The first time I voluntarily spent money to buy books was in November 1990.
That day, wages were paid, and the debt management company deducted a large portion as usual.
I separated rent and food expenses from the remaining money, and finally took three thousand yen from it.
My wife watched me put the money into my pocket and asked, "Drinking?"
I said I was buying books.
She stared at me for a long time.
"You?"
I was somewhat irritated.
"I used to read books too."
She nodded and continued bowing her head to pick vegetables.
"Oh."
I would rather she had a fight with me.
That afternoon, I took the train to Jinbocho.
I had been there before, accompanying people to buy first editions and picking out several beautifully bound complete sets for the main family.
Back then, when I entered a bookstore, the first things I looked at were the spine and the price, and as for what was written inside, it was often not important at all.
This time, I stood in the second-hand bookstore for over two hours.
I ended up buying five books.
"Basics of Cost Calculation," "Production Management," "Introduction to Logistics Management," "Corporate Financial Analysis," and another copy of "Commercial Contract Practice" whose edges were curled from being thumbed through by the previous owner.
When the bookstore owner helped me pack them into a bag, he casually asked, "Is the company having you take further studies?"
I thought about it.
"Sort of."
After returning to Minami-Senju, I spread those five books out on the low table.
The room was still six tatami mats in size.
My wife's clothes were hanging by the window, radishes were simmering on the kerosene stove, and the repayment statement sent by the debt management company was still placed at the corner of the table.
In the past, I had used a desk larger than this entire room in the Osaka office, but now, to read a book, I first had to move the soy sauce bottle to the floor.
I started with "Basics of Cost Calculation."
The very first page made me feel somewhat embarrassed.
Of course I had seen many things inside.
Direct material costs, direct labor costs, manufacturing overhead.
In the past, the finance section would send similar figures to my desk every month.
I looked at the total amount, the year-on-year comparison, and the profit margin; whichever figure was higher than the budget, I would call the department manager over and ask why.
I always thought this was called management.
Now, looking back from the first page, I realized that in the past, I rarely pursued the second layer.
Why did labor costs increase?
Why did overtime increase?
After the yield rate dropped, how many man-hours did the extra rework actually consume?
If a batch of raw materials lay in the warehouse for seven more days, besides taking up space, how much cash would it lock up?
Those department managers back then would tell me the reasons.
It is just that after listening, I would usually only ask one question.
"Can it be brought down next month?"
Thinking of this, I took a pencil and wrote a sentence on the edge of the page.
——Why?
Later, this word was written more and more often.
When I went to work at the warehouse, I started carrying a palm-sized notebook.
When a truck was twenty minutes late, I used to only scold the driver.
Now I would record where he set off from, what time he finished loading, and which few places along the way were most prone to traffic jams.
When a batch of cement sat in the storehouse for half a month, I would go and ask who ordered it, which construction site it was originally prepared to be sent to, and why the project was suspended.
After the night shift lost three people, how much the outbound shipping speed dropped, I would also record.
One day, the foreman saw me squatting next to the pallet writing things and asked if I was preparing to go to the Labor Standards Inspection Office to report him.
I handed him the notebook.
He flipped through two pages, his expression becoming increasingly strange.
"Tanaka, what are you recording these for?"
"I want to see why the wrong goods are always shipped out recently."
"Is there any need to look? There are fewer people, that is why."
"Last month we also had two fewer people, and it was not this serious."
He flipped through a few more pages.
The next day, he threw the shift schedule to me.
"Since you are so idle, you make the schedule."
The first time I scheduled it, it was terrible.
I put the three most proficient people in the unloading area, thinking this could increase the inbound speed.
As a result, when shipping out in the afternoon, the newly arrived workers could not find the cargo locations, and four trucks blocked the entrance together.
The foreman stood there and cursed at me for a full five minutes.
I did not reply a single word.
Returning home at night, I redrew the daytime shift schedule and discovered that the real problem was very simple.
The most valuable people in the warehouse were not the ones who carried things the fastest at all.
They knew which batch of goods was placed where, which customer would definitely urge them in the afternoon, and which driver said he was not in a rush with his mouth, but would actually rush into the office and slam the table ten minutes late.
These experiences would not appear on the payroll.
But if one person was missing, the site would fall into chaos.
I wrote this matter into the notebook and added a sentence underneath:
——You can not just look at wages.
The second month, the foreman let me schedule again.
