Chapter One: White Time

Read this chapter in the original Japanese

When he woke, the light lay across the ceiling at just the right angle.

Not too bright, not too dim. The morning light through the gap in the curtains always came to rest in the same place, at the same depth, as if someone had lined it up with a ruler. No one had. It simply came out that way. That was all.

Amane Tokiwa lay in bed a while, watching the light. There was little point in watching. He already knew, more or less, what would happen next. He would get up and want a glass of water. He would drink it, and it would be exactly the right temperature, with three small bubbles left at the bottom of the glass. It was always like that. Today would probably be no different.

Still, every morning, Amane dutifully got out of bed.

Doing nothing was an option too—an option in name, at least. But between doing nothing and lying there staring at the ceiling there was, in truth, no great difference. Either way, nothing happened, in roughly equal measure. In which case, being up and moving was that much less bad.

In the bathroom mirror was the same face as always. No lines in it, no age in it—a face whose years no one could have guessed. Amane sometimes studied that face as if it belonged to someone else. How many mornings he had greeted with it, he couldn't have said. Long ago, he had tried to count. But somewhere past the point where the number grew too large, the counting itself came to seem absurd. At some point, he had stopped growing older. When that was, exactly, he could no longer remember either.

The room was not large. There was not much in it. Live in one place long enough, and even the will to accumulate things wears thin. Whatever he wanted, he tended to have before the wanting. So the outline of the word want had grown, for Amane, steadily more blurred. Books lined the shelf, but most of them were books whose contents he had known before he had ever read them.

He opened the closet. What to wear today—he gave it thought, as a formality. And while he was still thinking, his hand was already reaching for whatever was easiest to slip into. Whatever he put on turned out to suit the day's temperature exactly. Not too cold, not too warm. He hadn't checked the forecast. It simply came out that way. Once in a while, Amane deliberately chose something out of season—a thick sweater in the height of summer, say. On that day, of all days, the morning had turned suddenly cold. Whether someone had arranged it, or whether his choice had simply caught up with the weather—which had come first, even Amane no longer had any way of finding out.

In the kitchen, the coffee maker had already finished.

Before Amane wanted a cup, the beans were ground, the water boiled, the grounds bloomed, the brewing done. No one had prepared it. He lived alone in this house. And yet, by the time the wanting came, it was always already done—as if time itself walked one step ahead of him.

He poured a cup. Steam rose. He went through the motions of checking the aroma anyway, holding today's cup up, dutifully, against the memory in his tongue and the memory in his nose. The result was always the same. Flawless. And flawlessness was not, in the end, a compliment.

Once—several centuries ago now—he had run an experiment. He deliberately chose a different bean, ground it differently, measured it differently. The result was the same. The taste settled, without the slightest deviation, into the usual taste. Whether the world smoothed over every change he thought he'd made, or whether his own tongue had simply lost the ability to register anything but the usual taste—which of the two it was, Amane still didn't know. He had stopped trying to find out.

He took a sip, then looked out the window.

It was raining. It was supposed to be raining, anyway—the distant rooftops still glistened with it. But the road in front of his house, and only that road, was dry. Drying, to be precise: as if the raindrops, wanting to steer clear of this one corner, had begun packing up for home a little early.

Amane left the house without an umbrella.

Sure enough, the rain had stopped—but only one step ahead of him. Each stride he took, the sky dried by exactly that stride's length, as if leading him on, or fleeing from him. When he looked back, it was raining properly behind him. On either side of the dry road, the world was properly, thoroughly wet. Nothing special was happening to him; something was simply failing to happen around him. That was the kind of anomaly it was.

Amane no longer bothered naming the phenomenon. The naming belonged to a much older time—he half remembered calling it the dry road, or the sunbreak that runs ahead, something like that. Now he just walked. Walked the dry road as a matter of course, passing people with their umbrellas up, finding only the raindrops beaded along their umbrella ribs a little too bright to look at.

Where the shopping street began, a line had formed at the lottery window. Amane walked straight past it. Once, in his youth—if youth was even the right word—he had bought a ticket out of curiosity. The result was an amount you'd sooner count from the bottom of the prize table than the top. Neither too lucky nor too unlucky. As if the world had meticulously rounded off the value of even that one scrap of paper in his hand. He hadn't bought a ticket since. Buying one never produced a meaningful number. If the tickets were ever accurate about anything, it was only the meaninglessness itself.

