Makoto Inaba, an oil painting student on leave from an art university in Kyoto, joins a team tasked with reproducing and restoring an ancient set of fusuma paintings created by Yukika Hirano, a female painter from the Edo period. Of the original twelve panels depicting birds and flowers, only nine survive. Together with two graduate students specializing in art restoration, Makoto works to reconstruct the missing three panels through research and imagination. This moving novel, winner of the 16th Kadokawa Haruki Novel Award, delicately captures both the anguish and joy of creative work.

To replicate not just the image, but the emotion the original evokes — that was the extraordinarily demanding art of restorative reproduction.