November 24, 1991, Sunday, 3:00 PM.
Tokyo, Ginza 7-chome, top floor of G-7 CRYSTAL (Ginza 7-chome Crystal Palace).
As soon as the elevator door opened, Kenjiro first smelled a faint scent of wood wax.
The entire floor had almost no partitions, and the walls were painted a very light gray. Paintings were hung far apart from each other, each with a small spotlight shining down from above.
The side facing the street was a whole wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, and the afternoon light shone in slantingly, carpeting the dark wooden floor.
Tucked under his arm was a kraft paper file bag containing this week's summary of Fuji Bank stock purchases.
To organize the transaction receipts from those dozen or so securities firms, he had checked them one by one in his study last night until almost 2:00 AM before going to sleep.
At noon, Satsuki's call woke him up, asking him to bring the things directly to Ginza.
Satsuki was standing right in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows.
She was wearing a camel-colored turtleneck sweater, her hair down, looking down at Central Link downstairs.
Chizuru was standing a few steps away from her, and seeing Kenjiro come out, she slightly bowed.
"Uncle, over here."
Kenjiro walked over and looked down following her line of sight.
On Sunday afternoon, Central Link was closed to traffic as usual, serving as a pedestrian paradise.
The roadway was full of people, including couples pushing strollers and young girls carrying paper bags. Christmas decorations had already been hung at the entrances of several department stores, and looking down from the seventh floor, one could clearly see all the way to the intersection of 4-chome.
"The view from here is pretty good, right?"
Satsuki turned around, her back against the glass.
"Uncle wasn't back then, right... Originally, this was just an excuse to build two more floors, but I quite like it here. Standing here and looking at Ginza is quite comfortable, so I simply turned it into a gallery."
"But... this isn't open to the public either."
Kenjiro shifted the file bag to his other hand and looked around.
"Who says a gallery has to be open to the public?"
Satsuki reached out her hand to him. Thinking she wanted the documents, Kenjiro quickly handed over the bag, but she instead handed it to Chizuru and walked deeper into the exhibition hall herself.
"A private gallery is still a gallery. Most of the paintings bought back in recent years are hung here."
She beckoned to Kenjiro.
"Speaking of which, I haven't even properly looked at these paintings; they were all just tossed here after being bought."
"We'll look at the documents later, Uncle can accompany me for a stroll first."
Kenjiro had no choice but to follow.
The first painting was a moderately sized oil painting, filled entirely with blobs of blue and green, with a few pale purple patches floating in the middle.
Looking closely, it was all paint piled up stroke by stroke; stepping back two paces, one could barely recognize a pond and a few water lilies.
Satsuki stopped in front of the painting, her hands behind her back, watching very intently. Kenjiro stood half a step behind her, stopped as well, thought for a moment, and then raised one hand to support his chin.
He stared at the pond for a while, and his gaze unconsciously shifted to the frame.
Such a thick solid wood frame must weigh at least over a dozen kilograms, yet only two thin steel wires could be seen hanging it on the wall.
He couldn't help turning his head, wanting to see if the hooks behind were driven into the concrete or just into the drywall.
"Monet."
Satsuki suddenly spoke up, and Kenjiro quickly straightened his head.
"In his later years, he dug a pond in his own yard, planted it full of water lilies, and painted more than two hundred pieces back and forth."
"Later, when he painted this one, he already had cataracts and couldn't judge the colors accurately anymore, which is why he painted heavier and heavier."
"Oh..."
Kenjiro nodded, and the hand supporting his chin pushed upward accordingly.
"To be able to paint like this even when his vision is unclear is quite impressive."
"This one was auctioned back from Sotheby's in 1988. At that time, Japanese people were going crazy snapping up Impressionist works, and prices changed every single month."
Finished speaking, Satsuki turned her head to look at him.
"Uncle was looking at the hooks just now, right?"
"...No."
Walking further in, a glass cabinet stood by the wall, and the lights inside were adjusted very dimly.
Kenjiro only saw clearly after approaching: a yellowed paper was laid flat inside, and a hand was outlined on the paper with thin ink lines.
The fingers were slightly curved, and even the wrinkles on the knuckles and the protruding blood vessels on the back of the hand were drawn out.
"Why is this one so dim?"
"Paper is afraid of light; if the light is too bright, it will fade in a few years."
