Chapter 197: The Coalition

Chapter 197: Chapter 197: The Coalition

The lawyer who had drafted Section 10 nine years ago climbed the stairs to Hirose’s office above the tea shop on Monday morning with two junior associates and a box of files. Then he asked whether he could sit on the floor.

"There isn’t room for chairs," he said, looking around the small office with what seemed to be genuine pleasure. "I haven’t sat on a floor for a meeting since university."

His name was Shirai Masahiro. He was in his late fifties, with a careful, unhurried manner and a very good grey suit. For nine years he had been the platform’s outside counsel. He had written the clause that gave the platform first negotiation on every creator’s adaptation. In December, at a board meeting in Shibuya, he had argued against deleting it, then drafted its deletion himself, properly, and renumbered every section after it so nobody would ever know it had been there.

He sat down on the floor with his back against Hirose’s ancient filing cabinet, opened the box of files on his knees, and looked around at the room.

It was very full.

Hirose sat at his desk in his cardigan. Hayama Rin sat beside him with her notebook and the grey wool scarf folded in her lap. Mizuno sat on the only other chair, very straight, turning a cup of barley tea a quarter turn on the corner of the desk. Haruki sat on the folding chair by the window. Tanaka was on an upturned box with a laptop. And on the floor, along the wall, crowded together with their knees drawn up, sat five young artists whose names had been printed on Lantern Cards for the first time the Monday before.

Morikawa Sayo had a small bunch of blue flowers in a jam jar on the floor beside her. She had brought them from Fukuoka on the Shinkansen, wrapped in damp newspaper. She hadn’t explained, and nobody had asked.

"I’ll begin with the law," Shirai said. "Then the harder part."

He explained it plainly, without notes, in the voice of someone who had explained the same thing to a great many boards.

Under the Unfair Competition Prevention Act, a business’s confidential information was protected as a trade secret if three things were true. It had to be kept secret, it had to be useful to the business, and it couldn’t be public. The platform’s editorial planning database met all three. Access was restricted, and it held the next six months of every serialized creator’s story. Nothing in it had ever been published.

"Anyone who acquires a trade secret by improper means," Shirai said, "or uses it knowing, or having good reason to know, that it was improperly acquired, can be ordered by a court to stop. That includes using it to make something new, such as a manga, or an anime."

Nobody spoke.

"We don’t have to wait for a full trial," Shirai went on. "That could take years. We can petition the Tokyo District Court for a provisional disposition. It’s a temporary order to stop the use while the full case is decided." He looked at Haruki. "If the court finds the evidence strong enough, it can order the studio not to broadcast material derived from the stolen outline. Even in March."

"How long?" Haruki asked.

"For a provisional disposition, weeks or months," said Shirai. "Not years." He paused. "If we file by the end of September, the court could rule before Christmas."

"And the evidence?" Mizuno asked quietly.

Shirai looked at Nakamura’s access logs on Hirose’s desk and the grey binder in its evidence photograph. Then he looked at the five young artists sitting along the wall.

"The logs show the account was used from Osaka at three in the morning," he said. "The binder shows a printout of the entry, timestamped two minutes later, in the hands of the studio’s ghost team. Five statements to the police describe how it reached them." He closed the box of files. "The evidence is very strong. The hard part isn’t the evidence."

"What is?" Hayama asked.

"Courage," Shirai said simply. He looked along the wall at the five of them. "A provisional disposition needs declarations from the people who can speak to the facts. Your names will be on the court record. They’ll be in the newspapers. The studio’s lawyers will ask the court to doubt you. They’ll say you were paid, that you signed a confidentiality clause, that you’re inexperienced and confused." He paused. "I’ve sat on the other side of cases like this. I know exactly what they’ll say, because I’d have said it myself, a year ago."

The small office was completely silent.

It was Ogawa Daisuke who spoke first.

He was twenty-two, the quiet one from Nagoya with ink stains on his cuffs. He had drawn a night-bus driver who left a thermos of tea on an empty front seat every night for eleven years. He hadn’t said a word all morning.

"Last Monday," he said slowly, "somebody I’ve never met put a thermos on the front seat of a night bus in Nagoya, with a card against it. With my name on it." He looked at the floor. "My mother saw it. On the news. She called me and asked if it was me." He swallowed. "I told her yes. It was the first time I’ve ever told her something I drew was mine."

