“You want to publish it under Ido?”

  Misaki nodded. “It’s the perfect Ido title. Wild, cheeky, avant-garde, unclassifiable.”

  Ran reached for his glass tumbler and gulped down the chilled sencha he’d brewed at home. The pressure around his head squeezed like a tightening band. Whatever little appetite remained vanished as he thought about a Misaki-edited title published by Ido.

  Misaki looked as though she wanted to say more when a colleague from Marketing called her over to review creative proofs.

  “You’ll pull through,” she said before leaving. “You’re the star of Suigetsu, and we’re all aware of that.”

  * * *

  Ando Misaki was one of Suigetsu’s first employees, headhunted by Kisuke while she was a journalist covering regional literature and global entertainment news. Armed with degrees in Theater Studies from Waseda and a Master’s in Comparative Literature from Meiji University, publishing was always in her sights. She preferred shaping books to reviewing them from a distance and had published a handful of short stories with Meiji’s college press, handing the rights to Kisuke when she joined Suigetsu and compiled them into a collection published under Ido.

  According to Misaki, every editor had their One Book.

  “Tell me about your One Book,” said Misaki on his first day at Suigetsu. Since Ran had joined during the coronavirus epidemic, his onboarding was over a video call.

  “You mean my favorite book?”

  She shook her head. “Your ideal book, as an editor.”

  “Aren’t we supposed to treat every book the same?”

  “Technically, yes,” she replied. “We joined this industry because we love books. Let’s face it, there will be books we will love working on more than the rest. No one’s going to judge you for that. Among these, one will call out to you, like a siren’s song, and only you will hear it. Once you hear it, you can’t forget it. It will wash over you, make you desperate to tip over the boat and drown in the sea with them.”

  Her words were hyperbolic, while he preferred his statements to be factual and to the point. Still, he mulled it over. A book came to mind—as it always did—but he felt it was too specific to share. He could have gotten away with saying something vague, skirting the lines of what he meant, but Misaki sounded so sincere, he thought he should reciprocate her candor.

  “I don’t know if this answers your question. What I’m looking for is a story that I can shape into something unforgettable.”

  “How far would you go to shape it into the One Book for both of you?” Misaki’s voice crackled over the web static. “I don’t mean editing. A process is just an established way of doing things. It’s impersonal. I’m asking about you—as a person, an individual. How far are you willing to put yourself into it, to create something unforgettable together?”

  There was a poetic manner to Misaki’s words. She was a writer herself, after all. Ran came from engineering. He was good at solving problems, not riddles.

  “It’s rhetorical, by the way.” Misaki laughed, trying to ease the tension that filled the silence. “Know that there will be at least once in your career, you will find it. Your One Book,” she said. “It may sound like a fairytale, but it isn’t. It will happen; the only question is when. Otherwise, most of us would have quit long ago.”

  Ran didn’t mention that he had already found it—a book already written and ready for publication, until it was abruptly scrapped.

  No, he didn’t mention it, because it was more than any One Book.

  It was Ran’s Only Book, the one thing in the world that could make him do the unthinkable: forgo his hard-earned engineering education and eschew the safety of a public sector job for the instability of publishing, at a time when the world seemed like it was ending the next day.

  His closest friends for over a decade, Aiko and Shin, couldn’t believe it when he told them. They’d cajoled him, urged him to rethink his decision. All that for a book?

  All that for a book.

  A book supposed to be published by Ido eight years ago.

  * * *

  Konishi Kisuke named Ido after his favorite metaphor—the well.

  The literary imprint under Suigetsu had launched the careers of several authors who debuted with them, including those who’d won the Suigetsu book prize for unpublished writers. Kisuke shortlisted from a pool of titles known only to him and vetted all twenty-three books published since forming Ido.

