The Samurai Strategy

New York, New York. Friday, early September, dusk. Heading uptown on Madison. Sheets of icy rain washed the pavement, heralding the onslaught of autumn and the miserable winter...

I was standing in the smoky entry of Martell's, on the way back downtown from Sotheby's, when I heard the voice, a Georgia drawl known from Wall Street to Washington. And sure e...

Some people will swear life runs on coincidence. Is it true? If so, here's one for the history books. It's the tale of an old flame. Before my ex-wife Joanna, before my later il...

Allan Stem's alarm about Japan's semiconductor challenge reflected only part of the picture. There was also plenty going on with Japanese research in addition to information pro...

"_Kami wo araitai no desu ga. Ii desu ka_?" Tam peered through the doorway and nodded hello to the girl in the blue Imperial Hotel uniform. The hair salon was almost empty. Perf...

"Hell, half of those loonies over there buying and selling 'bean contracts wouldn't know one either. Come to think of it, I don't know anybody over on the Merc who's ever even s...

Ken looked terrific. That was Tam's first thought when he walked through the high-security inner doors to greet her. He was square shouldered and sturdy, with high, full cheeks,...

Back in New York, optimism was in increasingly short supply. What do you do if you think you're being set up? One thing, you may have occasion to muse long and hard about the co...

Tam was headed east in the black Nissan limo, listening to the talk. And thinking. Seated alongside was Kenji Asano, wearing a light tan suit and gold cufflinks, while the space...

It was almost dark when they reached the spa, one of those vast Japanese resort hotels catering to the middle class. It had a fake- traditional exterior and hundreds of rooms in...

In the aftermath of that evening down in Ise, Tam was convinced of only one fact. Nobody was giving her the straight story. Not Noda, not Mori, not Ken. And when she tried to ta...

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 Y...

Funny thing about investor confidence: often as not it relies more on faith than facts. Give it a little unsettling heat, and it can just melt away. Belief turns to fear, then b...

The task ahead can be described very simply. I was going to help Dai Nippon acquire controlling stock positions in a bevy of ineptly managed American high-tech companies, and sh...

"Most regrettable. Some of them might even have to go out and find productive work." He rose and shook my hand. "You've destroyed the prospect of years of legal roadblocks in a...

Over the next couple of weeks I began to wonder if the scenario wasn't going a little too smoothly. Everything about Noda's setup seemed surprisingly pat. The answers came too e...

That Saturday turned out to be the day when winter descended abruptly and with rare vengeance. Remember we're only talking mid-December, still a dozen full shopping days till yo...

As we rode, I tried to get into mental fighting trim. It wasn't easy. Walton, I kept telling myself, you're too old for this kind of intrigue. And why drag this innocent woman i...

Jack O'Donnell and Joyce Hanson had been working through the ten-pound Christmas catalog known as the Sunday Times--she was up to Arts & Leisure and he'd advanced as far as Busi...

"We've 'moved the shadow.'" I spoke the words to myself hesitantly, maybe even a little apprehensively. That was the name for a famous strategy of the seventeenth-century swords...

Dr. Kenji Asano gazed out the window of his office at the Institute, the last shafts of sun casting long shadows in the canyons below. It was late Tuesday afternoon, and gales o...

Tsukuba Science City can be awe-inspiring or a specter, depending on how you choose to look at it. The time was Wednesday morning, and Tam and I were viewing the place through t...

Truthfully, she wasn't even sure she wanted to see him at all. The Dai Nippon scenario was getting too complicated, too insidious. Noda's play was turning into something with wo...

Kenji Asano was a very complex human being--Western on the surface, but with his own personality always glimmering through at the unexpected moment. He seemed to capture the bes...

Our major concern at that point was time. We had a lot to do, and we weren't sure how long we had to do it. Furthermore, it would be foolhardy to assume everything was going to...

Guess Tam's Shinto _kami _were on our side, since we made it through Narita Airport with no hassles; or maybe being dead keeps you off anybody's hit list. Now that MlTI was dete...

Bushido. Take it apart, _bu-shi-do_, and you have "military- knight- ways," the rules of chivalry that governed every moment of a samurai's existence. This code of honor of the...

"It's the worst of times, buddy, and the best of times. Whatever dude once said that didn't know the half of it. He oughta be around now to check out the Street."

_That was the credo of the formidable warrior-samurai Bokuden, who lived during the early seventeenth century. Focus on Noda, I told myself, not on staying alive. What we had to...

"Mori-san, that silver box is long gone, thanks to Noda." I suddenly felt as if we'd just dropped out of the twentieth century and back into the twelfth. Time warp. "Let me tell...

When we emerged into the lobby calmly as we could muster, fire engines were racing up outside, cops were crowded around the elevators, and Eddie was so frantic yelling about the...