26:I[86215,["6446","static/chunks/53c13509-e7ec011f8ac7df7d.js","6711","static/chunks/8e1d74a4-841e61b20d784c5f.js","2266","static/chunks/870fdd6f-d81c5e21b0b96e34.js","5802","static/chunks/69b09407-1ce59c69e508049d.js","8500","static/chunks/8500-01a63dafd809e317.js","8437","static/chunks/8437-39ef04864806a0fa.js","6659","static/chunks/6659-a0fca0b5b95eb832.js","1610","static/chunks/1610-af6f888fe3ea871a.js","2100","static/chunks/2100-768a05088f320fce.js","6499","static/chunks/6499-3139357d7362d8fa.js","601","static/chunks/601-42518cde4342bee4.js","7663","static/chunks/7663-36eadf9c83563138.js","7870","static/chunks/7870-f026ded79a9a89b4.js","9891","static/chunks/9891-388cf3487c4bfb5e.js","2454","static/chunks/2454-11d335ce6901e263.js","7782","static/chunks/7782-4f8509118ce25d3b.js","1628","static/chunks/app/story/%5Bslug%5D/page-c4ed111418a82338.js"],"default"] 27:I[62454,["6446","static/chunks/53c13509-e7ec011f8ac7df7d.js","6711","static/chunks/8e1d74a4-841e61b20d784c5f.js","2266","static/chunks/870fdd6f-d81c5e21b0b96e34.js","5802","static/chunks/69b09407-1ce59c69e508049d.js","8500","static/chunks/8500-01a63dafd809e317.js","8437","static/chunks/8437-39ef04864806a0fa.js","6659","static/chunks/6659-a0fca0b5b95eb832.js","1610","static/chunks/1610-af6f888fe3ea871a.js","2100","static/chunks/2100-768a05088f320fce.js","6499","static/chunks/6499-3139357d7362d8fa.js","601","static/chunks/601-42518cde4342bee4.js","7663","static/chunks/7663-36eadf9c83563138.js","7870","static/chunks/7870-f026ded79a9a89b4.js","9891","static/chunks/9891-388cf3487c4bfb5e.js","2454","static/chunks/2454-11d335ce6901e263.js","7782","static/chunks/7782-4f8509118ce25d3b.js","1628","static/chunks/app/story/%5Bslug%5D/page-c4ed111418a82338.js"],"default"] 31:I[86869,[],"IconMark"] 28:T1423,

Every morning, Nakamura arrived at the office with the punctuality of an unloved ritual—one of those minor urban ceremonies Tokyo conducts automatically, like traffic lights or vending machines blinking awake after a power cut. He passed through the lobby as if shot from a silencer: no noise, no ripples. The security guard bowed to everyone except him. Nakamura bowed anyway, just in case.

He took his seat—his “seat” being a kind of clerical oubliette at the end of a beige row of partitioned penance. His desktop computer was not old enough to be retro, but old enough to hum resentfully about it. His job, officially, was “Client Communications Officer,” which meant he wrote letters no one read to clients who had forgotten they were clients. His colleagues had evolved a beautifully choreographed way of ignoring him: they flowed around him like commuters around a lamppost. Nobody resented him. Nobody noticed him enough to.

At 10:13 a.m., one of the junior chaps—slim tie, good haircut, the full disposable salaryman kit—strolled past Nakamura’s desk and said, cheerfully:

“Nakamura-san will be first to go in the next round of redundancies, ne?”

It was said in the same tone you might use to predict a warm spring. A harmless, meteorological observation. Nakamura nodded once, blandly, like a man who had just been informed that the sun would indeed rise in the east.

By noon he was free. Free, in the sense of being released from one kind of captivity into another. He bought his daily rations from Lawson: two egg-mayonnaise sandwiches—those damp little coffins of bread so sweet it was more accurately described as sponge, compressed into submission by plastic packaging pulled so tight you could almost feel the microplastics sluicing down your throat—and a bottle of sweetened oolong tea, cold enough to make his molars flinch. Taken together, the sandwiches had less in common with lunch than with dessert: a confection masquerading as sustenance. He loved the sandwiches precisely because they were so ultra-processed. No deceit, no nutrition, no surprises. He could rely on them to deliver the exact same experience every day: a brief uplift, followed by a spectacular mid-afternoon energy collapse. Nakamura treated the crash as a kind of pharmaceutical. His personal relaxation pill. At around 3PM, his limbs would fill with that warm, woozy torpor, and he would let himself sink gently into it, as though the sandwiches were lulling him into a state of chemically assisted serenity.

