Our Funny Love Story: An Achillean Literary Mystery, page 1
Our Funny Love Story,
Or So We Say.
Stay updated with Byrd Koto
Sign up for Byrd’s mailing list at byrdkoto.com and be the first to receive exclusive news and invites to future ARC campaigns (and the occasional freebie).
First published in Singapore by Twig and Hwyl Books in 2026
Copyright © 2026 by Byrd Koto
All rights reserved.
Visit the author’s website at byrdkoto.com.
This work is protected by copyright law and is subject to the provisions of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works.
No amount of this book may be reproduced or stored in any format, nor may it be uploaded to any website, database, language-learning model, or other repository, retrieval, or artificial intelligence system without express permission, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. All rights reserved. Inquiries may be directed to Twig and Hwyl Books or hello@byrdkoto.com.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover Art by xiehuajun 謝花君
Illustrations by xiehuajun 謝花君
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the National Library Board of Singapore.
ISBN 9781476793864 (ebook)
9789819438181 (paperback)
Content guidance is located at the back of the book.
Our Funny Love Story
An Achillean Literary Mystery
Resistance
Book 1
Byrd Koto
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
A Note from Byrd Koto
Coming Next
Special Preview: Or So We Say
Bonus Oneshot
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Content Guidance
Also By Byrd Koto
How many meanings can a word have?
* * *
For example, funny.
Some write to be seen. Some write to be found. And there are those who write to hide. To be forgotten. To be buried under a sea of words.
1
Miyamoto Ran was brewing the perfect cup of Darjeeling on a perfect Saturday afternoon when his cell phone and the doorbell rang at the same time.
If there were no consequences, he would surely chuck his phone at the person pressing the doorbell. But Ran lived in a world shaped by choices and consequences, so he chose to answer the phone. He wanted to believe that he had a choice between the two most unpleasant things that could happen simultaneously.
One, meeting people he didn’t know.
Two, the phone ringing.
He could handle both passably in the office. But at home? He was ready to wage war.
On the dial screen was his boss, Konishi Kisuke, founder of the Suigetsu publishing house.
“I have great news,” Kisuke greeted.
Ran didn’t feel great about what his boss had to say.
“Mark this date. On the morning of July 12th, 2025, Baka Nori signed with us.”
Ran wedged the phone between his ear and shoulder, and set the kitchen timer for four minutes and thirty-five seconds. He had experimented with various timings, ranging from three to five minutes, when steeping a pot of Darjeeling White Peony at a water temperature of 82.7°C. This was the ideal recipe, enhancing the delicate yet musky sweet flavor only the youngest buds and leaves could bear.
Besides, it was none of Ran’s business that money had lured yet another Internet-famous author with a facetious pen name—Stupid Seaweed—to write for Suigetsu.
“Baka Nori chose us.” Kisuke’s voice brimmed with excitement. “He chose Suigetsu, a little nobody in a tiny corner of Tokyo, over all the others.”
Ran imagined that Kisuke surely had hit his head somewhere, because Suigetsu had published twelve books in five different genres last month and had just won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for one of their authors’ debut novels.
The doorbell continued to buzz, an incessant shriek that pierced the sticky air of a Tokyo midsummer. Ran wanted to storm to the door and give the offender a grand piece of his mind. But Kisuke paid his wages on time, and he didn’t mind his job as an editor. He walked to the balcony and shut the sliding door behind him to block out the noise. The scent of fresh laundry laid out neatly on racks on both sides of the balcony set his mind at ease, if only for a moment.
He had a feeling that Kisuke’s spiel wasn’t over yet. Kisuke didn’t call him to chat about the weather. Konishi Kisuke was all work, and Ran was waiting for the actual news to drop. He eyed the kitchen timer from where he stood. Three minutes left.
“Are you familiar with Baka Nori’s writing?”
“Heard of him. Never read him.”
“Perfect,” Kisuke said. “Baka Nori’s going to write a new serial, and I’m counting on him to bring his readers over to us.”
“On the new platform?”
“I’m launching it with the new platform in June.”
“That’s barely twelve months away,” Ran said slowly. He needed time to digest what he was hearing. “You’re doing something new with an author unfamiliar to us, and you expect a complete product to be ready in under a year?”
