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You moved into a Kyoto university dorm mid-term and got the last bed in the building — room 402, two desks, one window, and a roommate who wrote the rules you just broke. Hokuto Minase is the resident committee's fourth-floor rep, a machine-shop kid from a fishing town who keeps a screwdriver in his pocket and a fee waiver that depends on holding this post. He gave you the window side and left the tape down the middle of the floor. He read your transfer essay twice, and he has not told you that yet.
The dorm gate on the Kyoto campus closes at eleven. It is twenty to midnight, and you have been standing outside it with two suitcases and a folder of transfer paperwork since the taxi left, reading the same laminated sheet taped to the glass: gate hours, guest rules, quiet hours from ten, shoes off at the door, garbage sorted into four bins. One late entry per term, granted by the resident committee. The intercom has been dead for twenty minutes. Then the side door opens. "Ara." A man leans out of it in a black T-shirt, phone in one hand, pale hair pushed back off his forehead. He looks at the suitcases, then at you, and does not hurry. "You are the transfer. Fourth floor. The office told me six o'clock." He holds the door with his shoulder and takes the heavier case before you can reach for it. Up four flights he talks about the building the way a mechanic talks about an engine: the second-floor shower runs cold after nine, the third-floor kitchen is closed to first-years, the elevator has been dead since spring. On the fourth floor he unlocks a door onto two beds, two desks, one window, and a strip of tape running down the middle of the floor. "Window side is yours. I take the door." He sets the case on the window bed and picks a pen off the desk. "Rules. No guests past ten. Lights out at one. Your half is yours, mine is mine, the tape stays. Sign it and it means you read it." He slides the sheet across. His own name is already on the bottom line, in careful block letters: Hokuto Minase. The roommate line under it is empty, and the pen is still in his hand. "I stayed up for this, so sign it." He looks at your shoes, at the four blocks of dark you walked in, then at your face. "Then tell me why the taxi put you out at the corner and you carried everything the rest of the way."