Chapter 48: What Kind Of Existence Is Sakamoto Ken?
Hoshihara Ai first confirmed the place in the dream where she got drunk, then visited Sakamoto Ken’s residence, as well as the art academy he attended.
The residence was Room 403 in an apartment, but a woman lived there, not that Sakamoto Ken.
But she searched for the keywords “Sakamoto Ken” and “manga” and found some related information online.
A person named Sakamoto Ken drew a manga called 《Chainsaw Man》, published on a WEB site under JUMP.
And when she searched 《Young Lady, Sniper Rifle, and Pantyhose!》, the result showed the pen name Miyuki Haru.
These two manga were released in the same week; one book title matched her memory, and one author name matched her memory.
If it was just one dream about the “future,” Hoshihara Ai wouldn’t be taking it so seriously now.
More importantly, in recent days, she would occasionally recall those scenes.
The scenes were extraordinarily real—vision, hearing, smell, touch… every detail during the process of being intimate with him.
Hoshihara Ai felt it was impossible for her to be someone who always had erotic dreams, especially since it was always the same unfamiliar man; she had consulted a psychologist, and this situation was extremely unusual.
Then she continued searching for clues, recording every bit of information from each fragmented dream and piecing them together to form a rough timeline.
First, she established a time baseline, the assignment that depressed her enough to go drinking; the outline was proposed within 2015, so the time point of their first meeting Time0=2015.
Then, before the ending, she remembered mentioning to him something like “Let’s go to the World Expo together.”
And the Osaka World Expo is scheduled for 2025, so T2=2025.
There was also a key point: for a period, restaurants and businesses nationwide were announced closed, all foreign flights were suspended, and there was no one on the streets.
That abnormal time seemed to be around 2020.
At that time, she should have gotten two Olympic Games opening ceremony tickets early from school or somewhere, but the Olympic Games was postponed, and she discussed it with Sakamoto Ken.
As for the reason for the postponement, her memory was fuzzy and she couldn’t recall.
But she remembered suffering from a very uncomfortable respiratory illness in the dream, which he took care of at home; after she recovered, he got it too, and it dragged on for about a month.
Since it was an Olympic Games postponement, the time point was after the originally scheduled time in the summer of 2020.
Unable to determine the exact time, she estimated it as the midpoint T1 between T0 and T2.
Near T1, there was another one that could serve as an anchor point.
That was during the time Sakamoto Ken had a fever; she read a novel he recommended, which was translated from Chinese, called 《Three-Body》.
Sakamoto Ken knew she liked science fiction, and this book had just been published in Japanese version, so he recommended it to her; she remembered this conversation clearly.
She was quite surprised by this scene in the dream; she didn’t expect Sakamoto Ken to pay attention to Chinese science fiction novels, because she had already read the English version of 《Three-Body》 by late 2014, right when it was published in North America, and she had asked a friend to buy it for her.
So now there were three time anchor points, corresponding respectively to:
Starting T0=2015, which is now.
Midpoint T1=2020, anchor points include 《Three-Body》, infection, Olympic postponement.
Ending T2=2025, anchor point is World Expo.
With these three anchor points, and through impressions of their clothing and surroundings when together, she distinguished the four seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter.
The next part was the hardest to recall, because in that dream, what she remembered most clearly was everything related to him; the less related to him, the fuzzier the impression.
Flipping further in the notebook, there was a folded Tokyo map clipped here.
Unfolding the map, it had circles, dots, lines marked on it, with notes beside them.
In the dream, the “time” aspect wasn’t that difficult, but confirming the “locations” became extremely hard.
There were a few key pieces of information.
First was Kanzaki Art Academy, the art academy he attended.
The time could be confirmed as enrollment in 2015.
She drew a circle at Kanzaki Art Academy.
Then Ueno Zoo; in that dream, she went to the zoo with him to see a giant panda named “Xiang Xiang.”
She couldn’t remember the giant panda’s appearance, only the scene of surging crowds and the conversation with Sakamoto Ken.
After searching, she found that Ueno Zoo currently has no giant panda by that name.
So it could be inferred that the time was before T1 from today.
She also drew a circle at Ueno Zoo.
Finally, her own location, University of Tokyo, which was also a destination they dated at.
Similarly, she drew a red circle.
Starting from these three red circles, using the approximate duration and direction of riding vehicles together, and the vague outlines of destinations, she marked them on Google Street View, then visited in person to confirm that what she saw matched the general outlines in the dream.
Hoshihara Ai also marked some definite dating spots with him, places like distant stations, coffee shops, riverside paths.
Hoshihara Ai was certain she had never been to these places nor seen introductions to them on the internet.
After all, they were ordinary unremarkable locations, with extremely low probability of appearing in the media.
Why did I dream of places I’ve never been to?
Since these locations seen in the dream really exist in reality.
Then, will the events that happened in the dream also occur in reality?
The ending of the dream, where she and two other women killed Sakamoto Ken together, was no longer important.
What was important was, how did the 【information】 from 【2025】 in the 【future】 get transmitted to my brain in 【2015】 now?
This naturally led Hoshihara Ai to think of quantum-related theories.
Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.”
That is, two particles in an entangled state, no matter how far apart, operating on one instantly affects the other.
This influence is superluminal, ignoring spatial distance.
So, could there also be entanglement in the time dimension?
Me now in 2015 and me in the future in 2025—are we inherently in a time-entangled state spanning ten years?
Under normal circumstances, this entanglement is stable and unobservable.
But in 2025, an extremely intense “observation event” occurred: her and two other women teaming up to stab to death the core of it all—that man named 【Sakamoto Ken】.
Sakamoto Ken’s death, and the extreme anger she experienced at that moment, as well as the regret and remorse, this intense emotional outburst caused the quantum state of 【me in 2025】 to collapse instantly, transmitting the result to 【me in 2015】 in a moment, ignoring spacetime.
The dream was the decoding and visualization process her brain performed after receiving this collapsed information.
So, she saw that very long dream.
So.
What kind of existence is Sakamoto Ken?
Cliché labels like “scumbag” no longer had meaning.
More importantly, was it possible that all this information came with him?
Not that Hoshihara Ai thought herself noble; although she hadn’t been in romance yet, she was certain she would never fall in love with an ordinary person.
Otherwise, with so many people pursuing her since childhood, she wouldn’t still be single after getting her doctorate.
The person she would like would absolutely not be just superficially good-looking, nor factors like good grades or career success on worldly levels.
There must be other reasons.
He definitely had some quality that no one else had.
So… find him, study him.
