Chapter 174: Silence Doesn’t Sell

Chapter 174: Chapter 174: Silence Doesn’t Sell

The head of late-night programming at the third-largest broadcaster in Tokyo watched the twelve seconds twice. Then he asked Minase whether they could put something in the white.

"A title card, perhaps," he said pleasantly. "Or a sound effect. A heartbeat. Something so the audience knows the broadcast hasn’t failed."

It was the fourteenth of May, in a meeting room on the twentieth floor of a tower in Akasaka, with a view of the whole city in the hazy spring light. Minase sat across from him with a laptop. Tachibana sat beside her in his cardigan, with his stiff wrist resting on the table. Haruki sat at the end with his sketchbook in his lap, as Tachibana had told him to. Broadcasters like to see the thing they’re buying, the old man had said on the train. Even when they don’t understand it.

The man from the broadcaster was in his fifties, polite and tired, in an expensive grey suit. He had been in the industry for thirty years, he said, and had bought more than forty late-night series. He had watched the twelve seconds with his arms folded. He had listened to the first two minutes of Chen Wei’s demo with an expression of patient neutrality. He had turned the pages of the sketchbook quickly, like a man who already knew his answer.

"A heartbeat," Minase repeated.

"Or a title card," he said. "Ren’s mind goes white. Something to guide the viewer." He smiled. "Late-night audiences are channel-surfing. Twelve seconds of nothing, and they’re gone. We’d lose a third of the audience at that exact moment. The ratings data would show it clearly."

Haruki thought about a page twelve two years ago, where a third of his readers had left in a single afternoon, and Mizuno calling at nine in the morning about it.

"It’s in the contract," Minase said calmly. "Twelve seconds, white, no sound. It’s a condition of the adaptation."

"Contracts can be revised."

"This one can’t," Minase said. "The author has a veto. The author wrote it."

The man from the broadcaster looked down the table at Haruki for the first time, with mild surprise, as though he had assumed the young man at the end was an assistant.

"The series is lovely," he said to him kindly. "Truly. But it’s very quiet, Amamiya-san. There’s no fighting. The protagonist spends most of the first episode not doing anything." He turned a page of the sketchbook and turned it back. "My audience wants something to happen. Swords, or monsters, or a rooftop. Something at the end of every episode to make them tune in next week." He closed the sketchbook gently. "Silence doesn’t sell. Not at one in the morning."

They walked out of the tower at 11:40 into the bright, windy afternoon. None of them said anything until they reached the station.

On the platform, Tachibana sat down on a bench, slowly, because his hip still bothered him on long days.

"Forty series," he said. "He’s bought forty series and I’ve never heard of one of them." He looked at the tracks. "He’s not wrong about the ratings. He’s never wrong about the ratings. That’s his job."

"It was the third broadcaster this month," Minase said. She didn’t sit. She stood with her laptop bag over her shoulder, looking at the timetable board without reading it. "The first said the same thing about the silence. The second said the art was too sparse for an overseas market. This one wants a heartbeat."

"We’re not putting a heartbeat in it," Haruki said.

"No," Minase agreed. "We’re not."

The train came, and nobody said anything for three stops.

That evening, at the long table above the bicycle shop, Minase wrote the numbers on the whiteboard, beneath the red countdown to the first episode’s storyboard lock.

Required (Season 1, 12 episodes): ¥210,000,000.

Below it, she wrote what they had. It didn’t take long.

Naniwa Shobō (print partner): ¥20,000,000. Nishida had called in April and offered it before anyone asked. Her board had fought her for a week and then given in, because Volume 2 had gone into its third printing.

Platform (distribution partner): ¥15,000,000. Mizuno had taken it to the board in May. The lawyer who had once drafted Section 10 had spoken in favour, to everyone’s astonishment, and it had passed seven to two.

Chen Wei (music): ¥0 (in kind).

Kanda children’s publisher (licensing, furigana edition tie-in): ¥8,000,000. Tanabe from the board had called Minase personally.

Studio Hikari (in kind, labour): ¥—

She drew a line under it and wrote the total.

¥43,000,000.

The shortfall was a hundred and sixty-seven million yen.

"It’s a start," Minase said finally. She capped the marker.

"It’s twenty percent," said Ichinose, very quietly, from the end of the table. Then she went red and looked at her light box, because she hadn’t meant to say it aloud.

