“What did your father do?” he asked again.
Hashiba’s voice sounded far away. Whenever Saeko spoke to someone about her father, her voice didn’t feel like her own. It was like the ringing you heard in your ears when you yawned — as if there were a shutter door closing off her inner ear and opening up a narrow passageway into a different space. If her father were dead, she would probably have felt differently. But the possibility that he might still be alive somewhere made her feel the need to maintain this narrow passage to wherever he was.
When she talked to Hashiba about her father, Saeko felt as though someone else were doing the talking. When she thought about it, nobody knew who her father truly was. Saeko’s image of him was the polar opposite of the way his employees saw him. From her point of view, her father was a gentle, loving, pleasant person. But as far as his subordinates were concerned, he was a barbarian, quick to fly into a rage over the smallest mistake. Both were accurate descriptions of different sides of his character. Saeko could only explain her father to Hashiba as she had known him.
Saeko’s father, Shinichiro Kuriyama, had been a rare phenomenon in that he had possessed the attributes of both scholar and businessman, characteristics often considered to be in opposition. Rather than systematically mastering a specific field, he’d taken an interest in everything under the sun, from mathematics, physics, philosophy and astronomy to evolution, biology, sociology, religion, astrology, history, archaeology, and psychology. Well versed in all of these fields, he was probably best characterized as a natural historian.
As an undergraduate he’d majored in mathematics but had switched to philosophy in graduate school. On a scholarship awarded by a newspaper publisher, he had studied abroad in Europe. That was where he’d encountered the book that would change his life.
The summer Shinichiro was twenty-four years old, he came across it by chance in the Oxford book store in the U.K. It was called The Plumed Serpent.
As it happened, Shinichiro wound up purchasing the book quite by accident. Based on the title, Shinichiro had taken it to be the novel by D. H. Lawrence and brought the book up to the register without even leafing through it. It wasn’t until he’d returned to his boarding house that he realized his mistake; he’d purchased a different book by the same title. The author’s name was printed in tiny letters beneath the title: O. H. Wolles — a not entirely dissimilar name. According to the author bio, Wolles was a professor of archaeology at the University of London. Despite his encyclopedic knowledge, Shinichiro wasn’t familiar with the professor’s work. But when he delved into the book, he found himself completely captivated. It dealt with mysteries of ancient history, a topic that fascinated him and captured his imagination. Far from a bestseller, however, the book was barely known even in the U.K.
I want to translate this book into Japanese, Shinichiro realized. He wasn’t confident the book would sell well in Japan. Nonetheless, he felt that somehow, translating the book into Japanese was his mission.
After completing his two-year course of study overseas, Shinichiro returned to Japan and approached all of the major publishers with his translated manuscript. During his time abroad, he had met directly with the author and received permission to publish the translation. All he had to do now was find a publisher who wanted to print it. He tried cold calls and he tried using connections, but the response was always lukewarm. It was unclear whether the editors had actually even read the manuscript, as they all responded noncommittally that they didn’t see much of a market for it. On the other hand, they never turned it down outright. The general implication of their attitude was that they weren’t interested in publishing the book but also didn’t want another publisher to put it out and wind up with a bestseller.
If only they would give him a clear yes or no, Shinichiro would have been able to consider his next move. But when they simply kept him on hold for months on end, he felt that his time was simply being wasted. Frustrated, he made up his mind to drop out of graduate school, launch his own publishing house, and put out the book himself.
He borrowed money from his mother to launch the business and recruited a young editor who had been fascinated by the manuscript but whose boss had forced him to reject it. Soon Shinichiro had established an incorporated company and set about acquiring a publisher’s code.
The following year, just as Shinichiro, deeply in debt, was poised to publish his translation, the gods bestowed upon him a completely unforeseen blessing. Back in the U.K., scientific evidence for a theory proposed by Wolles’ had emerged, and the news spread quickly around the world.
Ruins of an ancient civilization had been unearthed at a particular location in South America, precisely where Wolles had predicted them to be in The Plumed Serpent. His hypothesis had been right on the mark.
In the nineteenth century, the German amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann had theorized that the epics of Homer were based on historical fact. He had postulated that the legendary ancient city of Troy had been located in Hissarlik, in northern Turkey, resulting in the excavation of a treasure trove of relics from the early Bronze Age. Now, the media descended on Wolles, heralding him as a modern-day Schliemann, lauding his achievement. The book wherein he had penned his theories—The Plumed Serpent—soon began to fly off the shelves in Europe.
When Shinichiro’s translation hit the bookshelves in Japan, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. The press were all over him. Suddenly Shinichiro was the man of the hour, the twenty-six-year-old grad-school dropout with the astonishing foresight to discover a brilliant treatise, translate it, and publish it himself. His impressive initiative was widely supported and admired by the younger generation.
Bolstered by all of the free publicity, sales of the book drove reprint after reprint. Before long, the book had sold over a million copies. Meanwhile, Shinichiro developed a personal friendship with Wolles beyond that of author and translator, and Wolles granted him the exclusive right to publish all of his works. Wolles explained his devotion to Shinichiro thus: “Even with little prospect that the book would sell, he recognized its value and invested his energies in its translation. Intuition of that caliber is rare.”
With a staff of just three people, the publishing house was off to a strong start from the beginning. They quickly released Wolles’ next book, then followed up with the rapid release of a succession of nonfiction works dedicated to mysteries of the natural world. Each book achieved bestseller status, and the company grew rapidly with the help of Shinichiro’s stellar managerial skills.
The company’s profit margin was high given that the president himself performed the translations. Soon Shinichiro had paid off his debts, and the company never again saw a drop of red ink. To that end, Shinichiro personally took on Herculean feats. He slept only two or three hours per night, managing his company during the day and holing up in his office at night to fashion new manuscripts. Everyone around him was astounded by the superhuman amount of work he accomplished.
Meanwhile, in his private life, Shinichiro got married, had a daughter, and lost his wife, all in the same year.
When he married his college sweetheart three years after establishing the company, she was already pregnant. During childbirth, however, an accident claimed the young bride’s life, and Saeko lost her mother the day she was born.
The singular tragedy rocked Shinichiro’s success-filled world. Overcome by grief, for several months he was unable to muster the will to put down a single word. Meanwhile, he found himself utterly smitten by the baby daughter who had come into the world just as his wife had left it. As a single parent, with the help of various babysitters, he managed to bring her up healthy and strong. Saeko’s existence gave him new vitality and sparked an interest in developing educational materials, a field he had never before even considered.