Chapter 159: Section Ten

Chapter 159: Chapter 159: Section Ten

Ōtsuka Masaki wore a tie to the board meeting on the fourth of December. It was only the second time in ten years. His wife knotted it for him in the hallway mirror, exactly as she had the morning he went to steal a page.

"You’re going to vote," she said.

"I’m going to vote."

"Last time you wore this tie, you came home without an office." She straightened his collar. "Try to come home with the same number of things you left with."

"I’ll try."

She looked at him in the mirror for a long moment.

"The boy with the persimmons," she said. "Is it for him?"

"It’s for everyone after him," Ōtsuka said. "He’d be annoyed if I said it was for him."

His wife smiled, very slightly.

"Then vote properly," she said. "Don’t let your hand shake."

The boardroom was on the sixteenth floor, one above the offices where Ōtsuka had once built a company with four editors and a whiteboard. It was a plain room with a long table, nine chairs, and a view over Shibuya’s grey December rooftops. There was a pot of tea nobody would drink. At the end of the table sat a small stack of folders, one for each member, containing a single document of twelve pages.

Proposal to the Board: Revised Paid-Tier Agreement (Renewal Terms) — Section 10 (Adaptation), Deletion.

Beneath it, attached as an appendix, was a single page more. It had been added by the proposal’s author three days earlier, after a hundred and twelve signatures arrived at the platform’s legal office in a manila envelope.

Appendix A: The Two Percent Pledge (voluntary; 112 signatories).

Ōtsuka sat in the Guardian’s chair, the ninth seat, at the far end of the table. It had no title on its nameplate except Editorial Standards. He had accepted the chair in January, on the condition that he could keep Tuesdays and Thursdays for the garden.

Around the table sat the eight others.

Arai Shigeru sat at the head, stooped and tall in his grey suit, with his hands folded on the folder in front of him. He hadn’t looked at anyone since he came in.

To his right were the three members who had followed him for years. There was a former accountant, a representative from an advertising firm, and a lawyer who had drafted the original Section 10 nine years ago. To his left were the two members from the publishers’ consortium, who had told Mizuno they were leaning yes.

Halfway down the table, in a cardigan over a pressed white shirt, with his walking stick hooked over the back of his chair, sat Nishida Kōsuke. He was eighty-one and had taken the 6:00 a.m. Shinkansen from Ashiya. He had read the proposal aloud to himself on the train, twice, and was now reading it a third time, with a pencil.

Across from him, very straight in her chair, sat the woman from the Kanda children’s publisher. She was in her fifties, with short grey hair and reading glasses on a chain like Oda’s. She had a copy of Threadless Gate Volume 1 on the table in front of her, closed, beside her folder. Ōtsuka noticed that the blank card at the back had been torn out.

Mizuno Rei sat against the wall behind the table, in the chair reserved for the proposal’s author. She was not a board member and couldn’t vote. She had turned her cup of tea a quarter turn three times since she sat down, and Ōtsuka had counted each one.

The meeting began at ten. Arai read the proposal’s title aloud and asked whether anyone wished to speak.

The lawyer who had drafted Section 10 spoke first. He was polite and precise, and not unkind. Adaptation rights, he said, were the only asset a web platform held that could grow in value over time. Without them, the platform would always be a middleman, publishing work it didn’t own and losing money until someone with deeper pockets bought it. He had drafted Section 10 nine years ago to protect the company from exactly that. He saw no reason to delete it now.

The advertising representative agreed. So did the accountant, with a short spreadsheet.

Then Nishida Kōsuke put down his pencil.

"May I read something?" he asked. "It isn’t long."

Arai nodded.

The old banker didn’t read from the proposal. He took a folded index card from his inside pocket and put on his reading glasses.

"A bookstore manager in Koenji sent me a photograph of this on Saturday," he said. "She said I’d want to read it before today. It was pinned on her shelf between a card about a dragon and a card from a seventeen-year-old. She wouldn’t tell me who wrote it." He paused, and read it aloud in his dry, old voice.

"For anyone who has only ever lent against what they could count. Read the names in the back of a stranger’s notebook. Some debts are paid in ways a ledger can’t hold. I didn’t know until tonight."

He folded the card and put it away.

"I lent against what I could count for sixty-five years," Kōsuke said. "I was good at it. My bank never failed. But in January, a florist in Nagano sent me a book, and I learned I’d spent my whole life voting against things I hadn’t read." He looked down the table at the lawyer, then at the accountant, and last at Arai, who hadn’t moved. "Section 10 has been in every paid-tier contract for nine years. In nine years, the platform lost money every year but one. That one year, a hundred thousand readers wrote cards for free." He picked up his pencil again. "I’d like to lend against that. I vote yes."

Nobody spoke for a moment.

Arai asked for the vote at 11:20.

The lawyer voted no. So did the accountant and the advertising representative, three against.

The two members from the consortium voted yes. With Kōsuke, that made three for.

Ōtsuka raised his hand from the Guardian’s chair at the end of the table. He had built this company nine years ago, with four editors and a whiteboard, so that every story would get a fair chance to be seen. His hand did not shake.

"Yes," he said. Four.

That left two.

Arai looked across the table at the woman from the Kanda children’s publisher. She sat very straight, with the closed volume in front of her.

"Tanabe-san?"

The woman didn’t answer at once. She opened the book in front of her, not to the first page, but to the very back, where a blank card had been torn out along its perforated edge. She looked at the empty space where it had been.

"I tore mine out on the first of August," she said quietly. "I wrote three lines about a picture book my mother read to me when I was five. I left it on a train seat on the Chūō Line." She closed the book. "Last Tuesday, my editor showed me a photograph someone had posted. A woman in Kōfu found my card on the train in August. She bought the picture book for her daughter. Her daughter is five. She reads it every night now." She looked up at Arai. "I can explain that to my board. Yes."

Five.

The room was very quiet.

Arai sat at the head of the table with his hands folded on his folder. The proposal had passed. His vote no longer mattered, and everyone in the room knew it.

He raised his hand anyway.

"Yes," he said.

The lawyer who had drafted Section 10 turned in his chair and stared at him.

"Arai-san—"

"I lent against what I could count for twenty years," Arai said. He didn’t look at anyone. "On Thursday night, I read a hundred and twelve names in a stranger’s notebook and left a card on a shelf." He unfolded his hands. "I’d rather my name be on the right side of this than the safe one. Six to three. The proposal carries."

Behind the table, against the wall, Mizuno Rei set her cup down very carefully on the floor beside her chair. Then she put both hands over her face.

Ōtsuka stood up from the Guardian’s chair, walked the length of the table, and put one hand on her shoulder without saying anything. She didn’t take her hands from her face for a long time.

At the other end of the table, the lawyer who had drafted Section 10 nine years earlier sat very still for a long moment. Then he closed his folder, squared it neatly on the table, and looked at Arai.

"If it’s going to be deleted," he said, "then it should be deleted properly. I wrote it. I’ll draft the amendment myself, so nobody can argue about the wording later." He paused. "And I’d like to read the appendix again. The pledge. I didn’t read it carefully the first time."

Arai looked at him for a moment, and then nodded.

"Call him," Ōtsuka said quietly to Mizuno, when she finally took her hands from her face. "He’s been sitting by his phone since nine. I’d put money on it."