Chapter 168: A Letter to Singapore

Chapter 168: Chapter 168: A Letter to Singapore

Kanzaki Hayato wrote to the man who had cut his garden scene with the red pen that man had left him. He wrote eleven drafts. He sent the twelfth.

He sat at the desk in his rented room in Shinjuku with the neon from the street turning the ceiling pink and blue and pink again. The pen lay on a sheet of plain white writing paper. Its folded note, the one he had kept for fourteen months, was propped against the lamp where he could see it.

For the garden scenes. Don’t let anyone cut them.

He had never written a letter by hand in his life. He had written rejection-letter replies, contracts, and a thousand captions in speech bubbles. He had never sat down with a pen and a blank page and tried to say something true to someone he didn’t know how to feel about.

The first draft was angry. It listed every cut, every participation schedule, every hand on his shoulder. It was accurate and fair, and it would change nothing. He tore it up.

The second draft was polite, the kind of letter Yamashita sent to licensing partners. He tore that up too.

The third through the tenth were all attempts to be clever. He tried to write something that would make Ishikawa feel what Kanzaki felt without Kanzaki having to say it. Every one of them sounded like Ishikawa. He had spent four years learning to write like the man, and he had never realized how deeply it had gone until he tried to write to him.

The eleventh was only one line. Please don’t let them cut it. He looked at it for an hour and tore it up too. It was begging, and he had promised himself on the edge of the moat that he would never beg that man for anything again.

At three in the morning, with the neon still flickering on the ceiling, he wrote the twelfth.

Ishikawa-san,

Kurenai’s new managing director called me on the fifteenth. He said the garden scene in season two, episode three, would probably be cut to thirty seconds for international pacing.

You know which scene. You cut it once, in February, two years ago. You told me later why. You said it was because it was the best thing in the Chapter, and you were afraid I’d become too good to need you.

Minase-san restored it in season one. The voice actress needed to hold a crown of grass to say the line. She did it eleven times, and on the eleventh, nobody in the booth could breathe.

I’m not asking you to save it. I’m telling you it’s being cut. The letter from your fund was copied to your advisory board. I think you copied yourself so that I would know you’d see it. I’m telling you anyway, because you taught me that the people who matter should hear the truth first.

You left me your pen with a note under it. I’ve never used the pen. I’ve kept the note on my desk for fourteen months.

It says: "For the garden scenes. Don’t let anyone cut them."

I don’t know if you meant it. I know I’ve believed it every day.

Kanzaki Hayato.

He read it four times, because that was how he read everything now. Then he folded it into an envelope and addressed it to the Singapore office of a fund whose name was printed at the bottom of a restructuring announcement. He wrote Attention: Ishikawa Kōji, Advisory Board in red ink.

He posted it at seven in the morning from the post office by Shinjuku Station, on his way to the ninth floor at Yamashita. He didn’t tell anyone except Akari.

Nothing happened for eleven days.

Kanzaki went to work. He drew Crown of Ash Chapter seventy-four, and sat in a meeting with Fujimori Aya about the second print volume. He had dinner with Akari twice, at a ramen shop in Chiba near the hardware store. She didn’t ask about the letter, because she knew he would tell her if anything happened, and because she had learned, somewhere in two years of reading his pages on her lunch break, when not to ask.

On the twelfth day, the twenty-eighth of March, two things happened.

At 9:40 in the morning, Kurenai’s new managing director called him again. He was polite, as he had been the first time. He said he had received guidance from the owners’ advisory board regarding season two. After review, the board had concluded that the garden scene in episode three was essential to the series’ emotional identity and international appeal. It would be retained at its full length, four pages, as storyboarded.

He said it as though it had always been the plan.

Kanzaki thanked him and hung up. He sat very still at his desk on the ninth floor, with the crown of grass on the shelf beside him and the Imperial Palace moat grey through the window.

At 6:15 that evening, when he got home, there was a postcard in his mailbox.

It had a Singapore stamp and no return address. His name and address were written on the front in thin red ink.