Satsuki bent down and looked at the hand through the glass.
"This was painted by Dürer, a German from five hundred years ago."
"He has a very famous work 'Praying Hands'; this one is a draft from the same period, just bought back from an old count in Paris the year before last."
Kenjiro also bent down, his nose almost touching the glass, and after looking for a long time, it was still just a hand.
He straightened his waist and supported his chin again.
"Five hundred years... This hand really looks like a hand..."
After saying this, he didn't know what to reply.
Fortunately, Satsuki didn't wait for his reply and led him around a partition wall.
This side hung Japanese paintings, the most prominent of which was a horizontal scroll on silk: golden clouds pressed below, and a snow-white peak appeared above the clouds.
This time without anyone introducing it, Kenjiro recognized it himself.
"Oh oh, I know this, it's Mount Fuji."
"Right, painted by Yokoyama Taikan."
Satsuki stopped in front of the painting, looking up at that patch of golden clouds.
"He probably painted over a thousand Mount Fujis in his lifetime, and later on, whenever people mentioned Yokoyama Taikan, the first thing they thought of was Mount Fuji."
"This one was painted before the war. Last year, a Former Kazoku family was in urgent need of money, so I took it over from their hands."
"On the day of delivery, they didn't even find the wooden box for the painting, and it wasn't until half a month later that they sent it over."
Kenjiro looked at the mountain in the painting, the corners of his mouth twitching slightly.
In the past few days, every time he opened his eyes, it was those two words in the newspaper. Now whenever he saw "Fuji," what popped up in his mind were entirely the long queues at the entrance of the Akasaka Branch and the stock price tables.
Satsuki looked at his expression, and the corners of her mouth also curved up.
"Rest assured, the mountain in the painting definitely won't fall."
Kenjiro couldn't help laughing out loud.
The two walked past a few more paintings, and Satsuki stopped in front of a small sketch.
Inside the frame was a portrait of an old man drawn in brown ink, with very messy lines, and in some places, the tip of the pen just casually swept a few times.
But the old man's eyes were drawn very carefully, his eyelids drooping, and the way he looked at people revealed weariness.
Kenjiro learned his lesson this time, preemptively supporting his chin and standing still, putting on an attitude of serious appreciation.
Satsuki glanced at him, turned back to look at the painting, fell silent for a moment, and her tone became much more solemn than before.
"Uncle, you must look closely at this one."
"In the entire gallery, this is the most valuable one."
Kenjiro subconsciously lowered the hand supporting his chin.
"Eh? This one?"
"Rembrandt, ever heard of him? A Dutchman, the most famous painter from over three hundred years ago."
"He was very glamorous when he was young, but unfortunately he spent money too fiercely, and by 1656 he simply went bankrupt. His house and collections were all taken away to be auctioned."
"Bankrupt? Painters can go bankrupt too?"
"Painters are the ones most prone to bankruptcy."
Satsuki raised her hand, pointing behind the frame through the glass.
"This one was painted a few months before he went bankrupt."
"At that time, he owed a French wine merchant three hundred guilders, and since he really couldn't pay it back, he casually drew this portrait on the back of the IOU, telling the person that this painting would settle the three hundred guilders."
"As a result, that wine merchant didn't honor the account, kept the IOU along with the painting, and later it was passed down all the way to that old count's family."
"Wait, wait a minute."
Kenjiro stared at the frame, his brain turning a bit slowly.
"Meaning, the back... is an IOU?"
"That's right, it even has Rembrandt's own signature on it, dated July 1656."
"And that money was never paid back in the end."
Satsuki turned her head and said with a straight face.
"So when I bought this painting, the creditor's rights on the IOU were transferred over together."
"According to the market interest rate in Amsterdam at that time, an annual interest rate of six percent, compounded all the way to this year, is exactly three hundred and thirty-five years."
"I had a lawyer calculate it, the principal and interest together add up to about ninety billion guilders."
"Converted into yen, it's about... six trillion."
"Six trillion?!"
Kenjiro's voice suddenly pitched higher, and Chizuru at the other end of the exhibition hall raised her head.
Six trillion yen. The loophole at the Akasaka Branch that caused the president of Fuji Bank to step down was only six hundred billion even at the height of newspaper rumors.
"Rembrandt has no descendants left long ago; the house he used to live in now belongs to the Amsterdam city government and has been opened as a museum."
