An Outrageous Proposal
The next morning, Tokyo.
Jo Sudeok had not closed his eyes all night. The boss had told him to see the sights and even charge a little sake to the company card, but the answer rose in him at once.
As if a man who hasn't finished his work could go out and play!
The day before, he had rushed back to the hotel and scraped together everything he could find on Mideumsa. A publisher inside the world's top twenty, they said—and sure enough, the subsidiaries were legion. That, perhaps, was why rumor had the internal companies at one another's throats. Their extreme touchiness about personal information might not have been a matter of morals alone. With the departments in the middle of a war, no one had any reason to hand a stranger something that could be used against him.
"Tsk."
Looked at that way, they had handled the thing rather well. Honestly, who trusted a man he had just met enough to hand over a phone number?
Fair enough. Even so—
I have to meet that Suzuki!
Which was why Jo Sudeok was charging toward Mideumsa at the crack of dawn. He stopped at a market nearby and bought a whole case of vitamin drinks.
Yes. This is the Korean style.
He strode on with grim resolve. The result was anything but encouraging.
"You again?"
They hadn't been warm yesterday. Today the look was closer to contempt.
"I know I was a nuisance yesterday. Even I can see that asking for a number out of nowhere—"
"Out."
"Five minutes... no, one minute..."
"The issue's about to go to press and everyone's dying in here. Leave."
"..."
"This is interfering with our work. Do I have to call the police before you'll listen?"
Push any harder and he would only make it worse.
"If I got in the way, I'm sorry. You must all be exhausted, and since I already bought these... please, have one while you—"
"I said get out!"
Deadline nerves, then. Today the shouting started at the door.
I wanted something to show before the boss arrived.
Nothing for it.
"Please, take them. I'll leave them here."
Jo Sudeok walked out of the building with heavy steps.
Mideumsa was on an emergency footing.
Why would a company riding the explosive popularity of Dragon Planet be in crisis? Because everything is relative. A rival was kicking up such a storm that Mideumsa, for all its success, was the one drawing sneers. So what could they do? Determined not to fall behind, they flung money in every direction. The company swelled beyond recognition, and the side effects came just as fast. Reckless expansion left the accounts forever scraping bottom.
When they went looking for outside capital, the mockery poured in.
Give those people money and they'll only buy land. They'll never put a coin into the actual content.
It wasn't even far from the truth. At some point, as if by a spell, the investment simply stopped.
Under the circumstances, the president of Mideumsa had to keep working the phones, calling the heads of the subsidiaries one after another.
"What are you doing, sitting idle in the office? Bring in investment! I told you a couple of ads won't fix this!"
And he always finished with a threat.
"Fail to deliver this time and I really will shut you down. Do you understand?"
Today, too, the president's office boomed with shouting.
An hour later, I arrived in the lobby of the hotel where Jo Sudeok was staying.
"Boss!"
I turned toward the voice and found him in a corner of the café, already half out of his chair.
"Stay there. I'll come to you."
I waved him back and headed in. He must have been sitting a long while: two emptied coffee cups stood on the table. I spoke as if it were a joke.
"Meeting someone?"
"Sorry?"
The puzzlement lasted only a moment. Jo Sudeok glanced down at the empty cups and laughed, a little sheepish.
"Ah... just trying to stay awake."
"You didn't sleep?"
"Must be getting old. The jet lag won't leave me alone. Ha ha."
Jet lag, in Tokyo? Knowing him, he had lain awake all night turning the job over and over. The shadows under his eyes were proof enough.
"Shall we go?"
"Sorry?"
"Let's finish this, and then you can come back and rest."
"Ah, about that..."
He ran through yesterday and today at speed, and then everything he had dug up on Mideumsa overnight.
"I wanted to make them an offer within the bounds of common sense, but..."
"I heard you. Let's go."
"Those people are on deadline. Extremely touchy..."
"You said a reasonable offer wouldn't be accepted."
"Ah. Yes."
"Then let's try an unreasonable one."
"An unreasonable offer?"
I didn't answer. I only nodded.
We stopped at a bookstore nearby.
Let's see just how impressive this is.
Well, well. The pride was earned. I opened the magazine and looked through what was inside. I cared about exactly one thing: how far the latest Dragon Planet had gotten.
I had read the whole series through more than ten times, so the art alone was enough to place the chapter.
So they're up against the Demon King.
The hero was still a boy. The true prime of Dragon Planet lay a long way off—and it was already doing this well?
Hm. In that case.
"Professor, you said the publisher was near here?"
"I did, but surely you haven't already... looked?"
"Yes. I've seen everything I need."
"Ha..."
We walked another ten minutes or so.
"This is it."
Mideumsa's headquarters rose in front of us. The building itself was nothing special. I turned to Jo Sudeok.
"Shall we?"
"Ah. Yes."
Shouts rang from every direction, as befitted a deadline season. I didn't need Japanese to get the gist. Someone was being hounded over a manuscript that still wasn't in.
