Nigel Findley

by Out Of Nippon

  The switchboard operator hesitated. “What is this concerning?” he asked carefully. “Detective Yuhi is exceptionally busy.”

  “This is Nikki Carlson. I need to talk to him about the Kasigi murder.” For an instant, Nikki closed her eyes. Murder. It was painful to even say the word.

  But it had been the right thing to say. The operator’s hesitation vanished. “Please hold,” he told her, “I will connect you immediately.”

  Yuhi picked up the phone almost immediately. “Miss Carlson,” he said in careful English. “How can [ help you? Have you remembered something we should know?”

  “No, I’m sorry,” she answered, then went on to briefly explain her concerns about the memorial service. “So I would like to know how I can contact Kasigi-san’s family,” she concluded. “Can you help me?”

  She heard Yuhi sigh — a sound that she’d come to realize was one of commiseration, a sign that the hearer understood and shared the speaker’s emotions. Then the detective spoke in Japanese. “So sorry, Carlson -san,” he said — and his voice sounded as though he were sorry. “I am desolated to tell you that I cannot help you.”

  Nikki was silent for a moment. To push, would be rude. But she couldn’t just back off on something this important to her. “I understand that there may be regulations,” she said carefully, “but I really have to know.”

  If Yuhi was insulted by her insistence, his voice didn’t show it. “You misunderstand me, Carlson-san. Yes, there are regulations, but I have some leeway when it comes to waiving them. I simply have no access to the information you desire. To my knowledge, nobody in the department does.”

  That set Nikki back for a moment. “Then how did you notify his next of kin?”

  “That task was left to his corporation.”

  Yes, Nikki thought, that makes a convoluted kind of sense. The corporation, the all-knowing, bountiful corporation. The employee’s home and refuge.

  “But they must have claimed the body,” she thought aloud. “Did anyone claim the body?”

  Yuhi hesitated. (More regulations, Nikki thought.) “Yes,” he answered finally. “The body was claimed.”

  “Who claimed it?”

  “I cannot tell you that,” Yuhi said slowly, “on that I have no leeway whatsoever” — a long pause — “but I can tell you it was not his family. And it was not his corporation.” He sighed once more. “I wish I could be of more help.”

  Nikki was silent, a little puzzled. For an instant, she felt as though something important had just happened, but that she’d missed it. Then the feeling was gone, and nothing was left but sadness.

  “Domoarrigatogozaimas,Yuhi-san,” she said. “Thank you for your help.” Gently, she hung up the phone, then bent forward until her forehead touched the cool desktop.

  * X- *

  The official memorial service for Toshikazu Kasigi took place at eleven the next morning, in the large auditorium on the Nagara Building’s ground floor.

  Nikki was one of the first there, sitting near the back watching as the other attendees filed in. She recognized most of them — the other members of her workgroup, of course, plus others from the Genetic Research Division. Then there were some she didn’t know, presumably from other divisions within Nagara. There were a few middle managers, but not many. She looked for Suganama —maybe he knows how to contact the Kasigi family, she thought — but didn’t see him.

  Soon there were about a hundred people there. A good turn-out, Nikki thought, and a testament to how many lives Toshikazu had touched. Perhaps unfortunately, the auditorium seated over five hundred, making the attendance look meager in comparison to the number of empty seats.

  At eleven o’clock on the dot, Agatamori Eichiro — senior manager of Toshikazu’s division, and thus the leader of the service — walked up onto the stage and took his place at the podium.

  Nikki wasn’t sure what to expect, but if she’d envisioned some kind of Shinto or Buddhist religious ceremony she was disappointed. There were no religious overtones whatsoever, no prayers or religious symbols or hymns. It was as secular as any business meeting she’d ever attended. Eichiro spoke for maybe five minutes, describing Toshikazu’s achievements, his strengths, and his value to the corporation …

  And that was it. He closed with a simple, “Nagara Corporation is diminished by his departure,” and then he walked from the stage. With the corporate anthem playing softly in the background, people started to file out. The memorial service was over.