It wasn't only lottery tickets that got rounded off. Let him pass a popular shop with a line outside, and exactly one seat would open up. Let him board a crowded bus, and the strap directly in front of him would come free. Whoever had let go wore a faintly puzzled look, as if unable to say why they'd let go. No one meant to yield to him, and Amane never meant to be yielded to. It was simply that gaps in his exact shape kept opening, one step ahead of him, all over the world. These days, when Amane saw a line, he turned around and went home rather than join it. Standing in line was an act that, for him, could not be made to happen. Waiting was a finer kind of time, permitted only to those who could not know when their turn would come.

Past the shopping street stood a small used bookshop. It had been there for decades, maybe longer. Owners came and went, the lettering on the sign changed, but its place never did. Amane sometimes stopped in, picked a book more or less at random, and read it in the chair in the corner.

Today he closed his eyes and reached for the shelf. Whatever spine his fingers touched, he pulled out without looking. A small, doomed act of defiance: to outwit his own will, if only in the instant of choosing.

What came out was a mystery novel by a writer he didn't know. The cover, the author's name—both new to him. That much was fresh. At least until the moment of choosing was over.

He hadn't read twenty pages before he knew who the killer was.

It wasn't deduction. He hadn't gathered clues. He simply knew. With every turned page, the ending—still unwritten—settled quietly into place in his mind, ahead of the words already printed. The truth the author had labored to hide lay, for Amane, further out in the open than the book's own cover. Choosing blind had changed nothing. He could outwit the hand that chose; he could not outwit the ending.

He didn't close the book. He read it to the end. Knowing the killer didn't mean he knew the prose. The order of the words, the choice of metaphor, the exact line on which a character would finally sigh—those details alone remained, just barely, things he didn't know. Though by the time he finished, even those had begun to feel like things he'd known all along.

But even this, he supposed, he would grow used to someday. It was only that, for now, the premonition hadn't come.

As he stepped out of the shop, the owner looked up and said, "Come again." Amane had known the words were coming before the man opened his mouth. He answered with a nod. The owner, today as always, didn't seem to quite remember his face—despite the years of visits. Last time, and the time before that, the man had started to ask, in the same tone, "First time here?"—and stopped partway, with the look of someone who felt a snag somewhere but never chased down what it was.

This, too, no longer surprised Amane.

The world made no great effort to remember him. Conspicuous results got rounded off when no one was looking. A prediction that came true too precisely shrank, in someone's memory, to more or less right. A moment that had nearly looked like a miracle dissolved, an instant later, into the ordinary, wearing an expression that said these things happen. Amane had never asked for this. The world simply handled him this way—so that no one would ever catch him out. So that he would never stand out.

Convenient, if you wanted to call it that.

But convenience was only boredom by another name.

Amane had, in truth, almost never thought of using his power to move anything on a grand scale. Founding a nation, bending someone to his will—the ideas had never even occurred to him. Where there was no one to compete against, winning and losing could scarcely mean anything at all. Strength only takes shape in comparison with someone else. Strength with no one to compare it against is merely a precondition—too obvious to register, like the weight of air, like the clearness of water.

So Amane simply walked. Simply watched. Staying unremarkable, letting himself be rounded off. Whether that was a refusal of arrogance or plain listlessness, even he couldn't say. But he had never once, in all this time, looked down on anyone. Looking down on someone requires something to compare between the two of you. For Amane, there was nothing left, anywhere, to compare.

At midday, he stopped at a small café near the station. A waitress came to take his order. He knew what she would say before she opened her mouth—Have you decided?—and knowing it, he still listened, carefully. The pitch of her voice, the spacing of her pauses, the faint trace of an accent—those details alone were still unknown to him. He had made a habit of gathering his attention around only what he didn't know. Not the substance of a conversation, but its grain. It was the one way Amane had left of staying, however barely, connected to this world.

At the next table, two young men—students, by the look of them—were arguing. One raised his voice; the other went silent. Amane knew that within three more exchanges, one of them would fold.

On the second exchange, the silent one burst out laughing.

Amane's hand stopped, just slightly, around his coffee cup. The movement existed nowhere in his prediction. The one who'd raised his voice looked, for an instant, as if the anger had been drained clean out of him. Something is about to happen, Amane thought. For the first time in some hundreds of years, there was the sensation of not being able to read the next line. The place where his heart sat seemed, just faintly, to take on heat.

The one who'd laughed said, "Haven't seen that face in a while—the one you make when you're actually mad," and clapped the other on the shoulder. The one who'd raised his voice, still disarmed, ended up laughing too, and folding. By the third exchange, they were both laughing.

