Episode 2
Dust in the Library, Ashes of History
Scene I — Lunchtime: Dining in a Gilded Cage
The noon bell rang.
At once, the classroom of the Imperial Academy stirred to life. Students reached into desk drawers and leather bags, drawing out their lunches in near unison. At this school, a lunchbox was never merely a lunchbox.
Layered lacquered bento boxes. Three-tiered wooden cases carved by Kyoto artisans. Lids lifted to reveal sea bream grilled with salt and laid upon pine needles, rolled omelets, finely cut burdock simmered in soy, silver-white rice crowned with a single crimson pickled plum. One student produced Western sandwiches and fruit, boasting that the jam had been brought all the way from London. Another ate with a silver fork.
At lunchtime, the classroom became a small salon.
The refinement of one's meal determined the refinement of one's conversation; the lacquer pattern on a box quietly proclaimed the standing of a family. The students laughed, chatted, compared the contents of their lunches, and in doing so confirmed, once again, the invisible hierarchy that governed them all.
And in the midst of that bustle, there was one person who did not move.
By the window, in the last seat.
Kagura Makoto had not taken out a lunch. There was nothing on his desk. He sat back in his chair with his eyes closed. He was not asleep. Nor was he simply resting.
He was somewhere else.
What moved across his mind was the scene he had seen on the way to school that morning.
The tram had turned toward Ginza. On the back street just one block behind the avenue where modern boys in tailored suits and bob-haired modern girls walked with effortless confidence, he had seen it through the window:
A man sitting against the wall of a shack.
He wore rags. An empty bowl rested in his lap. He stared vacantly up at the sky.
Beside him was a child.
Barefoot. Thin.
The child had looked up at the tram.
At the passengers inside—at their suits, their kimono, their parasols, all their brightness and polish. And in the child's eyes there had been neither resentment nor sorrow.
The child had simply been looking.
As though gazing upon something impossible to understand.
Makoto remembered those eyes.
And now, here in this classroom, spread before him was the spectacle of lacquered lunchboxes—and that empty bowl in the alley.
The same hour.The same city.Beneath the same sky.
Makoto's brow tightened, if only slightly.
Around the room, a few students stole glances in his direction.
"Is Kagura not eating again today?""Should we try talking to him?""...Forget it. After what happened in math class? What would you even say to someone like that?""But he's still one of us, isn't he...?""Have you ever felt it? When you get close to him—the air changes. Or is that just me?"
No one approached him.
They wanted to, perhaps. But their feet never quite moved.
There was a boundary around Kagura Makoto no one could see. It was not one he had drawn. It was one everyone else had made for him. In the presence of something too beautiful, too gifted, too still, people instinctively felt a certain distance.
Then, from one side of the room, a conversation began to rise above the rest.
"Did you hear? Things are getting lively in Manchuria again.""My father says once the continental enterprise really begins, there'll be tremendous business opportunities.""The military's pushing hard for it, apparently. Korea, and then Manchuria—our empire's reach just keeps expanding.""It won't be long now before Japan stands shoulder to shoulder with the Western powers!"
Their voices carried pride. Their eyes shone with excitement.
To these boys, colonial expansion was thrilling news. It meant business for their fathers. Prosperity for their households. Glory for the Empire.
Makoto opened his eyes.
His gaze turned toward them—not sharply, not even directly. He merely listened.
And within that quiet gaze, something sank, cold and heavy.
His lips moved.
The voice that emerged was so faint it could scarcely have been called sound at all.
"...Pointless."
He picked up his bag.
Rose from his seat.
Without taking out a lunch, without opening a single book, he turned and walked toward the classroom door.
For a brief moment, the room fell quiet. Eyes followed him.
Just as he was about to step into the corridor, one of the boys called out.
"Hey, Makoto. You don't look well. Is something wrong?"
There was genuine concern in the student's face. He was one of the very few in the school who could speak to Kagura Makoto without malice or calculation. A good boy, Makoto knew that.
Makoto gave a small shake of the head.
Without a word.
And kept walking.
