Tokyo Literary Masters: Starting from the Late 1980s

Chapter 191 Targeting the Japanese Economy

Inside the headquarters building of Sumitomo Bank, the atmosphere in the high-level conference room was as cold as a stagnant pool.

On either side of the large mahogany conference table, a dozen core executives sat upright, with only the voice of the public relations manager echoing in the somber space.

The large screen displayed a chart showing the equity structure of Glory Asset Management Company, as well as evening news footage of Kitahara Iwa persuading people to leave the apartment building.

"A physical separation must be carried out immediately."

The managing director, seated at the head of the table, coldly tapped the table, declaring decisively, "Regardless of the pretext, terminate all outsourcing contracts related to Glorious Assets. Maintain a unified narrative and shift all responsibility to the subordinate credit guarantee company's illegal operations."

"In addition, notify all branches and retail banking departments to prepare for the upcoming wave of defaults and cancellations."

"Under no circumstances should the core on-balance-sheet assets of the head office be affected in any way."

A casual remark made in a high-level conference room can directly determine the life or death of frontline staff.

At this moment, Takahashi Shunichi, who was in the market countermeasures room, was also staring intently at Kitahara Iwa, whose story was being repeatedly broadcast on various television stations.

Whenever the line "Yakuza poles only wield in dark alleys, while contracts stamped with private seals will—penalize your lives bit by bit" comes on TV, Shunichi Takahashi's eyes twitch uncontrollably.

Just a few days ago, he was using the most professional financial terminology to mock Kitahara Iwao for creating panic and for not understanding economics.

However, the assassination attempt in the alley the night before shattered his claims.

By this time, even the most oblivious ordinary customers had come to their senses: if that novel was really just a bunch of nonsense, why would the vested interests be so impatient as to use steel pipes and short knives to silence Kitahara-sensei forever?

At this moment, the phone in the office area rang incessantly, but none of the calls were inquiring about the timing of entry.

A wave of panic surged through the telephone lines, completely engulfing the entire business unit.

"All interviews next week are cancelled! We don't want the multi-million yen deposit for that Minato Ward apartment, but we absolutely will not sign the accompanying guarantee!"

"Withdraw the loan application immediately! I can pay the penalty for default, but I will absolutely not touch that additional collateral clause!"

The front desk assistants were overwhelmed by these hysterical cancellation requests.

For Shunichi Takahashi, these frantically canceled contracts mean that the sales figures he built up this month through aggressive marketing tactics are being wiped out at an avalanche rate.

According to the strict recovery mechanism of financial institutions, these orders that fail to be disbursed or are forcibly terminated by customers will directly result in the deduction of all the huge commissions and quarterly bonuses that he has already received, and may even leave him with heavy debts to the company.

Thinking of this situation, Shunichi Takahashi suppressed the chill that felt like falling into an ice cave in his heart and personally answered a call from a VIP customer whom he had strongly persuaded to attend.

"Mr. Takahashi, you repeatedly assured me that Professor Kitahara knew nothing about finance."

The other person's voice, laced with suppressed unease and anger, abruptly interrupted his attempts to soothe him: "Then please explain why someone wants to kill him?"

This direct and crucial question left Takahashi Shun feeling like he had a fishbone stuck in his throat.

He instinctively wanted to resort to his usual rhetoric of "don't be swayed by the media, and investment should return to the long-term value of assets," but in the face of the undeniable violence, these once-infallible financial pronouncements seemed utterly ineffective.

In the end, Shunichi Takahashi could only manage to squeeze out a dry sentence: "The police have not yet reached a conclusion on this security incident."

But the person on the other end of the phone laughed angrily, saying, "By the time the police reach their conclusion, my house will probably be worthless."

The next second, the dial tone sounded, and Shunichi Takahashi froze on the spot, holding the receiver.

Looking out the window at the still bustling Tokyo streets, an unprecedented sense of loss of control overwhelmed him completely.

The tower of capital has not yet completely collapsed, but I, the agent who once tried to stand on the top and point fingers, have already fallen into the abyss along with the wealth that has vanished.

When public opinion in Japan was completely ignited, the Ministry of Finance had no idea that the most fatal backlash would be directly triggered by a few foreign observers who remained in Tokyo.

In the early morning, in a luxury business suite at the Imperial Hotel, the ashtray was already overflowing with cigarette butts that had been burning all night.

