It was past eight in the evening by the time reporter Tanaka got back to his place.
He'd grabbed a bento and two cans of black coffee at a convenience store, then dragged his exhausted body up to the third floor of the old apartment building with no elevator.
He fished out his key, opened the door, and the smell peculiar to a man living alone hit him in the face.
The clean scent of laundry detergent mixed with the leftover grease of takeout from a few days back. Stacks of unsorted magazines and newspapers were piled in the corners.
The 1LDK apartment wasn't large. The combined living room and study ran about twelve tatami mats, laid with dark gray carpet.
A computer sat on the desk by the head of the bed, its screensaver drifting slowly across the monitor.
Tanaka set the bento on the table, shrugged off his jacket and tossed it over the arm of the sofa, then turned and drew the curtains.
He switched on the light.
White light filled the entire room.
Against one wall stood a full row of modular steel shelving, packed solid with books of every kind.
He kicked off his shoes and sat cross-legged in his socks at the low table, pouring himself a glass of water.
He took a long swallow, then let out a long breath.
What a long afternoon it had been.
The afternoon replayed itself in his head without being asked.
The elevator bank in the Shueisha building. The moment that boy in the school uniform had brushed past him.
His own decision to follow.
Then the long tail in a taxi, ending in front of the wani building.
Watching all four of them walk right inside.
wani...
Tanaka sat staring blankly at the computer screen, the blue glow washing over his face, making the bags under his eyes look deeper than ever.
He reached into his backpack for the digital camera he'd shot with that day, pulled out the CF card, and loaded the pictures onto the computer.
The photos opened one after another on the screen.
The first showed the four of them from behind, walking from the gate of wani toward the building entrance.
The second was the boy standing still at the entrance of the wani building, half his profile swallowed by the building's shadow, only a short stretch of jawline and the collar of his uniform showing.
The third... the fourth...
Tanaka rolled the mouse under his finger, zoomed in on one shot, studied the details closely.
After a good while, he closed the viewer.
He leaned back in the chair, folded his arms across his chest, and shut his eyes for a moment.
wani.
Why would a high schooler go to wani?
He knew perfectly well what wani did.
In Japan's publishing industry, wani was famous far and wide for its commercial adult manga magazines, the most celebrated of them Comic Kairakuten.
Since its founding, Comic Kairakuten had produced countless top-tier adult manga artists. Every issue's cover and contributor lineup served as a weather vane for the whole industry.
Tanaka himself was a faithful reader of Comic Kairakuten.
He never missed an issue. The latest one was sitting on the third shelf of his bookcase right now.
So why would a high school author who wrote pure literature turn up at Shueisha and then at wani, on the very same day?
Tanaka's mind began constructing hypotheses.
Shueisha... manga... wani...
Could wani have recently opened some all-ages manga submission channel?
That was the most reasonable explanation.
After all, Shueisha had already established that Tsushima Kagami was connected to manga somehow. Whether he'd been there to help review a manuscript or simply to escort those two women submitting theirs, at minimum it meant he had some contact with the manga world.
So the trip to wani might have been for the same purpose, just aimed in a different direction.
But...
Tanaka opened his eyes and pulled the newest issue of Comic Kairakuten out of the magazine pile at his right hand.
The cover was a girl in a sailor uniform, the art exquisite, the linework so fluid it was like silk sliding across paper.
He flipped through it idly, his gaze settling on the list of contributing artists.
Xuanyaye.
The name sat right there in the table of contents, third among that issue's submissions.
Looking at that name, Tanaka felt a tremor like an electric current shoot up from the base of his spine.
Xuanyaye...
When had he started following this artist?
When Xuanyaye-sensei's first submission appeared in Comic Kairakuten, reader response across the entire adult manga readership had detonated.
That art style was simply too distinctive.
It was adult manga, and yet it carried some literary air that nobody could quite name.
One reader had even written in to say:
"Every page of Xuanyaye-sensei's work is like a piece of art you could hang on your wall."
Afterward Xuanyaye went on to publish in Towako and other magazines, collecting mountains of praise with every issue.
Some guessed he was the secret alt identity of a famous manga artist. Some guessed he was a seasoned veteran past forty. But nobody knew who he really was.
