Chapter 175: The Kitchen Table

Chapter 175: Chapter 175: The Kitchen Table

Hino Michiko had cried at her kitchen table in front of her son once, two years ago, over a lawyer’s letter. On the eighteenth of May, she invited Haruki to sit at that same table. It was the first time she had ever let anyone from Tsubasa’s work into the apartment.

"It’s small," she said at the door, before he could say anything. "I told you once it was too small for anything important to happen in. I’ve changed my mind. Take your shoes off."

It was a two-room apartment on the fourth floor of an old building in Saitama, twenty minutes’ walk from the station. There was a narrow kitchen, and a living room that doubled as her bedroom at night. Tsubasa’s room was barely wide enough for a desk and a futon. The walls were thin, and the window looked out at another building’s wall, close enough to touch.

But every surface was covered in drawings.

They were pinned to the kitchen wall, taped to the refrigerator, and propped along the top of a bookshelf. There was a widow shelling peas on a cottage step, and a lighthouse on a horizon two Chapters early. There were cobblestones glowing as an eclipse began, and a hospital window with winter light falling across an empty bed. On the refrigerator, in the middle of all of them, a clumsy sea serpent with backward teeth was held up by a magnet shaped like a fish.

"Kenji sent that one," Michiko said, following his gaze. "Through Tsubasa. He said it was for the fridge of the person whose son teaches him on Thursdays." She almost smiled. "It’s the best thing on it."

Tsubasa was sitting at the small kitchen table already. He was eighteen now, taller than Haruki, with a sketchbook open in front of him that he wasn’t drawing in. He looked up when Haruki came in and didn’t say anything. He’d been told why Haruki was coming, and he’d clearly been thinking about it all week.

Haruki told them everything. He didn’t make it simpler or softer, because Michiko had once asked him every plain question there was about her son’s statement and his envelope, and she had never once forgiven anyone for making things simpler.

He told them about the broadcasters who wanted a heartbeat in the white. He told them about the whiteboard in Mitaka with a hundred and sixty-seven million yen still missing. Then he told them about the call from Fujimori Aya at 9:40 at night.

He told them what Yamashita wanted in return: its name on the credits, publicly, as the company that helped fund the anime of the series its own rookie division had once tried to take.

"The name would be on the credits beside yours," he said to Tsubasa. "Backgrounds, Hino Tsubasa. Then, a few lines later, Yamashita Publishing." He looked at Michiko. "Their return address was on the envelope. I’m not letting it go anywhere near his name unless you both say yes."

Michiko didn’t say anything for a long time.

She sat very straight at her own kitchen table with her hands folded in front of her. Haruki recognized the posture. It was how she had sat at the family restaurant in December of the first year, deciding whether to hand over an envelope wrapped in a clean handkerchief.

"You know what I did when that letter came," she said finally. It wasn’t a question.

"You cried," Haruki said. "At this table. You told me you’ve been ashamed of it ever since."

"I’ve stopped being ashamed of it." Michiko looked at her son. "He told me to."

Haruki looked at Tsubasa.

Tsubasa had gone red to the ears. He stared down at his sketchbook.

"In December," he said quietly. "After the statement. She said it again, that she was ashamed she’d cried in front of me." He turned a page of the sketchbook without looking at it. "I said I wasn’t ashamed. I said I’d copied someone’s whole series and admitted it on a forum in front of everyone. I’d walked into a classroom where only four faces were clear. If I wasn’t ashamed of that, she didn’t get to be ashamed of crying at a lawyer."

Michiko’s mouth twitched.

"He was very firm about it," she said.

"Michiko-san," Haruki said. "It’s your decision. And his." He hesitated. "But I want you to know I’ll understand if the answer is no. We’ll find the money somewhere else. It’ll take longer. That’s all."

Michiko didn’t answer him. She turned to her son.

"You’re eighteen," she said. "It’s your name on the credits. Not mine." She unfolded her hands and laid them flat on the table. "I’ll tell you what I think. Then you decide."

Tsubasa looked up.

"I think," Michiko said slowly, "that a letter came to this apartment two years ago and made me feel like the smallest person in Japan. It came from a company that had never once seen your face, and it had decided it could take your drawings because we were poor and frightened and didn’t have a lawyer." Her voice didn’t change at all. "And I think that same company is now offering sixty million yen to put its name next to yours. Not above it, and not instead of it. Beside it, as the company that was wrong."

She looked at the refrigerator with its sea serpent and its fish-shaped magnet.

"I don’t know if that’s an apology," she said. "I’ve never had one from a company before. I don’t know what they’re supposed to look like."

Tsubasa was quiet for a very long time.

"When I apologized on the forum," he said at last, "for copying, nobody believed me. Not for weeks. People said I was only sorry because I’d been caught." He turned the sketchbook slowly on the table. "The apology wasn’t what made them believe me. It was drawing backgrounds for the person I’d copied, two days a week, for two years, and never once missing a deadline." He looked up. "Saying sorry doesn’t mean anything. Doing something afterward does."

Michiko didn’t say anything.

"Sixty million yen is doing something," Tsubasa said. "It’s what they can do. They can’t take the letter back." He took a breath. "I think they should be allowed to try."

The small kitchen was completely quiet. Through the thin wall, someone in the next apartment was running a bath.

Then Michiko nodded, once, very slowly.

"Then yes," she said. "On one condition."

Haruki waited.

"I want to meet her," Michiko said. "The woman who called you. Fujimori-san. Before anyone signs anything." She folded her hands again. "Not the chairman or the lawyers. Her. She sat in a café two years ago and told you to read the transfer clauses. She was the only person in that company who tried." She looked at Haruki steadily. "I want her to sit at this table, in this apartment that’s too small for anything important, and tell me herself. Then I’ll believe it."

[Consent: Hino Tsubasa (18) — Granted. Reason: "Saying sorry doesn’t mean anything. Doing something afterward does."]

[Consent: Hino Michiko — Granted (conditional). Condition: Meeting with Fujimori Aya, in person, at the Hino family’s kitchen table.]

He called Aya from the station platform in Saitama that evening, while the trains came and went.

She listened without interrupting. When he finished, she was quiet for a long time.

"At her kitchen table," she said finally.

"Yes."

"Where she read the letter."

"Yes."

He heard Aya breathe out, slowly, on the other end of the line. It was the sound of someone who had been waiting two years to be asked to do something difficult and had just been asked.

"Tell her Saturday," Aya said. "Any time she likes. I’ll come alone." A pause. "And tell her I’ll bring the draft."

Haruki went very still on the platform.

"The first draft of that letter," Aya said quietly. "The one Kanemoto sent to her son. Kagawa wrote it by hand, and Ishikawa corrected it in red ink. He crossed out one sentence and wrote another above it." Her voice caught. "It was in his locked drawer last June, under his own rejection letters, beside the envelope addressed to you. I’ve kept it in my desk ever since. I didn’t know who it belonged to."

"What did he change?"

The line was quiet for a long moment.

"Kagawa’s draft said we believe our client may have an interest in the work," Aya said. "Ishikawa crossed out may have and wrote has above it, in red." A pause. "One word. That was the word that made her cry."

Haruki stood on the platform in Saitama while a train pulled in and the doors opened. People got off and on around him, and the doors closed again. He didn’t move.

"Hirose-sensei should have it," he said slowly. "For Ōkubo’s case. It shows who wrote the claim, and who made it a threat."

"I know," Aya said. "I’ll give it to him on Monday." She was quiet for a moment. "But I think Hino-san should see it first. At her own table. Before a court does." Her voice steadied. "It was her letter. She should get to decide what happens to the draft of it."