Don't remember anything?

What is he talking about?

Ma En's hand, halfway to pulling his own door shut, went stiff. He told himself he was falling into the old habit again — reading too much into other people's words, suspecting hidden meanings where there were none. But when he turned to face the crack in Room 3's door, the gaze that came through it made his scalp prickle. Not because he was afraid of the speaker, and not because some infectious quality in that furtive, off-kilter atmosphere had gotten to him. It was purely the information contained in the sentence — or rather, what the sentence implied — that made him feel, suddenly, as though the life he'd been building over the past month was groaning under a weight it couldn't bear.

As though his logic and his sanity were being subjected to some enormous pressure.

As though hearing a few more words would erase who he was right now.

A deep sense of crisis stirred — something rooted in a place he hadn't known existed, or rather, something he seemed to have buried in the furthest reaches of his memory. A fear of something he couldn't name, grinding its teeth just before waking.

— Hey, Ma En. Think about it. Isn't this interesting? Why did you come to Japan? Did you really have nothing confirmed, nothing definite — just a vague fantasy about the bizarre — and on the strength of that alone, you abandoned the homeland, your family, your friends, and came to Japan by yourself?

— Your knowledge, your abilities, your thinking, your willpower — that strength, the kind that exceeds what's normal — what was it all prepared for? Just to live an ordinary life?

— You spent enormous time and effort, and never once told anyone what you were actually working toward. Before you'd confirmed it, you kept your real interests hidden from family, friends, colleagues alike. If all you wanted was an ordinary life, you never needed to leave the country.

— Strange. Am I really the kind of person who'd cross an ocean for an unconfirmed fantasy? If I'm not... then what was the core of it? The thing that made me give up everything?

The thoughts came like sparks — flickering up from corners he hadn't known were there. Ma En pressed his fingers against his temples. Then, without speaking, he quietly closed his own door first, and only then turned to face the crack in Room 3's entrance.

The situation he was in felt overwhelmingly familiar. Not déjà vu — the instant the word déjà vu rose to mind, something deeper in him rejected it. He'd been through this before. Many times. No — recently, very recently, he'd encountered this person, encountered a situation like this one. But the moment he tried to dig further, an invisible wall of resistance slammed down.

He'd been trying to explain everything with logic, had even considered the possibility that he was mentally unwell. But deep down — did he really not want to believe he was that kind of person? The thought came unbidden. He felt calmer than he'd expected; in fact, the current version of himself felt nothing like his usual self.

A different soul had taken hold of his thinking and his emotions. Fear was part of it — but not all. His feelings were churning violently, yet behind them his mind was colder and more still than it had been during a job interview. Cold and clear, yet crowded with thoughts he couldn't decipher, thoughts that arrived and vanished before he could read them.

Yes — what he was actually experiencing was something extraordinary: massive internal turbulence, and underneath it, an attitude of preternatural calm. If a person had a soul, then right now, a pair of flat, cold eyes was rising to the surface of his.

"Do we... know each other?" he asked the figure behind the crack.

He didn't feel as though the question had come from him. The tone was wrong — nothing like how he heard himself speak.

But this was just an ordinary exchange between neighbors. Even if this particular neighbor had a poor reputation and an unsettling way of appearing.

"Hee hee... ohhh... poor Ma En, going to die soon... hee hee... dead and gone." The voice behind the crack was all nerves and giggles, delivering its content like a curse.

Bluffing?

The thought surfaced, and something else inside him immediately overruled it. He hadn't caught what the deeper voice said — only felt it — and found himself glancing back at his own door. The room number, 1304, gleamed in the hallway light.

— The Room 4 Ghost Story?

"Because I live in Room 4?" The words came out of him with a calm that startled even himself.

"Humans are low creatures who will accept anything as long as they feel the logic is correct, the emotion is correct, the morality is correct," said the voice behind the crack, ignoring his question entirely, talking to itself. "When you get down to it, what is human logic? And what's the standard for judging whether a person's logic is correct? How far does its jurisdiction extend? Human society? This planet? Or the entire universe? But humans haven't even finished understanding their own planet. In the vast, boundless cosmos, how much value does human logic actually carry?"

Ma En didn't find these words difficult to understand. Throughout history, whenever someone contemplated the relationship between the self and the world without the guidance of a sound worldview, they tended to slide toward the negative. Because — as this Room 3 tenant seemed to be driving at:

The world is too large.

The more acutely a person could perceive the world's enormity — or rather, the larger the world inside their own cognition — the harder it became to locate their own value against that backdrop. Unless you grounded yourself in something concrete, something you could actually touch and interact with rather than merely imagine, that feeling of self-negation would persist.

A person's value — not just logical value, but full, holistic self-worth — could only be established within a range they could actually reach and feel themselves reaching. Beyond that range of tangible interaction, almost any line of thought would be classified by mainstream society as "impractical" — of no positive use for one's growth or one's life.

The man behind Room 3's door was clearly a casualty of exactly this kind of thinking. No wonder he never came outside. In his eyes, life was probably a grey and joyless thing.

