at last is near!
It was done.
He sighed, leaned back, and reached for the cup of green tea that rested beside him on the polished boards. The verse was in an archaic style, a few syllables longer than a haiku, modeled on an eight-hundred-year-old work by a court poet of the Heian era. The strokes were perfectly nuanced, the flow of the brush precise, the intuitive strength as natural as a waterfall.
Noda drained his tea, then rose to go back inside. His antique house was tastefully "empty": its tatami-floored rooms, measured in multiples of those standard three-by-six reed mats, were barren, a museum to times past. They also were open to each other, their sliding doors, fusuma, being pushed wide. The walls, too, were vacant expanses of white plaster with only an occasional mounted six-fold screen depicting poetry parties of the Heian era, that courtly civilization portrayed in The Tale of Genji. And there were no overhead lights, merely an occasional cypress andon floor lamp to augment the pastel glow of the rice-paper shop windows.
"Asa-han." He curtly ordered his gray-haired cook to bring breakfast, then turned to mount the ancient stairs.
"Hai." She nodded and was gone.
Although he kept the lower floor exactly as it had been two centuries past, the upstairs was a different matter entirely. It had been converted into a high-tech office, hooked through a maximum security TeleSystems TCS-9000 direct uplink (via the mid-Pacific Mareks-B satellite) to the mainframe of his new NEC information management system in the Kyoto headquarters, an augmented NEAX 2400 IMS, which handled voice, data, text, image. He had scarcely flipped on the system when the woman who managed his kitchen appeared, bowing, and deposited a tray bearing miso broth, rice, an uncooked egg, and more tea.
He grunted thanks as he was checking a CRT screen for the current rate on Fed funds, the cost of the money American banks lend each other overnight to meet reserve requirements. No surprises. Then he turned and cracked the egg over his rice, adding a leaf of dried nori seaweed. As he leaned back, chopsticks in hand, he quickly glanced through the Tokyo papers, followed by The Asian Wall Street Journal and the satellite edition of London's Financial Times. Finally he tossed them aside.
This was always the moment when he liked to take measure of the three photos standing in a row across the back of his teak desk. The first was his deceased wife Mariko—long-suffering, deferential, resignedly selfless. A model Japanese woman. He still thought of her with fondness, but as was expected of a Japanese helpmate, she always ran a distant second in his affections. His work came first.
The next picture was very different. This woman's face was white, her hair a lacquered wig, her lips a tiny red pout. Her name, Koriko, had been assigned years ago in the Gion district of Kyoto, and she was holding a three-stringed lute, a samisen, and intoning some classical melody from centuries past. These days she purchased thousand-dollar kimonos the way most office girls bought jeans, but she worked for the money. She was a geisha, a real one, an artist whose calling required years of training and commanded the awe of even the most modern Japanese. Like a prizefighter or a matador, she'd spent long painful hours perfecting style, technique, art. She had been Noda's one-time protégée, beneficiary of his patronage. Now, though, she had other "patrons." He still missed her, but the memory was fading.