Kuroda's mouth twitched. "She sounds strict."
"She was terrifying," Jasmine said, and smiled. "She also made the best miso soup I have ever had in my life."
A small sound escaped Emiko Fujita then. Not quite a laugh. Delight, quickly covered, but delight all the same.
Fujita spoke next, faster than Kuroda, her words crisp and modern, the Japanese of a woman who moved between Tokyo meetings and foreign calls without changing her stride.
"If you studied international trade, what did you focus on?" Fujita asked. "Most students choose finance. It is the fashionable answer."
"I chose supply chains," Jasmine said. "And how small companies survive when larger ones buy into them. Fashionable answers bored my professors."
That time Fujita did laugh, openly, before she could stop herself. She glanced at Ishida as if to check whether laughing was permitted, and found him smiling into his tea.
Ren Takagi, the youngest of the four, had been quiet, turning his glass in slow circles. Now he lifted his head, curious in a different way.
"Your accent changed just now," Takagi said in Japanese. "With Mr. Kuroda you sounded like Osaka. With Ms. Fujita, you sounded almost like Tokyo."
Jasmine felt the room tilt, very slightly, toward her. Pierce was still seated at the head of his own table, a million-dollar bet hanging in the air, and no one was looking at him.
"It depends who I am speaking with," she said. "In Osaka people taught me to soften. In my classes, our professor was from Tokyo, and he hated when we softened too much."
"So you carry both," Takagi said.
"I try to carry what the conversation needs," she said. "Language is not only words. It is knowing how much space to leave between them."
Takagi nodded slowly, as if she had answered a question he had not quite asked out loud. He repeated her last phrase under his breath, approving of the shape of it.
Kuroda was not finished. Men who counted money for a living rarely finished quickly, and his next question came with numbers attached to it.
"If an American company buys a controlling stake in a Japanese division," he said, "what changes first, in your opinion? The contracts, or the trust?"
It was not a test question. Or if it was, it was a better one than Pierce could have invented, because it had no single right answer hidden inside it.
Jasmine considered him, this careful man, and gave him the honest version.
"The contracts change on paper first," she said. "The trust changes in the room first. If the people in the room stop believing each other, the paper stops meaning very much."
Kuroda sat back. He looked at Ishida, and something passed between them that had nothing to do with Pierce at all. Recognition, perhaps. Or simple pleasure at being understood.
Fujita leaned in again, her chin resting lightly on one hand now, her earlier professional distance gone.
"And your Japanese," she said. "You did not learn this from an application on your phone, did you?"
"No," Jasmine said, and laughed a little herself. "From being corrected. Constantly. By teachers, by my host mother, by a station attendant in Nara who refused to let me buy the wrong ticket."
"You argued with a station attendant?" Takagi asked.
"I tried," Jasmine said. "He won. He was right about the ticket, and then he drew me a map so I would not make the same mistake returning."
Even Kuroda smiled at that, a genuine, unguarded smile that changed his whole face. The folder beside his plate stayed closed. For these few minutes, business had stepped back.
All around her, the language moved like water finding its level. Formal with Kuroda, who respected form. Brisk with Fujita, who respected speed. Warm with Takagi, who was young enough to ask about accents instead of acquisitions.
Jasmine felt her shoulders ease for the first time that night. This was not performance. This was the thing she had built in private, year after year, finally standing in the light where it belonged.
She thought of her kitchen table at midnight, the flashcards, the radio dramas from Osaka she had listened to until the actors sounded like neighbors. None of that work had been wasted. It had been waiting for exactly this.
At the end of the table, Nathaniel Pierce shifted in his chair. His smile had thinned into something fixed and bright, the smile of a man watching a presentation in a language no one had translated for him.
He cleared his throat once. Nobody turned. The conversation flowed past him like a river going around a stone it had no use for.
Ishida raised his cup slightly, in her direction, not in Pierce's. It was a small gesture. In that room, at that table, it was enormous, and everyone who understood the language understood the gesture too.
"Miss Cole," Ishida said, in Japanese still, with a warmth that had not been there for Pierce all night, "you do not sound like someone who studied our language. You sound like someone who lived in it."
Jasmine bowed her head, just enough. "That," she said, "is the kindest thing anyone has said about my Japanese in ten years."
And still Pierce sat there, listening to the music of it, understanding none of it, beginning at last to understand one thing very clearly.
He had bet a million dollars on a woman he had never once actually seen.
Ishida was not done testing her, but the test had changed its nature.
Where his first questions had been careful, almost courtly, now something playful entered his voice. He settled back in his chair, studied her over the rim of his cup, and let his speech slide sideways.
The formal Tokyo Japanese fell away. In its place came Kansai, broad and rolling, the dialect of Osaka markets and comedy stages, of grandmothers scolding and shopkeepers bargaining.
"Well now," Ishida said, in that loose, familiar drawl, "if you really stayed in Osaka, you'll know we don't talk like newscasters down there, eh?"