The desk lamp stayed lit until past three in the morning.
Yukinoshita Shizuku had already gone back to her room and fallen asleep.
Tsushima Kagami, meanwhile, filled sheet after sheet of manuscript paper only to crumple them up, crumpling them and then rewriting them again.
The wastebasket was stuffed full of balls of scrap paper.
Traces of ink still lingered on his fingers.
In this era personal computers hadn't yet become widespread, and writing was done entirely by hand—one fountain pen, one stack of manuscript paper, filling in the squares one character at a time.
When he reached the latter half, his thoughts grew clearer and clearer instead, the nib rasping across the paper, and he wrote straight on that way until the sky paled with the first light of dawn.
When he finally set down his pen, his fingers had gone stiff, the knuckles faintly red, and a deep pen-groove had been pressed into the web of his thumb.
He straightened the manuscript pages by their page numbers and gave them a rough count—a little over ten thousand characters.
Just about the length of a short story.
He leaned back against the chair, held the stack of pages up before his eyes, and skimmed through it once more by the light of the desk lamp.
The handwriting was somewhat sloppy, but it was just barely legible.
In places there were even revision arrows and insertion marks drawn in, like a hastily scrawled map.
This was the first time he hadn't honestly copied the original work word for word, but had instead carried out large-scale "stitching" and adaptation on a foundation of "borrowing."
He had extracted the core conception of Dazai Osamu's "Villon's Wife," then blended in some of the elements and tonal qualities of Haruki Murakami's "South of the Border, West of the Sun."
Finally he changed the postwar setting to the Heisei era after the bubble burst.
He moved the story's setting from the ruins of the postwar period to the danchi.
Those collective housing estates that had once been gleaming and were now run-down.
You could say that, compared to the original "Villon's Wife," it had already changed almost beyond recognition.
And Tsushima Kagami had thereby upgraded from a mere copycat into a copycat who knew how to skillfully "borrow and stitch."
This was also the first time he had actively smuggled in his own agenda, wanting to write something he himself wished to express.
While writing, his blood had been up, and it had felt as though every single character weighed a thousand pounds.
But once he finished and calmed down, looking at that stack of manuscript pages crammed thick with corrections, a sudden wave of self-doubt welled up in his heart once more.
What if he'd ruined it with his changes?
After all, what a copycat fears most is copying to the point of actually mistaking himself for a great literary master.
The greatest taboo is presumptuous, reckless meddling that ends up leaving the whole thing incoherent nonsense.
Of course, there was no shortage of people who, being naturally well-versed in literature themselves—just like copying paintings—found that after copying enough and seeing enough, their writing skill and the substance of their thought rose right along with it.
But Tsushima Kagami felt that his own improvement over these past days was certainly real.
Yet it hadn't reached quite that genius level.
He, a mere dabbler—what right did he have to think he could add bricks and mortar on top of such a foundation?
Writing technique could be leveled up through the system's skill points, and prose style could be imitated.
But the reason a work becomes a masterpiece is absolutely not merely its seasoned command of the pen and its beautiful prose.
It is because of the thought it conveys after seeing clearly into society and human nature.
That sort of thing, at least judging by the skill points he could currently allocate, was something the system couldn't grant.
He rubbed his aching eyes and slid the manuscript pages into a kraft-paper envelope.
To avoid ending up the laughingstock of one who tried to paint a tiger and drew a dog instead.
He decided to go to Shinchōsha early and find Kobayashi Tomoaki to help him vet it.
In the early morning, the Tokyo sky was still dim and gray.
When Tsushima Kagami stepped out, the convenience store by the roadside had just lit up with its warm yellow glow, and a store clerk who looked to be a middle-aged woman was setting out the morning papers at the door.
He wrapped his coat tighter, clutching in his hand a kraft-paper envelope containing the manuscript he'd stayed up all night writing.
Then he set off toward the station.
When he arrived at Shinchōsha, it wasn't yet eight thirty.
The editorial department was still nearly empty, with only the cleaning lady pushing a mop through the corridor.
When Tsushima Kagami pushed open the door of the editorial department, he was surprised to find the light already on inside Kobayashi Tomoaki's office.
So Tsushima Kagami walked straight over.
"Kagami-kun, what are you doing here?"
Kobayashi Tomoaki's voice came out from behind a heap of manuscripts, carrying a slight hoarseness, as though he hadn't fully woken up yet.
He poked his head out from behind the pile of books, hair all disheveled, glasses crooked on the bridge of his nose, shirt collar hanging loosely open, a pencil pinched in his hand, its eraser end bitten out of shape.
He looked like a completely different person from his usual meticulous self.
Tsushima Kagami was taken aback for a moment.
"Editor Kobayashi, did you not go home last night?"
"I went home, I went home—I just came in early."
Kobayashi yawned, took off his glasses, and rubbed his eyes.
