Chapter 5

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Osamu Dazai and Chūya Nakahara were from the same hometown, yet the impressions they left on people were completely different.

In less than two days of knowing him, she had already begun to miss Chūya Nakahara, whom she had only spent less than a morning with.

The new transfer student, Dazai, was unfathomable.

First, he knew to line his overcoat with heat packs so he could keep both elegance and warmth at once. Second, by some unknown trick, he had gotten the school to accept his unruly hair and bangs.

Clearly, the head of discipline accepted it only grudgingly.

For a full week, he went to watch the upperclassmen do morning exercises every long break, and each time he stood there with a megaphone shouting:

“What kind of hairstyle is a hairstyle students should be wearing? What kind of hairstyle is the kind only a street loafer would wear?”

“When you are a student, you dress yourself like an adult, and when you are grown, you dress yourself like a student. Your whole life is out of place!”

The sophomores and seniors all glanced over in silence, and Du Zhengxuan was speechless.

She thought to herself that whether they could even understand that long tirade was another matter. Even if they did, the person in question wasn’t even here to hear it.

Student Dazai, through some unimaginable brilliance, had managed to obtain a sick note excusing him from morning exercises for an entire semester.

Long Wan was stunned by this move and said that if this were a period drama, he would at least be a favored consort.

Du Zhengxuan said, “...So you’re going to call him Consort Brother?”

“No,” Long Wan said, shaking her head with conviction. “Out-of-Place Brother.”

Du Zhengxuan: “...”

Sometimes she felt school was a truly miraculous place: classmates who seemed perfectly normal during vacation would return to school and, within two or three days, become mad one by one.

After morning exercises, she returned to the classroom. Dazai was sitting at his desk, leisurely reading something. When he saw Du Zhengxuan come back, he didn’t even glance her way.

To be honest, that was the state Du Zhengxuan found most comfortable.

She had been sitting alone in the very last row without a desk mate because her nerves were a little fragile; she was the kind of highly sensitive person who could be attacked by the sound of someone turning a page halfway through solving a problem.

That was also why she chose to commute rather than board at school.

If she had to share a dorm with several other people, and at bedtime heard them studying under the lamp and turning pages, she would genuinely lose sleep at night.

Better to commute. Out of sight, out of mind.

Still, after Chūya Nakahara and Dazai arrived, it had not affected her self-study much.

Du Zhengxuan’s anxiety came from competition, but she had at least a shallow understanding of the two foreign students’ Chinese proficiency.

She even gave Dazai a Chinese dictionary.

Dazai had a cool, detached air about him. Whether it was warm on the outside and cold within, or cold on the outside and cold within, in any case he gave off the sense of being far out of reach.

Du Zhengxuan did not try to force her way in. As long as she knew he was flipping pages and not doing problems, she felt very reassured. The two of them spent a week in peaceful coexistence.

Only, she still could not quite let go of the cosplayer teacher who had left.

Taking advantage of the long break, Du Zhengxuan hesitated over and over before leaning closer and asking:

“Um, Dazai, do you know whether Nakahara will be coming back?”

Dazai must have also brought a translation device, but unlike Chūya Nakahara, he didn’t use the speaker function. Instead, he wore it in his ear at all times.

Hearing Du Zhengxuan’s question, he looked over at her and spoke a string of fluent English.

Du Zhengxuan was willing to believe kindly that he had slowed his speech down, because she understood almost all of it. The few words she didn’t know could be inferred from context well enough.

According to Dazai, he and Nakahara were not only from the same hometown, but had also been sent out by the same study-abroad agency.

So Dazai had heard a little: Nakahara’s trip back to obtain the necessary certificate had not gone smoothly.

“His older brother recently went to look for him,” Dazai said, and the expression on his face was completely different from usual, as if he had become another person. “I don’t know how long it will take Chūya to recognize him, but in any case, he won’t be back any time soon.”