He walked to the underpass near the office, a concrete trachea for the city’s endless breath. Down here, the air smelled faintly of diesel, sweat, and human neglect. Beneath the overpass, the homeless men kept their tents pitched in ragged, oddly dignified formations, like a troop of veteran soldiers who had long ago stopped expecting orders.

Nakamura liked it here. The anonymity soothed him. The city above—his city, allegedly—ignored him; the city below at least acknowledged his presence with a nod, a cough, a rustle of tarpaulin. He sat on the same bench every day, a bench that sagged under him with the weary complicity of an old colleague.

He unwrapped his sandwiches with the solemnity of a priest handling relics. Bite, swallow, sip. The lunch hour was the most honest part of his day. Nothing pretended to be anything other than what it was. He watched the homeless men shuffle about their slow, minimal lives, watched suits hurrying across the overpass like industrious ants, watched bicycles flash past in streaks of commuter apathy.

No one here knew his name. No one here cared. And that, perversely, gave him a sense of belonging. This was a community of the unseen.

Back in the office, nobody asked where he’d been. Nobody had noticed him leave. He sat again at his desk, half-man, half-furniture. The room was filled with conversation from which he was exempt—laughter, arguments, the ecstasy of pointless meetings. He typed emails, adjusted phrasing, rephrased adjustments. It was work only in the sense that it resembled work.

The truth, though Nakamura himself rarely articulated it, was this: his life had entered the long, airless stage of quiet resignation. He had not been promoted in fifteen years. His responsibilities had been stripped from him one by one, like organs removed under anaesthetic. His marriage operated on a similar principle: food was left for him, a stipend exchanged, doors shut softly, conversations withheld for efficiency’s sake.

There were days—most days—when Nakamura could go from morning until night without hearing another human voice address him directly. Days when he felt translucent, as if his body had misfired in the process of becoming real.

In the fluorescent quiet of late afternoon, he caught his reflection in the darkened surface of his monitor. A faint shape, a blurred suggestion of a man. He adjusted his tie, though no one looked at him. He straightened his posture, though no one cared.

A ghost preparing itself for another day among the living.

29:T1423,

At 10:13 a.m., one of the junior chaps—slim tie, good haircut, the full disposable salaryman kit—strolled past Nakamura’s desk and said, cheerfully:

“Nakamura-san will be first to go in the next round of redundancies, ne?”

No one here knew his name. No one here cared. And that, perversely, gave him a sense of belonging. This was a community of the unseen.

A ghost preparing itself for another day among the living.

2a:T162a,

Shachō’s office had the reverent hush of a shrine, albeit one financed by software contracts and maintained by men whose souls had long since moved to cheaper neighbourhoods. He sat behind a desk so polished it could have served as a reflective device for satellite calibration. Inada, Nakamura’s buchō, stood before him in the time-honoured posture of middle management: respectfully petrified.

Shachō didn’t look up from the folder he was annotating.

“We need to prepare a new deal for Ondo Corporation,” he said mildly, as though discussing the weather. “Our biggest client. Their money pays your salary, Inada. And I am… unhappy”—a soft, deliberate word—“with how you and your division have treated Nakamura.”

Inada twitched, producing a wince disguised as a bow.

Shachō continued, “He’s been here fifteen years. A solid man. A dependable man. A linchpin. And he’s the only person in this building who can rescue the Ondo deal. The only one.” He closed the folder with a gentle, judicial click. “Where is he?”

Inada swallowed. A bobbing, amphibian gesture.

“Well… Nakamura is… he’s gone… rogue again,” Inada said. “He’s, ah… down there.”

Shachō finally looked up, eyebrows arching with genuine amusement. “Down… there?” he repeated, and let out a warm, appreciative laugh. “Ah, Nakamura. The company renegade.”

The title hung in the air like something framed and hung on a wall.

“Fine,” Shachō said, brisk now. “Send three juniors down there. Give them pens, paper. We need his mind—his genius—on the opening salvo of communications. Ondo must feel our sincerity. Our vision. And Inada—”

“Yes, Shachō?”

“Treat Nakamura with the respect he deserves. He was one of my earliest hires. A good man. A very good man.”

Inada bowed so hard his tie swung like a pendulum.

