Aka laughed. “It’s not all that exciting a story. After I graduated from college I worked in a large bank, but the job was boring. The people above me were incompetent. They only thought about what was right in front of them, never thought long term, and only cared about covering their asses. I figured if a top bank was like this, then Japan’s future looked pretty bleak. I put up with it for three years, but nothing improved. If anything, it got worse. So I switched jobs and went to work for a consumer finance company. The president of the company liked me a lot and had asked me to work for him. In a job like that you have much more freedom to maneuver, and the work itself was interesting. But there, too, my opinions didn’t exactly conform with those of the higher-ups, and I quit after a little over two years. I apologized to the president, but there it was.”

Aka took out a packet of Marlboro Reds. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Not at all,” Tsukuru said. Aka put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it with a small gold lighter. His eyes narrowed and he slowly inhaled, then exhaled. “I tried quitting, but just couldn’t. If I can’t smoke, I can’t work. Have you ever tried giving up smoking?”

Tsukuru had never smoked a cigarette in his life.

Aka continued. “I’m more of a lone-wolf type. I might not look like it, and I didn’t understand that part of my personality until I’d graduated from college and started work. But it’s true. Whenever some moron ordered me to do something stupid, I’d blow my top. It was like you could actually hear my brain explode. No way a person like that can work for a company. So I made up my mind. I had to go out on my own.”

Aka paused and gazed at the purplish smoke rising up from his hand, as if tracing a far-off memory.

“One other thing I learned from working in a company was that the majority of people in the world have no problem following orders. They’re actually happy to be told what to do. They might complain, but that’s not how they really feel. They just grumble out of habit. If you told them to think for themselves, and make their own decisions and take responsibility for them, they’d be clueless. So I decided I could turn that into a business. It’s simple. I hope this makes sense?”

Tsukuru said nothing. It was a rhetorical question.