Ma En's eyes snapped open. Under an intense wave of heart palpitations, the ceiling felt like it was spinning. He stayed still for a while, arm draped over his forehead, breathing through it; the light through the curtains had already brightened the room to a pale yellow, and with the fading echo of fear still present, sleep was simply not happening again.

He turned his head and checked the clock on the bedside table. Seven in the morning. The things he needed to handle today surfaced in his mind one by one.

He sat up and checked the alarm. Same as the last few times — jammed, for no clear reason. He picked the clock up, shook it firmly, and a thin sliver of plant root came free from the gap around the winding mechanism. He held it for a moment, this hair-fine thread of organic matter. He genuinely could not understand why it kept finding its way in there.

He didn't keep any houseplants. He never took the clock out of the room. If someone was sneaking into his apartment to play a prank on a man's alarm clock — and had done it multiple times without once being caught — then whoever they were, they'd also left without taking anything, because nothing was ever missing. What kind of intruder was that?

This combination of waking from a nightmare and finding the alarm jammed had happened too many times to be coincidence. He had wondered whether it might be some kind of ill-omened sign. But no matter how carefully he watched, nothing emerged — no pattern he could trace, no source he could identify. He didn't think it was coincidence, but trying to find the connection between the nightmares and the alarm was equally futile.

What bothered him most was that a full month had passed since he arrived in Japan. At first, everything had seemed to be moving in a good direction, but then, for reasons he couldn't identify, the nightmares had suddenly begun. He had used psychological questionnaires to check his mental state and tried to analyze why he would be having them; every answer came back the same: he was normal, and by all rights, he shouldn't be having nightmares at all.

But he was. Not every night, but regularly enough that at least once a week, without fail, he woke from one. Worse, after waking, only the pounding fear remained. The dream itself was gone. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't remember the contents; his mind was blank, leaving him no way to analyze the nightmares by what had happened in them.

It was one of the many things in his daily life, buried in the mundane details, that made his current existence feel slightly off. Whenever he examined any of them too closely he grew unsettled. But suspicion without result produced nothing except exhaustion.

So — pointless.

He swung his legs off the bed and, out of habit, reached for the black-framed glasses on the bedside table. The instant his fingers closed around them, a crawling sensation rose from his palm. He was used to this by now; instead of letting go, he automatically tightened his grip. The glasses let out a soft creak, as though on the verge of cracking. Somehow that small sound steadied him. He released, straightened the slightly bent frame, and put them on.

He stood up, padded barefoot to the window, and drew back the curtains to let in the yellow morning light. Then he went to the bathroom and stood under a cold shower.

For nightmares and their aftermath — that mandatory post-nightmare period where everything looked wrong — he'd built himself a whole protocol. One month in Japan, and almost all his free time had gone into figuring out what was happening to him, or around him. The result: very little he could call a real discovery. Strictly speaking, he felt he'd made no progress at all — like he'd been circling in place.

If the nightmares were all there was, that would have been one thing. But during the following three or four hours, nothing escaped suspicion. A pen. A sheet of paper. A stranger walking past on the street. A colleague who stopped to say hello. In the immediate aftermath of the nightmare, every single one seemed to be hiding something terrible, reaching toward him. Then it passed, and the same objects and people looked as mundane as they were.

Useless. Only wears you out.

He'd thought about it enough to know the worry itself wasn't the problem — the problem was that all the worrying produced nothing.

Nightmares came once a week. But on the other days — the days without nightmares — Ma En had gradually grown accustomed to life in Japan.

Since arriving in May, the position Kamishima Kousuke had arranged through Party channels suited him well. The final interview had been conducted personally by Katsura Masakazu-sensei and his wife — thorough, but not hostile. The questions dealt with administrative thinking, and Ma En had come through without difficulty. Both his identity as a Mainlander and Kamishima-san's recommendation had found considerable favour with Katsura-sensei.

The month of work had been, on the whole, uncomplicated. He'd anticipated sharp office politics, possibly with political dimensions, but reality had proved better than the expectation. Two-thirds of his colleagues were experienced transfers from other schools; the remaining third, like him, had come from other fields — unfamiliar with school operations but comfortable with work. New school, new work — when things got busy, it was genuinely relentless. Anyone looking to maneuver for position had to reckon with a practical fact: all roles were fixed. Before this term's results came in, changes were essentially impossible. Even the in-school communications department — the one Kamishima-san had been most particular about — was under Katsura-sensei's wife's direct control.

Ma En's assignment was intranet setup and what struck him as entirely introductory-level programming instruction. In the course of the work, none of his colleagues — including himself — had displayed any visible political inclination. Observing colleagues, observing the school, observing their patron Katsura-sensei — all of it required more time. One month had been barely enough to get the work on track, far too little to begin reading what the people around him were keeping hidden.

Whatever else could be said, the work was going smoothly — busy, and he was willing to admit it, genuinely enjoyable.

What had settled into the same rhythm alongside work was daily life.

He hadn't anticipated this: back in the homeland, he'd felt no particular drive to find a girlfriend. But within one month of arriving in Japan, he had one. Almost without noticing. Almost naturally.