The underpass was unusually cold that afternoon, the air sharp and metallic, as if the city were exhaling through its teeth. Three juniors appeared at the mouth of the concrete corridor, clutching stationery like talismans. They approached the tent—a modest, mustard-coloured affair whose flaps fluttered with the weary dignity of a monk’s robe.

“Nakamura-san?” one of them ventured. “Are you… receiving visitors?”

A grunt from inside. Then: “If this isn’t life or death, go away.”

The juniors exchanged a fearful glance.

“It’s the Ondo contract,” the tallest one blurted. “There’s been a miscommunication. A… problem. Only you can help us.”

A long sigh. Then the flap slid aside, revealing Nakamura: dishevelled, wrapped in layers, holding a small flask of warm sake with the careless intimacy of long companionship.

“Well, why didn’t you say so?” he snapped. “Tell me the problem, then give me something to write on.”

One of the juniors explained the issue, then handed over the pad like offering tribute to a local deity. Nakamura uncapped the pen and began writing—furious little bullet points, arrows, marginalia, underlines, a miniature storm of thought. He sipped the sake between phrases, as if the liquor were powering the prose.

Finally, he tore off the page and thrust it at them.

“There you go. That’ll fix it.”

“Nakamura-san… this is—this is brilliant,” whispered one of them.

“I know,” Nakamura said, already bored.

He pushed the tent flap wider.

“Well? Don’t just stand there freezing your balls off. Come in. I’ll give you some advice.”

The three juniors obeyed, stooping into the cramped space. The smell hit them first: an overpowering cloud of sake vapour, like the tent itself was slowly brewing.

“You smell that?” Nakamura said, grinning. “That’s the smell of privilege.”

They nodded weakly, though their eyes watered.

“I get to live like this because Shachō and I go way back. Decades. He trusts me. My colleagues? Idiots, every last one. Even Inada.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Especially Inada.”

They nodded again, now with reverence.

“Take my advice,” Nakamura said. “Build up your own knowledge base. Make it yours. Something only you can do. Then the company can’t fire you. You become indispensable. Untouchable.”

He gestured broadly at the tent walls with his sake flask.

“And then you get to live exactly as you damn well please. Like me. A free spirit. Drinking sake, reading my favourite authors”—he pointed to a corner where a small, uneven pile of books listed like a wounded ship—“and running my consultancy at my own pace.”

He leaned back, satisfied.

“This”—he tapped the floor with his foot—“is one of the most expensive consultancy rooms in Tokyo when you factor in how few hours I work. Two hours a week, tops. That’s my workload these days.”

The three juniors looked around in awe, trying very hard to ignore the fact that the consulting room’s ceiling was made of fraying canvas and its heating system consisted of Nakamura’s breath.

He smiled at them with patriarchal benevolence.

“Now go,” he said. “Take the memo to Shachō. He’ll know what to do. And remember what I told you.”

They scrambled out of the tent with the urgency of men fleeing an oracle whose prophecies were dangerously intoxicating.

Nakamura watched them go, took another contemplative sip of warm sake, and lay back on his flattened bedding like a man entirely at peace with his little empire.

2b:Te79,

Nakamura turned the key with the delicacy of a man afraid to wake something sleeping—or worse, something merely dormant. The door gave its usual soft, defeated click, and he stepped into the apartment he had lived in for twenty years: two small rooms conjoined by a corridor that pretended to be a hallway, the whole unit shaped like a narrow thought he had never quite finished.

The place was silent in that total, measured way peculiar to old marriages and newly abandoned buildings. The lights were off, but the kitchen glowed faintly from the streetlamp outside, giving everything a sodium haze, as if reality itself had been cut with cheaper ingredients.

On the kitchen table sat his dinner, arranged with military precision: rice, miso soup, a piece of grilled fish whose steam had long since ceased its negotiations with the air. A note, not needed and never read, lay beside it. His wife always left food. She was admirable in her punctuality, almost mechanical. The marriage ran on quiet logistics: calories in, salary out.

The salary—now there was a ritual. Nakamura deposited the monthly amount into the joint account; she subtracted household costs and transferred back what she referred to, with bureaucratic daintiness, as his personal allowance. He always found it touching how she managed to make the word allowance sound like a diagnosis.

This stipend, calculated down to the yen, covered precisely his Lawson lunches and a margin so thin it could be used to slice sashimi. It was like being granted parole but only to walk the perimeter of your own cell.

