Volume 1 · The Wrong Hands
Written by Luke Rhodes · Translated by Haruka Aoki · Art by Kagumi Nishijima
Draft (Final)
bleedingcherub.neocities.org
The Duet
1994 · Kanagawa
The mug held a full liter, and the rule was you drank it standing.
That was the whole custom and the whole draw. Empty the big mug in one go — no leaving the floor, no setting it down — and you had earned a duet with a waitress of your choosing. Most nights the mug sat on its shelf like a dare nobody quite took. It was not really about the beer. It was about standing up in a small room full of people you saw every week and saying, without saying it, watch me want something.
On a Thursday in the wet part of spring, Mrs. Oda took it down herself.
She was seventy-one and came in on Thursdays because Thursdays were Yasuko's nights, and she drank the liter the way she did everything — slowly, without spilling, without apology, her free hand flat on the bar not for balance but for dignity. The room counted her down the last few swallows. When she set the empty mug on the wood, upside down, the way you did to show it was finished, the six barstools and the two booths came apart at the seams.
Yasuko was already moving. She did not make anyone ask twice. That was the thing the regulars had learned about her: the duet was theirs the moment they earned it, and she met them the whole way, so that the standing-up-and-wanting never once felt foolish.
She sang an old song, the one Mrs. Oda's husband had sung to her before the war took the singing out of him, and she pitched it low so a seventy-one-year-old voice could find the middle of it and stay. Mrs. Oda found it. For a chorus and a half she was not a widow in a cheap bar in the rain. She was a girl, again, being sung to. Yasuko carried the parts she couldn't reach and let her have all the parts she could, and when it ended the old woman was crying and laughing at the same time and did not wipe either off her face, because Yasuko had made the room a place where you didn't have to worry about those things.
That was the gift. Not the voice — plenty of people had a voice. The gift was she made you feel like you did. On a Tuesday she'd carry a university student whose nerve ran out at the second verse, singing under him so the silence never landed, so he'd remember it as the night he sang and not the night he froze. On a Thursday she'd hand a widow her husband back for ninety seconds. She poured her whole self into a handful of people who would go home and forget the words by morning, and she did it again the next night, for free, because it had never once occurred to her to do the math on it. Yasuko’s mother was not the same.
Her mother's whole world ran on the ledger — you do this for me, I do this for you. Yasuko had taken everything from that world except the counting. She sang the way she loved: without keeping the receipt.
Tonight there was only the rain, and Mrs. Oda dabbing her eyes with a hankachi, and the mug upended on the bar, and a girl of twenty wringing out the last of a borrowed song into a room that would never be this full again and did not know it.
The last note ended, she went back to work.
She sang without armor, and asked for no pay —
a bird still unbound, with the cage on its way.
Yasuko's mother was a famous wasai-shi — a woman who had built her kimono business stitch by stitch with her own hands, and gathered around her a community of the same kind of women: capable, matriarchal, self-sufficient. That world ran on a ledger. You do this for me, I do this for you. It had kept those women fed and safe for generations.
Ryūsei Kuroda walked into the bar on a night he was not supposed to be there. His friends dragged him — “you have to hear this girl”, they said. He walked in overdressed, out of place, gold chain catching the bar light. He was the son of a famous record producer, Kuroda was a man who had never needed to make anything with his own hands because someone else's name had always opened every door.
And then he heard her.
Something shifted in him. Not love — he was not built for love. Something closer to acquisition. A recognition of value or of something he wanted to possess.
He introduced himself. He was charming, polite, good-looking, and had spent years learning exactly what a woman like Yasuko needed to hear. He saw her dream from across the room — the dream of every young woman in this city who had been told her voice was something. He asked her what he asked all of them: didn't she want to be famous? And he held her dream up to the light until it looked like a gift instead of a hook.
They started to date. She gave every bit of herself to him. He was her first love, her first experience of being chosen. She did not see the gold chain or the inheritance or the maneuvering underneath the warmth.
She saw someone who believed in her.
He began slowly.
First the friends — he didn't like them, they were a bad influence, they only distracted her from her real goal. She didn't need them.
Then college — she didn't have to spend her free time studying, he would take care of her. She should be focused on her voice.
Then the bar — why was she singing duets with strangers every night? Didn't she trust that he was going to get her something real?
