Chapter 198: Kasumigaseki

Chapter 198: Chapter 198: Kasumigaseki

There were eleven cameras on the pavement outside the Tokyo District Court on the morning of the thirtieth of September. When Haruki saw them, his mind began to go white before he had climbed the first step.

He hadn’t expected cameras. Shirai had said there might be a few reporters. The platform was filing a petition against a studio owned by a foreign fund, and the police investigation into the Osaka platform had been in the business pages since August. Somebody at the court might have mentioned it to somebody at a newspaper. That was all.

There were eleven cameras, three television crews, and perhaps thirty reporters with notebooks and microphones, waiting on the pavement in the grey autumn drizzle by the steps of a tall, plain building in Kasumigaseki. When the small group came around the corner from the subway station, every lens turned toward them at once.

Haruki stopped walking.

The edges of the street went bright and soft. The traffic noise grew distant, and the drizzle on his face seemed very far away. He was standing in a boardroom in another life, with six weeks of his best work on the table and his mouth open and nothing coming out. He was at a lectern in the Phoenix Hall. He was in a small bright room in Otowa, being asked why he drew.

Yui was in Helsinki, eight thousand kilometres away. It was four in the morning there, and she was asleep.

When your mind goes white and I’m not in the aisle, find someone else to look at.

He couldn’t find anyone. The faces on the pavement had dissolved into lines and shapes, the way Tsubasa drew crowds, with a few sharp near the front and everything else fading. The cameras were all looking at him.

Then, beside him, someone turned her head.

It was Morikawa Sayo. She was standing a step to his left, holding a canvas bag with a copy of her declaration in it, small and very straight. She was in a dark jacket she had bought specially, with paint still on her fingers that she hadn’t been able to scrub off. She had never stood in front of a camera in her life. She had spent five months making sure nobody would ever know her name.

She didn’t look at the cameras or the court steps. She looked at him, at his face, steadily, the way a girl in a scarf had once looked at a boy on a hillside with nothing above his head.

As though whatever he can’t say doesn’t matter.

The white cracked.

They didn’t stop for the cameras. Shirai had told them not to, and he walked at the front in his good grey suit, holding the petition in a plain document folder, saying no comment to every question in the same courteous voice. Hirose walked beside him in his cardigan, with his sleeves pushed down for once out of respect for the court. Then came Mizuno, with Haruki and Morikawa, and the other four young artists close together behind them. At the back, carrying nothing, walked Arai Shigeru, the chairman of the platform’s board. He had insisted on coming in person.

The questions came from every side as they climbed the steps.

Amamiya-san, is it true Crownless was based on your stolen notes?

Is this about the anime? Are you trying to stop the broadcast?

Who are the five people with you?

That last question stopped Mizutani Kei on the third step. He went very pale. Sano Aki took his sleeve, as she had at Sakuradamon, and walked him up the rest.

Inside, the court was quiet, grey, and very ordinary. There were long corridors and a filing counter with a numbered ticket machine, and clerks in cardigans behind glass. Shirai took a ticket and waited eleven minutes for his number to be called, like anyone else. He handed the petition across the counter to a clerk who stamped it with a date and a reference number, without looking up, and handed back a receipt.

It took thirty seconds.

Shirai looked at the receipt for a long moment. Then he turned and handed it to Morikawa.

"It’s your names on it," he said. "Not mine. You should hold it."

She took it in both hands.

They came out of the court at 10:40 into heavier rain. The reporters were still there, waiting under umbrellas on the pavement.

Shirai had said they would make a single short statement on the steps, and only one. He had asked who should make it. Everyone had looked at Haruki.

Haruki had said no.

He had said it at Hirose’s office on Friday, sitting on the folding chair by the window. It isn’t my story. I’m not the one whose name was taken. He had looked at the five of them along the wall. It should be one of them. If they want to.

There had been a long silence. Then Morikawa had said, very quietly, that she would do it.

Now she stood on the top step of the Tokyo District Court in the rain, with the receipt in one hand and a single sheet of paper in the other. She was small and very straight, and paint was still on her fingers. Eleven cameras turned toward her. Shirai held an umbrella over her head.

She didn’t look at the cameras.

She looked down the steps at Haruki, standing a few steps below with the others, the way he had needed someone to look at him an hour earlier.

He looked back.

She began to read.

"My name is Morikawa Sayo," she said. Her voice shook on the first word and steadied on the third. "I’m twenty-four. I draw flowers. For five months, I drew a manga called Crownless without my name on it, from an outline I was told was licensed. It wasn’t. It was taken from a creator’s private notes, through an account that should have been closed, at three in the morning." She took a breath. "Four other artists and I didn’t know. We’ve told the police everything we know. Today, with the platform and the creator, we’ve asked the court to stop anyone using what was taken."

The rain fell on the umbrella. Nobody on the pavement spoke.

"We’re not asking for money," Morikawa said. "We’re not asking anyone to be punished. We only want a court to say whose story it was." She lowered the sheet of paper. "And that we didn’t know."

She stepped back under the umbrella.

There was a long silence on the pavement. Then, somewhere near the back of the crowd of reporters, someone started clapping. It was an older journalist in a raincoat, with a notebook under his arm. Nobody else joined in, and he stopped after a few seconds, looking faintly embarrassed.

But he had done it, and eleven cameras had recorded it.

The clip was on the evening news at seven: thirty-eight seconds of a small woman in a dark jacket on the steps of a court in the rain, under an umbrella held by a lawyer in a grey suit. Most channels cut the last line. One didn’t. It was the public broadcaster’s evening bulletin, and someone in the newsroom had apparently decided it mattered.

And that we didn’t know.

Kurenai’s response came at 8:40 that night, a single paragraph released through its new owners’ public relations firm. It said the studio had full confidence in the originality of Crownless. It called the petition without merit, a commercially motivated attempt by a competitor to delay a rival production, and said the studio would defend its creative team vigorously.

It didn’t say which creative team, the five who had made it or the new one appointed to finish it. Shirai, reading it at his office in Chiyoda, apparently laughed out loud for the first time anyone at his firm could remember, and then asked his associates to print it out and file it with the evidence.

Haruki read it on the crate in front of his desk, twice. Then he put the phone face down.

At 11:20, it buzzed again. It was morning in Helsinki, and Yui was awake.

I watched it. Four times. On the bench, with the swans.

She looked at you before she started reading. I saw.

Halonen-sensei watched it over my shoulder. She asked who the girl with paint on her fingers was. I told her. She said, "That is what a ghost looks like when it decides to have a name."

He read it three times.

I went white on the steps, he wrote back. Before we went in. There were eleven cameras.

I know, Yui wrote. I saw your face in the first two seconds of the clip.

A pause, then:

Who did you look at?

Morikawa-san, he wrote. She looked at me first.

The reply took a long time to come.

Good, Yui wrote at last. Number three. You kept it.

[Petition filed: Tokyo District Court (provisional disposition, Unfair Competition Prevention Act). Date: Sept 30. Reference: Received.]

[Public statement: Morikawa Sayo (24). Press present: ~30 reporters, 11 cameras.]

[Host — Mind went white (court steps). Recovered by: Morikawa Sayo (looked at him).]

[Kurenai response: "Without merit." Will defend "its creative team."]