The Samurai Strategy

A high-finance, high-tech thriller that correctly predicted the 1987 stock market crash. It was the first fictional treatment of a major international concern of the Eighties. Set in locales as diverse as Wall Street and the offices of Japan's powerful Trade Ministry, THE SAMURAI STRATEGY describes a scenario of murder, worldwide currency manipulation, a revival of Japan's smoldering nationalism, and is set against a background of a new high-tech computer milieu. Matthew Walton, a freelance corporate 'takeover' lawyer is hired by a mysterious Japanese industrialist to purchase a New York office building and begin a massive 'hedging' in the financial markets. Two weeks later, off an island in the Inland Sea, divers working for the industrialist's organization, recover the original Imperial Sword, given to Japan's first Emperor by the Sun Goddess, Japan's 'Excalibur', and lost in a sea battle in 1185. He forms an '800-Year Fund' and billions of yen flow to his fingertips. He then dumps all the Treasuries Japan had acquired and devastates the American economy.

As the story rushes to its stunning conclusion, Matt Walton goes to Japan and determines that the 'Imperial Sword' is, in fact an unusual antique he once owned himself.

BOOKS BY THOMAS HOOVER

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Zen Culture

The Zen Experience

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The Moghul

Caribbee

Wall Street Samurai (The Samurai Strategy)

Project Daedalus

Project Cyclops

Life Blood

Syndrome

All free as e-books at

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Wall Street Samurai

(The Samurai Strategy)

Thomas Hoover

www.thomashoover.info

THE SAMURAI STRATEGY A Bantam Falcon Book / June 1988

All rights reserved. Copyright (C) 1988 by Thomas Hoover.

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

OPM 0 9 8 7 6 5 4

Key Words:

Author: Thomas Hoover

Title: The Samurai Strategy

Wall Street, Japanese Stock Market, Treasury bonds, Stock Market, Imperial Sword, Emperor of Japan, Japanese History, Supercomputer

The following story is entirely imaginary . . . I hope.

CHAPTER ONE

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 to come. The city was poised for its cruelest months, that twilight of the spirit when strangers arm-wrestle for taxis, nobody has time to hold a door, and you cherish every fleeting human kindness.

Bring on the blizzards, the holiday madness. This winter I was planning something long overdue. To treat my daughter Amy, the Madame Curie of her ninth grade, to a real vacation. Just us. We'd leave at Thanksgiving and stay gone through the Christmas break. She got to live with me three months a year, and December was by God going to be one of the months. School? She'd already skipped a year; maybe she was a little too fast-track for thirteen.

Since Joanna, my ex, had already lined up her own holiday excursion (Amy the spy claimed it was with some divorced Tishman VP), she hadn't bothered inventing the usual roadblocks. Clear sailing. We'd open the house down in St. Croix and spend a month getting reacquainted. Work on the tan and some postgraduate snorkeling, a strategic move while I still enjoyed a small sliver of her attention, before a certain "totally terrific" skateboard virtuoso finally got around to noticing her. Only a couple of jobs needed finishing, but they'd be wrapped up with weeks to spare.