For the first time, Ran understood what Misaki meant. Previously cryptic, they now shone a light, illuminating a path previously unseen.

  Eizo’s prose reminded him of Onodera Shiho’s.

  Too close for comfort, in fact. A disconcerting likeness that toed the fine line between mimicry and plagiarism.

  Had Eizo read Onodera Shiho’s manuscript and copied her style?

  That was the quickest explanation, but also the most erroneous. It wasn’t possible unless Eizo was one of the slush readers back then, and he must have had an extraordinary memory to replicate Shiho’s style from a single read-through. Besides, Ran would have remembered someone like Eizo.

  Was it a coincidence that two different writers could write in such a similar manner? Certainly. Then why did Eizo’s natural prose change so drastically in the stories he wrote for publication? One would never have guessed that the scandalous tale, Wizard, and New World were all written by the same author.

  Lurching from one conclusion to the next required several logical jumps, each of which needed assumptions to be met before he could accurately establish the next tier. It was far too early to determine any findings. Without Onodera Shiho’s manuscript, he couldn’t do anything.

  * * *

  That night, Ran couldn’t sleep.

  He thought about Eizo a lot. Eizo the writer, and Eizo the person.

  An escape artist with words. A young man whose smile ended below his eyes.

  Yet sometimes the mask slipped, revealing a tumult of emotions pouring from an unusually poised gaze.

  “Some write to be seen. Some write to be found,” Konishi Kisuke had said. “And there are those who write to hide. To be forgotten. To be buried under a sea of words.”

  42

  For two weeks, Eizo had accompanied his mother to survey suitable office sites in Tokyo as the base of operations for her new firm.

  They were viewing their fourth location for the day, a 6,250-square-foot unit on the 50th floor of a business tower. They had considered seventeen units across multiple business districts so far. Marunouchi, Yurakucho, Kyobashi, Gotanda, Ebisu, Akasaka (where he had masked up, claiming he was nursing a cold), and now Shiodome, next to Shimbashi and Ginza.

  The sun had set over Tokyo Bay, casting a hazy lull over Eizo’s eyes. He had been awake for over twenty-four hours, plagued by a migraine that would mysteriously surface whenever he worked on New World.

  She didn’t need him here. She was already bringing in far more competent people to the company. Graduates from high-ranking universities in Japan and abroad, armed with top degrees and years of experience in wealth management and taxation. They were eloquent, conversant in at least two languages—Japanese and English, usually, maybe French or Mandarin, too.

  To start her new firm, Kamada Kiko had resigned from Saiji last month. The first thing she did when serving her six months’ notice was to form the branding and communications team. They sprang into action at once, arranging interviews and scheduling ad placements on influential platforms and media often used by Japan’s wealthy. She spent weekends with her team to cover all touchpoints before the launch next June. She was leaving nothing to chance.

  After a quick tour around the office space, Kamada Kiko told the team of property agents to leave them for a moment.

  “This place doesn’t smell right,” she said.

  Eizo continued staring at the burned orange sky. He felt as though he was back at the tea shop in Ginza, wanting to leave but couldn’t.

  “Do you know what’s wrong?” Her voice rose a pitch, echoing around the vacant unit, prompting his response.

  He turned to face her.

  A regular person would reply with the location, office views, amenities, prestige, and infrastructure, all of which the Shiodome tower had in abundance. In fact, if it were up to Eizo alone, Shiodome would be in his top three. If it were anyone else asking, he would have bandied about any combination of these factors. But Eizo knew better, so he’d scanned the list of directory tenants in the lobby while they waited for the elevator.

  Eizo pretended to take time to think. “There’s only one other family office here,” he said. He’d worked out a position when the property agents introduced the unit to them.

  “Is that detrimental?”

  “Not worth considering,” he said, knowing it was what his mother wanted to hear before he intentionally swerved in the wrong direction.

  “Why?”