“Isn’t that how we work? Move so fast that the industry stalwarts never see us coming.”
The doorbell by now sounded like a distant chime rustling in the summer breeze.
“How sure are you about Baka Nori?” Ran asked.
“Enough to lock him down for a three-year exclusive contract.”
“Do you even know what he’s writing?”
“I choose to believe in the market. There’s a reason his serial has been racing up the web fiction rankings since last year. He writes addictive stuff. But—”
There it was—the inevitable coming for him, a tide sweeping toward the shore at full speed. One word upending all that came before it. But.
“—no one’s perfect. We will elevate his work. He will take us even higher. Whatever he writes, we will polish it to the highest standards. He’s breaking new ground with us. I can feel it. All he needs is the right pair of hands to nurture his potential.”
The kitchen timer was down to ten seconds. Ran couldn’t wait any longer. He wasn’t wasting an expensive batch of tea leaves. As he slid open the door, the real news dropped.
“There are two people I can trust to make this happen,” Kisuke said. “Between you and Misaki, I decided that whoever answered the phone first would lead this project.”
The doorbell stopped ringing. Ran heard sounds vaguely resembling the thud of something heavy against his door. It sounded like a harbinger of bad news, punctuated by the quiet beep of the timer.
“Ran, can I count on you?”
In exactly four minutes and thirty-five seconds, the perfect pot of tea was ready.
In exactly four minutes and thirty-five seconds, a choice that Miyamoto Ran made in the heat of a July summer would change his life forever.
* * *
Ran didn’t drink his tea.
After Kisuke hung up, he hurried to the door and found a parcel left on his doorstep. Addressed to Hane-pen-chan, or Little Quill, with his address neatly typed on the delivery slip. Judging from its size, the box could hold at least twenty hardcover books. The sender had sealed the parcel with tape folded into triangles at the corners, making it look like a gift.
Had the delivery company made a mistake? Or worse, was he the butt of someone’s prank? He retrieved the delivery slip and checked for sender details. Other than the name Yasuda, there was nothing else.
He should have answered the door first, because only a deliveryman or the NHK bill collector would ring his doorbell uninvited. But Ran always paid his subscription fee to the terrestrial broadcaster on time, even if he kept it only for the news and an upcoming live adaptation of his favorite manga, Black Jack.
He didn’t have a habit of shopping online either. Whateve r he needed for his home, he had purchased when he moved in five years ago. It was essential to plan carefully so that every item had its place and purpose, arranged according to how he used them.
He should have remembered that first. Courier services had been short on manpower, so deliveries were often left at the door these days if no one answered.
Ran retrieved the delivery slip and dialed the only phone number on it.
“The number you’ve just called is currently unavailable. Please try again later.”
Ran glanced at the number on his call screen and verified it with the slip. He tried again. Still the same automated message in response, a robotic female tone different from Kisuke’s cheer of earlier but bearing the same ominous meaning—something which didn’t belong to him was now in his possession.
Ran wasn’t giving up that easily. He repeated the sequence with the courier, where a service representative put him on hold before transferring his request to another department.
“We’ve confirmed the address on our end: 180-0004 Tokyo, Musashino, Kichijoji Main Street, Oakwood Apartments, 3-4-1-525.”
“The package isn’t mine,” Ran said, mustering the last ounce of his patience. He looked over to the kitchen. His pot of tea had long passed the ideal steeping time. “I didn’t order anything, nor have I ever called myself Little Quill.” Ran felt stupid saying that.
“Might it be a gift, sir?”
“I am not Little Quill,” he repeated, straining to keep the irritation from creeping into his voice. “Can you schedule a return pickup tomorrow morning?”
“It is now marked as ‘Delivered’ in our system, so I’m afraid we can’t do that. But I can share this with you—one of our Minato ward offices processed the parcel.”
“Which office exactly?” Ran asked.
“The Azabudai Hills branch, sir.”
The Azabu region, which bordered Roppongi and sat off Shinjuku, housed some of the most expensive apartments in Tokyo. A studio unit half the size of his two-room apartment sold for over 150 million yen. The wealthiest person on his phone list was Konishi Kisuke, but even he wasn’t Azabu rich.
Ran confirmed the recipient’s contact number with the service representative and hung up.