He sat at the table and ate his dinner in silence, tasting not so much the food as the absence of conversation. His wife slept in the next room—her room—having retired to bed hours ago. She was always asleep before he arrived. It was an arrangement they had reached ten years earlier after she complained that his late returns kept waking her.

“Better this way,” she’d said, already half turned toward the door. And he’d agreed because that was what the situation required: polite acquiescence, the maintenance of domestic detente.

He washed the dishes quietly, as though afraid to disturb the dust. The tap made more noise than he did. In the slender corridor outside the two bedrooms, he paused. Her door was shut, of course. It always was. His own bedroom waited opposite, a smaller space containing a futon, a wardrobe, and the weight of his unspoken life.

He reflected—because the corridor had that effect on him—on the state of his marriage. Once, long ago, there had been some warmth, some proximity, and tentative talk of future additions to the household—talk that dwindled year by year, until mentioning it felt like opening a window in winter, and so it was never mentioned again.

He opened his bedroom door. The room greeted him with its usual unenthusiasm.

He lay on his futon, staring at the faint cracks in the ceiling. He wondered, not for the first time, if the silence in the apartment was actually silence or simply the absence of anything worth saying.

From the kitchen came the soft, reverberant tick of the wall clock—an elderly metronome counting the beats of a life that had mislaid its melody.

Nakamura exhaled, closed his eyes, and thought—without wanting to think at all—how swiftly a marriage can migrate from partnership to polite cohabitation, and from there to this: two lives running parallel, never touching, separated only by a sliding door and the exhaustion of years.

He drifted into sleep like a man slipping beneath the surface of a quiet lake—leaving no ripple, making no sound.

2c:Tb9c,

The café was one of those dim, amber-lit refuges Tokyo hides between convenience stores and tax accountants’ offices—places that appear only after nightfall, like shy animals. Nakamura sat opposite a woman named Takako, who regarded him with the sort of devotional intensity usually restricted to religious art.

“You know,” she said softly, fingertips grazing the stem of her glass, “I’d forgotten what it feels like to be really seen.” She held his gaze as though it were a fragile instrument. “But you… you see me.”

Nakamura didn’t blush. He didn’t look away. Nakamura took in the compliment slowly, as though confirming something he had suspected all along.

“So few of us are seen today,” he said, voice even, authoritative. “It’s a crying shame, Takako. Look around.” He gestured at the city through the café window: neon, night, humanity gliding past like schools of spectral fish. “Tokyo’s full of ghosts. People walking through each other. Talking past each other. Only my Shachō appreciates me, really. I’m a linchpin at my company. Two hundred employees, but strip it down to bare bones and there’s maybe five, six of us who keep the whole thing afloat. And I’m one of them. Yet most people don’t even notice I’m there.”

Takako leaned in, her expression bright with fascination and something warmer.

“You have such a way with words,” she murmured. “Such a way… with life. Where have you been all my years? And you—no wife waiting for you at home.”

Nakamura lifted his hands in a gesture of calm resignation.

“I never had the time for marriage,” he said. “Being an integral player in a company—that’s its own sacrifice. You give the hours, the years, the best of yourself. There’s not much left for anything else.”

Takako breathed out as though receiving wisdom from a mountaintop sage.

“How do I keep you in my life?” she asked. “I mean it. I instantly know I need you forever. You’re… extraordinary. You walk into a room, and the whole room shifts.” She laughed, half in disbelief. “It’s unreal. I just met you, and already I can’t imagine not having you near me.”

Nakamura nodded with solemn assurance, as though such declarations were his daily fare.

“You see me, Takako. That’s rare. People go whole lives without being seen once. But if two people see each other—truly see—don’t they owe themselves a future? Don’t they owe each other that chance?”

Takako pressed a hand to her chest, stunned by the force of his conviction.

“Did I tell you,” she whispered, “that you have a way with words?”

Nakamura smiled—slow, knowing, entirely at ease.

“Possibly,” he said. “But I don’t mind hearing it again.”

They laughed together, softly, the sound mingling with the warm café air as if the night itself were leaning in to listen.

2d:T13d5,

Nakamura arrived at his desk and discovered that it no longer existed.

Or rather, it existed in the abstract — as a concept, a memory, a rumour — but the physical object had vanished. In its place sat a young woman he did not recognise, typing with violent optimism. His chair was gone. His computer was gone. The small, careful arrangements of his life — the pen aligned parallel to the keyboard, the documents stacked with monkish precision — all gone.

