Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 15: The Nikko train
EMIKO
She’d had the Nikko trip scheduled for two months.
The Toshogu shrine archives held materials she’d been trying to access for a year through institutional channels, and the director of the archives had finally agreed to a research visit in June, which was a significant professional achievement and one she was not going to reschedule regardless of what else was happening in her life. She had three days, a research hotel room, and a list of specific documents she intended to examine.
She told Ken on a Wednesday and he said: “When?”
She said: “Next week. Monday through Wednesday.”
He said: “I’ll come.”
She looked at him.
He said: “The Toshogu archive has materials I’m familiar with. I can provide context that the archival record doesn’t.”
She said: “You’ve been to Toshogu.”
“Frequently,” he said. “Over several centuries.”
She thought about this. She thought about three days of research access with the primary source she’d been building her documentation from, in a location with significant historical material, with the primary source able to provide context for every document she found. She thought about the research value of this and she thought about the other value of it simultaneously, because she was doing that more now — holding both at once.
She said: “I’ll get you a hotel room.”
He said: “I don’t need a hotel room.”
“Where will you stay?”
He said: “The Nikko region has fox shrines. I have—” He considered the right word. “Affiliations.”
“Affiliations,” she repeated.
“Long-standing,” he said. “I haven’t been to the Nikko shrines in forty years but the affiliation is permanent. I can—”
“I’m getting you a hotel room,” she said.
He looked at her.
She said: “We’re going to be working until late every night. The archive access runs from nine to five, but I’ll be reviewing material in the evenings. If you’re staying at a fox shrine affiliation forty years out of maintenance—”
“It’s not out of maintenance—”
“Hotel room,” she said firmly. “Same hotel. I’m not going to be three conversations away from a research question while you’re at a shrine I can’t reach.”
He was quiet for a moment. She could see him processing this — not the logic of it, he’d processed the logic immediately, but something else, the thing that happened when she proposed a practical arrangement that had a practical logic and also a different kind of logic underneath.
He said: “All right.”
The train was four hours. She’d known this. She’d taken the Nikko shinkansen before, for previous research trips, and she’d always worked on the train — laptop or notebook, reviewing material for wherever she was going. She prepared for this trip the same way.
She reviewed the preparation for approximately forty minutes.
Then she closed the laptop, because the person across from her — he’d taken the window seat, which she hadn’t expected, it read as a small preference she hadn’t known he had — was looking at the landscape with the quality of attention he gave things he knew well and was revisiting after a long time, and she was more interested in that than in her preparation.
She said: “When were you last in Nikko?”
He said: “1982.”
“You said forty years.”
“1982 is approximately forty years from the current date.”
She wrote: *precision varies — note.* She said: “What were you doing in Nikko in 1982?”
He said: “Visiting the archives, actually. There was a renovation project — the shrine authority was cataloguing the Edo-period material and I wanted to ensure certain items were handled correctly.”
She said: “Were they?”
He said: “Mostly.” He paused. “There’s a scroll in the eastern archive that was placed in the wrong century in 1982. I tried to correct the attribution through available channels and was unsuccessful.”
She said: “What century is it?”
He said: “It’s attributed as mid-Edo. It’s early Kamakura.”
She pulled out her notebook. She said: “I’ll see it tomorrow. If you can describe the attribution details—”
He described them with the precision of someone who had been maintaining the error as a minor irritant for forty years. She wrote everything down.
She said: “That’s not going to be easy to correct through the archive channels. I’d need comparative material to challenge the existing attribution.”
He said: “I have comparative material.”
“At the shrine affiliations.”
“At the Yanaka shrine archive,” he said. “I’ll have it sent.”
She looked at him. She said: “You have an archive.”
“A private one,” he said. “Primarily my own documentation and the materials the district’s traditions have accumulated over several centuries.”
She said: “What’s in it?”
He said: “A great many things.”
She said: “I’m going to need to see it.”
He said: “I know you are.”
The train moved through the outskirts of Tokyo into the green of Kanto and she looked at the landscape and thought about the private archive and the Kamakura scroll and the forty years of an incorrect attribution and the man across from her who had tried to correct it through available channels and had been unsuccessful.
She said: “How often do you encounter that? Things recorded incorrectly.”
He said: “Often enough to have developed a specific irritation about it.”
“I have that irritation too,” she said. “From the other direction.”
He said: “The other direction.”
“I spend three years trying to document something correctly that the record has wrong,” she said. “You spend forty years trying to get the record to accept the correction from someone who was there.” She looked at him. “We have the same frustration from opposite ends.”
He was quiet for a moment. He said: “That’s accurate.”
She said: “I’m going to get that scroll reattributed.”
He said: “You’re very confident about the archive director’s receptivity.”
“I have the institutional credibility to introduce doubt,” she said. “That’s all attribution challenges require. Once there’s documented doubt, the evidence can speak.”
He looked at her with the expression she’d been cataloguing since the Matsuri — the not-expecting-this one. She was getting it a lot.
She said: “What?”
He said: “I tried for forty years.”
“You were working from outside the institutional framework,” she said. “I’m working from inside it. The position matters.” She paused. “Also I’ll have your comparative material.”
He said: “The institutional framework has annoyed me for two centuries.”
She said: “Then you’ll appreciate having someone on the inside.”
He turned to the window. After a moment she heard the sound she’d been cataloguing since week two — the contained almost-laugh, produced when she’d said something that he’d found specifically and genuinely funny. She had been tallying its occurrences. This was the eleventh.
She wrote: *11* in her notebook with a small notation.
She looked out the window at the landscape moving past and thought that four hours was a very good length for a train journey and that she was going to correct the Kamakura scroll attribution and then she was going to examine what else was in his archive that had been incorrectly recorded.
There was going to be a great deal.
She was already looking forward to it.
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