The letter arrived in a way I had almost forgotten letters could — without sound, without warning, resting on the table as though it had always been there. I don’t mean this poetically. I truly believe I might have placed it there myself and then failed to remember doing so, which is something that happens more often than I like to admit.

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NOTICE OF TRANSFER TO MOUNT OBA: FINAL DATE ENCLOSED.

I read the letter twice, then a third time, because words had a tendency to rearrange themselves when I wasn’t looking directly at them. It’s simply how the days are now.

I folded the paper into a crane. I’ve always said I’m not good with my hands, but that isn’t quite accurate. It’s more that my hands remember things my mind pretends not to. The creases came out sharp. I placed the crane on the living-room window that didn’t open any more, the narrow one above the radiator that looked east towards the railway lines.

Tokyo below me, as it had done for many years, moved forwards without hesitation. Drones traced their polite arcs through the air. Turnstiles sang softly as they admitted the correct bodies and refused the incorrect ones. Somewhere nearby, a public announcement reminded us that Balance is Care. I mouthed the words along with it, a habit I’ve never entirely broken. Repetition, after all, has its comforts.

Mount Oba.

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When I was younger — before the corrections, before the recalibrations — Ubasuteyama was something you heard mentioned with a half-smile, as if it belonged to a children’s story no one quite believed. In the old folklore, it was the mountain where the elderly were left behind when times grew lean, necessity offered as mercy. I remember thinking the practice was cruel, but also thinking, rather shamefully, that it was clever. I’m not proud of that thought, although I can’t honestly say I regret having had it.

Now it’s not clever or cruel. It’s administrative.

I checked my reflection in the same living-room window, although the glass was dark and gave little back. Eighty-three, according to the records — a number that’s stayed consistent even when other details haven’t. My oestradiol tablets stopped arriving years ago; there was a letter about that, too, although I no longer recall what it said. My face has softened in ways I sometimes fail to recognize, and the faint swell at my chest still catches me off guard, but I’m still me. At least, I think I am.

I remember the first time the state sent me a letter with my chosen name blacked out and corrected. I cried — openly and with no small amount of embarrassment. It felt like being mocked from a great distance. My chosen name wasn’t enough; my birth name was the only one allowed to exist.

I filed an appeal. After that, I was meant to receive an official update — a reconciliation notice confirming which version of me the system had settled on: name, marker, care category, project cost. It would arrive once the audits were complete.

The update never came. Or perhaps it did, and I simply missed it.

The algorithm, I’m told, flags me as Low Utility, High Cost. I haven’t seen this myself, but I have no reason to doubt it. There’s a small pink triangle beside my file — gender-affirming care: legacy category. I assume the colour isn’t intentional. I assume many things like this.

On the day of the transfer, I boarded the bus with what I believed was a smile. I had practised it for years, after all. The attendant scanned my wrist and frowned.

“System lag,” he said, with the weary irritation of someone who didn’t want a story attached to his shift.

I should clarify something. I’ve told people — myself included — that I spent three years cultivating lag: learning to walk just unsteadily enough to confuse recognition software, borrowing a neighbour’s medication to flatten my pulse, filing appeals under different spellings, different genders, an old alias from a life that may or may not have been as real as I remember it.

All of this could be true.

It’s also possible that the system is simply less perfect than we were promised.

Mount Oba appeared through the fog like something unfinished. A bald shape, stripped of ornament. The sight stirred a surprising affection, which I attributed to nerves.

At the gate, the scanner blinked red. Then green.

“Go on,” the attendant said quickly, already turning away.

I wondered if he would remember me later, or if I would blur into a statistic before he reached the end of the platform.