By the time she took her surname from a marriage that would not last, Saeko had become a local fixture among flea markets and tiny secondhand stores. People came to her when analog gear failed: a tape that stretched, a VCR that refused to thread, a datastream lost to static. She had a reputation for coaxing ghosts out of old recordings — a radio interview from 1979, a children’s program wiped by a station and saved only in a consumer copy, a wedding filmed on a camcorder whose battery leaked acid into the battery compartment. She repaired what she could and digitized the rest, carefully cataloging metadata on index cards and, later, on an aging laptop.