Except they weren’t. If anything, the obedience presented in the handwriting contradicted the nature of what they wrote.

  The notes he came across were varied: a list of character names, locations, and half-sketched outlines of what resembled story ideas bubbling to the surface. A handful of references to Japanese folklore and monsters, such as the Baku. Perhaps it was the way they fell out of the books, he felt as though he’d tumbled into the scatterings of a person’s mind.

  He stopped after the twelfth book. Combing through another person’s possessions wasn’t his thing. He couldn’t throw them away either. Ran willed himself to pack everything back in the box and brought it home before he could change his mind.

  18

  “Please tell me I’m not hearing things,” said Hayato.

  The childhood best friends caught up over coffee at Mugino for the first time since Eizo graduated from Keio. Eizo recounted what happened with Suigetsu and his mother’s abrupt return, along with his many encounters with a certain prickly editor, such as their terse dinner and the short story he’d written as payback. He conveniently left the rest out of the conversation. Hayato didn’t need to know those trivialities.

  “I’m really curious what Ran looks like,” Hayato pondered. “Maybe I should drop by Suigetsu next week.”

  “Trying to sneak out of your grown-up job to catch a whiff of that runt?” Eizo asked, stirring his iced long black.

  “It’s interesting. I haven’t seen someone get you under the collar like this.”

  “He did not.”

  “You used your grown-up job to get back at him.”

  “You think so?”

  Hayato looked at him, eyes narrowing. “Why not? You’re getting paid for something you worked hard for. Of course it’s a job.”

  Eizo had known Hayato since they were six. They grew up in the same neighborhood in the west of Minato, attended the same schools and then studied at Keio. Where Eizo had spent all his time on baseball, Hayato was engaged in Toastmasters clubs. In high school, he’d founded a Governance and International Relations Society, combing through post-WWII global armament treaties and putting up new positions to the local government. Eizo always marveled at how Hayato’s eyesight stayed 6/6, despite the large volume of documents he read in tiny print.

  Hayato graduated as the valedictorian of the class of 2021, majoring in Politics and International Relations. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs scooped him up for a key role in trade matters related to technology exports. Hayato was always calm and sensible, forming his opinions from a broad perspective and stepping back to the heart of the issue when things became entangled.

  Eizo should have known that Hayato would use their conversation to address a fact he had almost forgotten.

  “You realize that you’ll be working closely with Ran for the next three years? That can’t be the first thing you do to your professional relationship,” Hayato said. “You’re jeopardizing your future.”

  “He isn’t the only editor in Suigetsu.”

  “There’s a reason Suigetsu chose him to manage your project. If you lose him, it will affect your work. Are you sure about this?”

  Eizo hadn’t thought that far. He supposed that, like with any service, editors would be replaceable. Ran was replaceable. So was he.

  “I read up on Suigetsu and Konishi Kisuke when I was on the flight home. How he grew them from a small printing press into what they are today. I looked him up and, boy, all I can say is, if I didn’t have a study bond, I would have quit MOFA and talked my way into becoming his assistant.”

  “He impressed you that much?”

  Hayato gave it some thought. “I would say it’s his sense of timing. Some people know when and how to move each chess piece on the board. I recall reading somewhere that he managed close to a trillion yen of assets before he left the Saiji Group.”

  Eizo knew that too. He also knew that if he had half of Konishi Kisuke’s intellect, he wouldn’t be stuck in this rut.

  “Do you think he knew your mother?” Hayato asked.

  “Doubt it. She joined after he left.”

  Hayato did the sums in his head. “You’re right.” He stirred his iced oat latte with the straw and took a sip. “Speaking of which, does your mother know you are writing again?”

  “Soon, I guess.”

  “You don’t plan to tell her?”

  “If it happens, it happens. Besides, I’m almost done writing Wizard, and she doesn’t know a thing.”

  “You’re comparing apples to oranges. Suigetsu will definitely launch a robust marketing campaign in June. If she finds out then, wouldn’t that be worse?”

  “I’ll manage just fine,” Eizo insisted. “Both the writing and the MBA. She won’t hear a peep of this unless I reveal myself.”

