Chapter 202 Below the Lantern Shop

Chapter 202: Chapter 202: Below the Lantern Shop

The shop on Keong Saik Road sold paper lanterns of every colour, hung in rows from the ceiling so thickly that the morning light came through them red and gold. Below it, down a narrow flight of stairs, Ishikawa Kōji was waiting at the only table, with three cups of coffee in front of him and his hands folded.

He stood up when they came in.

The last time Haruki had stood in the same room as this man had been a basement coffee shop in Jimbōchō, two years ago, when Ishikawa had offered him everything he wanted in exchange for everything he believed.

He looked older now. His hair was greyer at the temples, and he was thinner in the face. He wasn’t wearing a charcoal suit. He wore a plain white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow because of the heat, and his rimless glasses. He looked less like a senior editor and more like a schoolteacher on holiday.

He looked at Haruki first, for a long moment. Then he looked past him, at Hirose, who had come down the stairs slowly, one hand on the rail. Last, he looked at the woman behind them.

Something changed in his face.

"Sugiura-san," he said quietly.

Sugiura Chie stood at the bottom of the stairs in a cardigan, although it was thirty-one degrees in Singapore, with a new notebook held against her chest in both hands.

"Ishikawa-san," she said.

They looked at each other across the small room.

Haruki had imagined this moment many times in the past month, on the crate in front of his desk, in a pocket notebook, and on the plane. He had imagined anger, or accusations, or a long, cold silence.

None of it happened.

Ishikawa bowed. He bowed deeply, from the waist, the way people bowed at funerals, and stayed down for a long time.

Sugiura didn’t bow back. She stood very straight at the bottom of the stairs and watched him do it. When he finally straightened, she walked to the table and sat down in the chair across from his, without being asked. She laid her new notebook on the table in front of her and opened it to the first page.

"Sit down," she said. "I’ve waited eighteen years. I’d like to begin."

The owner of the coffee shop was an old man with a towel over his shoulder. He brought a fourth cup without being asked and went back upstairs among his lanterns, and didn’t come down again.

Hirose sat beside Sugiura, with his sleeves pushed up and his reading glasses on. Haruki sat at the end of the table with his sketchbook in his lap. Nobody touched the coffee.

"You knew about me," Sugiura said. It wasn’t a question.

"Yes," said Ishikawa.

"When?"

"Nine years ago," Ishikawa said. "The week you walked into the division head’s office and told him you’d seen Project Horizon on my desk." He folded his hands on the table. "He told me that afternoon. He laughed about it. He said a junior editor in print partnerships was jealous." He paused. "I didn’t laugh. I knew you weren’t jealous. I knew you’d read it."

Sugiura didn’t say anything. She wrote something in her notebook in small, precise handwriting.

"And lantern_07?" she asked, without looking up.

The room was very quiet. Upstairs, faintly, someone was buying a lantern. A bell rang as the shop door opened and closed.

"Seven years," said Ishikawa at last. "I found the account in the second year. A comment under a first Chapter with fewer than fifty readers, warning a rookie about a clause in a contest’s terms. I read first Chapters with fewer than fifty readers every Tuesday night. I always have." He looked at her. "I knew the handwriting of the sentences. Nobody else at Yamashita wrote read page six twice. You’d said it to me once, across a meeting table, in 1989."

Sugiura’s pen had stopped moving.

"You never stopped me," she said slowly. "You could have reported the account, or had it removed, or found out who I was. You had friends at every platform."

"Yes."

"Why didn’t you?"

Ishikawa didn’t answer immediately. He looked down at his folded hands, then up at her, and Haruki saw an expression on his face he had never seen there before. It wasn’t warmth, or calculation, or the tired fondness of the basement in Jimbōchō.

It was something closer to shame.

"Because someone should," he said quietly.

Hirose, beside Sugiura, took off his reading glasses very slowly.

