A fellow Tokyo Tech student, Sawakita Shin majored in Computer Science with a minor in business administration, so his career prospects were promising. His income, if he worked in technology management, was more than enough to supplement Aiko’s fluctuating earnings as a fashion stylist for women’s magazines. Aiko also took it upon herself to style their wardrobes, tearing through Ran’s small closet, determined to throw everything out. She couldn't let her Aniki continue to dress sloppily in long-sleeved t-shirts and pants.

  “I can never fault your face. But your outfits are disastrous,” Aiko complained. “Please never wear red with blue. You look like a whiteboard marker.”

  “They’re cheap and comfortable,” Ran insisted. “And who’s going to pay for these clothes you keep sending pictures of?”

  “You, of course, once you make adult money. I’ll take you shopping, and we’ll get you nice clothes. Everyone’s going to make googly eyes at you.”

  “Tell them to fuck right off.”

  “I’ll call you Aniki in front of everyone,” Aiko threatened. “Aniki, not Oniisan.”

  “Don’t you dare.”

  “How are you going to find your soulmate then? The law of attraction applies to everyone, even soulmates!” Aiko cried. “Stop making me worry about you.”

  Ran relented—not because he wanted to find his soulmate or anything remotely close to that, but because Aiko was a horrible nag and wouldn’t stop spamming him with images and links to sartorial articles.

  What started when he turned twenty-six became an annual tradition. Aiko would drag him and Shin out to shop for an entire weekend. From the tree-lined avenues at Aoyama to the neon-lit facades of Shibuya, they bounced in and out of boutiques from morning to night, until his limbs were sore from changing in and out of clothes. He usually ended up with three sets, which was enough to dent his monthly budget.

  Ran disliked spending money on frivolous things like fashion, so he worked hard to maintain his physique despite his increasing workload. His clothes still had to fit even when he reached his forties and, dare he hope, his fifties. Shin, however, was more than happy to indulge her. With his income as a software developer at an American tech firm, he could well afford to. More importantly, Shin could give her a home, one where she truly belonged.

  * * *

  Shin had to leave after lunch to pick up some files from his office at Shibuya Sky. Since they had a few hours until evening, Aiko made Ran accompany her to buy a gift for her prospective father-in-law.

  “The next time we go on our annual pilgrimage to Aoyama, I’ll be a Sawakita.” Aiko’s cheeks flushed with pride. Women typically took their husbands' family name upon marriage. Aiko would enter Shin’s family registry and become a permanent part of the Sawakita lineage.

  “You will have a proper family,” Ran said.

  “Will have?” Aiko glared. “Don’t make me call you Aniki in the middle of the street.”

  “Your family has grown,” Ran corrected himself. “Happy?”

  “Much better,” she said. “It’ll be best if you aren’t always working and could spare some time to find someone.”

  “I’m fine on my own.”

  Aiko glanced over impishly. “I envy Onodera Shiho. Faceless, yet she’s got my Big Brother working so hard all these years just for a glimpse of her.”

  “It’s her book I’m interested in.”

  “What if you find her and she turns out to be a beauty? And then she looks at you and goes, Here’s my dream man, let’s ride off into the sunset!”

  “You want to write for Suigetsu?”

  “Don’t you think this all sounds so incredibly romantic? A man pining for a mysterious writer. She shows up one day and takes your breath away. Just as her words have trapped you for years!”

  “I’m not pining for anyone, let alone a person whom I don’t even know.”

  “Don’t authors dig their hearts out when they write and leave them bleeding on the page? Or something like that?”

  “That doesn’t mean you have to like them when you read their books.”

  “Sounds tedious—spending hours in someone’s mind and not liking them at the end.”

  Ran scoffed. A job was a job. He took pride in keeping his distance from people at work—editors and writers alike. He would never cross the line between his personal life and work.

  Are you sure? A voice rattled in his head. Didn’t you just admit a few days ago that a certain writer was now entangled with you as the editor and you as the person?

  They entered a gallery to browse colored ornaments in glass displays. Ran then asked Aiko, out of both a morbid sense of curiosity and a desire to eject any unwanted thoughts that might have crept into his subconscious, whether people in her line of work fell for celebrities whenever they styled them.

  “I might stare a little at their faces sometimes. Like, oh, their eyelashes are so long, or their nose is so straight, or wow, there’s an insect bite under their chin, or hmm, their cheeks look a little too puffy today, you know.” She checked out a cigar-shaped glass ornament, then put it back on the shelf after seeing the price tag. “What I’m trying to say is, I’m curious about what they have been up to, what those little clues on their face mean. It’s not attraction, more of an inspection. Besides, there’s no way I will fall for them. I already have Shin.”

  They left the shop and went to the next. Aiko started again. “Have you ever considered that you may never find her book? What if Mr. Konishi scrapped the manuscript long ago?”

  “It’s there. Somewhere on Kisuke’s hard drive.”

  “Say if it’s there. What will you do if you find it?”

  The use of if grated on Ran’s nerves. It suggested the possibility that he might not find it, that he’d been wrong and wasted years on a futile endeavor. If Aiko weren’t Aiko, and if he didn’t know her frank manner of speech, Ran would have snapped at her.

