The morning after I quit my job, I woke up at eight.
I had turned off the alarm.
My phone said 8:03. No messages from work, no reminders about anything I had to do.
I opened my brokerage account.
The U.S. market had risen overnight, and I was up about 140,000 yen from the day before. Mutual funds, stocks, and cash combined, the total was over fifty million yen.
I had seen the number plenty of times by then.
I put the phone facedown.
The refrigerator motor stopped, and the room went quiet.
Across the street, a man was hanging shirts on his balcony. Office workers in suits moved along the sidewalk below. When the traffic light started blinking, one of them broke into a run with a convenience-store bag in his hand.
8:12.
Until yesterday, the morning briefing would have started by now.
I washed my face. My hair was still sticking up in the mirror.
Thirty-eight.
Yesterday, I had ended a working life that had lasted nearly twenty years.
I had been employed continuously since graduating from high school: five years at my first company, then fifteen at an electronics retailer.
I didn't have another job lined up.
I boiled water and made coffee.
The bouquet they had given me yesterday was still on the table in its wrapping paper. I had come home last night and gone straight to bed.
I sat down with the coffee and tried to think of something to do.
Nothing came to mind.
My eyes went to the bookshelf.
A book with a faded spine sat at one end of the second shelf. I pulled it out.
I had bought it when I was eighteen.
The corners were worn, and there were pencil marks under some of the passages. I couldn't remember the last time I'd opened it.
Then I found my own handwriting in the margin.
40 years old — ¥50,000,000
Two lines underneath it.
My handwriting had been rounder then.
During the winter of my final year of high school, I had gone to the city library to study for a certification exam. There were no empty desks, so I wandered through the shelves while I waited and picked up that book.
Start investing young, keep at it, and by around forty you could have enough money to choose how you wanted to work. It wasn't about getting rich or starting a company. Most of it came down to how much you could put aside each month and how long you could keep doing it.
Forty felt a long way off.
That made it seem possible.
On the way home, I found the same book at the bookstore by the station. It cost around fifteen hundred yen. I put it back once, then remembered I couldn't write in a library book and bought it.
At home, I wrote in the margin:
40 years old — ¥50,000,000
The following spring, I started working.
At first, I lived with my parents and commuted from home.
Every month, I gave them thirty thousand yen.
"You don't have to give us this much," my mother said when I handed her the envelope after payday.
"I eat here."
"Then save it."
"I am saving."
She didn't check what was inside. She put the envelope in a kitchen drawer.
Back then, I still saw my high school friends pretty often.
We had all just started earning salaries, and the way we spent our time wasn't much different from when we were students. We'd take a game to someone's house, then end up at a cheap chain restaurant and sit there for hours over refillable drinks. In summer, we'd buy drinks at a convenience store and talk on a park bench until late.
A thousand yen was enough.
Every payday, I moved a set amount into investments and lived on what remained.
At that point, I could still see my friends without reducing how much I put away.
The summer I was twenty-three, one of them called while I was at work.
I was in the stockroom checking inventory.
"You want to go to Hakone this weekend?"
"Who's going?"
"The usual group. Five of us, I think."
I kept the phone to my ear while checking the numbers on a shipment.
"How much?"
He laughed.
"That's the first thing you ask?"
"Roughly."
"Hotel, food, car... maybe thirty thousand?"
Thirty thousand yen.
Almost exactly what I had planned to put into an extra mutual-fund purchase that month.
"I'll pass."
"Again?"
"I don't have the money this month."
"You live with your parents."
"You can still run out of money living with your parents."
"What are you spending it on?"
Someone called my name from the sales floor.
"Sorry. Gotta go."
I hung up.
At the beginning of the next week, photos appeared in the group chat.
The five of them outside the inn. Some in yukata holding drinks. Another by the river with their shoes off.
They looked like they were having fun.
After scrolling through the photos, I opened my brokerage account.
The market had gone up. I was about 170,000 yen ahead of the previous month.
I hadn't spent the thirty thousand, and the account had grown.
I opened the photos once more, then closed them halfway through.
This was fine.
After that, I turned down more invitations.
Whenever someone told me how much something would cost, I found myself thinking first about what would happen if I didn't spend the money.
By twenty-five, even leaving my room on my days off had started to feel like a hassle.
I didn't blame my mother.
If your son still lived at home and spent every weekend in his room, you were probably going to ask him something.
Still, every time I came downstairs, I heard the same question.
"Going somewhere today?"
I wanted to get away from that.
I started looking for an apartment.
Whenever I found something in the sixty- or seventy-thousand-yen range, I'd calculate a year's rent and close the listing.
