Chapter 4: Haruka, 1969 — The Fishery Recruitment

The conference room on the fourth floor of the Osaka Prefectural University's humanities building smelled of old paper and the particular staleness that accumulated when too many cigarettes had been smoked too close to too many books over too many years. It was November, nineteen sixty-nine, and the heating system had not yet been persuaded to operate, and the sixteen scholars gathered for the Regional Folklore Studies Symposium on Ritual Practice and Coastal Topography were still wearing their coats.

Haruka was twenty-two years old. She was not, technically, supposed to be presenting.

The paper had been submitted under her supervisor's name — Professor Ikeda, who had then developed a convenient chest cold and sent his most difficult graduate student in his place, either as punishment or because he had read the paper carefully enough to understand that it was not, in the end, his paper at all. The methodology was his name on the cover page and nothing else. The argument, the three years of field recordings, the frequency analysis conducted on borrowed equipment in a borrowed lab at eleven o'clock on successive Tuesday nights — that was hers. She had the cassette tapes in a bag under her chair and the handwritten calculations folded into the breast pocket of her coat, and when she stood up to present, the room's attention shifted in the particular way attention shifted when it recognized, with mild surprise, that something real was about to happen.