Dragon Dance Read online

  In the last few years government influence over television had grown much stronger. According to one of Martine’s friends who worked in the industry, the TV companies had got together and agreed to bury any unpleasant topics in the middle of the early morning news. That way the morale of the nation’s workers would not be damaged ahead of a hard day’s labor.

  Today was no exception. There had been a shooting in Sendai, a bank employee critically wounded by an unknown assailant. The newsreader gave a little shake of the head, then hurried on to the high school baseball tournament. No explanation was given, no comment from the police or the bank. To Martine’s knowledge, over ten bank officials had been killed over the past two years, and many more had been attacked. The Japanese financial system had always been a maze of mirrors, but these days the risks of making a wrong turn seemed far greater than ever before.

  Martine switched off the TV and went to get her rollerblades. She was due to meet Kimura’s friend later that morning to talk about the strange e-mails she had received. Until then she could spend a few hours in the park with her sketchbook.

  Ten minutes later Martine was whizzing down the narrow, winding streets with the warm sun on her back and the chime of windbells in her ears, swerving through clusters of dawdling schoolboys, chirping “Good morning” at the old lady doing tai chi on a balcony, ducking under the railroad crossing gate just as it closed, then racing past the convenience store, the jazz coffee bar, the sushi restaurant with its fat cat sunning himself in the window, the pachinko parlor, the tiny shrine at the corner, the karaoke box, the nail parlor, the kimono [104] shop—the whole higgledy-piggledy mess that needed to be straightened out to make the economy more efficient, but which she hoped would never change.

  The park at the top of the little hill was quiet. A middle-aged man sat on a bench, reading a magazine and munching a riceball. He was wearing a clean shirt, with a polka-dot tie. At first glance you wouldn’t know that he lived in this park all year around.

  “Good morning,” he nodded to Martine.

  “It’s going to be hot today, isn’t it?”

  “Over thirty degrees, probably.”

  Martine sat down beside him to pull off her rollerblades. For a few minutes they chatted about world politics, the weather, the sumo tournament, the failure of the police to control the motorbike gangs. Then Martine pulled her sketchbook from her backpack and went to her usual place on the other side of the park. On the bench she left half-a-dozen paperback books and a box of biscuits from Fortnum and Mason.

  The measure of the depth of the crisis was not the number of homeless people, but the type. Back in the high growth era, the homeless had matted hair and mud-caked trousers held up with string. They had wandered the streets ranting at the traffic, and everyone had looked through them as if they didn’t exist.

  Then in the era of stagnation, a different kind of homeless person appeared—sad-eyed middle-aged men who had taken a wrong turn and ended up with nowhere to live and out of work. People looked through them too, but it was getting harder. They weren’t so different from everyone else.

  Two years into the crisis, and now the homeless were people of all ages and types, men and women. There were university graduates, ex-employees of major companies, young couples who had bought an apartment in the wrong area at the wrong price. You sometimes saw whole families, from grandmothers to toddlers, living in sprawling plastic tents. These were people you couldn’t look through, any more than you could ignore your own face in the mirror.

  Martine sat cross-legged on the grassy slope overlooking the shopping street. She sketched slowly, carefully—the crooked little station building, the railroad crossing gate hanging in the air, the jumble of signs. She had an image in her mind of lines and surfaces crossing and interlacing, of the hidden geometry that held everything together. On paper it never came out that way, but that didn’t stop her from trying.

  “This is a tricky one,” said Kimura’s friend, peering into the computer screen. “A lot of thought went into it.”

  [105] “I’m not surprised,” said Martine. “He’s an obsessive of some sort.”

  “A professional, I would say. He’s thought of everything.”

  The three of them were sitting around Martine’s desk at the Tribune. Kimura’s friend was sitting in Martine’s chair, with Kimura on his right. He had been tapping at the keyboard for almost two hours, with no result. Kimura was a handsome and witty forty-five-year-old bond market strategist at a foreign investment bank. His friend, about ten years younger, had a pale, angular face and long hair that fell over his eyes. Martine knew only his first name, Yasuo. He was a computer security expert attached to an unnamed part of the government. Kimura had met him in a Shinjuku bar about six months ago. Apparently it was love at first sight.

  “So the trail has run cold?” asked Martine.

  “That’s right, unfortunately.”

  “Nothing else you can do?”

  “Not really. Not here, anyway.”

  Martine wrinkled her nose in frustration. Yasuo had done his best, but Martine’s mysterious admirer had made sure that his trail was covered. The message had passed through the servers of the Tohoku Agricultural Cooperative, the University of Bangkok, a casino in Las Vegas, a bank in Tel Aviv, and a pornographer in Denmark, before looping back through the Tohoku Agricultural Cooperative.

  “So what would you advise me to do? I mean, what would your department do in these circumstances?”

  Yasuo glanced over at Kimura, who gave a brief nod.

  “We would probably try string recognition. That means taking the words used and looking for matches against data passing through the grid.”

  “I see. And what kind of data is that?”