Amane set down his cup. Only the order of things had strayed from his prediction. The ending itself—someone folding—had never been in question. Only, tucked in just before it, there had been one move he hadn't known. That was all. And yet for a while Amane sat turning that all over, savoring it. Their expressions—frustration, embarrassment, whatever it was—only the way such things surfaced ever lay outside his predictions. The substance of a feeling was the same every time, but the speed and angle at which it arrived at the face, the shape of the detour it took on the way—these differed, each time, slightly. If Amane still went on watching people, the reason, probably, lay there and nowhere else.

Toward evening, he walked the riverbank. Under the bridge, the water moved slowly. Two children were skipping stones across it. One got three skips, the other five, and each let out a small cheer. Amane had known, before either stone left a hand, exactly how many times it would skip. Knowing, he still didn't look away from the moment it happened. The children's cheers were a sound he didn't yet know.

A little further on, he passed an old man walking a dog. The old man nodded to him; Amane nodded back. How many hundred, how many thousand of these nods he must have exchanged by now. Old men were replaced by other old men. Dogs by other dogs. Only Amane went on, with the same face, returning the same nod.

From one of the houses, a television leaked sound—a song he'd never heard. Amane stopped and listened for a moment. By the time the intro had passed and the first line was sung, he already knew where the melody was going. Whether it would change key before the chorus, or wouldn't. He didn't put anything on wouldn't—there was nothing to wager when he already knew. The song ended exactly where he expected, never once changing key.

After dark, Amane stopped at the public bathhouse. The bath at home would have done; he knew that. His body didn't dirty easily, and it didn't tire. Even so, once every ten days or so, he paid his few coins and stepped inside the building with the tall chimney. If anyone had asked why, he would have struggled to answer. If pressed: because it was the place in town where the sound of other people's lives pooled thickest.

At the entrance sat the bent-backed old proprietor, who took Amane's coins and said, "Take your time"—and the particular rasp of the voice, the particular pause before it spoke, Amane knew already. The row of wicker baskets in the changing room, the rust on the scale, the fading of the posters on the wall. All of it sat exactly where he knew it would.

The water was exactly right. The man before him had climbed out grumbling that it was lukewarm today—and yet when Amane sank to his shoulders, the water was neither too hot nor too cool but precisely, correctly warm. Whether the water had yielded, or his own skin had simply gone quiet, there was no telling. Either way, it had been a long time since hot water had made him wince.

At the edge of the tub, two old men were debating tomorrow's weather. Rain, said one. No rain, said the other. Both were arguing from the ache in their knees. Amane knew tomorrow's sky, but he didn't touch their bet. The time spent not knowing—consulting one's knees, waiting for tomorrow to arrive—was a far finer thing than the answer itself. He knew that. And he knew, too, that it was a thing he would never hold again.

Looking up at the painted Mount Fuji, Amane stretched out in the water. Steam escaped through the window near the ceiling. Somebody's wash bucket rang off the tiles. Inside sounds like these, Amane could feel himself a lodger, tucked into one corner of a great many lives. Not a bad illusion. Even knowing it was one.

On the way home, he stopped at a convenience store open past midnight. He had no errand there. It was simply the one thing in the whole night that floated, white.

On the shelf sat a sweet bun released just this week. Amane picked one up. Before the wrapper was open, he knew the taste—the sweetness of the dough, the weight of the cream, the way it would begin to tire the tongue by the second bite. He bought it anyway. The sleepy-eyed student at the register scanned it and started to ask, "Shall I warm that up?"—of a sweet bun that needed no warming—and stopped partway. Starting, then stopping: that much was a current Amane knew. Only the shape of the laugh that followed—the clerk's small huff at himself—arrived half a beat outside prediction.

On the bench outside, Amane opened the wrapper. The taste was exactly the taste he'd known. But the faint warmth of the dough passing into fingers the night air had chilled—that alone was written nowhere in his advance knowledge. He could read the entire contents of the world, and still the world's texture arrived only by touch, one touch at a time. If he had to give one reason he still remained in this world, it was probably that.

He went home, turned off the light, got into bed.

He didn't, strictly speaking, need to sleep.

His body never tired. Even unslept, his thoughts carried no silt into the next morning. So sometimes Amane only pretended—closing his eyes, watching the dark behind his eyelids, waiting for morning. Nothing happened. However many hours passed, nothing happened.

Once, he had kept it up for a week. A full week, a hundred and sixty-eight hours, watching only the ceiling. He hadn't stopped out of boredom—the sensation of boredom had long since worn too thin for that, so there had been no reason to stop, either. Then one morning—whether it was truly morning, he couldn't say for certain—he felt like getting up. That was all it had been.

