January 1989, Tokyo.
The final days of the Showa era.
News of the Emperor’s grave illness had cast a solemn, oppressive mood over the entire country.
Variety programs were disappearing from television schedules one after another, and even the neon lights along Tokyo’s streets seemed dimmer than usual.
Jimbocho, the old bookstore district.
It felt like one of the few corners of Tokyo the feverish excess of the bubble economy had failed to consume.
The air smelled of aging paper and faint mildew.
Between the cramped shelves, it almost seemed as though time itself had stopped moving.
Shin Kitahara wore a thick dark coat and a scarf, a freshly bought bag of mandarins hanging from one hand as he slowly made his way between towering rows of books.
He wasn’t here to browse.
In one week, he would be auditioning for NHK’s Taiga drama Kasuga no Tsubone.
Producer Ishida had gotten him through the door, but that hardly meant the role was his.
Taiga dramas were notoriously strict about casting.
For a newcomer with no experience in period productions, the deciding factor wasn’t simply whether he could memorize the lines or wear the costume correctly.
He had to look as though he belonged to that era.
The role he would be auditioning for was Masasada Inaba.
Masasada was the biological son of the drama’s central figure, Kasuga no Tsubone—a tragic man who received only a handful of lines in most history books.
He had spent his life beneath the shadow of a powerful mother and ultimately became a sacrifice in the political games surrounding his family.
“Masasada Inaba…
There really isn’t much written about him.”
Shin had already come up empty-handed in several bookstores.
Most popular histories devoted page after page to Kasuga no Tsubone’s political maneuvering, while her quiet, unremarkable son was barely mentioned.
Eventually, Shin entered an old secondhand bookstore called Kogadou.
The interior was dim.
Behind the counter, an elderly shopkeeper wearing reading glasses sat hunched over a radio, listening to another update on the Emperor’s condition.
Shin made his way to a corner labeled EDO HISTORICAL MATERIALS.
His fingers moved across dusty thread-bound books, yellowed journals, and stacks of old publications.
Just as he was about to pull his hand away, a faint tingling sensation ran through his fingertips.
A system notification.
Shin stopped.
His gaze dropped to a cardboard box on the lowest shelf.
Several battered notebooks had been thrown inside.
Some didn’t even have covers anymore and looked more like discarded scrap paper than anything worth selling.
He crouched down and picked one up.
The notebook’s cover had yellowed with age and become brittle around the edges.
When he opened it, he found page after page covered in dense handwriting.
Bzzz—
A pale blue screen unfolded across Shin’s vision.
[Equippable Item Detected – Gray]
[Item: Annotated Notes of a Disgraced Historian]
[Original Owner: An elderly scholar who devoted his life to studying family politics in the early Edo period, only to offend the academic establishment and spend the rest of his career in obscurity.]
[Slot: Accessory / Book]
[Condition: Aged; Saturated with Resentment]
[Base Attribute: After reading, empathy toward the ‘loyalty and repression’ experienced by samurai of the late Sengoku period increases by 15%.]
[Special Trait: The Silent Scream – Passive]
[Note: The scholar wrote, “What people call loyalty is often nothing more than power slowly torturing the humanity out of a person.
Masasada Inaba was not killed by a blade.
He was crushed beneath the unbearable weight of his mother’s love and control.” While equipped, you can more deeply understand the suffocating despair of wanting to escape while knowing there is nowhere to run.]
“Loyalty…
and repression.”
Shin gently traced the furious handwriting, the ink strokes pressed so deeply into the paper that he could feel their grooves beneath his fingertips.
This was exactly what he had been missing.
For a modern actor, the hardest part of performing in a historical drama wasn’t learning the etiquette.
It was the eyes.
Modern people carried too much life in their gaze—too much individuality, desire, confidence, and freedom.
But a samurai of that age?
His eyes had to look almost dead.
Like stagnant water sealed beneath layer after layer of duty, family expectations, rules, and loyalty.
“Excuse me.
How much for this notebook?”
Shin carried it to the counter.
The old shopkeeper glanced up.
“That thing?
Came in with a pile of waste paper.
If you want it, give me two hundred yen and take it.”
Shin placed two coins on the counter.
By the time he stepped outside, the sky had turned so dark and heavy that it seemed ready to collapse onto the city.
Pedestrians hurried along the street, uncertainty written across their faces.
The Showa era was coming to an end.
The Heisei era was about to begin.
Strangely, that uneasiness—the feeling of one age dying while another waited just beyond it—echoed the period described in the notebook, when the chaos of the Sengoku era had slowly given way to the rigid order of Edo. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
…
Back at his new apartment in Nakano, Shin made himself a cup of hot tea and sat at the desk beside the window.
He opened the notebook and activated its equipment effect.
In an instant, the dense, difficult passages seemed to transform into moving images that flooded his mind.
He saw a young samurai kneeling on the gravel of a courtyard.
Sharp stones dug into his knees until blood seeped through his clothing, yet he didn’t dare shift his weight even an inch.
He saw a mother powerful enough to influence the fate of the realm.
Her cold fingers gently stroked her son’s topknot…
…while her lips calmly ordered him toward his death.
Shin felt the suffocation.
The despair of being born as someone’s son, yet living as nothing more than a tool.
“So that’s it…”
Shin murmured.
Was that feeling really so different from the life of an overworked corporate drone in the modern world?
Bound to a company like a samurai was bound to his clan.
Controlled by superiors the way a child could be controlled by family.
Forced to sacrifice himself for the sake of a so-called future, just as a warrior sacrificed himself in the name of loyalty.
Wanting desperately to walk away…
…yet trapped by debt, duty, and responsibility.
There it was.
The emotional bridge between the ancient world and the modern one.
Shin closed the notebook and shut his eyes.
When he opened them again, the bright sharpness normally present in his gaze had disappeared.
In its place was a bottomless stillness—and, buried far beneath it, a pain that had been suppressed for so long it no longer knew how to scream.
He didn’t need to imitate some exaggerated image of an ancient samurai.
He only needed to portray one thing:
The suffocating pain of a man who wanted to live, yet had never been allowed to live as himself.
That would be Masasada Inaba.
Outside the window, the season’s first snowflake drifted slowly from the sky.
Shin picked up the silver Zippo and gently ran his thumb across its casing.
“NHK, huh?”
A faint smile touched his lips.
“I’m ready.”