Eventually I found a place about a fifteen-minute walk from work. The building was more than thirty years old, with one six-tatami room and the washing-machine hookup outside.
Rent was forty-three thousand yen.
When I went to see it, the wall of the next building took up most of the view.
"How long is your commute now?" the agent asked.
"Just under an hour."
"Then this would make things a lot easier."
If I stayed with my parents, I could invest the rent too.
I looked around the room again.
No one would ask me what I was doing on my days off.
"I'll take it."
A month later, I moved out.
There wasn't much to take besides some clothes, books, and my game console. I bought the appliances I needed cheaply through work.
My mother brought over the last box.
The moment she stepped inside, she looked around.
"You're really okay with this place?"
"It's close to work."
"It's tiny."
"It's just me."
She opened the window and noticed the washing-machine space outside.
"The washing machine goes out there?"
"Rent's cheap."
"Won't it be freezing in winter?"
"I'll only be outside when I'm doing laundry."
She checked the kitchen, then opened the refrigerator.
It was empty.
"Make sure you eat properly."
"I know."
"You can always come home."
"I'm not coming back."
"That's not what I meant."
She laughed.
I didn't walk her to the station. We said goodbye at the door.
Once it closed, the apartment was quiet.
I connected the game console to the television and played until evening. Dinner was a marked-down bento from the supermarket nearby.
My routine wasn't very different from when I had lived with my parents.
The difference was that no one cared how late I stayed up, and no one asked where I was going if I slept until noon on a day off.
Forty-three thousand yen a month.
Before moving, it had seemed expensive. Once I started paying it, I got used to it.
Thirty thousand for a trip had felt wasteful, yet I was paying forty-three thousand every month for the privilege of being left alone.
I never did the math on that.
Even after moving out, I kept my expenses as low as I could. Raises mostly went into investments.
By the time I turned thirty, invitations from my high school group had almost stopped.
One night after a shower, I opened the group chat.
People were still talking.
There were wedding photos. One friend was holding a baby, and another had posted a picture with his wife in front of what looked like a beach resort. Restaurant names I didn't recognize kept coming up.
I scrolled back to the last message I had posted.
More than six months ago.
I tapped the message field and typed:
We should all go out for drinks sometime.
I left it there.
If the conversation moved on to choosing a place, I'd check the price. If someone suggested a trip, I'd ask how much it would cost.
I was the one who had kept saying no.
I erased the message and opened my brokerage account.
The balance was over twenty million yen.
It felt like everything I'd turned down over the years had ended up in that number.
As I got older, I went back to my parents' house less often.
The account kept growing.
At thirty-five, my annual salary was still somewhere in the four-million-yen range. My standard of living had barely changed, and if I had no use for a raise or bonus, I invested it.
At work, a younger employee bought a watch the month after getting a raise. Another traded in his car for a minivan after his child was born.
They talked about mortgages and cram-school fees.
"I swear, nothing stays in the account."
I bought cheap bentos for lunch and got drinks at the supermarket instead of the vending machine.
As my assets grew, the value of the account could move three or four hundred thousand yen in a single day.
One day, a customer buying a refrigerator asked,
"Can't you knock another thousand off?"
I checked with my supervisor and told him we could take five hundred yen off.
He kept negotiating for a while, then bought it.
During those ten minutes, my brokerage account had moved by several tens of thousands of yen.
For a moment, I thought he looked ridiculous arguing over a thousand.
Then I remembered that I bought drinks at the supermarket because they were ten yen cheaper than the vending machine.
Maybe it wasn't that different.
I'd just kept doing it for nearly twenty years.
My balance passed fifty million yen in the winter before I turned thirty-eight.
It happened at lunch.
I was eating a salmon bento in the small break room behind the sales floor when I opened my phone and saw that the balance was a few tens of thousands above fifty million.
I closed the screen, took a sip of miso soup, then looked again.
The number was still there.
What I had written in that book at eighteen came back to me.
I wasn't even forty yet.
While I ate, I looked up what would happen if I quit. I checked my unused paid leave and what I'd owe for health insurance and resident tax after leaving. Then I looked up the amount of my severance pay on the company site.
At my current rent and living expenses, I could live on the fifty million while keeping it invested.
Then it was time to get back to the sales floor.
That afternoon, I sold refrigerators like I always did.
A week later, I told my manager I wanted to quit.
There were only the two of us in the office.
He looked up from the schedule.
"Another job?"
"No. Nothing lined up."
"Then what are you going to do?"
"Take some time off."
"How long?"
"Haven't decided."
He set his pen down.
"Something happen?"
"Not really."
"Problems with someone here?"
"No."
"Money?"
"Not that either."
He shifted in his chair.