This time there was no traffic jam.
Suddenly I felt that compared to sitting in the office in the past and listening to a group of department managers report to me, this feeling was much more interesting.
Later, my job changed again.
I was already too lazy to ask why.
The debt management company called to say that a cold storage warehouse in Chiba was short of people, the salary was a bit higher, and asked if I was willing to go over.
I only asked one question: "Whose?"
The other side of the phone paused for a moment.
"Jointly invested by Saionji Logistics."
I smiled.
"Understood."
The other person probably did not understand what I was smiling at.
Nor did I explain.
What the cold storage warehouse taught me was different from an ordinary warehouse.
If a box of clothes was kept ten days longer, it would at most occupy a spot.
If a box of fish was kept ten days longer, it might have to be thrown away.
Temperature, time, loss, turnover—after these things were put on the same chart for the first time, I discovered that the two words "inventory" could actually have so many meanings.
Later still, I went to a central kitchen.
That place was even more exaggerated.
Making an extra thousand bento boxes in the morning, if they could not be sold at noon, they would turn into trash by the afternoon.
But making a thousand fewer, when the shelves were empty during lunch break, the loss was not just the money for that thousand bento boxes.
Customers would walk into the neighboring shop.
Tomorrow he might continue to go next door.
When I used to manage factories, I always felt that the higher the output, the better.
Now I began to understand that the moment certain things were made, they were already starting to lose money.
After that, the books I bought became more and more numerous.
My wife finally could not help asking me: "Are you preparing to take university entrance exams?"
I said what university entrance exams would someone in their forties be taking.
"Then what are you doing reading until one o'clock every day?"
"I did not learn it in the past."
She was patching the cuffs of my work clothes; upon hearing these words, her needle paused for a second.
"What is the use of learning it now?"
I could not answer for a moment.
Actually, I did not know either.
I no longer had a factory, no position, and even my name was just borrowed.
Even if I figured all these things out, the next morning I would still have to take the train to the warehouse to count inventory.
But I just wanted to figure it out.
Perhaps it was because I had already lost once.
After a person loses too miserably, they always want to know where exactly they lost.
So I continued to read.
Finance, production, logistics, contracts.
Where I could not understand, I would write it down and go to the library on Sunday to look for materials.
Sometimes I would even deliberately use the company I worked for to calculate.
How many trips a refrigerated truck made a day was the most cost-effective, to what extent a store's inventory should be suppressed, why a construction site would rather pay a little more in material costs than let key equipment stop for a day.
Slowly, those unrelated jobs in the past began to connect together.
Construction required materials.
Materials required warehouses.
Warehouses required transportation.
Transportation ultimately had to enter factories, stores, and restaurants.
The money sold by the stores would flow back into the hands of suppliers along the settlement system.
I had wandered around these industries of Saionji for several years, yet surprisingly, it was not until now that I saw the true relationship between them for the first time.
It was also from this time on that I understood Satsuki less and less.
Or rather, I felt more and more that I had never truly understood her in the past.
At the very beginning, I always thought the Osaka factory was just a setup.
She knew the yen would appreciate, so she pushed me to the front, let me bear the failure, and then took the opportunity to take back the split family industries.
This certainly made sense.
But when I recalled the events of that year one by one, many places began to feel strange again.
Why did she insist on making me sign the "Independent Management Agreement"?
What did I want most at that time?
Power.
I felt that Shuichi interfered too much, and felt that the main family held shares yet did not give me complete operational freedom.
Satsuki, of all people, gave me all the freedom.
And let me know for the first time that responsibility followed freedom.
That contract with triple default compensation was the same.
She had reminded me.
I did not listen.
Because at that time I could only see the total order amount.
As for why the main family truly did not fill in a single penny for me later?
In the past I thought this was heartlessness.
Thinking about it now, if Shuichi had given me the money back then, what would I have done?
Probably find another project.
Borrow another sum of money.
Then tell everyone that this time was just bad luck, and next time I would definitely turn things around.
Holding a pencil, I wrote up to here on the paper and suddenly stopped for a long time.
It was raining outside the window.
My wife was already asleep, and the kerosene stove was also extinguished.
In the six-tatami-mat room, only the desk lamp was still lit.
For the first time, a thought I would never have believed before popped into my head.
Could Satsuki have known back then that I had to fall this heavily?
Once this thought appeared, many things suddenly became smooth.