And he didn't actually know how vast the universe was. He didn't know the full extent of human nature's secrets, either. Yet here he was, pronouncing judgment on these immense questions from inside his dark little room.

Since he was equally an "unknowing person," was his logic really so impeccable? He spoke as though he'd reached some vantage point of absolute truth and was gazing down on everyone else.

These thoughts passed through Ma En in a flash and pulled him back from the strange state he'd been in — that uncanny mode that didn't feel like it belonged to him. His emotions and his thinking cooled down properly this time. He'd half-expected this figure, with this atmosphere and this entrance, to say something remarkable. Instead it was this.

"Are you a nihilist?" Ma En asked.

"No, nihilism has nothing to do with it. The objective fact is that human cognition and thought are riddled with limitations. Logic built solely on those limited foundations — when it encounters the unknown — is helpless. I'm merely... observing that." The voice behind the crack went on, but Ma En was growing impatient. The reasoning behind the words was a textbook case of what happened when someone talked themselves into a corner.

Has he not noticed? When he critiques human logic, the critique itself is human logic.

Ma En thought this, and answered offhandedly: "Humanity has always been progressing." He was ready to end the conversation. His reply was casual, but that was because the man's arguments were genuinely uninteresting.

Who didn't know about human limitations? If you had time to lament the obvious, you'd be better served doing what you could within those limitations, so that at the end of your life you could at least say you'd given it everything you had.

"And what of it?" the man continued. "Humanity may be unlimited, but a single person is not. Pinning your hopes for the infinite on the collective — isn't that just another empty fantasy?"

"I'm sorry, sir. I don't know how you define fantasy," Ma En said. "But I'd advise you — unless you aren't human — to stop talking this way. These thoughts aren't doing you any good." He looked steadily toward the crack. He could see one eye. At first it had struck him as unnerving. Now it only made him feel sorry for the man.

On a day this sunny, to be trapped in that dark corner, tormented by his own thoughts — unable to live a normal life.

"Your thinking is making you afraid," Ma En said, his voice firm and clear. "That, right there, is the fundamental error. A person's thoughts must allow that person to stand in the sunlight with dignity. That's the only standard that matters." He paused. "I don't know what your circumstances are. But if the reason you're saying these things to me is that you're hoping I can help somehow — then please, open your door. Let me come in. Let's talk face to face."

"Connecting the individual to the collective, finding the individual's meaning through the collective — that's nothing but a comforting lie. At its core, isn't it simply because the individual is limited, and so must seek the group's strength? But the group's strength is only the group's strength." The voice behind the crack was muttering on, as though it hadn't heard a word Ma En said.

Irritating as it was, Ma En held his patience. This tenant from Room 3 rarely showed himself at times like this. He'd been considering whether he ought to see a proper psychiatrist about his own mental state — but now a different thought surfaced: why not listen carefully to what this man was saying and try to assess his mental problems? It would serve as a concrete test of whether Ma En's own knowledge of psychology was truly as inadequate as he'd been fearing.

"Listen, Ma En-san. Don't misunderstand me. Humanity is an enormous monster, but a person is not. You can't take humanity's glory and strength and treat it as a single person's glory and strength. An individual, within the body of that enormous monster, is nothing more than a cell that is continuously replaced. That is the full extent of its value. When an individual faces even the most insignificant fraction of that collective — if the individual doesn't become part of it, they will be destroyed. Of that there is no question."

"And then?" Ma En asked. He was noticing something: the man's speech was remarkably coherent now, the diction clear. His worldview might be skewed and his philosophy flawed, but there was a logic to what he was saying — it operated within recognizable bounds.

"Then...? Then?" The man seemed caught off guard. His voice climbed, sharpening with anger.

"What does any of this have to do with me? I'm just an ordinary person." Ma En kept his voice level. "I'm human. I don't know how to look at myself or the world from the position of denying humanity. Everything you've said — with respect — is still a human being talking. You're not a monster. You're one individual within the human whole, same as anyone. Why diminish yourself to this degree?"

The panting behind the crack had been furious — but hearing this, it gradually subsided. Then came a different sound: a breathy, excited noise, somewhere between a chuckle and a wheeze.

"Very good, Ma En-san. Would you like to know why?"

"Yes." Ma En nodded. He was calculating time in his head — this conversation would probably run long. He might be considerably late for work today.

But this neighbor in Room 3 probably had very few chances to talk to anyone. Having caught him in a moment when he wanted to speak, rushing off would be a kind of cruelty. Ma En's work — even missing a full day — wasn't more important than this. If the cost of his time could give a neighbor with clear mental health concerns a foothold back into society, it was worth it.

Ma En walked to the center of the hallway, stopping at what he estimated was a comfortable distance from the crack. He set down his briefcase and sat on the floor. He patted his thigh, let a genuine smile come to his face, and said to the figure behind the door:

"Let's talk properly."

"...Aren't you in a hurry?" The voice behind the crack sounded startled. Ma En smiled. That single sentence proved the man still had common sense in him — he wasn't completely lost.