Because Xuanyaye never attended a single public event, never gave an interview. Not one photograph of him had ever been made public.
His one and only "appearance" had been at last year's summer Comic Market.
He had shown up at the booth of his partner circle, [rouge en rouge].
And wearing a mask, supposedly.
Hold on.
Tanaka's hand tightened around the copy of Comic Kairakuten.
If Dassai-ya could be an underage high schooler...
then why couldn't Xuanyaye-sensei also be an underage high schooler?
The thought was absurd to the point of madness, and at the same time so plausible it made his skin crawl.
If both of them could be underage high schoolers...
then why couldn't the two of them be one and the same person?
Tanaka's heartbeat picked up speed, blood thudding against his eardrums.
He spread Comic Kairakuten open on the table and reached for the other magazines on the shelf.
Shincho, Gunzo, Towako...
One after another, as if he were gathering the scattered pieces of an evidentiary puzzle.
Over the next two hours, Tanaka's room turned into an ocean of magazines.
He sat cross-legged in the middle of the carpet, back issues heaped all around him.
Every one of them was open to a particular page, flagged with sticky notes and marked in ballpoint pen of different colors.
Comic Kairakuten, Towako, Shincho and Gunzo lay side by side, arranged by publication date, each one copied out in order into a notebook.
He stared at the notebook in his hands, running his eyes down the list and back up again, checking it over and over.
That was it.
The issue in which Xuanyaye-sensei first appeared in Comic Kairakuten fell in exactly the same month that Dassai-ya-sensei published his first short story, "Cheesecake," in Shincho!
The timelines overlapped perfectly.
Tanaka rubbed his aching eyes.
He got up and went to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face. The shock of it cleared his head a little.
Maybe this was just coincidence.
That was what he told himself.
But his fingers were already trembling faintly with the particular excitement of closing in on the truth.
He went back to the bedroom, muttering to himself as he walked.
Starting from April...
May, June, July...
Wait!
He rifled through the stacks at speed and found that during summer vacation, across July and August, neither side had published anything new.
The same held true over winter break.
On the timeline... everything matched.
If this was coincidence, then there were far too many coincidences.
He dug a collected volume out of a corner of the shelf.
It was the one Xuanyaye-sensei had sold at the summer Comic Market, later published by wani in response to overwhelming demand.
He remembered it clearly. That volume had shot to the top of the adult manga sales charts in its first week on shelves and stirred up no small amount of discussion at the time.
Then something else came back to him.
Tanaka drew a deep breath, opened his browser, and started searching for coverage of last year's summer Comic Market.
Summer Comiket was Japan's largest doujinshi convention, held every summer at Tokyo Big Sight, drawing several hundred thousand people over three days.
Xuanyaye-sensei's circle, [rouge en rouge], had exhibited there for the first time last summer. The booth was said to have sold like wildfire, the queue doubling back on itself again and again.
Tanaka kept searching.
The results weren't plentiful, but they were enough to assemble a complete picture.
A few media reports mentioned [rouge en rouge]'s explosive popularity, and several personal webpages recorded convention-going impressions, some with photos attached.
Tanaka opened those pages one by one and went through the pictures.
Most of the photos were blurry.
Limited by the resolution of the day, details were nearly impossible to make out.
He worked through them patiently. Zoom in, zoom back out, zoom in again.
At last, on an unremarkable little personal blog, he found an official wide shot of the hall.
It had been taken from a slightly elevated angle, a sea of people filling the venue, circle banners and signboards woven into one great tapestry of color.
Tanaka downloaded the image and blew it up in his viewer, then blew it up further.
The pixel count wasn't high, and the compression smeared the picture soft at the edges.
But he could still pick out [rouge en rouge]'s booth, the circle name printed in white lettering on the sign.
Several people stood behind the booth. Their faces were indistinct, but the outlines of their bodies were faintly legible.
Three women.
And one man.
The man stood between the three women and a little behind them, with something on his head. A duck mask.
Tanaka's breath stopped for a beat.
Obviously, those three girls were the very three he'd seen today.
And the man in the duck mask...
Tanaka compared the curve of that man's build in the Comic Market photo against the pictures he'd taken that afternoon.
The line of the shoulders. The habitual tilt of the stance. The proportion of the head to the shoulders.