The construction site let me know what a project plan ultimately relied on to be completed.
The warehouse let me know inventory and turnover.
Distribution let me know time.
Stores let me know customers.
The central kitchen let me know loss.
I even spent three months in a small machinery factory that resumed work after bankruptcy, watching with my own eyes how the new management got a production line that had been stopped for half a year running again.
Six years.
Job after job was changed.
The time for each was not long.
And each time it just happened to let me see a little something I had not seen before.
If it was just to make me pay off debts, was it necessary to be this troublesome?
Staring at those books on the table that had already been thumbed old, an indescribable feeling slowly arose in my heart.
Perhaps...
These jobs were not just jobs from the very beginning.
Soon I felt again that I was overthinking.
Satsuki was only twelve years old back then.
Even if she was smart, could she possibly have arranged six years ago which warehouse and which book I would be reading today?
But this rebuttal only lasted a few seconds.
Because the target was Satsuki.
That was Satsuki, after all.
Suddenly I felt that it did not seem entirely impossible.
Over these past few years, I watched Saionji grow bigger and bigger from the newspapers.
I had moved their building materials with my own eyes, transported their clothes, organized their food, and also seen trucks bearing the Saionji Logistics logo enter the station punctually every early morning.
Outsiders only saw Saionji buying a company today and building a warehouse tomorrow.
In the past, I would only look at it that way too.
The more I understood now, the more terrifying I felt it was.
Those industries rarely existed independently.
When clothing sales increase, warehouses and logistics grow alongside them; produce from farms enters central kitchens, then goes into convenience stores; after the construction company gets a project, materials, transport, settlements, and labor move in sync with it.
Even when all of Tokyo was busy buying up land, Saionji had already begun selling.
By the time others realized they were running out of money, Saionji happened to have cash on hand.
I used to think Satsuki was just very good at making money.
Only later did I realize that the phrase "good at making money" could not explain her at all.
She always seemed to see several steps ahead of everyone else.
What hurt me the most was that when I was finally barely able to understand one or two of those steps, I realized she had probably seen right through me six years ago.
My greed.
My arrogance.
My reliance on the main family.
And how I shouted about independence all day, yet never considered who would take responsibility if I failed.
She picked me apart, piece by piece.
Sitting there, I suddenly let out a laugh.
My wife was awakened by me and raised her head from under the covers.
"What is wrong with you now?"
"It is nothing."
"Laughing to yourself in the middle of the night is creepy."
She turned over and soon fell back asleep.
But I did not close the book for a long time.
Because for the first time, I felt I might have understood why Satsuki did what she did back then.
She was saving me.
Even I found this conclusion absurd.
But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.
And then there were those debts.
I had deliberately avoided thinking about this in the past.
Back in Osaka, loan sharks had splashed red paint on our door and blocked my wife's path home after work.
After I fled to Tokyo, I slept lightly for the first few months, waking up whenever anyone in the hallway stopped outside the door.
But later, those people suddenly stopped coming.
The debts were still there.
Deducted as usual every month, and the interest had not vanished into thin air.
It was just that the debt collectors became a properly registered asset management company.
If I was a few days late, they would send a reminder letter; if my wages were low, we could negotiate to make up for it next month.
The most severe incident was when I injured my back at a construction site and missed work for half a month; they even agreed to spread that month's payment over the next six months.
Before, I just thought the debt had been resold.
Thinking about it now, how could there be such a coincidence?
Why would those people who actually dared to block doors and splash paint suddenly be willing to sell the debt to a company that only sends letters?
And who had the power to make them willing to sell?
The answer seemed to become clearer and clearer.
And my wife's job.
And every time I lost a job, the next job would always appear right when I needed it most.
I suddenly remembered Shuichi.
I had not called him big brother in my heart for many years.
After going bankrupt, I always felt he chose his daughter and discarded his younger brother.
But if Saionji really did all these things, who would be the first person to think of me?
Satsuki might not bother with such trivial matters.
She would probably only give a set of guidelines.
Not allowed to pay off my debts for me.
Not allowed to let me return to the main family.
Nor allowed to let me actually die outside, because that would be a hassle.
Shuichi would handle the rest.
The more I thought about it, the more it felt like something they would do.
I had even worked out the division of labor between the two of them.
Thinking up to this point, I suddenly felt I had been living rather obtusely these past few years.
The Saionji Family had never truly discarded me.
They just had not told me.
