Stories of the salarymen who went down a stairway in Kabukicho for one drop of shoyu, were shown their dreams in it, and paid far too much for the bottle.
| The house | The Shoyukan, the shoyu hall. It is on the second basement floor of a building in Kabukicho, in Shinjuku: down twenty-six steps, behind a curtain with one drop painted on it. Shoyu is what the rest of the world calls soy sauce. It is not called that here. |
| The man | The Shoyuken. In English he would be the Soy Sauce Fist. He wears a grey kimono, he has never been heard to raise his voice or to lower a price, and he can show a man his dream in one drop. |
| The night | A tasting, and then an auction. At the tasting each man is poured one drop on a white dish, and is told what is in it. Nobody is poured a second. The bottle is the second drop. |
| The lots | Shoyu, sold the way old wine is sold: by the kind and the town, the vat and the winters it has had in cedar, one small bottle at a time. |
| The hours | After the last train. The lamp is lit when the trains stop, and put out before the first one runs. |
What a man ought to know before he goes down the stairs. It has not been shown to help.
Two men whose work is to know exactly what a thing costs. Each went down the stairs certain that he was the one man in the room who could not be sold anything.
A careful man misses the last train by ninety seconds, and is shown a kitchen in one drop of shoyu.
Opens at ¥3,000.
A man whose company makes four hundred thousand litres of shoyu a day goes downstairs to laugh at three hundred millilitres of it.
Opens at ¥10,000.
One buys for a living. One was showing a younger man how it is done. Both went home pleased.
A trading-house man who has never paid an asking price meets a seller who will not argue.
Opens at ¥20,000.
A section chief takes his junior down the stairs to show him how a man handles a room.
Opens at ¥5,000.
Most men go down the stairs once. This barrel is for the other kind, and for what it has cost them.
Kondo has been married three times and divorced three times, and all three wives gave the same reason.
Opens at ¥6,000.
He sits on the last bench, by the door, and in twenty years nobody has seen him raise a paddle.
Opens at ¥8,000.
Single pages to come back to, between nights.
The five kinds the hall sells, how to read a label and a drop, and what each has cost a man.
How a night goes, from the street to the first train, and every move the Shoyuken has.
6 tales in 3 barrels, and 2 guides.
Every tale here is made up, and so are the hall and the man who keeps it. Kabukicho is real, and so are the kinds of shoyu and the towns they come from.