Late one night, a man quietly pried open the window of a house.
His name was Murata.
Desperate for money, he had finally crossed a line he had always sworn he would never cross.
Burglary.
From the outside, the house had looked promising. The people who lived there seemed well-off, and the window lock was an embarrassingly simple one.
Murata slipped inside with practiced caution.
The room beyond was dimly lit and, to his surprise, remarkably tidy.
“All right… Where do they keep the valuables?”
He whispered the words to himself as he scanned the room.
Then—
Something moved at the edge of his vision.
Murata spun around.
A woman was standing there.
Wearing a sailor-style school uniform.
“…What?”
For a moment, Murata simply stared.
A woman in a school uniform? In the middle of the night?
His first thought was that she must be the homeowner’s daughter.
But almost immediately, something felt wrong.
She was clearly not a teenage girl.
The face above the sailor collar belonged to a middle-aged woman, with tired eyes and features that suggested she had lived through considerably more than a few years of school.
“What the hell!? Who are you!?”
The woman recoiled.
“I should be asking you that! Who are you!? What are you doing in here?”
An absurd silence followed.
Murata’s mind raced as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing.
Wait.
Is this woman just… wearing her daughter’s uniform?
But that hardly mattered.
“Whatever! I’m grabbing you before you—”
Murata took one step forward.
His foot caught on a bag lying on the floor.
“Whoa—!”
He went down hard.
His head struck the floor.
And everything disappeared.
—
When Murata regained consciousness, he immediately knew something was wrong.
“Ugh…”
He raised his hands.
Then froze.
“…What?”
They were not his hands.
They were smaller, softer, unmistakably feminine hands he had never seen before.
Murata stared at them.
Then slowly looked down.
The sailor uniform.
A completely different figure beneath it.
“WHAT THE HELL!?”
He scrambled to his feet.
“I’m… I’m a woman!?”
Murata rushed toward the nearest mirror.
The moment he saw his reflection, the blood drained from his face.
The middle-aged woman from before stared back at him.
Murata lifted a hand.
She lifted hers.
He touched his face.
Her fingers pressed against her cheek.
“No.”
He shook his head.
The woman in the mirror shook hers.
“No, no, no, no…”
He grabbed the sides of his face.
“What happened to me!?”
Then he heard it.
The front door.
Someone had come home.
Murata stiffened.
A moment later, a young woman entered the room.
She stopped dead.
Her eyes widened.
“Who are you!?”
Murata opened his mouth.
“And why are you wearing my uniform!?”
Murata looked down.
Then back at her.
“Wait! Hold on! I can explain!”
Although, of course, he absolutely could not.
The young woman backed away.
“I’m calling the police!”
“No, wait! Seriously, this isn’t what it looks like! I’m—”
Then Murata realized something.
He looked around the room.
The other woman was gone.
And suddenly, the truth became horrifyingly obvious.
“She was a burglar too…”
The middle-aged woman had not belonged here either.
She had been another intruder.
And now—
somehow—
they had switched bodies.
Worse, she had apparently escaped in Murata’s.
Leaving him behind.
In hers.
Wearing the homeowner’s daughter’s sailor uniform.
“Oh, you have GOT to be kidding me.”
—
The young woman frantically called the police.
Murata tried desperately to explain himself, but every version of the truth sounded more insane than the last.
“I’m not actually this woman!”
That did not help.
“I mean, I am right now, but I wasn’t earlier!”
That was worse.
“There was another burglar, and somehow I became her!”
Definitely worse.
By the time the police arrived, Murata had concluded that explaining the supernatural body swap was probably not going to save him.
So he ran.
Barely managing to escape, Murata disappeared into the night.
But there was one problem.
His body did not change back.
Not after ten minutes.
Not after an hour.
Not after he reached the other side of town.
Murata found himself hiding beneath a streetlight, still trapped inside the body of a middle-aged woman—
and still wearing a sailor uniform.
“Damn it!”
He pulled his borrowed coat more tightly around himself.
“Why the hell did this happen to me!?”
Fortunately, once the uniform was hidden beneath the coat, nobody on the street paid much attention to him.
To everyone else, he simply looked like an ordinary middle-aged woman heading home late at night.
That, however, created an entirely different problem.
Murata no longer looked like Murata.
He could hardly walk back into his old life while wearing someone else’s face.
And somewhere out there—
another burglar was apparently walking around in his body.
“What am I supposed to do now…?”
For the first time that night, Murata truly understood the scale of his predicament.
He had broken into a stranger’s house looking for money.
Instead, he had lost the one possession he had never imagined anyone could steal.
His own identity.
—
Days passed.
Then more.
Murata searched desperately for clues.
He tried to find the mysterious woman whose body he now inhabited.
He returned to the neighborhood surrounding the house.
He searched for any explanation of what had happened that night.
Nothing.
No matter what he tried, the face in the mirror remained the same.
Eventually, the impossible began turning into the merely inconvenient.
Murata learned how to arrange the unfamiliar hair.
How to move without constantly being startled by the body’s different balance and proportions.
How to answer strangers without reacting every time an unfamiliar female voice came out of his mouth.
