The next day my bar shift ended early, and I hopped onto my bicycle. As I began to cycle home, I questioned who I should investigate first. The hermit-like NEETs, the overworked Salarymen, or the gifted prodigies? Though I could pass for a twenty-five-year-old, convincing people I was a friend to teenagers would be a stretch. How could I probe into their lives without alerting anyone?

My restlessness pushed for action, especially as I had already lost substantial time on that lone municipality clue. Now, I waited for Josh's feedback. Meanwhile, I pulled up the case map on my phone. It turned out I wasn't far from the house of the first victim, a mere twenty-minute ride away. With a satchel slung over my shoulder and headphones in my ears, I navigated through the late-night silence toward Victim No.1: Yoshiro Tanaka.

He had been a NEET who lived a solitary life in an abandoned mansion. The once grand pre-WW2 architecture of the mansion, though exquisite, now stood as a mere echo of its glorious past. The walled mansion was larger than I thought. It was an architectural relic which survived the bombings of the second world war through pure luck. I put on my latex gloves, hat, and a face mask and approached the side entrance. Only an old primitive cylindrical padlock stood on my way. With a bit of effort and the basic lockpicking skills I'd picked up during my intelligence training, I snuck in.

The entrance revealed a wildly overgrown garden with large white stones acting as a pavement. An ancient dojo flanked one side of the property, a reminder of what traditions this house once upheld. Under the eerie glow of the moon, I photographed the spectral mansion and its untamed garden. To my surprise, the front door was unlocked.

Carefully sliding it open, the unmistakable stench of decay and rot hit me. Only the decaying bodies in the jungles could compete with this one. The hallway was choked with garbage bags - a grim representation of Yoshio's life choices and habits. It looked disgusting and depressing at the same time. I had never known a happy person who had more than one bag of trash in the hallway. I allowed some fresh air to weasel in, and hoped the smell wouldn’t alert the neighbors. Now came the unpalatable task of sifting through this detritus to piece together the life of mister Tanaka.

Among the remnants of instant noodles, mold-ridden pre-packaged meals, hentai magazines with suspiciously stuck pages, and assorted broken electronics, a Game Cube console caught my eye. I took a note of that. That was an old console in good shape.

Continuing the search, I found a well-preserved black-and-white photo in a frame which stood out. It was lying on the ground under a trash bag. The image of an old man, gripping a bokken, eyes filled with wisdom, stared back at me. The frame bore the name Tanaka Hiroshi. I jotted it down in my case notebook and proceeded further.

Sliding open another door, my flashlight revealed a big room. On the opposite side of it there was a small shrine, or what remained of it. Torn scrolls hung askew, and a broken, unsheathed katana lay underneath. Weapons and training dummies were strewn all over, each one either broken or heavily damaged. Someone had clearly vented his rage on the equipment. At least he had spent an inordinate amount of time snapping hard wooden bokkens and poles and even the metal katana. An item resembling a squashed can drew my attention - it was a bell, at least it had been.

There was a nail between two torn scrolls at the shrine, with a differently colored patch of the wall behind, just the right size for the discarded photo frame. I hesitated, unsure if I should replace the picture. Maybe Yoshiro hadn't wanted the old man to see the carnage he created here. Symbols and icons were ripped down, and the wall was pockmarked with empty nails. The accumulated dust suggested that the place had been untouched for much longer than the few months since Yoshiro's unfortunate accident.

Given that the victim hadn't bothered to clean up, I surmised that Yoshiro hadn't held the dojo or his family legacy in high regard. All this showed that he had been filled with anger and resentment. It was a long lasting and strong emotion, a willingness to destroy.

I tried to mentally reenact the destruction of the dojo from the perspective of Tanaka, as I put myself in his shoes. I felt something more than disdain and anger. It was a deep, visceral hatred.

Leaving the picture near the shrine unsure of what to do with it, I proceeded towards the living rooms, maybe Yoshiro's room would provide some insights on his hatred. It felt wrong to leave this room in such a state, but I didn't know how one should act in such situations.

_________

Messy. That was the word that came to my mind when I entered the room Tanaka probably lived in. This room was in a more modern style. A 30-inch TV, complete with 4 consoles, stood on a TV stand right next to a mattress lying on the floor. The sheets weren't done properly, their uneven yellowish hue indicated that a sweaty and dirty person once lied on them. A can of soda sat next to a wireless controller. The curtains were shut, so I opened them for some extra light.