  “The most important factor is how comfortable they feel in our office, and I think this view is unbeatable. But the location is too business-centric. It feels…” He paused, averting his glance on purpose. “Too formal. Dealing with personal wealth requires a deft touch, on top of everything else.”

  Her look of disappointment was unmistakable—full lips pursed into a thin line that nudged down at the left corner. Almond-shaped eyes framed by thick, long lashes narrowed into a slit, looking at you as though you were the world’s greatest idiot. Eizo wondered if he had ever come across that way to anyone. He hoped not; he had tried so hard not to look remotely like her. Where her expression was often grim, he smiled.

  What his mother wanted to hear was: there is only one other competitor here. Is this befitting of who I am? If I can’t reign supreme in a sea of rivals, why bother stepping into the waters and getting my feet wet? I want them to know I’m here, and they had better watch out because I am here, in their space, demanding they make way.

  Her top pick must be Kyobashi. Close to the center of power, it sat within a cluster of offices recently built to offer white-glove services to Japan’s uber-rich and influential. He knew that very well. Every answer he gave was a demonstration of his incompetence—the undeniable fact that he needed a lot more work to reach the level she needed him to be at.

  Eizo smiled in response. “The sunset’s really beautiful. Maybe we should hold client meetings during the golden hour.”

  Kamada Kiko signaled for the property agents to return. “Get me the full quotes for the Kyobashi and Marunouchi sites. Kyobashi is a priority. I want to sign the papers before leaving for Europe next week.”

  They bowed deeply in her direction before tossing a slight nod at Eizo and heading for the lobby. With them gone, it was just him and her. The air in the space thinned rapidly. Eizo shifted his weight between his feet, hinting that they should leave as well.

  “In my thirty years of dealing with clients, it’s always the wife who talks about the scenery,” his mother said once the agents were out of earshot. “I’m surprised you said that.”

  There was no need for this conversation to continue. He should have kept his salesman’s smile and said, I still have lots to learn, and left it at that. But his mother had the peculiar ability of sucking the air out of everything, everywhere she went. Being around her for two weeks had starved him of oxygen.

  Something was pulling him underwater again. A pressure pushed down into the cavern in the center of his chest, a weight so dense that it sucked in his ribs from within, compressing his organs. It was becoming impossible to breathe.

  Tides rose and ebbed. It was dusk now. The sea was retreating. He must remember that.

  Eizo turned to his side, looking his mother in the eye as he spoke.

  “It’s the first thing that came to mind. Besides, wives could still hold some sway in what their husbands think.” Studying her expression, Eizo added—and he made sure she heard him clearly. “Some wives even control what their husbands think, right down to the color of their dreams.”

  Silence followed, interrupted by his mother’s thin voice cutting across the space, so sharp that it hurt his ears. “Because those men, when left to their own devices, are incapable of anything. They relied on their mothers as they grew up. To fold their clothes. Make their beds. Cook their meals and pack them into bento boxes, so they and their children can compete with their peers to see who has the most beautifully made lunches. Arrange their shoes in the right position below the platform at the entryway. Squeeze out the last roll of toothpaste that was left on the basin, because those men would rather leave the house without brushing their teeth than do that extra thing for themselves.”

  He watched as the sun dipped below the skyscrapers in Odaiba. The skies darkened. Ring by ring, from the streets closest to them, the city lights came on.

  “The only time they show some semblance of independence is in college, a display put on to lure the next generation of women into their homes. Someone they could rely on as their mothers aged. For that brief period, their vitality peaks. But as a woman would later learn, the man had misrepresented himself. Even if she left him, he would go on and do that to another woman, to inflict the same fate upon her as he did to the first.”

  He glanced askance at her. She was watching the sunset too. She had no right to watch something as beautiful as this.

  “You mean Dad?” Eizo’s smile stayed on his face. Even in a space that wasn’t their house, the rules of decorum between mother and son of the Kamada family held firm.

