Chapter 1: Six-Oh-One
Nanami Kento has lived in apartment 4B for nineteen months, and in that time the building has given him exactly nothing to object to. That is why he chose it. The walls are thick enough that he has never learned his neighbours' names. The lift is slow but honest. The convenience store on the corner stocks the good sparkling water and closes its hot-food case at eight, which is a kind of discipline he respects.
He comes home at six-twenty most evenings. He leaves the office (the word he uses for it, even in his own head, because "the place where I am paid to kill things" is not a phrase a reasonable man thinks while waiting for a train) at six exactly. He has a watch for this. It was expensive. He considers it the single best investment of his adult life, ahead of the apartment and well ahead of the two years he spent at a securities firm learning that there is more than one way for a job to eat you alive.
On the first Monday of October, he gets out of the lift at six-nineteen and the corridor smells like bread.
Not supermarket bread. Not the sweet, airy, faintly chemical milk loaf from the konbini. This is the smell of a crust going dark in real heat, of rye and something sour underneath it, of butter that somebody has browned on purpose. It is coming from 4C, which has been empty since the summer.
He stands outside his own door with his keys in his hand for longer than he would like to admit.
Then he goes inside, removes his tie, eats the onigiri he bought for dinner, and spends the rest of the evening very aware of the wall between his kitchen and the next one.
On Tuesday it happens again. On Wednesday, he realises it is not a coincidence.
He is sitting at his table at six-oh-four with his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, drinking a glass of water he does not want, when he hears it through the wall: a muffled electronic beep, the clank of an oven door, and then, ninety seconds later, the smell. He looks at his watch. He thinks about Monday and Tuesday. He looks at his watch again.
Whoever lives next door starts baking at six-oh-one.
It should not bother him. It is a neighbour making bread at a sensible hour, quietly, in their own home. If he described the situation to anyone at work, Gojo would laugh until he fell off something and Ijichi would apologise to him on the neighbour's behalf. It is not a problem. It is, objectively, the opposite of a problem.
The problem is that Nanami's only rule is that six o'clock belongs to him, and for three days running somebody else has been walking into it carrying a tray of something that smells better than anything he has eaten since August.
On Thursday, at six-twenty-two, he knocks on the door of 4C.
You open it with your elbow because your hands are occupied. One holds a serrated knife. The other holds half a loaf of something with a crust so dark it is almost mahogany, the crumb inside full of uneven holes, still breathing steam. There is flour on your forearms up to the elbow and a smear of it across one cheekbone, and your hair is pinned up with what he is fairly sure is a chopstick. You are wearing an apron that says, in faded English, KNEAD TO KNOW BASIS.
"Oh," you say. "Hi. Is it the mixer? The mixer's loud. I put a towel under it. I can put two towels under it."
"It isn't the mixer," says Nanami.
"Is it the smell? People complain about the smell, sometimes, which I don't understand, because it's bread, but I had a landlord in Osaka who said it gave her migraines." You tilt your head. "You don't look like you have migraines. You look like you give them."
He has been told this before, in less direct terms. He finds he doesn't mind it as much coming from someone holding a knife and a loaf.
"I live in 4B," he says. "I wanted to introduce myself. Nanami."
"Ah." Your eyes go from his face to the loaf in your hand and back again, and he watches you arrive at the correct conclusion about why he is actually here. To your credit, you do not say it out loud. You just turn the loaf so he can see the cut side. "I've been testing a rye-wheat sourdough for a café in Nakameguro. They want it by the first of November and they want it to be, quote, 'Like Copenhagen but with soul.' I don't know what that means. Do you?"
"It means they want it more sour than is popular in Tokyo and they want to charge eight hundred yen a slice."
You blink at him. Then you laugh, a short surprised sound like he has knocked something off a shelf. "Okay. Okay, that's actually helpful. Do you want to try it?"
"I wouldn't want to impose."
"You knocked on my door," you point out. "Six-twenty, on the dot. That's not a man who doesn't want to impose. That's a man who's been smelling this since Monday."
Six-twenty-two, he does not say. He takes the slice you cut for him instead. It is still warm, the crust shattering in a way that sends crumbs down his shirt, the inside tangy and dense and threaded with caraway. He chews. You watch him chew. He has been in rooms with special grade curses that felt less like an evaluation.
"Well?" you say.
"The crust is excellent," says Nanami. "The crumb is slightly underproofed at the centre. You can see it there, where the holes close up. I'd give it another forty minutes in the cold, or drop your starter percentage. And the caraway is doing too much. It's covering the rye instead of supporting it."
You stare at him. "Who are you?"
"Your neighbour."
"No, but who are you. What do you do?"
He considers the question. He has several answers prepared for this, for dentists and taxi drivers and the man at the dry cleaner. "Consulting," he says.
