Chapter 1: The Can of Second Chance

Kenji Muraoka was, by any reasonable measure, a failure.

Not a spectacular failure -- that would have required ambition. He was the quiet kind, the sort that accumulates like dust on a shelf nobody remembers to clean. Forty-two years old, assistant manager at a mid-sized paper company, divorced, living in a one-room apartment in Nerima Ward where the walls were thin enough to hear his neighbor's cat snoring.

He discovered the store on a Tuesday, which was appropriate. Nothing important ever happens on a Tuesday, and yet.

He'd missed the last train again. Not for any dramatic reason -- he'd simply been standing on the platform reading an article about a man who'd climbed Everest at sixty-three, and the doors had closed while he was still marveling at the existence of people who did things.

The convenience store sat between a shuttered ramen shop and a parking lot, in a spot where Kenji was absolutely certain no convenience store had ever been. The sign above the door read: EVERYTHING YOU NEED (Est. Always).

The fluorescent lights inside were the usual convenience-store white, almost aggressive in their cheerfulness. The shelves were stocked with what appeared to be ordinary products -- onigiri, batteries, magazines. But when Kenji looked closer, the labels were wrong.

A tall can, the blue of a summer sky, read: SECOND CHANCE -- Carbonated. 350ml. Best consumed before courage expires.

"That one's popular," said a voice.

Behind the counter stood a woman of indeterminate age -- she could have been thirty-five or sixty, with reading glasses perched on her nose and the calm, faintly amused expression of someone watching a dog chase its own tail.

"I'm Ms. Sakamoto," she said. "You look like you could use something."

"I missed my train," Kenji said stupidly.

"Yes," she agreed, in a tone that suggested she meant something larger.

He bought the can for 280 yen. It felt heavier than it should have. On the walk home, he cracked it open and drank.

It tasted like the morning air at his university campus, twenty years ago. Like the hallway outside Professor Tanaka's office, where Kenji had once stood holding a manuscript -- his first novel, 300 pages, handwritten -- before turning around and walking away because who was he to think he could write.

He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.

Because suddenly, with absolute clarity, he remembered every word.

Not a vague impression. The actual sentences. Every chapter, every character, every scene he'd written at twenty-two and then thrown away in a garbage bag along with his nerve.

Kenji sat on a bench under a streetlight and wept, which he hadn't done since his divorce, and before that, not since he was eleven and his dog died.

Then he went home, opened his laptop, and began to type.

He wrote until four in the morning. It poured out of him like water from a cracked pipe -- messy, urgent, alive. He called in sick to work, a thing he had never done, not once in nineteen years.

By Thursday, he had 200 pages.

By Saturday, he realized something was wrong.

The novel was good. He could feel it. But it was the novel of a twenty-two-year-old -- full of borrowed loneliness and secondhand philosophy. It read like a young man's impressive imitation of suffering.

He was forty-two now. He had suffered for real.

He closed the laptop and stared at the wall.

The can sat empty on his desk, and the last drop tasted like nothing at all.