How many centuries ago that was, he hadn't counted exactly. It had been a long time since counting felt like it meant anything.

Amane remembered a wall that someone had once declared would never fall. He never went to see it. He had simply known it would fall, before it fell. When word arrived that it had, he received the news with his usual quiet. There was no surprise in it.

He remembered a nation someone once declared would last forever. It didn't. He had known that too.

Once, in a public square, he had watched a young king crowned. Drums sounded, the crowd roared, and the young king gazed at something far away, proud and faintly afraid. Amane had seen, before the ceremony ended, what kind of reign the man would have, and when, and in what manner, he would come down from the throne. Only the crowd's roar was a sound he didn't know. Of the tens of thousands in the square that day, the ones who didn't know what would happen next were the young king himself, and the crowd—everyone, that is, except Amane. Amane alone watched the ceremony the way a man turns the pages of a book he has already finished.

He remembered, too, the year a long-tailed star appeared in the sky. People called it an ill omen and bolted their doors, or called it a blessing and passed the cup. Amane had known it for what it was: a thing merely passing through—bringing nothing, taking nothing, a cold mass crossing quietly over the calendar. And still people looked up night after night, trembling, praying, taking hold of the nearest hand. Amane watched not the star but the people. Eyes that could find something unknown in the sky and be afraid of it—perhaps he had never envied anything so much as he envied those eyes, that night.

Once, at a temple in the mountains, he had sat as an old monk's opponent at go. It was Amane who had to be taught how the stones were placed, but within a month there was nothing left to teach him. Everything on the board was visible before a single stone went down. Amane played so as not to win too much. When he lost, he chose whichever loss looked most natural. One snowy evening, the monk said, without lifting his eyes from the board, "Your go is skillful. And dull. You lose too carefully." Amane had no answer. The monk never spoke of winning and losing again, and after that the two of them simply drank tea across the board. Amane still thought of those eyes sometimes—among the very few that had ever reached him from outside everything the world so meticulously rounded off on his behalf.

Once, a plague ran through a distant town. It never came near wherever Amane happened to be. He had known it wouldn't. Knowing, he had done nothing. If he had done something, perhaps it would have come near after all. Or perhaps nothing he did would have brought it any nearer. Which it was, Amane didn't know, even now. Not knowing, he went on remembering only the name of that town.

Once, someone had called him a strange person. He could no longer recall the name of the one who said it. Not forgotten, exactly—closer to say the need to remember had lapsed.

He remembered much. He had been surprised little. So little there was nothing to count.

In bed, Amane went back over the day. The right light. The right coffee. The rain that stepped aside. The lottery ticket that never won. The strap no one quite meant to yield. The ending known before the reading. Himself, being quietly forgotten. The pitch of the waitress's voice. The student who laughed without warning. The number of times the stones skipped. The old man returning his nod. The song that never changed key. Bathwater beyond complaint. Old men reading tomorrow in their knees. A clerk who started, stopped, and laughed. The small warmth that crossed, in the night air, from bread into fingers.

A white time, Amane thought.

Not blinding, not dark. Just a stretch of time carrying no information at all. A day in which everything that happened was only the confirmation of what had been there before it happened. Today, for Amane, had been like a sheet of white paper. Words had been written on it, plenty of them. But every one was a word he had already read.

If anything on it had not been white, it was only this—the pitch of the children's cheers, the name of the old man's dog, the faint accent mixed into the waitress's voice: these, Amane still didn't know. That much was the one spot on today's page where the smell of ink still lingered.

And still, Amane thought. Still, today, just once, the place where his heart sat had held heat.

He didn't yet know the name of that heat. In all his long life, he thought he had finished naming most feelings—joy, loneliness, resignation. But those few seconds had refused to sit properly on any shelf. That there remained in the world even one thing he didn't know how to put away—that alone made breathing, it seemed to him, a little easier.

In the dark, Amane decided to try making a wish. Just one.

Not a large one. He had no intention of changing the world, or of saving anyone. Only something small, something quiet, far back in his chest.

—Tomorrow, let something happen that I don't already know.

In that instant, Amane smiled, a little. Not self-mockery, not resignation. Only the corner of his mouth, rising for the first time in a long while—that one movement, nothing more.

Today, for the first time in seven hundred years, I wanted to be surprised.

—Wanted is the wrong word. The wish slipped out of me before I could stop it. A wish, after all, always comes true before I finish saying it.

More chapters, as they are translated, will appear at /en/. In the meantime, the story continues in Japanese: all chapters so far.