The corridor outside was lively with the noise of lunchtime. Laughter spilled out from classrooms. Somewhere in the courtyard below, boys shouted over the thud of a ball. Makoto walked straight through the middle of it all.
No one spoke to him.
Only the measured sound of his shoes striking the floor echoed down the hall.
As he walked, his lips moved again.
This time, a little more audibly.
Though still only for himself.
"People themselves... are kind enough."
One step. Then another.
"It's the rotten environment that poisons everything."
Beyond the corridor windows, the school grounds stretched out beneath drifting cherry blossoms. Students laughed there, carefree in the sunlight. Beyond them lay the school gate. Beyond that, the streets.
And beyond those streets—the barefoot child he had seen that morning.
"...Disgusting."
Scene II — The Library: A Sanctuary in Dust
The Imperial Academy Library stood at the western edge of the main building grounds, a separate two-story structure.
Its entrance was Western in style: arched stonework, double oak doors. Inside, silence stood like a wall. Shelves rose to the ceiling on either side, while the second floor ran in a gallery around the upper stacks. Light poured down from the skylight overhead, catching in the dust and turning it into slow, drifting constellations. The air smelled of old paper and leather bindings.
At lunchtime, the library was empty.
Naturally.
No student at this school came to the library during lunch. That hour was for society, for performance, for rank. To bury oneself in books then was to step willingly outside the contest. No one made such a choice.
No one, that is, except one.
Makoto entered the library.
He set his bag down beside the chair at the farthest reading table and began to walk between the shelves.
His fingertips brushed the spines one by one.
The section on Western thought. Comte's positivism. Spencer's social evolutionism. Mill's On Liberty.
His eyes passed over them.
He had already read them.
Science. Commentaries on Newtonian mechanics. A Japanese translation of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. An introductory volume on Einstein's theory of relativity, recently translated from Europe.
He did not stop.
Medicine. German medical texts, anatomical plates, studies of epidemic disease.
He moved on.
Literature. Natsume Sōseki. Mori Ōgai. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke.
He passed them all.
Then, in one corner, a shelf devoted to imperialism and colonial policy. Makoto's steps slowed for the briefest moment. Fukuzawa Yukichi's "Leaving Asia." Treatises on managing a Greater East Asia sphere. Comparative studies of Western colonial empires.
His eyes swept over them once and moved on.
There was nothing here that interested him.
Either he had already read it, or it was not worth reading.
He came to the end of the stacks—the innermost wall of the library, beside the staircase leading to the second floor.
There, something lay on the floor, fallen from the wall.
A poster.
Once it must have been pinned up there, but the adhesive had weakened and given way. Makoto bent and picked it up.
Issued by the Imperial Japanese Army Ministry.
A propaganda poster.
Against the backdrop of the Rising Sun, a uniformed soldier advanced toward the continent. Printed beneath him were the words:
Hakko Ichiu — Opening the Dawn of Greater East Asia.
Makoto stared at it.
His expression changed.
Not into anger—not the hot, immediate kind. What came instead was contempt. Cold, deep, and old. The look of someone who already knew the ending of what the poster was promising.
"This will continue for quite a while," he murmured, looking at it.
"...For a long time."
And then—
A scream.
Makoto's eyes widened.
It was not something he heard with his ears. It was inside his head.
Thousands of screams, tens of thousands, crashing over one another all at once. Men. Women. Children. The smell of burning. The sound of collapse. Distant artillery. All of it, together, pierced through his consciousness in a single instant.
His hand trembled.
The poster slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor. The soft slap of paper against wood sounded strangely loud in the stillness of the library.
Makoto had gone pale. Cold sweat had gathered at his brow. His breathing had quickened by a beat. He seized his trembling hand with the other and forced it still.
This was not the first time.
It had happened before.
He did not know since when—but every now and then, he heard things like this. Sounds that could not be explained. Sounds that should not have existed. Sounds of things not yet happened.
Steadying his breath, Makoto said quietly,
"...This place, too, is finished."
Scene III — The Library Committee Girl: Tsurume Kanae
"I see."
A voice behind him.
