At the Sharpe End Read online

  What people are saying about At the Sharpe End

  “An intriguing trawl through the murky interface where industrial espionage, high finance and plain criminality meet in the Far East, with global implications – a Sharpe twist on the genre.” Ann Tierney, Managing Editor, Searching Finance (London)

  “The interests and challenges in this story make me feel like I’ve been living in it for four days. I love it.”

  “As an American who has spent time in Tokyo, I am particularly intrigued by Ashton’s depiction of ex-pats’ life in Tokyo. The unromantic detail brings realism to the story, which deepens the reader‘s involvement in the story. The characters in the novel become familiar, and stay with the reader long after finishing the book.

  “At The Sharpe End is definitely in the “page-turner” category of novels. This is a book that readers will find difficult to put down, and they will feel satisfied at the end.” B. K. Thomas (USA)

  At the Sharpe End

  Hugh Ashton

  Published by j-views at Smashwords

  Copyright © 2010, Hugh Ashton

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Foreword

  Writing fiction set in Japan poses a challenge to the author. For those living in Japan, descriptions of everyday things and actions may sometimes seem superfluous, and serve only to hold back the story, but for those outside Japan, the things we take for granted here may need some explanation (for example, when entering a Japanese house, one removes one’s shoes – a habit that becomes automatic after a while, but may need explanation, or at least a mention, for non-Japan dwellers).

  Kenneth Sharpe’s world is not that of the mysterious East, where esoteric Oriental wisdom is imparted to crass Westerners through subtle mystic practices – his Japan is centred on modern Tokyo – a world of foreigners who have made their home in an alien and sometimes bewildering society, often in definitely non-exotic surroundings, scratching a living from this vibrant city. With all the talk of depression and business downturns, Tokyo continues to be an exciting source of opportunities and adventure, even after my 22 years of life here, and hence I’m really happy to present my view of it. Though it doesn’t romanticise the city or the country, it is not self-consciously a “mean streets” locale – Sharpe’s Tokyo is pretty similar to mine, and if the streets seem mean to him at times, but not all the time, they do to me, too.

  Though some place names and events exist in real life, they exist only to give authenticity to the story and the characters in this book, who are fictional and exist only in my imagination.

  -o-

  As well as thanks to my wife Yoshiko, who has provided loving support, I would like to express my gratitude to those people with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working and meeting in my 22 years in Japan. Special thanks are due to Mark Thomas, John Talbot, Eric Bossieux, as well as Cindy Mullins of 4M Associates, for constant encouragement and support (and helpful criticism), and Mark Schreiber and Maclean Storer for their constructive hole-poking in a couple of early drafts. Holly Ueda and Simon Varnam provided their proofreading skills, and performed acts of heroic criticism, over and above the call of duty, to help make this a better book. Even if I didn’t accept all their suggestions, they forced me to look at what I’d written with new eyes.

  Oh, and I, like Kenneth Sharpe, am British. This book is largely written in British English (some Americanisms may have slipped in, though – living in a polyglot community tends to do that to your writing style).

  Hugh Ashton

  Kamakura, June 2010

  Contents

  Reviews

  Foreword

  Chapter 1: Tokyo

  Chapter 2: Tokyo

  Chapter 3: Tokyo

  Chapter 4: Tokyo

  Chapter 5: Tokyo

  Chapter 6: Hanoi

  Chapter 7: Tokyo

  Chapter 8: Tokyo

  Chapter 9: Tokyo

  Chapter 10: Tokyo

  Chapter 11: Tokyo

  Chapter 12: Tokyo

  Chapter 13: Tokyo

  Chapter 14: Tokyo

  Chapter 15: Seoul

  Chapter 16: Seoul, Tokyo

  Chapter 17: Tokyo

  Chapter 18: Tokyo

  Chapter 19: Tokyo, Shonan

  Chapter 20: Shonan

  Chapter 21: Tokyo, Narita

  About the Author

  Chapter 1: Tokyo

  It had been an aggravating day for Kenneth Sharpe as he trudged his way round central Tokyo. A stranger, an Australian backpacker from the look and sound of him, had dug his hooks into Sharpe on the morning train, and bent his ear with some crazy story about giant insects and a theme park. Sharpe didn’t really remember or care about the details – he’d turned off after a couple of minutes, writing off the guy as a first-order loony. Next, when he turned up to his client’s office for a meeting that had been arranged two weeks previously, he found that his contact had been transferred to Singapore the day after the meeting had been arranged, but had neglected to tell him. Now, nursing a consolatory cup of coffee while killing time before his next meeting, he was being accosted by yet another stranger, this time a Japanese businessman.

  “Sorry?” aggrieved, but still polite.

  “Excuse me, but I want to tell you something,” Sharpe’s interlocutor replied in almost fluent English with an accent that hovered between American and British, with almost no touch of Japanese in it, and with a curious slightly husky tinge to the voice.

  Sharpe used a paper napkin to wipe his face, looked down at his flies, checked to see his briefcase was still beside the chair. No problems in those departments. He sighed. “Go ahead.”