  Kamada Kiko smiled too, contrasting the vehemence that had spilled from her lips seconds before. “He had a dream. I will admit that. It burned brightly and lured me toward him when I was younger. But that kind of dream isn’t real. Our lives are like trains moving between stations. The beginning and the end. When a train derails from its journey, would you want to watch it crash and waste away in the rubble? Or would you do everything to make sure it gets back on track?”

  She walked toward the glass window, her high heels clicking dully on the carpeted floor. “How long can you grip a ball in your hand?” She tapped a painted nail on the surface. “When your strength weakens, you have nothing left. Do not let what isn’t yours derail you.”

  In a voice that barely rose above the dull hum of the air conditioning, she concluded their conversation. “I have your best interests at heart, Eizo. You are all that I have left.”

  43

  Miyamoto Ran knew a fine ass when he saw one.

  He’d seen many, kicked even more—especially those whose faces resembled a giant, misshapen ass.

  The posterior was often described as perky or flabby, adjectives trussed together and weighed by the bounciness of flesh on the rear. Ran didn’t see asses like that; he hardly ever stopped to comment on them. Only the bounce of a person’s ass interested him. Once in a while, he would chance upon the perfect one.

  Perched right up to his knee, a pair of immaculate globes with a curve that promised tensile strength dialed up to a hundred. A shape too good to ignore. A position begging for an impact to be made. When there was rebound, there was recoil. The temptation to plant his stronger foot on it and send it flying had never felt stronger.

  Ran stepped toward the owner of these globes. If he were to launch a kick here, how far would the lying twat named Kamada Eizo fly into the trash piles? Eizo was on all fours on the ground, palms smoothing out a flattened carton, head cocked to one side, as though pondering the philosophy of waste sorting.

  “Your ass is sticking out,” Ran began.

  Eizo spun around at once.

  “Right where it belongs,” Ran finished.

  Eizo hastily stood up, wiping his palms on the side of his shorts. Evenings in late November hovered around 10°C, but Eizo seemed to have no issue with the cold. He wore a plain white t-shirt and gray knee-length shorts with the letters KEIO BASEBALL stitched down the sides.

  “Aren’t you a proper gentleman, staring at my ass all night?”

  “The shape was too good.”

  “Shape?”

  “Like two freshly inflated balloons.”

  “B-balloons?”

  “Balloons that need release,” Ran added for emphasis.

  Eizo’s face reddened at an alarming rate. Under the orange glow of the overhead lights, it appeared almost scarlet on his tanned skin. Ran expected steam to spout out of his ears like a kettle on the boil. He gaped at Ran, unblinking. For someone so used to springing seedy moves on unsuspecting victims like himself, Eizo was terrible at receiving them.

  “Don’t you usually have better comebacks? Did the rewrites scorch your brain?”

  “I—”

  “Or did you drop your balls at the police station again?”

  That was all it took to spark Eizo to life, perhaps overly much. His facial muscles recomposed themselves, revving up for a tirade. As if an imaginary handbrake had fallen off, and he could finally say whatever he wanted with no fear of recourse. Was this how he’d looked when he penned that incorrigible story at his desk?

  “Can’t a man sort his trash without being eyed and made fun of? Can’t a man have some peace? What qualifies as a good enough comeback? What do you want me to say? Oh, here, baby boy. Smack my ass, let me shove it in your face, on it, and we can do whatever, wherever?” His rant continued, relentless in its velocity.

  “Just because I wrote that shit-ass story means nothing. Maybe my writing was too good and turned you on, but let me tell you this—there is fact and there is fiction. A thick wall stands between them. Now you find me on all fours on the ground. Instead of just leaving me alone to do my shit, you silent-fucking-ly ogled my ass for an eternity and compared it to balloons. Not just any balloons, but plump ones. What the hell? And why are you so obsessed with my balls, you crass old virgin! Even if you are the last person standing on Earth and I’m dying to get fucked and it will be my first and last ever fuck, it won’t be you. It definitely won’t be you.”

  It was now Ran’s turn to stare at him, speechless. He tried to make sense of what had just happened. It was the first time he heard Eizo swearing like this.