Makoto's shoulders stiffened, just slightly. He turned.
"So you think it will end, Makoto."
She stood there.
At the far end of the aisle between the shelves. Light from the skylight fell across one shoulder.
She wore hakama—the uniform of the academy's girls' division. Dark reddish-brown pleated trousers, a white blouse. Her black hair fell all the way to her waist, with her bangs cut neatly across her forehead. Her eyes were long and narrow, and there was always the faint suggestion of a smile at the corners of her mouth.
Tsurume Kanae.
Makoto's expression eased. Not wariness—something more familiar than that.
"Oh... it's you, Tsurume."
Kanae smiled and came toward him. Her steps were light. She moved between the shelves as though she belonged to this library more than anyone else.
"So you came again today, Makoto."
She stopped before the fallen poster and bent to pick it up. Dusting it lightly, she looked at it.
The Rising Sun. The advancing soldier. Hakko Ichiu.
Kanae's smile did not disappear. But something in its texture changed. It was no longer merely bright. It had become the smile of someone who understood more than she said.
"You think it will end?"
She held the poster up slightly as she spoke.
"But Japan is enjoying extraordinary success right now, isn't it?"
Makoto looked at her in a straight, level gaze.
"You don't care for it much either."
For a moment, Kanae's smile became real—not a social expression, but one that came from somewhere sincere.
"That's true... I don't care for it very much."
She set the poster lightly atop a nearby shelf.
"Perhaps it's because the Edo period was so nearly free of war. But I'm not fond of war."
A beat.
"But why do you think it will end?"
She stepped closer.
One step. Then another.
In the narrow aisle between the shelves, her face drew near his. The skylight illuminated the dust turning slowly in the air between them.
Kanae looked directly into Makoto's eyes.
Curiosity.
Pure curiosity—scholarly, and yet something more than scholarly.
Makoto—
lost his composure.
For the first time, a visible crack entered that cool expression of his. His eyes flickered. His gaze dropped. Her face was too close. Close enough that he could almost feel her breath.
The tips of his ears turned faintly red.
The greatest prodigy at the Imperial Academy. The boy who had left even Professor Mori in awe. The boy who seemed detached from all things in the world—
shaken by nothing more than a girl standing too near him.
Makoto took half a step back and cleared his throat.
"It may be ruined," he said at last.
He steadied his voice.
"But it won't be utterly destroyed."
Kanae's eyes lit up. Curiosity caught fire in them.
"And how do you know that?"
Makoto was silent for a moment.
Not because he was weighing the truth.
Because the truth was not something he could say.
So instead, he searched for words that might stand in its place.
"...Call it intuition."
Kanae burst out laughing.
The sound rang through the empty library, echoing between the shelves. She covered her mouth with one hand as she laughed, her eyes watering.
"You really are a strange person."
Scene IV — Each Their Own Time, Each Their Own Script
Kanae was on the library committee.
At lunchtime, the library was technically closed to students. That hour was reserved for organizing the shelves and arranging newly arrived volumes before afternoon classes resumed.
Student entry was prohibited.
And yet Kanae quietly let Makoto in.
If asked why, she would probably have answered this way:
"Breaking rules is not a good thing. But preventing someone from using a library they truly need is even worse."
Makoto sat at one of the reading tables.
He opened his bag.
And took out a book.
It was not one of the school library's books.
It was his own.
Nothing like the Western academic works, imperial policy texts, or science manuals lining the shelves around him.
This book was old.
Its leather binding was worn, the paper yellowed with age. On the cover were letters written in no script used in Japan.
Nor were they European.
Makoto opened the book.
And began to read.
His expression changed.
Not into the blank calm he wore in the classroom. Not into the cool irony he had carried into the library. Not into the contempt with which he had looked at the propaganda poster.
Now, as Kagura Makoto turned the pages, there was something else on his face.
The innocence of a child.
His eyes shone. The corners of his mouth lifted ever so slightly. His gaze moved across the script quickly, but with an unmistakable rhythm of delight. He no longer looked like a sixteen-year-old boy from an elite family.