Nobody said anything.

"If they say I’m confused in the newspapers," Ogawa said, "my mother will read it. She’ll know I’m not." He looked up at Shirai. "Yes."

"Yes," said Fujita Emi, beside him, before he had finished. Her fog alley had been asked for by three bookshops in Kyoto. "I’d like my name somewhere that isn’t a ghost."

"Yes," said Mizutani Kei. His voice shook, and he said it anyway. "I nearly didn’t go up the stairs at Sakuradamon. Sano-san held my sleeve." He looked at her. "I’ll go up these ones."

Sano Aki didn’t say anything. She reached over and took his sleeve again, and nodded.

Morikawa Sayo was the last. She looked at the blue flowers in the jam jar beside her for a long time.

"I wrote avenge us," she said at last. "In Chapter eight. A mother telling her son to go and break a man’s crown. Because the outline said TBD and they wanted a fight." She looked up at Haruki by the window. "And then he wrote nobody needs to pay." She turned to Shirai. "I don’t want anyone to pay. I don’t want revenge. I just want a court to say it was his, and that we didn’t know, and that they can’t finish it without us." She took a breath. "Yes."

"Then that’s five," said Hirose quietly.

"Six," said Haruki, from the window.

"Seven," said Mizuno. "The platform, through Arai-san. I’ll sign as the editor who entered the summary. I want my name beside theirs."

Shirai looked around the small office. There was a seventy-two-year-old lawyer in a cardigan and a bank loan officer with a grey scarf, an editor turning a cup and a rookie by the window. There was a boy with a spreadsheet on an upturned box, and five young artists along the wall with a jar of blue flowers.

"In thirty years," he said slowly, "I’ve filed a great many petitions on behalf of companies. I’ve never filed one on behalf of a jar of flowers." He stood up from the floor, stiffly, brushing dust from his good grey suit. "I’ll have the draft by Friday. Hirose-sensei will read it four times."

"Five," said Hirose. "For this one, five."

Tanaka spoke only once that morning, at the very end, as the five artists were standing up stiffly from the floor and Shirai was closing his box of files.

"It’ll cost money," he said, from his upturned box. He didn’t look up from the laptop. "The petition, the court fees, and expert witnesses for the server logs. Shirai-sensei’s firm is doing it at cost for the platform, he said. But the five of them will need their own representation, separate from the platform’s, so nobody can say their testimony was bought." He turned the screen around. "I’ve done the arithmetic."

It was a spreadsheet, as it always was. At the bottom, circled twice, was a number.

"The Lantern’s fund has two point four million yen," Tanaka said. "It’s enough for Hirose-sensei’s costs on the five declarations, if he’ll accept it." He looked at the old lawyer.

"I’ll accept nothing," said Hirose. "I’m seventy-two and I’ve waited twelve years. Put it toward the experts."

"Then it’s enough," Tanaka said. Then, after a moment, he added more quietly: "I posted a note to the Lantern’s mailing list at seven this morning. I didn’t ask for anything. I only said there was going to be a case, and that five rookies who’d been made into ghosts were going to put their real names on it." He looked at the screen. "By nine, forty-one people had sent money. Small amounts, a thousand yen, two thousand. One of them was the dragon bakery." He cleared his throat. "One was a florist in Fukuoka who sent three thousand yen with a note saying for the girl who came in for blue ones."

Morikawa, halfway to the door with her jam jar of flowers, stopped and didn’t turn around for a long moment.

"She didn’t tell me she was going to do that," she said finally, very quietly, to the door.

"Nobody ever tells you," said Tanaka. "That’s how you know it’s the Lantern."

[Coalition formed — Petition (provisional disposition, Tokyo District Court; Unfair Competition Prevention Act).]

[Parties: Platform (via Arai; counsel: Shirai Masahiro). Creator: Amamiya Haruki. Editor: Mizuno Rei. Declarants: Morikawa Sayo, Ogawa Daisuke, Fujita Emi, Mizutani Kei, Sano Aki. Counsel (declarants): Hirose Kenzō. Contract review: Hayama Rin.]

[Draft petition: Friday. Target filing: End of September. Ruling: Possibly before Christmas.]