Robert Finley, Margaret Hughes, James Walton, and others did not get any rest.

After news of the attack on Kitahara Iwa arrived, these British publishing magnates, who were still in Tokyo, immediately turned their suites into temporary command centers, maintaining frequent communication with the media at their London headquarters and Fleet Street throughout the night.

Robert quickly compiled the Metropolitan Police Department's flimsy official report, Shinchosha's public statement, the photos of Kadokawa Haruki falling at the press conference, and Kume Hiroshi's verbatim transcript directly pointing out the "premeditated assassination" in the newspaper.

When he sent the photos of shattered car windows, steel pipes scattered on the ground, and daggers back to his London headquarters via secure fax, the entire British publishing industry was thoroughly enraged by this utterly shameless violence.

Just a few days ago, they witnessed the National Tax Service ransacking their apartment in Kitahara.

Now, these vested interests have actually resorted to violence in the shadows.

International long-distance calls within the suite were always on hands-free.

Looking out at the Tokyo skyline just beginning to lighten with the first hint of dawn, Margaret Hughes said sharply, "They used a knife the day before yesterday, and yesterday morning they tried to cover it up with a 'common robbery.' This isn't just a clumsy cover-up; it's an arrogant provocation to the intelligence of everyone who knows the truth."

Sitting on the sofa, James Wharton slammed the copy of the fax shut and bluntly proposed a solution to the London headquarters on the other end of the phone: "If we only send a perfunctory letter of condolence in the face of this level of pressure, the bureaucrats in Tokyo will just think that the British publishing industry is good for nothing but politeness."

"This is no longer a simple suppression; we must strike hard!"

Robert picked up the draft translation of the English version of "The Collapsing Tower" from the table and said in a cold tone, "Joint Statement,"

Legal letters, media materials—these three lines of work must be pursued simultaneously.

"We need to make it clear to Kasumigaseki that Kitahara is not a pushover that they can confine within the island nation and manipulate at will."

Sir Jonathan Clarendon, who had been sitting next to the office checking legal documents, finally looked up.

This top barrister had already coordinated with his London partners in advance. His calm voice carried an undeniable professional authority as he stated, "The firm is already drafting a formal legal letter, which will be addressed to relevant Japanese administrative and financial institutions, and will also be copied to the British Embassy in Japan."

"Ladies and gentlemen, there is no need for overly strong language. Objectively stating the connection between tax searches and street violence is enough to make them look extremely bad in the international community."

Hours later, a joint statement led by Penguin Random House and co-signed by Faber, HarperCollins, and several other leading European literary institutions bypassed Japanese media censorship and was released to the world through international news agencies such as Reuters.

"We strongly condemn any attempt to silence writers through administrative power, capital coercion, or street violence."

"When literary creation touches upon real-world interests, civilized society should respond with open debate and the test of time, rather than with tax raids, channel blockades, and weapons hidden in back alleys."

"As an important writer with an international reputation, Mr. Kitahara Iwao's personal safety, creative freedom, and the right to global dissemination of his works are no longer merely internal matters of the Japanese publishing industry."

"We will continue to monitor the investigation and reserve the right to pursue the matter to the end through legal, diplomatic, and international publishing organizations."

After this important transoceanic statement was issued, Robert did not stop what he was doing.

He then dialed the hotline of a senior editor at the Financial Times.

This phone call was no longer just a simple condemnation from the publishing industry; it was a powerful and damaging core document thrown into the international financial world.

The evidence included a lawyer's on-site record of the National Tax Agency's raid on the apartment, photos of the scene with bloodstains, public statements from Shinchosha and Kadokawa Haruki, and support from Kume Hiroshi's program.

Robert compiled the translation of "The Collapsing Tower" concerning bad debts and joint guarantees into a book overnight and sent it directly to the Japanese economics section of the Financial Times.

Before dawn, the Financial Times' Japan economics team in London was fully awakened.

A few hours later, the Financial Times made an emergency layout change, with a lengthy report making it to the front page.

The title is: From Tax Searches to Street Victims: Why Does Japan's Financial System Fear a Novelist?

This report did not use any conspiracy theories or emotional accusations; it simply relied on the most basic objective descriptions of financial media to list all of the recent countermeasures taken by the Japanese government in chronological order.

This stripped-down statement, ironically, completely exposes the derailment of the official response.

