Chapter 31: Art Pieces

Ma En and the ramen shop owner didn't talk long. New customers arrived at the counter, and though the owner looked like he had plenty more to say, business came first. When Ma En said his goodbyes and left, Asuka was still in her apron, bustling in and out. She glanced up at him once, flashed a quick "let's keep in touch" gesture, and went right back to serving customers without so much as a proper farewell. But it was exactly this scene — the bustle, the noise, the ordinary aliveness of it — that made Ma En feel this was what Asuka needed most.

She collected ghost stories, sure. But what she chased was the thrill, not the genuine strangeness — the kind of deadly, life-shattering bizarreness that could annihilate this everyday warmth in a single stroke. The truly strange was not something she needed. Between the two of them, Ma En felt, there stood a wall — transparent, but impossibly solid. And it was precisely this wall that let him breathe a little easier.

Ma En wasn't stupid. He knew that during their time together this morning, something in her attitude toward him had subtly shifted.

This is fine. Can't let it go further than this.

That was what he told himself.

He put on the deep red hat, took up the black umbrella, and turned into the shadows outside the door. Asuka had been stealing glances at his retreating figure from the corner of her eye, but Ma En's silhouette turned once and vanished — so fast it left her wondering whether she'd seen anything at all. A flicker of melancholy touched her. But before she could dwell on it, her father was already hollering for help at the counter, and her thoughts swept along with the shop's rush. Moments later, she had no room left to think about any of it.

When Ma En returned to the apartment, the manager was already waiting for him in her room. The locksmith hadn't arrived yet, so she waved him inside. "Sit for a bit. I made pickled cucumber — let me get you some to try." She said it warmly, ducking into the kitchen before he could refuse. The semi-open kitchen was the same layout as Ma En's room. The manager was short; the moment she bent down, she disappeared behind the counter entirely.

This wasn't Ma En's first visit to her room. On previous occasions he'd taken note of the furnishings, and this time he spotted something new. In her display case, where a piece of ceramic art used to sit, there was now something else. The ceramic had been abstract — aggressively so. Ma En couldn't appreciate it at all. All he'd seen was a twisted shape that defied identification: he couldn't tell what it was, couldn't tell what it was meant to express. Even when he'd asked the manager, this kindly middle-aged woman had admitted she didn't know either. It just "felt like something," so she'd bought it and put it there. Truth be told, if Ma En hadn't brought it up, she rarely thought about it at all.

"What even is it?" The manager had worn a baffled expression herself.

"Maybe a squid. Look — all those twisty, curvy parts. Don't they look like squid tentacles?" Ma En had joked.

"Oh, stop. That's disgusting. It was fine before you said that — now I can't unsee it. Why did I ever take a liking to this thing?" The manager had grimaced. "I don't get it. I kind of want to swap it out, but I don't know what to replace it with. I love art, but I've got no patience and no eye for it."

That was what she'd said then. Now, in the same spot, a wood carving had taken the ceramic's place. But the carving had inherited its predecessor's strangeness and abstraction in full. Gone were the squid-like twists and curves; instead, the entire piece seemed devoted to presenting the raw, natural state of its material — as though insisting to the viewer: I was once part of a tree. The carving followed the wood's native grain, its surface gleaming with a freshness that suggested it had been felled at dawn, still carrying moisture. And yet, for reasons Ma En couldn't articulate, something about this "natural form" felt deeply wrong. He couldn't put it into words. It was hidden somewhere in details his eyes couldn't quite penetrate, hidden in that moist-looking sheen, hidden in those dense, intricate, eye-dizzying patterns of grain.

What was the carving supposed to be? Impossible to tell. It didn't resemble an animal, a plant, a human figure, or any familiar product of the imagination. It was something entirely new — grotesque precisely because he'd never seen anything like it.

By all reason, any work of art had to be a processing of things observed in life. No matter how abstract, at its core it had to contain human thought and feeling, and therefore had to bear some resemblance to things found in nature and experience. Human art drew from the accessible and everyday, extracting what moved people most — whether the moving was good or bad — and used it to touch others.

If the old ceramic and this wood carving shared anything in common, Ma En thought, it was the absence of exactly that. Both were missing the details that should have carried traces of human nature and human reason. He couldn't be sure whether the fault lay in his own aesthetic sense or in the artist's unfathomable depth. And it wasn't as though works he couldn't interpret were rare in this world. Resonance between people was never easy — it was far more common to develop distance over trivial things, let alone over thoughts conveyed through art alone.

From another angle, though, Ma En's pursuit of the bizarre actually gave him a fondness for both pieces. He'd once considered buying the ceramic from the manager, but ultimately let the impulse pass. The urge had been more whim than want.

With this wood carving, he'd only been admiring it through the glass. He stood, leaned in, and studied its overall form through the display case. The longer he looked, the more uncomfortable he felt — but the discomfort carried a strange pull, making him want to keep looking, even to open the case and take it out for a closer examination.

Not until the manager called "Ma En-san" from behind did he jolt back to himself, snapping free of that eerie attraction in an instant. He wasn't fully lucid at first, didn't register what she was saying. When he turned and saw the pickled cucumber already set on the table, the manager busy pouring tea, all he could feel was a cold dampness spreading across the back of his shirt. At some point, without his noticing, he'd broken into a drenching sweat.

His heart hammered. The manager looked up from the table's edge and gasped. "Ma En-san, what's wrong? Are you feeling unwell?"

He knew his face must have looked terrible. The body's reaction was that obvious. But all he'd done was stare at a wood carving for a while. What on earth was this thing? He couldn't help glancing back at it. But this time, whatever charm had drawn him in before was gone entirely. Instead, he found it strange that he'd felt anything so intense toward the carving at all.

