## Chapter 396 — Other People's Work

“Kanno-san.”

Miyake's surprise lasted only a moment. She adjusted the narrow wrapped book beneath her arm and looked past Kanno into 202, careful not to lean across the threshold. Kanno explained that Isha was next door because Saitō had borrowed her for furniture. That produced no visible confusion; Miyake lived close enough to both women to understand the likely division of labour.

“Then I can come back. I was only returning this.” Miyake shifted the book, and Kanno recognised the slim collection of climbing photographs Isha had shown her before. A strip of pale paper now crossed the inside of the loosened cover where none had been previously.

“You repaired it.”

“The hinge was beginning to separate. I asked Isha-san yesterday whether she wanted me to leave it or fix it.” Miyake glanced down at the repair. “She said fix it.”

Kanno opened the door a little farther, then stopped herself. “I am only a guest. I cannot invite you into their flat.”

“Yes.” Miyake's immediate approval almost made her laugh. She looked towards 203 instead and said she could wait for a minute; Saitō's estimates of five minutes often contained negotiation.

They stayed in the corridor with the open door between them. Kanno's archival box remained visible on the dining table, and Miyake's attention rested on it briefly before returning to Kanno. “I remember your photograph from the wedding. The wall with the rectangle where something had been removed.”

Kanno remembered showing it to her between ceremony and lunch, one image from the unfinished series because Miyake had asked what she was photographing next. She had expected polite interest. Miyake had instead wanted to know whether the pale area was old paint, new paint or adhesive damage, and Sugiyama had joined the resulting discussion before Kanno had answered properly.

“It was a signboard, probably. The fixings were gone.”

“The repair around it was bad.”

“That was why I photographed it.”

Miyake nodded as though that placed the image back in the category where she had expected to find it.

In 203, Saitō had already decided that the cabinet looked better on the opposite wall and was now reconsidering the exact position. She stood three steps back from it, cane beside her right foot, while Isha checked the new placement from two angles. The cabinet's former position had left a darker rectangle on the wall, protected for years from light and cleaning.

“Too far left,” Saitō said. Isha looked at her. “Three centimetres.”

“You said there.”

“I have now seen there.” Saitō pointed with the cane. “Three centimetres right.”

Isha crouched again. This time she raised one end, shifted it, changed sides and corrected the other rather than lifting the whole cabinet clear. The fitted sleeves of her top pulled smooth across her shoulders as she took the weight. Her forearms tightened around the lower rail; pale hair, tied high for convenience, slipped over one shoulder while she leaned forward.

Saitō watched with open enjoyment. “You should charge people for this.”

“I am paid to help people climb walls. Moving old furniture would be a different contract.” Isha lowered the cabinet and stood. Saitō inspected the spacing, considered asking for another centimetre and evidently decided she had tested neighbourly goodwill far enough.

“There. My husband would have hated you.”

Isha's eyebrows rose. Saitō rested both hands over the handle of her cane and explained that she and her husband had moved the same cabinet together when they were young. They had carried it up one flight because paying the delivery men to do so cost extra, then discovered that the bedroom door was narrower than the cabinet.

“What did you do?” Isha asked.

“Argued for twenty minutes. Removed the door. Argued about whose idea removing the door had been. Carried it through.” Saitō looked at Isha's bare forearms. “You would have picked it up, turned sideways and deprived us of an entire evening.”

Isha laughed. The room held several framed photographs, although she had never studied them closely. Saitō crossed to a low shelf beside the window, took down an album with a faded cloth cover and returned to her chair rather than remaining on her feet. “If you are going to make me remember being young, you can look at the evidence.”

In Tokyo, Matsuda did not ask where the gold had come from.

He asked how large it was.

Thomas had prepared for suspicion, disbelief and the uncomfortable necessity of giving a true answer that concealed its most important fact. The practical question went straight past all of that. “A little over a kilogram now. The original specimen was 1,098.4 grams before a section was removed. It isn't a kilogram of pure gold. It is natural gold-bearing material with quartz and darker stone.”

Matsuda moved his coffee away before Thomas opened the folder. He asked about the removed section, and Thomas described the cutting, destructive assay and later sale: just under eighty grams when separated, about sixty-three grams of metallic material after preparation, independently tested by the dealer and eventually bought for ¥912,000.

“Good,” Matsuda said, then caught Thomas staring at him. “Good documentation. I am not congratulating you on having mysterious gold.” He turned the first report so they could both read it. “What does Isha want to do with the kilogram?”

“We don't know.”

“That is a different problem.”

He read the chronology before the assay figures. The original acquisition line remained deliberately spare; below it, photographs, weights, surface analysis, cutting records, destructive assay, legal advice, dealer review, purchase record and tax-accountant notes accumulated with almost embarrassing density. Matsuda reached the first line again, paused for less than a second and continued.

“Your lawyer has already told you this gap cannot be repaired retrospectively, and the accountant is dealing with the transaction that actually happened.” When Thomas confirmed both, Matsuda turned another page. “Then why are you asking me?”

