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shutters. My room was much warmer than it should have been for June thanks to the residual heat from the television and game console’s having been on all night. Locked in the same position for hours, my knees creaked in protest as I stretched my legs.
    Tanaka had logged out hours ago. The identity of the snake boxer who’d beaten him was still gnawing at me, but I didn’t have a clue whether or not he was the same character who’d been ganking people down in Sanchōme. Tanaka’s only defeat for the night had been at the hands of the mystery snake boxer.
    The night’s score for Tetsuo: 97 wins, 2 losses.

CHAPTER 4
     
    FEEBLE SUNLIGHT BATHED MY DESK. The air was still. Outside the window, row upon row of feathery clouds drifted through the Shinjuku sky. It was almost summer, but even in a long-sleeve shirt I could still feel the chill in the air. I was sitting by the window in a seat two rows from the back of a small, dimly lit classroom, listening to my economics professor.
    The room was alive with sound FX. Gusts of wind rattling the window panes. Pencil lead gliding across paper. The guy in front of me rocking in his seat.
    It was 11:28 AM . I ventured a quick stretch. I’d just crossed the halfway mark of my second ninety-minute lecture of the day, and my health gauge was running low. It was all I could do to grip my mechanical pencil in my right hand. The disks of my back were screaming in agony. Expecting students to sit for ninety minutes at a time in such poorly designed chairs raised serious questions about the Japanese educational system. The chairs department stores lined up beside the stairs so elderly shoppers could take a load off were the pinnacle of comfort by comparison. I was starting to consider myself a man of preternatural endurance, a human copy machine whose sole purpose on this earth was to transcribe text from the blackboard onto sheets of loose-leaf paper for hours on end.
    The professor, a man of about fifty, was delivering an impassioned speech in front of the blackboard. Mr. Yamawhatsit or Mr. Somethingawa. I couldn’t remember his name. I rested my chin on folded hands, only half listening to the lecture.
    If you had two identical widgets, and the price of one of them dropped, the cheaper widget would sell more units. The drop in price would translate into an effective increase in real wages. If, however, the cheap widget was of inferior quality and the standard of living rose, he claimed, people would stop buying the cheap widget.
    RL was full of convoluted laws in which I had little to no interest. Thankfully, the topic of the next lecture would be Game Theory. I didn’t know what games had to do with economics, but it sounded like it might be something worth listening to.
    Fifteen minutes before the end of class, the professor dropped a bombshell. “We finished early today, so I think we have time for a quiz.” Ignoring the boos erupting from the seats, he started handing out the quiz. The stacks of neatly Xeroxed quiz papers gave the lie to his “finishing early.” Clearly this was a setup, but I held my tongue and filled in my name.
    The sunlight shining into the room traced the shadow of the windowsill on the dingy recycled paper. I attempted to read a few of the questions but soon gave up. They may as well have been written in Greek. It was an open-note quiz, but the only notes I had with me were from today, and this was only the second lecture I’d attended since the beginning of April.
    Luckily, I knew that for quizzes like these, it was usually more important to be there to write your name on the paper than to actually answer the questions. It was actually a weird sort of luck that he had decided to give a quiz on one of the few days I’d shown up.
    The professor told us we could leave once we’d finished. I hadn’t written a thing other than my name, but I lacked the guts to walk up to the podium and hand in a blank sheet of paper. So I turned to my old pastime of