Chapter 183: What the Monster Wants

Chapter 183: Chapter 183: What the Monster Wants

The boy who drew monsters in the margins of his Finnish reading book was eight years old and called Eetu. Within four minutes of meeting Haruki, he had decided that Haruki’s monsters were terrible.

"Liian kiltti," he said, frowning at the sketchbook. He looked up at Yui. "Sano sille."

"He says your monster is too nice," Yui translated. She was trying very hard not to laugh. "He says to tell you."

It was ten in the morning on the children’s floor of the university library. It was a long, bright room at the top of the building, with tall windows onto the canal and low shelves of picture books in eleven languages. Beanbags were scattered across a carpet printed with a map of the world. Finnish schools had been closed for the summer since early June. But the library ran a reading club three mornings a week, for children whose parents worked or whose summers were long and empty. Yui had volunteered at it since the day her placement school closed.

Eetu came every morning it was open. He always sat in the same beanbag by the window, over Norway on the carpet map, with a reading book open on his knees and a pencil in his hand. He always drew monsters in the margins instead of reading.

This morning he had looked up when Yui came in with a stranger, looked at the stranger’s sketchbook, and held out his hand for it without saying a word. It was so exactly like Tachibana that Haruki had almost laughed.

Now the boy was pointing at the sea serpent Haruki had drawn for him in the margin of a spare sheet of paper. It was a quick sketch, curling across the page, with its teeth pointing backwards, the way Kenji had taught Tsubasa.

"Hampaat on väärin päin," Eetu said, scowling. "Miksi?"

"He says the teeth are the wrong way round," said Yui. "He wants to know why."

"So the fish can’t get out," Haruki said.

Yui translated. Eetu considered this with enormous seriousness for a long moment. Then he took the pencil out of Haruki’s hand and added a very small fish inside the sea serpent’s stomach. It looked extremely worried.

"Nyt se on parempi," he said.

"Now it’s better," Yui said. Her voice wobbled.

They spent the whole morning on the carpet map, the three of them, over Norway and Sweden and the top of Finland.

Haruki drew and Eetu corrected him. Yui sat between them with Eetu’s reading book open on her knee, and every so often, very quietly, she asked the question.

"Mitä hirviö haluaa?"

What does the monster want?

The first time she asked, Eetu shrugged and kept drawing. The second time, he said food, which Yui didn’t count as an answer. The third time, forty minutes later, he stopped drawing and looked at the reading book on her knee for a long moment. It was a Finnish children’s novel about a boy and a lighthouse keeper on an island in the archipelago.

"Se haluaa kotiin," he said.

Yui went very still.

"He says it wants to go home," she said quietly.

"Missä sen koti on?" she asked him.

Eetu frowned. Then he reached over, took the reading book off her knee, and turned the page. He wasn’t reading it yet. He was only looking for the answer.

Haruki watched him do it. A boy who had spent all summer drawing in margins instead of reading had just turned the page himself, because he wanted to know where a monster lived.

He had heard Yui describe it on the phone, many times: four hundred pages in this library on something she had done by accident with a sea serpent in a tutoring centre above a dry cleaner’s in Asagaya. He had never seen it happen.

It took six seconds. Eetu turned the page, frowned at the words, and started to sound them out, very slowly, one finger under each line.

Yui didn’t say anything. She sat on the carpet map with her hands in her lap and watched him read. Haruki saw her face, and understood, for the first time, what it looked like when someone kept a promise they’d made at seven.

[Observed: The Kobayashi method (Helsinki). Subject: Eetu (8). Result: Voluntary page turn. Time: 6 seconds.]

Professor Kirsti Halonen met them in the café by the canal at two in the afternoon. She arrived on her bicycle, which she chained to the railing beside the bench where Yui sat every Sunday. She was sixty-one, very tall and thin, with white hair cut short and pale blue eyes behind round glasses. She shook Haruki’s hand firmly and looked at him for a long moment.

"So," she said in careful, precise English. "You are real."

"She thought I’d made you up," Yui said. Her face had gone pink.

