"I’m not a child anymore," I said, and if anyone heard the tiny echo of childish defiance underneath, I didn’t care. I folded my voice into Kairi’s—soft, a little too hesitant for someone who’d once been trained to lie through a smile—and I leveled my eyes at Ayaka.

"Can I go alone?" I asked, as Kairi. "Just for a little while. I need to see something."

Her face folded like origami. There was the habitual mother’s worry, the careful weighing of risk, and then something else—relief that I was asking for permission at all. She clenched the teacup for a second, then nodded once, resigned and terrified in the same breath.

"Take your phone. Call if you—if you think of anything," she said.

I promised her the thing she really wanted: the illusion of control. Then I left the cup cooling on the table and climbed the stairs to Kairi’s room to get ready.

Morning moved through the house with the ordinary cruelty of routine: a shower that made the world smell like soap and renewal, a quick breakfast spooned down as if I could swallow answers. I fussed with Kairi’s clothes because God help me, the sleeves always swallowed her wrists; they were designed for someone with longer limbs and less tendency to get lost. I knotted the scarf under her collar like a medal.

When the bathroom door cracked open I let my hand drift, impossibly, over Kairi’s forearm—just a fingertip, an assessing press at the wrist, like checking a pulse. My lips twisted. "Small," I muttered, half to myself, half to the empty room. I missed the weight of my own hands, the precise angle I’d always used to steady a scalpel or a pen.

I missed touching something that felt exactly the right size. It was ridiculous and fond and, yes, a little obscene in the tender way of self-recognition.

There—that was the line I allowed myself to cross. Nothing explicit. Just a private inventory: shoulder, wrist, the pale curve of collarbone visible above the shirt. A pervert’s tenderness, surgical and affectionate all at once.

The city outside was waking up as we left. I told Ayaka I’d be careful—she watched until I was a gray shape at the end of the street—and then I went for the train.

Shinjuku is a living thing: fluorescent lungs, concrete ribs, and a heart that never stops checking its watch. You feed a Suica at the gates like obeisance and get spat into a current — office suits, suitcases, tour groups with matching hats — all of them part of the choreography. The platforms smell faintly of coffee and old paper; they announce the trains in calm, double languages so even a scatterbrain can pretend there’s order.

The Yamanote hums like a well-oiled instrument; hop on and, if you don’t linger at the door, it will spit you out at Shibuya in a matter of minutes. Trains between those hubs run so often the timetable feels ceremonial rather than functional — expect a direct trip of roughly 4–7 minutes on JR services that connect Shinjuku, Yoyogi, Harajuku, and Shibuya in quick succession.

You don’t really see the city from the train so much as sample it.

Shinjuku blinks and then you’re through Yoyogi — a brief softening where the noise thins and you can pretend there are trees nearby. One stop later is Harajuku: teenage color and tinned energy funneling toward Takeshita Street, Meiji Jingu’s trees visible if you angle your face toward the window.

The Yamanote’s arc is almost theatrical: neighborhood beats stitched together by green-liveried carriages that loop the whole city. It’s efficient in the way a scalpel is efficient — clean, fast, and it leaves the mess for you to sort out when you step off

If you were feeling perverse—or sentimental—you could walk the whole way. The straight-line distance between Shinjuku Station and Shibuya Station sits in the low single-digit kilometers; on foot that’s roughly 40–50 minutes depending on how often you stop to be distracted by a ramen shop or a vintage store window. But we aren’t sentimental today. The walk is long enough to collect small obsessions; the train compresses the city into a tidy, manageable pulse. Rome2Rio+1

Shibuya arrives like a confession. The station disgorges you into the scramble crossing, and suddenly everything is louder — screens, taxi horns, the constant mechanical applause of neon. Walk north into Jinnan and the chaos slims into alleys of record stores, cafés with too-strong espresso, and the pulsing, tourist-friendly flares around Tower Records. If the paper in Kairi’s pocket says Jinnan 1-23-5, that puts you square in that web: near the Tower Records block, a few streets in from the station where the city’s curated noise mixes with the small, precise hum of local life. It’s close; precise; not the sort of place you accidentally end up.

