Even as the world began calling me "the genius author Fuyuno Yui," I knew I was ordinary.
Magazine interview requests came in. TV proposals came in too. Still anonymous, I was the man of the hour. Articles analyzing my writing lined up across the internet, and I even caught the occasional phrase like "a new talent in contemporary literature."
All of it felt like it was about someone else.
I was a guy who'd gone nowhere for three years. It wasn't that I was a good writer. I couldn't write anything flashy, either. I'd just kept writing gritty stories out of sheer stubbornness, and that was all.
Being called a "genius" all of a sudden, the clothes they'd put on me felt like someone else's jacket that didn't fit.
I'd never thought my work was anything that special. If anything, I thought it was clumsy. There were any number of better writers. At the top of the rankings, writing far more polished than mine glittered in a row.
My stories were just gritty. All they did was clumsily repeat live, over and over.
The reason it sold was that a conglomerate had moved. Not my ability. When I thought about that, the word genius made me squirm even more.
"You are not getting carried away," Koyomi said at the dinner table. It was her home voice, the ice melted. At some point, she'd switched to her plain, unguarded "I" as well.
"I can't get carried away." I stopped my chopsticks. "No matter what, I can't think I'm amazing. Somewhere in my heart, I keep thinking I just got lucky."
"Lucky."
"Yeah. Someone like you just happened to find me, and you moved a conglomerate. ...Really, nothing's changed. I'm the same guy who was writing in that six-mat room."
Koyomi looked at me for a while.
Then, slowly, she shook her head.
"You are mistaken."
Her voice was quiet, yet it did not yield.
"Your true greatness is not six-digit PVs, nor a book deal. ...Your greatness is that you carried one person through a single night."
I looked up.
"Not because your writing is skillful. Not because the numbers are large. Your words, somewhere in this world, kept one human being alive until tomorrow. That—is your true greatness."
With her hands still resting on her teacup, Koyomi looked out the window.
The lights of the night view were reflected in her eyes, one by one.
"You make far too light of the number one."
"...One?"
"You always used to say it. But it's one. That even if no one reads you, one person is reading."
I put down my chopsticks.
"...How do you know that?"
Those were words I'd been murmuring for three years to that 12:02 a.m. screen, alone in the six-mat room. Something like a charm I only ever said out loud. I'd never told anyone.
"You wrote it once. In an author's comment, three years ago. It was one again today. But it's one. ...It was gone by the next morning, though."
I couldn't remember. Written late at night, deleted in the morning out of embarrassment. Maybe there had been a line like that.
She had even the things I'd deleted.
"I know how much that one weighs."
Her voice trembled, slightly.
"A single light can carry a person all the way to morning. ...No matter how dark the night."
I couldn't move.
Across Koyomi's profile came a shade different from her usual faith—something deeper, like the bottom of dark water.
As if—she herself had once, on some dark night, been scooped up by a single light.
"Koyomi."
When I called her name, she came back to herself with a start.
Then she hurriedly pasted her usual soft smile back on.
"...I am sorry. I said a little too much."
That night, I had trouble falling asleep.
Koyomi's words kept circling in my head. Carried one person through a single night—.
Why had she made that face? That profile like the bottom of dark water—I had a feeling it hadn't been a figure of speech at all.
That the one at 12:02 a.m. was Koyomi—I already knew that. I'd heard it from her own mouth on a summer night.
But all I'd learned was who.
Why she'd kept opening that screen at that hour every single day for three years without missing one. She'd said from the very beginning that my work had "saved" her. But I still knew nothing of what lay at the bottom of those words.
Not six-digit PVs, not a book deal. Probably not skillful writing, either. And yet she was clutching tightly to a single word of mine.
What in my novels had carried her from that dark night all the way to morning?
I started to think about it, and for some reason I hesitated to go any further. I felt like if I stepped in, I wouldn't be able to come back.
Staring up at the dark ceiling, I was suddenly afraid.
Her faith had probably put down roots far deeper than I imagined.