  Hayato leaned back in his chair, rocking the ice cubes in his drink absentmindedly. “Is that why you didn’t think twice before giving Ran that story? Because you have the MBA as a backup?”

  Eizo had bashed out the smutty tale in one night, his mind ablaze in a pit of spite and cinders as his fingers flitted across the keyboard. No outline, no notes, not even a character map to get him started. Everything he wanted to write was all in his head. He didn’t even review the manuscript to catch typos or grammar mistakes. It was Eizo in his purest, unfiltered form. He was sure the document was error-riddled, but that didn’t matter. He needed to get it out in the shortest time possible, and in his furious chase for victory, he’d forgotten many, many things. Such as consequences.

  As Hayato sat before him, his gaze kind yet unyielding, Eizo felt the crushing impact of his actions from the past few weeks. How easily they could unravel what he had been planning.

  “Even if you don’t like Ran, consider that Konishi must value him enough to lead your project,” Hayato said. “You should make up with him before things go sour. He’s your editor. He holds the fate of your work in his hands, and he’s closer to Konishi than you are. What if he brings up the story you wrote to Konishi? In any other office setting, he could charge you,”—his voice dipped into a hush—“with sexual harassment.”

  Eizo avoided his friend’s gaze.

  “You have to apologize right away.”

  At Eizo’s silence, Hayato repeated himself. “If Ran speaks first, you’re as good as gone. You signed the contract, but they can take it away too. I’m sure any decent publisher would have terms and conditions laid out to protect their employees.” Hayato dropped his voice, barely concealing his growing chagrin at Eizo’s actions. “Ran is an employee of Suigetsu. You’re not.”

  If Hayato was right, then Eizo’s career as an author was at risk before it even took off. He would be liable for damages if he had caused the contract revocation. Eizo didn’t have the means to pay Suigetsu. He sure as hell wouldn’t touch the Kamadas’ money—he refused to owe his mother a single cent, and he made sure of it when he turned nineteen and secured a baseball scholarship to fund his Keio education.

  Eizo hadn’t sipped his coffee since it was served. The more he reflected on his actions, the deeper his regret grew. Why hadn’t he spoken to Hayato first? Writing that dreadful story was one thing; doing what he’d done to Ran was another. He buried his face in his hands, and a memory surfaced. How he had cornered Ran at his door. How he’d whispered in a voice he never would have imagined using, hot lips that brushed the shell of Ran’s ear, claiming that he wanted to taste the editor, to lick clean every inch of his body. He certainly didn’t need to recall how Ran smelled—clean and earthy, like a forest at dawn, where dewdrops clung moistly to the leaves of cypress trees.

  He was appalled at what he had just thought.

  Appalled at the version of himself who had even made that thought fathomable.

  If their positions were reversed and Ran had done that to him, he would have sworn revenge on his family and three generations of descendants.

  Eizo was grateful that Ran was a wimp who couldn’t even stand having his hand held. If Ran had raised the tension, how far would Eizo go to make him surrender? Eizo hadn’t even kissed anyone before. Was he willing to surrender it to a foul-mouthed, stink-face asshole who knew only violence and insults?

  He had sealed his victory. It was time to scale back the fun and get serious about work.

  “Eizo,” Hayato said with his trademark earnestness. He seemed to sense his best friend’s shift toward repentance. “Do the right thing.”

  * * *

  After lunch, Eizo texted Goro to ask what Ran liked most.

  That man loves tea, Goro replied. He likes the blend at this Ginza shop. I can’t remember the name. It’s French. Has a black swan as its logo. Noir something?

  Eizo knew which one it was. Le Cygne Noir. Kamada Kiko, influenced by her parents, liked it too. She often bought their specialty blends as gifts for her clients.

  Goro added, if you really want to please him, get him Darjeeling. First flush. Make sure you get the young buds. He’s very particular about them. If you get the wrong one, he’ll throw it back in your face and maybe kick you for wasting his time.