  The quality of books published under Ido reflected this: books written by authors whose prose made you think and feel more deeply than you ever had. Books written for readers who had trudged vast distances in the desert, drawing from Suigetsu’s well of literature to quench their thirst. The founder never said it, but everyone knew Ido was why he’d ditched his high-flying job to set up Suigetsu. If Ido was his bet to become Japan’s literary tastemaker, then the rest of Suigetsu was him hedging his bet.

  Ran wanted Ido.

  He’d wanted Ido from the start.

  Konishi Kisuke knew that. It was how he’d convinced Ran to join Suigetsu.

  “Do you know why I set up Ido?” Kisuke had asked when interviewing Ran.

  “You want to be the literary top dog,” said Ran.

  The Suigetsu founder smiled. “Some write to be seen. Some write to be found. Then there are those who write to hide. To be forgotten. To be buried under a sea of words.”

  He continued, “You know how even the softest voices reverberate into an echo at the bottom of a well? That’s what I wish for Ido to be.”

  Now, he merrily strung Ran along on the glimpse of a promise while dumping tedious projects with impossible deadlines on him.

  Ran didn’t just want to manage Ido. He wanted access to the elusive list of authors and past prize winners whose manuscripts Kisuke kept under lock and key. On the list was the author of his Only Book, the faceless person who had won Suigetsu’s first-ever contest for unpublished writers. But she never showed up to collect the award and prize money. Her name was never publicly shared. Neither was her award-winning novella.

  According to whispers within Suigetsu, the author had worked with Kisuke to polish the manuscript for publication in time for the award ceremony, only to stop him from releasing it at the last minute. Her request went against the contest rules, but Kisuke had accommodated it.

  No one knew why Kisuke agreed. He had every right as the organizer to publish the winning entry. He could even void her submission and move up the other entries to take the first spot, and so on. Yet he hadn’t. Maybe in Kisuke’s mind, having a no-show winner for an already high-profile contest was the stuff of literary urban legends.

  The award remained unclaimed in the back room of Suigetsu’s office. With no bank information provided by the mysterious author, Suigetsu recorded the prize money in a separate ledger, tagged as payable to her government name, Onodera Shiho.

  That was all Ran had found during his time in Suigetsu: her name.

  If Kisuke were that obsessed with Baka Nori’s writing, then he would never have let Onodera Shiho stop writing. She must be writing under another pen name. Maybe something happened, and she couldn’t show her face in public. Maybe Kisuke was the only one who knew. Or they had made a deal that Kisuke couldn’t resist.

  Why else would he agree to halt its publication? Why else would he have worked with her to polish her manuscript for publication? Why would Kisuke let all that work go to waste? Even Ran knew that the novella could have easily launched Suigetsu’s trajectory right from the start.

  But that wasn’t enough. Ran wanted to know where the unpublished manuscript was kept. He wanted to know what Onodera Shiho was doing now. Was she still writing? Something new, or a variation of what she once wrote? Wherever she was, it wasn’t with Suigetsu. Her prose was one of a kind—pulsating with an innocence that flitted between youth and the ache of growing up in a world determined to bend you into the shape it needed you to become. Her words were a protest against the forced metamorphosis, bursting at the margins with a hypnotic blend of self-deprecating wit and measured poise normally seen in experienced writers. He had combed through entire catalogs of Suigetsu and Ido to hunt her down. Had she been involved in any of their titles, he would have sniffed it out in the blink of an eye.

  Rumors once swirled in the office that Onodera Shiho was twenty-four when she submitted the entry. Could she now be rewriting what she wrote then, recasting words whose original form had gripped Ran by the throat when he was twenty-four himself and refused to let go ever since?

  Wanted was the wrong word choice.

  Ran needed to have the unpublished manuscript. He needed to know if the new version differed from the raw draft he’d first seen as a slush reader for the prize. He needed the original to go out to the world, instead of whatever monstrosity Kisuke had turned it into. He would find out once he took over Ido.

  He must find it, or he would remain the same person he was eight years ago, hopelessly lost in a book that had never come to be.