  Nikki remained seated for a few minutes. It just doesn’t seem right, she thought. Toshikazu’s dead, and he gets no more than a speech that’s appropriate for a … a retiring employee.

  But that was the way it was in the corporations, she admitted. Emotions meant nothing. Eichiro wouldn’t have even gone to this much trouble if he hadn’t known it was necessary to bolster morale. With a sigh, she climbed to her feet, and followed the other attendees out of the auditorium.

  The elevator heading down to the sub-basement was full, but Bojo and Matsukara from Group Five squeezed themselves into a corner to make room for her. They accepted her thanks with polite nods, but kept their eyes averted and didn’t speak to her — again, presumably not intruding on her grief.

  The other occupants talked freely, however, albeit quietly. She vaguely recognized a few of them — members of her division, but assigned to other workgroups. Two of these were talking animatedly; even though they kept their voices down, their gestures and body language showed they were discussing something they considered important. Although she didn’t consciously decide to eavesdrop, Nikki found her attention inadvertently focusing on their conversation.

  “Eichiro-son is still on shaky ground,” one was saying. “Kubota-san and the rest of the board don’t trust him any more. He’ll have to do something — something dramatic — if he wants to earn his credibility back.”

  His colleague grinned knowingly. “Perhaps he’s done it already,” he said quietly. “They captured the traitor, the one who helped the wreckers. Captured, then killed him.”

  At the word “wreckers,” Nikki’s concentration fully engaged.

  The first man was amazed. “Honto?” he gasped. “Truly? He was part of Nagara?”

  “Truly,” the other confirmed.

  “And he helped the wreckers?”

  “Yes.”

  The first man shook his head in disbelief. “Traitors,” he sighed. “How can anyone become a traitor?” He paused. “But he’s dead, you say?”

  “That’s what I heard,” the second man said. “Killed when he tried to escape from the security guards who captured him.”

  “It’s only right,” the first said virtuously. “It’s what he deserved.”

  Nikki couldn’t hold her silence any longer. “Excuse me,” she said to the two men, “I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation.”

  In corporate Japan, it was often impossible not to overhear someone else’s conversation. But it was the height of rudeness to acknowledge it. A polite person would simply pretend they heard nothing, even going so far to deny it if anyone were crude enough to ask. The first man looked shocked at what he obviously considered Nikki’s uncouth behavior. The second, though, just shrugged his shoulders and rolled his eyes, as if to say, “What else could you expect from a gaijin?”

  Even though Nikki felt her cheeks burning, she pushed on. “The wreckers,” she began, “they had inside help?”

  The man who’d spoken first pointedly turned away. But his colleague at least answered her. “Yes,” he told her brusquely.

  “How?” she asked. “I mean, how do you know?”

  He shrugged. “The grapevine,” he said vaguely. “People talk.”

  “Who was he?”

  He shrugged again. But this time he didn’t say anything, he just turned away.

  Nikki sighed. The grapevine, she thought. Sometimes the grapevine picked up on important news before the managers ever had a chance to learn it through normal channels. Or
sometimes it was actually used by senior management — they’d leak some piece of information they wanted all the employees to know, without making it official.

  But the grapevine was just as efficient at transmitting falsehoods — wrong conclusions, urban myths, even outright lies. Almost as often as it was right, it was hideously off the mark. Which was the case now?

  Nikki thought it through as she walked slowly back to her lab. It didn’t seem likely that the traitor story was true, she decided. If it were so, senior management would have made some announcement about it; Eichiro would, at least, to bolster his image.

  That part of the conversation — the part discussing Eichiro — made sense to her, however. He’d still be severely shamed by the raid, and would have to do some kind of damage control … and fast. She wondered what form it would take.

