Chapter 186: Bigger Teeth

Chapter 186: Chapter 186: Bigger Teeth

Kenji looked at the Finnish sea serpent for a long time without saying anything. Then he said the Japanese ones had bigger teeth, and spent the rest of the afternoon proving it.

It was a Thursday in late July, at the tutoring centre above the dry cleaner’s near Asagaya Station. The windows were open onto the hot street, and an electric fan turned slowly on the bookshelf, moving the pages of every worksheet on every table. There was a smell of barley tea from the kitchen and, faintly, of dry-cleaning chemicals from downstairs, which Tsubasa said you stopped noticing after the first month.

Tsubasa sat at the table at the back of the room with Kenji, as he had every Tuesday and Thursday since September. He was nineteen now and had finished high school in March. He had started at an art college in Tokyo in April, on the strength of a portfolio full of lighthouses and rain. He still came here twice a week without fail, rearranging his college timetable to do it, because he had promised a whole year and his mother had made him mean it.

Haruki had brought the drawing straight from Narita, still folded once in his bag. It was a sea serpent drawn by an eight-year-old in Helsinki, huge and dark, with a Finnish flag on one fin and a Japanese flag on the other. A small, worried fish inside it held both.

Kenji unfolded it very carefully on the table.

He was twelve now, taller than he had been at eleven, with a haircut that looked as though he’d done it himself. He read at his grade level now, and a little above it when nobody was watching, and he still drew monsters in the margins of everything. He looked at the Finnish sea serpent for a long time with his arms folded.

"Who drew it?" he said at last.

"A boy called Eetu," Haruki said. "He’s eight. He lives in Helsinki. He draws monsters in his reading book instead of reading it, like you used to."

Kenji didn’t look up.

"He reads it now," Haruki said. "Thirty-one pages, by himself. Because someone asked him what his sea serpent wanted."

Kenji was quiet for a very long moment.

"Yui-sensei asked him," he said. It wasn’t a question.

"Yes."

Kenji looked at the two flags on the fins and at the small worried fish holding both of them. Then he picked up a pencil, took a clean sheet of paper from the stack on the table, and pulled it toward him.

"The Japanese ones have bigger teeth," he said. "I’m going to show him."

He drew for two hours.

Tsubasa didn’t help him. He sat beside him drawing a river, the way he had on the first Thursday, with the concrete bank and the reeds and the water moving. Every so often Kenji stopped, looked at the river, and went back to his sea serpent with a slightly different line.

It was the largest thing Kenji had ever drawn. It curled across the whole sheet and off the edges, onto a second sheet Tsubasa taped to the first without being asked. Its teeth pointed backwards, and they were very large. Inside it, instead of one worried fish, there were two, one small and one smaller, holding hands.

At the very end, Kenji drew a map in the corner, copied carefully from the classroom atlas. It showed Japan and a long dotted line across Russia to a small dot in the north of Europe.

Along the dotted line, in careful, uneven capitals, he wrote THE WHOLE WAY THERE.

Then he wrote three lines at the bottom.

For the boy in Finland who draws monsters.

The Japanese ones have bigger teeth. So the fish can’t get out.

Read the next page. It’s worth it. — Kenji, Tokyo.

He pushed it across the table to Haruki without looking at him.

"Send it to Yui-sensei," he said. "She can give it to him. She’ll know which one he is."

Haruki looked at the drawing for a long time, with its two fish holding hands and the dotted line across a continent.

"I’ll send it tonight," he said.

Kenji nodded, very seriously, and went back to his worksheet.

It was near the end of the session, while the other children were packing up, that Kenji said something else. He said it so quietly and casually that Haruki almost missed it.

"Someone copied your boy."

Haruki looked up.

Kenji was putting his pencils in his case, not looking at him. "The one with nothing above his head. There’s a new one. On my cousin’s phone. She showed me on Sunday."

Across the table, Tsubasa had gone very still.

"What do you mean?" Haruki asked.