The build was unmistakably that of the Dassai-ya-sensei he'd seen today.
Tanaka sat there, hands hovering above the keyboard, perfectly still.
So...
Every last piece of it pointed to one single possibility.
The literary master Dassai-ya-sensei...
was also the doujinshi artist Xuanyaye.
Tanaka closed his eyes and let his body sink back into the chair, allowing himself to be drawn down into the whirlpool of the truth.
What have I found?
I've found the biggest secret in the history of Japan's literary and manga worlds.
A man standing at the shining apex of the pure literature pyramid and in the darkest corner of the adult manga industry at the same time...
He opened his eyes, and they burned with excitement.
It was the feeling of adrenaline spraying through him the first time he'd landed a major story on his own.
The instant of pressing the shutter and catching the decisive frame.
His scalp prickled, and the corners of his mouth curled up without his permission.
His whole body shook faintly with the sheer joy of discovery.
This was an exclusive that could blow the entire publishing world apart.
Literature and manga.
Pure literature and subculture.
All-ages and adults-only.
The distance and the contrast between them couldn't be contained by a word like "news." This would be a tsunami of public opinion.
Then the tide of excitement slowly ebbed away.
Tanaka's face cooled back into composure.
But...
Could this evidence really prove anything?
Tanaka laced his fingers and propped his chin on them, brows drawn tight.
Overlapping timelines? You could call that coincidence.
The three girls in the Comic Market photo? The picture was blurry, there were no frontal shots, no way to confirm who they were.
The build of a masked man...
There were far too many people with similar builds. There were several million teenage boys in the world shaped roughly like that.
No decisive evidence.
No frontal photograph.
Nobody had ever watched him pull Xuanyaye's mask off with his own hands.
All of it, every last piece, was conjecture.
Tanaka stood up in agitation and paced back and forth across the carpet.
His bare feet on the coarse fibers. Oddly enough, the texture underfoot settled him a little.
And besides.
He stopped walking. A thought flashed through his mind, and his whole body went rigid.
Even if I had decisive evidence.
Could I publish it?
He thought back to the last time Dassai-ya-sensei's identity had been exposed.
A reporter from Asahi Shimbun had exposed Dassai-ya-sensei's real name and school.
He'd run the piece without the subject's consent, billing it as an "exclusive exposé of the genius literary master's true face."
For a few days after publication, social media had indeed been in an uproar. Then the wind changed.
Readers began accusing the media of "violating a minor's privacy" and "stopping at nothing for traffic."
Academia and the literary world spoke out in condemnation one after another.
And what became of that reporter?
The word that reached Tanaka was this.
The reporter was suspended, the paper issued a public apology, and there was a lawsuit on top of it.
Dassai-ya-sensei's agency and legal team had sued on the grounds of "defamation" and "invasion of privacy."
The final outcome was never announced, but the reporter had reportedly paid out an enormous sum in damages, and his career was finished for all practical purposes.
What was more...
Tanaka sat back down, picked up his phone to glance at the date on the screen, then laid it face-down on the desk.
This time it wasn't merely the identity of a pure literature author.
This time it was a "doujinshi artist."
Drawing doujinshi wasn't illegal in Japan, but set beside the lofty station of a pure literature author, that identity was practically...
He cast about for the right word, and everything that surfaced in his head was ugly.
A rat in the gutter.
A cockroach in the sewer.
No, that went too far. But that was how public opinion would put it.
Tanaka knew the rules of the game in this society.
An author cheating on his wife, an author juggling two lovers? The media could file those under "amusing anecdote, not really a scandal."
And a commercial adult manga artist, working entirely within the law, hardly counted as a scandal either.
This was, after all, a country where being a host or a sex worker were perfectly legitimate professions.
But a pure literature author, especially an underage high schooler hailed as a "genius literary master," who was also a doujinshi artist.
The force of that impact belonged to an entirely different dimension.
Like a classical conductor spinning records in a nightclub.
Like a university professor doing senior-citizen disco in the middle of the street.
Not that these old relics couldn't manage it, maybe...
But whether the public could stomach it was another matter entirely.
He shut his eyes for a while.
And on top of everything, Dassai-ya was still a minor.
