Kawabata Yasunari’s (1899–1972) narrative about the tea ceremony has had a complicated reception, largely because of two factors: its early publication history; and the theft, in early 1954, of the notes that Kawabata would have used for completing the text. Kawabata Yasunari’s novel Senbazuru (1952), at the urging of the critic Nakamura Mitsuo, was published in book form before serialization had finished. The sequel to Senbazuru, later titled Namichidori (serialized 1953–1954), was still unfinished when Kawabata’s notes were stolen, and he left the text in a state that he himself described as mikan, ‘incomplete’. The seemingly unresolved quality of the text is even more apparent when one considers that the two last-written chapters of Namichidori were subsequently not included in published versions of that text, giving the impression that the sequel to Senbazuru ends inconclusively. The present essay examines the narrative as a whole, inclusive of the two concluding chapters. The theory of finance in literature is applied to a pivotal episode near the end of Namichidori (characters invest in the stock market); and thing theory is used to show that, in crucial ways, the narrative ends conclusively, if all the extant chapters are read as a whole.