  Kimura gave a thin smile, the first Martine had seen on his face. “What kind of data? Every kind, of course. There is no computer message in this country that doesn’t pass through the grid. That’s what it was designed for.”

  He glanced at Kimura and they both chuckled.

  “And this would enable you to identify the sender of the message?”

  “Theoretically, yes. But access to the data cache is strictly controlled. It should never be misused.”

  “Of course not,” said Martine gravely. She recalled hearing that Kimura’s trading team had been astonishingly successful this year, managing to be on the right side of every twist and turn in monetary policy. Now she had an inkling of the reason why.

  Martine paused and stared al the screen.

  “Tell me, Kimura-san,” she said finally. “Didn’t you once tell me you wanted to write a regular op-ed column for the Tribune?”

  [106] “Yes, I did.”

  “And didn’t I tell you that I had already asked the strategist from Silverman Brothers?”

  “That’s what you said.”

  Martine gave a bright smile. “Well, I think the situation has changed.”

  They left in mid-afternoon. Martine saw them off to the elevator, and then spent the next few hours on her own, adding the finishing touches to the Nozawa interview, and scouring the internet for information about the Morikawa School of Leadership.

  The official website gave the basic background. The school had been founded thirty years ago by Soichiro Morikawa, the most famous Japanese industrialist of the twentieth century. Its purpose was to offer “British-style elite education,” though what was described bore absolutely no resemblance to what Martine had experienced at Oxford.

  Only fifty students were accepted every year, usually from the cream of graduates from the nation’s top universities. It wasn’t enough for them to have outstanding exam results, they also had to be physically tough, have “benevolent instincts,” and “a strong pride in the uniqueness of Japanese culture.” The course was built around the philosophy of Morikawa himself, which was vague and pompous but, in Martine’s judgment, reasonably benign. According to Morikawa, excellent leaders should be men of noble character; they should never forget their o
bligation to the weaker members of society; they should continue to train their minds and bodies rigorously and not indulge in low pleasures; and their mission was to raise the nation’s standing and contribute to the future of the human race.

  There were a number of photos of Morikawa, a fierce-looking old man in a dark kimono, together with quotations from his numerous books.

  “Profits are unimportant to a true businessman. He should have the mind of a priest and the hands of a warrior.”

  “My company is my family. I am blessed in having eighty thousand children.”

  “The role of a bank is to provide money to manufacturers. Bankers should have pure hearts and ask no questions.”

  Martine scrolled down line after line of worthy cliché. Of the great generation of business leaders who drove Japan’s postwar recovery, she had always found Morikawa the flattest and least interesting. The man had no narrative. There were no illegitimate children or frolics with geisha, no battles with [107] disbelieving bureaucrats, no rash bets on new technologies. His only distinctive trait appeared to be his meanness. Right to the end of his life, he offered his guests rice gruel and cold sardines and made his wife and daughters wait at table.

  In business the Morikawa strategy was passive—wait for other companies to make breakthroughs, then flood the market with cheaper imitations. Morikawa Industries’ key strength was the loyalty and commitment of its workforce. Mass calisthenics three times a day; gray overalls worn by all grades of staff, from senior directors to female receptionists; a company shrine where employees were commemorated after death—these were the abiding images of “the Morikawa way.” Still, you couldn’t deny the man’s achievements. He had left school at the age of twelve to work in a backstreet factory that produced lightbulbs. Today Morikawa Industries was one of the largest industrial companies in the world, with top market share in cameras, TVs, watches, copiers, and washing machines.

  Extracts from Morikawa’s collected essays were followed by quotations from Buddha, Winston Churchill, Yukichi Fukuzawa, Helen Keller, Confucius, and other people whom Morikawa admired. There was little detail about the school’s activities, the faculty, or the nature of the courses.

  Martine scanned through the hundreds of other references to the school. These were mostly brief comments naming certain prominent people as alumni of the school. Martine was surprised by the variety. Apart from the politicians, there were writers, businessmen, bureaucrats, academics, and even one well-known movie director. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. If the school produced fifty graduates a year, by now there would be nearly two thousand of them altogether, with the most senior ones being in their late fifties. Compared to the many other networks of influence and mutual obligation that permeated Japanese society, the membership was not large. But that concentration would be its strength—giving it coherence and focus.

  Martine sat back and stared out the window. She had always thought of the Morikawa school as a marginal institution, little more than a monument to a successful businessman’s slightly naive egoism. In fact it was more formidable than she had expected. But was it strong enough to stage what amounted to a political coup d’état? Not on its own. It had a network of high-quality people, well spread through the strategic areas of Japanese society, but what it did not have was the immense financial resources of the establishment. Even after years of economic mismanagement, even after the UNG scandal had entangled dozens of senior politicians, even with public distrust at an all-time high, no credible opposition had emerged. The iron triangle of bureaucrats, senior politicians, and business leaders remained in control of the commanding heights, as it had for generations. To break it would require [108] something special, a complete change in the rules of the game. Which is why they needed Nozawa.