Thomas laughed once. “That is the question I should have started with.”

He explained the problem they had been circling for months. They did not need another lawyer to explain provenance or another dealer willing to make a one-off decision on the assayed fragment. They wanted to understand what a credible route for the larger specimen might look like if they later wanted further non-destructive analysis, a specialist mineral opinion, another controlled sample, refining, sale or simply stronger long-term documentation. Online searching kept returning businesses whose first answer was a cash price.

Matsuda let him finish. “I do not know gold, and I am not procurement. Most of my Tokyo project work uses outside suppliers, though, which means I spend enough time with procurement and technical staff to know how they find a company when none of us knows enough to trust the first search result.”

Thomas felt some tension leave his shoulders. Matsuda had already separated the problem into parts. A laboratory could describe composition; someone dealing with mineral specimens could assess the object in that context; a refiner could process metal; a dealer could decide whether it wanted to buy. Nishida and the accountant dealt with the questions those businesses should not be deciding for Thomas and Isha.

“That sounds obvious when you say it.”

“It is obvious because four professions have already done four different things in your folder.” Matsuda returned to the cutting report. “The next question is which sort of firm you need, if any. You do not need another sale simply to justify the work you have already done.”

Thomas had heard that last point from Isha, Nishida and the accountant. Hearing it from Matsuda irritated him just enough to make it land again.

In 203, Saitō opened the album near the middle. The woman in the first photograph was unmistakably her once Isha knew where to look: a fuller face, long hair carefully waved, an upright body with none of the economical caution Saitō now used on stairs. She wore a sleeveless summer dress with a narrow belt and stood beside a much younger man whose smile had been caught halfway between posing and laughter.

“You were beautiful,” Isha said.

Saitō snorted. “I was twenty-something and spent forty minutes on my hair. I had better be.”

The photographs that followed were less composed. Saitō on a beach in shorts, squinting into sunlight; Saitō carrying shopping bags and making an obscene face at whoever held the camera; her husband asleep upright on a train. A small kitchen appeared several pages later with the same cabinet against one wall, darker and less scratched.

“There,” Saitō said. “The criminal object.”

“It was already large.”

“It has not grown out of spite. It only feels that way.”

Children appeared too, though Saitō did not turn the album into a chronology. She paused over an image of herself sitting on the floor with one child asleep against her and another mostly outside the frame. Her upper arms were softer than Isha's and visibly stronger than in the earlier photograph, built through carrying children, shopping and household work rather than training.

“I thought I was too heavy then,” Saitō said. At Isha's look, she gave a small shrug. “Nobody sensible told me. I had two children, no sleep, and magazines full of women who had apparently never eaten rice. My husband liked me. I considered his opinion compromised.”

“Was it?”

“Of course. He was my husband.” Saitō smiled before the answer could settle into seriousness. “That did not make him wrong.”

She closed the album halfway and studied Isha over its edge. Isha's cardigan remained on the chair. The earlier exertion had left a faint flush high on her cheeks, and even seated she seemed too tall for much of Saitō's furniture.

“You receive a great deal of attention,” Saitō said. When Isha agreed, she asked whether she liked it.

“Sometimes. I like Thomas looking at me. I sometimes like choosing clothes that make people look.” Isha considered the rest before speaking. “I do not like being treated as though looking gives someone a right to me.”

Saitō accepted that without comment on the obvious difference between those things. She had once liked being looked at more than she admitted, she said. After children she had enjoyed being left alone more than expected. Later still, she sometimes became annoyed that people had obeyed. Isha laughed softly.

“It is inconsistent,” Saitō said. “Ageing did not improve my consistency.”

She set the album across her lap and asked how marriage felt. The question was lighter than the one about attention, yet Isha took longer over it.

“Mostly the same. Thomas is still Thomas. I still wake beside him. We still argue about whether he needs emergency socks.”

Saitō immediately asked whether he did. Isha said no, and received a firm “Good” in return. That made her smile before she continued. “But sometimes I remember he is legally my husband now, and it feels strange for a moment. Good strange. There are papers saying we are family here. I did not expect that to matter as much as it does.”

Saitō's fingers settled on the album cover. “The first year I kept noticing the word husband. Then I stopped noticing for years. After he died, I noticed it again because forms wanted a different word.”

She left the sentence where it was. Isha sat with her until Saitō opened the album again and pointed to the sleeping man on the train. “He snored before we married. He snored after. Legal recognition had disappointing medical effects.”

Isha laughed hard enough that Saitō looked satisfied.

Back outside 202, Miyake shifted the wrapped book to her other arm. Kanno offered to put it inside and tell Isha where it was, which felt different from inviting Miyake farther into someone else's home. Miyake accepted and stepped only far enough across the genkan to place the book on the shoe cabinet.

As she bent, Kanno noticed a second repair: a narrow replacement strip at the head of the spine, slightly paler than the surrounding cloth. “You didn't try to make that match.”

“I matched the structure. Matching the colour would mean dyeing new cloth to imitate old cloth, and this is a borrowed book, not a restoration commission.” Miyake straightened. When Kanno asked whether she would match it on an important book, Miyake looked at her more carefully. “What are you actually asking?”

