Fatal Reaction

vulnerability to any of them. “So, now that you’ve seen him what do you think killed him?” I asked, shaking off the thought.
    “I don’t know. But he definitely wasn’t stabbed to death. You saw him. There was no sign of any kind of injury.”
    “Could he have bled to death internally?” I asked.
    “Of course, he could have,” replied Stephen. “But that still wouldn’t explain why there was blood splashed all over his apartment or why the couch was turned upside down.”
     
    Customers in the bar swung into “My Sweet Adeline,” the bartender set us up with another round, and I steered the conversation to other matters, different levels of distress.
    “What’s Takisawa’s son-in-law like?” I asked. I’d seen his name on the list of people Takisawa was sending over. I wondered how he was going to take the news about Danny.
    “You’ll like him, Kate. Not only is he very bright, hut he’s also outgoing and personable, especially for a Japanese.”
    “How well did he and Danny know each other?”
    “They were very close, at least during the time they were both at Harvard. After that...”
    “So you’re saying he and Danny were more than just friends'?”
    “My guess would be yes.”
    “But now he’s married.”
    “Like I said, he’s a very bright guy. After he got his law degree, he picked up an M.B.A. at Wharton, then he went back to Japan and made what was probably his smartest career move—he married old man Takisawa’s only daughter.”
    “Do they have kids?”
    “They have one child, a boy.”
    “So I gather it’s safe to assume he’s never told his family about his relationship with Danny.”
    “Let’s put it this way, Kate. Who knows what confidences are exchanged between a husband and his wife, but I think it’s a safe bet a homosexual relationship in one’s past is not exactly the kind of thing Hiroshi would be likely to advertise to his father-in-law.”
     
    I had Stephen drop me off at my office. It may have been Friday night, but we both still had work to do. Besides, with each day that passed it seemed that the stakes for the ZK-501 project grew higher. With the rumblings of unrest among the company’s board of directors it was becoming increasingly urgent to strike a deal with Takisawa. With that in mind I settled down to read the thousand-plus pages that to date chronicled the history of Azor’s negotiations with Takisawa.
    I didn’t finish until well after midnight. Then, instead of taking myself home, I made my way to the firm’s library, not surprised to find the lights still on and a beleaguered first-year associate grimly wading through casebooks. He looked up, astonished through his fatigue to find that he was not alone. While my appearance no doubt reinforced the work-animal reputation I still possessed I felt a pang of gratitude that at least those days were behind me.
    I offered up a small nod of compassion and went off in search of what I was looking for. As it turned out the firm possessed an ample collection of books concerned with doing business with the Japanese. That night I read them all.
    It didn’t take me long to conclude that in choosing me to take Danny’s place, Stephen had made a terrible mistake. Not only was I as ignorant about Japanese business as I was about molecular chemistry, but that ignorance put Azor at a tremendous disadvantage. I’d always known that the Japanese conduct business very differently from Americans, but until that night I had not realized how deep the cultural roots of those differences went.
    There was a lot more to it than bowing and eating sushi. Japanese culture placed a much higher value on physical etiquette and group harmony than on the personal expression and individual freedom celebrated by Americans. Over time the Japanese with their single language, homogeneous culture, and common life expenses had developed highly evolved systems of informal consensus building and formal decision making that were strikingly different from our own.
    But what really frightened me was that Japanese businesses operate according to a completely different concept of time. While Jim Cassidy fixated on Azor’s single year of soft performance, the Takisawa Corporation was probably being operated according to a twenty-year plan. The Japanese, I reflected, had the time to grind you down.
    With their tradition of permanent employment, the Japanese were also highly averse to the transience of American employees. For that