Chapter 181: Midnight on the Thirtieth

Chapter 181: Chapter 181: Midnight on the Thirtieth

Haruki didn’t go looking for the man in the grey coat. Instead, on the night of the twenty-third of June, he wrote a card he had already written once, and pinned it on a shelf where it had never been.

He did it after closing, with Oda’s permission and Hinata watching from the register with her arms folded. He took an index card from the cup beside the paper sign-up sheets, sat down on the floor in front of the manga shelf under the START HERE sign, and wrote three lines from memory.

For anyone who ever held an umbrella over a stray cat instead of himself.

The rain on the bus stop is drawn so you can hear it. The boy’s shoulders are wet, and he doesn’t care.

It was good. Someone should have told you what was working.

He had written them once before, in July of the previous year, on the blank card at the back of a small book, and posted them to Singapore. They had never been on this shelf. But a man in a grey coat had stood here for ten minutes that morning and asked a seventeen-year-old whether they were still up.

So now they were.

He pinned the card near the top, beside Hinata’s card and Arai’s, and his own announcement. Then he stood up.

"You’re not going to look for him," Hinata said from the register. It wasn’t a question.

"No."

"He’s the one, isn’t he. From the red ink. The one who made the lawyer’s letter say has." She had heard the story, somehow. Everyone at the shop seemed to hear every story eventually. "Aren’t you angry?"

"Yes," Haruki said.

"Then why did you pin the card?"

He thought about it for a long moment.

"Because he asked if it was still up," he said. "And it wasn’t. That seemed like the only thing I could fix."

Hinata looked at him for a long time across the dark shop floor. Then she turned back to the till.

"You’re very strange," she said. "Oda-san says that’s why you’re good."

He called Hirose the next morning, because he had learned two years ago not to carry anything like that alone.

The old lawyer listened without interrupting: the red ink, the coins in an envelope at 10:14, the grey coat, and the question about the bus-stop card. When Haruki finished, Hirose was quiet for a long time.

"He’s allowed to be in Japan," he said at last. "The Commission referred the matter to prosecutors last May, but there’s no warrant yet, and there may never be one. A man who hasn’t been charged with anything can fly into Narita and buy a DVD like anyone else." A pause. "It was very foolish of him. It was also entirely legal."

"Should I tell someone?"

"Tell someone what? That a man signed a sheet in a bookshop with red ink?" Hirose almost laughed. "The prosecutors know where he lives. They know his fund, his flat in Singapore, and the name of the tailor who makes his coats. They’re building a case, slowly, the way cases are built." He paused. "They’ll call him when they’re ready, not when a rookie tells them he saw a grey coat."

Haruki didn’t say anything.

"Amamiya-kun," Hirose said, more gently. "Why do you think he came?"

Haruki looked across his desk at the crate and the red sketchbook. Beside them lay a shoebox with a faded ribbon, and a postcard of a boy at a bus stop in the rain.

"To put his name on the wall," he said slowly. "Somewhere nobody would notice. He’s been reading first Chapters with fewer than fifty readers every Tuesday night for twenty years. He’s never once put his name on anything he loved."

The line was quiet.

"That," said Hirose, "is the saddest thing anyone has said to me this year." A pause. "Keep the card on the shelf. If he comes back, he’ll see it. If he doesn’t, somebody else will need it."

For the last week of June, Haruki didn’t look at the numbers. He had promised himself he wouldn’t, and for once he kept it.

He drew. He finished Chapter sixty-three, where Ren found the first clue to where his parents had gone: a single letter left with the Gate keeper eleven years ago, addressed to Sora, unopened. He spent three evenings at the long table in Mitaka on the episode-one storyboards, arguing with Minase about the length of the walk up the hill. On Wednesday, he spent forty minutes on the phone with Chen Wei in Shanghai, who had finished the theme and wanted to play it for him. Neither of them mentioned anything they weren’t sure of yet.

Tanaka sent numbers every morning anyway, because he couldn’t help it. Haruki didn’t open them. He left them unread in a row on his phone, like cards pinned to a shelf for somebody else.

On the evening of the thirtieth, a Sunday, he called Helsinki at seven exactly, as always. He didn’t mention the pre-order once. Yui didn’t either. They talked about a child in her placement school who had started drawing monsters in the margins of a Finnish reading book, and whether the monsters wanted anything, and about January, and the doorframe.

At 11:40 that night, he was sitting on the crate in front of his desk when the phone buzzed.

It wasn’t Tanaka. It was Hinata.

I counted the paper sheets. All of them. Oda-san drove me to Asagaya to collect her sister’s. We sat on the stockroom floor with a calculator from nine until now.

A pause, then:

The forty-one shops. Paper sheets only. Not the internet.

11,412.

He stared at the number.

Before he could answer, the phone buzzed again. This time it was Tanaka, sending a single screenshot of the pre-order page and the total on it, which Haruki hadn’t looked at in a week.

Online: 49,871.

Below it, Tanaka had added Hinata’s number himself, by hand, in the spreadsheet he had built for exactly this moment.

Online + paper: 61,283.

Target: 57,000.

Surplus: 4,283.

The pre-order closes at midnight. It’s 11:43. I’m going to watch it close. I’ve never been this happy watching a number stop moving.

Haruki sat on the crate in the dark and didn’t move for a very long time.

Sixty-one thousand two hundred and eighty-three names would go on a screen of their own at the end of the first episode. They had come from trains and bread shelves, and from paper sheets on the counters of forty-one bookshops, in pencil and biro and children’s crooked capitals. One of them was in red ink, from a reader on Tuesday nights.

At midnight exactly, the pre-order closed.

The blue screen opened quietly above the desk.

Supporters’ pre-order: Closed. Total supporters: 61,283 (online 49,871 / paper 11,412). Funds raised: ¥61,283,000. Production funding: ¥214,283,000 / ¥210,000,000. FULLY FUNDED (102%). Note: The last 29% of the Host’s first anime was paid for by people who had already spent a year paying for other people’s doors. None of them own any of it. All of them are in it.

He took the first train to Mitaka the next morning.

The studio above the bicycle shop was full, although it was only 8:40. All eight owners were at the long table, and nobody was drawing. On the whiteboard at the end of the room, Minase had written a single number in red marker, very large, and underlined it three times.

102%.

Tachibana was standing by the wall behind his armchair. It was the first time Haruki had seen him standing without his cane since the stairs. He was holding the small framed photograph of a carpenter and a young man in a borrowed suit at the top of these same stairs in 1971. He had taken it down from its nail.

"Come here," he said. "All of you."

They gathered around him by the wall.

Behind the place where the photograph had hung, on the plaster, in faded pencil that had been hidden for thirty-one years, were three names in three different handwritings.

Sakamoto Tomi — noodle shop, Mitaka.

Hayashi Genta — age 14.

Anonymous — "for the projector."

"The noodle-shop owner who let me show my pilot in her back room," Tachibana said quietly. "A boy of fourteen who gave me his New Year money and said he wanted to be an animator. He never became one. He became a dentist in Chiba." He touched the third name very lightly with one finger. "And someone who left five thousand yen in an envelope on my projector, with a note, and never told me who they were. I’ve never found out."

Nobody said anything.

"Three names, for thirty-one years," Tachibana said. "Nobody ever noticed." He looked at the whiteboard, at the red number underlined three times. Then he looked at Haruki. "Now there are sixty-one thousand, two hundred and eighty-six."

He hung the photograph back on its nail, carefully, over the three names.

"And one of them," he added, "is in red ink, from someone who also never told anyone who they were." He picked up his cane from the armchair. "I think the man who left five thousand yen on my projector would have liked him."