One in seven.
That's the number. One man for every seven women.
Doesn't sound like a big deal, written out like that. Just a fraction. A statistic. The kind of thing someone mentions in a classroom once and then everyone forgets because there's a quiz next period.
But numbers don't stay on paper.
They get into things. Into laws. Into habits. Into the quiet way people learn to stand in a room, which voice gets heard first, which one learns to wait. Give a number enough time and it stops being a statistic. It just becomes how things are. And once something becomes how things are, nobody can even remember what came before it.
Men in this world did not say please or thank you or sorry I'm late. They arrived late, left early, forgot names — and the world made room for it every single time. Like water filling a footprint. Patient. Automatic. Without any particular resentment, because resentment requires first believing something should have been different.
A man here could cancel plans twice in a row and receive a third invitation.
A man here could say I'll consider it when asked if he loved someone — and she would thank him. Sincerely. For the consideration.
Nobody thought this was unusual.
It had always been this way.
Nobody remembered it being any other way.
Into this world, on a grey Tuesday morning, Shirogane Kaito arrived.
No lightning. No dramatic music. Just — one moment he was in his office in Seoul at two in the morning, slumped in his chair with a phone ringing somewhere he was too tired to care about. And the next moment he was flat on his back in what was very clearly a dumpyard, staring at a sky the colour of old dishwater, wearing a body that was nineteen years old and approximately eight centimetres shorter than the one he'd had five seconds ago.
He lay there for a moment.
Hm, he thought.
He sat up. Looked at his hands. Younger. A scar on the left knuckle he had no memory of earning. Crumpled bill in his pocket. Shoes half a size too small.
He took one breath. Let it out.
In his previous life, he'd been important. His name was on buildings. He had a PA who managed his PA. He'd worked eighteen-hour days and eaten lunches that went cold mid-call, and had looked up once — just once, near the end — and realised he had built an enormous, impressive, completely hollow life and had absolutely no idea how it had happened.
His very last thought, right before the dumpyard situation, had been embarrassingly small for a man of his supposed legacy.
I just want a normal life.
Not power. Not revenge. Not transcendence. Just a normal, quiet, unremarkable life where he could eat food while it was still warm and maybe sleep eight hours without feeling guilty about it.
The universe, apparently, had been listening.
It had also, apparently, decided that normal was a very funny word.
He stood up, dusted off his knees, found work within a week, found an apartment within a month, enrolled in a local college at month two because why not — and spent the entire three months since in a state of watchful, bemused neutrality.
Like a tourist in a country whose customs he found genuinely baffling but whose passport he was currently stuck with.
He developed one rule, simple and effective:
Don't get involved. Watch, nod, move on.
He was quite proud of this rule.
He was about to have a very bad Wednesday because of it.
The problem started, as problems often do, with rice.
He had run out. Yesterday. Had made do with bread, which was fine but was not rice, and the nearest grocery store was four minutes away, and that was the entire plan for the morning.
Rice. Home. Manga. Lunch.
Simple. Clean. Normal.
Kaito walked down Nishioka Street with a paper grocery bag under one arm, manga tucked into his back pocket, white shirt sleeves pushed to the elbows because he'd woken up ten minutes late and this was the first thing he'd grabbed. His dark navy hair sat unstyled in that effortlessly intentional way. His face was doing the documentary-narrator expression he'd been wearing since approximately day three.
He passed the first scene without slowing down.
A man sat alone at an outdoor restaurant table. Twenties. Nice watch. Four women arranged around him like the solar system had quietly reorganized itself overnight.
He was on his phone. Had been for a while — his coffee had developed that faint skin on the surface that takes at least fifteen minutes to form.
Two of the women were talking to each other in low, careful voices.
One was watching the man with the focused patience of someone memorising a train schedule.
The fourth was refilling his water glass. It was not empty. It had not been empty before she started. She was doing it slowly, gently — like the sound of pouring might bother him.
He did not look up.
Kaito looked at that man's face as he walked past — the blank, settled look of someone who had never once in his adult life wondered if he was being too much trouble — and felt something move through his chest.
Not pity. Not anger. Just a quiet, tired kind of oh.
I see.
He kept walking.
Forty metres further, outside a convenience store, a woman in a pharmacy uniform stood very still while a man jabbed a finger at the bag she was holding.
"I said the other one. How is this difficult."
"I'm sorry, I thought you meant—"
"You thought." He said it like the word itself was the problem. Took the bag from her hand without looking at her face. Turned and walked away without another word.
The woman stood there a moment.
Then she straightened her jacket. Exhaled once — quiet, measured, through her nose. The exhale of someone who has had a great deal of practice keeping things inside.
And went back into the store.
Two women passing on the opposite pavement had watched the whole thing. They glanced at each other. One of them shrugged — not callously, just the shrug of someone acknowledging rain — and they kept walking.
Kaito stopped at the crosswalk.
He watched the don't-walk signal and thought about nothing in particular, which was a skill he had worked very hard to develop and considered one of his finer personal achievements.
Rice, he reminded himself. Just rice.
The signal changed.
He stepped off the curb.
They were waiting at the centre of the crossing.
Three women, coming from the opposite direction, who had slowed their pace in a way that was completely natural and completely coordinated at the same time. By the time Kaito reached the other pavement, they had arranged themselves — without any visible communication — into a shape with a gap in it exactly the width of one person.
He noticed.
The way you notice a door that is slightly too narrow. Not alarming. Just — requiring acknowledgment.
The one in the centre smiled first.
Late twenties. Fitted blazer, silk blouse, hair in an updo with exactly one strand loose. That one loose strand was a choice. He could tell.
"You look like you've been walking a while." Her voice was warm. Friendly. Completely harmless the way deep water looks shallow from above. "There's a place nearby — quiet. Good coffee." The faintest tilt of her head. "We could sit. Get to know each other properly."
