Lady Joker, Volume 1 Kaoru Takamura (ereader ebook .TXT) 📖

did not return for three whole days. On the fourth day he finally called and told Shiroyama that he had met with the young owner of a sake wholesaler who, despite having a liquor license, was thinking of shuttering the business after the previous owner had passed; Kurata had convinced him instead to become a distributor for Hinode. He then said that he had persuaded Hinode’s Fukui branch to sign an official distributor contract, and managed to start things off by selling them the fifty cases of beer left in his truck at wholesale. Shiroyama would never forget how nonchalantly Kurata had recounted it all.

That was the kind of man Kurata was. He used whatever means necessary to make a sale, always taking responsibility for the numbers he did sell; what was more, he grasped the larger picture of the sales business to expand their network and improve figures, going beyond individual performance. Everyone took notice of Kurata and his abilities, but within Hinode’s antiquated corporate environment his personnel reviews were rather low. It could have been that Kurata’s service as first responder to customer complaints since early on in his career had an unfairly negative effect. Shiroyama was aware that he was the first man to capitalize on, deploy, value, rely upon, and nurture Kurata’s talents.

When he was promoted he made sure to recommend Kurata as his second-in-command, and when he was transferred he pushed for Kurata to be his successor. Even as he worked to keep the peace around him, he had continued to support Kurata both publicly and privately because he believed that not valuing Kurata’s business acumen would be a loss for the company. In the time since the two of them had taken on managerial positions, Kurata had never disappointed Shiroyama’s expectations, and as others gradually came to accept him, the dominion of the Shiroyama and Kurata partnership took hold.

But times had changed. Kurata’s corporate view was conservative, even compared to Shiroyama’s—which perhaps could not be helped so long as the manufacturing industry remained as it was—but the gaps in Kurata’s capacities as a manager, especially in contrast with someone like Sei’ichi Shirai, had now become all too evident. Kurata was still preoccupied with increasing sales month-to-month, while Shirai, on the other hand, had been assessing the profitability of their company based on its return on shareholders’ equity, declaring stagnant growth for the future of the process industry and spearheading the charge toward diversification. Now that producing and distributing beer out of their own company factory was the direction the manufacturing industry was inevitably heading, it was apparent which of these corporate views should take the lead for the betterment of Hinode’s future. Shirai was handicapped by his age—he was fifty-nine now—but he was more than capable of carrying on for a few more years.

And yet, it goes without saying that the transformation of the future would not happen without those who could increase profits in the present, and did not change the fact that the beer business would remain the foundation of their company. With his steady performance, Kurata’s power was as immense as ever, and precisely what gave rise to the petty swirl of personal emotions within the other departments. Over the last five years, Shiroyama had managed to keep them sufficiently balanced, but when it came down to it there was no middle ground in any matter, and he was well aware that with every decision he made he was sowing the seeds of personal grudges. He didn’t know how much those seeds had grown, but whatever dissatisfaction sprouted would obviously be directed toward Kurata, as the one in line under Shiroyama. And Shiroyama was painfully aware that when an unexpected incident such as this occurred—one that could undermine the fate of the company—those internal anxieties and concerns must have all been leveled at Kurata.

Yet even this did not account for Kurata’s current behavior. Previously, Kurata would have quickly suppressed the movements of any executives who seemed restive, then would have acted as if nothing had happened; or he would allow them to rebel and use that as an excuse to quash them, again pretending as if nothing had happened; or perhaps he would feign indifference and maneuver his way through them—in any case, he would never have allowed any sign of discord to reach Shiroyama. Instead, he would have run interference on any such strife, proclaiming to Shiroyama that he should not trouble himself with these matters, that he should instead focus on managing the company. But here Kurata was tonight, suggesting that Shirai share what the executives had been saying in Shiroyama’s absence.

Shiroyama could not imagine that Kurata would ever defect, but he now had to consider that Kurata’s devotion—in which Shiroyama had placed his trust completely over the past thirty years, and his loyalty to the company that sustained it—might be suffering from systematic fatigue.

In particular, after everyone else had proved incompetent in the company’s dealings with corporate extortionists, Kurata alone had served as liaison with the Okada Association, reluctantly but diligently. By circumventing the official channel of general affairs, this tacitly presented the arrangement as a fait accompli created by the merciless corporate logic that, should it become necessary, any legal questioning would be contained to a single executive. Shiroyama could only describe Kurata’s motive for carrying such a burden on his own as single-minded devotion to the company, but even devotion had its limits, he presumed.

It wasn’t hard to imagine that when they learned of their president’s kidnapping, everyone in the company guessed it was at the hand of the Okada Association and had focused their criticism on Kurata, wondering what he had been doing all along. For now the only three people who knew that Okada, with whom they had severed ties two years ago with a billion-yen settlement, had reappeared this year to demand that the company purchase land in Gunma prefecture were Shiroyama, Kurata, and Shirai, but no doubt Kurata must have received the