The Shinchōsha office building stood on the corner of Yaicho, Shinjuku Ward.
Tsushima Kagami stopped outside, glanced up at the building, then pushed open the glass front door. He exchanged a few words with the security guard — a familiar face by now — and walked in.
He had the elevator to himself. The floor numbers ticked upward one by one, the red indicator light coming to rest.
He stepped out and made his way down the corridor. Framed covers of Shinchōsha's classic titles lined both walls, a parade of the house's history.
At the far end of the corridor, a door stood half-open, a sign reading "Editorial Department" hanging from it.
Tsushima Kagami walked straight in.
The smell was the same as always — cigarettes, printer's ink, and tea, all folded together — accompanied by the occasional ring of a telephone.
One editor who had been idling over a newspaper looked up and spotted Tsushima Kagami walking in. He sat up at once and called out a greeting, and like a ripple spreading across still water, the other editors buried in their work lifted their heads one by one. A chorus of "Welcome, Dassai-ya-sensei" rose and fell across the large open office.
The editors at Shinchōsha's editorial department had long since grown thoroughly familiar with this writer who, to the outside world, remained shrouded in mystery.
With most authors of his stature, it was the editors who had to make pilgrimages to the author's home and wait on their doorstep. Tsushima Kagami, by contrast, had a habit of simply dropping by the editorial department whenever the mood struck him — which meant everyone here had no choice but to get to know him.
They couldn't help thinking: youth really is something. Young people really do have energy.
Tsushima Kagami smiled and returned the greetings one by one.
"I'm here to see Editor-in-Chief Kobayashi."
"Editor-in-Chief Kobayashi is in his private office." One of the editors pointed toward a side office.
"Gunzō has been on a real upswing lately, but Shinchō keeps losing ground. It's been putting Editor-in-Chief Kobayashi in a bit of a mood recently."
The editor said this, then glanced at Tsushima Kagami before pressing on.
"Did you come by especially today to..." "Is it because you finally have a new work to publish in Shinchō?"
"Something like that."
Tsushima Kagami gave a nod.
"Then I'll go find Editor Kobayashi first." "I'll catch up with everyone in a bit."
With that, he headed directly toward Kobayashi Tomoaki's office. Behind him, the cluster of editors stared at his retreating back, whispering excitedly to one another about what he'd just said — a new work to publish.
He pushed open the door. Kobayashi Tomoaki was seated behind his desk, a manuscript in hand, reviewing it.
"What is it now?"
He spoke in a slightly irritable tone, head still down, assuming it was a colleague.
"A new work for publication."
At that familiar voice, Kobayashi Tomoaki froze for a moment. Then he looked up, saw who it was, and his face broke into a wide, delighted smile.
"Kagami-kun!"
"Why didn't you call ahead?!"
He rose from his chair, came around the desk, and seized Tsushima Kagami's hand — as if afraid he might bolt at any second.
"You're finally here! Last time you mentioned a new work, I waited so long I thought I was going to go bald!"
Tsushima Kagami glanced at his still-thick head of dark hair and smiled.
"Editor-in-Chief Kobayashi still has plenty of hair."
"Sooner or later you'll worry it all off me."
Kobayashi Tomoaki pulled him down onto the sofa.
"You really do have a new work to publish today?"
He asked again, still not quite sure.
It wasn't that he doubted Tsushima Kagami — it was that Tsushima Kagami seemed to have absolutely no creative ceiling whatsoever. Most authors took a year or two to produce a single new work, and that was considered fast. Tsushima Kagami was turning out one every month. And on top of that, he'd heard Tsushima Kagami was simultaneously drawing for an adult manga magazine.
Wasn't that just absurd?
A future literary giant, and rather than spending that time developing his craft — or at the very least resting and looking after himself — he was off drawing manga. The sort of thing children flipped through. Was that really something befitting a serious literary figure? And not just manga, but adult manga at that.
Truly...
Writers really do have peculiar habits.
And now, on top of this, Kobayashi knew that at the start of this very month Tsushima Kagami still had to deliver the final installment of the Hear the Wind Sing trilogy to Gunzō for publication. If he was now showing up to say he had another work ready on top of that...
That would be two in a single month.
And Kobayashi Tomoaki had no doubt both would be of the highest quality. He couldn't help wondering: did this young man truly have no creative limits at all?
"This is the manuscript. Please have a look, Editor Kobayashi."
Tsushima Kagami reached into his bag and drew out a thick manila envelope, handing it over.
Kobayashi Tomoaki took it, unsealed the flap, and removed the manuscript pages inside.
One glance at the neat, careful handwriting told him Yukinoshita Shizuku had copied it out fresh. Kagami had many fine qualities, but his handwriting was simply dreadful. Oddly enough, his Chinese characters were passable — it was the hiragana and katakana that were truly painful to look at.
Having silently lamented the handwriting he'd seen before, Kobayashi Tomoaki swept his eyes to the page. On the right side of the first line, after two blank spaces — a four-character title.
No Longer Human.
Kobayashi Tomoaki's eyes narrowed slightly.
What does that mean? To lose the qualification of being human? To be unworthy of being a person?
He picked up the manuscript and began to read through it, line by line.
Tsushima Kagami sat on the sofa and waited quietly.
The office had gone very still. Only the ticking of the clock on the wall — click, click, click — and the occasional sound of a telephone being answered in the outer office.
Kobayashi Tomoaki turned the first page. The second. The third.