His first thought was to discard the parcel. Then he decided against it, because frankly, he had made enough poor decisions for the day. He fought against his gut feeling and brought the parcel into his home.
Tearing off the duct tape, Ran removed the crushed paper stuffing from the top of the box and found a tall stack of cram school textbooks for junior high. The school must be famous, since its name—Kujo Juku—was slapped on the cover, without the usual marketing spiel that guaranteed entry to top colleges. The stack covered a wide range of subjects taught in schools, with additional supplementary texts on mathematics, biology, and English literature. He counted twenty-four books.
Was Little Quill a student?
Cram school for high school was stressful, but cram school for junior high was unfathomable. It was a system spun off from the highly competitive high-school-to-college pipeline, targeting youth aged thirteen to fifteen to prepare them for college admission exams, years ahead of their peers. A system created for the truly privileged and ultra-competitive.
Maybe Little Quill was a Little Asswipe, their brain fried from excessive studying, and had misspelled the address. Most likely an honest mistake.
Ran thought to give the intended recipient another chance and saved the number from the delivery slip on his phone. He would try again tomorrow.
The box stood out like a sore spot—an offensive, unwanted variable that couldn’t be erased. The sanctity of his home, where everything had its place, was now marred by what wasn’t his. He couldn’t decide which was worse: the presence of the box or the knowledge that the box existed, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Irked, Ran emptied the teapot into the sink and drank water instead.
* * *
After Ran cleaned his house and whipped up a quick oyakodon for dinner, he headed out for a run around the neighborhood. He usually ran in the mornings, but the late July heat suffocated him, so he’d switched to night runs to clock his daily miles.
He passed rows of apartment buildings packed together, with the occasional parking lot for cars and bicycles, painted shades of gray, brown, and many earthy hues that Kichijoji embraced, each barely distinguishable from the others.
If he kept at his current pace of seven miles per hour, he would reach Inokashira Park in forty minutes. The streets were quiet, and the roads were empty, with a town bus passing by every so often.
Ran was rounding the last bend at the edge of Kichijoji when he saw a young man sitting alone outside a convenience store. Normally, he wouldn’t have paid a second glance. But the man was so still, his presence so thoroughly blending in with rows of white plastic tables and chairs that Ran nearly mistook him for a marionette.
The man wore a baseball cap that hid his face. On the back of his yellow t-shirt was a picture of a plate of gyoza and a bottle of chili oil. The streetlights bore down on him as if he were alone onstage, an actor launching into his soliloquy. It was then that Ran noticed how clear the skies were that night.
Soon, the man stirred into life. He must have had sensed someone watching him. Ran looked away and continued on his run. Later, when he reached Inokashira Park, he thought about the young man drenched under the streetlights.
What would you say if no one were watching?
Something funny, so the night becomes less lonely?
2
Kamada Eizo slung his backpack over his shoulder as he stood outside Oakwood Apartments in Kichijoji. Shielding his eyes from the midday sun, he gazed up and counted eleven floors.
His new home was on the fifth floor, at an oddly shaped corner of a long corridor that pierced out into the air like a flint’s edge. It was a design feature, an architectural quirk that divided the two halves of the brownstone building constructed ten years ago.
“Don’t you think it looks like a flowerpot?” the real estate agent had asked.
Eizo had met her in the second week of June to view the unit, having just completed his final exams at Keio and needing a new place to stay.
According to the agent, the first to fourth floors formed the pot, and the extended length of the fifth captured the rim of the pot.
“What about the sixth to eleventh?”
“It’s the tree itself. Oakwood Apartments.”
Eizo smiled in response. He had no clue what she was saying.
Later, when they were alone in the empty unit to inspect the preinstalled furnishings, she’d asked if Eizo was staying on his own. It was a small space, after all, a studio apartment with a triangular layout that sought ingenuity to fit the furniture for a functioning home. That meant the monthly rent was cheaper than other units on the same level—and that it was still available in a neighborhood popular with young professionals and families alike.
Eizo had told her yes, and he knew exactly the question she’d ask next. He’d heard it so many times, he could time the question with the precision of a train arriving at the station.
“Are you single?”
“My boyfriend is overseas,” Eizo said without missing a beat. Noting the flash of disappointment on the agent’s face, he smiled. “Thanks for asking.”