  “It’ll be the first title I publish,” he said. “It’s a story that needs to be read.”

  He had never mentioned why he needed to do so. Not to Shin, not even to Aiko. They would understand once the book hit the shelves.

  Aiko paused in front of a shop window. “What if the story you remember is better than the one you read?”

  Again, if.

  There was no if.

  There was no condition under which, or on the assumption that, or in the event of, whereby Onodera Shiho’s manuscript would cease to exist.

  There was no way time could sully Ran’s memory of her story.

  Had he allowed the seed of doubt to bloom, he wouldn’t have pushed himself as hard to reach where he now was. Even so, he was falling short. He still wasn’t doing enough. Ido had yet to be his, and Ando Misaki remained a threat.

  Call it a sunk cost fallacy. Call it a perception warped by time.

  Eight years had passed since he first held Onodera Shiho’s manuscript. Yet when he thought about it, the passage of time would collapse, and he would return to that morning at Suigetsu’s brand-new office in Akasaka, sun-dappled, where newly potted indoor plants lined the walls, and the stench of fresh paint pierced his nose. Ran was twenty-four then, a civil engineer stepping into full-fledged independence for the first time. He was among the fifty people selected by ballot to a slush pile read for the inaugural new writer’s prize. On his desk was a towering stack of manuscripts, and he would read each one with a critical eye, unaware that he was about to encounter a story that would hold his life suspended since.

  31

  Entry for the Suigetsu New Writers Prize 2017

  Author’s Name: [Redacted]

  Entry Title: An Act of Courtesy

  * * *

  Even in death, she was polite.

  When M decided she wanted to die on her twenty-fourth birthday, she meticulously planned it in the manner everyone knew her for.

  Flight ticket to a country at least five thousand miles from home—done.

  Rental car from a dodgy agency with an even more dodgy safety track record—now, that took a while to find, and she had to trawl through many websites with broken, unsecured links before she found some numbers to dial. Took some effort to get there, but it was done.

  Leave from work approved. She had only five days unclaimed for the year, but that would have to do.

  Sent her colleagues an email with links to her latest projects and files. Everything was shareable with the recipients—she would hate for work to halt when she was no longer around.

  Set an out-of-office message for two weeks. Hello, thank you for your email! I’m away at the moment, so please direct all queries to my lovely colleagues in the lab!

  A room that looked ready for her return from a trip to a place she’d never been—done! This was the easiest. Like preparing a flat lay for a photoshoot, except that investigators would take the photos if they remained unconvinced of the politeness of her death. Weird, but that could happen.

  And lastly—a letter—no. No letter. Oh, god. No, god, no. Note to self: this is almost always how the police determine if a person died from foul play or unnatural causes.

  Some people wrote with their right hand. Some with their left. Some could do both. Would you consider left-handed people a case worth studying? No, you think to yourself, this is how we are wired. The same for living and dying. People died accidentally. People died naturally. People hardly died with intention. They lived with meaning, but there were those who worked hard on ending their lives, plotting each step as if they were following a recipe and death a meal to eat.

  Therefore, dying with intention meant she would have planned for it, knowing death meant success, and failure occurred if she were to survive an attempt. Not only would she be embarrassed if that happened, but her family would be for her, too. It would shame them to the high heavens. Everyone would always remember M as the person who failed even at dying, a mark on her flawless record.

  * * *

  Now, won’t you feel embarrassed for M, too, if she fails? You are reading M’s quest to pursue a choice that only she could make. You are reading a story. M’s story as narrated to me, and me narrating a story to you. Do you see it now? Our connection through the page.

  I will remind you again. We are reading M’s story together—a work of fiction. Words strung together into sentences, to make you feel, make you think, make you want what you can’t have. There is a distance between you and me, and me and M. I will hold the line, so don’t cross over. To put it plainly, what M wants is what you can’t have.

  32

  It’s safe in there, the townsfolk cried. The box will keep you safe!

  Chapter 281 — Battling the Dragon: Shocker, It Speaks!

  * * *

  Wizard hit an all-time page-read high in September.

  With twenty chapters left in the serial, Eizo’s debut work was racing to the top of Yoeisha’s fiction rankings again. When success came knocking, so did unwanted attention. Yoeisha, which had largely ignored him for the three years he’d been writing on their platform, asked that he consider extending the web serial for another season and offered to raise his page-read bonuses. He had been ignoring their emails. Even if they tripled his earnings, he would still decline.

  New World was now his focus. The story he must write.

  After five hours of work in the living room, Eizo shut down his laptop and sank back on the sofa when Mrs. Yasuda called from the kitchen, “Want something to eat while you take a break?”

  “Fish with pickled seaweed and rice sounds awesome.”

  “Coffee?”

  “Of course.” Eizo smiled. “You’re the best.”

  He had been back at Azabudai since Monday, in case his mother returned earlier than expected. For as long as he was twenty-four, her eyes would be on him the whole time, ensuring he remained inside the box she had painstakingly folded for him.

  It’s safe in there, the townsfolk chorused.

