Something in the living room's air had changed. The sudden knocking had rattled Hirota badly. Ma En acted as though nothing had happened, but looking at it from another angle, her reaction seemed disproportionate — the knock had been loud and abrupt, sure, but she was still pale even after he'd returned to his seat. Her eyes kept drifting between him and the door, her expression caught in that space between wanting to say something and not quite daring to.

"You're not still scared, are you? Scared of what?" Ma En said lightly, picking up his chopsticks. Is Hirota-san really this timid? A thread of suspicion tugged at the back of his mind — the instinct to connect her terrified face with the eye outside the door — but he didn't follow it.

He'd never witnessed it firsthand, but he'd heard from others: some women could be extraordinarily sensitive in certain situations, reacting in ways that bore no resemblance to the boldness they showed in everyday life.

Unlike the bizarre things Ma En pursued, people with deep experience of the world often found that real life supplied enough strangeness on its own — not just strange, but dangerous, at levels that rivaled the things he chased.

Death, mystery, misfortune, coincidence. Every element found in ghost stories existed in reality too. In a sense, the tales people told and retold were nothing more than reflections of the lives they actually led.

Ma En had thought about this: what separated the bizarre things he sought from the bizarre realities others described? His conclusion was that the difference was purely subjective. When genuine misfortune struck, whether its cause was comprehensible or inexplicable, the suffering was identical. A person diagnosed with a terminal illness didn't care whether the cause was mundane or supernatural — what made it terminal was that it had exceeded the limits of human intervention.

Most people would simply mourn the outcome and chalk it up to ordinary bad luck. Ma En was the one who'd look for what might be extraordinary hiding within those ordinary causes.

Which produced greater catastrophe — the bizarre, or the already-known? So far, Ma En still believed it was the latter. The known was understood and still couldn't be prevented. That was its own kind of tragedy.

Was Hirota's fear genuine knowledge of what that knock signified? Or was she simply the kind of person who fell apart at loud, unexpected sounds? Ma En hoped for the latter. If she'd merely been startled — if she hadn't been drawn into anything truly strange — then the reach of Room 4's disaster was still limited.

But if she was someone who knew... then Ma En would have to reconsider the entire apartment, and every person he'd encountered in the past two days.

Even as he resisted thinking toward the worst case, his mind was already threading the intelligence together on its own.

Ordinary people had access to very little information. For a normal tenant, the Room 4 Ghost Story was exactly that — a ghost story confined to one room. However frightening, its scope was clear: a single apartment unit, maybe the cemetery in Sanchoumoku Park, and the people who'd died inside. How many dead? Some said eight, some said over a dozen, but the number would never exceed anyone's rough impression of "twenty."

That figure felt proportionate to a ghost story. And for most people, imagination stopped there.

Ma En's sense of scale was nothing like theirs.

Think about it for a moment. The Room 4 Ghost Story reached upward into Japan's political elite. If its spread downward wasn't limited to Room 4's tenants but extended through the whole building, the whole street — if it radiated through the police system across all of Bunkyo District — how many citizens had already been touched without knowing it?

Follow that line of reasoning, and you arrived at a conclusion that was vague in outline but drenching in its implications. And this was not a threat that ordinary law enforcement could neutralize.

Without a suitable pretext, a large-scale investigation was out of the question. Internal inquiries would face massive resistance.

So — is that also why they chose me? An outsider?

If he could have, Ma En would have refused to touch that conclusion.

He had no proof. But in his gut, Hirota — this woman in Room 6 — felt like the unspoken dividing line of how many people Room 4 had truly affected.

"That really scared me." Hirota pressed a hand to her chest, nothing performative about it. She complained loudly: "I absolutely cannot handle things that come out of nowhere like that. Whether it's a sound or someone tapping my shoulder from behind — my heart just stops."

Ma En studied her expression from the corner of his eye. He found nothing unnatural in it, and felt a measure of relief. If she truly didn't know what was outside the door, then his job was to keep her from getting drawn any deeper.

Best to eat fast and get back.

He picked up his rice bowl. "Let's eat. It was just a prank."

Hirota finally let the tension go, nodding meekly. Not that she had much choice — she hadn't even dared approach the door.

They ate in silence for a few bites. The atmosphere hadn't recovered.

"Hey, Ma En-san — do you really think it was a prank?" Hirota said. "I've lived in this apartment for ages. Nothing like this has ever happened. You really think someone's playing knock-and-run?" She was clearly remembering the questions he'd asked her the night before.

"It's never happened?" Ma En looked up. "Or do you mean the whole building has never had anything like this?"

"Never. Not the whole time I've been here." Her voice dropped. "It is strange, isn't it? I can't think of who would do something like that."

"Nothing strange about it. People do things for no reason all the time, and strange things happen for no reason all the time. Overthinking it won't help." Ma En deliberately gentled his tone. "Next time it happens, I'll deal with whoever's doing it."

"Mm." She murmured her assent, nodding, and ate a few more quiet bites. She hated that knocking — no, she'd hated it from the start, but now she hated it even more. The mood in the room had been building nicely before the interruption, and even now that they were talking again, the conversation kept orbiting back to that wretched noise.

No — I need to talk about something else.

She cast around for a topic, scanning the coffee table, until her eyes landed on something and she let out an "Ah."

"What?" Ma En asked.

"Making you eat at the coffee table — I'm sorry about that." She'd been saving this topic on purpose. It wasn't that she didn't have a proper dining table; she'd just deliberately not used it. In fact, since buying it, she'd never once eaten at it alone.

