Chapter 45 Dream's Continuation

After Room 3's door closed, Ma En stood in the hallway for a long while. The words the Room 3 occupant had spoken kept echoing through him, the information they contained seeming to decompose continuously — recombining with other fragments in his memory, forming entirely new configurations. These new and old fragments were together drawing the Room 4 Ghost Story into sharper relief, yet even so, the full picture of everything revolving around it remained just out of reach.

The one thing he could say with certainty was this: the current Bunkyo District — at least within the range of his knowledge — had in all likelihood already been drawn into an enormous whirlpool. A political whirlpool, yes, but also a civil one. The number of victims hidden behind the events, the number of ordinary people already caught up without knowing it, might well be large enough to trigger genuine social upheaval.

Ma En had known from the beginning that Kamishima Kousuke hadn't arranged this apartment purely out of goodwill toward a fellow Party member, and had prepared himself mentally for some degree of trouble. He hadn't expected the trouble to be on this scale.

A single building's ghost story had grown into a ghost story many people were chasing. That ghost story had spread into Bunkyo District's police system. Through a senior police official, it had become a political power struggle playing out in the open and in the shadows. And that political struggle had now, possibly, already reached down to touch ordinary people in the most direct way imaginable.

Of everything the Room 3 occupant had said in his disjointed way, what stayed with Ma En most was —

Here. The streets. The residents. Everywhere.

What kind of range, exactly, would a person describe as everywhere? Even for someone who never left his room — as a contemporary resident of Japan, as someone with a normal common-sense life circle — that range would encompass at least half of Bunkyo District. Which meant everywhere might well carry the meaning of everywhere throughout Bunkyo District.

And then there was the "kill Matsuzaemon" framing as the ultimate solution. Regardless of whether it was correct, it meant that in this person's thinking, the senior government police official occupied an absolutely central role in the events — his weight was something like that of a final antagonist.

Ma En still couldn't be sure how much the man actually knew, couldn't verify whether his reasoning was correct or mistaken. And given the mental state the man had displayed, it was difficult to believe his logic was sufficiently clear and rigorous, or to know how much guesswork and speculation had crept in.

And yet —

Combined with the hints Kamishima Kousuke had given him that afternoon, Ma En could readily supply many reasons why Kamishima had to hint at things that way.

If Matsuzaemon had a problem, why couldn't the government intervene directly? If Kamishima Kousuke — a Red Party member — already knew something of the situation, why would they task him, a foreigner still pending Party review, with following up on it?

In short: if they'd already moved to undermine Matsuzaemon's political standing from the government level, why were they still investigating Matsuzaemon through such a roundabout method?

Judging from Kamishima's manner, his targeting of Matsuzaemon was unmistakable — and not born of personal feeling or private grudge.

Perhaps the reason was precisely this: Matsuzaemon's problem could be solved neither at the political level nor by letting him drift away from politics; simultaneously, it couldn't be addressed too openly or aggressively — otherwise the result would be direct social upheaval, not merely turmoil in the political landscape. Though his information was still insufficient, Ma En found himself thinking it anyway: Matsuzaemon and the Room 4 secret had an extremely direct impact on ordinary people throughout all of Bunkyo District.

But how direct, exactly?

For ordinary people, the most critical things were, without question, economic concerns and concerns about life and death.

So was this only an economic-level problem? Or something further — something life-and-death?

The former was easier to imagine, but economic turbulence in a single district alone wouldn't necessarily make the government and the parties resort to methods this indirect.

If it was the latter, that was genuinely alarming.

Would there be massive riots? Would it cause enormous casualties directly? And how enormous would those numbers have to be for the Japanese island government to be this afraid of making a wrong move?

Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?

The thought arose instinctively, then struck him immediately as excessive.

The Room 3 occupant was, beyond question, a highly valuable informant. But the greater his value, the greater his weight, and the more Ma En found himself doubting what he'd heard from others about this man. Had he really, through all the previous Room 4 incidents, never once exposed himself as someone who knew the truth? Did he genuinely possess the ability he claimed — that dangerous things, whether man-made or supernatural, simply couldn't see him?

And this Matsuzaemon he spoke of — in what sense, exactly, was the man "unable to die"?

People die.

Ma En told himself this, pushed all his thoughts back inside, and returned to Room 6.

The room was dark, but only with ordinary darkness compared to before. As he drew the door shut behind him, the living room seemed to brighten. The lights were off — it was just that the window where the smoke-face had appeared no longer offered an absolute void as its backdrop. The city's ambient glow and the night scenery beyond filtered through the clean glass and the thin curtain, faintly visible.

He carried the black umbrella toward the window, and passing the coffee table and the sofa, he glanced at Hirota Masami asleep there. She'd turned over again; she lay on her side with her back against the sofa cushion, occasionally grinding her teeth, occasionally producing a faint rumble. In the dark Ma En couldn't see her face, which gave him a sense of relief born precisely from that — the relief of normal.

The clock on the wall had crept past one in the morning without his noticing. He felt no trace of sleep.

The sudden clash of the small hours, and the intelligence that had poured in afterward, had his mind running at full speed. An ordinary person might have collapsed from the overstimulation, but this level of provocation hadn't pushed past his threshold. And having lived through such bizarre conflict himself, he felt something very close to the exhilaration of a long-held wish finally granted.

He went to the window, set down the umbrella, and pushed the pane open.

May's night air carried a pleasant coolness and a faint dampness against his face. Looking down at the city lights spreading all the way to the horizon — lights that seemed to never go out — he felt an impulse to spread his arms and embrace this new world.