The deadline comes every single week. Why the performance?
And frankly, what did their being busy have to do with me?
I walked into the editorial department as if I belonged there. Maybe I was too calm about it; no one stopped me. Then they saw Jo Sudeok at my back, and one face after another began to crease.
Let them.
"Professor, which one is the editor-in-chief?"
"That man there."
"Green vest?"
"Yes."
The editor-in-chief spotted Jo Sudeok and came over fuming, wearing the look of a man who had finally caught his culprit.
"Do you not understand words? I asked nicely, and you take me for a fool?"
He was rolling up both sleeves, ready to get louder still, when Jo Sudeok spoke.
"Our president wished to see you himself."
"What? The president?"
"This is him."
At Jo Sudeok's words, the editor-in-chief looked down at me.
"I am up to my neck, and this isn't a joke!"
I met his eyes and held them—a gaze that did not so much as flicker before a grown man.
He must have felt that something was off. The editor who had been raging paused to catch his breath, and that was when I spoke.
"Let's talk for a moment."
"If this is about that background artist... a number, an address, I won't be giving you anything..."
"We didn't come because of Suzuki."
"...?"
Jo Sudeok, interpreting, and the editor-in-chief who heard the words—
"...!"
Both of them went wide-eyed at once.
The editor-in-chief's office.
Jo Sudeok and I sat side by side on the sofa reserved for executives. The editor had a staffer bring in a spare chair and perched on it with barely room for his hips, and still he laughed.
"Heh heh."
"I heard you were busy with the deadline."
"Busy? Please. We've got it down to a routine. We'll knock it out in no time."
"There was so much noise I thought something had gone wrong."
"There is ab-so-lute-ly no problem. Every hit series is ready to run."
He was, at a glance, a man hungry for advancement. Once the subject of investment came up, his eyes changed so completely that there was no mistaking it.
He wants a seat for himself, with the credit for landing an investor.
Unless I was badly wrong, he was already dying to know the size of the sum.
That's his problem.
All I had to do was move at my own pace.
"I... I was told you oversee distribution for Daisho America..."
"I'm also the majority shareholder of Hyeon-gang Semiconductor."
"Good heavens! To think I raised my voice at someone so tremendous without recognizing you... I apologize again and again."
The editor-in-chief bent at the waist.
"No. You never shouted at me."
"Oh my, to have you say so—I hardly know where to put myself..."
"You did shout at the director, though. If you're determined to apologize, it might be better offered to him than to me."
"What? Ah... look at me..."
He hurriedly bowed to Jo Sudeok.
That much, at least, saved the face of the man who had come ahead and taken the bruises.
And that's enough of yesterday.
I turned to business in earnest.
"A million copies a week, you said?"
"Yes, roughly that, and quite often more. These days the response to Dragon Planet has been so strong..."
"A million copies every week for a year comes to about fifty billion won in revenue alone."
"Yes. It should be about that."
"And there's income from the collected volumes."
"That's right. The popular series are published separately as volumes and sold that way."
"Those sales ought to come to about fifty billion as well."
"It does vary by quarter, depending on whether a hit comes out or not..."
Here the editor-in-chief's voice quietly shrank. Collected-volume sales, as a rule, fell short of that figure.
Okay. That's far enough.
"Annual revenue under a hundred billion won. I'll take that as the number."
"More or less... yes."
Perhaps he sensed that the serious part was coming. His Adam's apple bobbed, hard.
"I hear you're in greater need of investment than ever."
"Sorry?"
"That you're looking at the American market."
"Ah, well, there have been some overtures..."
"Th-that's right."
"So you do need the money."
"Ah, it's less that, and more that we're looking for a partner to expand the business with. That's the more accurate—"
"What? Five billion yen?"
"Why? Is that a problem?"
"Ah, well..."
He had assumed a few hundred million yen at the outside, which was why the editor-in-chief had sat down at the table himself. But five billion yen, by the standard of the eighties, was enough to buy several publishing houses outright.
"I'm sorry, but an investment of that size... it simply isn't something I can settle at my level..."
"Does the president of Mideumsa need to come in person?"
"I imagine so..."
"Then call him."
"Right now?"
"What, shall I wait?"
"N-no. Ahem. I'll report it... immediately."
While the editor-in-chief snatched up the receiver—
"...Boss?"
Jo Sudeok turned to me, startled.
"If this is about getting a number, I can come at it from any number of other directions..."
Who in the world poured out a fortune like that for a single phone number?
"Of course they move a million copies a week now, but there's no telling what comes after..."
I grinned.
A million a week was only the present. Once Dragon Planet reached its war in outer space, and once Buzzer Beater and Spirit Detective found their stride, the magazine would sell more than six million copies every week and smash a Guinness record while it was at it.
Perhaps he read the certainty in my eyes.
"Then again, since when have I ever doubted anything you set your hand to, Boss..."
Jo Sudeok's eyes were already shining, as if to swear he would trust me without limit.