The Strange Incense
The room was filled with a unique sense of stagnation, like the slow process of a carcass returning to the earth.
It was a two-story wooden apartment, thirty-five years old. Situated near a crossing on the Seibu Shinjuku Line, the building leaked the sound of creaking materials and faint vibrations every time a train rattled past. The tatami mats in the six-mat room had long since lost their original color, scorched by the merciless western sun that beat in through the window.
Takuma sat on the edge of his perpetual futon and lit a suspicious stick of incense he had found in the deep reaches of the internet—advertised to “induce astral projection”. There was the dry snap of a matchstick. Immediately, a plume of smoke rose, carrying a cloying sweetness similar to cheap vanilla, underpinned by the rancid stench of scorched old grease—an odor that carried a premonition of decay.
“…This again.”
He inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs. The mucous membranes of his throat grew grainy, and a sensation like a numbing of the core of his brain spread through him. For Takuma, these few minutes were his only salvation.
He was in his mid-twenties. His body should have still been young, but the heavy labor at the day-hire logistics warehouse had stripped away his vitality, transforming him into nothing more than a “lump of meat known as labor power”. A flabby stomach, a lower back that screamed with constant dull pain, and hollow eyes lacking any vista for the future.
As the smoke bleached his vision white, his physical sensations suddenly vanished. The weight of his internal organs, the sluggishness of his limbs—the “shackles of the flesh” that had held them in place snapped audibly.
“…I’m floating.”
His field of vision rose slowly, approaching the soot-stained grain of the ceiling. Looking down, he saw his own “husk” sprawled below. Pale arms peeking out from a tattered T-shirt. His own body, mouth half-open, repeating shallow breaths. To his astral self, it looked like nothing more than an unwieldy burden.
Ignoring the laws of physics, Takuma drifted through the wall. His destination: the adjacent room. A woman named Yukiko lived there. She was a gloomy single woman over forty-five, perpetually carrying the fatigue of life on her shoulders. She reportedly worked stocking shelves at a supermarket; whenever they passed in the hallway, she was a background presence who merely offered a small, downcast nod.
However, that “background” room was also filled with the same smoke as Takuma’s. To his surprise, Yukiko was also drifting through the air as an astral form, while her body lay prone on the tatami. Her soul looked even more aged than her chronological years—a shadow-like entity tinged with a dim hue of obsession and a certain dampness.
Before any sense of kinship at finding a fellow “escapist,” Takuma was driven by an unspeakable sense of omnipotence.
“…I can do it. I can swap us.”
An ungrounded conviction. His naked consciousness reached out toward Yukiko’s soul. He seized her drifting spirit as if grabbing a tattered old rag. She tried to resist, but her soul lacked the tension of life. Takuma dragged her across the wall and violently slammed her soul into “his twenty-something body” lying on the bed in the next room.
Then, Takuma slid into Yukiko’s body—the vessel of the “middle-aged woman” left vacant by its master. He was sucked into that frame, which had succumbed to gravity and was etched with fine wrinkles.
“…!”
Violent vertigo. His vision narrowed rapidly, and colors grew muddy. Upon entering Yukiko’s body, the first thing Takuma felt was an overwhelming, “unpleasant weight”. He became aware of the arrangement of internal organs—something he had never considered once as a twenty-year-old man. There was a strange sensation of ptosis, as if his insides were being dragged down several centimeters toward his lower abdomen by gravity. His lungs felt smaller; with every breath, his ribcage creaked uncomfortably.
And then, the chest.
Two “mounds of flesh” that had never existed before intruded into the lower edge of Takuma’s vision. They were neither sexual symbols nor enticing fruits. They were merely “weights” that forced his upper body into a slouch via bra straps digging into his shoulders.
“Heavy… what is this…?”
He took a step onto the tatami. His knee joints creaked as if grinding sand. In the depths of his lower back, a chronic heaviness—likely accumulated from years of standing work—settled like silt. For the first time, Takuma realized how “automatically” a twenty-something body moved. Yukiko’s body demanded a clear “command” and “effort” for every single motion. Even moving a finger carried a resistance, as if pushing through viscous air.
However, a toxin far exceeding that physical pain dominated Takuma’s brain: the transgressive pleasure of having usurped another person’s life.
“Haha… I’ve really become an old woman.”
Takuma (as Yukiko) touched his face with trembling hands. The skin felt dry, pores open, with small patches of keratin buildup beside the nose. The flesh of the cheeks had lost its elasticity, sagging slightly in obedience to gravity. He crawled toward an old full-length mirror in the corner of the room. The reflection was the “neighbor, Ms. Yukiko” he knew, yet it was an anomalous creature harboring a nearly malevolent curiosity deep within its eyes.
“Terrible… so this was your ‘reality’.”
Using Yukiko’s fingers, he toyed with the face in the mirror. He pulled up the corners of his eyes, trying to forcibly smooth the crow’s feet. But as soon as he released his fingers, the wrinkles etched themselves even deeper. He was now verifying the female anatomy—which he had previously viewed only as an object for “observation” or “consumption”—from the inside, as a “function,” or rather, a “defective product”.
The sensation of emptiness between his legs felt like a fatal deficiency. The heated, protruding organ that had supported Takuma’s identity was gone; in its place was only a cold, damp sense of occlusion. The spatial sense of his urethra and internal organs was skewed, making him feel as though the body’s center of gravity had been entirely lost.
He violently threw open Yukiko’s closet. Inside were drab office clothes, a supermarket uniform, and several worn-out sets of casual wear. Deep in the back, there was an out-of-place bundle. Takuma dragged it out. It was a maid uniform made of polyester, emitting a cheap luster. The frills were stiff, and the lace looked as though it would prick the skin. It was likely the wreckage of a distorted desire Yukiko had harbored in secret.
“Not bad. I’ll wear this and act even more like an ‘old lady’ for you.”
Takuma pressed the costume against Yukiko’s body. The act of changing clothes was itself heavy labor. Simply reaching his arms behind his back to pull up the zipper sent a sharp pain through his shoulder blades. The apron strings tightening around the waist bit mercilessly into the soft adipose tissue of the abdomen, making his breathing even shallower.
The figure in the mirror went beyond the comical; it was pathetic. The white-trimmed headband unnaturally emphasized Yukiko’s hair, which had begun to grey. It was not a “pretty girl” cosplay. It was a record of a disastrous failure—the attempt of a woman exhausted by life to decorate herself as a “sexual symbol” after losing her sanity.
“…Ah, aah, aaah.”
He tried sounding his throat. What came out was the parched, withered voice of a woman. Every time that voice reached his ears, Takuma fell into the illusion that he was rapidly dissolving from the young man “Takuma” into the attribute of an “anonymous middle-aged woman”. Adaptation was not salvation. It was merely the process of the brain becoming numb to the sensation of breaking down.
Behind him, a scream erupted from Takuma’s room. Yukiko, borrowing “Takuma’s flesh,” had witnessed her original vessel—and the “defilement” that vessel was currently undergoing.
But Takuma laughed. Using Yukiko’s face, he distorted the corners of his mouth hideously. He was attempting to forcibly convert the body’s screams of “heavy, itchy, painful” into “pleasure” as a side effect.
Unaware that this was the first step toward an irreversible ruin.
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