"...It's fine. I'm used to it, actually," Ma En said, unbothered. "Where I come from, plenty of people use the coffee table as a dining table. I've heard that over here, meals are just meals — but back home, a lot of families eat in front of the TV."

There we go.

Hirota silently gave herself a thumbs-up and ran with it. "Really? The whole family?"

"The whole family. Coffee table as the dinner table, eating and watching TV and chatting. Back home, the six-to-nine block is prime time. Everyone eats dinner while critiquing the programs. It gets pretty lively." Ma En gestured at the television with his chopsticks.

"You use TV shows as conversation topics? What about personal things? When a family sits down to eat together, isn't the point to talk about each other's lives? Work, school, funny things that happened, problems you're dealing with — things like that. Isn't that how you stay connected?" Hirota pressed. "You can discuss TV any time. But eating with your family — that's when you should be talking about family things. Ignoring your family to talk about shows... I don't know. That's hard for me to accept."

"Well, it's not all TV. People talk about their own things too — household stuff, whatever. But if that's all you talked about, you'd run out of material in five minutes, wouldn't you? Not every day is eventful. Most days are just... days. What is there to say?" Ma En countered.

"Look at us right now — we're not talking about TV, just having a normal conversation. You don't need shows as a crutch, do you?" Hirota wasn't backing down in words, though in truth, the question of what families should discuss over dinner didn't concern her much at all. She'd expressed surprise at Ma En's description, but her actual feelings were the opposite of surprised — perfectly flat.

What mattered was that the living room's atmosphere was warming up again. That made her happy.

"We just met, so there's plenty to talk about. But a family that sees each other every day — there's genuinely nothing to say." Ma En paused, then caught himself. That was too sweeping. Not every family was like that. Among family, the subject matter didn't really matter, did it? Even boring things were fine. Watching TV while eating was just a habit.

"Oh — so that's how you see family, Ma En-san?" Hirota drew the words out deliberately. "Family is just a bunch of boring people?"

"...That's my fault." Ma En surrendered without resistance.

At that point, Hirota cracked open her second beer and looked at him. "Want another?"

"No thanks." Ma En shook his head.

His bowl was nearly empty.

"You eat fast." Hirota observed. "Have another bowl."

He was about to decline, but she cut in: "You still haven't touched the mixed vegetables. Once you try them, I guarantee you'll want three more bowls of rice."

His chopsticks stopped.

He had no desire whatsoever to eat those vegetables. Since the meal had started, he hadn't spared the mysterious plate a single glance. He'd actually forgotten about it — but Hirota hadn't. She'd waited until he was almost done, down to the last few bites, to bring it up.

"Go on, go on." Hirota rose to her knees, plucked the remaining tonkatsu from in front of him, and replaced it with the plate of mixed vegetables. As she leaned forward, the neckline of her T-shirt fell open — wide — and from where Ma En sat on the sofa, he had a clear and unobstructed view. A corner of purple lace peeked out, but what the lace failed to cover was considerably more than what it concealed. The shape beneath was fuller than anything her office clothes or loose wear had suggested.

The lean didn't last long. But Ma En felt he'd seen enough. He thought about it — and decided to pretend it hadn't happened.

"You can't say you don't like it without trying a single bite." Hirota swirled her beer can, eyes fixed on his face. Her other hand tugged lightly at her collar, as though she were warm. Ma En didn't want to believe it was deliberate.

Being stared at by this woman was not a comfortable experience. He didn't suffer the dry-mouthed paralysis of the stereotypical virgin from a novel, but the pressure to eat the damned vegetables was intensifying by the second.

"Fine — stop pushing. I've already eaten a whole bowl of rice, and now you want me to have an appetizer?" he muttered, dipping his chopsticks into the vegetables, stirring through the plate just as he had before.

This time, no sudden knocking interrupted him.

"It's an appetizer, but it works as a post-meal salad too." Hirota lowered herself until she was practically draped across the coffee table, tilting her face up to watch him from below — an angle she'd calculated in advance as her most appealing. "You're not going to stop at one bowl, are you? You'll be starving at midnight."

Ma En's gaze slid, involuntarily, back into the gap at her collar. He saw it clearly. At this angle, even the slightest drop of his eyes made the view unavoidable.

The pressure was extraordinary.

He was beginning to suspect that even though her expression hadn't changed, she was fully aware of where he was looking.

"...Fine, fine." He couldn't muster a single excuse. All he could do was mutter his compliance. "I'll eat more."

Then he steeled himself, picked up a small clump of the vegetables, and put it in his mouth.

The dish was supposed to be all mountain produce, according to Hirota, but it carried almost none of the wild, earthy fragrance he'd expect. He'd been wary of unfamiliar food, but he wasn't the type to fake eating — once it was in his mouth, he chewed properly and let his palate do its work.

He couldn't call it delicious, but it wasn't inedible either. The flavor differed from the Japanese food he'd been eating. Rather than showcasing the ingredients, the cooking leaned heavily on seasoning — yet he hadn't smelled those seasonings beforehand. What they were, exactly, he couldn't place. Something between spice and herbal medicine.

Not bitter. But after the initial taste faded, what lingered was a vast, flat blandness that left his mouth aching for something to fill the emptiness. In that sense, it really did work as an appetizer.

Ma En shoveled the last few bites of rice into his mouth. That helped. Then he held out his bowl to Hirota.

"One more bowl."