She said yes to everything. To Yasuko, it sounded like love. She thought it was love but she couldn’t see the bars being built around her, one at a time. Love has a way of making us numb to the things we don’t like and hyper focused on the thoughts, of what could be.
He moved her in. He promised his father was almost ready to sign her. He kept their meeting just far enough away to stay the carrot, never close enough to be a commitment.
What she had was: no job, no college, no friends, no family contact — he had cut her off from all her support systems, afraid they would look too closely at what he was — all she got was hope, an apartment to clean and take care of, and often a plate of food going cold most nights because he hadn't come home.
When he finally arrived it was always worse than the waiting. He was unfaithful and told her that is the way all men are. He projected all his insecurities on to her and told her that is what women are. He accused her of singing loudly at home so the neighbors would hear. He took the one joy she had and turned it into evidence of betrayal. He told her she was a horrible cook. He made her doubt her own experience of every moment until her experience of every moment was filtered through what he thought of it. She endured this for years.
She still loved him. She still held on to the thought, it could be different if she just gets through this rough part. She had nothing else. Saying yes to every new diminishment wasn't weakness — it was the last shred of something she was trying to protect.
Yasu began on one of these nights Kuroda came home drunk, rejected by his mistress and looking for somewhere to put his rage.
Yasuko did not consent.
He did not remember it by morning.
This time Yasuko felt unwell. She went to the doctor. When she returned with the good news, she was pregnant, he was happy. Not for the reason a father should be happy but for the reasons Kuroda saw. The pregnancy solved two problems at once: his father had issued an ultimatum about his behavior and a baby meant a reason to finally propose, which would buy more time. And in his twisted arithmetic, a pregnant woman was trapped. No one else would want her now. She was his.
She said yes to the proposal. Under everything she felt he would change now. All her hard work would finally pay off and she could have the happy family she had always dreamed of.
He strung the wedding engagement out for years. Engaged was enough to satisfy his father for now.
Yasunobu Shimizu was born into this house.
Keiko was conceived the same way Yasu was.
Another night, another rejection by his mistress, another door Kuroda came through looking for somewhere to put it.
Yasuko did not consent.
When Kuroda-san found out the second child was a girl, something turned in him. Cold, cruel, irreversible. A daughter threatened him in some way he could not name and chose not to examine. Perhaps because some part of him knew exactly what men like him did to women. Rather than face that, he turned it outward — into cruelty toward Yasuko, into a coldness he didn’t have to hide under warmth anymore, not even the performance of warmth.
The charm was gone. What was left was just the damage.
She poured every dream into hands built to take,
And learned what a promise is worth when it breaks.
Enough
2003 · Kanagawa
He didn't go looking for the bat.
It was already there. Beside the front door, same as every night — the same place he had put it two weeks ago without quite deciding to. He had carried it out of his room one evening while Keiko slept, and he hadn't asked himself why. He just knew it should be closer to the door.
He was eight years old.
For two weeks the bat stood by the door and nobody mentioned it. His mother must have seen it. She dusted that corner. She never moved it.
The sound came through the wall.
Not the voice. He knew the voice — polite, level, the one that meant trouble. He had learned to sleep through the voice.
This was different. Something hitting the floor. Something with weight.
He knew his mother's weight. He knew it from her footsteps, from the stairs, from the boards outside his door. He knew it before he was out of bed.
The bat was in his hands before he remembered crossing the room.
The front door slammed.
The apartment went very quiet.
His mother was on the kitchen floor, sitting up now, Keiko folded inside her arms. Keiko was awake. Not crying — too new to it to cry. His mother looked at him over the top of his sister's head. She didn't say thank you. She didn't say anything. She looked at him like she was seeing who he was and who he was going to be, and already knew both.
The bat was still raised over his head. His arms had started to shake. Not from fear. From holding.
He put it down.
His mother packed.
She was quiet about it. No throwing, no slamming. A drawer. The closet. The shelf in the bathroom where she kept the things that were hers. The sounds of a person who had already decided, working through the steps.
Yasu sat on the floor of the hallway with the bat across his knees and listened. He did not ask where they were going. Later he would understand that she didn't know either.
Keiko appeared at the rail of her crib. She had pulled herself up and stood there swaying, half asleep, and she made the sound she used for him — not his name yet, just the shape of one.
He put the bat down by the door. He went and picked her up.
She grabbed the front of his shirt in both fists and pressed her face into his neck. She smelled like sleep and the powdery soap their mother used. She was two years old. She did not understand what was happening, and she trusted him completely, and he held both of those things at once.