I looked down at my notebook, which was already filled with writing.
The first page was still the wages and debts I recorded five years ago.
Later, terms like warehouses, construction sites, materials, turnover rate, wastage, and contracts began to appear.
Further back was a relational diagram of the Saionji business empire that I had drawn myself.
The lines were drawn very messily.
Some parts were even blatantly wrong.
But at least it proved one thing.
I was starting to be able to understand a little bit.
As for how much Satsuki actually hoped I would see, I did not know.
Perhaps this was the exam question.
When this thought surfaced, I surprisingly accepted it quite naturally.
I even began to wonder when this so-called "trial" would come to an end.
Would it be when all debts were paid off?
Or one day, when I could truly understand a corporate financial report and no longer just stare at the profit?
Or maybe starting from scratch, then returning by being acquired?
Or perhaps when I finally qualified to stand before her again, and she asked me in person—
"Uncle, do you understand it this time?"
Thinking of this scene, I laughed to myself.
If that day really came, I would probably still find her annoying.
It is just that I would not be able to hate her anymore.
After 1991, the frequency with which I changed jobs slowed down.
I stayed at a company responsible for Kanto region deliveries for half a year.
At first, it was just field work, but later I was responsible for scheduling and dispatching a night shift.
Then, the supervisor took sick leave, and I temporarily filled in for him for two weeks.
For the first time, I had an office again.
It was very small.
Inside, there was only a metal desk, two filing cabinets, and a window facing the parking lot.
On my first day sitting in it, I did not feel happy.
I first brought in all the vehicle dispatch records from the past three months.
I spent three nights re-planning the routes, merging several routes that often returned empty, and reassigning two veteran employees who knew the clients best to manage the night dispatches, which were most prone to errors.
In the third week, empty vehicle trips decreased.
Overtime work also decreased a bit.
After the supervisor returned, he looked at the report for a long time.
"Tanaka."
"Hmm?"
"Were you really just a Section Chief before?"
I remembered Sakamoto on that construction site many years ago.
"More or less."
He clearly did not believe it.
Nor did I explain.
Returning home that evening, I bought a very cheap bottle of sake.
When my wife saw it, she asked me, "How come you are willing to treat yourself to a drink today?"
"The work went well."
"Did you get a raise?"
"Not yet."
"Then what is there to celebrate?"
Though she said that, she still went to the kitchen and sliced a small dish of pickled radish.
I poured myself a cup.
The sake was very ordinary.
But I felt far more comfortable drinking it than those hundreds of thousands of yen bottles I had in the past.
Because this time, nobody praised me just because my surname was Saionji.
The work was genuinely accomplished.
I suddenly began to look forward to the next job.
If Shuichi really was still arranging things, where would he send me next time?
If Satsuki really was watching, what else did she think I was lacking?
This line of thinking was probably laughable.
But I had already waited six years.
Waiting a bit longer did not seem to matter much.
Until one day in June...
That day I finished my night shift half an hour later than usual.
It had just rained in Minami-Senju, and the ground in the alley was still wet.
I walked toward home carrying an old canvas bag filled with books and a lunchbox, and when I was still a few dozen meters away from that old wooden house, my footsteps suddenly slowed down.
Parked at the entrance of the alley was a black Toyota Century.
Cars like this rarely drove in here.
The body was too wide, occupying almost half the road.
The driver stood beside the car, wearing a dark suit.
I stood there and watched for a few seconds.
It was definitely here for me, of that I was certain.
Surprisingly, there was not much shock in my heart.
I just felt that it had finally come.
The rear door opened.
A person I had not seen in six years stepped out from inside.
He was a bit older than in my memory.
There was more white in his hair, though the contours of his face remained the same as before.
His expensive dark suit looked completely out of place in the damp, narrow alley of Minami-Senju, yet he stood there, looking at me from a few dozen meters away.
The canvas bag in my hand suddenly felt heavy.
Inside was a copy of Corporate Financial Analysis, a textbook on logistics management, and half a rice ball left unfinished today.
I looked down at myself.
An old jacket, work trousers, and dust from the warehouse still on the shoes.
Six years ago, when I was dragged out of the Saionji Family's front gate, I probably never dreamt in my wildest dreams that our next meeting would be like this.
Shuichi did not walk over.
Nor did I move.
Raindrops fell one by one from the edge of the eaves.
After a long time, I realized that I had already called out in my heart that title I had not used in years.