Kanno appreciated that she had identified the second question first. “At the wedding you were talking about album repair.”

“With Sugiyama-san, mostly. You started it.”

“I remember.” Kanno glanced towards the archival box. “I have been printing photographs recently. Private ones. I do not know whether I want them in a box, an album or nothing more complicated than envelopes. And the wall photographs keep making me look at repairs.”

Miyake said those were two different problems. Kanno agreed, and Miyake's brief “Good” made her laugh.

They remained in the genkan while Miyake described her own albums in practical terms: photograph corners where she wanted prints removable, interleaving where surfaces might mark one another, guarded or hinged pages where thickness would otherwise distort the binding. Repair work started somewhere else. She first wanted to know what an object still needed to do.

“If a page is torn, I want it to turn again. If a photograph is loose, I want it held safely. If an old label is ugly but stable, I do not remove it because I dislike the handwriting.”

Kanno's eyes moved towards the generated Venus print inside the open archival box. “What if the repair becomes visible?”

“It often is. I am not very interested in fooling somebody into believing I was never there.” Miyake shrugged. “If new paper is needed, it is new paper. I choose something that works with the original. I do not stain it with tea and pretend it is eighty years old.”

The answer pleased Kanno quickly enough that she distrusted her own enthusiasm. Miyake noticed where she had looked and asked whether the box held the private photographs, adding at once that Kanno did not have to show her.

“I know.” The words came out sharper than intended, but Miyake only nodded.

Kanno looked at the closest print of Venera 14. She could invent a harmless origin for it—composite, film still, experimental work—but she did not want to begin this particular conversation by manufacturing a history simply to obtain paper advice.

“I may want to make a very small private set,” she said instead. “Three or four prints. I want them protected, and I want to be able to take them out later because I do not yet know what they are.”

“Then do not glue them into anything.” Miyake seemed surprised that this required emphasis. She recommended a box first, or corners in an album if sequence mattered, and suggested that Kanno make a more permanent decision after the photographs had annoyed her for longer.

Kanno glanced towards the box and said that was almost exactly the stage they had reached. Miyake regarded this as evidence that the photographs were functioning correctly.

The lift arrived farther down the corridor and opened for nobody. Kanno waited until its doors closed again, then asked whether Miyake would show her the albums sometime—repaired ones, ordinary ones, whatever she was comfortable showing. “I am interested in what you decide to leave visible.”

Miyake had apparently expected more questions about material and not a request to see the hobby itself. After a moment she nodded. “Come when I am not working. The table is small. Do not bring Thomas unless you want every tool identified.”

“I will consider that a condition of entry.”

The door to 203 opened before Miyake answered. Isha stepped into the corridor carrying her cardigan over one arm, with Saitō behind her and the photograph album tucked against Saitō's side.

“Kanno-san,” Saitō called, “your friend has moved my furniture and insulted my youth.”

“I did not insult it,” Isha said.

“You existed near it with those arms. That is sufficient.”

Miyake looked at Isha, then at Saitō's album. “You showed her photographs.”

“Evidence,” Saitō said.

Miyake's mouth moved slightly. “That word is dangerous around Kanno-san.”

For several seconds Kanno became the subject of three women's amusement in a corridor she did not live in. She accepted it with what dignity remained available.

In Tokyo, Thomas asked Matsuda what his company did when it needed a specialist supplier it had never used. Matsuda finally reached for his phone. References and written scope were only the beginning: he cared about whether a company stated what it would and would not do, how samples were identified while moving between hands, whether subcontracting was disclosed, what happened to residues, and whether the final report named methods as well as conclusions.

He stopped before the list became absurd. “I can ask one person at work which independent materials-testing companies they would trust enough to put on a project shortlist. I can also ask whether any of those firms accept private clients or can point to someone who does. I will not send them this.” He touched the closed folder. “And I will not say gold unless I need to.”

Thomas asked whether that put him in an awkward position. Matsuda shook his head. Asking a colleague how they found a testing company was normal; putting a friend's undocumented material through a corporate supplier relationship would be extremely abnormal. “I am offering the first thing.”

“Thank you.”

“You have spent months worrying about asking me this, haven't you?”

Thomas took too long to answer. Matsuda's expression barely changed. “That was not a difficult inference.”

He made only three notes on his phone: **independent testing**, **private clients**, **sample custody**. If he found a useful firm, Thomas wanted a name and a reason it was worth approaching, nothing more. Matsuda agreed to ask during the next day or two and put the phone away.

Thomas returned the folder to his bag. It contained exactly the same papers and seemed lighter anyway.

“Now,” Matsuda said, “we can return to the important problem.”

Thomas waited. It turned out to be the saucepan lid. He reminded Matsuda that he had bought it and had tested it in the shop. Matsuda's objection was immediate: he had tested the display pan, not his own. His own pan, he explained with complete seriousness, might have warped.

Thomas stared at him until Matsuda began to smile.