A precocious child, perhaps, growing up in Azabudai, then studying at a prestigious prep school and attending Keio. And now, he had the freedom to do as he chose—spend his time writing stories in a little apartment in Kichijoji whenever he liked, after receiving an expensive education.

  If so, what was it about Eizo’s writing that pricked at him with such discomfort?

  Was it because he knew Eizo’s background and now held a particular bias against him that the author wrote from a place of privilege?

  In Wizard, the protagonist had everything.

  In the Baku fantasy, the dumpling could become anything.

  Misaki’s words came to mind again. He could have asked her directly, but he didn’t want her to catch on to New World.

  “When you read, you form a connection with the characters, and by extension, with the author. An intimate triangle of feelings between three parties. When the author purposely subtracts themselves from the page, they are building distance between you and the characters, and by extension, themselves. You become less privy to their inner world. You know they are hiding something. It’s done on purpose—at least to you, the reader. Sometimes it’s a piece of the puzzle in the story. Sometimes it’s a piece of the puzzle in their own story.”

  Misaki’s words were cryptic, conjured by an editor who wrote stories herself and understood why authors were the way they were.

  “They can tell you they have a story they are not willing to share and yet somehow, in their writing, it trickles out of them, like a faulty tap,” she’d said. “It’s a sure sign the story is ready to be told. But the author remains hesitant, fearful of being judged. They shrink themselves on the page. What should we do when we encounter such writers, who hide by becoming smaller?”

  “What would you do?” Ran had asked.

  “They are my greatest fear,” she’d admitted. “There is no quick win. You have to know them as a person first before drawing up a plan to lure them out of their shell. I once met such a writer a few years before you joined. I was so eager to prove myself to Kisuke that I did something I regret to this day. I told the writer that if the topic makes her uncomfortable, we can change it. We’ll keep it for the next book, or when she feels more ready. I thought being patient with her was the trick. I wanted to be as gentle as possible while keeping her morale up so she could keep writing and I’d have a new title to show for it. But I was wrong. She stopped writing after publishing one book with us. Bungei Shunju criticized it for being ‘a vapid piece of skullduggery that promised highs but only delivered the lows.’ She quit entirely. I haven’t heard from her since.”

  Ran crunched the can of beer in his hand before tossing it into the bin with the chicken wrapper. Where Misaki had failed, he would succeed. That was the only way he could convince Kisuke to give him Ido.

  40

  Back in the office, Ran reread all four new chapters of Wizard, combing through each line as an editor this time. Once he finished the read-through, he returned to his email and downloaded the file Eizo had sent for New World.

  He printed out an early draft—something he hardly did. A change of medium might lend fresh perspectives as he swept through each line with a pen and ruler, a practice he had adopted early in his career. It allowed him to read each line with precision and catch nuances that weren’t obvious at first. He stopped once he’d grown used to the pace of editorial work and gained enough experience. Editing on physical copies slowed him down, and he didn’t like being stalled in anything he did.

  Ran arranged the pages in order, grabbed a bunch of stationery from his desk, and entered an empty meeting room. He read the chapters aloud to himself, catching his voice echoing within the four walls before moving on to the next. The draft had clean, polished prose, just as it did when he first read New World three weeks ago.

  Contrary to Takeru’s opinion, Ran didn’t think that Eizo’s writing for Suigetsu varied from his recent style for Wizard. It was detached, unnervingly so; the plot unfolded matter-of-factly, as though the stakes were predetermined, and the Baku waddled through the machinations of its fate without any care for what could happen. It reminded him of the wizard’s pointless debates with the townsfolk.

  While its use in Wizard was satirical and elevated the protagonist’s exasperation, it proved an odd choice for New World, given that it was ultimately a tale of survival, in which the Baku lived by transforming into what it feared.

  Fear was the theme of New World, yet there was no sense of that same fear threading through the narrative. No panic, no dread that the worst had yet to come.

  If being patient was the wrong move, then Ran must do the opposite. He must become an instigator. Expose the writer and draw out their fear. Provoke them, rile them up a little. Watch how they react. Would they respond faster if they feel more threatened?

  Easier said than done, Ran thought. Unable to find a breakthrough, he pushed the papers away. Crisp sheets crunched under the heft of his scribbles in the chapter margins. He was still clutching his pen, the side of his hand stained with red ink. If only he could reach into the page, pull out the words, and shake them in his hands like a pack of dice until they grew dizzy and threw up what they hid in their bellies.

  In other words, Ran was stumped.

  Over the course of five years, he had developed his editorial principles. One, keep himself out of the text. Two, don’t be too quick to judge the work. Three, separate the author from their work. Four, if something smells like shit, it probably is shit. Stop, walk away, wait for the stench to subside, then return and pick at it again. Five, if something is too good to be true, grab a red pen, mark out the dubious points, then consider if he had struck a goldmine. Six, keep himself out of the text at all costs.

  None of those taught him how to handle someone like Eizo.

  Ran tapped the brass cap of his pen on his temple. Flipping to a blank side of the printout, he drew three intersecting circles.

  He: noun. A quill, a seaweed, a person, a former shortstop, a writer, a wizard, Eizo, 英蔵.