  12

  Eizo drummed the top of his pen restlessly against his fingers, elbows propped on the table as he leafed through yet another tome he’d pulled from the shelves. He spent all morning in Mitaka, at a private library renowned for its fantasy collection, scouring for ideas to develop his serial proposal, his letter pad fast filling up with concepts that had been dominating the genre. It was tricky to find a shape that could hold the story he had long wanted to write.

  Just as he typed fast, he wrote fast, in a scrawling print only he could read. If he added today’s notes to the stack he kept at Oakwood, it was enough to fill a ring folder. A hundred sheets easily. Which meant he had reached a critical mass of research; anything more would be redundant, as if he were overcompensating for fatal traits he lacked as a writer. Imagination. Creativity. Originality. The ability to coalesce countless tales spoken into the world into a form that captivated its first reader—the writer themselves. Him.

  This was the tenth day he’d cycled through the same routine.

  He’d visited bookstores and various libraries around Tokyo to skim through critically acclaimed books in the genre—those written in Japanese and English, or translated into either language. He studied how each subgenre differed from the others in its treatment of popular concepts. The chosen one. The hero’s journey. The fallen empire. Magic systems with no inherent moral alignment. Magic systems layered upon secrets tucked into the fabric of the universe. He made a mental list of character stereotypes commonly mentioned and analyzed how they furthered the plot. He pulled up Internet searches to narrow down the list of books he needed to study. Once he had a sense of the narrative to use for a three-year serial, he switched to flipping through collections in other genres, such as horror and mystery, to glean for elements he could borrow to keep his concept fresh.

  At night, he pored through his notes and sketched out ideas in his notebook, some more fully formed than others. He ensured he left at least four and a half pages of space for each idea, a technique used by a famous writer whose novels he’d enjoyed as a child. The writer had an illustrious catalog of fantastical works set in post-war Japan, but was best known for his morbid, often controversial sense of humor, which included seppuku and hara-kiri. His most famous line went like this⁠—

  I arrange my ideas on the page, then I sit in the middle, in the gap where the four corners of the tatami mats do not meet, awaiting the execution of my soul.

  * * *

  Eizo rubbed his right wrist, sore from two hours of writing, and stood up for a quick stretch. The quiet of the library was getting to him. He could hear the gentle whir of the air conditioner and the occasional cough from patrons browsing newspapers near the window. Outside, the sun was almost overhead, sweeping the library in an intense burst of light that sent him scurrying between the shelves.

  This time, he was in the nonfiction aisle, pulling out author biographies and flipping through them idly, curious about what writers did when they weren’t at their desks. He moved to the next floor, scanning the spines for titles that caught his eye. Again, nothing.

  He almost wished that it were Thursday, so he could present the proposal to Suigetsu and be done with the first step toward publishing his new story. It was only Monday, however, which meant he had three more days to tinker, tweak, and add another stack of research notes to the pile that he wouldn’t look at again. To another person, he appeared like any other student dutifully researching citations for their graduation thesis. In truth, Eizo was only going through the motions of what seemed like an author’s typical research process. He already had the idea for the Suigetsu project, filed away in a thick pile of notebooks. When Kamada Kiko took them away eight years ago, she wrung from his hands entire worlds meticulously brought to life between the lines. It should have died then. Instead, it’d lingered in his mind, restless and fragile, the thinnest thread that could snap if he attempted to pull at it.

  He hadn’t expected to revisit this idea, let alone manipulate it into a form for public consumption. For so long, it had belonged to him and no one else. But he had no choice. Wizard wasn’t supposed to take off. The attention wasn’t supposed to fall on him. He hadn’t even created social media accounts for Baka Nori, thinking that his life as a writer equated to a routine of uploading new chapters twice a week, followed by an hour of responding to reader comments, then logging off and continuing to write the next chapter. The idol-turned-actor Kurokawa Jun wasn’t supposed to become a fan and its loudest spokesperson, stirring virality late in the game and inviting Suigetsu to knock on his door.