"There was a manuscript yesterday that gave me a headache to read, so I thought I'd come in early to deal with it.
"And you? Didn't you say a few days ago that you might rest for a while? How is it you've suddenly come in so early today?"
Tsushima Kagami walked in from the doorway.
"I wrote something.
"I'd like you to take a look at it for me."
The pencil in Kobayashi Tomoaki's hand stopped.
He lifted his head and glanced at Tsushima Kagami.
In those eyes, bloodshot from staying up all night, a flicker of surprise passed.
But it was quickly replaced by a professional seriousness.
"Oh?"
He set the pencil down and leaned back against his chair.
"It's only been a few days and you've already squeezed something out?"
"I wrote it last night."
Tsushima Kagami walked over and set the envelope with the manuscript inside on Kobayashi's desk.
Kobayashi Tomoaki drew a sheaf of manuscript pages out of the envelope.
He lowered his head and took a glance at the stack of pages.
"Written last night?"
Kobayashi repeated, and instead of rushing to leaf through it, he picked up the thermos on his desk and took a sip of jasmine tea.
Only then did he reach out and take the pages.
"'Danchi-zuma'?"
His eyebrows rose slightly as he read out the title.
For now he had given this piece the tentative title "Danchi-zuma."
Originally he'd meant to keep "Villon's Wife," but he felt that after the drastic changes, "Danchi-zuma" actually fit the content better.
In substance it combined the conception and structure of Dazai Osamu's "Villon's Wife," the character elements of Haruki Murakami's "South of the Border, West of the Sun," and on top of that his own understanding drawn from what he had seen and heard.
The three were mixed together, kneaded into a single mass.
It was the first work he had "stitched" together himself.
He himself couldn't quite say whether it counted as a good work, couldn't even say whether it counted as "his" work.
Tsushima Kagami sat on the folding chair across from him, watching Kobayashi Tomoaki, who had already begun to read.
It felt like being back in his middle school days, being called into the teacher's office to have his homework corrected right in front of him.
Years later he had become a teacher himself—an art teacher, admittedly.
But he never expected he would still feel this same nervous unease he'd felt back then.
He noticed Kobayashi Tomoaki was reading word by word.
Now and then he would pause at a certain passage, knit his brows and think for a moment, draw a small mark in the margin of the page with his pencil, and then continue turning pages.
When he reached the first page, Kobayashi's eyebrows rose slightly.
Did he think the opening was written well enough, or that something felt off?
When he turned to the third page, he gave a soft "mm" and drew a circle on the paper with his pencil.
On the fifth page, his brows knit up, twisting into a knot.
Tsushima Kagami's heart sank right along with it.
That's it—had he revised it too outrageously?
But Kobayashi didn't stop, didn't even lift his head to glance at him, and only kept turning pages.
On the seventh page, that knotted brow suddenly relaxed...
All the way to the last page, which he read over twice, the pencil resting at the edge of the page, never once coming down.
Then he closed the manuscript and set it on the desk.
He pressed both hands crossed over the cover, as though afraid it might be blown away by the wind.
The novel's content changed the postwar setting to the era after the bubble burst, set against a backdrop of massive pay cuts and layoffs.
It told the story of a wife living in a danchi who, for the sake of her husband and children, bore the pressure of real economic hardship and the public censure of social prejudice, and stepped out of her home to work and shoulder the burdens of family life together.
After the bubble burst there was no shortage of incompetent husbands who wallowed in self-pity, never recovered from then on, drowned their sorrows in drink day after day, and paid no heed to their families.
But at the same time there were also virtuous wives who shouldered the family's economic burdens, standing on their own and striving upward.
And among all this—the danchi.
Postwar Japan, a land of ruins, needed vast quantities of sturdy concrete housing, and so, following the Soviet Union's lead, it began the construction of large-scale community housing—these were called danchi.
Because of their trendy design, combined with the scarce initial supply, residents had to be selected by lottery.
Those who won the lottery and moved in all felt it lent them prestige, and the danchi became the ideal living environment for the middle class of the time.
At that time Japan's political movements were flourishing, and the old and new left were active.
The collective lifestyle of the danchi—husband going to work, children going to school, wife managing the household—meshed strikingly well with the left's propaganda of the ideal family.
The result was that the wife-centered danchi self-governing bodies became, in the 1960s, a vote bank for the leftist parties.
These wives were also called danchi-zuma.
However, the United Red Army Incident of the early 1970s brought down the curtain on the fervor of Japan's social movements, and the beautiful vision of the family was buried right along with it.
The image of the danchi-zuma had been born of political need, and by political need it was also stigmatized.
At the same time, the economy developed at breakneck speed, men were reduced to corporate drones—called "asexual worker bees"—while women, confined within a self-drawn prison, grew restless with unfulfilled longing.
Because the danchi had taken privacy into account during construction, their soundproofing was very good.