  Ei, 英: England, English, outstanding, a hero.

  Zo, 蔵: to hide, to own, to have, to possess.

  From there, he circled the nouns and traits he knew of the writer: ‘outstanding,’ ‘to have,’ and ‘to hide.’ He drew a line connecting ‘wizard’ to ‘a hero,’ and onward to connect with ‘to possess,’ shaping the three words into an equation. He once heard that a person’s name was a compass to the map, the start and end of their journey charted across two distinct points. He didn’t buy it, of course, but here, he thought he should give it a try.

  As if taking on a life of its own, the pen in his hand scratched out a box under the three circles. Within the four walls, he wrote:

  Kichijoji: 吉祥寺

  Onodera: 小野寺

  Ran stared at the kanji, focusing on ‘寺,’ the common character used for both words. He shook his head, wondering if he was grasping at straws now. With vigorous strokes, he crossed out the box.

  Back to the three-word equation. Next to it, he copied the haiku from Wizard and underlined the second stanza.

  Ghosts of what they never held.

  That line—no, he must be specific—that word. Deep down, he knew which one it was, but he wanted to confirm again. To match Eizo, he had to be precise to uncover the juncture where his prose distanced itself from the story, from the reader. Eizo was trying to say something through the haiku. It was no coincidence that Wizard was slated to end at the 300th chapter, with the haiku positioned in the middle. There was a symmetry to how Kamada Eizo ordered his story.

  Ran tapped his pen against his temple again, harder and faster this time, knocking out a rhythm that loosened the haiku and tossed its words into the air, a neat five-seven-five structure splintering into seventeen characters forced to become foreign to one another. Seventeen pieces of a puzzle that paused midair as he picked out each character and assessed their fit in the broader web serial.

  He stopped before the word ‘never.’ This must be it.

  Never came from not and ever. Meant at no time.

  At no time did the wizard have powers.

  At all times, people lauded the wizard for his ability to save the world.

  Each time the wizard was forced into the gilded carriage, he would insist that it was built for someone else.

  To hide, to own, to have, to possess.

  Outstanding. A hero.

  Ran clutched his head. He was shifting onto a very dangerous assumption: that Eizo was writing himself as the wizard. What he’d lost, the wizard gained. Tracking this line of thought, he strung what little he knew of Eizo’s past together: a rich young master type who used to write but had to stop at some point. To escape the pressures of family, he rented a unit in Oakwood, and now, through writing, he found his only outlet to reconcile his situation with the future he’d once envisioned. If Eizo were the wizard, was he then lamenting that he had never held his destiny in his hands?

  If power in the LitRPG serial equated to Eizo’s writing ability, was the baseball bat an allegory for the source of his creativity?

  How about the torn notes tucked in Eizo’s cram school textbooks?

  How would New World fit into all of this?

  Ran knew he should stop, but tight in his hand was the beginning of a thread he picked up in the dark. He was a moth drawn to the flame. He thought about the house Eizo had built in his notes, doors and windows removed to prevent light from entering. If he followed the thread, would the house light up when he reached the end?

  What should we do when we encounter such writers who hide by becoming smaller?

  “Look beyond what they write,” Misaki had mentioned once. “Probe how they write. The language they use. The rhythm of their prose. How words and spaces stack upon each other. Close your eyes and stop seeing. Start feeling. Rely on your instincts. What they leave on the page is the fingerprint of their soul.”

  Where Misaki had been kind and patient, he’d wager the opposite: a solution so plain and straightforward, it was almost brainless.

  Trap escape artists using their own devices. Use words to flush out those who hide behind the written word. Lay a trail of crumbs to tempt them into emergence. Once spotted, back them into a corner and suck the oxygen out of the space, then watch as the language they have desperately concealed seeps out of their skin, gasping for air. By then, the words would have tumbled out roughly, emotions pushed to the brink. The full expression of their fury turned toward you, the antagonist in their story. Wanting you to feel everything they felt. That is them on the page, laid bare for the naked eye to behold. All done subconsciously, of course.

  In short, he had to agitate Eizo to that point for the evasive young man to forget about the prose he painstakingly cultivated and cleverly hid behind all this time.

  The pen fell from Ran’s hand, rolling across the table until it stopped at the edge.

  Why hadn’t he thought of it sooner?

  He held one such example in his hands, one that he’d nearly forgotten. He should have destroyed it long ago. Like when he had relented with Little Quill’s package, he’d kept the dastardly story. He hadn’t kept them per se, just reused them as liners for his shoe cabinet. The last thing he wanted was to revisit that story, but his gut told him the answer he was searching for could lie in those pages.

  That day, Ran was the first to leave for home.

  41

  When Ran finally gathered the sheets from his shoe cabinet, he cleaned them first with a wet wipe, then used correction tape to redact all the names.

  He had read it only once on that terrible Friday night. Once was more than enough grace for this fuckery. With the story in his hand again, he could feel Eizo’s presence lingering in the corner of his apartment like an unwanted shadow, waiting to pounce on him and plant his hot, moist lips near his ear. At that thought, Ran covered his ears, blocking out unnecessary thoughts that did nothing but bother him. Goose pimples prickled his arms as he made tea.