  Restless, Eizo returned to his desk and turned to a new page in his notebook. He drew a rectangle, within which four tatami mats were arranged to leave a square in the center. The execution of a soul.

  He drew a dumpling in the space, but thought of the wizard instead.

  He had written Wizard every day for three years. All because he’d wanted to cast a stray thought from his mind.

  Eizo asked the wizard before penning the first word, “I gave you my baseball bat. What can you give me in return?”

  The wizard replied, “What the sea took from you.”

  “The sea took nothing from me.”

  To which the wizard murmured in a whisper, one that barely rose above the chatter of the townsfolk, “The world is full of disappearances. If you can’t find what you lost, it means the sea has taken it. The sea swallows everything.”

  “Get it back for me then,” Eizo mocked. “Use your powers.”

  “I have no powers,” the wizard lamented.

  Insisting that he couldn’t hear the wizard, Eizo foisted his bat on him as he forced an equivalency of exchange between their worlds. He couldn’t recreate the world he lived in, but he could do that for the wizard. In doing so, what he had lost would return to him again.

  He supposed the wizard gave him one thing: a glimpse of the future he could have, beyond what he already knew.

  Still, his frustration grew. Without his notebooks, the thin thread connecting several fragments of his story could snap in a breeze. He could scaffold them with relentless research, but without the real thing, the idea would never stand on its own. It was strong because it came from the notebooks. When Kamada Kiko took something from you, it was gone forever. He wouldn’t be able to find the books again. He could conjure up the worlds—he knew he could force himself to—but it wouldn’t be the same. It would never be as good as the original.

  The countdown had begun. The wizard stepped between the tatami mats, entering the square, awaiting the end.

  Once he penned the last word, Wizard would cease to be his.

  Once he penned the last word, the notebooks would forever be lost.

  Eizo closed his book and packed his bag. It was time to stop the research. He had already let in too many voices from too many books. Any more, and they would drown out the wizard’s voice, should he choose to speak before his time was up.

  This is how you create a story, right?

  13

  New World was the code name for Eizo’s project. Coined by Reika and Takeru, two promising newcomers handpicked by Kisuke from the pool of junior editors. It was exactly how Kisuke would have named the flagship fantasy serial—breaking new ground for Suigetsu’s growth as a company, with Baka Nori as the chosen one to bring them to greatness.

  Kisuke’s belief in Baka Nori was unbelievable, illogical even. But Ran didn’t refute the idea or ask them to think of other names. Names were an arbitrary construct, built on the meanings people gave to letters they strung together and imbued with their hopes, dreams, wants, and desires, sounding larger than life, more magnificent than they were. How often had names promising grandeur ended up becoming mediocre and forgettable? Ran cared little for names, unless they already bore a negative connotation.

  For example, Stupid.

  Reika and Takeru’s hopes for New World were more important than what he thought of it. Ran might be the lead editor, but his role was to focus on the big picture and on marketing and publicity directives for the digital platform. His younger colleagues were the ones who must sleep and breathe New World and twist the lying bastard’s arm so he would do Ran’s bidding and propel Suigetsu into the proverbial new world.

  The next meeting with Eizo was two days away.

  When Ran wasn’t editing manuscripts, his mind circled back to what Kisuke had said about Baka Nori, who was Kamada Eizo. Who could also be Little Quill, recipient of the accursed parcel with a pile of cram school textbooks.

  In their interactions so far, Eizo acted as though he was not aware of the parcel’s existence. But when Ran tried to rattle him at dinner by almost mentioning the nickname, Eizo’s face, for a split second, turned.

  Eizo recognized that name. His pupils had dilated into a black dot, a harsh contrast against warm brown irises. He knew what Ran was going to say. To draw out the full range of Eizo’s reactions, Ran listed each option as close to Little Quill as he could. What he had seen intrigued him. Eizo was on edge, struggling to keep a sea of emotions buried under that fake smile. When the words Little Quill teetered on the cusp of his tongue, Ran knew he’d gotten his answer.