"Consulting." You narrow your eyes. "Consulting on what? Bread?"
"Risk."
"That's so vague it's almost rude."
"It's a vague industry," says Nanami, and then, because it would be ungracious not to, "The bread is very good. Thank you. I'll let you get back to it."
He is two steps down the corridor when you say, "Wait," and he turns to find the rest of the half-loaf being held out to him, wrapped in a clean tea towel.
"I can't take that."
"You can. I've got four more of them in there and the café won't see any of them. I live alone and if I eat all this rye I'll die." You push it at his chest until he has no choice but to put his hands up and take it. "Tell me what you think of tomorrow's. I'm dropping the caraway."
"I don't accept bribes," he says, holding the bread.
"It's not a bribe. A bribe is when I want something." You lean against your doorframe, flour and all, and look up at him with an expression he can't quite read. "I just want to know if I'm right."
So begins the routine, and Nanami, who loves a routine more than he has ever loved a person, cannot quite work out how it got past him.
On Friday there is a paper bag hanging from his door handle when he gets home. Inside it is a smaller loaf, no caraway, and a sticky note in handwriting that slants hard to the right: PROOFED 40 MIN LONGER. HAPPY NOW?
He eats a slice standing at the counter. Then he finds a pen.
Crumb: much improved, more open, even through the centre. Crust: two minutes too long, the base is bitter. Flavour: rye is now audible. I'd consider a lower oven temperature for the last ten minutes. Thank you.
He sticks the note to your door with the tape from his desk drawer, and then stands in his own hallway for a moment feeling the specific embarrassment of a man who has just written a performance review for a loaf of bread.
On Saturday, a new bag. HOW DO YOU KNOW ALL THIS. ARE YOU A BAKER IN DISGUISE.
No, he writes back. I just eat a great deal of bread. The milk bread this time is too sweet for my taste but would sell well. The salt butter roll is perfect and I would like to formally request more of them.
On Sunday: REQUEST DENIED. EARN IT.
How? he writes.
TELL ME WHAT RISK YOU CONSULT ON.
He does not answer that one. He does, however, leave a bottle of white wine outside your door that pairs well with the roll, which he thinks is a fair trade, and on Monday there are four salt butter rolls in the bag instead of two.
He learns things about you in sticky notes. You worked for six years at a hotel bakery in Osaka, starting at three in the morning, and you quit in the spring after your head baker threw a sheet tray at the wall beside your head and nobody did anything. You moved to Tokyo because you had a cousin here and a café owner who liked your focaccia on Instagram. You are going to open your own place. You don't know where or when. You bake at six-oh-one because the oven in 4C is an antique that needs an hour to heat properly, and you put it on when you get home from the café kitchen you rent in the mornings, and the hour lands where it lands.
He learns that you sing while you shape loaves, badly, mostly songs from dramas he has never watched. The walls are thick, but not that thick.
He does not tell you much about himself. You do not seem to need him to. That, more than the bread, is the part he keeps returning to on the train home: that a person can stand in the space between two apartments for a week and want nothing from him except an honest opinion.
On the second Friday, he comes home at six-twenty-one and the corridor doesn't smell of anything.
He notices it in the lift, before the doors have even finished opening, a lack where there should be crust and steam. He tells himself it's nothing. You have a life. You could be out. You could be ill. You could have decided, quite sensibly, that the strange man next door who writes notes like an auditor is not worth four salt butter rolls a day.
Your door is shut. The bag isn't there.
He goes inside and takes off his jacket and his tie and puts the kettle on and does not think about it. He thinks about it while the kettle boils. He thinks about it while the water goes into the pot. He is standing at the counter, letting the tea steep, when the hairs on his arms lift all at once.
It is faint. Low grade, barely a smear. The kind of thing a window would mark on a map and someone like him would clear in thirty seconds on a slow afternoon. But it is close, and it is coming through the wall, and it smells (the way they smell to him, under the nose, like something left wet in the dark) as if it has been there for a while.
There is a knock on his door.
When he opens it, you are standing in the corridor in your coat and outdoor shoes, keys clenched in your fist. There is no flour on you. You look like you have been standing in your own entranceway for a long time deciding whether to do this.
"I'm sorry," you say. "I know it's after six. I know that's your thing. I've noticed that's your thing." You swallow. "Can I ask you something weird?"
"Yes."
You glance back at your own door, and for the first time since he has known you, you look frightened.
"There's something in my kitchen," you say. "I've seen it before, in other places. Not often. Only out of the side of my eye. But it's sitting on my oven and it hasn't moved for an hour, and I've never told anyone I can see them because they'd think I'd lost my mind." Your voice wavers, then steadies. "You opened the door and looked straight past me at my kitchen wall, like you already knew where it was. Can you see it too?"
Nanami looks at his watch. Six-thirty-four.
Then he unbuttons his cuffs.