As the sun began to set we parted ways with Sanae and made our way back home, stopping off at our office just long enough to deliver Genji back to his pond, supply him with food and a dish of sake and give his shell a good scrubbing. As we walked through the streets filled with the smells of cooking meals and peach-colored light, I turned to Renko.

"So how is it, chief investigator? Was today's testimony enough to crack the case?"

"Maybe. It was enough for me to come up with a pretty plausible hypothesis, anyway."

"Oh, already?"

"The problem is I haven't come up with a way to disprove it yet. It could explain most of the mysteries you listed out earlier in one go, but it's not falsifiable, so we'd never know if it's true or not."

Once we got back to our rented room, I opened the door and Renko proceeded to walk inside, remove her shoes and then throw herself down on the tatami mats with a sigh. "I'm surprised you've come up with even that much so quickly after talking to Futo," I said as I tidied up our shoes in the entryway and shut the door. "From where I stand it just looks like the mysteries have gotten deeper."

"Well, truth be told, I don't like my current theory much," Renko said, rolling over and sitting up with a dissatisfied expression on her face. "It doesn't sit right with me. It explains things, but I can't help but feel that I'm still missing something important." She sat for a moment, pondering with a furrowed brow, then groaned and flopped backward once more.

"Maybe your initial premise is wrong then," I said without paying much attention, as I was going through our cupboards, pulling out supplies for a simple meal. I stoked the coals in the hearth and added some kindling then got to work putting together some yakimeshi with salted ham and green onions. The whole while I was working Renko was laying on the floor, occasionally groaning or rolling about. All at once she sat up again, chin tucked to her chest, scratching her head as she thought.

Eventually, she spoke up. "I think the problem is that this isn't my area of expertise. Merry, who do we know who would have a lot of experience with love and relationships?"

"What? Where's this coming from, Renko?"

"I'm a physicist, Merry. The wiles of the human heart can't be described with equations but that's what this mystery centers around. It's made more complicated by the fact that we're talking about relationships from 1,400 years ago when societal standards were different. People were still people then though and I would think there are certain basics to human mating practices that probably haven't changed..."

"I have no idea what you're going on about, Renko."

"Well you should. You were studying psychology after all, Merry."

"Relative Psychology. It's a bit different Renko. It's concerned with perception and epistemology rather than emotion and sentiment."

"Well, okay, let's look at it this way then. If my soul were to leave my body and take up residence in Genji, would you still recognize me as Renko? Would you still keep me around if I looked like a cross between a turtle and an old man?"

"You're talking about something like Descartes' mind-body dualism. If your consciousness were in Genji and able to say "I am Renko" then that would be who I would talk to."

"Well I guess that's good to hear, but what if after I moved into Genji's body another me who looked the same as I look now showed up and claimed it was the real me? If someone else took over my body and they and the version of me that was in Genji were standing right beside eachother, which one of us would you say 'Hey, Renko' to?"

"Well I think if I were able to have a conversation with you both it would still be Genji, but it's hard to know. As an external observer it would be very difficult for me to prove that your soul was really inside Genji."

"And if you were in a situation where both me and whoever had taken over my body were both in danger and you could only save one of us, which one would you rescue?"

"That's a hell of a situation, Renko. What sort of circumstance could lead to something like that?"

"It's just a thought experiment."

"Well, again, if I believed at the time that your soul was in Genji, then that's the one I'd save, but I think if that ever happened and your body was lost afterward, I'd have a hard time ever being sure if I had done the right thing from then on. The Renko I know is the one that lives in your body. If that were to change, it would be some time before I could recognize you as something else."

"What if I were to become a ghost then? I might look just the same as I do now, but I'd be a different sort of entity. If a ghost that looked like me showed up, would you believe it was the real me?"

"If the you that was in your body was still here too? I think I'd have a pretty hard time deciding. Humans' visual organs are deeply tied into their brains. It's very difficult for us to recognize something if the visual signifiers we associate with it have changed. If I showed you a fried shrimp and said 'this is a hamburger' it'd be pretty difficult for you to accept without tasting it, right?"

