ARI

In Nishi-Ogikubo, one of Tokyo's residential neighborhoods, Arinori Mikami, a 23-year-old hikikomori, lives secluded in a world of pixels and silence. His daily life is turned upside down when an elderly neighbor tells him about the "dancing mania" of 1518 in Strasbourg, a forgotten epidemic in which a crowd was seized by compulsive dancing until they died. Shortly thereafter, an unexpected event breaks Ari's routine and leaves him facing a void he never thought he would have to confront. An unlikely circle gathers around the young man, taking the name "Children of Troffea," after the woman who started it all in Strasbourg. And a similar phenomenon resurfaces in Japan. Between isolation, trance, and collective memory, Ari unwittingly becomes the gravitational center of a phenomenon that passes through bodies like a wave, awakening an unknown memory that connects the solitudes of a world on the brink of collapse.

But the story does not belong to him alone.
It unfolds through several perspectives:
those of the police, caught up in the incomprehensible;
those of decision-makers, who waver or try to contain its scope;
and those of anonymous individuals, seized by the trance despite themselves.

Among them is Nao Takasugi, a sociology student who unwittingly becomes involved in a plot that is beyond her.
Through their journeys, the reader traverses the layers of the same earthquake.
For all of them, each in their own way, are affected by this silent plague.
Discover a Tokyo that is both familiar and strange, realistic in its details, its density, its noisy promiscuity, its neon lights, its heavy silences. A city of contrasts, flooded with life and yet permeated with loneliness.

This nascent choreomania becomes the organic link between beings.
Where words fail, movement takes over.
It is movement that reveals flaws and revives bodies.

How far can you dance without falling?
And who decides when the music starts, or when it stops?