He stood there for a moment, briefcase in hand, like a man who had returned home to find a stranger brushing their teeth.

He looked left. Looked right. Three cubicles down, he spotted it: his things. His monitor. His keyboard. His mug. The entire Nakamura apparatus, airlifted intact and redeployed elsewhere without ceremony or explanation. The move had been surgical, almost affectionate in its thoroughness.

He approached his former neighbours.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Do you know why my desk has been moved?”

No one replied. A young man adjusted his headphones. A young woman laughed softly at something on her screen. Someone swiveled their chair half an inch away from Nakamura, a gesture of exquisite social engineering.

“I just wanted to understand,” Nakamura continued, smiling faintly, the way one does when asking directions in a foreign country. “My things were here yesterday.”

Nothing.

Not even the courtesy of eye contact.

He walked to his new cubicle and sat. The chair was slightly lower. Or perhaps he was.

He tapped his password into the computer.
Access denied.

He tried again.
Access denied.

A third attempt.
User not recognised.

User not recognised. Nakamura felt a flicker of professional admiration for the phrasing.

Nakamura went to HR. There, a young man sat behind the desk, face illuminated by his screen, fingers moving with athletic indifference.

“I think I need to reset my password,” Nakamura said. “My desk has been moved, and the system no longer recognises my login. My name is Nakamura.”

The young man did not look up.

“Nakamura…” he murmured, fingers dancing. “You’re in sales, right? Kenji Nakamura?”

“No,” Nakamura said. “Client communications. Yoshio Nakamura.”

The typing paused. The young man frowned, as if confronted with an obscure dialect.

“Huh,” he said. “Okay. Right.” A beat. “Found you.”

Nakamura waited.

“Just check your email,” the young man continued. “There’s a reset link there. On your phone.”

“My phone,” Nakamura repeated.

“Yeah. That’ll be quickest.”

Nakamura bowed — an unnecessary flourish, but habit is a hard muscle to unlearn — and left. He checked his phone. The email had arrived. The system, at least, still remembered him enough to inconvenience him.

Back at his desk, he reset the password. The machine accepted him reluctantly, like a customs officer waving through a man whose documents were technically valid but spiritually suspect.

Mid-morning, a young man appeared at the edge of Nakamura’s cubicle. He was tall, assertive, freshly promoted by the look of him — the kind of man whose confidence still had a factory seal on it.

“I need the Ondo figures,” he said. “Now.”

“I’m in the middle of something,” Nakamura replied, surprised by his own voice. “I can get to it later.”

The young man blinked.

“I don’t want to pull rank,” he said pleasantly, “but I would consider this insubordination. I may be in a different department, but I’m senior to you. If I say I need it now, I need it now.”

Nakamura looked up at him fully. For a moment — just a moment — he considered refusing. Imagined it, even. The consequences unfolded in his mind with cinematic clarity.

Then he nodded.

“Of course,” he said. “I’ll prioritise it.”

The young man smiled, satisfied, already turning away.

Nakamura worked quickly. Efficiently. He delivered the information. It was received without thanks.

By late afternoon, his desk felt provisional, as though it might drift again if left unattended. He glanced around the office: at the young faces, the rapid conversations, the future being aggressively installed all around him.

He caught his reflection in the darkened monitor: a man still technically employed, still technically alive, but increasingly spectral.

In recent years, Nakamura had grown accustomed to feeling like a background process. A human, but poorly rendered. Low opacity. A man whose alpha channel has been quietly turned down. He’s there, but the world’s software doesn’t quite commit to drawing him. In his mid-fifties, he had crossed some invisible threshold beyond which he barely existed for the young — not as authority, not as cautionary tale, not even as failure. Just a figure already processed and filed away by time.

2e:Td45,

They met at a café in Funabashi, close enough to Nakamura’s apartment that the geography itself felt conspiratorial. The place had the agreeable neutrality of success: pale wood, soft lighting, an espresso machine that hissed with professional confidence. It was the sort of café you chose when you wanted to believe your life had coherence.

His daughter arrived first. Mika, twenty-five, composed and alert, the kind of young woman who gave the impression of being mildly busy even when seated. She hugged him quickly, warmly, then pulled back to look at him with that mixture of affection and appraisal children reserve for parents they’ve quietly outgrown.

“Otōsan,” she said. “You look tired.”

“I’m always tired,” Nakamura replied. “It’s my brand.”