  The agent’s choice of words was weird—please him?—but Eizo didn’t dwell on them. If asked, he could explain that he wanted to build camaraderie within the team. If pressed, he could admit that he wished for Ran to play favorites and prioritize his manuscript over other projects.

  The tea salon was five minutes from Ginza Station. He had been there several times as a child. Until he entered junior high, his mother would bring him there in the last week of every quarter. She didn’t need to be there to pick up her orders, since the shop could arrange delivery. But she wanted everyone to see her son and have them praise him for being such an obedient child, trooping along to help his mother with her shopping bags.

  It had been over ten years since Eizo had stepped inside Le Cygne Noir. The shop was now more spacious, with round counters embellished with black marble and gold etchings of its logo. On each counter were displays of teapots and golden- and silver-glazed teacups, set among palm-sized bone china dishes showcasing the shop’s iconic teas.

  The shelves used to be packed more closely together, with boxes of muslin tea bags arranged on tables pushed against the wall. A cramped shop floor made worse by diners from the second floor coming down to pay their bills. Kamada Kiko would take her time browsing the teas, her smile beautiful and warm as she directed it at the staff who had fulfilled her last-minute orders.

  Eizo recalled how his young self would stand in a corner, trying his best to avoid knocking into shoppers who dressed to the nines and spoke in a manner as refined as the tea they drank. Every ounce of contact meant he’d need to apologize with a slight bow of his head, even if it wasn’t his fault. Proper manners, as he was taught. Or maybe it was his fault—occupying space in a place where he had no business being.

  “Ah, you must be Mrs. Kamada’s son,” the shop staff greeted him when he walked in. He introduced himself as Kozawa and thanked Eizo for their family’s patronage over the years. “Are you here to pick up something for your mother? She placed an order with us recently.”

  Of course, they knew him. If they knew Kamada Kiko, who wore her looks well into her early fifties, they could easily identify him—the son who bore a striking resemblance to his mother. Eizo made a mental note to avoid returning here.

  “Actually, I’m here to get something for my grandfather,” Eizo said, a practiced smile forming on his lips like clockwork. “Do you have first flush Darjeeling?”

  Kozawa bowed his head. “Sorry, we ran out of that. New stock came in last week, and we’re already sold out. We’re still waiting for new shipments from our Paris office.”

  Eizo scanned the rows of tea canisters the size of pails in the wooden grid behind the counter. His mother once told him that the popular varieties within most people’s budgets took center stage. Near the back door, however, were exclusive blends—rare teas that could cost up to 75,000 yen for two ounces, often reserved for those on the velvet list—such as the well-heeled Kamadas, who didn’t blink an eye when dropping a million yen on tea each time.

  “If you want to show staff who don’t know you that you’re on the list, tell them you want that one.” His mother had pointed to an unlabeled canister in the top right corner of the grid. Most people would crane their necks to glimpse it. Not Eizo.

  Kozawa tracked his line of sight and retrieved a cream-colored canister the size of a hand from the backroom. Marked as SFTGFOP1, the canister had a black swan carved on the lid, the outline of its wings dipped in gold.

  “Brumes D’Himalaya Summer Flush.” Kozawa proudly displayed it on the counter. “Special Finest Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe 1. Our highly exclusive Himalayan Mists, produced on the renowned Ambootia Estate in the misty Darjeeling mountains. The plucking of the buds occurs only in the evening, under a rising moon.”

  Eizo vaguely recalled that the 1 stood for the first production of the year.

  “The harvest is minimal this year because of climate factors. Only six came to Tokyo, and this is the last one for the year.”

  Eizo smiled in response, offering assurance to Kozawa that he could afford it despite his young age.

  “I’ll take it,” he said at last. “Only the best for my grandfather.”

  Kozawa held the paper bag containing the tea, worth over 90,000 yen, and handed it to Eizo with both hands, bowing at the entrance.

  “If my mother comes by, please mention nothing about this,” Eizo said. “It’s a surprise.”

  Unlike young Eizo, who had felt bored but couldn’t leave, Eizo left the shop in under fifteen minutes.

  19

  Miyamoto Ran was brewing the perfect cup of Darjeeling summer flush from Le Cygne Noir on a perfect Saturday afternoon.

