Chapter 180: Names on the Wall

Chapter 180: Chapter 180: Names on the Wall

Haruki posted the supporters’ pre-order at 5:52 on a Friday evening, eight minutes before six. It had become a habit, and he had stopped pretending it wasn’t. By six o’clock, eleven people had signed up. By midnight, it was four thousand.

He had written the post himself, over three evenings, sitting on the crate in front of his desk, and rewritten it more times than the afterword. It was one page long and plain. Minase read it at the long table in Mitaka and changed one word. Tachibana read it in his armchair and changed nothing.

Studio Hikari’s adaptation of Threadless Gate is seventy-three percent funded. We need fifty-seven million yen more.

A fund offered us all of it in exchange for twenty percent of the series’ future. We said no. We didn’t think the story should belong to anyone who hadn’t read it.

So we’re asking you instead. You don’t have to say yes.

If you’d like, you can pre-order the first DVD at ¥1,000 above the normal price. Your name, or any name you choose, will appear in the end credits of the first episode, on a screen of its own, as a supporter. Nobody gets anything else. There’s no reward tier and no poster. Just your name, where people can see it.

In 1971, three people who lent money to a small studio above a bicycle shop in Mitaka asked for their names on the wall instead of being paid back. Their names are still there. Nobody has ever noticed.

We’d like to put yours somewhere people will notice.

If you’d rather not, please keep leaving cards on trains. That was always the most important thing.

He posted it on the platform’s series page, where Mizuno scheduled it herself. It went up on Hikari’s single-page website, which Ichinose had rebuilt twice since the announcement crashed it. It went out to the Lantern’s mailing list. And Hinata pinned it to the shelf by the entrance of the Koenji bookstore, on an index card, with a pencil and a sign-up sheet beside it for anyone who didn’t have a computer.

Then he closed the laptop and didn’t look at it again until morning.

By Saturday morning, the number was nine thousand four hundred.

Tanaka sent the figure at 7:15, with no comment except a single line: I’ve made a spreadsheet. Of course I have. It’s the happiest spreadsheet I’ve ever made.

The names were what Haruki couldn’t stop reading.

Supporters could choose any name they liked. Most chose their own. Some chose other people’s. By Saturday afternoon, the list of names waiting to go into the credits had already begun to look like something he recognized: the #ThreeLines weekend, the #LeftCards summer, and a hundred thousand strangers writing on trains and bread shelves for other strangers.

Hinata (class 2-C, Koenji) was the forty-first name on the list, signed up at 6:03 on Friday evening. Oda told him later that Hinata had counted out the ¥1,000 in coins at the register before she was even allowed to go home.

Asahi Tomiko (Asahi Bakery, Chōfu) was there, Nanami’s grandmother. Nanami had signed her up and paid for it herself, because her grandmother didn’t trust computers, and had added a note in the comments field: She says to put her next to the bread.

There was Nishida Kōsuke (Ashiya), signed up with the exact amount and not a yen more. In the comments field, in the careful language of a man who had filled in loan applications for sixty-five years, he had written: Collateral: seen.

The Kinoshita Family (Mitaka / Kagoshima), with a note: Deduct from 1994.

There was Tanabe (Kanda), the board member whose card had been found on a train in Kōfu. Three names below her was a name Haruki didn’t recognize: Kōfu reader & daughter (5). The comment said only: We found a card on the Chūō Line. Now we read every night.

Tsuji Kaho (Nagano), with For H.K. in the comments.

Hayama Rin (Ōji), with a note: For the girl who repaired umbrellas.

Ōkubo Setsuko (Kawasaki) was Ōkubo Shin’s mother. Her son had signed her up while she was in hospital for her check-up, and she had insisted on dictating her own comment: For room 312.

Haruki read the list sitting on the crate for three hours without moving.

By Monday, the number was thirty-one thousand. By Wednesday, it was forty-four.

Then, for two days, it slowed almost to a stop.

Tanaka’s messages grew shorter. On Thursday evening, he sent only a number: 46,210. On Friday morning: 47,005. The pre-order would close at midnight on the thirtieth of June, eight days away. They still needed ten thousand more.

