Japanese Entertainer

In the cramped studio apartment, barely ten square meters in size, the most valuable item was probably the Yamaha acoustic guitar standing in the corner. Its soundboard, marred by countless fine scratches from overuse, revealed its condition clearly under the sunlight.

A bottle of sleeping pills lay on the floor, now empty despite being originally filled with a hundred tablets. On the low table, beneath a pager, was a note scrawled on the inside of a cigarette pack: "Looking back, there truly isn’t a single thing worth mentioning."

Standing before the bathroom mirror, Ye Zhao gazed at a stranger’s face: clean-cut brows and eyes, a high, straight nose—features that were both refined and unmistakably masculine. In plain terms, he was a strikingly handsome young man, easily a ninety out of a hundred. Yet, accustomed to his own ordinary features in his previous life, Ye Zhao wasn’t sure whether to feel pleased or sorrowful at this transformation.

Yes, Ye Zhao had crossed over—or rather, been reborn. About half an hour earlier, when he awoke from unconsciousness, he found himself inexplicably in Japan, inhabiting the body of a nineteen-year-old youth.

The boy’s name was also Ye Zhao, a Chinese descendant whose grandparents had immigrated to Japan and opened a Chinese restaurant in Yokohama’s Chinatown. Later, his father met his mother—also of Chinese descent—while in university. The two married and chose not to inherit the family restaurant, instead working as teachers at a private high school in Yokohama.

In his youth, Ye Zhao not onl