Chapter 58 Downpour

Half an hour ago the sun had heated the seats warm enough to feel through fabric, and the whole car had been bright enough to demand the curtains be drawn. Now the view through the window was a wall of leaden cloud, so heavy it looked like it might collapse under its own weight. Even with the windows shut, the air tasted of moisture.

Rain was coming. Everyone in the car was saying so.

Ma En paged through his documents and listened to the conversations around him. He'd abandoned the active search for suspicious figures. Hirota Masami's appearance at the station had taught him the lesson cleanly: he truly could not identify the watchers from within the crowd, no matter what they were doing to achieve it. Hirota-san had mentioned a man sitting by the planter outside the station — but Ma En had no memory of him whatsoever. He was certain he hadn't seen anyone near any planter close to the entrance.

Which meant: the observer who'd orchestrated that encounter had been positioned somewhere else entirely, then relocated. Someone had stage-managed the scene.

Hirota Masami showing up had genuinely caught him off guard. But logically, given that he'd been under constant surveillance and Hirota Masami was both his neighbor and his girlfriend, the probability of her being drawn into the net — unwittingly, as a victim — was high. The thing he'd feared while still in the homeland had already come to pass. Whether or not the bizarre was involved, the threat had reached the people closest to him.

Even so, he couldn't recall what specific bizarre thing had driven him to leave the homeland. There had to have been something concrete — a specific, bizarre object. The everyday dangers of postal service work alone wouldn't have been enough to make him leave his country. He'd joined the service with full awareness of those risks, accepted them as part of serving a greater number of people.

Logically, whatever he'd brought out of China was something specific and strange. And he'd almost certainly noticed something happening — something already in motion — before he left.

Whether the Room 4 Ghost Story was connected to whatever he'd brought remained impossible to determine.

He took the paper ball from his pocket. Even during the preparations he'd made before boarding — the notes he'd encoded, the trails he'd laid — this paper had been completely invisible to his mind. Every time his intention turned toward discarding something, its existence seemed to turn transparent.

Ma En trusted his memory. Its persistence, by inversion, confirmed that the paper had some quality worth paying attention to. Perhaps his pre-attack self had performed some kind of psychological self-conditioning, embedding a coded signal in this paper. The twenty-four symbols — or characters, or whatever they were — gave him nothing to work with: no decryption key, no structural rule, no lingering impression of method.

For the past half hour he'd been turning the crumpled page over in his hands, and the thought had occurred more than once: these symbols might have nothing to do with the Room 4 Ghost Story. They might relate to whatever he'd brought from the homeland. And if that were so, his past self had almost certainly been studying them — even if only for two or three days in Japan, that would have been on top of however much research he'd done back home. There had to be accumulated material somewhere.

He searched his memory for anything in his room that connected to the number twenty-four. The most obvious match was the Twenty-Four Solar Terms. The Solar Terms' names were each two characters, and these symbols on the paper were clearly not modern script of any kind. So perhaps what he'd been tracking wasn't the Solar Terms themselves but the significance of the number twenty-four — its symbolic resonance, its pattern.

At this point, all he could do was reconstruct the shape of his own past from imagination and logic. He didn't know how much memory he'd lost, but judging from what this morning had revealed, the gaps had deeply warped his thinking. He was now convinced that his current approach to the Room 4 Ghost Story — the angle from which he examined it, the assumptions he brought — was fundamentally different from his past self's.

His past self had probably insisted on the premise that the bizarre was definitely part of it. Even in just a few days, that past self might have pushed deep enough into something to provoke a response — and it was precisely because he'd gone too deep, too fast, that he'd been hit.

Whatever hit him had been sudden and total. The past version of Ma En had been defeated so swiftly and so completely that he'd barely managed to leave any trails at all.

The past Ma En failed abruptly and utterly. The present Ma En survived only because the enemy wanted more from him than a quick kill — which only proved how much room the enemy had to maneuver.

He thought this, rubbed his sore eyes, and slid the documents back into the briefcase.

Most of the files inside concerned school business. His leave was three days; afterward, keeping his daily life functioning meant returning to work. By then there'd be no more leniency, and he'd need to produce enough results and effort to repair the damage from today's recklessness.

The Room 4 Ghost Story was life and death. But beyond it, the school job mattered more. He had no contempt for teaching — the position paid well, carried genuine social significance, and getting it after leaving the postal service had been a stroke of luck. For that, he owed Kamishima Kousuke, even if the man had delivered enormous trouble alongside the favor.

