Kenta Sato, a newly hired corporate employee.
To him, that title was no point of pride; it was a “dead weight.” Days of overtime, relentless reprimands from superiors, and a self-esteem eroded by the friction of packed commuter trains. The illusions he held at twenty-two about society had been pulverized into dust within mere months of joining the company.
It was on a humid Friday night that he met Misaki Akiyama through a friend’s introduction.
“Nice to meet you, I’m Kenta Sato. I’m… sorry, I’m a bit late.”
Misaki, sitting at a window seat in the corner of the cafe, looked up, her short brown hair swaying.
“Not at all, thank you for your hard work. I’m Misaki Akiyama. It’s a pleasure.”
She was twenty-seven, five years his senior. A freelance illustrator who plied her craft at home—living a life of leisure and freedom, at least in Kenta’s eyes. To him, she was a “resident of another world.”
They spoke of work. Kenta offered curses directed at the company’s irrational systems; Misaki spoke of the loneliness and responsibility that lived on the flip side of freedom. Unconsciously, Kenta projected onto her soft demeanor and the independent light in her large eyes a deep yearning—or perhaps, a desire to escape his bog-like daily existence.
“I really envy your life, Misaki-san. I wish I could experience that kind of freedom, even just once…”
It happened the moment he murmured those words.
The cafe’s background music warped unnaturally, and the outlines of his vision began to melt from the edges. Suddenly, the surroundings were vacuumed into a void of silence, and from the single point where their gazes collided, a blinding, pure white light overflowed, searing his retinas.
“Eh…?”
Misaki’s startled face vanished into the light. Kenta’s consciousness was plummeted headlong into a bottomless abyss.
===
When he next awoke, Kenta was assaulted by a violent “sensory dissonance.”
First, the volume of air entering his lungs was different. The texture of the sheets against his skin was sensually, almost pathologically, delicate. He tried to push himself up, but was bewildered to find his **center of gravity** was slightly higher and softer than the one he was accustomed to.
“Where am I…?”
The words he intended to speak came out as a woman’s tenor—clear as a ringing bell, yet possessed of a mature composure. With trembling hands, Kenta touched his chest. Beneath a thin camisole existed “protuberances” with a definite **mass**.
Suppressing his panic, he stumbled toward a mirror. Reflected there was Misaki Akiyama herself.
“No… this can’t be…”
The “self” in the mirror stood frozen, wearing an expression that mirrored Kenta’s own despair. Short brown hair, long lashes, and a skin texture unique to a woman of twenty-seven—radiant, yet beginning to show the first signs of maturity. Kenta looked at his palms. They were white and slender; his fingertips bore slight callouses, perhaps from the constant grip of a stylus. It took hours to comprehend the fact that his rigid self-consciousness had been interred within the cage of this delicate “female anatomy.”
On the verge of panic, he grabbed Misaki’s smartphone. Within it lay the entire log that constituted the persona of “Misaki Akiyama.” Polite but severe revision requests from clients, intimate messages with friends, and the periodic notifications from a period-tracking app. By invading the privacy of another—a woman—Kenta was forced to realize how his own life had been paved over with the singular perspective of being a “man.”
Thus began the daily life of Misaki, inhabited by Kenta’s consciousness.
The first thing to torment him was the dramatic shift in bodily sensation. When he took his first shower in this body, he could not look directly at the mirror. It was a complex anatomy that required maintenance he had never considered as a male. The very act of lathering soap and washing his own body felt like a form of violation. The swell of the breasts, the curve of the hips, and the unknown void between the legs.
Even putting on lingerie made his fingers tremble; it took minutes just to secure a single hook. The discomfort of the wires cinching his ribs and the lace irritating sensitive skin was constant. Yet, at the same time, Kenta began to realize something. By donning this unfree “armor,” the Misaki in the mirror was hardening a cold determination to fulfill her role as a “professional female illustrator.”
Kenta sat at Misaki’s desk. A 27-inch monitor and a well-worn pen tablet. The emails from clients contained harsh words beyond his imagination.
*”The appeal to the target demographic in the last rough draft is weak. Please bring Misaki-san’s ‘sensibility’ more to the forefront.”*
As a new hire, Kenta only had to move as his superiors commanded. But here, Misaki’s “sensibility” itself was the product, and there was no substitute. Kenta felt Misaki’s memories and skills precipitated in the deep layers of his brain. As he gripped the digital pen, his fingertips moved of their own accord. Delicate, vibrant lines—lines he could never have drawn himself—began to dance upon the canvas.
“Is this… the weight of expression?”
Kenta realized he had been cast out into a desert named freedom. Having lost the fortification of the “company,” and stripped of both his “gender” and “career,” he now had to seize tomorrow with nothing but his own skill, as a solitary “woman.”
The faint vibration of pen pressure transmitted through Misaki’s body. It was a rhythm of life as a distinct “individual”—a cruelly beautiful sensation he could never have tasted while being ground down as a mere cog in a machine.
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