Kengo Fujimoto delivers ikigami, the twenty-four-hour death notices his government hands to citizens it has quietly condemned. Under the National Prosperity Law, one in a thousand first-graders receives an inoculation carrying a nanocapsule set to kill the recipient somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four, and the state sells the practice as a lesson in the value of life. Every assignment leaves Fujimoto watching a stranger spend a final day, and the work presses harder on him with each notice he hands over.