His past self — that single-minded pursuer of the bizarre — had probably never imagined the Room 4 Ghost Story would be something of this magnitude.

He was fairly sure that guess was right. Based on hearsay alone, treated as nothing more than an interesting urban legend, Room 4's story was just one ghost story among thousands.

"Hey — you studying in Tokyo?" The man sitting across from him spoke up. Probably just couldn't stand the silence anymore; the four-person compartment had gone nearly half an hour without a word.

Ma En didn't mind. He had things to think about, and thinking consumed most of his attention. The other three appeared to be strangers to one another: a young woman in the window seat, an older man also by the window on the opposite side, and the one who'd spoken — a solidly built man in his thirties, sitting directly across from Ma En. None of them looked like the type to strike up conversations with strangers.

Most of the passengers had departed from the Tokyo Metropolitan Area and were bound for other parts of Japan. In terms of dress, all four of them — Ma En included — lacked what might be called a Tokyo sensibility.

Ma En wasn't attuned to fashion, but a month of daily life and a girlfriend who edited for a fashion and celebrity magazine had taught him enough to recognize what counted as stylish in current Tokyo — and what didn't. Falling short of stylish, in Tokyo terms, was practically synonymous with "provincial." Even though Ma En personally saw nothing wrong with that.

"No, I'm already working." He'd finished gathering his thoughts, and looked up at the solidly built man with the kind of mild, cultured smile that an educator might wear.

"Working? You don't look it..." The man wasn't the overbearing type — his voice was deep but his manner unexpectedly gentle. "Sorry to ask, but how old are you?"

"Twenty-four."

"Started working right out of high school? Didn't go to university?"

"No — I graduated university already." Ma En didn't mind the questions. People asked this even back in the homeland. In their eyes he looked too young. But at certain selective-enrollment universities there were students who entered before thirteen and graduated at fifteen or sixteen, going straight into research institutes. Compared to actual prodigies, he was unremarkable.

"What?" The solidly built man stared. The young woman and the older man couldn't help glancing over.

"I finished university at twenty. I've been working for four years." He saw no reason to hide any of this; even for counter-intelligence purposes, the enemy likely knew far more. "I was on the mainland before. Came to Japan about a month ago."

"Ah... is that so." The solidly built man seemed to have run out of words. He wasn't particularly talkative to begin with — he'd only broken the silence because the quiet was getting to him, and Ma En had looked approachable. Instead, he'd gotten more than he'd bargained for and didn't know how to follow up.

"I'm a teacher now. At a school in Bunkyo District." Ma En had already assessed all three. Nothing abnormal. He didn't mind continuing the observation; all three had shown varying degrees of surprise, which was natural enough.

The best-controlled reaction belonged to the older man — wearing a plain suit, a flat cap, carrying a walking stick. Ma En couldn't pin down his exact age.

The young woman, as noted, wore a long-sleeved cardigan over a one-piece dress — the style, the colors, the coordination, and every detail of her makeup fell squarely into what Hirota-san would call "the most common unfashionable look." Not that Ma En cared.

The solidly built man was packed with muscle, his frame straining a black tank top beneath an open short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt — the sleeves not even through the armholes, just draped over his shoulders. The impression was vaguely delinquent, but as established, his demeanor was restrained and his voice soft. The moment he opened his mouth, any sense of menace dissolved.

"University graduate? A teacher? At your age..." The young woman looked Ma En over properly for the first time, her expression acquiring a touch of deference. "May I ask — which school?"

"The Academy of Peaceful Learning," Ma En said. "It's the new school that Katsura Masakazu-sensei founded in Bunkyo District."

"I see — Katsura-sensei's school." The older man nodded knowingly, then added with feeling: "Katsura-sensei truly is devoted to education."

"Katsura Masakazu? The Academy of Peaceful Learning?" The solidly built man looked puzzled, clearly unfamiliar with either name, but after a beat his face cleared. "Oh — Katsura-sensei, right, the educator? I know, I know."

The young woman shot him a look of undisguised contempt and said nothing. The solidly built man took it in stride, offering only a dry, self-conscious laugh.

Several minutes of silence followed.

Having already broken the ice once, this renewed quiet felt worse than the original. Ma En was comfortable enough, but the other three had grown visibly restless — the book-reader no longer reading, the scenery-watcher no longer watching.

Ma En made no move to start a topic. He simply sat with a slight smile, observing the three of them.

The pressure in the car seemed to drop with the weather. When the young woman closed the book she'd been holding, the sound was startlingly loud.

