The study before dawn was quietly cold. Mayuko still hadn't closed the diary. The LED lantern cast a small circle of light across the desk. Within that circle, a leather-bound notebook lay open. Pages darkened by water damage. The remnants of characters eaten away by insects. Mayuko's fingertips traced the legible words again and again. This was the third time today. A single phrase: "escape." That alone existed quietly in the light. What occupied her mind was a scene from the library yesterday. The quality of that silence when Aoi had said, "There are things that must not be spoken of." It wasn't a silence chosen by her own will. Something older, heavier, lay beneath the words. Not unwilling to speak, but unable to speak. That distinction wouldn't leave her head. There was something connecting the Saegusa and Kigata families that stretched back a hundred years. Aoi knew what that "something" was. But Mayuko couldn't even grasp its outline yet. An unnamed death notice in a local newspaper from Taisho 13. "Accidental death, one fatality." That was all. (There's too little information.) Mayuko thought this, yet she couldn't bring herself to close the diary. Closing the pages felt like ending something. She couldn't explain why. She simply felt it that way. The window outside was beginning to lighten, just barely. --- With the dawn, Mayuko left the study. The Kigata mansion's garden was wrapped in morning mist. The ridgeline of Senrei Mountain dissolved into the thin gray sky. Night dew remained on the grass, and with each step Mayuko took, the soles of her shoes grew damp. The air of late October morning was cold enough to sting slightly when drawn in through the mouth. Since moving into the mansion, she'd developed a habit of walking the garden once each morning. There was no clear reason for it. Simply, there was a sense that living in an old building meant knowing its exterior as well. It wasn't something her mother had said. Mayuko had learned it naturally here. She circled the fountain basin and walked along the Kigata hedge. The thorns of the trifoliate orange caught the morning mist and gleamed. Past a section where the old iron fence had partially collapsed and remained unrepaired, a dried well came into view at the back of the grounds. The stone well had been dug during the Meiji period, according to the real estate documents. Approximately six meters deep. Now it was dry, with sediment accumulated at the bottom. Mayuko always passed by it without ever facing it directly. This morning, for some reason, she placed her hand on it. The stone at the well's rim was cool against her fingertips. A sensation mixing the morning's chill with the stone's coldness. Mayuko slid her fingers across the surface horizontally, slowly circling the rim. Moss and weathering had made the surface uneven. Her fingertip caught on something. She stopped and withdrew her hand. She touched the same spot again. It was a thin line. Mayuko leaned closer. On the outer face of the well's rim, a line ran across the stone's surface. Not just one. Several lines were carved at regular intervals. They looked like the remnants of weathered characters, or like marks where something had been intentionally carved. She couldn't determine which. Was it a natural crack, or something carved by human hands? Mayuko pulled out her notebook from her backpack. Suspending judgment while recording was also a form of investigative integrity—words her mother had spoken. In front of old maps in the university research room. When Mayuko had asked, "What does this mark mean?" her mother had said before answering, "First, copy it as it is." Don't rush to interpret. Preserve what you see exactly as you see it. That's the first task. Mayuko drew those words from her chest today as well—her methodology for solitary investigation. She traced the shape of the lines in her notebook with a pencil. The curve's character, the spacing, the overall length. As she drew, yesterday's events flickered through her mind. When Aoi had closed the photo album in the library, he'd said, "You're thorough." Just that—a short phrase. Not an evaluation or praise, but simply words spoken directly from what entered his eyes, in that tone of his. Mayuko looked up from her notebook. The morning mist had thinned slightly. (Focus.) She told herself this and returned her gaze to the notebook. She looked down at the lines she'd copied. The meaning was still unclear. But she'd recorded it. That was enough for this morning. --- Before noon, Mayuko visited a private home about five minutes' walk from the Kigata mansion. Isayama Tokuzo—an elderly man who had lived in Hirageshioka for over forty years and was once the person living closest to the Kigata mansion. Mayuko had found this noted in the remarks column of an old residential map she'd seen in the library's reading room. When she'd confirmed with Librarian Tsukishiro, she'd been told, "Isayama-san still lives in that house." Adding, "Though he may not speak much about things." It was an old wooden house. A persimmon tree stood in the garden, orange fruit still remaining on its branches. The gate was open. When Mayuko pressed the intercom, after a moment the front sliding door opened. An elderly man emerged. Probably in his eighties. White hair cut short, wearing thin-colored work clothes. His footing was slightly unsteady. The moment he saw Mayuko, his eyes narrowed. "...The child from the Kigata mansion?" It was phrased as a question, but he showed no sign of waiting for an answer. The old man wasn't looking at Mayuko's face, but at what lay behind her—the direction of the Kigata mansion. "Yes." Mayuko answered. "...Come inside." --- She was shown to the veranda. The old man sat down in a position facing the persimmon tree in the garden and gestured for Mayuko to sit as well. Tea was brought. The teacup was warm. Silence continued. Isayama showed no sign of speaking. Mayuko