Thomas Hoover - The samurai strategy

He'd once declared that the kimono was actually the most sensual garment in the world. Take a look at some of the shunga, he said, and the possibilities become obvious. Though it seems cumbersome, entangling, yet it lifts away like a stage curtain to invite all sorts of dramatic possibilities. The human nude is only interesting when half concealed.

Games. She reached and took the petal from him, then ran it along the silk of his own kimono, over his muscular thighs as he sat, Japanese-style, feet back. Next she lifted away the silk from the flawless ivory skin she knew so well. She drew it along his thighs to tease him.

"Tam…" He reached to slip away her yukata, but she caught his hand. Then she touched his lips with her fingers, silencing his protest. She pushed away his kimono and trailed the petal upward, lightly brushing his own nipples. Finally she pushed him gently backward and smoothed her cheek against his thigh, drawing back his kimono even more.

The glow of the coals was dying now. As the last shadows played against his face, she laid the petal on the tatami and moved across him…

They lingered till the moon was up, then strolled back through the garden wearing their antique wooden clogs. The air was scented, musical with the sounds of night. Later that evening they downed an eight-course meal off antique stoneware plates, drank steaming sake on the veranda, then made love for hours on the futon.

Around midnight he ordered one more small bottle of sake, a go, and suggested they move out onto the veranda again, this time to watch the moon break over the trees. She slipped on her yukata and padded out. She'd just decided.

"Tamara, I want to tell you something." He poured her small porcelain cup to the brim. "You are everything Matsuo Noda is seeking. The way you held the tea bowl tonight, tasted the tea. The cha-no-yu doesn't lie. You have discipline, our discipline. That's very, very rare."

"You mean, 'for a gaijin'?"

"For anyone. Besides, I don't think of you that way. You are one of us now."

She looked into his eyes, dark in the moonlight. Then she remembered the tokonoma alcove in the teahouse where a rugged vase had held the single white bud, its few petals moist as though from dew. Not a bouquet, a single bud-all the flowers in the world distilled into that one now poised to burst open.

Kenji Asano lived that special intensity, that passion, which set Japan apart from the rest of the world.

"Ken." Her voice was quiet. "I'll do it."

"You mean Noda?"

"Noda."

He said nothing for a moment, then finally he spoke.

"The game begins."

Over the last three weeks I'd spent long hours on the phone handling Matsuo Noda's new hedging in the currency markets. The play started out modestly, but as his Eight Hundred Year funds became bloated with cash, it grew into an avalanche of speculative positions.

His guiding principle was to keep a low profile in order not to spook the markets, same as any good trader would do. Whenever the FOREX desk of one market-maker bank on his list would start getting nervous, I'd just hit the next place in line. Finally after everybody on this side of the ocean began backing away, he went international. Zurich, in particular, loved the action and took everything he threw in its direction. I guess the Swiss are used to high rollers, since their financial casino never got cold feet and invented a house limit.

Somewhere along the way I also came to realize I couldn't possibly be the only agent in his employ; there was far too much money to move. Also my list of contracts eventually got pared to manageable levels, so somebody else had to be picking up the slack. It appeared that just as I was spreading the action he'd assigned to me all over the globe, he was spreading his own assignments worldwide. The man had to be covering a major chunk of the world market in interest-rate futures and currency forwards, but not a penny of it was traceable to Japan. Or to Matsuo Noda.

How, I kept marveling, could this be happening right under the nose of all our supposed geniuses of world finance? One thing, Noda had all his moves down pat. My hunch was he'd started routing a lot of short selling through Sydney and Hong Kong, and also was hitting the off-exchange "third market," anyplace he could find somebody to take his bets. If you remember how the dollar plunged in the mid-eighties, you'll also recall that anybody who'd had the foresight to dump it in advance would have been sitting pretty. Plenty of traders did, but none of them received any particular attention, since the pond is so huge. In cumulative totals the currency exchanges worldwide easily handle as much as two hundred billion dollars a day. Although DNI's massive short position clearly signaled that somebody major was anticipating a crash of the dollar, Noda realized that all he had to do was keep moving and nobody would put it together.

Need I add that my own little dollar hedge for Amy was peanuts compared to what was going on now. Dai Nippon through its anonymous agents was dumping American currency in the multi-billions worldwide, but since Noda kept the action spread out, nobody bothered to notice the pattern. Ditto his awesome "naked" shorting of Treasury futures. I mean, anybody who'd troubled to assemble the numbers could have predicted somebody up on the bridge must have sighted a reef dead ahead. I kept trying to warn traders I knew, both on and off the exchanges, but nobody wanted to hear downbeat speculation from some Cassandra. They were all too busy pocketing commissions and ordering more champagne.

And then it happened. In broad daylight. I'll explain the operative details shortly, but if you were there, that could be a little like reviewing the theory underlying nuclear fission for somebody standing at ground zero when the bomb hit. So first let me recollect how it felt down in the trenches.

I was breakfasting at the dining room table downstairs that particular Monday morning-November 7, as we all remember so vividly-when Matsuo Noda dropped the first shoe, or maybe it's more accurate to say he began loosening the laces. I'd just finished squeezing some orange juice when I punched in the number of a financial update service on my trusty cordless phone, mainly to hear the (recorded) sound of a human voice. I'd totally forgotten the U.S. Treasury was holding its quarterly refunding that day.

Newsbreak. Dealer banks were reporting that demand for the long bond, the thirty-year, was extremely soft to nonexistent. Equally unnerving, there wasn't any noticeable interest in Treasury's ten-year notes either. The reason seemed to be that the usual heavy participation by major Japanese investment houses (typically twenty to forty percent of the total) had inexplicably evaporated. In fact, a rumor currently flying across the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade said a number of Japanese securities houses and banks in New York had begun what appeared to be a program to divest their current Treasury holdings massively. Since spokespersons at Japanese outfits like Nomura and Daiwa Securities had clammed up, refusing to deny that rumor, the usual institutional buyers like Oppenheimer and Goldman, Sachs were holding back, nervous.

Hang on, I said to myself. Can this mean we're about to test out Henderson's "worst case" scenario, that Japanese pullout all the analysts say could never happen? But there's no reason. No sudden icebergs out ahead…

Noda. I said the word out loud. Noda's kicked off his play.

I almost laughed at the thought of his naivete. Was this going to be his game? Who was he planning to fool? For once you've got a little surprise in store, chum. Treasury may have to sweeten the pot, but there's a lot of money in the world. The United States of America can't be blackmailed.