He turned it over.

On the back, filling most of the card, was a drawing in black ink. It was a crown of grass, crooked and lopsided, the way a child’s hands make one. It sat on a plain wooden table in soft light, with a few loose stems scattered beside it.

The lines were looser than the bus stop postcard, and more certain. They were the lines of someone who had now drawn twice in twenty-four years and found that his hands were starting to remember.

Beneath it were three lines in small red handwriting.

I meant it.

Four pages. Not a panel less.

Tell Amamiya: the building. Before summer. They’ve stopped waiting.

Kanzaki called Haruki at 6:40. He didn’t say hello.

"He saved it," he said. His voice was very strange, unsteady and flat at once. "The garden. Four pages. The managing director called this morning like it was his own idea."

"Kanzaki—"

"He drew it," Kanzaki said. "The crown. On a postcard. It’s on my desk next to the real one. They look like each other." He stopped. There was a long silence on the line. "I didn’t think he’d answer. I thought I was writing into nothing."

Haruki sat on the crate in front of his desk and didn’t say anything for a long moment.

"There’s something else," Kanzaki said. "It’s for you. At the bottom." He read it aloud. "Tell Amamiya: the building. Before summer. They’ve stopped waiting."

Haruki went very still.

"What building?" Kanzaki asked.

Haruki looked across his desk at the Hikari storyboards for episode one, the second act, pages sixty to seventy-five, spread out beside the shoebox and the red sketchbook. Studio Hikari was owned by eight people who climbed twenty-four stairs every morning, and no fund in the world could buy a single share of it.

The studio could be protected. The staircase couldn’t.

"The bicycle shop," he said slowly. "Hikari doesn’t own the building. They rent the top floor. They always have." He stood up. "The landlord’s the bicycle shop owner’s brother. He’s in his seventies. He lives in Kyushu."

The line went very quiet.

"They can’t buy the studio," Kanzaki said slowly. "So they’re going to buy the stairs."

He took the first train to Mitaka the next morning, before the studio opened.

The bicycle shop’s owner was wheeling his row of secondhand bicycles out onto the pavement, as he did every morning at eight. He was in his sixties, broad and quiet, with sawdust still on his sleeves from some repair. He had been a carpenter before he inherited the shop from his father. He had replaced the top step with a single pale plank, measured twice and cut once, and he had heard an old man calling from the bottom of the stairs and come running.

He looked up as Haruki crossed the street, and his face changed.

"You’ve heard," he said.

Haruki stopped on the pavement.

"My brother called on Tuesday," the bicycle-shop owner said. He set down the bicycle he was holding and wiped his hands slowly on a rag from his back pocket. "From Kagoshima. He owns the building. Our father left it to him, and the shop to me." He looked up at the narrow unsigned door beside his shop, and the twenty-four stairs beyond it. "Somebody made him an offer last week, through a property company in Osaka he’d never heard of. It’s three times what the building’s worth. Cash, with no conditions, and a decision wanted by June."

Haruki couldn’t say anything.

"He’s seventy-four," the bicycle-shop owner said. "His knees are bad. His wife needs a new hip. Three times the value is a lot of money for a man with bad knees." He folded the rag and put it back in his pocket. "He asked me whether he should take it."

"What did you say?"

The bicycle-shop owner looked up at the stairs for a long time.

"I said I’d ask the old man upstairs," he said. "Tachibana-san. He’s been renting that floor from our family for thirty-one years. He never missed a month." He paused. "I haven’t asked him yet. I didn’t know how."

[Crown of Ash Season 2 — Garden scene (Ep. 3): Retained (4 pp.). Source: Advisory board guidance.]

[Ishikawa Kōji — Second drawing in 24 years (postcard, crown of grass).]

[Warning received: "The building. Before summer." — Studio Hikari (leased premises, Mitaka).]

[Offer (via Osaka property company): 3× market value. Owner: Bicycle-shop owner’s brother (74, Kagoshima). Decision: June.]