Tokyo Literary Masters: Starting from the Late 1980s

Chapter 171 Inspiration from Akina Nakamori

When Kitahara Iwa returned to the apartment, he deliberately paused in front of the door before inserting the key to open it.

"Click".

The door lock clicked softly.

In the living room, Izumi Sakai was sitting on the sofa reading a book.

She was wearing a light-colored knitted cardigan, and a half-open book of poetry lay open on her lap.

The two white porcelain teacups on the coffee table were still there, with a little bit of cooled tea left at the bottom.

Hearing the noise from the entrance, Izumi Sakai looked up.

Their gaze first fell on Kitahara Iwa, and then they naturally glanced behind him.

It was deserted there.

Izumi Sakai did not immediately ask further questions.

She first tucked the bookmark back into the book, closed it, and then glanced at the empty entryway behind Kitahara Iwa before softly asking, "Iwa-kun, why are you the only one who came back?"

Hearing Izumi Sakai's concerned words, Iwao Kitahara paused in his shoe-changing motion.

"Um.

""

Then Kitahara Iwa took off his coat and hung it on the coat rack next to the entrance.

"Akina leaves first."

Izumi Sakai nodded, then continued, "Is she alright?"

Kitahara Iwa was silent for a moment, then shook his head: "Not good."

Then he went into the living room and sat down on the sofa.

"But the matter is resolved. The management company has taken back the contract, and GG, the album, and the tour will no longer be used to threaten her."

Kitahara Iwa tried his best to keep his tone calm, attempting to suppress the unexpected emotional turmoil that had erupted in front of the elevator.

However, in the brief moment when Kitahara Iwa spoke and lowered his gaze slightly, a hint of worry inevitably surfaced in his eyes.

Recalling Akina Nakamori's retreating figure in the twilight, and the heavy emotions she entrusted to him without reservation, mixed with tears, has become a new unresolved problem.

This sincerity is not only profound, but also carries the vulnerability that could hurt the other person and Izumi Sakai at any moment.

How to handle this desperate emotional gamble is far more challenging for him than forcing a few businessmen to back down at the negotiating table.

Upon hearing Kitahara Iwao's reply, Sakai Izumi paused slightly.

As a singer herself, she naturally understands the weight behind those words.

GG, albums, tours—these may sound like just work assignments, but in the hands of the agency, they are often the most direct constraints.

The fact that Yan Yin was willing to take all these things back shows that the conversation downstairs was definitely not something that could be resolved with just a few words of persuasion.

Izumi Sakai looked at Iwata Kitahara, who was sitting back on the sofa.

She knew all too well how much effort it would take to force those capitalists to back down, and as her gaze swept over the worry between his brows, a silent comfort and heartache were revealed.

A moment later, the worry that had been hanging over her eyes all afternoon gradually faded away.

In any case, in this cutthroat world of fame and fortune, Ms. Akina has finally broken free from her shackles for the time being and no longer has to be pushed forward like a puppet by the agency.

Thinking of this, Izumi Sakai let out a soft breath, then asked, "What about her brother?"

"I warned you."

Kitahara Iwa leaned back into the sofa and pinched the bridge of his nose.

"I probably won't dare to force her to sign anything again."

Izumi Sakai nodded and said, "That's good."

After she finished speaking, she looked at Kitahara Iwa quietly for a while, then suddenly asked, "And what about you, Iwa-kun?"

"I?"

Kitahara Iwa was slightly taken aback, as if he hadn't expected her to turn the topic to him.

He thought he had covered up the unexpected incident in front of the elevator door fairly well.

But when he met Izumi Sakai's quiet gaze, Kitahara Iwa realized that the worry he had brought back with his brows had not escaped her intuition.

Izumi Sakai put the book aside and nodded gently.

"Um."

"You've been saying things are resolved, but you don't seem genuinely relaxed."

Kitahara Iwa paused for a moment before saying in a low voice, "It's alright."

However, Izumi Sakai did not press him further, but simply watched him quietly for a while.

At this moment, Kitahara Iwa felt somewhat helpless under her gaze.

He then realized that she had probably seen through his lingering emotions downstairs the moment he walked in.

Kitahara Iwa chuckled softly and said, "So obvious?"

Izumi Sakai smiled slightly and said, "Others won't be able to tell."

"But I can tell."

Kitahara Iwa did not respond.

At this moment, Izumi Sakai walked to the kitchen, picked up the teapot that had cooled down, and said, "The tea is cold, let me pour you a fresh cup."

Kitahara Iwa wanted to say no, but he stopped himself from speaking.

As he watched her back as she bent down to brew tea again, the unease he had brought back from the elevator lobby finally subsided.

A moment later, Izumi Sakai returned with a cup of hot tea and placed it in front of Iwa Kitahara.

