At nine in the morning, the bookshop streets across Tokyo had only just opened their doors, and before the staff had time to finish tidying the shelves, long queues had already formed outside.
Because today, the latest issue of Shinchō had hit the shelves.
To that end, Shinchōsha had been running advertisements in every bookstore since the previous week.
All of them announcing that Dassai-ya-sensei would be returning to Shinchō with his latest masterwork, No Longer Human.
By half past ten, all five bookstores in the Shinjuku area had sold out.
By eleven, the bookshops large and small throughout Shibuya Ward, Bunkyo Ward, Chiyoda Ward and every other district had begun hanging up their [Shinchō Sold Out] signs.
Twelve noon. The editorial department at Shinchōsha.
Kobayashi Tomoaki sat at his desk, the freshly tallied sales report pinched between his fingers, the corners of his mouth twitching upward in a way he couldn't quite control.
"Twenty thousand copies this morning. Every last one sold."
He murmured it under his breath once, then again, and finally lifted his head to announce the news to the entire editorial room.
The office instantly erupted in applause and cheering.
The editors clapped one another on the shoulder. A few of them even let out exaggerated sighs of relief, as though they had just finished a hard-fought battle.
It wasn't hard to see why.
From manuscript-gathering to proofreading, every single person on this issue of Shinchō had been keyed up to breaking point.
Especially Dassai-ya-sensei's No Longer Human — the content was simply too sensitive.
All those depictions of self-destruction, of the darkness in human nature, of being "disqualified from being human" — they had left a quiet, gnawing unease in everyone who had read the manuscript.
Even though Kobayashi Tomoaki and Tsushima Kagami, along with the other colleagues, had taken turns going over the manuscript, offering suggestions and reworking it tirelessly during that whole period…
In the end there were still many places where, no matter how they revised, the original intent would be damaged — so they had no choice but to publish many of those passages exactly as they had appeared in Tsushima Kagami's original manuscript.
For that reason — as a conservative measure for managing public-opinion risk — this print run had not been like The Setting Sun's, where they had churned out copies as if they were printing money, on and on without pause.
Instead, they had cautiously printed an initial stock of sixty thousand copies, releasing only twenty thousand into stores in the morning to feel out the readers' response first.
Who could have guessed that this time, too, the entire morning's stock would be sold out by midday.
"This afternoon, get every one of the remaining forty thousand copies onto the shelves."
Kobayashi Tomoaki rose to his feet, an excitement in his voice that he could no longer suppress.
"Notify the printers. Keep the reprints coming."
"This time… this time we might just break The Setting Sun's record…"
He walked over to the window and looked down at the bustle of the street below.
The early-autumn sunlight filtered in through the glass, warm and gentle, the sort of warmth that made a person want to stretch.
He thought back to the grand spectacle of The Setting Sun the previous year — that really had been like printing money. However many copies they printed, that was how many sold.
This time… was it about to happen all over again?
Two in the afternoon.
The streets of Tokyo were still busy, and the bookstore clerks were still standing behind their counters, waiting for customers.
But ever since the first peak wave of morning shoppers had passed…
In the afternoon, the flow of people had visibly, oddly, begun to thin.
Inside one bookstore in Shinjuku, the copies of Shinchō that had been snapped up that morning now sat in neat, orderly piles in the most prominent spot by the door.
One stack, two stacks, three… a good few dozen copies in all.
Every now and then someone would walk past, throw a glance at them, and keep on going.
Some bent down to pick up a copy, flipped through it, hesitated for a moment, and then put it back.
Across Tokyo's twenty-three wards — and including the Tama area, where extra distribution channels had been opened up that afternoon — much the same thing was happening everywhere.
At five in the afternoon, the latest sales figures landed on Kobayashi Tomoaki's desk.
He bowed his head over the report his colleague from the statistics section had just brought up, and the smile on his face slowly froze.
[Shinchō November Issue Sales Data (as of 15:00)]
Morning stock released: 20,000 copies
Morning sales: 19,847 copies
Afternoon stock released: 40,000 copies
Afternoon sales: 3,621 copies
"Impossible…"
He muttered to himself, his voice dry.
"This is absolutely impossible!"
Kobayashi Tomoaki sat staring at the report for a long while, deep in thought.
At last he picked it up, walked out of his office, and made his way to the main hall of the editorial department.
The hall was thick with smoke.
Every editor's ashtray was already crammed full of cigarette butts.
Every editor was leaning back in his chair in disbelief, an indescribable confusion etched onto each face.
Clearly, they had all received their own photocopies of the same report.
They stared at the strings of numbers, at the pie charts and bar charts and line graphs.
Kobayashi Tomoaki, too, was silent for a long moment before he finally spoke.
"Can someone tell me what on earth is going on?"
No one said anything.
The office was so quiet that you could hear nothing but the wall clock ticking.
"Twenty thousand copies this morning, sold out in half a day."
"To be precise, in under three hours."
Editor-in-chief Kobayashi went on.
"Forty thousand copies in the afternoon, and so far we've sold barely four thousand."
"Does any of you think that's normal?"
"It's not."
A male editor with glasses said quietly.
"It's deeply abnormal."
Of course it was abnormal. Every editor in the department understood that.
But as to why, exactly, it was abnormal — that none of them could figure out either.
"By all the usual logic…"
The bespectacled editor pushed his glasses back up.
"If there were a problem with the work, if the readers were unhappy with it, if the word-of-mouth had soured and caused the afternoon sales to crash — then the editorial department should be drowning in complaint calls and letters."