His mother came out with the suitcase. One suitcase. Everything.
She stood a moment in the middle of the apartment and looked at it — the kitchen, the window, the shelf with the empty spaces. None of it was hers. Kuroda had chosen every piece of it; she had only lived there. Everything that was hers was in the suitcase, or standing in the hallway holding his sister.
She wasn't memorizing it.
She was releasing it.
"Ready?" she said.
He nodded.
The street was dark and cold. Their breath made small clouds.
There was no place they were walking toward. He worked this out slowly, corner by corner, from the pauses his mother took where the streets crossed. He did not ask. Asking would have made her say it out loud.
Keiko got heavier as she slept. He shifted her and kept walking.
That first night they slept close together on a bench with his mother's coat over the three of them, the suitcase under her feet, and Yasu lay awake doing the only job left — listening. Footsteps. Doors. The city at night has a hundred sounds and he learned every one of them before morning.
The days had a shape. His mother walked them from shop to shop with the suitcase, and outside each one she would stop, fix her hair with her fingers, and put on the smile she wore for strangers. Yasu waited outside with Keiko and the suitcase. Waiting was his job. So was listening.
Mostly the doors were thick. At the noodle shop the window was open.
"No address?" the man said. "And two kids. Can't use you."
His mother came out with the smile still on. Looking down at Yasu’s dirty face, she said, "Not the right fit. We'll try again tomorrow." She picked up the suitcase. "Who wants to see the river?"
He said he did.
That was his job too.
The man had only said out loud what Yasu already knew. He had done the math days ago, walking: one suitcase, two kids, no address. He knew what he weighed.
He knew his mother would never set him down anyway.
He would not remember being cold.
He would remember his mother's back — straight, deliberate, giving the night nothing. He would remember Keiko's fists in his shirt, holding on even in her sleep. He would remember that he never swung the bat.
He didn't need to.
That was the whole of it, and he carried it the way he carried everything — quietly, completely, and without being asked.
He lifted what was asked of him and more,
And found that this was what a brother's for.
Izakaya
2003-2004 · Kanagawa
Kuroda had cut her off from her family and friends years ago. She had nowhere to go. She had two small children and a suitcase and the clarity that arrives when there is nothing left to lose. She knew what the call would cost. Her mother's love was real, and it kept accounts — never spoken, never itemized, but kept. A roof came with a say in everything under it. Help arrived with hands that stayed on whatever they had helped with. Yasuko had left that house once to live a life that was hers.
For her children, she was willing to do anything, even if that meant handing it back.
She made the call. Her mother asked which station.
This train ride was something Yasuko would carry for the rest of her life — the stations clicking past, the city releasing its hold on them, Yasu pressed against her side and Keiko asleep in her lap, exhaustion and grief and relief all tangled together in a way that had no name. Her mother was on the platform when they arrived. She had been there an hour early. She had never met her grandchildren. Kuroda had stolen those years too.
Her mother accepted them without a word of blame. Blame had never been her currency.
Once they arrived at Ayako’s house, the community closed ranks the way it always had. They did not ask questions — questions were not what was owed. They showed up, and every kindness was entered somewhere, and Yasuko knew she would spend years paying it down.
She paid.
She went back because there was nothing else and she knew how to pay.
That was the whole of it. The house they slept in was Ayako's — one of several the old woman owned, offered before Yasuko could bring herself to ask. Ayako came by when she felt like coming by. No warning. Her own key. That was the rent. Keiko was too small to understand any of it. Yasu was old enough to have questions his mother could not answer yet.
The little izakaya she worked in was still there. It had changed — the owner was the same, but the regulars were different. She quickly got back into the flow of things. She knew the weight of the bottles. She knew which regulars took their drinks without ice, where the mop was kept, how to stand still when a table turned and needed managing. She had learned all of it at twenty-two. Before Kuroda. The bar did not ask what had happened. It just asked her to show up.
She showed up.
The work was steady. She was good at it — no vanity in that, no resentment either. It was a thing she had decided to do, so she did it with her full attention. The other women were young. New since her time. The owner had learned that young faces brought the men in, and hired accordingly. They were quick with the customers and slow with the closing work, and they called her Nee-san without being told to. They did not ask about the children. She did not offer. She showed them where the mop was kept, which regulars to laugh at and which to stay away from, and left the rest alone.
