Tokyo: I Picked Up a Troubled Girl on the Yamanote Line

A depressed economy, meager income, lonely life, and a broken home.

Reborn into Tokyo of the millennium, just thinking that such days would continue for thirty more years made Kaminaru Haruki feel all the more gloomy as he stood on the train platform. The train approached, alarms blaring, and right before his eyes, a delicate, lonely, and petite figure caught his attention.

—Ah, she’s about to jump onto the tracks.

Yet, as he looked at that figure, a stirring of anticipation inevitably welled up in his heart. Was that anticipation born of compassion for someone like himself? Or was it the vain hope that the cliché trope of a hero saving a damsel in distress from novels was about to play out in his own life?

“Probably neither.”

He flicked away the cigarette in his hand and watched the smoke ring drift into the sky, recalling that afternoon in his childhood when his father buried the kitten he had been raising—alive.