Unless you pressed a stethoscope against the wall, once the neighbors shut their doors it was basically impossible to eavesdrop on the world next door.
All sorts of speculation about the danchi-zuma followed, and the danchi-zuma were criticized as women who failed to keep to their place, forever objects of adultery.
In 1971, a film company called Nikkatsu went bankrupt and folded, and the boss, perhaps feeling there was nothing left to lose, threw caution to the wind and shot a pile of erotic films about the danchi-zuma.
From then on the danchi-zuma were thoroughly stigmatized, becoming a byword for married women prone to adultery.
The danchi, once so gleaming, likewise became a byword for the backward, the old and worn, the poor, and the salacious.
And never mind how many of the countless danchi-zuma had truly committed adultery.
In fact, the wives who remained in the danchi were not nearly as idle as imagined.
And so the wife in the novel, out of the inferiority and lack of confidence caused by the long-standing social prejudice born of that insulting term "danchi-zuma" with its stereotype of the adulterous wife, once more recovered her social confidence and self-affirmation.
After finishing, Kobayashi Tomoaki lifted his head and looked at Tsushima Kagami.
"You wrote all this in one night?"
Tsushima Kagami nodded.
Kobayashi was silent for a while.
"Wonderful.
"The novel is full of tragedy and indictment toward the current social environment and the agonizing price women pay for survival, family, and even their contribution to society."
"Even after encountering such immense misfortune, the wife can still calmly go on living."
"Yet it is by no means a beautification or encouragement of her suffering and her adultery."
"It is the most primal, most tenacious adherence to 'living' itself, after tasting all the world's hardships."
"Through the image of the wife, it praises this feminine vitality, as tough as wild grass, and her silent devotion to family and society."
As expected of Editor Kobayashi—in one stroke he had analyzed the core theme of this short story to seven or eight parts in ten.
Just as Tsushima Kagami was thinking that this drastic reworking of his was more or less without problems—
"However. However."
Kobayashi Tomoaki's expression turned serious, and he tapped at the manuscript.
"There are a few places where the writing is a little disjointed."
Tsushima Kagami's heart gave a thud.
"For example?"
Kobayashi Tomoaki flipped back to the front.
"For example here, the opening part, the style leans hard—a bit like…that sort of postwar literature style of writing."
"Right, just like your 'The Setting Sun' and 'No Longer Human.'"
"But then later it softens again, more like a modern touch."
"Like your 'Hear the Wind Sing.'"
Saying this, Kobayashi Tomoaki paused slightly.
Then he pushed up his gold-rimmed glasses and looked toward Tsushima Kagami.
"The core idea, though, is consistent with your 'The Setting Sun' and 'No Longer Human.'"
"But the overall style of writing leans toward the popular-literature style, similar to 'Hear the Wind Sing.'"
"Rather interesting."
"Kagami-kun, are you trying out a new writing style again?"
Tsushima Kagami said nothing.
He too knew where the problem lay.
For the Dazai Osamu portions, he had written almost following the rhythm of the original text.
And for the Murakami portions, he had used another rhythm.
The two rhythms placed together—though he had done his best to blend them, the seams could still be seen.
"Can it be fixed?"
Tsushima Kagami did not answer Kobayashi Tomoaki's earlier question, but asked directly instead.
Kobayashi Tomoaki picked up the thermos again and took a sip of jasmine tea.
Then he leaned back against his chair with a smug smile.
"Of course it can."
"Otherwise what would I be an editor for?"
"So long as you're willing to revise, Kagami, I can revise it with you right now."
Tsushima Kagami stood straight up from the folding chair and gave Kobayashi Tomoaki a slight bow.
"Please help me polish it, Editor Kobayashi!"
Kobayashi Tomoaki seemed to eat this up from Tsushima Kagami.
Usually somewhat stiff and formal, his smiles always carrying a hint of the insincere, Kobayashi Tomoaki—
couldn't help straightening his collar, revealing an expression of thorough, satisfied contentment.
After signaling for Tsushima Kagami to sit down first,
he took two red pens from the drawer, handed one to Tsushima Kagami, and gripped the other himself.
"Then let's start revising from the spots I marked in red beforehand."
"After that, you tell me which places you yourself feel have problems, and we'll take a look together."
"Alright!"
Tsushima Kagami and Kobayashi Tomoaki thus, forgetting to eat and sleep, revised from the morning straight through until the sky went dark that night.
During which, had the other editors not reminded them, they would nearly have forgotten even to eat their meals.
But fortunately, with the two of them communicating and revising so efficiently, they got the entire piece more or less revised in a single day.
Next it would be sent straight off for review and proofreading, and it should make it into this issue of Shinchō.
And what Tsushima Kagami never imagined was that a mere spur-of-the-moment work of stitched-together reworking—
would, a few days later, make him the "Married Women's Friend" of all Japan on account of it, once again gracing the various major news media and being reported on with great fanfare.
____
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