  “I am in trouble. I work for a small electronics company. You probably haven’t heard of Katsuyama Electronic Devices,” (Sharpe shook his head in agreement), “but we will soon be very important players when it comes to putting AI image-recognition algorithms onto silicon.”

  “Meaning?” Actually, Sharpe had a fair idea of what was meant here, but wanted to be sure. As it happened, one of his clients who made digital cameras was looking for something that sounded like this kind of technology as a gimmick to build into their next generation of products.

  “Meaning that within a year, we can build face recognition into a chip-set costing less than ten dollars in mass production.”

  “With what kind of figures for false acceptance rate and false rejection rate?” Sharpe asked, more to show off his knowledge of the jargon than because he was seriously interested in the answer. “Wait a moment.” Sharpe stopped to think for a second. “How did you know that I would be interested in what you’re talking about?” Sharpe started to come awake as he realised that this wasn’t the sort of information that would be passed on to random strangers.

  -o-

  Confidences passed to him by strangers seemed to be part of his life now. People he’d never met before kept coming up to him and telling him the most amazing stories of their lives, or those of other people. It didn’t seem to matter whether these people were Japanese or not. And it didn’t even seem to matter about the language. Once a little old Japanese man came up to Sharpe and started talking earnestly to him in what seemed to be some Eastern European language he couldn’t recognise. This went on for a full ten minutes, broken only by Sharpe’s “Da”s of incomprehen
sion (it was the only vaguely relevant Slavic word he could remember at the time). And another time, an elderly Japanese lady sitting next to him on the Tokyo underground train had spontaneously launched into a long story in Japanese of how her son had been eaten by an exceptionally large octopus, the recounting of which had lasted from Naka-Meguro to Akihabara (Sharpe was pretty sure it had been that way round – the octopus doing the eating, that is – but then again, Japanese is a notoriously vague language, and Japanese cuisine features quite a lot of octopus, so it might have been that the son had died while or after eating an octopus. Sharpe didn’t really care either way).

  An ex-girlfriend had disabused him of the notion that he had a kind sympathetic face, when he’d mentioned this phenomenon. “Sometimes when you’re not concentrating, you look kind of stupid, and people think you might give them money,” she had explained.

  Well, thanks, he had thought to himself. Always nice to be appreciated. But the thing was, he reflected later, none of these people had ever asked him for money, and it was difficult to see how most of these long involved stories, half of which he didn’t really understand anyway, could ever end up being a pitch for a confidence trick. This one seemed to be a bit different.

  -o-

  “Less than 0.2 per cent FAR and 0.15 for FRR. Impressive, no? And I’m pretty sure you’re interested. Believe me.”

  Sharpe and the Japanese businessman regarded each other over their empty coffee cups. The Japanese saw a rapidly balding, paunchy, middle-aged Englishman, wearing a light grey summer suit that looked as though it could have been replaced to advantage at any time in the past couple of years. Sharpe saw an eminently forgettable Japanese face below a full head of neatly styled longish hair, above an equally forgettable dark blue suit. But the eyes stood out from the rest of the face as a memorable feature. They reminded Sharpe of the eyes of someone he’d once known – a kindly and sympathetic martial arts teacher who had later been accused and convicted of sexual offences with young girls.

  In the meantime, his new-found companion looked as though he was about to burst with the information he wanted to pass on. Too many espressos in the past hour, thought Sharpe.

  “Better than 99 per cent, on both counts, eh?” Sharpe asked. A silent nod in response. “How about some fresh air?” The same nod. Sharpe’s new friend reached into his pocket and put on a surgical mask – a Japanese trait that always annoyed Sharpe – some days the train looked like a surgeons’ convention. Sharpe packed his computer away into his briefcase and the two went outside where the humid Tokyo atmosphere struck Sharpe with an almost physical shock after the air-conditioned coffee shop.

  Without saying a word, Sharpe’s new friend led the way down a side-street towards the river, and a few minutes later the two men were standing side by side, looking straight ahead at the brown water of the Sumida River swirling towards Tokyo Bay. A farting barge passed, carrying a load of something heavy and messy-looking. The Japanese man’s nervousness seemed to have disappeared.

  “So what’s the trouble?” Sharpe asked, picking up the conversation from where it had left off in the coffee shop. “What’s so strange about all this business? Do you want me to sell it for you?”

  “I know too much about this technology. I’m being approached by the American security services to give them the details.”

  Sharpe stole a sideways look. He seemed serious. And to Sharpe’s eyes he didn’t seem that paranoid. But Sharpe didn’t view himself as an expert in these matters.

  “CIA or FBI, then? Not the KGB or MI5?”

  “I’m serious. These agents have threatened to harm my family if I don’t co-operate.”

  Humouring him. “What does the president of your company want to do with the technology? Isn’t it up to him?”

  “I am the president!” he exploded. “It’s my company.”

  “But?” At this moment, Sharpe actually thought longingly of the Isle of Mantids, as had been related to him by the Australian. Meter-long killer insects seemed relatively safe and sane compared to this.

