The night he moved in, Katsuragi froze on his balcony.
Across the way hung one absurdly bright window.
Every other window glowed soft and dim, but this one burned white, staring back at him like a challenge. No curtains, either. It looked like someone had flipped on every light in the place, just to show off.
”…Rude.”
Katsuragi muttered it under his breath. He’d barely unpacked, and already he felt like he was losing to the neighbors. He was the kind of man who noticed things like that, and couldn’t let them go.
The next morning, he went straight to the hardware store and bought the biggest lamp they had. He lashed it to the balcony railing, flipped the switch, and turned his apartment into high noon.
“There.”
The window across the way didn’t flinch. It just kept blazing. Stung, Katsuragi went out and bought a second one.
Within a week, the whole building was glowing.
Mr. Saito downstairs saw Katsuragi’s oversized lamp and figured he was competing with the place across the way, so he wasn’t about to lose either — he put up a floodlight. His neighbor Mr. Ota saw that and assumed he was up against Saito, so he installed something even brighter.
“Ota, you’re really something, aren’t you.”
“Ha, no — you’re the one.”
Everyone was competing with somebody. And everyone agreed, deep down, that the real culprit was that showy window across the way. By night the whole building blazed like a lighthouse, drawing swarms of insects, and somewhere out in the dark, a ferry drifted off its course.
Eventually, Mori, the building manager, went door to door.
“Um, excuse me, everyone. About that bright thing. Across the way.”
“Yes,” Katsuragi said. “Quite the showoff, aren’t they.”
“That’s a star.”
”…Sorry?”
“A star. Very far away.” Mori flipped through his notebook. “Light that left it about eight hundred years ago is just arriving now. Nobody’s moved in across from you. There isn’t even a building there.”
Katsuragi stepped back out onto the balcony. Looking again, the light could have passed for a window, or just as easily for a single, impossibly distant point. Nobody lived there. Nobody had ever flipped a switch. It had simply been burning on its own for eight hundred years, with no one watching.
”…So I—”
He’d spent a full week going all out against an opponent who didn’t exist.
Katsuragi switched off his lamp. One by one, lights across the building went dark too, as if embarrassed to be caught at it.
But the light the building had thrown off that whole week was already long gone, traveling.
Somewhere, on a star unthinkably far away, a man who had just moved in stood frozen on his balcony. Across the way hung one absurdly bright window. Every other window glowed soft and dim, but this one burned white, staring back at him like a challenge.
”…Rude.”
The man muttered it, and the next morning, he ran to the hardware store.