Moreover, the script is very dull. There’s no character analysis, no inner monologue, no lengthy background explanations—it's entirely driven by dialogue, with action and scene descriptions as mere supplements. The writing is plain and direct; for anyone with a less vivid imagination, it would be especially boring to read. Interpreting the story is the director’s job, enriching the characters’ emotions is the actor’s job—none of that concerns the screenwriter.

Simply put, the same story might be a page-turner as a novel, but once it’s turned into a scenario script, eight or nine times out of ten, readers will be left completely confused and utterly put off—it’s so bad you’d be afraid of lead poisoning if you used it as toilet paper. Unless it’s a literary script, which is meant for investors and other laypeople to read, but if a producer can’t even understand a scenario script, Ryan Chandler doesn’t think that’s the kind of person he wants.

Right now, Ian Murphy is clearly an insider, so for this insider, whether the script is worth filming is another question.

Just because an interesting story is filmed doesn’t guarantee it’ll be a hit. Countless TV dramas that were highly anticipated beforehand but ended up getting axed have already proven this point.

Fortunately, judging by her current reaction, she still seems quite interested—Ryan Chandler is mainly worried whether this kind of multi-twist drama would be accepted by the public if set in the 1990s. On the other hand, in the 1990s, twist-driven dramas were still a novelty, so as long as people could accept it, they’d definitely be interested, right?

After all, this isn’t 2019, when twist-filled and mind-bending dramas are everywhere, so it’s actually something innovative.

……

That’s right, Ryan Chandler came here from 2019, truly the first unlucky soul of 2019.

His original name was Landon Shaw, a student majoring in directing and screenwriting at a well-known university. During summer break, he was diligently holed up in his dorm writing a paper—this was important, as it would determine whether he’d pursue directing or screenwriting after his junior year.

But then disaster struck. The city he lived in was prone to thunderstorms, and every year, among six or seven million people, there were always one or two unlucky souls struck by lightning. In 2019, he was one of them.

He was sitting at his desk late at night, focused on his paper, oblivious to the world outside. Suddenly, lightning struck somewhere near his dorm, traveled along the wires, and electrocuted him. What a wrongful death!

There were circuit breakers and other safety devices, but they were useless.

When he woke up again, he found himself in late 1994, in Tokyo, Japan, as Ryan Chandler, who couldn’t find a job and was wasting away in despair.

And, unbelievably, this was a parallel world—he confirmed this after getting familiar with the environment. The broad strokes of history were about the same as his original world, with only minor differences in timing and similar cultural customs, but the people were different. For example, in bookstores, he couldn’t find works by famous authors like Kawabata Yasunari, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Natsume Soseki, Mishima Yukio, or Haruki Murakami.

Apparently, since the people were different, the works were different too—there were plenty of good books in the stores, no less classic than those in his original world, but he hadn’t heard of any of them, didn’t recognize a single author, and even the famous Nobel Prize in Literature was gone, replaced by something called the Sebald Prize for Literature.

It seems that in all the accidents of human history, there is a kind of inevitability, or perhaps fate itself, that creates two worlds that are similar yet distinctly different.

It was a fascinating question, but he didn’t have time to study it—he had to figure out how to survive first.

The original owner, the former Ryan Chandler, had holed up at home for over two years, living off his savings. Aside from a few personal belongings, he’d left almost nothing behind.

Before the bubble economy burst, the original owner’s family had lived quite well. They owned a family-run business—not large, but thanks to Japan’s economic boom and the huge market brought by China’s reform and opening up, their profits were quite high, and their wealth far exceeded that of an average middle-class family. Unfortunately, the original owner’s parents couldn’t control their greed. Seeing how lucrative real estate was, much more so than manufacturing, they decisively mortgaged the company for a loan and jumped in. When the bubble burst, the company couldn’t even pay the interest on the loan and was ultimately forced to file for bankruptcy protection.

Afterward, the original owner’s parents couldn’t accept that generations of hard work had vanished overnight. They were blamed by shareholders for mismanagement, tormented by guilt over their poor decisions, and unable to bear the shame. In the end, they committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

As a result, the original owner became penniless overnight. The house was seized to pay off debts, he couldn’t afford university tuition, failed to get a student loan, and had to drop out. He then rented a tiny apartment and survived on the pocket money left in his personal account.

He tried to find work, but with no degree or professional skills, he couldn’t get a proper job. Temp work was exhausting and humiliating, and he couldn’t stand it for more than a few days. Eventually, he gave up completely, shut himself in his cheap apartment, cursed the world, and wrote all sorts of complaints about life’s unfairness under the guise of “writing,” until Landon Shaw arrived—Landon Shaw read through his “works + suicide note,” learned about his past, found the writing incoherent and delirious, with no artistic value whatsoever, and sold it all for scrap paper.