Akasaka Research's business address

Akasaka Research’s corporate residence is the concealed building erected on the former Miyawaki property after the family lost the house and the land passed through bankruptcy proceedings and an unsuccessful sale. Built behind high fences and accompanied by the reopening of the old dry well, it transforms a familiar vacant lot into a guarded, anonymous site. Its development joins the novel’s domestic and supernatural histories to a more prosaic machinery of debt, title, corporate concealment, and property value.

From family home to disputed asset

The property’s development begins with Kojiro Miyawaki’s financial collapse. He had owned restaurants, including a Ginza establishment, but a stock-market loss cost him his house, land, and businesses. His uncle’s account describes a man who had never learned to work hard and was taken for everything he had while trying to open another restaurant. The family’s eventual disappearance from the house is later revealed as a catastrophe: after debts and pressure from nonbank lenders, Miyawaki killed his fourteen-year-old daughter and he and his wife died by suicide; their eldest daughter remained missing.

The house had stood empty for years before the property could be sold. Miyawaki had lost it in the fall of 1983, but creditor disputes over reimbursement delayed its final disposition until a court-mediated settlement opened the way to a sale. A major Tokyo real-estate company bought the land below market value, demolished the house, and tried to sell the lot. Buyers withdrew after hearing its history, and the family tragedy received renewed publicity. The company eventually accepted a substantial loss rather than keep paying interest on land it could not move.

The lot’s value was therefore divided between its physical attractions and its reputation. It measured a little over 3,500 square feet, or nearly 100 tsubo, and had a desirable setting with southern exposure. A local estimate put ordinary market value at 1.5 million yen per tsubo, but the Miyawaki property was already offered at 1.1 million, with the possibility of falling to 900,000. The land’s location made it valuable in principle; its history made it difficult to sell in practice.

The corporate buyer and the hidden building

The buyer was Akasaka Research, a company registered in Minato Ward whose stated business was economic research and consulting. Its stated purpose for the purchase was construction of a corporate residence. Investigators found no substantial operation at its listed address, only a small plaque on the door of an apartment in a condominium building. The purchase thus placed a corporate name on the property without making the people or interests behind that name visible.

The new residence was built quickly and out of sight. Construction began in May and took two and a half months, with high fences and canvas screens blocking the view. A caterer who delivered lunches described a plain, one-story concrete structure, more like an air-raid shelter than a conventional home or office: small, with few windows. By contrast, the garden received conspicuous attention. Mature, well-shaped trees were planted at a high cost, and the landscaper was given a garden plan and firm written instructions. The discreet building and carefully composed grounds offered sharply different faces of the same development: opacity at the center, deliberate cultivation around it.

Security reinforced that separation from the neighborhood. The property was enclosed by a wall higher than any nearby, a solid black iron fence designed to prevent peeping, and a video camera mounted above the gate. Neighbors saw the electric gate open for a black Mercedes 500SEL with tinted windows, reportedly entering and leaving several times a day, but observed little other movement and heard no sounds from inside. The vehicle was leased through a company, and investigators could not confirm the customer’s identity, although they suspected a connection to Akasaka Research. The building’s occupants and actual use remained inaccessible even as the exterior became a local landmark of concealment.

The well and the return of the past

During the landscaping work, a well-digging company was called in to restore the old well. The workers excavated the original concrete tube, which had been filled only recently, and found no water. The landscaper understood the work as a restoration rather than an effort to find water; nevertheless, the decision to rebuild a dry well on a newly purchased lot was striking enough to seem to him to have some particular purpose. The residence therefore did not simply replace the former house. Its development reintroduced a feature tied to the site’s earlier, obscured life.

For Toru Okada, the well was not an incidental detail. He had descended into it by lowering a rope ladder tied to a nearby tree, after removing the stones that held down its cover and testing the depth with a pebble. The pebble struck dry, and the longest ladder he could buy disappeared into darkness without his seeing or feeling its bottom. The new development’s reconstruction of the well connects the property’s material history to Okada’s experience of descent, confinement, and uncertain boundaries between ordinary space and another world.

The property’s earlier vacancy also gives its redevelopment a human contrast. After the Miyawaki family disappeared, the house seemed to have shed any connection to the people who had lived there. Years later, after its demolition, Okada looked through gaps in the new fence at flattened black earth and a few weeds; the house, trees, well, antenna, and bird sculpture were all gone. The transformation from lived-in home to empty lot, and then to a screened corporate residence, repeatedly changes what the site appears to remember. Its structures are removed or replaced, but the land’s association with loss and the dry well persists.

Ownership, control, and Okada’s claim

The residence and property also become part of an arrangement that complicates the distinction between legal ownership and practical control. Ushikawa tells Okada that he is renting the “hanging house” and its land from a company under a lease-option arrangement. Although Okada’s name does not appear publicly, the payments function like mortgage installments; the total for the house and property is about 80 million yen, and the arrangement should allow him to take title in less than two years. Ushikawa has traced the concealed structure behind the transaction but tells Okada that he may not know who ultimately receives his money.

Okada’s wish to acquire the property is not fulfilled simply by wanting it. He has almost no realistic funds, no job, and nothing to offer as collateral; what remains of his inheritance is disappearing into ordinary living expenses. He briefly pins ten lottery tickets, each for fifty million yen, to the kitchen wall and stares at them as if a hidden code might appear. Recognizing that chance will not solve the problem, he tears them up and concludes that he must find the money through his own efforts. The residence consequently stands at the intersection of a secretive corporate purchase and Okada’s precarious attempt to make a place his own: the same land can be an opaque asset in one system and the prospective ground of a personal claim in another.