Chapter 66 Contracting Defense

Ma En didn't get the answer he'd hoped for. All three said Tokyo. Their stated purposes had shifted from what they'd declared on the outbound journey: the solidly built man and the young woman, who'd both spoken of traveling to Kamakura for sightseeing, now said they were returning to Tokyo for work. The older man, who'd spoken movingly of going home to Kanagawa after twenty years to see the ocean, now said he was heading back to his apartment in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area.

The feelings each of them had expressed about Kanagawa just hours earlier — the spontaneous warmth, the anticipation — had been erased as though wiped with a rubber. And as if the page beneath had not been blank, not even a trace remained.

Observing their expressions and reading their emotional states, Ma En still couldn't find a single sign of concealment or performance. Their revised reasons sounded as though they'd always been the truth. But he'd exhausted his faith in his own observational judgment. Years of experience at the postal service — the cultivated ability to read faces, parse intentions — seemed, where the Room 4 Ghost Story was concerned, to count for nothing.

All three had jobs in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, but none worked in Bunkyo District. Ma En tried, sidelong, raising the subject of his apartment building's Room 4 Ghost Story. All three said they'd never heard of it. They weren't entirely uninterested in ghost stories — they simply didn't put stock in urban legends. They treated them as idle chatter, barely even that: something to half-listen to when someone else brought it up, something worth a passing comment and nothing more. Under normal circumstances, Ma En would never have connected these three to the ghost story. But now they were plainly entangled — even if subjectively they were "completely unaware," they'd already been influenced.

Ma En had no intention of treating his outbound journey as a hallucination. You couldn't return from Kanagawa to Tokyo without first going to Kanagawa. A round trip had occurred, and in the missing hours between, something had happened. The three simply didn't remember.

In the sphere of the Room 4 Ghost Story, memory, attention, and comprehension were no longer safe. They appeared to be locked in each person's private vault, but in reality they'd been freely handled by some external force — and the people affected had neither understanding nor awareness.

Ma En himself was the most direct evidence. If he'd been altered to this degree, it was entirely normal that ordinary people couldn't perceive their own modifications.

He didn't know whether the three passengers' altered memories would be noticed by the people closest to them after they returned to their lives, or what might follow. But if the number of affected individuals truly reached 100,000, yet daily life continued without major disruption, then any fallout from individual memory gaps couldn't be large.

But there was one inference worth holding onto. These three passengers didn't all live in Bunkyo District — which meant that even if a hundred thousand people had truly been affected, they weren't all concentrated there. In the midst of everything pressing down on him, this was a meaningfully good sign.

He'd previously imagined half of Bunkyo's permanent population compromised — knowingly or not, all of them potential instruments of whoever pulled the strings. The thought had made his scalp crawl. If that density could be reduced — even by a single percentage point — it was something to work with.

He got off at Bunkyo District without following them further. The station was busy, foot traffic flowing normally. To his relief, Hirota-san was nowhere in sight. Her unexpected appearance that morning — at the station, holding his deliberately abandoned briefcase — had cast a shadow he knew he wouldn't shake until the ghost story was resolved.

He confirmed that the vomit bag was still in his briefcase. The contents — those nauseating objects — were among his most important pieces of physical evidence, alongside the paper with its twenty-four symbols.

He planned to have the vomit analyzed at a university-affiliated research lab. Whatever those root-like and seed-like objects were, they weren't common plants, but they also weren't endangered rarities. Their supply was large enough to sustain use on tens of thousands of people, which meant they likely grew in concentrated quantities somewhere — possibly a regional specialty from some remote corner of the countryside. Japan's soil-science research was still in its early stages, but if this was a local product, records might already exist at a Bunkyo District research institute.

Before the hospital, Ma En first retraced his steps to recover the evidence he'd planted that morning. Every piece was where he'd left it, each recovery confirming his current memory and reasoning hadn't been tampered with — except for the gap covering his arrival in Kanagawa and his boarding of the return train.

He still couldn't determine how the enemy had put him into the nightmare on the train, or how — while he was unconscious and perceiving nothing of his physical body — someone had arranged his return trip through ordinary social channels.

The bizarre elements and the realistic elements were woven together, producing a journey that almost defied the distinction between reality and illusion.

Throughout his evidence recovery, he found no suspicious persons. But the more normal everything appeared, the less reassuring it felt. The sense that everyone was watching him persisted. Ma En considered his nerves tougher than average, yet he couldn't ignore the psychological distortion. He imagined the previous Room 4 tenants must have had it worse — if they'd ignored the ghost story entirely, never noticed anything, simply drifted into August unaware, their remaining time might have been more bearable. But if they'd actively pursued the ghost story, the deeper they went, the more clearly they saw, the greater the psychological burden.

