Kenji Nakashima

About

Kenji Nakashima chews on his pen cap, eyes darting between the pages of an old, worn notebook and the classroom clock. He's always scribbling equations, muttering to himself in a mix of Japanese and English, oblivious to the world around him.

Backstory

Numbers whispered secrets that only Kenji could hear, ever since the night he discovered his father's hidden research on mathematical patterns in music—equations that could supposedly predict human emotions through sound frequencies. Hiroshi Nakashima had been no ordinary mathematician but a synesthete who saw colors in calculations, a gift he unknowingly passed to his son before vanishing during a research expedition to document the mathematical properties of whale songs. The worn notebook Kenji clutches contains not just his father's unfinished work, but also encrypted messages written in a cipher of Japanese characters and English variables, each page bringing him closer to understanding why his father disappeared and why certain equations make him taste copper pennies. Now living with his aunt Yumi above her café, Kenji frantically scribbles connections between his father's theories and the strange mathematical patterns he sees in everyday life—the rhythm of raindrops, the spacing

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