“...Would he really not recognize him?” Du Zhengxuan was a little puzzled at this. “What, have those two brothers never met since birth?”

Then that family situation was rather complicated.

Dazai smiled. “Perhaps. Who knows?”

“...”

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Du Zhengxuan fell silent. She had only asked casually, and had not expected to uncover such a complicated family story.

The eyes of Long Wan, who was sitting in front of her, lit up instantly.

As it turned out, when it came to gossip, people always gave it their all. For example, Long Wan, who usually scored poorly in listening comprehension, had actually broken through the language barrier.

Du Zhengxuan tapped her on the back. “You can’t go spreading this around.”

Long Wan made a locking-the-mouth gesture. “Don’t worry.”

Aside from liking to joke around, Long Wan was usually quite a good person. Du Zhengxuan said no more, after all Dazai had already said it; she couldn’t exactly ask him to swallow it back down.

Still, Du Zhengxuan kept thinking about it.

That evening, after self-study, she went home. After washing up, she checked her phone, only to find that the friend request she had sent a few days earlier on the green-chat app had been accepted.

The new contact was Chūya Nakahara.

He probably hadn’t quite figured out the home Wi-Fi settings. One day before he left, Du Zhengxuan had noticed that he had renamed the Wi-Fi network into a phone number.

She had never had a chance to remind him. Later, when she realized the man had been gone for almost a week and the network was still visible every day, she understood that Nakahara had left without turning off the power.

Du Zhengxuan felt that, no matter what, it would be better to add him and mention the issue.

She mentally drafted her message and explained the situation in one go.

There was a one-hour time difference. It was probably nearly midnight on Nakahara’s side. Du Zhengxuan thought that, at best, she would get a reply tomorrow, or else the other side had already deleted the app entirely, in which case who knew when he would ever see her message.

Unexpectedly, just after she sent it, the other side quickly popped up a message: “Thank you.”

Du Zhengxuan froze.

At that response speed, the other party must have been online.

Then the original plan of “you see my message and reply, I see your message and reply,” with both sides politely going through one round of courtesy, was not quite going to work. No matter what, they had to exchange a few words.

Du Zhengxuan quietly opened a translation page in her browser.

*

Two days after returning to the country, Chūya Nakahara still had not fully adjusted.

He felt that perhaps something was wrong with him. Going to the foreign country had felt awkward, and coming back from it still did not feel quite right.

When he returned to Yokohama and stepped off the plane, breathing the air of freedom, everything had still been normal. But when he heard gunfire and his first reaction was to think it was fireworks, Chūya knew something was seriously wrong.

It could not all be blamed on him. The day he moved there, some festival in the other country seemed to have just ended, and the sound of firecrackers he heard was more than he had heard in Yokohama in an entire year.

Just when he had finally gotten used to that environment, damn it, the firecrackers had turned back into real guns.

Expressionless, Chūya dealt with the attackers. While his subordinates cleaned the battlefield, he stood in the night wind, still somewhat dazed.

Who was he?

Where was he?

Why would someone like him have to go get some medical certificate to prove he had neither permed nor dyed his hair?

...

Damn it.

Yokohama was not peaceful. Some of the assignments given to Chūya Nakahara were different from Dazai’s, and had to be handled personally, so he had accumulated quite a few.

As soon as he returned, he began working overtime without pause. By late night, someone from headquarters relayed word that the Boss wanted to see him. Chūya stubbed out the cigarette that had been between his fingers without ever being lit and left the scene by car.

He met with the Boss and gave a brief summary of all the tasks he had handled during that time, as well as the situation on the other side.

The current head of the Port Mafia was Mori Ougai. He told Chūya not to worry; the necessary medical certificates had already been issued, and once he finished handling things here, he could go back directly.

Before becoming the Boss, Mori Ougai had been a black-market doctor. Chūya still trusted his professional standards.

But after reading through those certificates again and again, Chūya still set them back on the desk and said:

“Since Dazai has already gone, there’s no need for me to go back too, right?”