  *

  It didn’t take long to find out. The next morning when she arrived at work — tired after another night of disturbing dreams — she found a message in her E-mail in-box announcing a divisional meeting. According to “the electronic message, Eichiro planned to announce sweeping organizational changes in the Genetic Research Division. Which makes sense, Nikki thought. Special Projects is gone, and my job is mainly to support Special Projects. What does that mean for me?

  For us, that is, she corrected quickly, looking around at the others in her workgroup. Although they weren’t saying anything, she could sense their mood. The message had disturbed them… as well it might. Even though Group Five had been busy even after the raid, their main raison d’atre had vanished when the charges had detonated in the Special Projects labs. There was a very real chance that Eichiro-san’s “sweeping organizational changes” would include disbanding Nikki’s workgroup.

  And what would happen to her and her people—to Omi, Ito, Toshima, Matsukara, Zakoji and Bojo? Traditionally — the way she understood it — there’d have been no doubt at all what would happen. All the members of Group Five would be reassigned within the corporation. Nobody would be let go, everybody would remain secure. The great and bountiful corporation would protect and succor its employees. Only in the case of out-and-out incompetence or misconduct would that protection be withdrawn.

  That was the way it used to work. From what Nikki had heard from colleagues — largely from Toshikazu, she remembered — things were slowly changing. As the large corporations continued to merge — becoming megflcorporations like Kanawa — some of the traditions of Japanese corporate life began to fall by the wayside. First among these was the life-long job security that many workers had come to depend on. A decade or so ago, if a merger made certain jobs redundant, the unnecessary workers would be kept on, kept working, until a new need for their skills arose, or until they could be retrained. Sure, it cost the corporations money to support unneeded workers, but that was part of the “social contract” between employer and employee.

  No longer. Just recently, when Kanawa Corporation acquired the Magnolia Station Research Park, a well-known facility dedicated to industrial and pure science research, Kanawa management decided that many support functions like payroll would be handled through the megacorporation’s central headquarters. More than fifty employees of Magnolia Station — the people who used to handle the support functions — were laid off without warning, and with only a month’s salary as severance. In America, Nikki knew, the lawsuits would have flown thick and fast. But here labor laws were very different, and the terminated employees could do little but accept it fatalistically and look for another job. Some found work, but the numerous mergers had seriously depressed the job market. All too many skilled employees had to take lower-paying work — even manual labor, the kind of grunt work the Japanese used to leave to Koreans and Chinese, and was now performed by robots and other automated devices.

  And some couldn’t find work at all. What happened to them ? Nikki wondered grimly. Did they join the half-starving underclass — the buraknmin — who eked out a living in the wooded areas of Chiyoda-Ku, or lived in cardboard boxes on the normally-pristine streets of Shinjuku? Or did they commit suicide — still a socially accepted response to failure and shame?

  If it turned out that Nikki lost her job, her pride would suffer the most. She was fairly confident that her skills would get her a similar position at one of Nagara’s competitors. Even if nobody hired her, she had enough money salted away to support her while she arranged transit back to the United States. There was no danger whatsoever that she’d find herself among the burakumin.

  No danger for her. But for the other members of her workgroup, the danger was very real. She looked at the nervous faces of her colleagues. Take Toshima, for example. He was the oldest member of Group Five, in his early fifties. A stolid worker, unimaginative and without an ounce of creativity, but reliable if he was told exactly—step by step and in excruciating detail — what he had to do. How likely was it that he’d get another job if Nagara let him go? Not very. And how likely was it that Nagara would keep him on and invest who knew how much money in retraining him? Again, not very.

  Maybe they had no reason to worry, she thought after a moment. These ideas of being laid off — in her case, going home in some kind of disgrace; in her colleagues, being forced out on the street — were just fear and paranoia talking. What evidence did they have that Eichiro’s “sweeping organizational changes” actually meant layoffs? None. Even if Eichiro had planned firings, wouldn’t he have spoken individually to the people involved? What kind of manager would announce layoffs at a divisional meeting so the people being let go heard it there for the first time?