  He followed the instructions and steeped the white buds in water off the boil for three minutes. Since it was his first time trying the highly exclusive tea, he limited the first drink to a single serving of leaves, wanting to draw out the desired flavor as he experimented with steeping times. Timing was crucial for first flush teas. It was better to taste it with a short steep first, then gradually adjust the duration to suit his taste buds.

  His cell phone didn’t ring. Neither did his doorbell. Neither had he seen his neighbor for a week after the salacious moves he’d put on him.

  Ran had cleared his deadlines and handed back marked-up manuscripts to the authors ahead of time. He didn’t set a specific timeline for their return with revisions. Those usually took two to three months, and with the festive season approaching, he wouldn’t expect them to reply before the New Year.

  At last, he could turn his full attention to New World. He had been relatively absent before, leaving most of the work to Reika and Takeru. Not the best way to handle a project, especially one he needed to succeed to stand a chance of managing Ido. But with the onslaught of manuscripts sent his way and timelines that drained him more than usual, there wasn’t much he could do. Thankfully, his juniors took to instruction well and were conscientious in their work, although he nagged them several times not to become too chummy with their authors. For example, Kamada Eizo. That man definitely wasn’t who he appeared to be.

  Eizo disliked him. Probably hated him. He wanted to fight him, and even that was an understatement. Whatever Eizo felt toward him was born from spite and vengeance and something Ran couldn’t quite pinpoint yet. He could trace it back to the start, when their eyes had met at the traffic junction for the first time. Ran had been his usual self, albeit more annoyed than normal, but Eizo exuded pure fear. If he had done nothing wrong, why did he look as if he were being stripped down to his core in the middle of the street? Ran had seen that same expression on his mother’s face before, when he returned home from school earlier than usual and caught her packing her bags, to which she had claimed she was only going to a friend’s place for an overnight chat, but the amount of clothes she had packed could last her a week or more.

  Ran pulled out a chair and watched the kitchen timer tick down. He’d ignored Eizo for the past two weeks, not because he wanted to punish him. Human Resources delayed hiring, so he had no choice but to continue covering the fast-growing fair-play mystery genre, which he didn’t enjoy at all. He wanted something grittier, featuring a protagonist who was morally upright but continually challenged by circumstances to change himself. Those titles never seemed to come to him, just as Ido had yet to go to him.

  Besides, there were a thousand and one ways to kill someone in cold blood without damaging his professional reputation. Kamada Eizo was within reach, although he disappeared for lengths of time. Two weeks ago, he’d achieved corporeal form to make a nuisance of himself, and now he reverted to an apparition, one that briefly haunted Ran’s existence nine days ago when he came home to find a paper bag from Le Cygne Noir at his door. Tagged to the tea canister was a note in the ugliest handwriting known to mankind, the same font used on the manila envelope containing the pornographic story. Ran took a few attempts before he could decipher Eizo’s words:

  You’re right. I’m a stupid seaweed. Please accept this as a token of my apology. I won’t do it again. Promise.

  Unlike the parcel unceremoniously dumped at his door two months ago, Ran took an immediate liking to the tea. He brought it inside and displayed the black lacquered canister on his shelf. He did not know how Eizo had obtained the rare tea, or even knew that he liked Darjeeling to begin with. At first, Ran was paranoid, wondering whether Eizo knew more about him than he should. Still, for someone who hadn’t even realized that he had a parcel of books missing, Eizo had been incredibly lucky to walk into the tea salon and nab one off the shelf like that.

  By now, it was clear to Ran that the misdelivery was accidental. He wasn’t sure before, but looking at Eizo’s frightfully ugly scrawl, the sender—Yasuda—probably mistook ‘6’ for ‘5’ as they wrote it on the mailing slip. Ran thought of the jagged sheets wedged inside the cram school texts, written in a controlled, almost delicate, manner that stayed within the page’s lanes. In contrast, the handwriting on the apology note belonged to someone who scribbled between the lines however they liked. What could have happened between then and now for someone’s handwriting to change this drastically?