Remnants of a Chinese Dream: The Silken Touch Across Boundaries
A basement café, sequestered from the city’s cacophony.
Amber lighting cast a dim glow upon aged leather chairs and walls stained with the lingering scent of tobacco smoke.
Takeshi stared at the coffee cooling in his cup, unable to suppress the irregular pounding of his heart.
Usually, their words were exchanged through a smartphone screen, lost in a sea of anonymity. Interpretations of anime, critiques of new games, and the state of subcultures in their respective countries. The woman he met there, “Riina,” was the most intellectually stimulating presence in his life.
But today, that “other side of the screen” was manifesting into reality.
“I hope I didn’t keep you waiting, Takeshi-san.”
A low, slightly husky alto voice washed over him from above.
As Takeshi looked up, he was met with a scene that felt devoid of reality.
Black silk, steeped in the colors of deep night. A cheongsam—rigorous enough to cover her to the neck, yet cruel in how it brought every curve of her body into sharp relief. Riina stood there like a phantom strayed from an old continental film, or perhaps a priceless jade carving.
“…Riina-san.”
Takeshi’s voice was pathetically hoarse.
Her presence was far beyond anything he could have imagined from her online icon or a few landscape photos. Her eyes were an abyssal black, seemingly harboring the quiet, overwhelming gravity of a soil layered with thousands of years of history.
“We finally meet. …Your face is much more ‘honest’ than I expected.”
Riina sat across from him. Every time she moved, the faint yet seductive rustle of silk echoed in the narrow booth. The heavy scent of an exotic, musk-like perfume began to slowly erode Takeshi’s reason.
Initially, their conversation was held together by their shared hobbies of anime and manga. However, Riina’s interpretations of these “stories” were far more visceral than anything Takeshi knew, occasionally revealing a cold, piercing depth.
“Japanese anime is skilled at giving shape to lost dreams. But in my country, stories were always weapons used to survive the ‘present.'”
Her words carried a “reality” heavier than any knowledge Takeshi had encountered before. Gradually, he found himself overwhelmed not just by her beauty, but by the weight of the alien culture encapsulated within her physical form.
“Tell me, Takeshi-san. What do you think would happen if our positions were swapped?”
Suddenly, Riina posed the question. Her eyes held the sharpness of a raptor eyeing its prey, yet the tenderness of a compassionate Madonna.
“What… what do you mean by that?”
“Exactly what I said. You take on my country, my language, my flesh; I take on your daily life. …To cross the boundary and completely usurp the ‘life’ of another. Does that not interest you?”
Across the table, Riina gently placed her hand over Takeshi’s. Her hand was startlingly slender and cold. But the moment her fingertips touched him, a violent ringing pierced his brain.
“Do you want to try?”
Riina’s lips curved into a seductive arc.
Before Takeshi could utter an answer, the world began to transform.
His vision distorted, and the walls of the café began to undulate like ripples from a stone cast into water. The frame of thought he had constructed in Japanese was dismantled piece by piece. In its place, a flood of kanji written with heavy brushstrokes and unknown syllables with musical intonations surged into his mind.
“——gh, hah…!”
A burning, hot mass rose in the back of his throat. His heartbeat was rewritten into a thin, rapid rhythm entirely different from the one he knew.
“…A… ah…”
When he opened his eyes, Takeshi tried to scream. But what escaped his lips was a dignified yet somehow sorrowful feminine sigh, like the sound of silver bells rolling.
His field of vision had dropped by several centimeters. And above all, his “sense of touch” had gone mad.
The sensation of the cheap T-shirt he had been wearing vanished. Instead, his entire body was dominated by the “pressure of silk”—smooth, yet chillingly tight against his skin. The standing collar dug into his neck, forcing his chin upward. From his armpits to his waist, he felt a sense of constriction as if his body were being pressed into a single “mold.”
With trembling hands, Takeshi touched his lap. There, he found supple legs wrapped in black silk that should not have been his. From a slit cut deep into the side, skin as white as snow peeked through.
“…What… is this…?”
He didn’t even need a mirror. The very air enveloping him had been completely replaced by that of a foreign land, and that of a woman.
“Are you surprised, Takeshi-san?”
In front of him, he heard his own familiar voice.
He looked up to see his own body sitting there. The slightly hunched shoulders, the somewhat unrefined expression. But those eyes—they narrowed with pleasure while harboring that same mystical light belonging to Riina.
Riina (now in Takeshi’s body) looked at Takeshi’s large palms with interest, curling the fingers one by one.
“A man’s body is so rugged, so hard. Like a rock formed specifically to reject the outside world. …With this, even the cold winds of Japan won’t be so frightening.”
“Ri-Riina-san… please, change me back. This is wrong.”
Takeshi (now in Riina’s body) pleaded desperately. But the voice that passed through Riina’s throat was too beautiful; it sounded like nothing more than the lament of a tragic heroine.
“I refuse. We’ve gone through the trouble of crossing the boundary, haven’t we? For a while, you should try traveling through the ‘foreign country’ that is my body.”
Using Takeshi’s body, Riina stood up gracefully.
“I’ll be taking your room key and your smartphone. …I’ve decided to experience the ‘Japanese dream’ you love so much directly with my own soul.”
Whether she had instantly mastered the habits of Takeshi’s body or not, she walked with a stride far more dignified than his own as she disappeared from the basement café toward the surface.
The light of a summer sunset poured down from above, leaking through the basement entrance to illuminate Takeshi in the black cheongsam.
Takeshi sank deep into the chair. The tightening of the silk continued to silently demand that he behave as “Riina.”
An exotic shadow. It was far heavier than the “stories” he had once admired—clinging to his skin as a sensual, inescapable reality.
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