  “But it’s not my money backing the company. My wife’s parents helped me to go to Stanford University to do research, and lent me the money to expand my company. Excuse me—” and he dived into an inner pocket, apparently for a business card. Sharpe told himself that if you were to try to save someone from a burning building in Japan, they wouldn’t agree to be rescued until they’d swapped cards with you. Sharpe mirrored the move, diving into his own pocket, and the two men emerged with their respective 91 x 55 millimetre pasteboard rectangles, exchanged with due ceremony.

  Sure enough, the card presented to Sharpe was from Katsuyama Electronic Devices, with a fancy-looking modernistic logo, and Sharpe’s new friend, Masashi Katsuyama, with “President” as his job title. The card given in exchange, which gave the company as Sharpe Practice, also listed a “President”, Kenneth Sharpe, and had an equally flashy logo, but Sharpe was willing to bet that Katsuyama Electronic Devices consisted of something more than one person, a telephone, a Web site and an e-mail account, which was the basis of his own business, a freelance technology consultancy in Tokyo – Sharpe’s way of describing his bumming his way through life, getting paid for playing with new technology toys by companies, mainly banks, with no time or inclination to do it for themselves. He found this way of making a living much more congenial than teaching English – the standard “foreigner” job in Japan for those not employed by companies, and he had never bothered to learn to read Japanese well enough to work as a translator.

  More than once it had occurred to Sharpe that running his own show and living on his wits was hardly a way of guaranteeing a secure retirement. Some of his friends were ensconced in Japanese companies, but from his days when he had worked as a language teacher seconded to some of these companies, he doubted if he could survive the high volume of bullshit that seemed to be shovelled over the workers there on a daily basis. He had a feeling that Katsuyama’s company might be a little different, but he wasn’t going to rush into asking for a job from someone who claimed that the secret services of the USA were after him.

  “Thank you,” Katsuyama said, tucking the card carefully into a small alligator-skin case. “Let me explain a bit more to you. My wife’s parents helped me build up the business when I took it over from my father. They hold a controlling interest. And they don’t want to sell to the Americans. You see,” and his voice dropped to a lower tone, “they’re Korean.”

  Sharpe considered some of the implications of this. It was more than a matter of simply “so what?” As it happens, Sharpe reminded himself, “Korean” as used in Japan doesn’t necessarily mean simply “born and bred in Korea”. Japan actually used to regard Korea as part of Japan before World War Two, and many Koreans came over to Japan, some of them against their will, to work for Japanese companies. Come the end of the war, many of those from the North couldn’t go back to Korea, for a variety of reasons, mainly on account of Japan’s not recognising the North Korean state. Nor could they acquire Japanese citizenship, so a compromise was reached whereby they were granted permanent right of residence in Japan, but remained as Korean citizens, as did their children and grandchildren. To this day, these “Koreans”, some of whom may have Korean towns given as their official place of birth, although they have never been to Korea, make up the largest percentage of “foreigners” living in Japan.

  Many of these “Koreans” have close ties with the Stalinist North Korean regime, and some, discriminated against by Japanese, find it easier to get jobs on the legal fringes of society than to work at “respectable” jobs. The situation’s complex, and the details of the explanation depend on who you talk to and when you talk to them, but the basic facts are roughly what are outlined here.

  These things went through Sharpe’s mind as Katsuyama went on, “My wife’s parents are basically kind people – actually, I suppose they’ve been really good to me – but I have to admit that my father-in-law has connections I’m not ha
ppy about.”

  “Oh?” Sharpe raised his eyebrows.

  In response, Katsuyama held up his left hand with the little finger tucked into the palm – a sign representing underworld yakuza connections. “And they’re very sympathetic to the North. That’s where their family comes from. Half of them are still living over there,” he added.

  Sharpe grunted in sympathy.

  “I started publishing the results of my work at Stanford. I came up with the idea that you could break down a face into a series of discrete components. Standard things like eye spacing and nose width – that sort of thing. Then I realised you could use some funky little DSP convolutions – you know, in-chip digital signal processing – to match these up almost in real time against a compressed database consisting of modelled combinations of these primary components. And then I started getting messages from some very strange places around Washington. This kind of technology’s very exciting for them – they see it as a way of picking faces out of crowds. Security screening. Finding suspected terrorists. The Americans have been trying to make this kind of thing work, but they’ve not got as far as they hoped. They want to use my technology as a shortcut.”

  Sharpe grunted again. The current American obsession with security against the hordes of terrorists infesting politicians’ brains, and the handful of actual terrorists, irked him every time he had to fly to Seattle or San Jose. Last time, one of the young gum-chewing security workers had plunged his hand down the front of Sharpe’s trousers without warning. He’d imagined there were constitutional amendments against that sort of thing, but apparently not. “Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t want to give them more ways of playing Big Brother,” he said.

  “Me, too. And you can imagine what my wife’s family would have to say about it. I and my invention would probably be disappeared to North Korea or something. So I came back to Japan as soon as I had my doctorate.”