  Taking a sip, Ran psyched himself into believing that he was just editing a manuscript submitted by a newbie author in a genre he didn’t read—romantic suspense with a dash of erotica. Like a paid editor, he would treat it with the professionalism accorded to all drafts that came his way.

  He sat at the dining table with his ruler and red pen. The draft was twenty-five pages. A mere 7,500 words. He would get through this in the blink of an eye. Despite his efforts, Ran remembered exactly which redacted names were R and E. He set aside the papers and finished his cup of tea, then brewed another, and kept drinking until the teapot was empty. Darjeeling, with its high caffeine levels, was not the best tea to drink at night.

  In thirty minutes, Ran finished two pots and was on the verge of brewing a third when he felt his heart racing quicker than usual, tremors in his hands. Reluctantly, he switched to water. As he drank, he moved the ruler down the lines in quick succession, scanning every word. The effect of caffeine faded. Perhaps he was calmer now; rereading the story felt different. Eizo’s unedited prose once again was immaculate—as though he wrote with the spellcheck and grammar tools switched on, much like a story ready for publication from the get-go. Written in a deep third-person point of view, the prose was easy on the eyes. Words glided smoothly across the page, pulling him into the story with an unspoken urgency. Unlike his more recent writing, which carved out acres of emotional space between the author and reader, this dirty little story knocked down all barriers between them, forcing the reader, in this case, Ran, to wear the skin of the protagonist named R, a touch-starved man yearning to be accepted for who he was. Ran, though incensed by the depiction of R, reminded himself that he was not R and pushed through his discomfort.

  * * *

  The story took a turn. Similar to what Eizo did in Wizard, the bathroom scene served as the mid-story twist. With fifteen pages left, Ran had fully expected the two characters, R and E, to fuck nonstop from night to day, and day crossing back into night. That didn’t happen.

  Against his expectations, the salacious moment where E offered to bathe R ended in a scintillating kiss under the shower. R was pleading and needy, and E was more than willing to give. Before they went any further, R collapsed in E’s arms, weakened from a seasonal flu.

  Ran circled that paragraph with disdain.

  With R unconscious, the story switched to E’s perspective as he watched over R and began narrating audio notes on his phone. Each note corresponded to the time E took R’s temperature and changed the towel to cool his head. He recorded seven notes. When R woke up at eight a.m., he found himself in his own bed, wearing his pajamas and holding his favorite stuffed teddy bear.

  He never saw E again. When he banged on the unit next door, no one answered. Desperate, he overcame his reticence and called the landlord. “It has been vacant since last year,” said the elderly man. “I can let you have it cheap.”

  Was the whole encounter a figment of his imagination, an obsession with an unseen face in the crowd that manifested into its own plane of reality?

  A few days later, R found a phone under his bed. On the home screen were two folders—one labeled ‘phone settings’ and the other unlabeled, containing seven audio notes, each recorded on the night R lost consciousness. One by one, they revealed what happened when R was asleep.

  * * *

  The story ended there, with a note from Eizo: Hang tight. Part Two is coming.

  A most nonsensical plot, Ran concluded. There was no Part Two. Eizo wrote it to warn Ran that the story might become more obscene than the first. Given the sensual manipulations of E in the bathroom, the idea of E doing nothing to an unconscious R was hard to believe.

  Kamada Eizo was an escape artist of the written word—the kind who carved every stroke with intention. They sculpted the reality they wanted you to see. Their worst enemy? Stream of consciousness. Until their egos were pushed to the brink, they would never show their true face. It made sense to take a pause when you ran into their meandering plots. Let it sit for a moment, like tea being steeped. Eventually, their secrets would trickle out, drop by drop.

  Ran didn’t want to think this, but the way Eizo wrote reminded him of a story long ago. Not the content, obviously, but the way he playfully flipped between object and subject and verb. It wasn’t discernible at first, but past the midpoint, when E cleaned and dressed the unconscious R before tucking him in bed, the style emerged, as though Eizo fell into a trance and the words just surged out of him like tides rushing toward the moon.

  The author knew the rules of engagement with the reader and wanted to showcase their abilities, resulting in prose that read like spoken word—hip, rhythmic, infused with a frenetic, youthful energy, and at other times, a little disaffected. Hot and cold. Fire and ice. A constant mismatch of contradiction and harmony. When strung together, these words generated a propulsive force, each stroke luring you forward like gravity, pulling you on to the next word, and the next, and the next. Before you knew it, you were accelerating to the end.

  This was a style the author created for themselves, choosing to eschew the staid prose reigning in the local literary scene, yet more stylish than the minimalism that had taken root among the younger generation. A style that cried for attention, wanting all intended visitors to their words and trespassers alike to know it was them writing. No one but them. No one else could mimic them. It was their signature, their proof of identity in a world full of voices speaking at once.

  A style that screamed both ways:

  I write because I’m alive.

  I’m alive because I write.

  This was a very specific style Ran had experienced before. He should have noticed this when he first read the story, but he’d fallen prey to the tricks of an escape artist, allowing the content to blindside him.

  Look beyond what they write. Probe how they write.