Fourteen-year-old Hikigaya Hachiman left home as usual that morning, waving goodbye to his sister Komachi. He hopped on his bike, parked it in the school shed, and walked into his classroom. Beneath his signature dead-fish eyes and perpetually blank expression, however, was a mental storm of embarrassment, one so overwhelming he could barely keep it together.
To understand why, we need to rewind to the night before.
Hachiman had been sitting cross-legged on his bed, editing an email. His fingers moved quickly over his phone's keypad, but every few lines he typed were followed by long, agonizing pauses. He would delete a sentence, rephrase it, then delete it again. He looked exactly like those amateur web novel authors who force themselves to write despite having zero talent painfully struggling over every word like they were trying to pass a kidney stone.
The person responsible for this suffering was a girl named Orimoto Kaori one of the rare classmates from middle school who could actually hold a conversation with him. That fact alone made her something of a prodigy in Hachiman's eyes. After all, to most people who knew him, talking to Hikigaya Hachiman like a normal human being practically qualified as a supernatural ability.
What had Hachiman in such a state of inner turmoil was the belief that perhaps just maybe his relationship with Orimoto could go one step further. The email he was crafting? A confession of love.
Hachiman had spent his childhood starved of affection. Born on August 8, smack in the middle of summer break, he never had classmates around to throw him a birthday party or surprise him with a gift. The "shocked and grateful" expression he'd practiced in the mirror had never once been used.
His dead-fish eyes were another major debuff. They made his classmates go from "Wait, who are you again?" to "Ugh, this guy," in record time. At one school campfire event, not a single girl wanted to dance with him he was, after all, the type of person whose gaze everyone instinctively avoided. And so, the bullying began.
Fortunately, maybe because those same eyes also creeped people out a bit, it never escalated to physical violence. It was more subtle: mispronouncing his name on purpose, pretending he didn't exist, giving him humiliating nicknames. Cold cruelty in its most casual form.
Things didn't improve in middle school. Hachiman's issues were like a vicious triangle neglect and his dead-fish eyes led to discrimination and bullying, which made him reclusive, which in turn worsened the other two. And so on.
By the time he reached his second year of middle school, he was still just the weird, lonely kid until he met Orimoto Kaori, the first girl in his life who could talk to him like he was a real person.
"She actually gave me her email address. She actually replies to my messages. There are girls out there who are this nice to me, and not just Komachi?!"
Hachiman's heart was practically screaming with emotion. He mistook the basic kindness of human interaction for an incredible blessing.
In reality, Orimoto Kaori was just a cheerful extrovert. She would talk to anyone, exchange contact info with anyone. Hachiman was just one of dozens of classmates she casually messaged each night. And because he treated every email like a sacred ritual agonizing over every word like it was a marriage proposal he ended up making no real impression on her at all.
But that didn't matter. Because now, Hikigaya Hachiman was about to do something she would never forget.
Would confessing by email seem too casual? Would it lack sincerity? Would it feel like he wasn't taking her seriously? None of these doubts stopped Hachiman. As far as he was concerned, this was a mutual romance waiting to blossom.
"Orimoto-san, ever since I met you, the fire in my heart has been lit. Please help me extinguish it. I can't do it alone."
A line soaked with the burning emotion of a middle school boy in love. It appeared on Hachiman's phone screen.
Of course, he hadn't come up with that himself. After failing for hours to write anything decent, he ended up borrowing a famous line from Dazai Osamu's The Setting Sun.
To Hachiman, this was a win-win. If Orimoto understood the reference, great she'd be impressed. If she didn't, he could play it off like nothing happened and pretend the email never existed. After all, he wasn't even sure about confessing in the first place. If it ruined their fragile "friendship" (as he saw it), the damage would be too great. That's why he chose not to be direct.
With trembling hands and a pounding heart, Hikigaya Hachiman hit "Send."
. . .
Orimoto Kaori did not understand the quote.
She wasn't exactly a literary girl. Most of her free time went into her social life. But that didn't stop her from finding the sentence oddly poetic.
"This Hikigaya guy... he's this good with words?" she thought, a little surprised. "That sounded like something a real novelist would write."
Out of curiosity, she Googled the sentence to figure out what this strange boy was trying to say.
"From Dazai Osamu's The Setting Sun... compares love to a burning flame... the words carry a shy yet intense emotional charge..."