The steam from the tea slowly rose.

Kitahara Iwatsu took the cup, his fingertips touching the warm cup wall.

Izumi Sakai sat down next to Kitahara Iwa and asked, "Akina-san—how are you doing now?"

Kitahara Iwa held his teacup and remained silent for a moment.

"It's not good."

"But at least after today, she can catch her breath."

Izumi Sakai lowered her eyes and responded softly.

"That's already very good."

Outside the window, night had quietly fallen in Tokyo.

In the distance, skyscrapers lit up in clusters of lights, and the neon lights of Ginza and Roppongi still made this city, which was in a frenzied bubble, seem unreal.

Beneath this glitz and glamour, some are greedily borrowing and mortgaging, while others are being driven to the brink of despair by blood relatives and capital.

Kitahara Iwa lowered his head and took a sip of tea.

The warm tea went down my throat, but it couldn't suppress the lingering emotional turmoil from the sudden incident in front of the elevator.

That genuine feeling, tinged with tears, was less about ambiguity and more like someone struggling to survive in deep water, desperately grasping at a straw offered from the shore, only to awkwardly let go after realizing the boundaries between them.

Kitahara Iwa lowered his eyes and quietly looked at the teacup in his hand.

After a moment, he put the cup back on the coffee table, stood up and said, "I'm going to sit in the study for a while."

Izumi Sakai responded softly, and then, just as Iwata Kitahara was about to enter the room, gently reminded him, "Don't stay up too late."

"it is good."

The study door closed gently.

The warm colors of the living room, a hallmark of family life, were shut out, while the desk lamp in the study cast a quiet, cool halo.

On the large desk lay a half-finished book, a record of the madness and collapse of this era.

The Collapsed Tower.

The confrontation downstairs still seems to linger in my body.

Nozaki Toshio's frozen smile, Nakamori Yoichi's greedy yet timid eyes, Nakamori Akina's pale face as she lowered her head and clenched the file bag with her fingertips, and the fear that simultaneously appeared on the faces of the two men after the words "front page of the newspaper" were written.

In reality, these scenes represent only a brief conflict.

But when Kitahara Iwa sat down at his desk again and looked at the outline on the paper, it was no longer just Nakamori Akina's private matter.

They became a slice of the bubble era.

The overall framework of "The Collapsed Tower" was actually set long ago.

In the outline that Kitahara Iwao gave to Sato Kenichi and Murata Taro, this book adopted a dual narrative structure.

The story begins with a murder case in a luxury apartment in Tokyo.

When the detectives entered the scene, they found what appeared to be a respectable middle-class family: the father was missing, the mother was dead, and the daughter was mentally unstable. The apartment contained numerous property contracts, bank statements, housing loan documents, and several yellowed guarantee letters.

On the surface, the case is about the collapse of a family during the bubble economy era.

However, as the investigation progressed, the detectives traced the relationships between the apartment residents layer by layer and discovered that almost every family in this upscale apartment building was entangled in the same thing.

Housing prices, debt, mortgages, and guarantees.

And then there were those seemingly heartwarming phrases like, "This is for the family."

The other storyline unfolds from within the bank.

After joining the real estate finance department, a young banker gradually sees through the so-called "high-quality loans" and "asset allocation."

'

The true face behind the "dividends of the times".

Banks continue to extend loans to boost their performance, while real estate brokers take on the risks that are ostensibly transferred out. The financial sector repeatedly uses real estate projects to siphon off funds, while bureaucrats use elegant language to cover up corruption in reports and reviews.

This book contains bank scandals and collusion between officials and businessmen, reminiscent of "The Corruption of the Financial Islands," as well as apartment murder cases and portraits of residents, reminiscent of "The Reason."

The upper section lists the bank, housing agency, finance sector, and Xiaguan.

The lower level depicts family, kinship, debt, and the fall of ordinary people from the bubble.

But it wasn't until today that Kitahara Iwa realized that this book could have been even more straightforward.

The financial clashes from a macro perspective have been written in a sufficiently cold and hard style.

The ethical tragedies within micro-families also laid the groundwork for the necessary repression.

However, if all that is written is bad debt figures, land price curves, bank meetings, and bureaucratic reports, readers will know that this is a disaster, but they may not truly feel what it is like when disaster strikes people.

What's truly suffocating isn't how the bubble bursts on the newspaper.

It's not about how it ends up on a specific person, at a dining table, or on a document.

It falls on a woman who is trembling with fear, yet is still surrounded by her father, brother, firm manager, and bank manager, who persuade her that "just sign the papers."

The father said it was for the family.

My brother said, blood is thicker than water.

According to the agency, this is part of the future plan.

The bank stated that the procedures were entirely compliant.

Everyone stood around her.

