said “the Namiya General Store—One-Night Special.”
The Miracles of the Namiya General Store Page 27