The rain whispered intimate secrets against the windows of the conference hall as Detective Arakawa Hajime-san stood at the podium. His slender frame, draped in his signature charcoal suit, seemed to absorb the harsh camera lights rather than reflect them. An unlit cigarette—his constant companion through decades of investigations—dangled from his lips like an unfinished thought.
How peculiar, Arakawa mused inwardly, that endings so often disguise themselves as beginnings.
His weathered hands, each crease and callus a testament to case files penned in the twilight hours, gripped the edges of the podium. The murmurs of the press corps subsided as he leaned toward the microphone.
"Today, I retire," he announced, his voice carrying the gentle authority of someone who had seen too much of humanity's shadow play.
The assembled journalists—their faces a collage of surprise and anticipation—erupted in a symphony of flashing cameras and overlapping questions. Arakawa raised one hand, and the chaos stilled like magic.
"But I leave behind my final gift to the world: my autobiography. It will not be published until after my death." His eyes drifted to the window, where raindrops traced patterns like tears on a mourner's face. "Consider it my confession."
A profound silence blanketed the room. Even the rain seemed to hesitate, as if eavesdropping on this pivotal moment.
"I will not take questions," Arakawa continued, a melancholy smile playing at the corners of his mouth. "After all, this story has only just begun."
As he turned to leave, his gaze fell upon the far corner of the room—a patch of shadow deeper than the rest. There stood a man dressed identically to himself, down to the unlit cigarette. Their eyes met in silent recognition, but Arakawa alone could see the grotesque wound that had opened the doppelgänger's throat like a second mouth, wet with crimson promises.
"Are you here to guide me home?" Arakawa thought, nodding imperceptibly to his spectral twin.
The apparition merely smiled, blood cascading down its collar.
Sunlight had just begun to paint the Tokyo skyline in hues of amber and rose when Arakawa Hajime's housekeeper discovered him. The detective's study—a sanctuary of leather-bound books and case files—had become the stage for his final scene.
The famous detective sat slumped over his antique desk, the polished wood drinking deeply of the blood that pooled around his outstretched arms. His throat bore a wound so precise it seemed almost artistic—a crimson smile carved below his chin. His own fingerprints adorned the knife that lay nearby, as if he had placed it down with ceremonial care.
Beside his cooling body, a single page torn from a manuscript caught the morning light. The paper—expensive stock, the kind reserved for precious documents—contained typed words that seemed to hover above the surface rather than rest upon it:
"Case File Zero: The First Murder I Ever Committed Was My Own."
The housekeeper would later tell police that as she backed away to call for help, she could have sworn she saw Arakawa's reflection in the window, standing behind his own corpse, watching her with sorrowful eyes.
Seven days after Arakawa's funeral—attended by colleagues but no family—Natsume Keigo received an unmarked package at his apartment. Rain tapped against his window like impatient fingers as he sliced through the packaging tape.
Keigo, whose true crime podcast "Unsolved Tokyo" barely paid his rent, had devoted three episodes to speculating about Arakawa's mysterious death. His small but devoted audience had been captivated by his theories about the detective's final message.
"No way," Keigo whispered, lifting the book from its nest of bubble wrap.
The cover was bound in deep burgundy leather that felt unnaturally warm to the touch. Golden characters caught the light of his desk lamp: "How I Committed Murder and Framed the Innocent" by Arakawa Hajime.
But this shouldn't exist yet, Keigo thought, heart racing. The autobiography wasn't supposed to be published until—
A slip of paper fell from between the pages, bearing a single line of handwritten text: "For Natsume Keigo, who will understand what others cannot."
His apartment suddenly felt too small, the walls leaning inward as if listening. Outside, the rain intensified, drumming a warning he couldn't decipher.
"Just a few pages," he promised himself, settling into his reading chair. "Just to verify it's authentic."
The first chapter began conventionally enough—Arakawa's childhood in post-war Japan, his first encounters with crime in his neighborhood. But halfway through, the text began to... shift. Words rearranged themselves before Keigo's eyes, letters sliding across the page like water droplets on glass.
Keigo blinked hard, certain he was hallucinating from lack of sleep. When he looked again, the chapter had transformed entirely:
"I remember my first crime. The victim's name was Natsume Keigo."
A dizzying vertigo seized him. The walls of his apartment seemed to breathe, the wallpaper peeling backward like film rewinding through a projector. His phone vibrated on the table, its screen displaying not a caller ID but a churning mass of static.
With trembling fingers, he answered.
"You opened the gate. Now you must walk through," a voice whispered—Arakawa's voice, but fractured, as if speaking through water.
The book in his lap pulsed with unnatural warmth. Keigo understood with devastating clarity: this was no memoir. It was a time trap—a cursed manuscript that would drag him through the fragmented history of Arakawa's investigations, forcing him to witness—perhaps even participate in—the detective's most haunting cases.
Keigo stumbled to his bathroom, desperate to splash cold water on his face, to anchor himself in reality. The faucet sputtered before releasing a stream that seemed too viscous in the dim light.
When he raised his head to the mirror, the reflection that gazed back wasn't his own.
It was Arakawa Hajime—not the elderly detective from the press conference, but a younger version, perhaps in his thirties. Blood trickled from a thin line across his throat, yet his lips curved upward in a contemplative smile.
"What does it mean to solve a crime?" the reflection asked, its voice echoing not in the bathroom but inside Keigo's mind. "Is it to identify the culprit? Or is it to understand the narrative that made the crime inevitable?"
The lights flickered, plunging the bathroom into momentary darkness. When they returned, Keigo heard the whisper of pages turning from the hallway—a sound both delicate and menacing.
One by one, spectral hands pushed through the walls of his apartment, each holding a torn page from the autobiography. The pages, suspended in air, each bore a single word written in Arakawa's distinctive hand:
"Innocent."
The bathroom door slammed shut with such force that the mirror trembled. When Keigo turned back to it, his own reflection had returned—pale, wide-eyed, terrified. But he was not alone.
Behind him stood a woman with her head twisted completely backward, her inverted face hovering over his shoulder. Her eyes, rolled back until only the whites were visible, somehow still seemed to see him. Her mouth moved with painful slowness:
"Frame me next."
Keigo's scream died in his throat as the pages outside began to swirl, creating a vortex of words and memories not his own. The autobiography had claimed its reader, and the boundary between past and present, between detective and suspect, between the living and the dead, had dissolved like ink in water.
The first echo had appeared. The investigation had begun.