Chapter 170: Pay When the Show Sells

Chapter 170: Chapter 170: Pay When the Show Sells

Kinoshita Hideo climbed all twenty-four stairs to Studio Hikari on the sixth of April. He took eleven minutes and stopped four times, and he swore at every one of them in a Kagoshima accent so thick that Ichinose had to ask Minase what half the words meant.

"Better that you don’t know," Minase said.

He was seventy-four, short and broad like his younger brother, with a face burned brown by fifty summers in the south and knees that clearly hurt him. He had refused the bicycle-shop owner’s arm at the bottom of the stairs, and his cane on the fifth step, and help of every kind on the eleventh. When he reached the top, he stood on the new pale plank for a long moment, breathing hard, and looked down at it.

"Who fixed this?"

"I did," said his brother from three steps below. "In October."

"Took you long enough," said Kinoshita Hideo. "Dad asked you to fix it in 1989."

Then he stepped into the studio.

Nobody had told the eight owners of Studio Hikari what to do while he was there, but they had all decided the same thing without discussing it. They didn’t stop working. They sat at their desks drawing, as they did every Saturday morning. There were eight light boxes and eight bent heads, a whiteboard at the end of the room covered in episode numbers, and a red countdown to the twenty-sixth of April. The only sounds were pencils and the faint hum of old monitors.

Kinoshita Hideo stood in the doorway and looked at it for a long time.

Tachibana rose from his armchair by the window slowly, with his stiff wrist held against his chest. The two old men looked at each other across the long room.

"Tachibana-san," said Kinoshita Hideo.

"Kinoshita-san." Tachibana bowed, carefully, from the waist. "You’ve grown older."

"So have you. You look terrible."

"I fell down your stairs," Tachibana said. "In October. Your brother fixed them afterwards."

Kinoshita Hideo grunted. Then he limped across the room, past the desks and the light boxes, to the wall behind Tachibana’s armchair, and stopped.

On the wall, among the layers of drawings from three series nobody had watched, hung a single small photograph in a plain wooden frame. It was faded almost to sepia. It showed a stocky man in a carpenter’s apron standing at the top of these same stairs. Beside him was a much younger Tachibana with black hair and a borrowed suit, holding a hand-lettered sign that said STUDIO HIKARI — OPENING. Both men were squinting into the sun and smiling.

Beneath the photograph, pinned to the wall with a single drawing pin and yellowed with age, was a small slip of paper with four words on it in a carpenter’s blunt pencil.

Pay when the show sells.

Kinoshita Hideo stood very still in front of it.

"Dad wrote that," he said at last, very quietly.

"In 1994," Tachibana said. "I’d missed three months. He came up those stairs with the rent book, and I told him I couldn’t pay. He took the pencil from behind his ear, wrote that on the back of a receipt, and pinned it to my wall himself." The old director looked at the slip of paper. "I’ve never taken it down. The show never sold."

Kinoshita Hideo didn’t say anything. He looked at the photograph of his father at the top of the stairs for a very long time.

Minase showed him the twelve seconds.

He sat in her chair by the window with his cane across his knees and watched the dawn hillside. He saw the humming threads, the boy walking into the frame, and the gap in the chord. The camera rose slowly into the pale sky above an empty space.

He watched it twice. He didn’t say anything either time.

Then Minase showed him the storyboards. There were the first episode’s first act and second act, and the Gate ceremony. There was page twelve, the blank one, held for twelve seconds. Haruki brought his sketchbook, as Tachibana had asked. Kinoshita Hideo looked through it slowly, one page at a time, holding it at arm’s length because he had left his reading glasses in Kagoshima.

When he reached the doorframe, the six faded marks and the new line at seventeen with both names beside it, he stopped for a long time.

"This one’s yours," he said, looking at Haruki. It wasn’t a question.

"Yes."

"Somebody measured you once," the old man said. "Against a real one. Nobody draws a doorframe like that from imagination."

Haruki didn’t answer for a moment.

"My mother," he said at last.