Though he was reluctant to admit it, on missions like this, where one had to get close to the target and extract information, Dazai was indeed slightly better than he was.

And because their abilities belonged to different types, some of Yokohama’s tasks were difficult to handle without Chūya.

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To deploy so many people across borders for one mission was indeed a bit extravagant.

Hearing him say that, Mori Ougai smiled and shook his head.

“You are mistaken, Chūya-kun. If it were merely a matter of using schemes and stratagems, perhaps Dazai-kun alone would be enough. But the children of that country are simply inexperienced, not foolish. On the contrary, when judging the essence of a person, they may be even keener than you and I.”

As he spoke, his gaze turned deep and unreadable. “Dazai-kun alone is not enough.”

“...”

Chūya had not paid much attention to what Mori Ougai was saying; his eyes had been drawn entirely to those purple eyes of his.

For some reason, he thought: are the Boss’s eyes naturally that color?

“...Yes, they are natural, Chūya-kun.”

Hearing Mori Ougai’s reply, Chūya realized that he had unknowingly said aloud what he had been thinking.

He felt a little awkward and hurriedly covered it up. “...I was just thinking that Alice is blonde and blue-eyed, which is still rather rare here in the home country, and, um, ...you know about someone named Mendel, right? He was the one who grew peas...”

As if possessed by something, Chūya rambled on and on, reproducing with near-perfect fidelity the very lecture he had endured for two classes in the head of discipline’s office. The other man would surely have been deeply gratified to hear it.

In the end, even the Boss fell silent.

Mori Ougai said, “Chūya-kun, how about this. I know hearing about Verlaine has put a lot of pressure on you. Take two days to rest before going there; there’s no need to rush.”

At the mention of Verlaine’s name, Chūya abruptly stopped talking.

He nodded and said no more. “I understand.”

On the ride back to his residence, he received a message from Du Zhengxuan, reminding him that the main power at home had not been turned off.

The message was in Japanese, likely still machine-translated.

It was understandable, though not very smooth, and it was about something as trivial as the household breaker being left on.

Seated in the back with the car windows closed, Chūya read the message through and felt oddly relieved. After a brief consideration, he replied with a “thank you.”

On the other side, the typing indicator appeared: [typing...]

Five minutes passed, and it was still [typing...].

This time Chūya really could not help smiling a little. He could almost imagine Du Zhengxuan anxiously typing on the other end.

In the end, it was only after he sent another message that she stopped whatever typing-and-deleting she had been doing, and they chatted casually for a bit.

At first, Chūya had not intended to say much, but after lightly embellishing the company colleagues and superiors around him, he seemed to discover a small pleasure in this kind of conversation.

Du Zhengxuan did not know about the Port Mafia or about Boss Mori Ougai. When Chūya mentioned it, she replied, “Well, then that boss really is...” and afterward added, “Has nobody on your side ever questioned his purple eyes?”

She should have been preparing to sleep. Considering how sleepy she had looked at school before, Chūya was a little puzzled why she was only going to bed now, so he asked tentatively:

[1983■■1797: Something came up today?]

[D: This is my normal routine. I’m going to sleep soon.]

[D: Actually, I didn’t expect you to reply. I thought you’d already be resting at this hour.]

[1983■■1797: I just got back, so there are a lot of things to deal with. A few friends were also just called away by the boss.]

[D: At this hour? All of you together?]

[D: That reminds me of that saying, “There is no need to wear armor when reporting to the drill ground tomorrow for pay.” I wonder if you’ve heard it.]

Du Zhengxuan sent that last message because she had suddenly thought of it and wanted to crack a joke while also sharing a bit of home culture.

She did not expect that after she sent the explanation, the other side would go silent and disconnect entirely.

It was not until the end of the next evening’s self-study period that she received another “thank you.”

Du Zhengxuan: “...”

Had he really spent a whole day studying it?

That was a little too serious...