Anyone familiar with the workings of the capital market can easily see that behind this series of pressures against Kitahara Iwa lies a panic of desperately trying to cover up the books.

Furthermore, the report's conclusion at the end was like a heavy blow that directly shattered the Japanese government's whitewash: "When a country's financial system has to rely on administrative pressure, supply chain blockades, and street violence to respond to a novel, what the market should really focus on is perhaps no longer the literary value of the work, but the balance sheet it points to."

When this conclusion reached the City of London and Wall Street, it immediately triggered extreme alarm among professional investors.

For fund managers who manage billions of dollars, they don't need to concern themselves with the feuds in the Japanese literary world; they only need to confirm one core fact through this report: the Japanese government's response has completely spiraled out of control.

If the macroeconomy is truly as stable as the Ministry of Finance claims, the authorities could simply let market forces naturally eliminate a fictional novel.

However, instead of disclosing the true data to set the record straight, they resorted to extreme measures such as tax investigations, pressuring the supply chain, and even condoning street violence.

This overreaction of trying to cover up the books is tantamount to directly handing global capital an invitation to short sell, highlighting a fatal weakness.

Once the Financial Times published its major report, The Times, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal quickly followed suit, shifting the focus entirely to the real estate risks deep within the Japanese banking system.

The Economist pointed out in a short commentary: "Novels may not provide accurate financial models, but the government's fear of fictional works exposes the most realistic bottom line of risk."

This statement was quickly quoted by major investment banks and became the core quote in their internal research briefings.

At the same time, multinational institutions have launched a full-scale campaign of substantive pressure.

Robert Finley mobilized Penguin Random House's legal department to submit formal letters directly to relevant Japanese agencies, demanding that the environment for enforcing English copyright be protected from interference.

Sir Clarendon's legal team submitted a detailed memorandum to the British Embassy in Japan, logically linking the Inland Revenue Service's search to the violent attack in Ginza.

Margaret Hughes, a senior editor at Faber Publishing, acted more swiftly than Robert had anticipated.

This old-school editor, who had been deeply involved in the British literary world for more than 20 years and was usually mild-mannered, showed no mercy when it came to the absolute bottom line of freedom of publication.

Margaret sent the records of the IRS raid and bloodstained photos of the scene directly to the core literary circles of Europe.

Faced with some hesitation from her peers regarding "interference in other countries' internal affairs," she forcefully united the front with the coldest logic: the European cultural community does not need to endorse Kitahara Iwao's financial model; it only needs to reiterate a bottom line to the public—correcting the "errors" in the novel should rely on readers and time, not tax officials and murderers in dark alleys.

This approach, which completely strips away financial controversies and relentlessly pursues "violent silencing," instantly clears away all obstacles to intervention.

Within half a day, publishers' associations from France, Germany, Italy, and many other countries were drawn into this transnational support movement.

Thanks to the literary craze that "Never Let Me Go" previously sparked in the English-speaking world, Kitahara Iwa is no longer a name limited to Japan.

A top novelist who had just entered the international spotlight narrowly escaped assassination on the streets of Tokyo. This violent incident, with its strong visual impact and political metaphors, instantly ignited the anger of the entire European cultural community.

That evening, the vice president of the European Publishers Association issued a restrained yet weighty statement, clearly pointing out that administrative intimidation and personal threats against writers constitute substantial damage to the publishing system.

PEN Britain followed suit, leaving an extremely sharp statement in its announcement: "When power begins to fear the novel, the safety of writers is no longer a private matter."

Then the fire quickly spread like wildfire.

In his column, a leading French literary critic provided an in-depth analysis of the dangerous strangulation chain that extends from "reputation smearing and publishing pressure" to "tax evasion and street violence."

The German Publishers Association went even further, stating publicly that if the Japanese government cannot guarantee Kitahara Iwa's safety and creative environment, the European publishing industry will escalate the multilingual overseas distribution of "The Collapsing Tower" into an international public event to defend freedom of publication.

When these overseas protests fell back into Tokyo like snowflakes, the Ministry of Finance's plan to suppress the incident domestically and rely on press releases from the Metropolitan Police Department and the media from conglomerates to downplay it completely failed.

The European literary world doesn't need to understand Japan's bad debts in housing and real estate or the second mortgage on real estate. They only need to cling to the fact that "the writer almost died in the street for exposing reality" to put the Japanese government in an extremely passive diplomatic and public opinion quagmire.