Kinoshita Hideo nodded slowly, as though that were the only possible answer. He closed the sketchbook and handed it back. "Our father measured us on the frame of the storeroom downstairs. It’s still there, under the paint. Four marks each for my brother and me, and then he stopped, because we were too old and too embarrassed." He looked at the photograph on the wall again. "I haven’t looked at it since he died."

He didn’t say anything about the offer all morning.

At noon, he asked his brother to help him down the stairs. It took thirteen minutes this time, because his knees were worse going down. He sat on a folding chair on the pavement outside the bicycle shop with a can of hot coffee from the vending machine, and looked up at the narrow unsigned door and the window of the studio above it.

The eight owners of Studio Hikari had come down to the pavement too. They stood in a loose line, not quite knowing what to do with their hands. Tachibana sat on a second folding chair beside the old man from Kagoshima, and Haruki stood a little apart, by the bicycles.

"The company in Osaka," Kinoshita Hideo said finally, to his brother. "Three times the value."

"Yes."

"My wife’s hip costs about a tenth of that."

"Yes."

Kinoshita Hideo drank his coffee.

"If I sell to them," he said, "they own Dad’s building. Your shop, the old man’s stairs, the photograph on the wall. And they spend five years being polite until everybody leaves." He looked at his brother. "That’s what the lawyer said on the phone. The one in Kichijōji."

"Yes."

"And if I don’t sell, I’m seventy-four with bad knees and a wife who needs a hip, and a building in Tokyo I haven’t visited in eleven years."

Nobody on the pavement said anything.

"So I’ll sell it to you," Kinoshita Hideo said to his brother. "At what it’s actually worth. Not three times. What it’s worth." He drank the last of his coffee. "You’ll pay me in instalments, over fifteen years. You can pay them out of the rent from your own shop, and the old man’s studio. I’ll take a tenth of the price now, from your savings, which I know you’ve got because you’ve never spent a yen in your life." He set the empty can down on the pavement. "My wife gets her hip. Dad’s building stays with Dad’s sons. The old man gets a lease for as long as he wants, at the rent Dad set, adjusted once a decade."

His brother stared at him.

"Nii-san," the bicycle-shop owner said. "That’s a third of what they offered. Less than a third."

"I know how to divide," said Kinoshita Hideo. "I ran a fishing supply shop for forty years."

He turned to Tachibana on the folding chair beside him.

"One condition," he said.

"Anything," said Tachibana.

The old man from Kagoshima looked up at the window of the studio, at the narrow door and the twenty-four stairs, and at the new pale plank at the top that his brother had taken thirteen years too long to fix.

"When the show sells," he said, "I want to be paid back for 1994. Three months, at the old rent." He almost smiled. "Dad would want it collected. He never forgot a debt in his life."

For the first time that morning, Tachibana laughed out loud. It was a short, astonished bark of a laugh, and it sent a pigeon flying off the bicycle-shop sign.

"When the show sells," he said, "you’ll be paid first."

Before he took the train back to Kagoshima that evening, Kinoshita Hideo asked his brother to unlock the storeroom at the back of the bicycle shop.

Haruki didn’t go in. It wasn’t his to see. But he stood on the pavement outside and watched through the open door as the two brothers stood side by side in the dim little room among spare tyres and chains. The older one leaned on his cane, and the younger one held a torch. On the inside of the storeroom’s doorframe, the torchlight showed eight faint pencil lines under a coat of old paint, four for each boy, climbing to about the height of a ten-year-old’s head.

Neither brother said anything. They stood there for a long time, looking at the marks their father had made and then stopped making, because they had grown too old and too embarrassed.

Then the younger one took the carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear. It was his father’s habit, Haruki realized, and he had inherited it along with the shop. He handed it to his brother.

Kinoshita Hideo stood with his back against the frame, the way a child stands to be measured. His brother reached over his head and drew a line.

[Building (Mitaka) — Sold to: Kinoshita (bicycle-shop owner). Price: Fair value. Terms: 15-year family instalments.]

[Studio Hikari — Lease: Indefinite, original rent (decennial adjustment).]

[Osaka offer (3×): Declined.]

[Outstanding debt: Studio Hikari → Kinoshita family, 3 months’ rent (1994). Payable: "When the show sells."]