Chapter 194: Five Names

Chapter 194: Chapter 194: Five Names

Five young artists climbed the narrow stairs to Hirose’s office above the tea shop in Kichijōji on Wednesday afternoon. None of them had ever been introduced by name to anyone in the industry.

They came one at a time, as though they had agreed not to arrive together. Morikawa Sayo came first, at 1:40, with the grey binder in a canvas bag held against her chest. Ogawa Daisuke came next, twenty-two, a quiet young man from Nagoya with ink stains on his cuffs. After him came Fujita Emi, twenty-one, who drew the backgrounds and had come up from Kyoto on the night bus. Last came two nineteen-year-olds, Mizutani Kei and Sano Aki. They had never met each other or anyone else on the team in person, because Crownless had been drawn in five rooms in four cities and sent to Osaka by courier.

They stood in the doorway of the small office, looking at each other for the first time, not quite knowing what to do with their hands.

Hirose rose from behind his desk in his cardigan with his sleeves pushed up.

"Please," he said. "Sit down. Wherever you can. There isn’t much room." He looked at them over his thick glasses. "I’m Hirose. I read contracts. Four times."

It took three hours.

Hirose read each of their contracts in turn, all five, at his desk, with a pencil. Hayama Rin sat beside him in her office blouse, having taken the afternoon off from the bank in ōji, with the grey wool scarf folded in her lap. She read each contract after him, three times, and made her own notes in a small notebook.

They were all the same contract. There was the confidentiality clause on page six, and the repayment penalty at eighteen percent a year if any of them spoke about the project. There was a clause assigning every drawing, sketch, and idea they produced to the Osaka company, forever, with no credit. There was a payment schedule that had stopped on the twenty-second of August without notice.

"The eighteen percent is void above fifteen," Hirose said at last, taking off his glasses. "You already know that. ōkubo-kun showed you the page." He looked at the five of them squeezed onto folding chairs, a box, and the edge of a filing cabinet. "The confidentiality clause is harder. It’s legal to ask someone to keep a project secret." He paused. "It is not legal to use a confidentiality clause to hide a crime. And it isn’t enforceable against anyone who reports a crime to the police."

Nobody said anything.

"The reference binder," Hirose went on quietly. "The page at the back, printed at 3:14 in the morning from a platform account that belonged to a man who’d resigned fourteen months earlier. That’s evidence of unauthorized computer access. The police are already investigating it. The platform’s chairman filed the complaint himself." He laid his hand on the grey binder on his desk. "If you give this to the police, no court in Japan will make you pay a yen for breaking a confidentiality clause to do it."

Mizutani Kei, the youngest, was nineteen, with a long fringe that fell over his eyes. He spoke for the first time.

"They told us it was licensed," he said. "The outline. The original creator’s development notes." His voice shook. "I thought we were doing something legal. I thought everyone did it this way."

"You did nothing wrong," said Hayama, before Hirose could answer. Her voice was very gentle and very firm. "Somebody lied to you and put the lie on page six so you’d be too frightened to check." She touched the grey scarf in her lap without seeming to notice. "I signed a contract like yours once, when I was nineteen. I stopped drawing six months later and became a loan officer. I read contracts for a living now, because nobody read mine with me." She looked at the five of them. "Somebody’s reading yours."

Tsubasa arrived at four, after his last class at the art college, as he had promised.

He stood in the doorway of the crowded office with his portfolio under his arm, nineteen and tall. He looked at five people who had spent five months drawing a boy with nothing above his head from a tabbed folder of pages he had helped draw.

He didn’t say hello. He sat down on the floor, because there was nowhere else, and told them.

He told them about a series he had drawn at seventeen, two and a half years ago, at his desk at two in the morning. He had studied someone else’s pages and drawn them different but the same, because he didn’t believe he could make anything of his own. He told them about the lawyer’s letter that had come to his mother’s kitchen table, and about admitting it on a forum in front of everyone and not being believed for weeks. He told them about the person he’d copied, who hadn’t shouted at him and had offered him backgrounds two days a week instead.