From that perspective, the Room 3 neighbor's visibly abnormal lifestyle and mental state only strengthened Ma En's conviction: that man was currently the most likely person to know the full story. But how to convince him to share it? Ma En had no idea. A person with psychological damage operated on a different kind of logic — the neighbor's deep secrecy had almost certainly formed under the enormous pressure of the ghost story, and the greater that pressure, the deeper the secrecy was rooted. This had nothing to do with rationality. Outsiders could easily say just tell someone from the comfortable height of normalcy, but this wasn't a matter of should or shouldn't — it was a predictable, universal psychological mechanism.

Even knowing the better answer, the heart blocked the way. Knowing but unable to act. As though grease had been smeared over the mind's eye. These were the most common descriptions of the contradiction between psychology and behavior.

Ordinary people couldn't resist this mechanism. Without some regular outlet, found before the condition deepened, the outcome was almost inevitable.

Ma En hadn't met the Room 3 neighbor face to face, but from their fragmented conversations he could tell: unless the ghost story itself was resolved, the man's secrets would never fully come out. Not even truth serum could excavate everything.

He was equally aware that his own psychological problems were worsening. He was better off than most, but not by much. The best he could guarantee was that he wouldn't lose his mind before August.

But that's enough. As long as I don't collapse before the deadline, there's still a chance.

Carrying this thought, Ma En walked into a nearby hospital. He needed treatment for the broken pinky. For most people, a fractured bone was serious business. For him, it barely registered.

"You don't seem to be in much pain?" The doctor looked puzzled by Ma En's flat expression, as though every patient with a broken finger ought to arrive with a suffering face.

"No, it hurts." Just — compared to the full-body nerve pain the nightmare had left behind, a broken finger was trivial.

"Is that so?" The doctor eyed him skeptically. When Ma En requested a full-body X-ray in addition to the finger, the skepticism deepened. But Ma En was paying, so the doctor obliged — though not before carefully explaining the risks of radiation exposure and the price difference between a full scan and a targeted one.

Ma En wanted to see whether his body showed anything different from baseline. If the scan found an anomaly, that would actually be the best possible news. If it found nothing — that would be worse.

He left the hospital close to midnight. The pinky was splinted and bandaged. The disappointment was real: as he'd feared, the X-ray showed nothing abnormal beyond the fracture. The pain saturating his body was phantom — psychosomatic, probably. A pain with psychological roots.

The doctor couldn't explain it, naturally. He prescribed painkillers and sleeping pills and advised Ma En to avoid taking either unless absolutely necessary.

Ma En would never touch those drugs. The pain was tolerable, and at this point, the pain was necessary — his evidence that he was in reality, not in another dream.

He didn't go back to the apartment. Instead he checked into a hotel nearby.

That night, Ma En stood by the bed, using a finger to part the blinds, and studied the apartment building in the darkness. From the hotel window he could see the front entrance and the even-numbered rooms on the visible side. At this hour, only Hirota-san's room still had a light on. He hoped to wait until she'd left for work tomorrow, then slip back to Room 4 without encountering her or the building manager.

He watched for a while. Nothing unusual. He let the blinds fall, sat on the edge of the bed, and lit a cigarette. The briefcase lay at his feet, emptied of everything. He reviewed every item, checking for anything he'd overlooked, then recorded his current thinking on paper — relationship diagrams, annotated with every point of suspicion.

He crossed out Kamishima Kousuke. He crossed out the political dimension — the implied government tensions, the two-party friction. He didn't want to elevate the Room 4 Ghost Story to that level of political depth. Expanding the problem gave him no advantage; it only made him more of a pawn, and a pawn could accomplish nothing. Thinking from that height would only drive him into a corner.

Between enlarging the problem and shrinking it, he chose to shrink.

Shrink it to Bunkyo District. Shrink it to the local police system. Shrink it to Matsuzaemon and his official position — which, as Katsura-sensei had mentioned, was merely Superintendent. That was a senior rank, yes, but even within Bunkyo District alone, it didn't put him in the top three chairs of power and responsibility.

Using Katsura-sensei as a reference point: his attitude toward Matsuzaemon was less like fear and more like wariness toward a dog that bites. He wasn't afraid of Matsuzaemon personally; he simply didn't want any entanglement — yet had ended up owing the man a favor through the school's establishment.

Strip away Matsuzaemon's hidden backers, and his public-facing social position was lower than Ma En had initially estimated. Moreover, the man had apparently been tripped up by political rivals and demoted to Bunkyo District to serve as a minor inspector.

Shrink the problem to a Superintendent who is currently being targeted and suppressed by his political opponents — and for the first time, Ma En felt a realistic possibility that he could affect the outcome.

What exactly to do, he still couldn't map out. He didn't even know what Matsuzaemon looked like.