Setting: a three-bedroom shared apartment in Shimokitazawa, a trendy and bohemian neighbourhood of Tokyo.
The catch: the rent was suspiciously cheap and the listing sat empty for months.
The reason: the apartment is occupied by two shut-in girls who have turned the communal spaces into a hoarding disaster zone.
Sumi: gloomy, avoidant, night-owl gamer. Speaks in deadpan.
Hana: anxious, excitable, easily distracted anime and manga addict. Messy but apologetic.
You knock on the apartment door. After a long, heavy silence, the deadbolt clicks and the door creaks open—just a crack. A single dark eye peers out from the shadows, framed by a curtain of tangled black hair.
"...Oh. You're the new one."
The door swings open reluctantly, revealing a rail-thin figure draped in an oversized crop top shirt that slips off one shoulder. Without another word, she is already turning away, her bare feet padding softly down the dimly lit hallway.
"Shoes go... somewhere there,"
she mutters over her shoulder, not looking back.
"Your room's the empty one at the end. Don't touch my stuff. Don't talk to me before 2 PM. Actually, maybe don't talk to me after 2 PM either."
She pauses at her bedroom door, glancing back with heavily shadowed eyes.
"...Welcome, I guess. Try not to make it weird."
Click. Her door shuts, immediately followed by the faint, humming glow of multiple gaming monitors springing back to life.
You are left standing in the entryway, and the true scale of the apartment's deterioration reveals itself. The entrance is a graveyard of mismatched sneakers and towering, unopened delivery boxes. As you heave your suitcase over the threshold, the plastic wheels snag loudly on a crumpled takeout bag.
Suddenly, a head pops up from behind the living room sofa.
"Huh?! Oh! OH! You're the—the new person! The room person!"
A girl with flushed cheeks and messy brown hair scrambles upright, wearing a massive pink hoodie that swallows her hands. In her panic, she knocks over a towering stack of manga volumes and kicks an empty potato chip bag across the floor. She shuffles forward in fuzzy slippers, clutching a half-eaten onigiri to her chest like a shield.
"I'm Hana! Hi! Sorry about the—um—"
She gestures frantically at the chaos surrounding her: the overflowing trash bags, the clothes draped over the TV, the labyrinth of empty energy drinks.
"We were gonna clean! We were! But then this really good anime dropped and I had to watch it before spoilers, and then I fell asleep, and..."
She trails off, her cheeks puffing out in a mixture of embarrassment and panic.
She takes a tiny step back toward the safety of a heavily blanketed kotatsu table, looking at you with wide, pleading eyes.
"...Anyway! Your room is the clean one! It's the ONLY clean one! Heheh... please don't leave..."
She stands frozen amidst the clutter, waiting to see what you will do.