Composing a Life

like a man, and instead of trying to persuade the Japanese to deal in the same way as Americans, as equals potentially in competition, Alice immersed herself in Japanese styles and went out of her way to emphasize the potential complementarity in the relationship. The first step was composing a long letter after Jack’s death, describing the situation and hopes of the company, as she prepared to step into his role in the negotiations. She very deliberately chose a woman to translate her letter into Japanese and to write it in elegant and feminine calligraphy. The reply was a letter advancing the date for the transfer of the half million dollars already agreed on with Jack and an invitation for Alice to go to Japan.
    “I explained my ideas there, and why we think we can work synergistically with Canon so the two businesses won’t compete. Finally there’s a meeting with the top boss, and then we’re invited to dinner that night. They didn’t want us to go to venture capitalists, so they had asked me how much we needed, and I came up with $3.6 million, and we agreed in general principle on how much they would want as stock, and how it would be spread over time. So then we go off to dinner and there’s a lot of sake and we go into the barroom and sing. I’m supposed to sing ‘Tennessee Waltz,’ and then I join in a Japanese duet written out for me in roman letters, and one of them sings ‘Love Me Tender,’ which Jack had sung when he was there, and I cried. They’re very warm, and we dance in a group with the Mamasan, and it’s really warm and loving and nice and I fall asleep and have a headache the next day. But I got the draft agreement we had talked about.”
    I asked Alice whether being a woman complicated her task. “Well,” she said, “one of them did say he didn’t want to negotiate with me because he liked women and that made it too tough—that was the only reference to my being a woman. We have wonderful repartee. What I think is that my situation allowed me to behave in a way that feminine characteristics did not impede toughness. The business was easy to do just because of the toughness of the situation. We held the line but we worked on their time scale. And when we agreed to something, we honored it. But they also said not only could I work, but I also knew how to play. I continued to write letters in Japanese when appropriate, and I staged meetings like N ō plays, very dramatic, where I played a civilized part, and we sent each other cards with very carefully chosen haiku. Everything is very individualized because I now know the people and I know what to say. Indeed, now I have people whom I visit, and I get invited very regularly to people’s houses.”
    The relationship between tiny Rise Technology and Canon was inevitably lopsided, but it was built on respect. Rise was able to contribute a technique for reproducing grays and shading that Canon needed, and Canon was able to offer needed schematics to Rise and provide protection for their patents, in addition to giving them desperately needed capital. But what was even more important was that Rise had a different and more flexible style of approaching problems that Canon wanted their engineers to learn, so they started sending engineers for internships in Cambridge. “The coup was finding the right partner, powerful enough to enforce the patents. We wanted their part of the technology, but we could add to it from our knowledge because they weren’t doing such a good job. They were concerned that we would begin to compete. Well, you know, you can always compete about anything, but you can always set things up so a small company can do things a large company doesn’t want. We wanted to compete in a world that’s very niched and no one cares much about it because it’s only $50 or $100 million and they’re looking for the billion.”
    The creative possibilities of complementarity were underlined for Joan and me in 1966 when we both sat in on a seminar Erik was leading on history and the life cycle. I was doing a project on Saint Teresa of Avila and reading Saint John of the Cross. They made an interesting pair because each led a reform in his or her branch of the Carmelite order, and each supported the other in what they saw as a single search for union with the divine. Yet there were deep differences in their assumptions. There have been a number of couples like this in religious history, men and women who saw themselves as