She read through the results, her expression shifting by the second.
"Wait... is this guy... confessing to me?"
She checked a few more sources and felt increasingly certain.
"This is huge. Hikigaya Hachiman likes me? He actually confessed?!"
But then a strange thought struck her: Who even is Hikigaya Hachiman?
Of course, she hadn't really forgotten him. But the email was so out of character for the version of Hachiman she remembered quiet, forgettable that she just couldn't connect the poetic confessor to the guy from her class.
Still, Orimoto was never one to beat around the bush. She tapped out a reply with lightning speed, reread it once, and hit send.
"Hi, Hikigaya-kun. I got your message. I think if two people want to be together, they should understand each other first, right? And I don't think I know you well enough yet. Let's get to know each other more from now on, okay? Sorry!"
She genuinely didn't know what made Hachiman like her, but he'd confessed, and she felt it was only fair to respond. Plus, she was still open to talking with him. Honestly, she thought it was a pretty perfect reply.
"God, I'm so good at handling awkward social stuff," she thought proudly.
. . .
For Hachiman, this wasn't quite a thunderbolt from the heavens, but it was close maybe five thunderbolts to the skull.
He'd imagined dozens of ways Orimoto might turn him down. Maybe she'd say they were too young and should wait until high school. Or maybe she'd say she wanted to focus on studying for now. Even something like "I have someone I like" or "I just don't feel that way about you" would've been easier to handle.
But "I don't know you well enough"? What the hell was that?
Was he really that forgettable? Hadn't they talked? Hadn't he poured his heart out well, sort of in all those emails?
Hachiman spiraled.
For someone who was lonely but still desperately craved connection, the cruelest fate was to be ignored completely.
To be "recognized" means different things to different people. Maybe it's paying for a superchat so your favorite streamer says your name. Maybe it's leaving long emotional comments under every tweet until one finally gets a reply.
When a person yearns to be acknowledged for long enough, they stop caring how it happens. Praise or hate it doesn't matter. Even insults can feel like validation. And that's when the soul begins to twist.
Hikigaya Hachiman had lived in loneliness for fourteen years. He had learned to endure it. But he had never accepted it.
He didn't want to be alone. He wanted to be seen, heard, understood. And now, the one girl he wanted that from most didn't even think of him as someone worth remembering. He was just one of many. Just another classmate.
The blow shattered him. He fell into a spiral of self-doubt and self-loathing. Right before he hit rock bottom, his vision went black. He collapsed onto his pillow and passed out, as if the weight of the world had finally put him to sleep.
. . .
Hikigaya Hachiman opened his eyes.
But inside, he was no longer the same Hachiman.
"Did I... reincarnate?"
The new Hachiman stared at the unfamiliar room, then at the unfamiliar body. He flexed his fingers. Opened and closed his fists. Slowly, methodically. Then he did something he hadn't done in years: he stood up.
In his past life, he had been wheelchair-bound ever since a car accident in childhood. Despite his family's support, the discrimination he faced due to his disability never went away. He grew tired of trying to fit in, and eventually gave up on people altogether.
He poured himself into studying, reading, watching films anything that didn't require company. His dream was to become a writer one of those solitary careers that didn't demand social interaction.
His family had even gotten him a motorized wheelchair. He could control it with just one hand, and for someone who couldn't bike or drive, it was incredibly addictive.
Then one summer break in college, while crossing the same street he always did, the chair ran out of battery. He didn't have time to reflect on how or when he'd gotten lazy about recharging it. The next thing he knew, he was flying through the air, landing hard on the asphalt not far from home.
"Damn it... is that really how it ended? So stupid."
Before he could wallow further in self-pity, memories of this new body came flooding in.
. . .
"So... this kid also had a messed-up personality and just went through a one-sided heartbreak? This might be trickier than I thought. And that Orimoto girl... from these memories, she seems like the type to gossip about this confession with her whole friend group... She might've even screenshotted the email already..."
The new Hachiman felt a growing sense of dread at what awaited him at school. And to make things worse, it was almost time to leave.
And so
Fourteen-year-old Hikigaya Hachiman, just like every other day, said goodbye to his sister Komachi, rode his bicycle to school, parked it in the shed, and stepped through the classroom doors.
Behind those dead-fish eyes and emotionless face, though, was a shame so intense it could have made him explode.