  At that moment Martine glimpsed a movement out of the corner of her eye. There was an advertising blimp slowly drifting across the skyline. On its side was an almost cartoonish picture of Nozawa, wearing his headband and smiling sardonically. Martine remembered her dream and shuddered.

  Mark Fletcher was woken by the ringing of the phone downstairs. He had the feeling it had been ringing for a long time already. He rolled onto his back and lay there blinking at the shadows on the ceiling and wondering who on earth would have the nerve to call at this time of night. Nobody who worked for him, or at least nobody who wanted to stay working for him, that was for sure. Few people at InfoCorp even knew where he lived, let alone his private number. And those who did had strict instructions never to call after dinner.

  Since his marriage, Mark had been determined to keep his home life insulated from everything else. He owed that much to Natasha and the children. The world was just too dangerous nowadays. In many countries—not just what was once called the developing world, but also places like Italy, Greece, and Spain—car bombs and kidnappings had become ordinary tools of business.

  The ringing stopped, and Mark gave a sigh of relief. It must have been a wrong number. He closed his eyes again and lay there listening to the sound of Natasha breathing alongside him. She breathed so softly, almost like a child. On a few occasions he had been gripped by the frightening thought that she had stopped breathing altogether. But then he would lean closer to her face and feel the feathery warmth against his cheek and see the dark contour of her breast rising and falling.

  The phone had started ringing again. Mark could hardly believe it. It was four o’clock in the morning! The children wouldn’t wake up—they hadn’t stirred even when there was an intruder in the garden and the alarms were screaming and the security guys were yelling into their walkie-talkies—but Natasha was a light sleeper. Just a few nights ago he had woken in the middle of the night to find himself alone in bed. He had hurried downstairs and gone through every room, nerves jangling. At last he had found her in the games room, playing the children’s electric piano with headphones on. Mark stood in the doorway and watched her fingers flying across the keyboard, her head swaying gently from side to side. She didn’t hear him, and he didn’t disturb her.

  This time the caller wasn’t going to give up. Mark slid out of bed, eased [109] open the bedroom door, and moved noiselessly down the corridor, glancing into Liam’s room as he passed. The boy was curled up under the blankets, just a mop of tousled hair visible on the pillow. It was black, like his mother’s, whereas Julie’s hair was the same straw blond as Mark’s. A soccer magazine lay open on the floor beside his bed.

  Mark padded downstairs and into his study. He sat down at his desk and gazed at the phone. For some reason, he felt a strong resistance to picking it up. Perhaps if he waited a few more seconds it would stop ringing. It didn’t. Finally he took a deep breath and snatched at the receiver.

  “Yes,” he muttered, aware that his hands were clammy with sweat.

  “Mark! Thank God I got you.”

  He knew the voice at once. It was Roger Mance, the longest-serving of his father’s American advisers and one of the few to survive the latest management shake-up.

  “What’s the matter, Roger? What’s going on over there?”

  “There’s bad news. Are you sitting down?”

  “Say it!” snapped Mark.

  “It’s your father. He’s just had a stroke, a bad one.”

  An icy flush ran through Mark’s stomach. Deep down he had known it would be something like this.

  “How bad is bad?”

  “He’s unconscious, in an oxygen tent. The doctors aren’t saying anything yet. I don’t think they know.”

  His father lying helpless in an oxygen tent, tubes sprouting from his body? The idea was bizarre, a joke almost. Objectively, though, Mark shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, his father was well into his seventies and had been suffering from hypertension for years. But he had always seemed so brimming with life force, so indestructible. Somehow Mark had assumed that his father would outlast him, just as he had outmaneuvered him every time they came into conflict.

  “When did it happen?”r />
  “A couple of hours ago. He was having dinner with Jenny.”

  “Who else was with him?”

  “Nobody, Mark. It was an intimate occasion. They were celebrating her birthday.”

  Mark’s fingers gripped the phone a little tighter. Another image was flashing through his mind, one that he didn’t want to linger over. Why had his father ever got involved with that woman? She had turned him into a different person, breaking up his family and business empire in the process. Now she had destroyed him too.

  “Jenny’s got such presence of mind,” Mance was saying. “If she hadn’t [110] been there, your father wouldn’t have made it.”

  Mark would have put it differently—if she hadn’t been there, none of this would have happened.

  “Really,” he said grimly.

  “Yes, really. Straightaway she called this specialist she knows, got him to come right over. David Liu’s one of the top men in the field. He made all the arrangements, took care of everything personally.”

  “I see,” muttered Mark. “Thanks for filling me in. I appreciate it.” The words came out automatically. They sounded unconvincing even to himself.

  “It’s the least I could do. We’ll be putting out a press release tomorrow, trying to put a lid on things for a while. It’ll be pretty low-key—‘suffering from exhaustion,’ ‘cutting down on routine duties,’ you get the picture.”

  “I suppose that was Jenny’s idea too.”

  “As a matter of fact it was. But that’s the best way, right? We don’t want any speculation about the company’s future, not at this stage of the game.”