He paused.
"But we…"
"We haven't received a single thing."
Another editor picked up the thread.
"Forget complaints — we haven't even had one phone call."
"I went down to the mailroom myself just now. Not a single letter has come in."
Editor-in-chief Kobayashi's brow furrowed even more deeply.
"That's strange…"
He walked over to the window and pushed it open.
The autumn wind swept in, scattering the smoke that filled the room.
Just as the two earlier editors had said.
If a book sold well in the morning but stalled in the afternoon, the only possible explanation was that the book had served its readers and fans a steaming heap of garbage.
The morning readers had swallowed it, then realized what they'd been fed, and the word-of-mouth backlash had made later readers too wary to buy.
But in that scenario, the editorial department should have been flooded with furious calls and letters by midday.
And yet here it was, nearly the end of the workday, and both the mailroom and the office landlines were eerily silent.
Had every reader in the country suddenly been called into emergency overtime, or sent back to school, this afternoon?
Surely not?!
"I've been in publishing for thirty years."
Another, older editor suddenly spoke up.
"I've never come across anything like this."
Only then did Kobayashi Tomoaki nod and turn from the window to face them.
"Where do you all think the problem is?"
The editorial room was silent for several seconds.
Then someone spoke up.
"Could it be… a problem with No Longer Human itself?"
Everyone turned to look at him.
He was a young editor in his early thirties, surname Yamada, five years with the company, in charge of the pure-literature section.
His eyes were a little red and the bags under them obvious, as though he hadn't slept well the night before.
"Yamada-kun, explain what you mean."
The editor-in-chief looked at him.
Editor Yamada stood up, picked up one of the sales reports, and pinned it to the data board beside him.
"Everyone, take a look at this curve."
He pointed at the line — one that dropped off a cliff exactly like the K-line of the stock market when the bubble burst back in '91.
"What do this morning's sales tell us?"
"They tell us that Dassai-ya-sensei — which is to say, Kagami-kun's pen name — still has serious pulling power."
"The first batch of buyers this morning all came specifically for him."
He paused.
"The question is what happened to those people after they finished reading it."
"You mean — they thought the book wasn't any good?"
Someone asked.
"It isn't a matter of whether it's any good."
Editor Yamada shook his head.
"If they had simply found it boring, they would curse. They would call to complain, they would write letters berating Dassai-ya-sensei for betraying their trust, they would post rants online to vent."
"That would be normal word-of-mouth fermentation."
At another desk, in front of a computer, a young editor — clearly the youngest person in the room, apparently in his early twenties — was staring at the screen, scrolling the mouse little by little, and murmured:
"There don't seem to be any posts about No Longer Human on any of the major literary or fiction forums online either."
"Strange, isn't it?"
"Take the past — whether it was Gunzō running Hear the Wind Sing."
"Or even earlier, with The Setting Sun, on release day there were always at least a few related posts and replies."
Once everyone had heard the report from this young, computer-savvy editor…
Their eyes all turned again, in unison, to Editor Yamada.
The meeting room was silent for several seconds.
"So…"
Editor-in-chief Kobayashi spoke slowly.
"What is it that you're saying?"
"What I'm saying is."
Editor Yamada went on.
"This batch of readers — it isn't that they dislike the book."
"Could it possibly be that…"
He hesitated, as though searching for the right word.
"They've been struck by this book."
He pointed at his own chest.
"Right here. Struck."
"So they need time to recover?"
"And that strange atmosphere has gradually spread to the other readers around them as well."
"And bit by bit, the eager buying has turned into a silent watching from a distance?"
Then Editor Yamada pointed once more at his own reddened eyes.
"I secretly printed off a copy of No Longer Human myself, and stayed up last night reading the whole thing through in one go."
"Its aftereffects — I don't need to spell them out. I trust you can all imagine."
The editorial department fell silent once again.
Kobayashi Tomoaki sat in a corner, and a scene from the previous night abruptly surfaced in his mind.
Last night he had taken the final draft of No Longer Human home, meaning to give it one last read-through.
He had ended up reading until two in the morning.
When he had finished, he hadn't done his usual washing-up-and-going-to-bed routine.
Instead he had just sat at his desk, completely motionless, for a full hour.
He thought of that line from Oba Yozo.
"Mine has been a life of much shame."
He remembered the years just after he'd first entered the industry — the days of having his work returned in rejection slips, the moments when he had felt unworthy of being an editor at all, the late nights spent sitting alone in the office, staring into space.
And he suddenly felt that this man called Oba Yozo seemed to overlap, somehow, with him.
No — looking at it now, Oba Yozo could overlap with anyone.
He thought once more of that line from Kagami-kun's afterword in the book.
[The truth is, there is an Oba Yozo inside every person's heart.]
"Editor-in-chief Kobayashi."
Editor Yamada's voice pulled him back to reality.
"Hm?"
"You read the final draft last night, didn't you?"
Editor Yamada looked at him.
"Do you think there's anything wrong with this book?"
Kobayashi Tomoaki was quiet for a while.
"No."
"There's nothing wrong with this book."
"Then why do you think this afternoon's sales have turned out the way they have?"
Kobayashi Tomoaki thought it over, and slowly began to speak.
"I think… I may know why."
Everyone looked at him.
"Because this book…"
He turned away again, looking out at a sky that had been clear and cloudless that morning but had, in the afternoon, turned overcast and a dull, ashen grey.
"…isn't something you [like]."
"It's something you use to [go on living]."
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