Kenji shrugged, the way twelve-year-olds shrug when they think adults are being slow.

"It’s a new manga," he said. "On a different website. Not yours. There’s a boy, and everyone else has a light over their head, and he doesn’t." He zipped up his pencil case. "But it’s not the same. His one’s a glowing crown instead of a thread. And he fights a lot. There’s a sword." He looked up at Haruki for the first time. "It’s not as good. But my cousin likes it. Everyone in her class is reading it."

Haruki didn’t say anything.

"It’s called Crownless," Kenji said. "It came out in June." He stood up, put his bag over his shoulder, and headed for the door. At the door he stopped and turned back. "The Japanese sea serpents still have bigger teeth. Tell the Finnish boy."

He left.

Tsubasa didn’t say anything for a long time after the room had emptied. He sat at the back table with his river drawing in front of him, looking at the door.

"Crownless," he said at last.

"You’ve heard of it."

"I’ve seen it." Tsubasa took out his phone, found the page, and turned the screen toward Haruki.

It was the first Chapter of a web manga on a new platform Haruki had never heard of. It had launched in the spring with a large advertising budget and a list of partner series. The art was polished and professional, the kind produced by an experienced team, not a rookie alone at a desk at two in the morning. On the first page, a boy stood in a crowd of people on a hillside. Above every head except his floated a thin glowing crown of light.

Above his head, there was nothing.

The empty space was drawn in exactly the way Haruki had drawn it for two and a half years: the silhouettes, the room left above the character so that the page itself seemed not to know what to put there. It was the thing Kanzaki had learned and bettered, which a juror had once called a real instinct, rare.

Somebody had studied it very carefully.

Haruki scrolled down to the credits at the bottom of the first Chapter. The author’s name was one he didn’t recognize, clearly a pen name. Beneath it, in small type, was a line he had learned two years ago to look for on every page.

Produced in association with Studio Kurenai.

He called Hirose from the pavement outside the dry cleaner’s, in the heat, with the smell of chemicals drifting out of the shop door.

The old lawyer listened without interrupting. When Haruki finished, he was quiet for a long time.

"Send me the first three Chapters," he said. "I’ll read them tonight. Four times." A pause. "But I’ll tell you now what I expect to find, so you don’t spend the evening hoping for something else."

"Please."

"The law protects expression, Amamiya-kun. It doesn’t protect ideas." Hirose’s voice was gentle and very precise. "Nobody owns the idea of a boy with nothing above his head. You don’t. If someone draws a glowing crown instead of a thread, and a sword, and a different world, and different names, then they’ve copied your shape. That isn’t the same as copying your pages." He paused. "The empty space is harder. A court would have to decide whether a way of drawing emptiness is expression or style. Courts don’t like deciding that. It usually takes years."

Haruki didn’t say anything. Across the street, a child was eating shaved ice outside a convenience store, very slowly, with enormous concentration.

"So it’s legal," he said.

"It’s probably legal," Hirose said. "It’s also exactly what Horizon did with Threadbare two years ago, done properly this time, by people who’ve learned from their mistakes." He was quiet for a moment. "The first copy was clumsy. It used your heroine’s name, nearly, and her scarf, and it was easy to see. This one has studied you. It’s taken the shape and left the details. It will be very difficult to prove anything."

"Why now? Why a manga?"

"Because a manga comes first," Hirose said. "Every anime needs a source. If a studio owned by a fund wanted a series that looked like yours, with a boy with nothing above his head, which it could adapt without asking you or paying you or giving you a veto—" He stopped.

He didn’t need to finish.

"Twelve seconds of white," Haruki said slowly. "The broadcasters said silence doesn’t sell. Crownless has a sword."

"Yes," said Hirose quietly. "I expect it does."

[New series detected: Crownless (web manga, new platform, launched June). Premise overlap with Threadless Gate: High.]

[Production credit: Studio Kurenai (61% Singapore fund).]

[Note: The fund was refused twenty percent. It appears to have decided to make its own.]