Somewhere Only We Know

Chapter One

"NO. SHUT THIS PROJECT DOWN."

You could hear a pin drop in the expansive, dark cedar-panelled boardroom as the rows of men seated on either side of the conference table froze in silence after the most-feared business tycoon in the region spoke.

"B-but Ma'm, if you can just look at the numbers again, we can assure you-" the Senior Vice President presenting the expansion proposal buckled. Everyone looked at him in disbelief, even the secretaries preparing the afternoon tea and the print-outs, fearing he would be without a job in a few minutes still trying to assemble a plausible defense.

Aihara Mei glared at him with her piercing, storm-violet eyes. A tall, pallid woman in her 30s who can make seasoned, highly-skilled business executives– the smartest of Japanese universities, forget they ever knew anything about the market.

No one in the Aihara Group of Companies is expected to defend their work, once it was turned down by Aihara Mei. No one questions the Chairman in this environment, even more so in the totality of Tokyo's business district. The tycoon has earned this status by working harder than everyone and beating the patriarchal economic system of Japan to become the first female Chairman, expanding the already successful Aihara business to retail, property development, and banking. She holds shares and controls most of the giants in the system too.

In her formative years in the field, the tycoon was once married until her ambition, fixation to be the best, and her husband's disloyalties drove her to be reclusive. She first inherited leadership of Aihara Academy but she upset the late Aihara patriarch and its board when she decided to divorce her husband, momentarily losing control of the school. Yet she fought on, starting businesses under her own name, making gold out of the scraps women are given in the system. She was able to grow her business to the extent she's able to buy back shares in the Aihara Group taking absolute control of it.

The Chairman is successful but it is to the detriment of her mental health. Despite her public relations teams working day and night to launch campaigns to counter and reframe the stories, rumours are rife that she is losing her sanity.

The Senior Vice President began to say his closing formalities to the presentation. The secretaries have begun to retract the screen, take away the presentation boards and scaled urban planning models when she spoke again.

"Saito-san, rip those ugly, substandard proposals up."

The proposals they've worked on for months, missing family dinners, missing their children's graduations, and countless anniversaries. Every person employed within Aihara works tirelessly in the hopes they'll be spared from this kind of humiliation. But the reclusive tycoon is ruthless, she wants to see what she deems substandard destroyed in everyone's presence to drive home the lesson.

"Do I need to repeat myself?"

In their minds however much of what remains of their pride is currently being shredded, they understand that for Aihara to maintain its grip on the unpredictable, ever-changing Japanese market and for them to enjoy this kind of prosperity, earning numbers that are on the top end of the wage curve– its leader has to exercise a kind of brutality to keep raising standards and run all of its components proficiently.

Aihara Mei was specifically raised to fulfil this role.

One of the secretaries fumbled for a bit and dropped one of the presentation boards. She is trembling. She has a sick mother to support, kids to send to school. But it's impossible to rip up a 2mm-thick material made of blocks, paper and wood. It will not fit in any shredder either. Struggling with both hands, she begins to cry. The situation is sitcom, if not for those pained, unforgiving violets staring at her.

"I-I'm sorry, Madam, i-it's, I–"

"Then throw these proposals out the window!" the tycoon yells from across the room.

"Am I wasting valuable company profit paying everyone in this room to make ordinary, unimaginative work like the one presented? Each one of you is dispensable. There are thousands in line out there, younger and hungrier, ready to take your place. It is expected that you have a few neurotransmitters functioning well enough to figure out that you have to show your value to this business in every meeting. It is a form of respect."

"You have the weekend to come up with something less offensive. I don't give a damn what you have scheduled. Don't bother turning up on Monday if you're just going to waste manhours with another one like this. Present something like this again, you're gone. Gone. Understood?"

She gives each one of them that icy stare before standing up and walking out of the long boardroom leaving everyone unnerved, on the edge of their seats. The weather hanging above the Tokyo skyline outside the glass windows of the room have felt bleaker. To be able to survive in the Aihara environment, and maybe in the whole of the city's business landscape, one needs to live out the hell the Chairman went through. Giving everything up– family, friends, life.