His brow had begun to furrow.
[I have seen three photographs of that man.]
[The first was a childhood photograph. He appeared to be around ten years old in the picture, standing beside a garden pond surrounded by a cluster of girls — his sisters or cousins, most likely. He wore loose, wide-striped overalls, his head tilted thirty degrees to the left, a grotesque smile on his face...]
[For some reason, the longer you looked at this child's smiling face, the more it crept under your skin. Look closely and you'd realize he wasn't really smiling at all — you could tell from his tightly clenched fists, since it's impossible to smile genuinely while your hands are balled into fists. The boy's face was like a monkey's — a monkey with an ugly, wrinkled face.]
[In the second photograph, he had changed beyond recognition. Dressed as a student — impossible to tell whether secondary school or university — he had by now become quite handsome.]
[But strangely, there was not a trace of life in him. He sat in a rattan chair, student's uniform on, a white handkerchief tucked in his breast pocket, legs crossed, smiling. This time the smile was more artful — no longer the crumpled monkey of before.]
[Yet he was unlike ordinary people. His smile lacked the weight of blood and the texture of life. There was nothing vital about it. He wore an expressionless smile, and everything about him — from head to toe — looked manufactured. In short, the longer you looked at this handsome student, the stranger and more unsettling he became. I have never encountered such a peculiarly handsome young man.]
[The third photograph was the strangest of all — I couldn't even begin to guess his age. His hair had gone white. He sat hunched in the corner of an extraordinarily squalid room, both hands stretched out over a small brazier. This time he was not smiling. His face held no expression at all. He sat there like a corpse, hands reaching toward the fire, and the entire photograph was suffused with a sense of foreboding. ...The face was so ordinary that the moment I closed my eyes after looking at it, I had already forgotten what it looked like. If I am being blunt — I had no desire to look at it at all, for it left one only with unease and irritation.]
What Kobayashi Tomoaki had been reading was the opening prologue — or more precisely, what in the text's structure was labeled a Prologue.
It was not a preface in the traditional sense — not the author's own notes on the writing, nor a blurb written by someone else. It was an organic component of the novel's own narrative architecture.
The overall structure ran: Prologue — First Notebook — Second Notebook — Third Notebook — Epilogue. This framework gave the novel a three-layered structure: the observer's narration, the subject's own confession, and the observer's retrospective account — adding depth and a sense of reality to the telling.
By the time Kobayashi Tomoaki finished the prologue, his breathing had grown slightly unsteady.
The fourth page. The fifth. The sixth...
He went from reading carefully to flipping rapidly through, scanning for the key passages.
At last Kobayashi Tomoaki set the manuscript down and looked up at Tsushima Kagami.
"Kagami-kun..."
His voice was a little dry.
"Are you... all right? Mentally, I mean?"
Even from a cursory read-through, Kobayashi Tomoaki already felt as though a rope had been cinched around his throat — breathless, utterly hollow, hope for life draining away in an instant. The despair was even heavier than the final pages of The Setting Sun. And that was only from reading it. He could only imagine what it had been like for Tsushima Kagami to write it all the way through.
Tsushima Kagami looked at him with a smile and said nothing.
Kobayashi Tomoaki drew a deep breath, picked the manuscript back up, and kept reading.
The double suicide with Tsuneko — Tsuneko died, he survived. Living together with Shizuko, then leaving. Meeting Yoshiko, marrying her. Yoshiko defiled, and his silence.
Alcoholism. Drug dependency. A psychiatric ward. Convalescence in the countryside...
And finally, that line...
[Mine has been a life of shame.]
Kobayashi Tomoaki set the manuscript down, removed his glasses, and pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose.
He looked up at Tsushima Kagami.
In his eyes: shock. Bewilderment.
"Kagami-kun." "Are you... doing all right?"
Tsushima Kagami blinked, then realized what he was asking, and couldn't help but smile.
"Don't worry." "I'm fine, Editor-in-Chief Kobayashi."
Only then did Kobayashi Tomoaki let out a slow breath of relief.
"This piece of yours..."
He shook his head.
"It gave me a fright."
He picked up the manuscript again and flipped through a few pages.
"The style — it's gone back to something like The Setting Sun." "Nothing like the breezy, sardonic feel of Cheesecake or Hear the Wind Sing."
"Kagami-kun's style really does shift all over the place."
He paused.
"And it's even more... than The Setting Sun..."
He couldn't find the right word.
More bleak? More despairing? More devastating?
"Honest."
Tsushima Kagami supplied it for him.
Kobayashi Tomoaki thought for a moment, then nodded.
"Yes. More honest." "Honest to the point of being frightening."
He set the manuscript down and looked at Tsushima Kagami steadily.
"Kagami-kun — do you understand what will happen if this gets published?"
Tsushima Kagami nodded.
"I do."
"The social climate right now."
Kobayashi Tomoaki stood, walked to the window, and gestured at the streets below.
"The bubble only burst a few years ago. The Asian financial crisis has barely passed." "Unemployment is rising. Suicide rates are rising. The whole of society is at its lowest ebb."
He turned and looked at Tsushima Kagami.
"What the government is thinking about right now is how to stimulate the economy, how to steady public morale."
"If No Longer Human gets published at a moment like this..."
He paused.
"People could die."
____
👻🔥Walnut-chan🔥👻
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🎯 100 Powerstones = +1 Bonus Chapter for everyone