If the last exposé had merely been "sloppy" and an "invasion of privacy," this one carried an extra layer of risk.
I could be accused of damaging a minor's reputation. Hounded by lawyers until I lose the roof over my head.
A violent shiver ran through Tanaka.
He thought of his mortgage. He thought of his parents back home. He thought of the ten years he'd spent scrapping his way through this trade just to reach the threshold of Bunshun.
The moment I publish, my career's probably done for.
And yet.
A story like this was simply too tempting.
Tanaka opened the photos again and worked through them one by one.
The last shot showed the four of them from behind, walking into the wani building.
The boy in his school uniform, backpack swaying gently on his shoulders, the three women flanking him on either side.
This one was usable.
No faces.
Nothing that could identify anyone outright.
Only silhouettes.
Tanaka took a deep breath, held his fingers above the keyboard for a few seconds, then began to type.
[SHOCKING! The Man Believed to Be Dassai-ya-sensei and the Startling Nature of His Connection to wani!]
With the headline down, his fingers kept moving across the keys.
"On the afternoon of a certain day this month, this reporter witnessed a boy in a school uniform appear at the Shueisha building in the company of three women. According to sources familiar with the matter, the boy's build closely resembles that of the genius literary master [Dassai-ya-sensei], the subject of recent nationwide debate.
More unexpected still, after leaving Shueisha the group proceeded directly to wani, the publisher renowned for its adult manga, entering the building and remaining inside for a considerable length of time."
Tanaka stopped and read back over what he'd written.
"According to sources familiar with the matter." There were no sources. The reporter had seen it himself.
But phrased that way, the origin of the information went pleasantly out of focus.
"Closely resembles." Not "is." Only "closely resembles."
What followed was the circular, wheel-spinning language of Spring and Autumn Brushwork.
It seemed to say the figure from behind was Tsushima Kagami himself, and yet it seemed not to confirm that the figure was Tsushima Kagami at all.
It seemed to hint that Dassai-ya-sensei was Xuanyaye-sensei, and yet it seemed to stop short of definitively linking the two.
In the news business, this was the standard technique for saving one's own skin.
First, none of the relevant parties showed their faces. Second, sentences built on "apparently" and question marks, raising the question without nailing anything down.
What other people choose to think isn't my problem. I never said it.
I'm handing you the clues. Let your imaginations do the rest.
And in the end, even if I'm sued, I can always say this.
I merely found the two things "thought-provoking." I never said they were the same person.
Besides, the entire piece contains one photograph of someone's back, not a single frontal shot, no explicit identification.
Just deny it outright. And once you've denied it, it has nothing to do with me.
Sloppy? Fine, I'll apologize.
You're hardly going to volunteer a confession yourself, are you?
But the story would already be out. The damage would already be done.
The truth.
Or rather, the "truth" everyone chose to believe, would already have spread.
And then my purpose is served.
Another big story in the bag!
Tanaka spent roughly another forty minutes polishing the draft line by line.
He adjusted the wording here and there and cut the statements that were too categorical.
He added a handful of blurring phrases: "apparently," "it is understood," "is said to be."
The whole piece read like a round of tai chi.
But the core never once showed a definite direction.
He processed the photos in the article as well.
He blurred out any key features in the frame that might expose an identity, keeping only the silhouettes and the wani sign.
Then he leaned back in his chair and read the whole thing through one last time.
That was about right.
Publishable.
There was risk, but nothing fatal.
And if he really did get asked to apologize for being "sloppy," well, that was its own kind of exposure for him.
Tanaka remembered something a senior colleague had once said to him.
"In this business, the terrifying thing isn't being cursed at. It's nobody paying you any attention at all."
He attached the photos to the draft, packed it into a compressed file, and opened his mail client.
In the recipient field he entered the submission address of the Shukan Bunshun editorial department.
The mouse pointer hovered above the "Send" button.
Then he pressed the left button.
The send confirmation popped up in the lower right corner of the screen, accompanied by a crisp chime.
Tanaka stared at that notification for three seconds, then shut down the computer.
Outside the window, Tokyo's night sky was stained a murky orange-red by the city's lights.
The clouds hung low, as though the whole curtain of night were about to come down on top of him.
____
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