At this moment, the protective barrier surrounding Kitahara Rock has undergone a qualitative change.

If Shinchosha was protecting Kitahara Iwa himself, and the Japanese literary world was protecting its own literary giants, then the European publishing industry, which is now fully involved, is defending the universal ironclad rule that "capital and power must never be allowed to silence realism through violence."

Faced with this line of defense built by transnational consensus, the Metropolitan Police Department's official report, which attempted to downgrade the alleyway stabbing as a "common robbery," instantly crumbled, turning into a blatant international scandal.

Tokyo's bureaucrats, accustomed to resolving problems behind closed doors with an iron fist, suddenly found that every violation they had made in an attempt to cover up the crisis had been exposed to scrutiny by international rules and transatlantic laws.

However, what chilled Xia Guan even more than the condemnation from the cultural circles was the substantial entry of international capital.

After all, no matter how harsh the condemnation from the cultural sphere may be, it ultimately remains only a game of public opinion. But once international capital begins to move on a large scale, what falls is real money that can destroy a country's macroeconomy.

The day after the Financial Times published its lengthy report, "The Collapsing Tower" was listed as a core reference for the first time at the morning meetings of several hedge funds in the City of London and Wall Street, New York.

While no fund manager would equate fictional novels directly with financial statements, the Japanese Ministry of Finance...

This series of extreme overreactions, orchestrated by distributors and the Metropolitan Police Department, has provided the most expensive official endorsement for the book's theories.

Since the Japanese financial sector had to resort to tax audits, blockades, and even street violence to forcibly silence the author, the capital market naturally understood that this novel must have accurately hit the core of the Japanese financial system's bad debts.

After stripping away the literary aspects of the discussion, overseas institutions quickly focused on the scale of bad debts in the housing market, the implicit guarantee agreements of parent banks, the fragility of the joint guarantee chain, and the severely inflated mortgage valuations of Tokyo real estate.

Instructions from Wall Street investment banks such as Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Salomon Brothers began to be issued intensively.

Initially, it was just a few tentative short selling orders, but after discovering that the support below was much weaker than the official claims, the probing quickly turned into heavy short selling.

At the Tokyo Stock Exchange, Japanese bank stocks were completely repriced by foreign investors, trading volume of real estate-related financial products surged abnormally, and short positions related to the Nikkei index rose sharply in just a few days.

When the buy orders placed after the afternoon opening were instantly overwhelmed by a continuous stream of overseas sell orders, the local traders in the trading hall finally realized that foreign capital was targeting the Japanese banking sector.

The capital market doesn't care about personal relationships. It won't listen to the "long-term value" endorsements from TV scholars, nor will it heed the "technical adjustments" reassurances from Ministry of Finance officials. It only uses sell orders to cast its most ruthless vote.

Accompanying the short-selling frenzy was substantial accountability from authoritative international institutions.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and several international rating agencies submitted formal inquiry letters to Kasumigaseki almost simultaneously.

These letters are worded in a diplomatic manner, but they address the core issues: What is the actual scale of bad debts in the housing market system? Have the real estate collateral been revalued? If housing prices stop rising, where will the first link in the guarantee chain break? Have the relevant parent banks set aside sufficient loss reserves?

These are the very secrets that the Ministry of Finance has been desperately trying to hide deep within the archives over the past few years.

When facing domestic media and Congress, they can still evade responsibility and divert attention.

However, when the questioning party becomes an international institution that dominates the flow of global capital, silence and evasion themselves constitute the most fatal negative answer.

Inside the imposing gray granite building in Xiaguan, a transoceanic inquiry letter lay heavily on the high-level conference table.

When Kishimoto Takeo's gaze fell on the line, "Please explain whether the potential scale of non-performing loans in the housing and construction system has been fully disclosed," the entire conference room fell into a deathly silence.

They knew the true number, which was enough to trigger an avalanche, and that was why they could not reveal a single word of it.

But now, the whole world is scrutinizing them and forcing them to reveal their hand.

This bubble dream, which had flourished throughout the winter, was finally torn open by the absolute rationality of multinational capital, leaving an irreparable crack.

What left these high-ranking bureaucrats feeling absurd and powerless was that what personally pried open the safe of state secrets and ignited this international financial storm was not a top short-selling report from Wall Street, nor a downgrade warning from rating agencies.

Instead, it was a novel they thought they could silence by blocking channels and using weapons in the shadows.