"So the lawyer's meaning is, we might as well just mail the collection letter directly to the City of Amsterdam."
Satsuki even nodded very seriously, and even the positions of her pauses were identical to how she usually presented proposals in meetings.
Kenjiro kept his mouth open, unable to close it for a long time.
No way... This is too outrageous, even Satsuki would...
But on second thought, last month he was sitting across the dining table, watching her with his own eyes have someone take a certificate of deposit stamped by the branch itself to the counter to withdraw money, resulting in the president of an urban bank losing his position.
Going to someone's door to demand money with an IOU bearing their personal signature, what kind of thing like this wouldn't she do?
The more he thought about it, the more it seemed real, and his back felt somewhat tense.
"Th-Then for the lawsuit over in the Netherlands, do we have to find local lawyers? Also, it's been over three hundred years, the issue of statute of limitations... Does Dutch law actually recognize this kind of thing..."
Before he finished speaking, Satsuki couldn't hold it in anymore.
"Pfft—"
She let out a pfft of laughter, quickly raising her hand to cover her mouth, her shoulders trembling nonstop.
"Hahahaha... No, no more..."
"Uncle, don't look at me like that... Hahaha..."
In the end, she laughed so hard she bent over, steadying herself by holding onto the nearby wall.
Kenjiro froze in place, looked at the painting, then looked at her, and only reacted after several seconds.
"...You're messing with me?"
"Uncle actually even thought of the statute of limitations..."
Satsuki laughed until the corners of her eyes were wet, wiping them with her knuckles.
"There's nothing on the back at all, it's just a sketch. Rembrandt's bankruptcy is real, everything else is just made up by me."
Kenjiro's face suddenly heated up. He raised his hand to scratch the back of his head, wanting to say something to save face, opened his mouth, and finally could only squeeze out one sentence.
"You made it up way too convincingly."
"That's because Uncle, you believed it."
Satsuki laughed for a while longer before slowly straightening her body and tidying the hem of her creased sweater.
"Alright alright, I won't tease you anymore, the last one."
She led Kenjiro to the very back of the exhibition hall. Only one painting hung on this wall, larger than all the previous ones, horizontally occupying almost half the wall.
The painting was of the sea.
The sky was a grayish yellow, making it hard to tell whether it was dusk or close to dawn.
Waves rolled over layer upon layer, the foremost wave curling very high, white foam churning on the crest.
Floating on the sea surface beneath the waves was a broken section of a mast, with five or six people hugging the mast, one of whom already had half his body soaked in the water, still reaching out a hand to pull the person next to him.
Further away, a broken piece of the ship's side tilted up, and behind that, there was only the sea left.
Satsuki stood still in front of the painting.
The smile on her face gradually faded away bit by bit, and after looking at the painting for a long time, she spoke.
"Uncle, do you know what this is?"
Kenjiro did not support his chin this time. He took two steps forward, looked at the painting from left to right, then back from right to left, resting his gaze on that section of the mast and the people hugging it, before speaking hesitantly.
"This... the ship sank?"
"Yeah, the ship sank."
Satsuki nodded.
"The person who painted this painting is named Aivazovsky, a Russian born in Feodosia on the Crimean Peninsula, a small seaside town."
"In his lifetime, he painted more than six thousand paintings, almost all of which were of the sea."
"There's a saying among Russian sailors: the waves in a storm come one by one, the ninth wave is the biggest, and ships mostly capsize under that very wave."
"So his most famous painting is called 'The Ninth Wave,' and it's still hanging in the State Russian Museum in Leningrad."
"This one was painted by him later, not as famous as that one, and was bought from the Count of Rochefort's family along with that Dürer from earlier."
She looked at the mast in the painting, her voice lowering a bit.
"The count's great-grandmother was Russian."
"During the 1917 revolution, when the Tsar fell, their family fled from Petrograd without bringing anything else, carrying only a few boxes."
"At that time, this painting was rolled up inside one of those boxes."
Kenjiro didn't expect a painting to have such an origin, and couldn't help taking a few more glances at it.
"You see, this painting has already escaped once from a shattered country."
Satsuki paused.
"Now, that place is going to shatter a second time."
Kenjiro turned his head to look at her.
"Shatter?"
"Soviet Union."
Satsuki's gaze did not leave the painting.
"The Soviet Union is about to be gone, Uncle."