  That made her feel a little better. But still, she was glad that the meeting was only an hour away. Nobody in her lab—or probably in the entire division—would

  get much done until the meeting was over.

  *

  The divisional meeting was scheduled to take place in one of the smaller lecture theaters on the fifth floor, not in the large auditorium where Toshikazu’s memorial service had been held. Nikki had never been in any of those lecture halls, but she was surprised that they’d be large enough for the whole Genetic Research Division.

  As she walked into the room, surrounded by a nervous knot of co-workers, she realized that size wasn’t a problem. Despite what Eichiro-san’s e-mail had implied, this wasn’t a full divisional meeting. She looked around at the people who already had their seats. Instead of the two hundred or so members of the Genetic Research Division, there were fewer than one hundred people here. She recognized most of them, even if she didn’t know them by name. Most if not all were in position similar to hers — the technicians and scientists who actually worked “in the trenches.” As far as she could see, there were none of the support people that made up the rest of the division — the word processors, the maintenance techs, the database clerks, etc. That was interesting, Nikki thought as she

  found a seat near the front. But what did it mean?

  Now she had more time to look around, she spotted some people she definitely didn’t recognize. They were sitting in a group right at the front, to the right of the low stage. They wore the same standard Nagara labcoats as most of the people in the room, so their appearance didn’t set them apart. But there was definitely something about their body language — about the way they talked only to each other and seemed to draw back from contact with the people Nikki recognized sitting around them—that definitely segregated them from everyone else.

  Without openly staring, she looked the group over. They were relatively young — ranging from Nikki’s age to late thirties, she guessed — and all men (of course!). They seemed totally relaxed — unlike everyone else in the room — as if they knew what the meeting was about—which could well be the case, she admitted. And they all had a cool, calm air about them that Nikki interpreted as confidence and competence — the former arising from the latter.

  Who are they? she wondered.

  Before she had more time to think about it, Eichiro strode up on stage — a vis
ual echo of Toshikazu’s memorial service. “Good morning, and thank you for attending,” he said brusquely.

  “As you know, the heinous acts of wreckers have interrupted the work of our colleagues in this division’s Special Projects lab.” (Nikki had to smile grimly at that. Getting yourself blown up tends to be an interruption.) “Despite the delay,” Eichiro continued, “Nagara considers the success of the Special Projects initiative to be vital. Senior management estimates that it would take as much as a year to bring the Special Projects research back on stream” — he paused for emphasis — “in the form that it was. Instead, Nagara Corporation has decided to assign additional resources to the Special Projects initiative, and to change its focus.”

  Nikki heard muffled sighs of relief from around the room. “Additional resources” were the magic words that dispelled most people’s fears. If this “SP initiative” needed additional resources, then nobody would be laid off.

  If Eichiro had heard the reaction from his audience, he didn’t acknowledge it. He went on, “The majority of the Genetic Research Division will focus its attention on bringing the original Special Projects research back on line. The remainder will dedicate their efforts to supporting a new direction of research, an entirely new and innovative approach. This new enterprise will be led by a group of highly experienced scientists transferred from Nagara’s Matsushima Bay operation.”

  So that’s who they are, Nikki thought, looking at the expressionless young men at the front of the lecture theater. She was impressed: she’d read a fair bit about the Matsushima Bay operation. Located on a manmade floating “island” off the coast of the southern island of Kyushu, it was described as the largest and the most sophisticated research facility in Japan, and praised as the originator of breakthroughs in half a dozen different fields. Nikki had to admit that the descriptions she’d read of quantum leaps in microprocessor architecture, virtual reality and X-ray cosmology could just as well have been Greek to her. But in her own areas of expertise — in microbiology and genetic engineering — she could recognize the importance of the developments coming out of Matsushima Bay. And the personnel that were assigned there — she knew them by name only, and by reputation, but there wasn’t any doubt they were the finest genetic engineers in the world, or at least in Japan.