彼女は、本を読むのではなく、本に読まれている。

The 41-year-old Asian woman, a librarian, wore a ripped black tuxedo, revealing a sheer white fabric resembling silk underwear. Her skin, slightly yellowed like ivory exposed to years of book dust, was engraved with a phantom pattern of letters appearing and disappearing. Her hair was short and neatly trimmed, each strand sharp like the tip of a thin black pen, swaying as if cutting through the air. Her eyes were fixed on the amber pages of an old book to her right and an endless swirl of black ink to her left. Her expression was cold and pitiless, as if she had realized she no longer needed to read. With her right hand, she pulled a black thread extending from her chest, and at the end of it was a small book floating in the air—the final diary of a man she once loved. With her left hand, she gently pressed a book on the floor. The pages were filled with portraits of women who resembled her, their eyes staring back at her one after the other. The lighting, a copper-colored light welling up from under the floor, casts an enormous shadow over her, which then extends over the bookshelf and out through the skylight in the ceiling into the night sky. The angle is low, looking up from her feet, and the composition makes her small, buried in the countless piles of books in the background. In the background, rather than bookshelves, there are countless books standing like dolls, outstretched hands, calling to her. The style is a gothic portrait, but the silence is like the moment someone stops praying deep in an abandoned church.