He didn't. He told himself his inner self shouldn't still be this sentimental at his age.

He fished a cigarette from his pocket and held a cupped hand around the lighter as he faced into the night wind. After several attempts he finally got it lit.

He drew a long drag and breathed out his excitement with the smoke.

What a pain. Will I even be able to sleep tonight? I have an interview tomorrow.

He said this to himself inwardly. Despite calling it a pain, he felt none of it.

Hirota Masami shifted again on the sofa but didn't seem to notice the open window; she slept on steadily. The sounds around him grew richer — sounds from inside the room, sounds from outside it, the quiet nearby and the distant noise weaving and swelling together like a symphony.

He smoked two cigarettes by the window, then closed it again.

He came back to the coffee table, leaned the umbrella against his side, and lay down flat on the carpet in his dress clothes. He folded his hands on his lower abdomen, brought his feet together, and stretched himself out straight — completely still — looking exactly like a corpse.

Then he closed his eyes. He felt no discomfort, and let his breathing gradually slow. Afterward his breathing grew so faint it was nearly inaudible, and he looked more like a corpse than ever.

The tiny tangled sounds around him quickly receded. His consciousness blurred. Sometime afterward — he didn't know how long — when he became aware of himself again, there was an odd floating quality to that awareness, as though he were suspended between waking and sleep. It felt as if he were drifting along something fluid — perhaps water, perhaps wind, with no distinct character — flowing toward a horizon with no end.

Darkness surrounded him, though this was less something he saw than a vague, blurry sense of it. Gradually, the world around him brightened — not brightly, only dimly. Definitely not artificial light, and not daytime. If he had to describe it —

The moment he thought about how to describe it, he suddenly realized he was already awake.

Ma En forced his eyes open. He'd thought he was lying with them closed, even though just a moment ago he'd been thinking about darkness and light.

At first it was as though his eyelids had been glued shut — no matter what he tried he couldn't get enough force behind them — but after a sustained effort he managed it. Only then did he slowly understand that what he'd sensed as brightness was the actual brightness around him.

And yet everything he saw now made him feel that already awake was the illusion.

He was still inside a dream. It was just that this dream was disturbingly clear.

Light fell from the sky.

Ma En lay on the ground, and opening his eyes he could see a vast moon hanging directly overhead.

It was absurdly large — visibly spherical, not the flat disk it appeared in daily life. Looking up at it felt like standing on the ground and craning your neck to take in a skyscraper: that kind of looming, pressing weight. And it was detailed enough that the outlines of its craters were plainly visible to the naked eye.

The lunar surface had brighter areas and dimmer ones, their silhouettes suggesting something evocative, something that readily triggered association. But whatever it suggested, he couldn't put a name to it the way he normally would — couldn't call it a rabbit, couldn't call it a face.

No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't pull any appropriate description from his memory. Not animal, not plant, not human — only the sense of something alive, something he'd never quite seen before and yet didn't find entirely unfamiliar, as though he'd encountered something similar somewhere once and the impression had lodged below the surface.

Looking around, the landscape was equally strange and vaguely familiar. Trees, grass, small paths — a modest natural environment, neither desolate nor lush — everything washed in the moon's amber tint. He seemed to stand at a boundary between the natural and the man-made: on one side the vegetation grew increasingly dense, and on the other, more and more artificial structures appeared; through the treetops he could just make out the corner of some building.

Is this a dream?

He wondered. Then he stood up and looked himself over: still the dark dress clothes, still the deep-red necktie — though unlike his memory from before sleep, he now wore the deep-red hat, and the black umbrella was gripped firmly in his hand.

This wasn't Hirota Masami's room. This was an outside world that felt like a dream.

He believed it was a dream, yet couldn't understand what the dream meant, and for now felt no trigger for waking up. Even inside a dream he could move freely; there was no particular destination, but he couldn't just stand here indefinitely.

He surveyed the environment once more. The giant moon aside — visibly a celestial body in the sky — the things on the ground showed nothing especially unusual. The air... Ma En sniffed carefully. He could breathe, but there was no smell. No exhaust fumes, no natural scent, nothing. Not the freshness of clean air; more that the act of breathing barely registered the air entering his throat and lungs.

No wind. No sound.

Everything visible was completely motionless, as though painted on a backdrop, or arranged from hyper-realistic models. Yet when he crouched and touched the soil and grass, the sensation against his skin was startlingly real. The hyper-real and the false coexisted, giving the sense that something might shift at any moment.

That feeling, perversely, only made the dreamscape feel more artificial. Ma En didn't know why he was having a dream like this, couldn't identify what had triggered it — he could only force a link to the bizarre abnormalities of not long before. Though perhaps that was exactly it.

He decided it was time to choose a direction.

He straightened up and looked toward where the vegetation was dense. The darkness there was so pronounced it might as well have been a warning sign. He could hear nothing standing here, yet looking in that direction gave him the sense that some sound was reaching him — not something heard, but something felt.

Even in a dream, even with some faint familiarity he couldn't quite place, he had no intention of walking that way first.

So — toward the building, then.

The building side lay directly opposite, so deliberately positioned that it felt as if something were saying: pick one or the other, the forest or civilization.

Whether there were actually people where there were buildings — Ma En wasn't certain. But if this was his dream, seeing familiar faces in it was possible.

What put him most on guard, without question, was that this dream had arrived too tightly, too conveniently — leaving him wondering whether it was a continuation of the dangerous strangeness that had preceded sleep.

— Already entered the dream, and still won't let people rest.

Thinking this, he set off at a free stride toward the direction where the corner of the building showed.