The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

take the risks.
In the decade since 1960 it had become possible,
as in America, to guess a man’s age from the stocks
he owned. The bright celebrities among stocks were
day by day becoming more vulgar, day by day taking
on the look of the hoi polloi. The makers of small
transistor parts, recording annual sales of ten billion
yen, with stocks once fifty yen a share now touching
fourteen hundred—they were altogether too ordinary.
While paying careful heed to his taste in stocks,
Honda was quite insensitive to taste in real estate.
He had made a very good profit from the houses he
had put up in 1953 for American soldiers near the
Sagamihara Base. In those days it took more money
to build houses than to buy land. Upon the advice of
his financial consultant, Honda at first ignored houses
and bought up some ten acres of unimproved land at
a hundred yen or so per square yard. Each square
yard was now worth perhaps twenty thousand yen.
Land for which he had paid three million yen was now
worth perhaps seven hundred and fifty million.
This was of course a windfall. He had had good
luck with some of his land, rather poorer luck with
other, but none of it had lost value. He regretted now
that he had not left half that million dollars’ worth of
forest land as it was.