South of the Border, West of the Sun Page 0,54

a fish, with no need to think, not even about swimming. Next I showered, changed into a T-shirt and shorts, and started pumping iron.

Then I headed to the one-room flat I used as an office and set to checking the account books, figuring my employees’ pay, working on the plan for remodeling the Robin’s Nest the following February. At one, as usual, I went home and had lunch with my wife.

“Honey, I had a call from my father this morning,” Yukiko said. “Busy as always. He said there’s this stock that’ll go through the roof, and we should buy as much as we could manage. Not your run-of-the-mill stock tip, he said, but something extra special.”

“If it’s going to earn that much, he shouldn’t tell us about it but should keep it to himself. Wonder why he didn’t.”

“He said this was his personal way of saying thanks to you. He said you’d understand what he meant. Do you? He’s letting us have his share, you see. He said to invest all the money we have and not to worry, because this stock was hot. If somehow it didn’t turn a profit, he’d make sure we didn’t lose a penny.”

I rested my fork on my plate of pasta. “Anything else?”

“Well, he said we had to move quickly, so I called the bank and had them close out our savings accounts and send the money to Mr. Nakayama at the investment firm. So he could buy the stock. I was only able to scrape together about eight million yen. Maybe I should have bought even more?”

I drank some water. And tried to find the right words. “Before you did all that, why didn’t you ask me?”

“Ask you?” she said, surprised. “But you always buy the stocks my father tells you to. You’ve had me do it any number of times, haven’t you? You always tell me to just go ahead and do what I think is right. So that’s what I did. My father said there wasn’t a minute to lose. You were at the pool and I couldn’t get in touch with you. So what’s the problem?”

“It’s all right,” I said. “But I want you to sell all the stock.”

“Sell it?” She screwed up her eyes as if blinded by a glaring light.

“Sell all the stock you bought and put the money back in our savings accounts.”

“But if I do that we’ll have to pay a lot in transaction fees.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “Just pay it. I don’t care if we end up losing. Just sell everything you bought today.”

Yukiko sighed. “What happened between you and Father? What’s going on?”

I didn’t answer.

“What happened?”

“Listen, Yukiko,” I began, “I’m getting sick of all this. I don’t want to earn money in the stock market. I want to earn money by working with my own hands. I’ve done a good job up till now. You haven’t wanted for money, have you?”

“I know you’ve done a good job, and I haven’t complained once. I’m grateful to you, and you know I respect you. But still, my father’s doing this to help us out. Don’t you understand that?”

“I understand. Yukiko, do you know what insider trading is? Do you know what it means when somebody tells you there’s a one hundred percent chance you’ll turn a profit?”

“No.”

“It’s called stock manipulation,” I said. “Somebody inside a company manipulates the stock to rack up an artificial profit, then he and his pals split up the proceeds. And that money makes its way into politicians’ pockets or ends up as corporate bribes. This isn’t like the kind of stock your father urged me to buy before. That kind of stock probably was going to make a profit. That was just welcome information, nothing more. And most of the time the stock did go up, but not every time. This time is different. This stinks. And I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”

Fork in hand, Yukiko was lost in thought.

“How can you be sure this is a case of stock manipulation?”

“If you really want to know that, ask your father,” I said. “But I can tell you this: stock that’s guaranteed not to go down can only result from illegal deals. My father worked in an investment firm for forty years. Worked hard from morning to night. But all he left behind was a crummy little house. Maybe he just wasn’t good at it. Every night, my mother was hunched over the household account books, worried