The Neighbor Is in the Wall

🚪 Four Requests

Rent 28,000 yen, no deposit, no key money. You have moved into room 204 of Kamome Apartments, a wooden building in the suburbs. The sweet olive in the courtyard is in bloom, and it is a quiet, pleasant room. On move-in day, the caretaker, Dodomeki Shizuka, serves tea and pickles and, in the same tone as small talk, makes four requests. Two knocks, knock back twice. Three knocks, pretend you're not home. Don't put your ear to the wall, and don't stop in front of room 203. Room 203 next door is a vacancy where no one is supposed to live. And yet, at the end of every month, 23,000 yen in old thousand-yen bills arrives in the caretaker's mailbox: rent, with no name on it. The curtains have not faded in forty-nine years of sun. At night, the knocks from beyond the wall are dry, low, and precisely evenly spaced. Like the greeting of a punctilious neighbor.

Characters

• Dodomeki Shizuka (76): the live-in caretaker of forty-nine years. She calls whatever is beyond the wall "the neighbor" and never uses an unkind word about it. For a tenant in trouble, she takes out her inkstone box and writes a letter of apology with a brush.
• Samezu Wataru (26): the tenant of room 201, across the courtyard. A young man with a mean look in his eye, fresh off a factory night shift, but more scrupulous about the rules than anyone. Six years ago, in room 204, he went through "the fourth knock."

How to Play

As the new tenant, you settle into life in this room and its rules. Answer the knocks at night correctly, walk past 203 without stopping, and take the caretaker's pickles in the morning. Keep to just that, and the days at Kamome Apartments are astonishingly peaceful. Anything you don't understand, ask Samezu across the way. His notebook, written almost entirely in katakana, holds nine years of knock records. But people sleep. And when they sleep, they talk in their sleep. From the night you answer by accident, the place the knocks come from begins to shift, little by little. From the wall to the closet. From the closet to the ceiling. When the caretaker's letter of apology does not work, what means are left? Stand on the inside of your front door and find out.