A bookshelf was filled with light novels and manga. "To Another World with the Bow that Can Kill the Demon Lord", "Slayer of the Ancients Metadrones", and "Hero of the Holy Cross Fighting for Justice in Another World" to name a few. As I quietly giggled at the ridiculous names of the novels he had been reading, I noticed the symbol of Harvard Press. They were biology textbooks written in English. I opened them to find the books filled with notes in Japanese. One of the shelves fit tight with different textbooks, all printed at least 10 years ago and filled with notes and page markers.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

So, I jotted that Yoshiro had been reading a lot of trash-light novels while being capable of understanding up to graduate-level textbooks a few years back.

A pile of cardboard boxes was in the corner here, but no odor came from them. I thought he at least didn't want his room to smell, but maybe my sense of smell had died from the stench.I just couldn't tell anymore.

I opened the boxes one by one. Underneath the console games and manga, mostly of the harem and hentai genre, I found a box with mementoes: A silver medal. Second place in an unknown martial tournament.

I inspected further: more than a dozen silver and a couple of bronze medals from different tournaments, but not a single gold one.

A picture of a young boy with an older version of Tanaka Hiroshi and another girl, all wearing kimonos. The second box contained cheap manga. Other living rooms indicated that he had used them sometimes as manga/light novel storage but did not use them otherwise, his collection of light novels and manga was massive. He had some source of income. His clothes indicated that he was at least 120kg and suffering from obesity. The kitchen was mainly used to brew coffee and heat pre-made food.

One of the rooms was a home office. I checked the drawers. Something was odd with one of them. It was more shallow than it should have been. I checked and there was a double bottom in this drawer. I opened it. Letters, they were acceptance letters from European and American universities, not from the top 20, but good ones, they were dated 12 years ago.

The toilet was not as dirty as I had expected it to be. The laundry machine was half full, indicating that he sometimes used it.

It was time to summarize my findings. It was getting brighter outside, and I might get caught if I didn't leave before people started to wake up.

I turned on the recorder and tried to add up all the clues gathered here.

"Yoshiro - 35 years old. A bit older than me at the time of the accident. Years on the medals indicated that up to 22, he was actively participating in regional and once in Japan-wide championships where he got bronze. Did he throw away the gold ones or never have them?

I don't know that. At the time he stopped participating or winning in the tournaments, he was studying sciences at an advanced level, which might mean that he was a University student trying to get his Master's or Ph.D. abroad. Letters of acceptance indicated that he got accepted on both masters and PhD programs. But the letters of acceptance were hidden in a room Yoshiro didn't use and clearly belonged to someone else, in a secret compartment. I assume someone wanted to hide them from him. But why not throw them away? Why keep them in a hidden compartment?”

I looked at the acceptance letters, all opened. There was a possibility that he was the one who opened them but tossed them aside, and his family was keeping them safe from him. Did he even see them? There were some strange family dynamics I couldn’t piece together with what I had. So I continued recording.

“For one reason or another, between that time and his death, his life had crumbled, as textbooks got replaced with cheap manga tomes, pornographic books, and an endless array of video games. Adding to that, he had had enough hatred and resentment to destroy the dojo, or never cleaned it up if that was done by someone else, but such possibility was miniscule.”

I had heard about the second-place effect, where people who don't get the gold but get the silver feel most distressed and less happy than bronze medal owners. Such effects usually don’t lead to outbursts like in the dojo or personal collapse.

I thought about the spy theory: he was too disorganized and depressed to be recruited as a spy, the chances of the Japanese government believing that they could fix that… I doubted it. It looked like the owner of this place had long passed the point of no return of the mental stability required for work in intelligence.

Serial killer theory made no sense in this case either. I doubted that a person who had so many trash bags stuck in the corridor left home often. Thus, leaving only the suicide or real accident as valid hypothesises of what happened here.

“I couldn't find his university diploma or phonebook, so I am not sure how to continue the investigation. He had no social network accounts registered on his name where I could gather more, nor does his name come up in search results with anything notable. He clearly had some fall-off or a tragedy, but what happened years ago probably did not relate to the case."

I remembered my brother's theory on suicides and opened chapter 1 of "To Another World with the Bow that Can Kill the Demon Lord". On page five a fat and ugly portrayed character gets hit by a truck. The next page is from the perspective of a newborn. The next one was similar: Truck accident, but this time the protagonist was greeted by a goddess with a revealing outfit who gave him superpowers on page 10.

I added to my recordings "Yoshiro Tanaka most likely committed suicide by throwing himself under a vehicle similar to the one in pulp literature he was consuming or died in an accident. He held no interest to intelligence, and I doubt a serial killer would target him."

I turned off the recording, most likely Yoshiro's case wasn't connected to the cases of the prodigies.

I put letters back, closed the curtains I had opened, and locked the side door that I entered through with my lockpicks.

The dawning sun greeted me as I reached home. I took a cigarette and processed what I had learned. I tried not to rush to conclusions, but one conclusion was obvious: I needed to take a long night's rest.