He looked like a child who had only just learned to read, discovering one secret of the world after another for the first time.
Meanwhile, Kanae was working among the shelves. Sorting new arrivals. Returning books to their places. Updating the lending ledger. Her hands moved quickly; she was practiced at it. She finished sooner than expected.
When she turned back toward the reading area, she saw Makoto in the distance.
And stopped.
That expression.
She had seen him many times before. The cool face he wore in class. The indifferent profile he showed in the corridors. The quiet stillness with which he read in the library.
But this expression—she had never seen it.
It was childlike.
Pure.
As if, in all the world, this moment alone were real.
Kanae held her breath.
Then, slowly, she slipped into the shadow of the shelves and approached, careful not to make a sound. Even the soft soles of her indoor shoes barely brushed the wooden floor.
What on earth is he reading?
She drew closer.
And looked over his shoulder.
Her eyes widened.
"What is this?"
Makoto's shoulders jumped. He turned.
Kanae's face was close to his again.
Once more.
Did this girl have no notion of personal distance at all?
For an instant, Makoto looked flustered—but this time he recovered quickly. Indicating the book, he said,
"...Hieroglyphs?"
Kanae leaned closer over the page. Strange pictographic characters filled it in dense rows—birds, eyes, reeds—and beneath them, in pencil, Makoto's own notes. Translation notes.
"Yes," he said. "These are Egyptian hieroglyphs."
Beside that page lay another, written in an entirely different system—nothing like Egyptian at all. Wedge-shaped marks. Spiral symbols. Geometric forms that resisted recognition altogether.
Kanae's eyes gleamed with curiosity. She pulled over a chair and sat beside him.
"So this is what interests you, Makoto."
A beat.
"I thought perhaps you weren't interested in anything in the world at all. Heh."
Makoto answered without looking up from the page.
"Well... things happen. It's not that I care about nothing."
Kanae tilted her head. A shaft of light fell across her eyes through the aisles.
"So you're interested in history."
Makoto turned the page.
Quietly, matter-of-factly, he said,
"Yes. I suppose I am."
A beat.
"This age, too, is no more than a single page in history."
Kanae's hand stopped.
She looked at his profile.
Sometimes he said things like this—things no sixteen-year-old ought to say. Heavy things. Distant things. Things spoken from too broad and too far a vantage point. As though he stood outside the age itself, observing it from beyond.
Every time he spoke that way, Kanae was impressed.
And every time, she was also a little afraid.
The corner of her mouth lifted again. Mischief returned.
"Then—"
She leaned forward.
"What do you think the history of the future will say about me?"
It was a light question. A joke.
She meant it as one.
Makoto stopped.
The hand that had been turning the page halted. The movement of his eyes ceased. For one moment, even his breathing seemed to stop.
Then he moved.
He closed every book laid open before him. One after another. Quietly. Precisely. He returned them to his bag, lifted it, and stood from his chair.
Kanae froze.
Her expression hardened with confusion.
Had she said something wrong?
But what?
It had only been a joke.
Makoto walked between the shelves toward the library exit. As he passed her, he did not stop. He did not even turn fully toward her.
Only, as he went by—without breaking stride, over his shoulder—he said:
"...Poor child."
That was all.
Then his back disappeared between the shelves. The library door opened. Closed. His footsteps faded.
Kanae remained sitting there, in the reading chair, beside the place where Makoto had been only moments ago. The warmth of his presence still seemed to linger in the seat next to her.
Her smile was gone.
Poor... child?
Her hands trembled lightly in her lap.
She was not angry.
She was not sad.
But just now—when Kagura Makoto had said poor child—there had been something in his eyes.
Sorrow.
Not sorrow for her alone.
But a deep, old, inescapable sorrow for everyone in this age—including her.
Light continued to pour down from the skylight. Dust drifted through it in silence. The library was still again.
Kanae looked at the seat where Makoto had been sitting.
On the desk, there remained the faint trace of pencil.
Something he had written and then erased.
She leaned closer to see.
A translation note beside the hieroglyphs.
And in one corner, written small in Japanese:
Memory is the cruelest inheritance.