Chapter 1
The rain-soaked campus felt colder than late September had any right to be. Steam rose from the seams of the flagstone paths, warping the shadows of the old stone buildings. Hurrying from the parking lot toward the Faculty of Letters, I stepped squarely into a puddle in my black leather shoes. I clicked my tongue at the chill seeping in through the seams and turned up the collar of my coat.
Today was the day of the special lecture. A visiting scholar from America had been scheduled to give it, but he had canceled the day before — sudden illness. And so I, Takumi Nagai, had been drafted to fill the gap.
Takumi Nagai. Fifty-eight years old. Nearly forty years of teaching at this university. My field is modern Japanese literature — Izumi Kyōka, above all. In my youth they called me brilliant, a rising star no one could deny. Now I am simply an old professor. The students call me "Professor Nagai" with a certain fondness, but in truth, I have long since become a stranger to their world. I know this better than anyone. Rumor has it my lectures are dull. I am perfectly aware that my voice does not reach the ears of students lost in their phone screens. And still I stand at that lectern. It is my pride. It is the reason I exist.
When I entered the lecture hall, students were already filing into their seats. Whether drawn by curiosity about the special lecture or merely by the obligation of course credit, their eyes were not on me. But then one student noticed me and rose smoothly to her feet.
"Good morning, Professor."
Long black hair. Fair skin, a slender frame. A white blouse with the faintest tint of green, a charcoal-grey skirt. Her name was Misaki Misato — a third-year, one of the few students in my seminar. Misaki always sat in the very front row of my lectures, listening with an earnestness that bordered on devotion. She alone, I had always felt, chased the ghost of Kyōka that haunted the edges of my words.
"Good morning, Misaki. How are you?"
"Well, thank you. Professor — I'm so sorry about the sudden request today."
"Not at all. It's nothing."
"But if you're the one teaching it, we'll gain far more from it."
She said it and lowered her eyes, faintly embarrassed. In that instant, the noise of the lecture hall receded. Between the two of us, it was as if a thread had been drawn taut — and I felt its trembling through my whole body. What was this feeling? I had stood at a lectern for forty years. That a single female student could shake my heart now, at this late hour of my life — impossible. I collected myself and walked to the podium.
"Well then, everyone. Good morning."
My voice cut through the air of the hall. The students reluctantly put away their phones and turned toward me. Among them, only Misaki had been watching me from the start. Her eyes carried an uncommon heat. I began to read aloud the opening of today's text — Izumi Kyōka's *The Surgery Room*.
*"In those days, the physician newly established in Tokyo, the one whispered of in the streets, was Doctor Takayama, who claimed descent from Takayama Ukon —"*
All through the reading, my awareness kept drifting back to Misaki. Her posture, utterly still. The long lashes lowering in quiet blinks. And above all, what lay deep in those eyes: intellectual hunger, yes, but beneath it something else, something far more primal. The sensual death and eros of Kyōka's world — Misaki seemed to receive it not with her mind but with her body. She had always identified deeply with Kyōka's characters, the women especially. Once, in seminar, when she spoke of the blind woman in *The Holy Man of Mount Kōya*, her eyes had shone with an intensity that was almost unsettling.
*"— it was not the color of human skin but of polished jade, a whiteness so translucent that the veins rose beneath it in threads of blue —"*
My voice trembled despite myself. It was her presence that made it tremble. When the lecture ended and the students drifted out, she did not move from her seat. She seemed to be waiting for something. When the last of them had gone, she walked slowly toward the podium.
"Professor."
"Ah — Misaki. Thank you, as always."
"Your reading of *The Surgery Room* was fascinating. Especially what you said in the second half, about the significance of the act of *gazing*. The exchange of glances when the Countess offers her body to the surgeon, to Cadeusius..."
She broke off and looked down. I did not miss the way her earlobes had flushed red.
"And what did you think of that scene, Misaki?"
"...It moved me. No — *moved* isn't enough. Something deeper. Something that hurts, that cuts to the bone... I thought — I want to be gazed at like that. The way the Countess was. I want someone to look at all of me."
She confessed it with startling boldness. My heartbeat stumbled. This fifty-eight-year-old body, warming again with blood, because of the words of one young woman. Kyōka's world was beginning to take on flesh, here, between the two of us.
