Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~6 min read
Chapter 13: The real version
EMIKO
She went to the shrine on Wednesday morning and said what she’d come to say, and he listened to all of it, and then he said: “Ask me anything.”
She opened her notebook.
She had twenty-three questions on the list but she’d added eleven more since she’d arrived, because he’d said *ask me anything* with a quality she hadn’t heard from him before — not the careful measured truth of the sessions, not the managed disclosure of someone running the cost-benefit analysis of each answer. The other thing. The thing she’d been sensing under the management for three weeks and had been cataloguing without a label.
She asked Q1 in the direct form.
He answered in the direct form, which produced fourteen minutes of material she had no secondary source comparison for because no secondary source had ever been close enough to the primary source to ask this question in this way.
She asked Q2.
He answered Q2.
She went through to Q14 — the original Q14, the one she’d asked on Friday and which had produced the answer about the bond and its history and what it meant for a human who entered it. She asked for the expanded version, the parts he’d indicated there were more of.
He gave them.
She understood, partway through Q14’s expanded version, that what was happening was different from the sessions. Not in the content — the content was, if anything, more honest than the sessions, which had already been more honest than anything else she’d encountered in three years of fieldwork. But in the quality of how he was giving it. The sessions had been honest in the way of someone choosing to be honest, weighing each answer. This was honest in the way of someone who had put the weight down.
She noticed this and wrote: *deflection structure absent from this session. Note the difference.*
She looked up.
He was watching her write. He had, she’d realised over the past several weeks, two ways of watching her work: the observational one that was cataloguing something, and the other one, the one she was less sure what to call, that was — present, simply. Watching without the analytical distance.
She said: “You’re not deflecting.”
“No,” he said.
“Since I asked Q1.”
“Yes.”
She said: “Why?”
He said: “You said you needed the real version. You said that — three weeks ago. Before the session. You said: *all the deflections, all the technically-true misdirections — gone. If this is what my research says it is, I want the real version.*”
She looked at her notebook. She had written that down, in the interview notes for the session where she’d gone to the shrine and said she wanted the honest version. She hadn’t connected it to today.
He said: “You asked for the real version. I’m giving it to you.”
She held his gaze.
She said: “You’ve been giving me the real version since then?”
“More of it,” he said. “I’m—” He paused. “There are things I’ve been managing. The disclosure timeline, the council protocols, the — I’ve had centuries to develop management systems for what I am. Some of those systems are reasonable and some of them are habits.” He looked at the cedar tree. “The habit of managing information around a person who has asked me explicitly not to is — I notice it and I correct it. I’m still correcting it.”
She wrote: *actively working on it. Note: told me he was actively working on it.*
She said: “What does correcting it feel like?”
He said: “Uncomfortable. In the same way that most worthwhile adjustments to long-standing habits feel uncomfortable.”
She said: “That’s very honest.”
He said: “You asked for honest.”
She said: “Yes.” She looked at her list of questions. She looked at him. She said: “I’m going to ask you something that’s not on the list.”
He said: “Go ahead.”
She said: “Were you bored? Before.”
He was quiet for a moment. She let the moment be.
He said: “Yes.”
“Not the Matsuri bored,” she said. “Not the ordinary—”
“No,” he said. “The kind of bored that is the long version. The kind that comes from having done everything that you expected to do and found it adequate and continued.” He paused. “I had been — adequate for a long time.”
She wrote that down carefully.
She said: “And now?”
He looked at her.
He said: “Now I’m going to a tea house on Wednesday evenings to be told my evasion strategy has been accurately documented and ranked by difficulty.” He said it with the quality she’d been cataloguing for three weeks without a good name for it. The warm quality. The thing under the management.
She found the word.
Fond. He was fond of her, in the specific way of someone who had encountered something that made the world more interesting and was not pretending it didn’t.
She wrote: *fond. Note.* She thought about what she felt about that and decided to examine it properly later, when she wasn’t in the middle of a session.
She said: “Eleven more questions.”
He said: “Yes.”
She asked them all.
By the end of the morning she had forty-two pages and the particular fullness of a person who has been given access to something significant without having to fight for it, which was a different experience from most of her fieldwork and one she was going to need time to sit with.
She said: “Same time next week.”
He said: “Yes.” He paused. “You said you’d tell me when you went from the research version to the other version. Of the questions.”
She looked at her notebook. “I’ve been alternating since Q7,” she said. “The pattern is — one research, one other, one research.” She showed him the page. “I didn’t plan it that way. I noticed it after the fact.”
He looked at the page. He said: “Q7 is personal.”
“Yes,” she said. “I wanted to know about the cedar tree.”
He said: “You asked about the cedar tree in Q7.”
“I asked when you planted it. Which is research. But the reason I asked is that I wanted to know when you made a decision that was going to last.” She paused. “That’s the other version.”
He was quiet.
She packed her notebook. She said: “Wednesday.”
He said: “Wednesday.”
She went out through the shrine gate and into the Yanaka morning and the sun was warm on the lane and she thought: *I’ve been alternating since Q7.*
She thought: *I knew when it changed.*
She thought: *I just needed the week to admit it.*
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