Chapter 185: A Natural Experiment

Chapter 185: Chapter 185: A Natural Experiment

Professor Kirsti Halonen solved the problem of the twelfth of April in four minutes, over coffee, without taking off her bicycle helmet.

"A national broadcast," she said. She had arrived at the café by the canal at eight in the morning, chained her bicycle to the railing, and sat down in her helmet because she had a meeting at nine and saw no point in taking it off. "On the public broadcaster. In the early evening, on a Saturday, when families watch together." She set down her coffee cup. "With one minute at the end of every episode of a child reading three lines about a book they love."

"Yes," said Yui carefully.

"And the first child is the boy from your tutoring centre. The sea serpent." Halonen looked at Haruki over her round glasses. "Kenji."

"Yes."

Halonen was quiet for a moment. Then she turned to Yui.

"Do you understand what that is, Kobayashi-san?"

Yui looked at her, puzzled. "A premiere?"

"It is a natural experiment," Halonen said. Her pale blue eyes had gone very bright behind the glasses. "The largest one ever conducted in children’s reading, as far as I know. Every Saturday, for twelve weeks, millions of families will watch a child their own age tell them to read a book. We can measure it. There’s library borrowing in every prefecture, bookshop sales of every book mentioned, and school reading logs. Your tutoring centre in Asagaya will be the control, and Eetu’s reading club will be the comparison." She leaned forward. "Nobody has ever been able to measure what happens when a whole country hears a child say I used to hate reading, and then I didn’t. You will be in Tokyo on the night it begins."

Yui stared at her.

"Your fieldwork ends on the thirty-first of March," Halonen said. "I’m extending it to the thirtieth of April. There’s no question of your coming back on the first. You’d miss the most important data of your doctorate." She finished her coffee. "I’ll write to the department today. I’ll tell them the candidate has discovered an opportunity her supervisor didn’t think of first." A pause. "It’s becoming a habit."

Nobody said anything.

Yui had put both hands flat on the table. Haruki recognized the gesture. It was the one Sugiura made when something was too large to hold in her face.

"Halonen-sensei," she said. Her voice wasn’t steady. "You’re not doing this because of—"

"Because of your young man’s list?" Halonen stood and adjusted her helmet. "Number five. The seat next to him." She almost smiled. "Kobayashi-san, I have supervised thirty-one doctoral students. I don’t extend fieldwork for romance. I extend it for data." She picked up her bag. "It’s merely convenient that, in this case, the data and the romance are in the same room at six o’clock on a Saturday."

She unchained her bicycle and rode away along the canal without looking back, as she always did. A gull lifted off the railing as she passed, and the two swans turned their heads to watch her go.

[Yui’s fieldwork (Tokyo): Extended — January 1st to April 30th. Reason: Natural experiment (broadcast literacy segment). Authorized: Prof. K. Halonen.]

[Host’s need #5: Secured.]

They spent the last three days finishing the map.

There was the market square at seven in the morning, where an old man sold cloudberries from a wooden crate and gave Yui an extra handful because she said kiitos like a Finn. There was the rooftop terrace of the library at midnight, in sky that was still grey-blue, with students reading all around them, and a girl asleep on a textbook. There was the sauna by the sea where Yui had once screamed so loudly a man dropped his fish. This time, in July, she only yelped. There was the white cathedral on its hill, and the steps they had climbed on the second night, and a bakery that sold cinnamon buns the size of Haruki’s hand.

There was Eetu, on the last morning at the reading club. He had now read thirty-one pages of the lighthouse novel by himself, and he had drawn a monster for every Chapter. He had solemnly presented Haruki with a drawing of a sea serpent wearing a Finnish flag and a Japanese one, one on each fin, with a small worried fish inside it holding both.

"Yst?v?t," Eetu said, pointing at the flags. Friends.

Haruki drew the carpet map and the beanbag over Norway, and a boy with his tongue between his teeth, reading. He made another cross.

By the last evening, on the bench by the canal, there were eleven.

He hadn’t planned eleven, any more than he had planned eleven in Koenji. He had simply drawn every place that mattered, and when he counted, there were eleven.

He wrote the footnote at the bottom of the page in his own handwriting.

There will be more than you think.

Then he tore the page carefully out of the pocket notebook along its edge, folded it once, and gave it to her.

"For the wall," he said. "Beside Koenji."

Yui held it in both hands and didn’t unfold it.

"There’s room for one more," she said. "At the edge. Where the city ends and the airport starts."

"I know," Haruki said. "I left it for you."

She took him to the airport on the morning of the tenth day, on the train, holding the sea serpent Kenji had drawn for the arrivals hall. She said she’d hold it up at the security gate, in case he forgot which end of it he was going back to.

The departures hall at Vantaa was calm and bright, with tall windows onto pine trees and a high blue sky. There was a long line of passport booths, grey trays for belongings, and a sign in four languages that said Passengers Only Beyond This Point.

They stood at the gate. Neither of them said anything for a long time.

"January," Haruki said finally.

"January," Yui said. "I’ll check the doorframe on the first morning."

"I’ll have grown."

"You’d better."

She held up the sea serpent. Then, without saying anything, she stepped forward and kissed him once, briefly, in front of a Finnish family and a group of backpackers and a security guard who pretended not to see.

He walked through the gate.

He didn’t look back until he reached the far side of the X-ray machine. Then he turned, found her face in the crowd, and looked at her. She was holding up the sea serpent in both hands, and she wasn’t crying. She was smiling, small and crooked and completely real.

He went round the corner, and she was gone.

The email was waiting on his phone when the plane landed at Narita the next morning at 8:50. He read it standing in the arrivals hall, in the same terminal where he had once watched a girl walk through a security gate without looking back until she was past the X-ray machine.

The subject line was one word.

Landed?

Beneath it was a single photograph, taken on a phone in the bright Helsinki evening. It showed the page of the Helsinki map pinned to the wall of a small room, beside the map of Koenji and a scrap of lined paper in a seven-year-old’s handwriting. There were eleven crosses in his hand.

There was a twelfth, in hers, at the very edge of the page, where the city ended and the airport began.

Vantaa. Gate 31.

Beneath the photograph, she had written three lines.

You looked back. I saw.

Two maps now. Twelve crosses each.

January. I’m checking.

Takeda was waiting outside arrivals with the van, as he had promised. It was the white one with Takeda Air Conditioning, Est. 1978 on the side and the wing mirror still held on with tape. The pine-tree air freshener was still swinging from the rear-view mirror, long past smelling of anything.

"How was Finland?" Takeda asked, taking his bag.

"Light," Haruki said. "It never got dark."

Takeda considered this for a moment, then nodded as though it explained everything.

They drove back toward Tokyo through the flat green rice fields of Chiba in the morning sun. At the red light where Takeda had cried the September before, he stopped and looked sideways at Haruki.

"You’re smiling," he said.

"I’m not."

"You are. You’ve been smiling since the arrivals hall." Takeda pulled away as the light turned green. "Last time we drove this road, you didn’t smile for a week."

Haruki looked out of the window at the rice fields and didn’t answer. In his bag, folded once, was a drawing of a sea serpent wearing two flags, with a worried fish inside it holding both. On his phone was a photograph of two maps pinned side by side on a wall eight thousand kilometres away, with twelve crosses each.

"Air conditioning," he said at last.

Takeda laughed so hard he nearly missed the turning.

[Helsinki visit: Complete (10 days). Map of Helsinki: 11 crosses (Host) + 1 (Kobayashi Yui: "Vantaa. Gate 31.").]

[Next: January 1st — Yui returns to Tokyo (fieldwork: Jan–Apr). Premiere: April 12th.]