Tamio takes Itsuko to an art gallery and, low and behold, the two find that the award-winning painting is a nude portrait of Miwako, Itsuko's mother who disappeared twenty years ago when she was just a baby. No one knows the first thing about the artist who painted it, but he goes by the name Shiro Sofue (Shigeru Amachi), and he's the dude always wearing shades in the daytime and accompanied by a dwarf sidekick he calls "Tiny." Shiro's real name is Nobutaka Takenaka and he's not quite human.