"I see... So that's how you feel."
"Yes, Professor. If you have time — would you tell me more about today's lecture? There's a quiet café nearby..."
I accepted her invitation without a moment's hesitation. It was a dangerous wager. A university professor and his own student — a relationship society would never forgive. But something in me demanded that the forbidden door be opened. From that moment on, what lay between us had already begun to slip past the safe boundary of teacher and student.
The café stood tucked away in a back alley, some distance from the university. No sign outside — the kind of place known only to those who knew. The interior was dim, an old record playing softly. We were shown to a booth at the very back. The distance between us was far too close for looking at each other's faces — and we looked anyway. Only the steam rising from our coffee hung between us, a thin veil.
"Professor — through Kyōka's work, how do you understand the psychology of his women?"
Her question was sharp. She was not asking for impressions. She was probing my interior. I looked back into those translucent eyes.
"The women Kyōka writes are beauty itself — and at the same time, they wield that beauty as a weapon, or bear it as a curse, and take men captive with it. They appear passive, but in truth they are the most active sorceresses of all. The Countess is the same. By opening her body to Cadeusius, she takes complete possession of him. It is a union of souls, achieved through the act of gazing."
"A union of souls..."
Misaki repeated the words as if turning them over on her tongue. Her fingertips were stroking the small spoon on the table. The unconscious gesture looked, to me, unbearably sensual.
"Professor, you look at Kyōka's world as an object of study. But for someone like me, it's a compass for living. A way of being. You couldn't understand that feeling — could you."
"I've lived too long to claim I understand nothing, Misaki. But fifty-eight years is, above all, an accumulation of things I do not understand."
I lifted my coffee cup as I said it. My hand was trembling, just slightly. Misaki did not miss that small tremor, and her lips curved in the faintest arc.
"Professor. I don't think we're finished talking. If you'd like... my apartment is near the university. We could speak more quietly there. Here, it's..."
She glanced around the room. The voices of customers who happened to come in seemed to be scattering our secret conversation. Her proposal was too direct, too dangerous. A teacher and his student — the weight of it pressed against my heart. But somewhere inside me, the answer had long since been decided. I set down my cup and nodded quietly.
"Yes. That would be better."
Her apartment was on the third floor of an old mixed-use building. No elevator; we climbed the aging concrete stairs. Following behind her, her black hair brushed my arm now and then, and each time, my body flinched in response. When she opened the door, the scent of soap and something faintly floral drifted out. The room of a woman living alone. It was the place farthest from anywhere my life had ever taken me.
"Please, this way. It's a little messy..."
She showed me into a small tatami room that served as her sitting room. It was indeed cluttered, but not chaotically so: academic books lying open, a manuscript in progress, and shelves of collected literature. On the central bookcase, Kyōka's works stood in a long, devoted row. It was a space in which her seriousness and her passion had been distilled.
"Professor, can I get you something to drink?"
"No, I'm fine. I won't stay long."
"Don't say that... There's still so much I want to talk about. The Countess's gaze toward Cadeusius — is it really only love? Isn't there something more transcendent in it — the way a mother gazes at her daughter, or the way a god gazes at a believer? That's what I think."
Misaki sat down beside me, leaving a small, careful distance. The warmth radiating from her body. Her scent. All of it was dissolving my reason.
"...Perhaps you're right, Misaki. There is certainly something there that the word *love* cannot settle. In Kyōka's world, love and hatred, life and death, the sacred and the profane are always two faces of one thing. So is the act of gazing. To gaze is also, at the same time, to dominate, to possess — and to destroy. By allowing Cadeusius to cut her open, the Countess makes him her captive, and in the same instant becomes part of him. A dangerous exchange of souls."
"A dangerous exchange of souls..."
She leaned toward me, just slightly. Her gaze was no longer that of scholarly inquiry. It was the flame of pure desire. In fifty-eight years I had seen that look many times. But hers was purer than any of them, and more fierce.
"Professor. Look at me."
At her sudden words, my breath caught.
"...Misaki?"
"I want to hear the rest of the lecture, Professor. Like *The Surgery Room*. Let me be the Countess, and you be Cadeusius. Dissect me with your words. Gaze at me. I want you to see all of me."