The duets went to the young ones now, too. The house custom: empty the big mug — a full liter, in one sitting — and you had earned a duet with a waitress. The owner had kept the custom, and the girls laughed their way through songs they were too new to mean. A few regulars still drained the mug and asked for her by name. Older men, who remembered. She would thank them, pour the next round, and bring one of the girls over to sing it with them. They got their duet — just not the one they had drunk for. It was not a wound. It was a drawer she had closed.
Kuroda did not come in. She had prepared for it — how she would hold herself, what she would look at, how she would make it plain without a word that he was not to approach. He did not come. After a few weeks, the preparation was a knot tied for a rope she no longer needed.
She was all right. Not happy. Not unhappy. Level.
The girl came in on a Thursday in autumn.
Yasuko noticed her the way she noticed most things: without stopping her hands. Young — twenty, maybe less. Bright, a little loud, not yet hurt by anything that had left a mark. Short copper hair. A smirk that found most things funny, herself included. She sat at the bar and ordered without hesitating. She had done this before, at other bars if not this one.
"Haven't seen you here," Yasuko said — not unwelcoming, just noting.
The girl grinned. "Haven't been here."
Her name was Saki. She gave it freely, along with the rest: three blocks away, a friend's recommendation, came to see what the fuss was about. Yasuko had not known there was fuss. She poured the drink and let Saki talk. Saki talked easily and required little in return. That was not a problem. Yasuko could continue to work and listen for a long time.
She came back the next Thursday. Then the Tuesday after. She brought a friend once, who did not return. Saki did. She warmed a room without raising her voice. She leaned in when she asked a question because she wanted the answer. Yasuko found her charming. She also found her familiar, and did not name why.
She named it later, walking home. Saki reminded her of herself at that age — the same belief that wanting a thing hard enough was a kind of protection. She had believed that once.
Kuroda came back in November.
She had not seen him since bat night. He looked the same. She did not look longer than the work required. He sat at the far end of the bar.
She took his order. He was polite. He had always been polite. Her face held. The knot held.
He ordered, he drank, he left. She finished the shift the same as any other.
He came back the following week. And the week after.
Saki was there the third time.
Yasuko kept to Saki's end of the bar. She stood where the pouring put her — between Saki and the far end, a bottle always moving, the talk kept easy. It was not a plan. It was what she had instead of one. It held for most of an hour.
Then the ice ran low. She was gone a minute, no more. When she came back, Saki was looking down the bar — all at once, the light switched on.
Saki picked up her glass and slid off the stool.
"The man at the end," Yasuko said. Quietly. Not a performance. The voice she used for everything. "He's one of the ones I'd stay away from."
Saki stopped. Turned. Surprised, then delighted, like she'd been handed a gift. "I like a challenge."
"It isn't one."
Saki looked down the bar again, longer this time. Back. "He's just a man at a bar, Yasuko."
"He's not."
Something moved through Saki's face — not dismissal, not curiosity. She was trying to read Yasuko and finding it harder than usual. That was information too. "What is he, then?"
Yasuko weighed what to say. There was a whole truth, and half of it was not even hers — it belonged to a boy in a hallway with a bat. She could not hand it across the bar to a girl she had known two months. It was not hers to translate.
"He will not stay," she said. "Whatever he offers, he will not stay."
Saki held her gaze a long moment. Her face had gone somewhere complicated. "You're warning me off."
"I'm telling you what I know."
Another moment. Then: "How do you know?"
Yasuko held steady. She did not look at the far end of the bar. She did not look away from Saki. She let the silence say the rest.
Saki's face changed. Yasuko watched the decision happen — the kind a person makes first and finds reasons for after. "I can handle myself." She said it gently, the argument already over. Then she carried her glass down to the far end of the bar.
Yasuko wiped the ring it had left.
She did not look at either of them again that night. She had said what she knew. The rest was not hers.
Saki still came in on Thursdays. For a while it was almost the same. Then a little less — shorter visits, more surface. Not hostile; that was not in her. Just no longer quite there. Yasuko noticed and did not name it. Naming it would have changed nothing.
By February the Thursdays had stopped.
Yasuko learned later — a woman who knew a woman who knew Saki's upstairs neighbor — that a man had been coming and going from the building for a few months. Very polite, the neighbor had said. Then he stopped coming at all.
Yasuko asked no questions. She had none that needed answers.