"I built something that hurt people," Ishikawa said. "I believed it was necessary. I still believe some of it was. But every Tuesday night, I read a warning under a first Chapter from someone who’d watched me do it and written it down. And I thought, good. Somebody’s leaving the light on." He paused. "I couldn’t do it myself. I’d built my whole life on not doing it. So I let you."

Sugiura sat very still across the table.

For eighteen years, she had kept a green notebook of names and dates and series that had stopped. For eight years, she had left comments under first Chapters nobody was watching, believing almost none of them made any difference. She had thought that if anyone ever found her, they would be angry.

The man she had been writing down the whole time had been reading every word.

"Forty-one names," she said finally, very quietly. "In the notebook. Forty-one people who stopped drawing. One of them died never having drawn again." Her voice didn’t change, but her hand on the table had gone white at the knuckles. "Letting me leave warnings didn’t bring any of them back."

"No," said Ishikawa. "It didn’t." He looked at her steadily. "I’m not asking you to forgive me, Sugiura-san. I asked Amamiya-kun to come because he asked properly. I didn’t ask you." He paused. "But I’m glad you’re the one sitting across from me. You’re the only person alive who knows exactly what I did, year by year, because you wrote it down."

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then Sugiura closed her new notebook. It had three pages, all about him. She laid her hand flat on the cover.

"Give him the name," she said. "The courier. That’s what we came for." She looked at Ishikawa over the rim of the coffee cup she hadn’t touched. "The rest of this, I’ll write down later. I’ve had eighteen years of practice."

Ishikawa looked at her for a long moment. Then he turned to Haruki at the end of the table.

"The sketchbook first," he said. "Please. I asked you to bring it."

Haruki hesitated.

He thought about a girl in Helsinki on a bench by a canal: I think he wants to read it the way he reads first Chapters on Tuesday nights. He thought about Tachibana, holding out his hand without a word, and reading forty minutes from the first page. He thought about a grey-avatar review on the third night of the first March, cold and precise. It had hurt more than anything anyone had ever written about his work, and he had fixed everything it said by Chapter three.

He handed the sketchbook across the table.

Ishikawa took it in both hands, the way Hinata had once taken a book bought with coins. He opened it to the first page. It was a rough sketch from the first March, of a boy under an arch with nothing above his head and hands with six fingers.

He began to read.

He read for fifty-two minutes. Nobody spoke.

Upstairs, the lantern shop’s bell rang eleven times as customers came and went. The coffee went cold in four cups. Hirose sat with his glasses in his hand, watching the man across the table turn the pages. Sugiura sat with her hand flat on her closed notebook and didn’t move once.

Ishikawa read the way Tachibana read, and the way Hirose read contracts, one page at a time, from the beginning, with nothing skipped. He stopped at the six-fingered hands, and at the first thumbnail of a girl in a scarf. He stopped at a page from the first June covered in crossed-out lines of dialogue, where Haruki had learned from Akari to cut everything in half and then in half again. He stopped at a hospital door, a riverbank at dawn, and a drawer of letters.

He stopped for a long time at a doorframe with six faded marks and a new one at seventeen, with two names beside it.

Then, near the end, he stopped at a page Haruki had forgotten was there. It was a small sketch drawn on a train the summer before last, of a boy at a bus stop in the rain, holding an umbrella over a stray cat instead of himself. Haruki had copied it once from a yellowed manuscript page marked Pass, to understand how the rain was drawn.

Ishikawa looked at it for a very long time.

Then he closed the sketchbook gently and slid it back across the table.

"Your hands are still ordinary," he said. His voice was not quite steady. "But you’ve learned to leave out everything that doesn’t matter. I couldn’t do that at nineteen. I put everything in, and they marked it Pass." He reached into his shirt pocket and took out a plain white envelope, sealed, and laid it on the table beside the sketchbook. "His name. And the name of the person who hired him. Both are in there."

Nobody reached for it.

"Before you open it," Ishikawa said quietly, "you should know that the second name will surprise you less than the first."