She rose, and her fingers went slowly to the top button of her blouse. My mind went white. I could not be allowed to stay in this room a moment longer. I should stand. I should walk out. That was the right thing to do. But my body would not move, as if it had taken root in the chair.
"Professor...?"
At the invitation in her voice, I found myself on my feet, standing before her. My hand, moving of its own accord, tilted her chin upward. The instant my fingers touched that translucent skin, a current ran the length of my body.
"Misaki... Are you sure? Is this truly what you want?"
"Yes. Professor — please."
Her eyes were already closed. Her long lashes trembled. My reason did not survive it. My lips found hers — gently at first, then harder. Her mouth was soft and sweet, and it welcomed me. It was our first contract. Something between us had changed, decisively and forever. I drew her into my arms; her slender body was far warmer than it looked. I stroked her hair, and its smoothness slid beneath my fingers like water.
"Your scent, Professor..."
Misaki murmured it with her face pressed to my chest. It could only have been the smell of an aging man — old leather and old books. And yet she breathed it in as if it were something precious.
"You're beautiful, Misaki... Like a woman out of Kyōka's pages."
At my words, a tremor ran through her.
"To hear you say that... makes me happy."
"You'd show me everything?"
"...Yes. Everything. Only you, Professor."
What happened after that, no lecture could contain, and no page will hold. The rain returned to the window. The old record turned and turned. And in that dim little room, in the hush between one song and the next, the Countess and her surgeon completed their dangerous exchange of souls — wholly, and without regret.
When the world returned to me, we lay tangled in the quiet, her hair spilled across my arm, our breathing slowly finding its separate rhythms again. I stroked her hair; the warmth of us both still lingered on my hand.
"...Professor."
"...Mm."
"Just now — it was like that scene, wasn't it. From *The Surgery Room*."
Misaki said it and smiled faintly. Her smile held satisfaction and, at the same time, something quietly sorrowful.
"...Yes. The Countess let Cadeusius open her body, and their souls became one. You and I did the same."
"Yes. A union of souls..."
She pressed her face against my chest. Her warm breath moved across my skin. We no longer needed words. The heat of our bodies, the beating of our hearts — that alone told us everything. The bond of teacher and student had already collapsed, long ago. What remained was only this: a man, a woman, and a love that was forbidden.
After a while, I rose and sat at the edge of the bed, and lit a cigarette. The room had grown darker. The rain had begun again. The sound of it striking the window glass seemed to seal our secret away from the outside world.
"Are you leaving already, Professor?"
Misaki sat up in bed and asked it. Loneliness bled through her voice.
"...Yes. I have to. I can't stay until morning."
"No... I suppose not."
She slipped quietly out of bed and began gathering her clothes. From behind, she looked terribly fragile.
"Misaki."
I called her name.
"Will you come to tomorrow's lecture?"
Still holding her clothes, she turned, and smiled a little.
"Yes. Of course. If it's your lecture, Professor — I'd follow it anywhere."
Her words brought me relief, and at the same time, something like dread. This would not end here. Tomorrow, and the day after, and on and on, it would continue. What had I done? I had pulled a young woman's whole life into the pages of my own story.
When I had dressed, I walked to the entryway. Misaki saw me off there — saying nothing, only standing quietly. At the last moment, as I opened the door, I touched her hair without meaning to. Once more, that smoothness slid beneath my fingers.
"...Goodbye, Misaki."
"Goodbye, Professor."
The door closed. I stood there for a long moment. Then I went down the stairs. The rain struck my face, cold. Outside the building I hailed a taxi. Beyond the window, the neon of Tokyo blurred and ran in the rain. Had what happened in that room been a dream? No. The warmth of Misaki's skin, her breath, her voice — it had been reality, unbearably vivid.
The taxi reached my apartment building. Inside, the rooms were cold, as they always were. I collapsed onto the sofa and closed my eyes. Misaki's face rose before me. *If it's your lecture, Professor — I'd follow it anywhere.* The words would not leave my ears.
I would not sleep tonight. And tomorrow I would stand at the lectern again. And Misaki would be there — in the front row, looking straight at me. The world of Izumi Kyōka no longer lived only in literature. Between me and that girl, it had begun to move as reality. It was the beginning of a story — beautiful, and terrifying.