His son, Haruto, arrived moments later, tall and earnest, wearing work trousers that still carried the seriousness of someone newly employed. He bowed — not deeply, but sincerely — and shook Nakamura’s hand as though the gesture mattered.

They sat. Coffee arrived. The ritual of family resumed as if it had been paused rather than invented.

Haruto spoke first, modestly, about his job at the industrial plant. Engineering. Systems. Processes that either worked or catastrophically didn’t. It was a good job. A skilled job. One that paid accordingly. Nakamura listened with visible pride, nodding slowly, absorbing the vocabulary of competence like a man warming himself near a fire he no longer owned.

“You dodged a bullet,” Nakamura said eventually. “Both of you. Salaryman life is useless. A long, bureaucratic way of dying indoors. I’m glad you never went near it.”

Mika laughed. “You always say that.”

“And I’m always right,” Nakamura said. “They ignore me at work now. Completely. Which is fine. I’ve been there so long I’m invisible. But the boss — the Shachō — he knows my value. We’re close. That’s what matters.”

They nodded, instinctively deferential. This was a familiar refrain, delivered often enough to sound like wisdom rather than complaint.

Mika talked about her business: an online reputation management firm, run with two university friends. Clients, strategies, metrics. It was doing well. Very well, in fact. Nakamura listened with an air of amused distance, as though business acumen were a genetic trait that had skipped his own generation and reappeared intact in his children.

When his wife came up — inevitably — Nakamura waved a hand.

“Oh, you know your mother,” he said. “Always insisting we go out. I tell her I’m exhausted, but no — there’s some new restaurant opening, so she drags me along like I’m some kind of food reviewer.”

Mika rolled her eyes. Haruto groaned in unison.

“Typical mum,” they said, perfectly synchronised.

“And I don’t care about overtime anymore,” Nakamura went on. “I just go home on time now. But that’s when the traps begin. Last week she booked a night at the cinema. Three-hour film. Subtitles. I sat there wondering which act of my life had led me to this.”

Mika laughed. “She might be a pain,” she said, “but she dotes on you.”

Nakamura smiled at that — a small, satisfied smile — and lifted his cup.

“Well,” he said, “someone has to.”

2f:Ta4a,

Kinshichō performed its evening routine with industrial efficiency. The station exhaled commuters in steady, obedient bursts, each person already half dissolved into their private anxieties. Office workers moved with the slumped choreography of people whose best hours had quietly expired. Couples walked in silence, their conversations deferred indefinitely. Single men hovered near convenience stores with the air of people waiting for instructions that would never arrive. Salarymen queued at 7-Eleven and Lawson with the solemnity of parishioners, purchasing their ritual offerings: sandwiches sealed in plastic optimism. Optimism laced, invisibly, with microplastics flaking off into the bread, the filling, the bloodstream. A slow, polite poisoning. Endocrine systems gently confused, hormones nudged off-script, whole populations quietly recalibrated at the molecular level by convenience food and its petrochemical skin. No alarms. No conspiracies. Just an evolutionary suggestion whispered daily into the gut: be smaller, be flatter, desire less, endure more. Tokyo wasn’t just feeding its workers; it was editing them, sanding down the rough biological edges until ambition itself began to look like a developmental glitch.

And the people of Tokyo repeated the ritual with metronomic accuracy: eat, commute, endure, repeat — a civilisation held together by convenience food and the mutual agreement not to ask questions too late in the day.

This was not a cruel system, exactly. It was merely thorough. It did not crush people; it processed them. Men entered full of ambition and left perfectly formatted, their personalities reduced to habits, their rebellions confined to brand preferences. Kinshichō had seen thousands of hopefuls: men who had once mattered briefly, intensely, and then not at all. Tokyo didn’t mourn them. It simply adjusted the flow.

Two middle-aged salarymen stood near the underpass, waiting for the pedestrian signal to change. One of them frowned.

“Hang on,” he said. “Isn’t that… that guy? Nakamura? He used to work in Communications. Left, what — seven, eight years ago?”

The other squinted. Across the street stood an immaculately dressed man — coat pressed, shoes polished — pausing outside a small tent pitched beneath the concrete belly of the expressway. He bowed, neatly, to no one in particular, and slipped inside.

“Hm,” the second man said after a moment. “Could be. Hard to say.” He shrugged. “I can barely remember what he looked like.”

The light changed. They crossed.

The tent flap settled.

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Nakamura

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