And, most importantly—
how to keep the sailor uniform hidden beneath a coat whenever circumstances forced him to wear it.
“This is ridiculous…”
Murata muttered one evening as he examined himself in a mirror.
A middle-aged woman stared back.
The sailor collar was visible beneath the open coat.
“This seriously can’t be my life now.”
But for the moment—
it was.
The burglar who had entered that house as Murata was gone.
In his place was a mysterious middle-aged woman with no identity he could safely use, a sailor uniform that raised far too many questions, and absolutely no idea how to reclaim the body that had been stolen from him.
Murata continued searching for a way back.
But he would soon discover that the body swap itself had only been the beginning of his troubles.
Because somewhere in the city—
someone else was living behind Murata’s face.
And sooner or later, their paths would cross again.
Murata remained on the run.
Or perhaps it was more accurate to say that the person who had once been Murata was now living as the mysterious “middle-aged woman in a sailor uniform.”
All the while, he continued desperately searching for some way to regain his original body.
Night after night, he slipped into libraries and dug through books on occult phenomena, supernatural legends, and unexplained incidents.
He spent long hours in internet cafés scrolling through dubious message boards, searching for anyone who claimed to have experienced something similar.
Body swapping.
Possession.
Identity displacement.
Anything.
But no matter how hard he searched, he found nothing useful.
Until one night—
fate intervened in the most ridiculous way imaginable.
“Gah!”
Murata walked straight into a utility pole.
His forehead struck it with a solid thud.
For a fraction of a second, consciousness deserted him.
His vision spun.
The street warped around him as though the entire world had suddenly become liquid—
and then snapped back into place.
Murata opened his eyes.
Something was different.
Very different.
“…I’m back!?”
He rushed toward the nearest reflective window.
A man stared back at him.
A man.
For the first time in what felt like forever, Murata saw a masculine face in the glass.
“Yes!”
He looked down at himself.
Male hands.
A male frame.
His old sense of physical weight—
“No.”
His excitement vanished.
“Wait.”
Murata raised his hands closer to his face.
They were certainly a man’s hands.
But they were not his hands.
The bone structure was wrong.
They were broader and rougher, the fingers weathered in ways Murata did not recognize.
“This isn’t me…”
Slowly, he looked back at the glass.
The reflection belonged to a middle-aged man he had never seen before.
“Who the hell is this!?”
Murata stared in disbelief.
Then he remembered the impact.
The dizziness.
And the stranger who had passed close by only moments before.
Apparently, whatever had happened during his first transformation had not been a one-time accident.
Somehow, the blow to his head had triggered another swap.
And this time—
he had exchanged bodies with a completely random man.
Murata stood beneath the streetlight, trying to process the discovery.
Then, slowly, his shoulders relaxed.
“…Well.”
He examined the unfamiliar masculine body again.
“At least this is closer to normal.”
It was not his body.
But after spending so long trapped inside someone completely different, being male again should have felt reassuring.
For several moments, it did.
Then something else emerged.
A strange emptiness.
Murata frowned.
Something’s missing.
He shifted his weight.
The body responded predictably.
A heavier frame.
Broader shoulders.
A familiar masculine center of gravity.
Nothing about it should have bothered him.
And yet—
it did.
His memories returned to the body he had inhabited before.
The softer proportions.
The different distribution of weight.
The unfamiliar way clothing rested against him.
The strange awareness of moving through the world as a woman.
At first, every difference had horrified him.
Then he had adapted.
And somewhere during that adaptation, the unfamiliar had stopped feeling entirely unfamiliar.
Murata looked down at the man’s hands again.
They suddenly seemed almost disappointingly ordinary.
“…What the hell?”
He flexed his fingers.
Something inside him resisted the relief he thought he was supposed to feel.
I wanted to become a man again.
That had been the goal.
Hadn’t it?
But now that he was standing inside a male body once more, he discovered an uncomfortable truth.
He did not simply want to return to being male.
He wanted to return to being Murata.
And if that was impossible…
then perhaps the question of what body he wanted had become far more complicated than he had realized.
His thoughts returned once more to the woman’s body.
The softness.
The rounded silhouette.
That strange sense of experiencing the world from a completely different physical perspective.
He had spent so long trying to escape it that he had never seriously considered what it would feel like to lose it.
Until now.
“…I want more.”
The words escaped before Murata could stop them.
He stared at his reflection.
The middle-aged stranger stared back.
Murata slowly shook his head.
“No…”
He finally admitted what the thought meant.
“I want to be a woman again.”
It was not a joke.
Nor was it merely curiosity anymore.
The desire had taken root somewhere deeper.
He had discovered that the phenomenon could happen again.
That meant this body did not have to be permanent either.
And for the first time since the nightmare began, Murata was no longer thinking only about how to undo the swaps.
He was thinking about how to control them.
Somewhere in the city were thousands of possible lives.
Thousands of faces.
Thousands of bodies.
And if Murata could discover what triggered the exchange—
perhaps he could choose what he became next.
Standing beneath the cold glow of the streetlight, Murata slowly smiled.
His search had changed.
He was no longer merely looking for a way home.
Now he wanted to understand the power that had taken his body from him—
and find out just how far it could take him.
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