"Then why quit?"
I looked for an answer.
I didn't want to tell him I'd saved fifty million yen. I couldn't exactly say I'd been waiting for this since I was eighteen either.
"I've been working since high school. I just want a break."
He still didn't look convinced.
"What a waste."
"You think?"
"Of course. You're only thirty-eight. Your salary's still going to go up."
My manager probably made a little more than I did. He had a mortgage and kids.
I doubted he'd ever save fifty million yen.
Another ten years. Maybe twenty.
I wondered if he actually liked living that way.
A little more pay didn't seem worth giving the company all those years.
"I've made up my mind."
"I see."
He picked up his pen again.
We settled on a resignation date a few months later.
Until then, nothing at work changed. I worked my shifts, bowed to customers, and stayed late when the floor was understaffed.
A week before my last day, one of the younger employees asked,
"What do you want for your leaving present?"
On my last night, we went to an izakaya near the station.
About ten people came.
My manager gave the toast.
"Well, thanks for everything. You've been here a long time. I don't know what you're doing next, but if things go wrong, come back."
"You'd take me back?"
"We're short-staffed. You can come back tomorrow."
Everyone laughed.
We clinked glasses.
At first they talked about me leaving, but by the time the sashimi and fried food arrived, it had turned into an ordinary work drinking party.
The younger employee across from me kept checking his phone.
The conversation drifted to mortgages and school expenses. Someone was talking about replacing his car.
To me, it all sounded like money they had already promised from paychecks they hadn't earned yet.
We left the restaurant about two hours later.
Outside, the younger employee handed me a bouquet.
"Thanks for everything."
"Thanks."
"Come visit when you get bored."
"The store?"
"Buy something."
"I won't have the employee discount anymore."
"Full price, please."
"Then I'm definitely not coming."
He laughed.
I shook hands with my manager for the last time.
"Take care."
"I will."
"If you change your mind, call me."
"Okay."
"Seriously. It's a waste."
"You've said that enough."
We walked to the station together.
At the ticket gates, our lines split off and people disappeared one by one.
I got on the train with the bouquet on my lap.
At the next station, a man in a suit got on and took an empty seat. He tapped at his phone for a while, then folded his arms and closed his eyes.
Beside him, a younger office worker was looking through property listings, opening apartments with nearly identical floor plans and comparing the prices.
Tomorrow morning, they would probably ride this train at the same time again.
I wouldn't.
When I got home, I set the bouquet on the table and took off my tie.
My manager's words came back to me. Nearly twenty years on the job, and I was walking away now.
What exactly was supposed to be a waste?
I took off my shirt and hung it over the back of the chair.
Wasn't this what I'd spent all those years working toward?
The next morning, I opened the book I had bought at eighteen.
40 years old — ¥50,000,000
I had made it at thirty-eight.
I closed the book and drank my coffee.
I didn't have to go to work today.
I didn't have to go tomorrow either.
Just before noon, I went to the supermarket.
On a weekday, most of the people there were elderly or had young children with them.
I picked up a hamburger-steak bento from the prepared-food section.
When I passed the milk, I checked the expiration dates. The cartons farther back were good for two days longer than the ones in front.
I took one from the back.
It probably made no difference. I'd finish it at the same time either way.
I put it in my basket.
At the register, the young cashier asked,
"Need a bag?"
"Yes, please."
As I put my wallet away, I realized he was the first person I had spoken to all morning.
It was cloudy outside.
Back home, I ate my bento while watching a video about a man in his thirties who had quit his job and was walking through a seaside town.
When it ended, I clicked on another one about a couple who had retired early and were fixing up an old house in the countryside. From there I ended up watching someone who had moved overseas.
By the time I put the phone down and made coffee, it was already afternoon.
I thought about taking a trip, or maybe going to a movie while the theaters were empty.
I could decide tomorrow.
For the first week, I still woke up around eight.
I ate breakfast, did laundry, went to the supermarket, then came home and watched videos. I checked my brokerage account several times during the day.
By the second week, I was waking after nine and staying up later at night.
Breakfast and lunch started running together. So did the rest of the day.
No one from work contacted me, and there was nothing new in the high school group chat.
One afternoon, I closed a video and couldn't remember what day it was.
I thought it was Monday.
The phone said Wednesday.
The calendar was empty.
The bouquet was still sitting on the table in its wrapping paper. I had never put it in water, and one of the flowers had started to lean.
I went to the kitchen and cut the top off an empty plastic bottle.
Some of the flowers fit. I cut the others shorter and put them in another bottle.
Then I returned the book I had bought at eighteen to the shelf and set the flowers beside it.
A few days later, the edges of the petals began to turn brown.