Everyone seemed to be thinking of her best interests.

But in the end, she was the only one who truly ended up with debt.

Kitahara Iwa lowered his eyes, and finally put the pen down in his hand.

A line of text appeared on the paper first.

She did not die on the day the market collapsed.

After writing this, the pen paused briefly on the paper.

Then Kitahara Iwa pushed the page aside and pulled out a blank character design sheet.

Between the macro-level financial executives and the micro-level low-rise apartment dwellers, Kitahara Iwao decisively filled in a new role to shoulder this heavy burden.

Since the storm in reality has been forcibly stopped, then in the fictional world of words, someone needs to bear the misfortune that was originally going to befall us.

To compensate for the raw reality of how the bubble era crushed humanity, this character can only follow the inertia of the times, step by step heading towards the ultimate fate of being swallowed up by capital.

The pen tip hovered for a moment in the blank space of the name column.

Then, Kitahara Iwa calmly put down his pen and wrote three words on the paper.

Hayakawa Rei, female singer, 26 years old.

Her family, under the guise of "family asset allocation," demanded that she sign a real estate contract worth hundreds of millions of yen.

The firm used work arrangements as leverage to exert silent pressure.

Bank managers, knowing the risks were too high, proactively completed the loan structure due to performance evaluations and access to housing-related channels.

She won't be the main character.

But he will become the first person in the entire book to be truly crushed by the times.

She did not die on the day the market collapsed.

In fact, she had already begun to die slowly before the first newspaper about the drop in Tokyo land prices was delivered to her apartment mailbox, before the Nikkei index plummeted from 30,000 points, and before the bank manager first showed a troubled smile.

The earliest death occurred at a dining table.

That evening, her father pushed a document in front of her.

My brother sat beside me, his face flushed with a mixture of anxiety and excitement.

The mother stood at the kitchen doorway, clutching her apron, without saying a word.

The financial advisor from the firm sat opposite her, impeccably dressed in a suit, speaking in a gentle voice as if introducing her to a very respectable future.

The father said, "It's just a matter of signing a document."

My brother said, "With your income so high now, the bank is giving you a credit line because they think highly of you."

The financial advisor said, "This isn't debt; it's asset allocation."

She looked down at the documents.

Real estate purchase contracts, joint and several guarantees, second mortgages, and priority repayment of income.

She was unfamiliar with none of these words.

But everyone was watching her.

That kind of gaze made her feel that if she hesitated, she would be immature, she would be letting down her family, and she would not understand who was supporting her in everything she had achieved.

The bank manager smiled and handed him the pen.

That pen was very light.

It was so light that she could barely feel its weight.

But when she held it, she felt as if an entire building was pressing down on her wrist.

She looked up, as if to say that she was scared.

But the older brother impatiently tapped the table and said, "What are you still hesitating about?"

'

So she swallowed those words back.

She did not die that day.

She simply signed her name.

Years later, when the police found her in that now-empty luxury apartment, the young detective in charge of taking notes looked at the yellowed contract and suddenly understood something.

The real weapon in this case was never a knife.

It was, in fact, a loan agreement that everyone called an "opportunity."

Kitahara Iwa paused his writing at this point.

The only sound in the study was the soft rustling of the pen tip leaving the paper.

He looked at the newly written text, his eyes calm.

This is exactly what "The Collapsed Tower" needs.

Bank corruption cannot remain just news from the top.

Family tragedies cannot be merely isolated incidents.

What separates them is never social class or distance, but a contract that everyone has collectively pushed in front of the victim.

Banks package risk as opportunity, capital packages oppression as arrangement, and family members package demands as affection.

When these three elements converge on the same piece of paper, a person is pushed to the bottom of the towering structure of the times.

When that giant tower finally collapses, people will only ask:

Why didn't she run away?

Why did she sign it?

Why didn't she refuse sooner?

But few are willing to admit that before she signed, everyone stood behind her, telling her in a gentle, patient, and matter-of-fact tone—

This is all for your own good.

Kitahara Iwa lowered his head again and added a note next to the outline paper.

New female character: the ultimate bearer of the bubble after it spreads into the family.

After writing the last line of the character description, Kitahara Iwao pressed the page of manuscript under the paperweight.

The lingering emotions that had nowhere to go in reality, along with the absurdity that was quietly fermenting in this era, were all subtly transformed into the cold, hard skeleton of the novel at the moment of writing.

Then Kitahara Iwa pulled out another blank sheet of graph paper, and the scratching sound of the pen echoed rhythmically in the quiet study.

Tokyo outside the window is still ablaze with neon lights. This city, immersed in a frenzied bubble, continues to tirelessly overdraw its future prosperity.

On the paper, a bleeding crack appeared on the giant tower called Foam.