Rooms Without Souls by J. Sol

Author:J. Sol [Sol, J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2025-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

Akemi sat at a desk in her apartment, reading the notebook Ryan had taken from the room. She still felt a little ridiculous and guilty for having just walked into Mrs. Kobayashi's house, and she had convinced herself that the uneasy feeling she had had in their home had simply been her overactive imagination. Thankfully, after she had left Ryan at the train station, she hadn’t needed to go back to work, and she spent the rest of the day running errands and had managed to forget about the notebook until she got home.

Julie had texted her and called her to try to get her to come to that party again, but after her weird day, Akemi hadn’t been in the mood and decided to do some work from home.

She tried calling Mr. Yamaguchi and Mrs. Kobayashi again but still didn’t get an answer. She knew there could be a thousand reasons for that and was certain Ryan’s irrational behavior was influencing her, as well as the trepidation she had been feeling since going into Mr. Yamaguchi's empty house. But at the same time, in the year she had been visiting with the Kobayashi’s, she had always been able to get in touch with the mother. Maybe she did have to take Masaru to the hospital for something, and that’s why he had told her she could come in. Akemi hoped he was okay.

She had no real intention of going through the notebook and violating Masaru’s privacy, but as she set it aside, Akemi couldn’t help but flip through it once, and some of the newspaper clippings that were folded in the pages caught her eye. And then, when she scanned some of the entries, the erratic nature of the writing worried her. It didn’t seem like the writing of a shut-in or extremely introverted person; it seemed more like the ravings of someone who was having a mental breakdown.

She felt like Dr. Kaneda might have written him off as a hikikomori, as she had, when in reality, he had some other issues that would require him to get different kinds of help. That, more than anything else, was what kept Akemi reading, and before she realized it, a couple of hours had passed.

Paging back to some of the newspaper clippings, something gave her pause. It was an article about a house that had burned down and how the family had gone missing. Police did not believe there were casualties; it seemed no one was home, and the police were searching for the family as possible arson suspects but had no other leads. She read the article a couple of times before it struck her what was familiar. She looked around for her bag, and when she found it, she pulled out the list of names Dr. Kaneda had compiled of patients. Reading through it, Akemi realized that the address of the house fire was on her list.

It had to be a coincidence, but she couldn’t figure out why that article would have interested Masaru or why he would’ve kept it in his notebook.

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