Chapter 177: The Announcement

Chapter 177: Chapter 177: The Announcement

The anime of Threadless Gate was announced to the world on an index card pinned to a bookshop shelf in Koenji. Hinata pinned it there, and she wasn’t allowed to read it first.

That had been Oda’s condition. She had laid it down on the telephone the week before, when Haruki called to ask whether the shelf would mind.

"The shelf doesn’t mind anything," Oda had said. "The shelf is a shelf." A pause. "But the girl who works it will want to read it before anyone else. You’re not going to let her."

"Why not?"

"Because she bought the first copy with coins," Oda said. "She should find out the same way as everyone else, at the same time, from the card." Another pause. "She’ll be furious. It’ll be good for her."

The committee had voted on the twenty-fourth of May, at the long table above the bicycle shop.

There were nine votes: Haruki’s, and one from each of the eight people who owned Studio Hikari. Tachibana didn’t vote. He had given his shares away in October and said he was only an old man in an armchair now, with opinions nobody had to listen to.

Minase read out the terms before the vote. Yamashita Publishing would put sixty million yen into the production committee, on the same terms as Naniwa and the platform. It would take a share of broadcast and licensing revenue and nothing else, with no participation and no page six. Its name would appear in the credits, and in the announcement, as a funding partner.

Then she read out the condition Hino Michiko had set and Fujimori Aya had met at a kitchen table in Saitama, and the condition Yamashita itself had set. Its name would go beside Tsubasa’s, publicly, as the company that had been wrong.

"All in favour," Minase said.

Nine hands went up.

Ichinose’s hand was shaking again. When she saw it was unanimous, she put her face in her hands and said something muffled about not crying at a committee meeting. Tachibana laughed so hard in his armchair that he spilled his tea.

On the whiteboard at the end of the room, Minase crossed out the old total and wrote a new one.

¥103,000,000.

It was forty-nine percent.

"Now we tell people," Tachibana said from his armchair, mopping his tea with a handkerchief.

Minase looked at him. "We’re at forty-nine percent. Studios don’t announce at forty-nine percent. If we announce and can’t find the rest—"

"Then everyone will know we tried," Tachibana said. "And someone who’s been waiting for a reason will have one." He folded the handkerchief. "I’ve made three shows nobody watched. Do you know why? Nobody knew they existed until they’d already finished. We announced them the week they aired, at one in the morning." He looked at Haruki. "This boy put his first Chapter on a website with eleven readers. He didn’t wait until he had a thousand. He put it where people could find it."

So they wrote the announcement together, at the long table, over three evenings.

It was short. Haruki insisted on that, and Minase agreed, and Tachibana said anything longer than a page was a press release and nobody read those.

It said that Studio Hikari, a small studio above a bicycle shop in Mitaka, would produce an animated adaptation of Threadless Gate. It would be directed by Minase, with music by Chen Wei. It named the funding partners: Naniwa Shobō, the platform, a children’s publisher in Kanda, and Yamashita Publishing, who wish it known that their former Rookie Development division once attempted to claim this work, and who have chosen to fund its adaptation instead.

It said the production was forty-nine percent funded, and was still looking for the rest.

It said the Gate ceremony episode would contain twelve seconds of white, without sound, and that this was not negotiable.

It gave no air date. They didn’t have one.

At the bottom, in Haruki’s handwriting, were three lines. It was a #ThreeLines card, the same shape as the twenty-one thousand strangers’ cards that had filled the internet one September weekend.

For anyone who has ever stood under an arch and seen nothing appear above their head.

Someone is going to make it move. Someone else is going to make it sing.

We’re not finished yet. Neither are you.

It went up at noon on the first of June, in four places at once.

It was posted on Threadless Gate’s series page on the platform, where Mizuno scheduled it herself, at 12:00 exactly. It went up on Studio Hikari’s single-page website, which Ichinose had built in an afternoon and which had never had more than forty visitors in a day. It was sent to a mailing list of every creator in the Lantern.

And it went on an index card on the manga shelf by the entrance of the Koenji bookstore, under a hand-painted sign that said START HERE.