"It's nothing. I was just curious about this wood carving," he told the manager.

"'Nothing,' he says. Your face is white as a sheet." Her tone sharpened slightly. "Looking at a wood carving shouldn't do that to you."

"I just felt something off about it. A bit unsettling," Ma En said honestly. Words like that risked sounding like a jab at her taste, but the manager didn't seem particularly offended.

"I don't see it. Same as the ceramic before, right?" she countered. Ma En wasn't sure what she was getting at.

He picked up the chopsticks, took a bite of pickled cucumber, followed it with a sip of warm tea. The chill in his body and the pounding of his heart gradually eased.

"You like this kind of art piece?" he asked.

"I don't know much about art. Like I said — I buy on feeling. Though this wood carving wasn't bought. Someone gave it to me." The manager said it like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. "After what you said, I liked the ceramic less and less. Wanted to sell it to a secondhand shop. But just as I was heading out the door, I ran into an acquaintance. He took one look at the ceramic and said, 'How about I buy it off you?' We knew each other, so I was going to just give it to him. But he swapped this wood carving for it instead. So — you see how it goes. Ended up with another one of these things." She sighed, looking faintly mournful.

"Pieces like that, you're better off not keeping at home. Looks pretty frightening, doesn't it? Imagine coming into the living room at night and suddenly catching sight of that thing." Ma En deliberately laid it on thick. That earlier bad feeling had left him with an urgency, and he was reaching for every leading tactic he had.

The manager studied the carving carefully, several long looks. Ma En watched her. He detected nothing unusual — she seemed completely insulated from whatever the carving was, fundamentally unable to sense it.

"Now that you mention it, you're right... Once you say it, I'm a bit scared." The manager murmured, brow creasing. She looked genuinely troubled. "But it wasn't so easy to just throw it out, either. I honestly don't know what to do with it."

"If you don't mind, how about leaving it with me for now?" Ma En seized the opening. He still felt he'd been too eager. Best not to let her think he had ulterior motives.

Sure enough, the manager turned and simply stared at him. Ma En met her gaze without flinching. He genuinely believed something was wrong with the carving — he didn't know what, but with so many strange things already swirling around him, a little extra suspicion cost nothing. If he was wrong, he'd return it. If he was right, at least this kind woman wouldn't become a victim first.

Because there was nothing to hide, his gaze was open. The manager held it for only a few seconds before her expression softened with relief. "You're really okay with keeping it? You don't like this carving either, do you? When you saw the ceramic, you didn't say anything, but I could tell you weren't a fan."

"Didn't like it?" Ma En smiled. "No — I actually loved it. Several times I almost asked if you'd be willing to part with it."

"But you never said a word." The manager's expression finally warmed, and she smiled too. "If you'd asked, I would have given it to you."

"Then what about this carving?"

"That'll be three thousand yen, please." The manager said it like a shopkeeper play-acting.

But Ma En immediately pulled out his wallet, drew three thousand yen, and set it in front of her. Now she was the one caught off guard, waving her hands in refusal. "No, no — I was joking. Take it, it's yours."

"Please. I insist." Ma En was immovable on this point.

After several rounds of declining got her nowhere, the manager put the money away. But the look she gave Ma En grew even warmer.

"Can I ask — where did you buy that ceramic piece?" Once they'd settled back into their seats, Ma En pressed.

"At a secondhand market," she said. "You just got to Japan, Ma En — you probably don't know this, but disposing of unwanted items here costs money. Large items cost even more. Plenty of things — sofas, TVs, tables, chairs — are perfectly fine, just being replaced. The old ones still work, but you'd have to pay to have them hauled away. How wasteful is that? So quite a few people bring things that are still usable but no longer wanted to designated spots and sell them cheap to whoever needs them. A lot of young people new to Bunkyo District go scavenging for secondhand goods to save money. It's actually not bad at all."

"So that ceramic was essentially someone else's discarded decoration?"

"That's right."

"Can the seller be tracked down?" The question came abruptly. The manager paused, puzzled, then said, "I still have the receipt. But that family is probably gone — they sold everything because they were moving."

"I see..." Ma En felt a twinge of regret. The carving and the ceramic shared subtle commonalities. Now that the carving seemed strange, he suspected the ceramic might have been strange too — he just hadn't sensed it at the time. He wanted the original seller's information, just in case. But if it couldn't be found, it didn't matter much. The items were no longer with their original owners. And whether the carving or the ceramic actually had anything wrong with them was still uncertain. Maybe what he'd felt earlier was nothing more than his imagination.

"Then — the acquaintance who traded you this carving, could you introduce me?" Ma En pressed while the iron was hot. "If he knows where these two pieces came from, I'd love to learn a thing or two."

"That man. Hmm... how to put it — he's an odd one. I don't know him all that well, honestly. He used to rent here. After he moved out, I've only seen him a handful of times. I have his business card somewhere. Hold on." She walked over to a drawer, pulled out a card holder, flipped through it, extracted a card, and handed it to Ma En. "This is him. He calls himself an archaeology professor. That ceramic and this carving are both replicas of some ancient folk art — nothing valuable, but quite rare. Not many people are willing to collect that sort of thing."

"He collects these?" Ma En took the card and looked. It bore only a name — Mitarai Sanshirou — and a phone number.

"He's devoted to uncovering the truth behind folk tales and urban legends. He's written several academic books and novels — they've all sold well. Not even fifty yet and already a professor. A very talented person." The manager described him with evident admiration, despite claiming she didn't know him well.