To be precise: he hadn't pursued her. Their interactions had remained within the range of courtesy. Yet somewhere in that courteous range, she had arrived at the settled conviction that they were a couple — and had done so without informing him first. Daily life produced exactly this kind of thing: circumstances that made no particular sense, which you also couldn't cleanly refuse. It looked, on the surface, like a good thing. Whether it truly was — Ma En measured that against standards that didn't quite match most people's. He hadn't forgotten why he'd come to Japan. But a relationship was a two-sided matter, and whatever he thought of it was only ever his own side.

When the woman next door — Hirota Masami, whom he'd known for exactly one month — announced their relationship to the building manager, Ma En's memory of his own reaction was vivid: pure, speechless stupefaction. He remembered very clearly the quiet conversation between the two women in the kitchen.

"You two really suit each other," the manager had said. "I knew from that very first night."

"Which night?" Hirota-san's voice carried a faint confusion.

"Ma En-san had only been in the building three days when he spent the night in your room — and you two went out together just the other day. I saw."

"Ah — yes. Talking about it now is almost embarrassing."

"Was it him who asked you out?"

"He broke the door lock and gave me a terrible fright. Dinner was his way of making it up to me."

"That's not quite how you should look at it. Ma En-san has a good nature. Another man would've just said sorry and left it there — some would've even turned it around and blamed you for making a scene." The manager's tone carried the weight of genuine experience. "Am I wrong?"

"Is that how it is?"

"Have you gone completely soft in the head? Of course that's how it is. After all the men you've seen through your work — the graceless ones."

"Ah!"

"Entirely soft. Hirota-san is completely a woman in love."

At that moment, could he have stepped in and announced flatly that there was nothing to it? Hirota-san's eyes had been so earnest when she'd looked at him that he hadn't been able to deny it outright — only to let the moment slide past without resolution.

In the weeks since, he'd watched clearly: Hirota-san's investment in the relationship was genuine, and actively maintained. He was being pushed along — and now, a month later, if he wanted to refuse he'd need a better moment and a better reason. So far he'd found neither. He couldn't use "I'm a dangerous man who pursues the bizarre" as grounds for rejection.

And yet, however it had come about, however passively he'd ended up in it — having a girlfriend had brought a warmth he'd never known while chasing the bizarre alone in the homeland. A quiet ease that simply hadn't existed before. Working seriously, living seriously — those were the things he'd done best this past month.

Yet within this smooth, good-humored daily life in Japan — all these small stories of adjustment — he kept noticing how much the person he'd become differed from who he'd been. When he considered whether that bothered him, the honest answer was: he couldn't bring himself to mind. The changes felt as natural as water finding its course downhill — the kind of thing that came at every stage of a life, as it had to.

He stepped out of the bathroom, toweled his hair vigorously, and went to the desk to look through last night's work notes and his personal research. The school work — steady, unremarkable, easier than the postal service had been. The personal research was a catalogue of the slightly strange things that had accumulated around him since arriving: his mental state, the jarring details in daily life.

Under everything else was the file on the Twenty-Four Solar Terms — barely half done, left exactly where he'd set it aside. The first time he'd spent a night in Hirota Masami's room, that research had stalled; and afterward, the feeling that his Solar Terms work was connected to the bizarre had faded. Whatever instinct had drawn the link in the first place seemed increasingly like the product of fixation. He'd concluded, around that time, that continuing it would just be accumulating more Solar Terms data, with no real use.

He still couldn't quite recall what had drawn him to the Solar Terms to begin with. Or rather — he could recall several reasons, each seeming equally plausible as the original, none quite ringing true. In retrospect, he suspected he'd been half-obsessed. The practical concerns of actual school work had clarified the contrast: his fixation on Solar Terms seemed, from a settled perspective, wildly impractical.

Perhaps the postal service had simply been too much stimulation for too long, and this was the decompression.

He didn't think so. But the thought showed up anyway.

He slid the Solar Terms file out from the bottom of the stack, tucked it back onto the bookshelf. That felt final, somehow.

On his way back to the desk, his knee clipped the wastepaper basket. It didn't spill — only one paper ball rolled out, apparently overlooked when the bin was last emptied.

He picked it up. He didn't know exactly why; it was entirely automatic. He uncrumpled it.

He stared at the page for a long moment.

He didn't recognize a single symbol on it.

Twenty-four of them in total — drawn in a hand that was unmistakably his, in a pattern that resembled both notation and text without clearly being either. Then, in what was also unmistakably his hand, crossed out entirely. Every one of them.

He sat with this for a while. He couldn't remember writing it. He couldn't remember throwing it away. He might have been doodling — some idle moment of scribbling that his mind had already discarded as meaningless — embarrassed himself, crossed it out, tossed it. That was the most reasonable explanation.

There was no particular reason to look harder at it.

He crumpled it back into a ball and dropped it in the basket.

Take it outside to the bin later.

He was still holding that thought when a knock came at the door. He didn't move to answer it — he didn't need to. He already knew this time of day, this knock.

Before he reached the door, a key turned in the lock from outside, and Hirota Masami walked in carrying a tray. This was their breakfast — both their portions.