"It’s twenty percent," Tachibana agreed, from his armchair by the window. He didn’t sound discouraged. He sounded almost cheerful. "In 1987, I made a whole series on six percent. It was very short, and every episode was mostly one room." He picked up his tea. "Twenty percent is luxury."

Nobody laughed. But the room felt a little lighter.

[Production funding: ¥43M / ¥210M (20.5%).]

[Broadcasters approached: 3. Declined: 3. Reason given: "Silence doesn’t sell."]

Haruki’s phone rang at 9:40 that night, while he was still at the long table going through storyboards with Minase.

It was a Yamashita number. For two years, a Yamashita number had meant a lawyer’s letter, a folder with page six in it, or a man with a red pen. He stared at it for a moment before he answered.

"Amamiya-san?" It was Fujimori Aya. She sounded nervous, and a little breathless. "I’m sorry to call so late. I’m still at the office. I didn’t want to wait until morning." She took a breath. "Kanzaki-kun told me this afternoon. About the broadcasters. About the silence."

"It’s all right," Haruki said. "We’ll find someone."

"You have," Aya said. "I think."

He sat very still at the long table. Across from him, Minase had looked up from the storyboard.

"Yamashita’s new board met this morning," Aya said. "About Rookie Development. About what the division should be now, after everything." She paused. "I proposed that Yamashita join the production committee for Threadless Gate. Not for the rights. We’d take no participation and no page six. We’d be a funding partner, on the same terms as Naniwa and your platform. A share of the broadcast revenue and nothing else."

Haruki couldn’t answer.

"The board asked how much," Aya said quietly. "I said sixty million yen." Her voice caught. "They said yes. On one condition."

"What condition?"

"They want it known," Aya said, "publicly, on the credits and in the press, that Yamashita Publishing helped fund the anime of the series its own Rookie Development division once tried to take." A long pause. "The chairman said it’s the only way anyone will believe the company has changed. He said an apology nobody pays for isn’t an apology."

Haruki sat at the long table with the phone against his ear for a long time without speaking.

Across from him, Minase had put down her pencil. At the far end of the room, Tachibana had set his teacup on the stool beside his armchair and was watching him over his thick glasses. Ichinose had stopped pretending to work.

Sixty million yen would bring them to a hundred and three million, nearly half.

It would come from Yamashita, the company whose rookie division had sent a lawyer’s letter to a seventeen-year-old’s mother, and put a participation schedule on a desk above the Imperial Palace moat. Its name had once been on a finalist lanyard in the Phoenix Hall, in the same week a man with a microphone asked Haruki whether his success owed more to conflict than to craft.

"Aya-san," he said at last. "Can I have a week?"

"Of course," Aya said at once. She sounded almost relieved. "I told the board you’d ask for time. I told them you’d want to ask other people first." A pause. "They didn’t understand why. I said that was the whole point."

"Thank you."

"Amamiya-san," Aya said, more quietly. "Whatever you decide, I wanted you to know that I voted for it first. Before anyone else in the room." Her voice caught again. "I sat in a café in Hitotsubashi two years ago and told you to read the transfer clauses. I couldn’t do anything else then. I’d like to be able to do something now."

She hung up.

He put the phone down on the long table and looked at Minase.

"It isn’t my decision alone," he said. "It’s the studio’s too. You’re the committee."

"I know," Minase said. "We’ll vote. All eight of us, and you." She looked at him steadily. "But you’re not asking us first, are you."

He shook his head slowly.

"There’s someone else who has to say yes," he said. "Before any of us."

Minase understood at once. She had heard the story on the pavement outside the bicycle shop, on a folding chair, with a can of coffee going cold in her hands.

"The boy who draws your backgrounds," she said quietly. "And his mother."

"Yamashita’s return address was on the envelope," Haruki said. "The lawyer’s letter. His mother cried at the kitchen table in front of him. She told me once she’s been ashamed of that ever since." He looked down at the storyboard on the table. It was the Gate ceremony, and the whole valley was watching, drawn by Tsubasa’s hand, with a few sharp faces near the front and the rest dissolving into the hillside. "If Yamashita’s name goes on the credits of this anime, it goes on the credits beside his. I’m not letting it go there unless they both say yes."

At the far end of the room, Tachibana picked up his teacup again.

"Good," the old man said, and nothing else.

[Production funding offer: Yamashita Publishing — ¥60,000,000 (no participation). Condition: Public acknowledgement.]

[Potential total: ¥103M / ¥210M (49%).]

[Consent required before committee vote: Hino Tsubasa and mother.]