"Sensei, don't you have class today?" she asked.

"The school has some administrative business in Kanagawa." Then, turning it around: "What about the three of you? Where are you all headed?"

"Ha — funny coincidence, I'm going to Kamakura too." The solidly built man gave another of his dry laughs. "Sightseeing."

Kamakura was the famous seaside city in Kanagawa prefecture — ancient capital, rich in cultural and natural heritage, a favorite retreat of modern literary giants, and currently one of the most popular tourist destinations in the region. The solidly built man's physique and wardrobe, however, did not readily suggest someone drawn to such a place.

The young woman compressed her lips for an instant — a flicker of contempt, there and gone, more restrained than before. Ma En thought he detected a slight thaw. Perhaps because she, too, was a Kamakura enthusiast.

"You?" the solidly built man asked the young woman and the older man quickly, as though afraid that if no one spoke, the silence would descend again and become unbearable.

"Kamakura as well." The young woman's voice was quiet. She touched the cover of her book with something like tenderness, her expression carrying a faint melancholy. "The main character in this novel met their love in Kamakura. The beautiful things they experienced — I want to see the real places."

"Oh, a romance novel? Do the leads get married?" The solidly built man followed her lead.

"There is no female lead," the young woman said.

"Huh?" He didn't understand.

"It's a real love story. A true one." She offered nothing further.

Ma En wasn't sure he understood either — a true love story with no female lead. He couldn't picture the plot. He exchanged a glance with the solidly built man, who returned a look of mild helplessness.

The older man, who'd been gazing out the window the entire time, spoke at last: "I'm going to Kanagawa too. I was born there, but it's been more than twenty years since I went back. I'd really like to see the ocean again."

Ma En had been expecting something like this. He couldn't identify anything wrong with any of the three, but the morning's events had made coincidences harder to accept. Kanagawa was large, of course — just as Bunkyo District was one ward within greater Tokyo, Kanagawa contained Kamakura and many other cities.

The solidly built man and the young woman were bound for Kamakura. The older man wanted the coast. Ma En himself had no specific destination — he'd decide after getting off. Going to Kanagawa was about creating the impression that he was fleeing the Room 4 whirlpool. He'd return eventually. If the enemy had anticipated this, he had nothing to lose.

If the enemy's ongoing influence relied on proximity and sustained drug exposure, three days of distance should weaken it.

If the enemy didn't follow him — didn't attempt close contact during these three days — that would give him enough time for psychological and cognitive self-assessment.

No Hirota-san, no Room 3 neighbor, no one from his immediate circle. If strangers in a train compartment were actually compromised, this was his best chance to detect it.

Even so, the enemy was hidden, elusive, and tenacious. He had no idea which approach would work. All he could do was test.

If my past self fell into the trap purely through carelessness, that's one thing. But seriously — what kind of method works even when the target is on guard?

He turned a pen between his fingers. He was prepared for anything to happen at any moment. He couldn't imagine what form it would take, and the possibility that overthinking would exhaust him into a vulnerable state wasn't lost on him.

If only the black umbrella were still here.

He knew the umbrella contained prohibited substances. Combined with certain psychological techniques, those compounds might have been more effective at counteracting whatever the enemy had dosed him with — might have helped him excavate memories from the subconscious that hadn't truly been erased.

He sat with his thoughts. The other three had fallen silent again. Without anyone noticing, the car had sunk back into its quiet.

Then a crack of thunder split the air outside the window. Everyone looked up. The mass of cloud had begun to glow from within; forks of lightning crawled through it, and the heavy black sky flashed purple-red in pulses, like a wound opening and closing.

Two or three more deafening peals of thunder. The window glass began to rattle with the first drops — a staccato tapping that quickly thickened. Beads of water streaked down the glass in lines.

Rain.

Heavy rain. In a few breaths, the downpour had drawn a curtain of water across the landscape, blurring everything beyond the window to smears of color.

Despite the noise — the rain hammering, the thunder rolling, the sky outside looking like the end of the world — Ma En began to feel drowsy. His head dipped once. He caught himself. Dipped again. On the third time, in the last instant of clarity, understanding hit him like ice water.

— Damn. So that's how it works.

Before consciousness went dark, Ma En quietly, deliberately, broke his own pinky finger.

The pain arrived — sharp, immediate, radiating — but it couldn't stop his mind from sinking. And breaking the finger hadn't been only about creating pain.

...This was the only thing he could do.