Hinata pinned it there at 11:59, with the card folded in half, as Oda had instructed, so she couldn’t read it. At noon exactly, Oda said now. Hinata unfolded the card and pinned it flat, and read it at the same moment as everyone else in Japan.

Haruki wasn’t there. Oda told him about it afterward, on the phone, in her driest voice.

"She read it three times," Oda said. "Then she said a word I won’t repeat, very loudly, in front of a customer. Then she went into the stockroom and sat on the new crate for twenty minutes." A pause. "When she came out, she’d written a card. She pinned it next to yours."

"What did it say?"

"I’m not telling you," Oda said. "It’s for a stranger. You’ll have to come and read it yourself."

By six that evening, the announcement had been shared forty thousand times.

By midnight, Studio Hikari’s single-page website had had more visitors than in the previous thirty-one years combined, and Ichinose’s server had crashed twice. The #ThreeLines community had found it within an hour, and the Lotus Index within two. Someone had already made an image placing the announcement’s three lines beside Chen Wei’s English card from the first October. I think some of us have one too.

Hikari’s phone rang eleven times the next morning, before nine.

Most of the calls were journalists. Two were animators asking whether the studio was hiring. One was the bicycle-shop owner’s brother in Kagoshima, calling to say his wife’s hip operation had gone well. He wanted it on record that he was still owed three months’ rent from 1994.

The eleventh call came at 8:52. Minase took it at her desk by the window while Haruki watched from the long table.

She listened for a long time without speaking. Her pencil was very still.

"Yes," she said finally. "Yes, I understand. Twelve seconds. No, it won’t be changed." A pause. "You don’t want it changed?"

Another long silence.

"I see," Minase said slowly. "Thursday. Ten o’clock. Yes. We’ll be there."

She put the phone down and looked at Haruki across the long room.

"That was the public broadcaster," she said. "The educational channel. The early evening slot. Children’s programming." Her voice was very steady, and her eyes were very bright. "The head of the department said her daughter is seven. She said her daughter reads Threadless Gate with a furigana edition from a publisher in Kanda."

She turned her cup a quarter turn on the desk.

"She said she wants the twelve seconds," Minase said. "She said she wants every seven-year-old in Japan to learn that a white page isn’t broken."

Nobody at the long table said anything for a long moment.

Then, from his armchair by the window, Tachibana began to laugh. It was quiet at first, then louder, until he had to put down his tea and hold his stiff wrist with his other hand.

"Children’s programming," he said, when he could speak. "Fifty-five years, and I never once thought of children’s programming." He wiped his eyes. "All those broadcasters wanted a heartbeat, because they thought the audience was adults channel-surfing at one in the morning." He looked at Minase. "Seven-year-olds don’t channel-surf. They sit on the floor two feet from the screen, and they wait."

Haruki went to Koenji that evening, after the studio closed, because Oda had told him he’d have to read Hinata’s card himself.

The shop was still open. Hinata was behind the register in her too-big apron, ringing up a stack of travel guides for an elderly couple. She saw him come in and went very red, and then pretended she hadn’t seen him at all.

He went to the shelf by the entrance.

The announcement card was pinned near the top, beneath START HERE, in his own handwriting. We’re not finished yet. Neither are you. Beside it, in a seventeen-year-old’s careful, slightly rounded handwriting, was a second card, the same size.

For anyone who bought the first copy with coins.

It moves now. Or it will.

I told you it comes. — H.

He stood in front of the shelf and read it three times.

When he turned around, Hinata was watching him from the register, very straight, with her arms folded. The elderly couple had gone.

"Don’t say anything," she said. "It’s for a stranger."

"I’m not saying anything."

"Good." She unfolded her arms and went back to the till. Then, without looking up, she said, "I want a ticket. For the first episode. Wherever it’s shown."

"It’s on television."

"Then I want to be told the date first," Hinata said firmly. "Before anyone. You promised to tell whoever printed it. This time, tell me."

[Production committee vote: 9–0. Yamashita (¥60M): Accepted. Total: ¥103M / ¥210M (49%).]

[Public announcement: June 1st. Shares (first 12 hrs): 40,000.]

[Broadcaster interest: Public broadcaster (educational channel, early evening). Meeting: Thursday, 10:00.]