"I thought she had made up a young man who draws a boy with nothing above his head, and stays in the same apartment next door for fourteen years." Halonen sat down and ordered coffee in Finnish without looking at the menu. "It seemed unlikely. People in my experience do not stay anywhere for fourteen years."

She asked him questions for an hour. She wanted to know about Threadless Gate, the empty space, and why a boy with no thread. She asked about Kenji and the sea serpent, and about the #ThreeLines weekend. When he told her about the post-credits minute on the public broadcaster, one child a week reading three lines about a book they love, she put down her coffee cup and looked out at the canal for a long time.

"That is my life’s work," she said finally. "In one minute, every Saturday, at six o’clock." She shook her head slowly. "I have written two books about why it matters. You have put it on television."

"Yui’s idea," Haruki said. "Not mine. It was her promise first."

Halonen looked at him, then at Yui, who had gone very quiet beside him.

"Yes," she said. "I thought it might be."

At the end, as she was unchaining her bicycle, she turned back to Yui.

"The doorframe," she said. "In the photograph you showed me in April. Did you ever ask him what I said?"

Yui went pink again. "You wouldn’t translate it."

"I will now, since he is real." Halonen looked at Haruki over her round glasses. "I said, Tuossa ovenpielessä on enemmän tutkimusta kuin koko kirjastossani."

She got on her bicycle.

"There is more research on that doorframe than in my entire library," she said, and rode away along the canal without looking back.

That evening, on the bench by the canal, with the sky still bright at ten o’clock and the two swans awake now and drifting on the water, Haruki opened the pocket notebook to the Helsinki page.

Beside the bench and the swans, he drew a second small sketch: a carpet printed with a map of the world, a beanbag over Norway, and an eight-year-old turning a page.

He made a second cross.

"Two," Yui said, watching.

"Two."

He looked at her wrist then, at the thin silver band he’d noticed at the airport and hadn’t asked about, because he’d learned that the second thing was always the one that mattered and she hadn’t said the first.

Yui saw him looking. She was quiet for a moment. Then she slid the band off her wrist and held it out to him on her open palm.

It was very plain, a thin circle of silver. On the inside, in small engraved letters, was a line in Finnish.

Lue seuraava sivu.

"Read the next page," Yui said. "I bought it in December. With my first stipend, in the week I cried every Sunday." She took it back and slid it onto her wrist again. "The jeweller asked what I wanted engraved. I didn’t know. Then I thought about what I say to every child who draws instead of reading. What Kenji wrote on his card for the broadcaster." She looked at the swans. "It’s what I say to myself too. When it’s dark at three and I don’t know if I’m any good at this."

He didn’t say anything.

"The next page," Yui said. "That’s all. You don’t have to know what’s on it. You just have to turn it."

Before they left the children’s floor that morning, Eetu had done one more thing, which Haruki only understood later.

He had taken a clean sheet of paper from the stack on the low table. Very carefully, with his tongue between his teeth, he had drawn a sea serpent of his own. It was Finnish, huge and dark, and it curled across the whole page, with teeth that pointed backwards and a small, worried fish inside it.

Then he had pushed it across the carpet map to Yui and said something in Finnish.

"He says it’s for the boy in Tokyo," Yui had translated. Her voice had been very unsteady. "The one who drew the first one. He says to tell him the Finnish ones are bigger."

The drawing was in Haruki’s bag now, folded once. Next week it would go into an envelope addressed to a tutoring centre above a dry cleaner’s in Asagaya, care of an eighteen-year-old who taught there on Tuesdays and Thursdays and had promised to stay the whole year.

"Two boys," Yui said on the bench, watching the swans. "Eight thousand kilometres apart. Drawing sea serpents for each other." She almost laughed. "Halonen-sensei is going to want that in my thesis."

"Put it in," Haruki said.

"I’m going to," said Yui. "Chapter one."

[Helsinki map: Crosses 2.]

[Kobayashi Yui — Silver band (engraved): "Lue seuraava sivu" (Read the next page). Purchased: December, first stipend.]

[Exchange initiated: Eetu (8, Helsinki) → Kenji (12, Asagaya). Sea serpent, Finnish.]