Chapter 10
The Woman on the Screen
Setsuko Endo answered from a kitchen with a green clock on the wall.
Imani noticed the clock first because she had imagined a studio. The imagined room had been full of brushes, paper, and the authority of an artist whose work had crossed an ocean. The real room contained a dish towel, a bowl of oranges, and a nephew apologizing for the camera angle.
Setsuko told him to stop moving the computer.
Then she saw Aiko.
For a long moment, neither woman spoke.
“Your hair,” Setsuko said at last.
“Yours too,” Aiko replied.
They laughed, then cried without trying to disguise either.
Naoko waited. Imani looked down at her notes so the reunion would not feel watched.
When Setsuko was ready, she asked to see the current photographs. Her nephew opened them on another screen.
She studied each in silence.
At the fifth panel, she leaned closer.
“No,” she said. “That bird is someone else's bird.”
Naoko asked what she remembered of the original work.
Setsuko described making the screen with three colleagues in nineteen eighty three. Toru Fujita had built the wooden structures. Michi Arai had contributed the patterned passages inspired by cloth. Yasue Noda had developed much of the color work and painted sections beside Setsuko. Masaru Endo had handled the workshop's business, supplied finishing labor, and organized the exchange.
“He worked,” she said firmly. “Don't correct one unfairness by inventing another. But he did not paint this alone.”
Imani wrote the names carefully.
The panels had gone to Willow House under an arrangement involving exhibition, community fundraising, and several parties' contributions. Setsuko did not claim that memory alone could establish every later right. She asked for the agreements rather than an opportunity to declare ownership on camera.
“I wanted people to sit beside them,” she said. “Not necessarily to speak softly.”
Aiko showed the old dinner photograph. Setsuko pointed at a child with a paper crane on his head and began laughing again.
“He refused to take it off.”
“That was Lena's cousin,” Aiko said.
“Was it? He'd be grown now.”
“Very.”
The years entered the room in ordinary details, not a speech about heritage.
Setsuko asked to see the exhibition program before discussing the disputed letter. Her nephew enlarged the cover, and she smiled at the lettering.
“Toru hated that typeface.”
“He said it looked like a shoe advertisement,” Aiko replied.
“He said everything looked like a shoe advertisement.”
Yasue's name entered the conversation when Setsuko remembered the program's blue border. Yasue had mixed a color for the screen that the printer could not reproduce. She complained, then decided the printed mistake looked better on paper than her first choice would have.
“We changed our minds,” Setsuko said. “Please include that if anyone begins describing us as people born knowing exactly what to make.”
Naoko made a note and asked which records might document the sequence.
The nephew mentioned boxes stored in a room above the old business premises. Some had been inventoried. Others contained household papers mixed with workshop records. He would need permission and help to identify what could be shared.
Imani listened while they arranged a next step instead of demanding every page by morning.
At the edge of her screen, Aiko had begun folding the corner of a napkin. Imani recognized the gesture from difficult days in the shop. She moved a blank pad nearer without speaking. Aiko used it to write down a date she wanted checked, then placed the napkin flat.
The room became easier to breathe in when remembering did not have to mean remembering perfectly. All the people on the call could correct one another, ask for a pause, and still remain welcome at the table when they returned to the question.
When Imani introduced herself, Setsuko asked why she had learned Japanese.
“Aiko had biscuits,” Imani said.
“An expensive habit, apparently.”
Everyone laughed, including Imani, who had begun to fear she would be expected to represent something larger than herself.
Setsuko gave permission for relevant workshop records to be copied through the agreed channels. She also asked them not to use her age as a reason to hurry her answers or present her as the last fragile keeper of a secret.
“Yasue is alive,” she said. “And she will tell you when I'm wrong.”
After the call, Aiko remained seated before the blank screen.
“I should have written,” she said.
Imani began to reassure her, then stopped.
“Would you like to write now?”
Aiko looked up.
“Yes.”
Imani found paper. She did not draft the letter for her. She moved the kettle closer and sat at the other end of the table, working on a list of questions they still could not answer.
For the first time, the list felt like an invitation rather than an obstacle.