The rain had ended in the night. By eight she was on the lane in a clean gray light that smelled of wet stone and last year's leaves, and the puddles along the gutter held the same flat sky in broken pieces. Her bag was lighter than yesterday. She had left the A3 grid at the minshuku because today she would not be filling rows; today she would be making the room around them larger.
Hatsumi-san had given her rice and dark miso and a small flat fish whose name Iva still hadn't learned. The tea was hotter than the room. The irises in the green vase were the same irises. She ate without saying very much and bowed in the doorway with the bow that was the right size for breakfast.
She had written her list of requests on the train two nights ago and revised it in pencil over the tea. Three items. Prefectural maps from the 1970s, set against the 1981 administrative reform that had renamed the rural roads. Local newspaper holdings for 1973 through 1975, the literary columns in particular. Court records concerning intellectual property and authorship from the same window, regional, no narrower than the prefecture.
Naomi was at her counter. The same gray cardigan. The same precise bow. Iva put the list down on the polished wood between them and let Naomi read it. Naomi read it once and then again, the way she read everything, as if the second pass were what the work required and the first what civility allowed.
"All three," Naomi said.
"All three."
Naomi gave the small nod that meant she would begin with the maps, because the maps were in the public room and would take her four minutes, and the newspaper holdings were on the second underground floor and would take her twenty.
By twenty past nine the maps were on station two. Iva spread the modern GSI sheet first, then weighted its corners with the lacquered river stones the archive kept in a wooden bowl for this purpose. Then the 1978 Showa survey beside it. The two sheets came from different stocks of paper. The Showa was softer, fox-edged, the ink a warmer black than she had remembered from yesterday.
She found Tatsumi-bashi in eleven minutes.
It was a footbridge in the foothills north of the city, two valleys over from the Ujigawa proper, on a stream the modern sheet had folded into a culvert under a numbered prefectural road. The Showa map still drew the stream and the bridge and named both in the careful hand of a surveyor who had signed his initials in the bottom corner in 1978. After the 1981 reform, the road across the bridge had been swallowed by a route number, and the bridge had taken the route number with it, and the old name had gone to no map and no signpost. The bridge was still there. It would have been a fifty-minute walk from where she was sitting if she had risen and gone north.
She made a small pencil mark on the GSI sheet where the Showa sheet had the bridge. Yesterday's entry in the places column of the grid would stay where it was. The old name was still the name. The new name was only the new name.
Kuromata-michi was on neither map.
She lifted her hands from the table and rested them in her lap and let her shoulders down. The method had produced one of two. The method would produce the other when the right document came under her hand, or it would not, and either way the procedure had been honest.
The newspaper holdings came up at ten-twenty in three gray clamshell boxes, dated by month across the spines. Iva worked through the spring of 1974 in the literary columns of the two regional weeklies and the morning daily. The dailies were the easier object; the weeklies took longer because their literary columns ran behind everything else. By eleven she had what she had asked for and not expected to need.
It was eighteen lines in the morning daily for the eighth of March, 1974. The headline was small. Prefectural court to rule next week in literary appropriation matter. The body kept the careful, declining-to-elaborate prose of small newspapers writing about court matters their editors knew slightly more than they could print. A known poet had brought a claim of appropriation against another party in connection with a recent cycle of poems. The prefectural court would deliver judgment the following week, on the seventeenth. The notice withheld both names.
She wrote the date down in the back of the leather sleeve. 17 March 1974.
She wrote the location down. Kyoto Prefectural Court.
She did the small arithmetic she always did. The first letter in the box at Shinsei was dated the twentieth of March, 1974. The arithmetic gave her three days.
She closed the clamshell and went out into the courtyard.
The bench by the bicycle rack was warm in the patchy noon sun. She ate a salmon onigiri, because the konbini on the corner sold what it sold, and she kept her eyes on the worn slats of the bench. Along the courtyard wall a sparrow worked at a crack in the concrete. She folded the wrapper into the same small square as the day before. She thought about what she had and what was still outstanding.
What she had: a known poet, victorious in March of 1974, in a copyright matter heard in Kyoto. A letter begun three days after the court's judgment, in the hand of a man who addressed no one and so every one. A pair of initials in parentheses set down two months later as if the parentheses were the only place the initials could be set down. Two unverified place-names, one of which a 1978 surveyor had been able to find and a 1981 administrative reform had unfound.
What was missing was a name.
She went back inside. Naomi was at her counter, working on a card index in the unhurried, complete way she did all small jobs. Iva put the request slip down. Court records, intellectual property, authorship and plagiarism, March and April of 1974, Kyoto prefecture. The number of cases was not on the slip because she didn't know it; she had asked for everything that fit the description.
Naomi looked at the slip. "Several cases," she said in English, by way of confirmation that she had the categories right.
"Several. Yes."
Naomi nodded and went into the stacks.
It took her twenty-five minutes. The archive was quiet enough that Iva could hear the soft sound of the wheels on the cart three rooms away, growing nearer in stages. When the cart came through the door Naomi had four folders on it; she lifted a fifth from a lower shelf as she rolled the cart up to station two. Five.
Iva did the methodical thing. She laid the folders out by the date of decision printed in small ink on the upper right of each cover. The covers were dark brown, the bindings cloth-corded, the paper old enough to feel like cloth itself. Three of the five were from March. Two were from April.
She opened the earliest first. Educational publisher against secondary school, copying of textbook materials. Not what she was after; she closed the folder and set it to her left.
She opened the second. Two screenwriters concerning the authorship of a teleplay broadcast by a regional station. Not literary in the sense she wanted, but she read the first page anyway. She wanted to be sure about what she was setting aside. She closed the folder and set it to her left.
She opened the third.
The cover read, in the patient brushwork of an archivist of 1974:
Yamada Hideo v. Mizuno Ayako.
The line below: Plaintiff: Yamada Hideo. Defendant: Mizuno Ayako.
The date of decision in the upper right: 17 March 1974.
She read the line about the plaintiff again. She read it the way she read a letter she was about to translate, the way she read anything that asked her to be sure: once for the words, once for the order of the words, once for what the order of the words meant.
The plaintiff was the poet.
She held the cover for one breath. Then she closed the folder.
She let her hands rest on the brown paper. The paper was cool. Under her left palm she could feel the cloth-corded binding through the cover and the small slight rise where the corner-tie had been threaded. Under her right palm she could feel the date.
She opened the leather sleeve to the page where the two notes from the courtyard lay. She added a third line beneath them, in pencil, in the order in which the dates had occurred.
17 March 1974.
20 March 1974.
She let the pencil rest on the dot of the second period a moment longer than the writing required.
At her counter Naomi was logging a return slip into the card index. The small slide of card against card was the only sound in the room except for the faint whisper of the air handler in the ceiling. The light through the high windows had moved by an inch since she had sat down. It fell now across the corner of the brown cover and made the brown a shade lighter where it touched.
She did not open the folder again.
She put her hands flat on the cover and she kept them there.