  Since September, Mrs. Yasuda’s housekeeping hours had dwindled to two mornings a week so she could care for her newborn granddaughter. As long as she remained in her mother’s employment, he’d best avoid rocking the boat. Come to think of it, Mrs. Yasuda’s behavior had seemed a little odd when she said she’d sent the textbooks to Oakwood. Had she been following his mother’s instructions? Just how much could he trust the housekeeper? Did Mrs. Yasuda snitch on him and tell his mother that he was renting his own place, and thus, by leaving Tokyo and returning at intermittent times of the year when she normally would have stayed in Europe, she was effectively telling him, “You can leave, but you can’t.”

  These thoughts crossed Eizo’s mind as he chatted mindlessly with Mrs. Yasuda about this year’s fall foliage, her family in Kyushu, her granddaughter who cooed at pigeons whenever she brought her out in the pram.

  Later at noon, Eizo left right after Mrs. Yasuda clocked out for the day. He didn’t want to stay in the penthouse. Using the monthly royalties from Wizard, he treated himself to a deluxe karubi set lunch at the restaurant he’d visited with Ran. It had twice as much beef as the one he had. Twice the shimeji mushrooms too, and since Ran wasn’t there to insult his manhood, an avalanche of grated yam.

  Eizo made a mental note to treat Hayato to a meal when his schedule eased up. Hayato had been the first to congratulate him when Wizard cracked the top ten rankings. He consistently tracked it—perhaps more ardently than Eizo—and texted him the good news at the start of each month. If Hayato hadn’t reined him in back then at Mugino, would Eizo have lost his contract with Suigetsu and ruined his only chance to break out of the box?

  He was so close now. Too close to let a pathetic grievance block his path. The world could stand against him and sling mud and he would face it head-on. Because he had the notes, the story he needed to write. A truth lay within the margins of the Baku’s journey from Tokyo to the imaginary land off Kyushu. Only he could decipher it and make it known to everyone. That was all Eizo could think about as he grabbed a coffee on his way to Suigetsu.

  * * *

  That afternoon, a nervous energy pulsed through the crowded coworking space. Keyboards clacked from private pods with green soft dividers wrapping three-quarters of the cubicle. Light chatter occasionally turned into terse exchanges coming from centrally located four-seater tables marked as collaboration zones. Everyone was rushing to meet deadlines, perhaps fueled by the upcoming holidays. Were there others like him—web novelists signed to produce exclusive works for Suigetsu’s new platform? He had gone into publishing on his own, encouraged by Hayato after reading the first draft of Wizard. If Hayato hadn’t seen his draft when he went to his college dorm unannounced, Eizo would never have confessed that he was writing again.

  Some staff members whom Eizo had seen before in the office shuffled in and out of the space, making conversation with the freelancers and nailing down decisions rapid-fire style. He wondered if Ran would drop by to say hi if Eizo told him he was here?

  Eizo shook his head. Ran didn’t do hellos, only crass puns on balls and asses.

  Eizo found an empty work pod near the window and hunkered down with his headphones and laptop until the office closed. Though he had barely slept for four hours, Eizo felt like he could push out another two chapters if he set his mind to it. He fed on the adrenaline, something he had missed since his playing days ended. He went over the uploaded notes, taking in the breadth of what should happen in the first season of New World, and continued where he left off that morning. By the time he looked up, it was almost ten p.m. A deep silence fell around him.

  He stood up and walked to the window. Beyond the glass were the lights of Akasaka. In the distance, he could see office workers at their desks, little white rectangles that stacked up block by block toward the night sky. He craned his neck as he counted the number of blocks, the tallest being forty-five stories. The tower glowed vermilion in the backdrop.

  His stomach growled. He had been so engrossed that he ended up skipping dinner. Not that he felt hungry. Even if he did, he had no appetite. Working on New World had left him feeling wrung out, like a rag that had been twisted forcefully so many times that the fabric frayed.

  Eizo checked his phone. No messages. His mother had to be making her way back from Europe, or worse, she could be in a cab from the airport right now. He should leave soon. He was packing his bag when he caught sight of that all-too-familiar low pompadour at the lift lobby.

  The coworking space was located next to the elevator, so anyone waiting in the lobby could look inside and see everything. The eagle-eyed man would definitely spot him. Eizo sat back down, slammed his laptop shut and rested his head on the table, pretending to sleep until the coast was clear.

  The sliding glass doors opened with a quiet beep, followed by the sound of soles clopping lightly on the floor, growing louder and louder, until they came to a stop near him. Even with his eyes closed, he could feel Ran’s presence close by. Could smell him even; that pleasant waft of cypress mixed with something grassy. Vetiver?

  A sigh, and then an inaudible murmur, as if Ran was talking to himself. “Why do you always pop up in the weirdest places?”

  A quiet laugh followed, making Eizo curious. He had never seen Ran laugh before. What sort of face was he making?

  “What am I saying? Kisuke gave you the staff pass. Of course you’d use it.”

  Eizo felt something sink into the cushioned seat next to him. Judging from the weight, it was a briefcase. He felt a finger dab the top of his head. Ran’s finger.