Furutani had been drafted for the day — one of those volunteers who shows up when the town hall needs help clearing out a storage room.
The “Sky Color Reports” were something most people had never heard of. The filing system started sometime in the Showa era. Each form had two fields: a date, and a color. You submitted it to the Environmental Affairs window. At peak, eleven residents in town were filing them. By the last decade, it was down to one — Furutani’s great-grandmother, and nobody else.
Four cardboard boxes. Each one had a year range written on the back in marker. Furutani had been asked to carry them to the disposal bin.
“Are all of these hers?”
Miyashita, the clerk working through the ledger beside him, glanced up and nodded. “Fifty years’ worth. Every single day. Rain, typhoons, didn’t matter.”
Whether anyone had actually read the submissions was another question. Miyashita herself had only learned about them during handover — a passing remark: that one’s already stopped.
Furutani opened one of the boxes. Loose sheets of rough paper, the kind schools used to use. Every page the same handwriting, one line each: a date, then a color name. Navy. Navy. Navy. Gray. Off-white. Navy. Pale navy. Fifty years of sky, in his great-grandmother’s careful, slightly slanted script.
She had evidently developed her own vocabulary. Plain “blue” never appeared once. Instead: pale navy, lead navy, ash white, ink wash, vermillion gray. He pictured her paging through a color dictionary somewhere, looking for the right word.
He stopped turning pages. Somewhere in the middle of the fifty years, there was a blank. The date was filled in. The color was not. The day before: navy. The day after: navy. Just that one in the middle, white.
Miyashita leaned over to look.
“Oh. That’s probably…” She trailed off. “The day she passed, I’d guess.”
Furutani said nothing. He closed the box. He was lifting it toward the disposal bin when the phone rang — the landline, somewhere in the back of the storage room.
Miyashita answered. A short exchange. She pressed her hand over the receiver and turned around.
“Furutani — hold on a second. There’s a professor on the line. He’s asking if we still have the original Sky Color Report records. Says they should be kept here.”
Furutani stood there, box in hand.
“He’s saying it’s…” Miyashita’s voice came from somewhere far away. “The only continuous half-century observation record of its kind in Japan.”
One of the fluorescent tubes had been out for a while. The remaining two flickered in the dust.
Furutani set the box back down. He opened the lid and took the top sheet — his great-grandmother’s last entry, he figured. The same precise handwriting, one word: navy.
He looked out the window.
The sky was the same color.