"Now I'm the one who doesn't understand what you're going on about. This isn't about appearances, Merry. The real question is the nature of the soul and how an outside observer could detect its presence. We're talking about people here, after all. It would be a little easier to believe your example if a hamburger was the sort of thing that could talk to us and say 'despite the way I look, I'm really a hamburger on the inside.'"

"Well then what do you want me to say then, Renko? These metaphors have gotten rather silly but essentially you're asking about whether someone can continue being the same person after they become something completely different, but as humans we can only tell that that's happened based on our perceptions. Appearance is a big part of what we associate with an individual's identity. You're wondering, I assume, if Tojiko and Futo still recognize the crown prince as being the same person before and after her resurrection, right? If that's the case then isn't it equally likely that Miko might be more recognizable as the crown prince now than she would have been in her original body? Her new form is a manifestation of her soul, isn't it?"

"Well that's the question, Merry. Is it?" Renko said with a sigh. "Futo and Tojiko are zealots who were willing to drink poison on prince Shotoku's command in the hope of being resurrected with him. Both of them loved and respected prince Shotoku so much that I wonder if they would notice if the person who came out of the mausoleum was an imposter, or if they're just so invested in the idea of a resurrected prince that they're willing to believe that the woman who calls herself Miko must be the real deal. Especially in Tojiko's case, she was married to prince Shotoku at one point, so I'm guessing she would know if Miko is really the same person or not but I don't know what it's like to be married. Maybe she could get so attached to the idea of prince Shotoku that after 1,400 years of waiting without him she might forget what the real prince was like. That's not exactly something I could ask her without getting electrocuted though."

"Well maybe the reason everyone doesn't seem surprised by it is precisely because they knew prince Shotoku so well. What if before she died, she said to them 'by the way, if this works, I'm going to come back as a woman.' In that case, the fact that she was reborn the way she was would actually be proof of the continuity of her identity, right?"

"That's a possibility too. Alternatively with the histories themselves being questionable who's to say that Shotoku wasn't a woman to begin with? I know the Nihon Shoki specifies that the prince had numerous children by several different wives, but that's just one more detail that might have been or changed after Shotoku's death if people were trying falsely claim they were related. All of Shotoku's descendants were wiped out a hundred years later, so there's no way to know, right?"

"Well I don't see what choice we have but to take Miko at her word then. It's not like there's any evidence to say she's not who she claims to be, is there? It's a remarkable story, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's false. At any rate if you're expecting your soul to end up in a different body any time soon, don't use Genji's. Go for Ran's, that way I can spend all of the time we waste hanging out in the office every day buried in her tails."

"Merry, did you just let one of your fantasies slip? Do you secretly dream about snuggling a Renko with fox ears and a tail? Foxes bite, you know."

I opened my mouth to scold her for that comment, but as I looked up from the cooking to yell at her, I could see that she wasn't looking at me any more. She was staring into space with a slack-jawed expression, the fingers of one hand dancing along the brim of her hat.

"No way..." she muttered. "That would make sense, but if you look at it that way..."

She was lost in another world. As was often the case after we conducted an investigation, she had new information to synthesize and new delusions to dream up. There was no point in expecting her hold a proper conversation. I shook my head and turned my attention back to the cooking, settling the wok onto the hearth to get hot and getting started on dicing the ingredients before preparing the eggs. I was just about to start whisking when a knock sounded from our front door.

I looked over to Renko, but she was still sitting on the floor, staring into space and lost in thought. With a sigh I put down the eggs and walked over to the door, wondering who could be visiting us at this time of day.

I opened to door to reveal Keine, who, unexpectedly, was standing on our doorstep holding a box full of home-cooked food. "Good evening," she said. "I hope I'm not interrupting dinner, but I thought it had been a long time since we had eaten together. It looks like you're cooking something, would you mind some company and some side dishes?"