  Ran swore to express annoyance. Eizo swore in the sexual meaning of the word, from one man to another. Reading what happened between E and R was one thing—having Eizo announce that to his face was another.

  While Eizo had affirmed several times over that he didn’t see Ran that way, he’d so far only proved that he was adept at lying. The corners of Ran’s mouth twitched.

  Eizo’s hands flew up to his face. “It’s a figure of speech!” Dirt from the carton smudged across his cheeks. He was in full-blown panic. “A fucking metaphor!”

  “I would pay to watch a metaphor fuck.”

  “Asshole,” the younger man mumbled under his breath, only to bristle at his first choice of word. He squeezed his eyes shut, looking every inch the foolish man retreating into the hole he’d dug for himself. Once he regained his senses, he sorted through his trash at light speed, tied up the bags and separated them by waste type. Combustibles. Non-combustibles. Organic. Residuals. For recycling—glass, paper, cardboard, and fabric. In less than a minute, he was done and had fled a distance from Ran.

  So fast was he that Ran, who considered himself somewhat of an expert in trash sorting, could hardly believe what he witnessed. While Eizo should have done this at home first, perhaps he didn’t have the correct type of trash bags for sorting.

  Was this how the rich in Azabudai lived? With housekeepers at their beck and call, their trash promptly dealt with, and once they were on their own, they became prone to harebrained actions that made little sense to common folk.

  Eizo could have returned to his unit, and Ran would have left it at that. Yet, for no apparent reason, he felt the need to clarify what he’d said earlier.

  “No one is fucking me. You hear that?” he hissed from the side gate that opened to the residential lobby.

  After Eizo left in a huff, Ran placed his trash bag in the mesh cage for collection. He leaned against a wall for support as his shoulders began to twitch uncontrollably. Ran had been chewing on his bottom lip, swearing that he would hold it in until Eizo was out of earshot. He suppressed the urge to laugh so violently that his lip was bruised.

  He felt—to quote Konishi Kisuke—great.

  Soon, Ran was clutching his sides, straining to break the laugh. He hadn’t laughed this hard in a while, not since he’d read the beginning of Baka Nori’s web serial. Kamada Eizo, the bastion of dishonesty, was precisely the type of person he would never acknowledge, let alone approach.

  Yet, the more he knew about the younger man, the more intrigued he became. Not just Eizo the writer, but Eizo the person. The problem and the solution. Two instances separated by cause and consequence, now conflating together.

  * * *

  A perfectly shaped ass was meant to be kicked. The fat on the posterior insulated them from severe injuries, allowing Ran to launch as hard as he wanted. Seeing his bullies crash face-first into the mud was his favorite pastime as a child.

  Until a growth spurt at seventeen, he’d been constantly shorter than the average boy. Being small and alone made him an easy target for bullies, who often taunted him in the classroom and outside the school premises after kendo practice. In the sport, you could never use your feet to strike, but outside of practice, anything was fair game.

  Boys of that age disliked anyone or anything that stood out from them. In Ran’s case, there were three things. One, his shaven head. Two, he always wore long sleeves and refused to change into his exercise clothes in front of others, not even in the locker room. Three, he'd grown up in an orphanage.

  A familiar refrain he heard throughout junior high went like this: “Your parents must really hate you. That’s why they dumped you at a place where nobody wants you!”

  Because their heads could only see inside their asses, they never saw Ran’s feet fly up to land a satisfying, meat-searing bam! on their butts and sometimes, the back of their knees, forcing them to keel over on the ground.

  When Ran got really pissed, he aimed for the nose bridge—released the right amount of force so that everyone could see that asses were capable of crying. It took time to perfect the gradient of attack and the timing of the pullback, much like how he appreciated the depth of flavor for his tea, so that he wouldn’t shatter the cartilage. He read books, practiced, watched videos, and continued to practice. His punches were to warn, not scar. The more he threw, the more accurate they became.