She went to work. She poured the drinks. She counted the till. She walked home in the cold and let herself in. Ayako had been by — the dishes done and put away in the wrong places. The house was quiet in the right amount; both children asleep. She hung up her coat.
She had spoken what she knew. Speaking what you know is not the same as being heard. She had learned that some years ago.
It was not a lesson she needed to learn twice.
She wiped the ring clean without stopping her hands—
She'd given the warning; the rest never lands.
INTERLUDE: RisaAfterDark I - How the Smaze was born
2017· Meguro Rokmaykan, Tokyo
▶ clip one — "!!!!!" — 0:51
Vertical phone video, shot from just above her face — the selfie angle. Behind and below her, past a rail, a black room packed shoulder to shoulder, and fog. A lot of fog, red stage light bleeding through it. She's in full paint: black lips, winged liner, a lace choker, nails like little blades. She keeps her voice low, conspiratorial, leaning toward the mic over the crowd.
RISA: Good evening. RisaAfterDark, reporting live from Meguro Rokmaykan, where — as you can see —
She tips the camera down into the fog, then back to her face.
RISA: — conditions have deteriorated. Visibility near zero. We've got heavy smoke, with a bit of haze coming off the stage. Smoke, plus haze. Which in this reporter's professional opinion makes it a… smaze. Sumēzu. You're welcome. First on the scene.
A small laugh, pleased with herself. Then a sound starts under the crowd noise — one piano note, held, swelling. The red light drops to almost nothing. The room goes up. She turns the camera to face the stage. Fog, and then movement in the fog.
RISA (quieter): Okay. Okay, hold on —
The smaze rolls back off the lip of the stage and four figures are just — there. Not walking on. Already standing in it. Like the fog had been hiding them the whole time.
RISA (barely a whisper, the bit gone out of her voice): …I'm not doing the voice anymore.
She says nothing else. The camera stays on the stage. Her hand comes into frame once, at her mouth. The first chord lands, the whole room leans in at once, and for a second you can't tell the crowd from the fog. Cut.
caption: they didn't walk out. they were already in it. waiting for us to find them. #bleedingcherub #smaze
▶ clip two — "ok so. update." — 2:14
Different video. Her apartment — small, a clothing rack, a wig on a stand. Flat lamp light, ordinary. This time she's only half done: one eye lined, the other bare, no wig, real hair pulled back. She looks younger, and tired, still in the work blouse she hasn't changed out of. Phone in her lap, looking down at it, not performing.
RISA: So. That did a thing.
She flips the phone to show a screen — a scroll of numbers, comments — then flips it back.
RISA: Forty views is my usual Tuesday. This is not that. And everyone's calling it the smaze now, which — fine, fair, I named it, legally it's mine. But then somebody signed off "proud smazeling," and now that's a word. There are smazelings. Plural. Of which I am, apparently, patient zero.
A breath. She rubs at the un-lined eye, forgets the camera for a second.
RISA: Here's the part I left out of the first one. I'm not — this isn't me during the day. During the day I'm at a desk in Shinbashi in a gray suit answering emails and nobody there knows this channel exists. That's the whole "after dark." That's the joke that isn't a joke. I go to those shows alone. I went to that one alone. Because it's the one place I don't have to keep the other face on.
Quiet. Then, almost annoyed at herself for meaning it:
RISA: And it turns out a couple thousand of you are doing the exact same thing. Gray all day. Real at night. Standing in your own smaze, waiting for something to clear.
She reaches to stop the recording, stops.
RISA: …anyway. Hi. I'm Risa. Welcome to the smazelings, I guess. We should've named ourselves years ago.
End.
The Uriko
2022 · Yokohama
The harness fit differently on days when the keg was full.
She had learned to adjust for it — lean forward going up the stairs, knees soft on the turns, one hand for the counter when the crowd shifted left all at once because the batter had sent one deep. She knew the weight of a full quarter keg — fifteen kilos — and a half-empty one, and the one that was just vapor and metal and a slosh that meant a trip to the stock room before the next inning or she'd come up short. She knew which regulars on her route rounded up and waved off the change, which counted out exact coins, and which flagged her down just to have someone to talk to for thirty seconds. That was fine. She had thirty seconds.
She was seventeen years old. She wore an orange uniform that fit her almost exactly right, which she took as a good sign.