Private. Get to know each other properly. Dressed up in the most reasonable sentence structure imaginable.
"I'm heading somewhere," Kaito said.
"We don't mind walking." The second one — younger, soft face, the kind of carefully approachable prettiness that had been practiced until it stopped looking practiced. She laughed once, small and self-deprecating. "You just seem... different. We noticed from across the street." A pause, placed with precision. "We'd treat you really well." Another pause. Smaller. Heavier. "Better than anyone has."
The third one said nothing.
She was standing slightly to the side — not behind the others, but at an angle that happened to cover the natural exit. She watched him with the calm, experienced focus of someone making a very quiet decision. When he looked at her, she smiled.
The smile did not reach the calculating part of her eyes.
Around them, the street kept going. A woman passing on the left read the situation in under a second and looked cleanly away — the careful, apologetic look of someone who had long since learned that involvement has costs.
Somewhere to his right, a man leaning against a wall with a coffee cup was watching the whole thing with vague entertainment. The expression of someone watching a mildly interesting television programme. Unbothered. Uninvested. He caught Kaito's eye, raised his cup slightly in a gesture that said good luck in the tone of someone who doesn't mean luck at all.
Then looked back at his phone.
The gap in the arrangement tightened. Nobody moved dramatically. No raised voices. It was just — the social equivalent of a room's exits quietly rearranging themselves.
I just wanted rice, Kaito thought, with a very specific, very personal species of exhaustion.
"He said he's heading somewhere."
It came from his right.
A girl had stopped on the pavement beside him. Close enough to be clearly with him. Far enough that there was nothing pushy about the distance. Honey-brown hair half-up, loose strands catching the morning light. Mint-green knit top, plain jeans, a canvas tote over one shoulder that had a small keychain on it shaped like a dumpling.
She was looking at the three women with the relaxed, unbothered expression of someone who had walked in on a mildly tedious situation and decided to be inconveniently present until it resolved itself.
She glanced sideways at Kaito — one quick second, the full-assessment kind, the kind that asked you okay? without requiring an answer — and looked back.
"Sorry, we're running late," she said pleasantly.
The tone of someone commenting on the weather. Warm. Completely immovable.
The blazer woman held her smile for exactly as long as it took to decide today wasn't the day. Then she reached into her jacket, produced a card between two fingers, and extended it toward Kaito without any visible embarrassment at all.
"In case your schedule changes."
He took it. Refusing would have made the scene longer.
The three of them left the way they'd arrived — smoothly, without visible frustration, already recalibrating before they'd fully turned. The silent one glanced back once. Kaito held her gaze without expression until she looked away first.
He looked down at the card. Heavy stock. Embossed. Of course it was.
He tucked it into the grocery bag against where the rice would eventually go and turned to look at the girl beside him properly for the first time.
She was already looking at him.
Then she seemed to remember she was doing that, and looked at a point somewhere past his left shoulder instead.
"You okay?"
"Yes," Kaito said. "Thank you."
Simple. Genuine. No performance in it.
She blinked.
"Oh — I mean — " She adjusted her bag strap. Readjusted it immediately. "It wasn't really anything, I was just passing and I saw and it looked like — " She stopped. Restarted. "You don't have to thank me. It was nothing."
Beat.
"I mean it was something but not a — you know what I mean. It's fine."
Kaito watched her talk with the quiet attention he gave to things he found genuinely interesting. Which, in this city, in this world, was not very many things. She had made it onto the list in approximately fifteen seconds.
She seemed to realise she'd been talking too fast. Stopped. Looked at him.
He was looking back at her the way people rarely looked at anyone here — straight, present, without agenda. Like she was simply a person standing in front of him and that was enough reason to pay attention.
Something shifted in her expression.
Just briefly. Like a sentence that had lost its ending and was quietly figuring out a new one.
Then she laughed — short, a little awkward, and completely real — and rubbed the back of her neck.
"Sorry. I don't know why I said all that."
"It was helpful," Kaito said. "I meant it."
She opened her mouth.
Closed it.
Gave one small, decisive nod — the kind people give when something landed somewhere they weren't expecting — and shifted the tote on her shoulder.
"Well." She glanced up the street. "Good."
She went that way.
Kaito watched her disappear into the ordinary morning crowd with the same effortlessness with which she'd arrived. No production. No backward glance. Just someone who had decided to do a decent thing and then moved on, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Which, in this city, it was not.
Which was, he realized, exactly the point.
He stood there for a moment longer than he needed to.
Around him the street continued — the news ticker cycling through its morning headlines, the man at the outdoor table still on his phone, the world going through its careful choreography like it had been doing for generations. Built around a number. Reorganized by arithmetic. Patient and thorough and completely certain of itself.
He started walking.
He had come from a world where he had everything and had wanted, at the very end, only something embarrassingly small.
He had gotten the small life. The ordinary one. The fresh start in a city that had no idea who he used to be and no particular reason to care.
He had not expected to also get this.
Whatever this was.
He didn't know yet that the girl with the honey-brown hair and the dumpling keychain was enrolled in the same college he'd signed up for last week.
He didn't know yet about the black-haired mom who had been leaving coffee outside his apartment door every morning this week and sprinting back to her room before he woke up, hoping — with the specific, desperate optimism of someone who has seen too many romance dramas — that he hadn't checked the hallway camera.
(He had checked the hallway camera.)
(He had not said anything yet because he genuinely did not know how to address it without making it weird.)
(It was already a little weird.)
He didn't know about any of them yet.
He just walked — hands in his pockets, grocery bag swinging, manga pressing against the small of his back — through a world that had absolutely no framework for someone like him.
Which was fine.
He'd figure it out.
He always did.
But first: rice.
End of Prologue