Practicalities, because I keep my tools sharper than my sympathies: the Yamanote stops are frequent, signage is bilingual and abundant — if you can’t follow one stop on the loop, you probably weren’t trying.

If you need a backup, Saikyo or the Shōnan-Shinjuku service can cut travel time or reduce transfers; taxis and buses exist, of course, but traffic will remind you that Tokyo’s punctuality is a social contract, not a promise. In short: tap the card, get on, count two stops if you like the slow reveal (Shinjuku → Yoyogi → Harajuku → Shibuya), and keep your eyes peeled when the city opens up and Jinnan’s narrower streets show themselves.

So: a five-to-seven-minute, clinical train ride to get you where you need to go; a forty-minute pilgrimage if you prefer to collect the city’s crumbs; and a Jinnan that answers to addresses like 1-23-5 the way a map answers to a needle. Keep your phone charged. Remember: Kairi gets lost. I don’t plan on letting that happen again.

If you want to keep it painfully realistic, the sensible way from Shinjuku to central Shibuya is embarrassingly simple and annoyingly efficient: head to the South Exit of Shinjuku Station (Takashimaya and Lumine sit like polite sentries there), find the elevated Yamanote platforms—platforms fourteen and fifteen are where the loop toward Harajuku and Shibuya waits—and hop on the train that stops at Yoyogi, Harajuku, then Shibuya.

It is three stops, six, maybe eight minutes of metal and stale air if the schedule’s decent. If you’re avoiding the Yamanote you can use the Saikyo or Shonan–Shinjuku runs and still be at Shibuya in the blink of an eye—train options are stupidly plentiful here.

I watched platform numbers flicker overhead, catalogued the faces moving like a current—suit, student, delivery backpack, tourist with an enormous camera—and stepped into the carriage. The train lunged forward; the city spilled past in slices: the cramped, neon-scraped blur of Shinjuku’s outer skirts, then a cleaner green as we crossed near Yoyogi Park.

One stop.

Then Harajuku, all teenagers and thrift shops and the smell of crepes.

Two stops.

Finally Shibuya, the crush and exhale of a hundred lives intersecting at the crossing. If you timed it right, you could ride from one heart of Tokyo to another while finishing your last cigarette of thought and still have minutes left to change your plans.

I didn’t want the train—too easy, too anonymous—but it was practical.

My mind had a habit of unfolding when I was in motion, and a short stretch of steel and vinyl let me assemble the map before I hit the street.

From the Hachiko / Hachiko Exit at Shibuya Station the city opens into a stage: the scramble crossing, an ocean of feet; the tower of screens throwing color into faces; Center-Gai’s press of shops; the neon signage that somehow smells like youth and lost direction.

If you follow the crowd toward Tower Records and then east along the small backstreets—past the cafés where the waitresses tattoo their hair with syrup and the shops that sell things meant to be photographed—you drift into Jinnan: film posters, narrow alleys with second-floor bars, and the quiet pockets where the city allows you to step out of the performance. That’s where Kairi’s address pointed—somewhere between the noise and the thin quiet that hides behind it.

I walked. It was faster than the train when you accounted for waiting, and walking forces you to make choices—left at the convenience store, through the green-tinted pedestrian underpass, down past the small shrine tucked behind a pachinko parlor.

People slice through the streets like rivers; if you know how to read their eddies you get to where you want to be without asking. I kept my steps measured, my ears tuned for the city’s banal warnings: the high bell of a crossing, the clack of heels on tile, the voices that always sound more confident from behind sunglasses.

When I reached the general block, the city changed texture. Shibuya’s shout softened into Shibuya’s mutter: quieter cafes, a bicycle leaning against a lamppost, the familiar scent of roasted coffee and distant diesel. I let the address lead—turning down narrower ways, looking for the little things that give away a place: the pattern on a mailbox, a faded logo on a sliding door, a sticker I’d seen before on another life.

And there—unremarkable as any door in Tokyo but with the authority of something that had been waiting—I paused. The paper burned in the pocket like a brand.

The rest of the story had to be found, not manufactured.

And here I was, in front of the mangaka’s apartment.