wasn't in a hurry either. A white-eye perched on the persimmon tree outside the window and remained motionless for a while. Mayuko opened her mouth after the white-eye flew away. "A diary was hidden behind the bookshelf in the study." The old man's shoulders moved slightly. Mayuko didn't press him. She didn't ask, "Do you know something?" or "What happened in that house?" She simply stated the facts. And after a brief pause, she added just one more thing. "I thought that if someone took the trouble to write something down, perhaps they wanted someone to read it." The old man didn't respond. His gaze remained on the garden, utterly still. But Mayuko could tell that his silence had changed. The silence from before was like a wall facing outward. Now something was moving inside it. "...There was a young man." The old man's voice was low and dry. "From the Kigata house. With a woman of different station. It didn't end well." That was all. The old man kept his gaze on the garden and closed his mouth. It was the kind of closing that meant nothing more would come. Mayuko caught quietly on the passivity of the phrase "didn't end well." Who did what to whom? What wasn't "well"? Was it intentionally vague, or did the old man himself not know the details? As she wrote that very ambiguity into her notebook, Mayuko didn't press further. (Ambiguity itself is information.) She preserved the outline of the testimony in its original form. That was the only integrity she could manage now. --- The next day, Mayuko went to the library carrying Isayama's words. Aoi was already in the local history materials room. Several files were already stacked at the end of the long table. When Mayuko opened the door, Aoi looked up. Indigo two-block hair. Cool silver eyes. The silver ear cuff on his left ear caught the light streaming through the window. "Were you able to ask?" A short question. Mayuko had told him yesterday about her plan to visit Isayama. "Just a little." Mayuko sat down across from him and opened her notebook. "A young man. A woman of different station. It didn't end well."—she read the words she'd transcribed, exactly as they were. Something passed across Aoi's expression. It wasn't surprise. It wasn't denial. It was the quiet tension of someone whose existing knowledge had been confirmed from outside—that kind of face. Mayuko saw it and held her breath slightly. (He does know, after all.) Aoi said nothing. Instead, he pulled one file from the stack. The management records of the Kigata Silk Mill—the Kigata family's factory that had employed over a hundred female workers in Hirageshioka during the Taisho period. It was restricted material that Librarian Tsukishiro had permitted, and Aoi had applied for access. The two of them sat side by side and turned the pages. The records from Taisho 11 through 13 were orderly. Wage ledgers, raw material purchase records, equipment repair expenses. But from the latter half of Taisho 13, it began to fall apart. Multiple irregular expenditure items appeared. Large amounts, vague descriptions of purpose. And after Taisho 15, the records themselves ceased. "The factory closed in Taisho 15." Mayuko spoke, comparing the numbers in the materials with facts she'd confirmed at the library yesterday. "The records began to deteriorate in the latter half of Taisho 13. The death notice in the Hokureirei Daily—the local paper at the time—appeared the same year." "I don't think the factory's decline was a management problem. Something happened, and the family collapsed. That was the order of things." Aoi didn't respond. He simply closed the materials' pages quietly. Within that motion, Mayuko felt both affirmation and denial. He was acknowledging it, but not confirming it. That was the shape of his silence. This time too, she didn't press further. Not because she couldn't ask, but because she judged this wasn't the time to ask yet. Autumn light slanted through the window. The shadows of the two of them overlapped and stretched across the table. When Mayuko glanced up, Aoi was also looking in the same direction—at the row of privet trees outside the window. For a moment, their eyes met. From neither direction in particular, the gaze broke. Mayuko drew a short, meaningless line in her notebook. (What was that?) She tried to tell herself it was the tension of the investigation. But that didn't quite work. It didn't work well enough to say so with certainty. Something deep in her chest beat strangely for just one beat. That alone left Mayuko slightly confused. --- Near evening, even after Aoi left the materials room first, Mayuko remained alone, still examining the photo album. A photo album from the Taisho period—one of the local history materials held by the Hirageshioka Town Library, containing record photographs of the town taken from the late Meiji through early Showa periods—contained a group photograph of the Kigata Silk Mill. A single sepia-toned image. Over a hundred female workers stood in two rows. The horizontal banner read "Taisho 11 Kigata Silk Mill Complete Photograph." Mayuko's eyes stopped at the edge of the photograph. Slightly apart from the rows of female workers, there was a group of four or five people. Presumably the factory owner's family. Two men in Western dress, one woman in a kimono, and—at the very edge of the row, a young man was photographed. It was the moment when Isayama's words "young man" overlapped with vision for the first time. Mayuko leaned closer to the photograph. He appeared to be in his early twenties. White shirt, thin necktie. He was facing the camera, but his gaze was slightly averted from it. While the other people faced straight ahead, only this man was turned slightly to the side. But there was no name listed in the caption. "Taisho 11 Factory Complete" was all it said. (Is this person connected to whoever wrote the diary?) She didn't know. But she could pose the question. Th