"I draw his backgrounds now," Tsubasa said. "Every lighthouse, every rain. The hospital window in Chapter forty-seven. The house by the mill stream." He looked at the grey binder on Hirose’s desk. "Some of the pages in that folder are mine."

The five of them stared at him.

"I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel bad," Tsubasa said. "I’m telling you because I copied him on purpose, and he forgave me. You copied him because someone lied to you." He picked at the edge of his portfolio. "Whatever you’re afraid he’ll think of you, he won’t."

Sano Aki, the other nineteen-year-old, had started crying quietly into her sleeve. Fujita Emi put an arm around her without seeming to decide to.

Haruki came at five.

He hadn’t been asked to come earlier, and he hadn’t wanted to. It was their meeting, not his. But Morikawa had sent him a message through ōkubo that morning, a single line. We’d like to meet him at the end, if he’s willing. Not to explain. Just to say it to his face.

He climbed the stairs and stood in the doorway.

The five of them stood up at once, all together, very suddenly, in the cramped office. Then, before he could say anything, they bowed, deeply and all at once, the way people bow at funerals.

"We’re sorry," said Morikawa, to the floor. "We didn’t know. We drew your next Chapter and we didn’t know it was yours."

Haruki didn’t answer immediately. He looked at the five bent heads: a florist from Fukuoka, a quiet young man from Nagoya with ink on his cuffs, a background artist from Kyoto, and two nineteen-year-olds.

"Please stand up," he said.

They straightened slowly.

"You don’t have to apologize for drawing," he said. "You drew what you were told, and you drew it well. The empty space in Chapter four, the crowd scene, is better than mine." He looked at Fujita. "Whoever drew those backgrounds understands fog."

Fujita Emi went bright red.

"I’d like to ask you something instead," Haruki said. "Each of you." He looked around the small office at five people whose names nobody in the country knew. "Show me something you drew that was yours. Not Crownless. Something you drew before, or wanted to, or never showed anyone."

For a long moment, nobody moved.

Then Morikawa took a folded sheet of paper out of her canvas bag and held it out. It was a small bunch of blue flowers on a windowsill, drawn in ink, the same flowers she had sent him in a photograph two years ago with no caption.

The others followed, one at a time, slowly, as though they were handing over something they had never shown anyone.

Ogawa Daisuke had a page from a short comic about a night-bus driver on the Nagoya–Tokyo route. For eleven years the driver had been leaving a thermos of tea on the empty front seat for someone who never got on. Fujita Emi had a single background from Kyoto: a narrow alley at dawn, so full of fog that the lanterns along it seemed to float. Mizutani Kei had a boy and a broken robot on a rooftop, the boy teaching the robot to fly a paper kite. Sano Aki, still wiping her eyes on her sleeve, had a girl who collected umbrellas people left behind on trains and returned them, one by one, to the lost-property office at Shinjuku Station.

Haruki looked at all five for a long time, laid out side by side on Hirose’s crowded desk beside the grey binder.

None of them had anything above anyone’s head, and none of them had a sword.

"Next Monday," he said at last, "the Lantern posts its cards. Seven accounts, two hundred and sixty thousand people." He looked at the five of them. "I’d like to write five cards. One for each of these. With your names on them. Your real names, not a pen name, and not the ghost team."

Nobody said anything.

"You don’t have to say yes," Haruki said. "It’s your decision."

Morikawa looked at the blue flowers on the desk for a very long moment.

"Yes," she said. Her voice was barely audible. "Yes. Please. I’d like someone to read my name once."

One by one, the other four said yes too.

At the end of the table, Hirose had taken off his glasses and was polishing them very slowly on his cardigan. He didn’t put them back on for a while.

[Ghost team — Identified: Morikawa Sayo (24, Fukuoka), Ogawa Daisuke (22, Nagoya), Fujita Emi (21, Kyoto), Mizutani Kei (19), Sano Aki (19).]

[Counsel: Hirose Kenzō. Contract review: Hayama Rin. Status: Willing to submit evidence to police.]

[Lantern Cards (next Monday): 5 — original works, real names.]