"It always slows," Minase said at the long table on Friday evening, looking at the figure on the whiteboard. She didn’t sound worried. She sounded like someone who had seen a great many things slow down and then speed up again. "Everyone who was going to say yes on the first day has said yes. Now it’s the people who have to think about it."

"What if they decide no?"

"Then they decide no," Minase said. "That’s what you told them they could do." She turned her cup a quarter turn. "Tachibana-san’s three names on the wall didn’t come in a week either. It took him two years to find eleven people."

At his armchair by the window, Tachibana didn’t open his eyes.

"Two years and a noodle shop," he said. "You have eight days and a bookshop. It’s an unfair advantage."

On Saturday morning, the twenty-third of June, Hinata called Haruki at 9:40. She had never called him before. She had only ever spoken to him across a register.

"The sign-up sheet," she said, very fast, without saying hello. "On the shelf. The paper one, for people without computers." A pause. "It’s full. Both sides. I had to pin up a second one at eight this morning." Another pause. "And a third one at nine."

"How many?"

"I don’t know. I haven’t counted. There are too many." She took a breath. "There’s a line. Outside the shop. Before we opened. Oda-san says it’s the second time in thirty-one years."

Haruki sat up very straight on the crate.

"Who?"

"Old people, mostly," Hinata said. "People who don’t use the internet. A man said his granddaughter told him about it, and he wanted to sign up in person with cash, because he didn’t trust websites." Her voice wobbled slightly. "A woman said she found a card on the Yamanote Line last August. She wanted to sign up in the name of whoever left it, so they’d be in the credits too, even if they never knew."

He couldn’t say anything.

"Oda-san says every independent bookshop on the list is doing it now," Hinata said. "The forty-one shops that carried your samplers. They’re all pinning up paper sign-up sheets on their counters." She paused. "Oda-san’s sister in Asagaya has four sheets already. Nobody refuses her sister."

He went to Koenji at noon.

The line had gone by then, but the shop was busier than he had ever seen it on a Saturday. People stood in front of the shelf by the entrance under the START HERE sign, reading the cards and waiting to write their names on the paper sheets. Hinata stood beside them in her too-big apron, handing out pencils and explaining very seriously that the names would go on a screen of their own and nowhere else.

Oda stood behind the register with her arms folded, watching all of it. When she saw him in the doorway, she didn’t say anything. She tilted her head very slightly toward the stockroom.

On the new crate in the stockroom, she had laid out the first three paper sheets, flat and weighted down with a stapler. There were hundreds of names in hundreds of different handwritings, in pencil and biro, some neat and some shaky, some in children’s crooked capitals.

He read them standing up.

Near the bottom of the second sheet, in a careful, old-fashioned hand, he found Arai Shigeru (Chiba). Beside it, in the comments column, were four words. Some debts. Ledger can’t.

He kept reading.

On the third sheet, among a column of strangers’ names, one line was written in thin red ink.

A reader on Tuesday nights.

There was no address and no city. The comments column beside it was empty, and the ¥1,000 had been left in coins, exactly, in a small envelope clipped to the sheet. Hinata had written a note on the envelope in pencil: Left on the counter at 10:14. Man in a grey coat. Didn’t stay.

Haruki stood in the stockroom with the sheet in his hands for a long time.

I read everything with fewer than fifty readers every Tuesday night, and have for twenty years.

He went back out onto the shop floor. Hinata was handing a pencil to an elderly woman with a walking frame.

"The man in the grey coat," he said quietly. "At 10:14. What did he look like?"

Hinata frowned, thinking.

"Forties," she said. "Glasses. Very polite. He stood at the shelf for about ten minutes reading the cards, then wrote his name in red pen and left the coins." She paused. "He asked me one question before he left."

"What?"

"He asked whether the card about the bus stop was still up. The one about the umbrella and the stray cat." She looked at him. "I didn’t know what he meant. I told him I’d never seen a card like that."

Haruki didn’t answer.

He had written that card on the back page of a small book and sent it to Singapore in July. It had never been on this shelf.

[Supporters’ pre-order — Day 8: 47,005 (online) + paper sign-up sheets (41 independent shops, uncounted).]

[Target: 57,000. Closes: June 30th, midnight.]