The section was F through K, rows seven through twenty-two. Sixteen rows, one post at row twenty that blocked a seat and made its owner lean left, one aisle that curved at row fourteen. She could have walked it with her eyes closed and spilled nothing. The section did not know her. That was the job, and she had made her peace with it.
"Hey — over here!"
She pivoted. Row eleven, seat C — man in his forties, already on his third. The waved-off change grew with each one. She poured without asking, because he always wanted the same thing, took the gesture that was half nod and half wave, and moved on.
She liked being in the middle of something without being asked to belong to it. The crowd had the experience. She had the route.
She had tried to explain that once to her grandmother. Baba had listened the way she listened to everything — like there would be a test. Then she had said: "So you are happy." And Riko had said it wasn't exactly happiness, it was more like — and then she'd stopped, because Baba was smiling the smile of someone who already knew the answer and was waiting for Riko to find it. It was one of those conversations Baba won by sitting still.
So she was happy. Approximately.
The inning ended. The crowd redistributed itself — some staying, some headed to concessions, the shuffle of thirty thousand people changing states at once. She went down to the stock room, traded the empty rig for a fresh one — fourth keg of the night, eight to go — checked her count, and drank half a cup of water standing at the counter, because you drink when you can or you don't drink.
The woman at the next station worked sections A through E. Moriko. Four years on the circuit, she had a whole theory about what a drink order said about whether a customer would wave off the change—a lecture she’d delivered to Riko in full on her third shift. Riko had been testing it against her own route ever since. It held up about eighty percent of the time, which, for a stadium theory, wasn't bad.
"Section K again?" Moriko said.
"Yeah."
"There's a group in row sixteen that's been passing a flask. Security's going to move on them next inning. Just so you know."
"Thanks."
Moriko nodded. This was as much conversation as they usually had, and it was enough.
The stock room between innings was the quietest place in the building. Riko stood in it for a moment. She thought about nothing. It was a thing she was good at — standing in a room without asking it to mean something. The keg was cold against her side. In a few minutes the inning would turn and sections F through K would need her.
She was fine. Close enough.
There was a version of her that was not fine. It lived at home, where her mother's chair had been empty three weeks this time. But home was also Baba and Jiji — fruit peeled before anyone asked, crossword clues read aloud whether or not anyone answered. Three at the table counted as full. Four was a surprise, and she had stopped budgeting for surprises. She did not bring the not-fine version on shift.
The inning turned.
She hefted the rig, adjusted the harness, and went back up the stairs.
Row seven, seat A: the old man who took a minute to get to, paid in clean bills folded twice, and never waited for his change. Row nine, the woman with the scarf who ordered something different every inning — she was deciding which one she liked best before the season ended, which Riko thought was a fine way to approach any problem. Row twelve, the two teenagers sharing one drink they probably weren't supposed to have. They were clearly together and clearly nervous, and Riko had decided on first contact that this was none of her business.
She poured. She moved. She gave every person who flagged her down thirty seconds, and sometimes more. Not because it was required. Because it cost her nothing, and sometimes thirty seconds was the thing a person had needed all day and didn't know how to ask for. She had been that person often enough to know the difference it made.
The crowd roared. Something had happened at the plate — she couldn't see what from row nineteen, but the sound told her enough. She held the rig steady against the surge of people standing. For a few seconds the stadium was one thing instead of thirty thousand things.
She thought, briefly, of Baba.
Baba would like this. She should bring her to a game before the season ended. She filed it under things she would get around to.
Then the sound settled and the crowd sat back down and she moved on.
She counted her seconds and gave them for free,
Not knowing how heavy this season would be.
The Mikan
2022 · Yokohama
The keg felt different today. It never quite settled on her back like usual, the weight sitting slightly wrong no matter how many times she adjusted the harness. She had been on this route long enough to know the keg by feel, and she'd been filling cups since five. Today it just felt off. She couldn't have said why.
Late September now, the season nearly run out. It was the eighth inning. The crowd had that restlessness of people who could already feel the end coming — some leaning forward, some already folding their programs, a few drifting toward the exits with the practiced nonchalance of those who want to get a good seat on the train. Demand had slowed. The keg was almost empty.
Three hours into her shift, someone large turned without looking.
She didn't see him so much as she felt the physics of him — the sudden wall of a shoulder, the cold shock of a full cup of beer emptying itself down the front of her in one clean motion. She stumbled back a step. He turned around. He was very large and very red and he said I'm so sorry several times while she was still catching her breath.
"No," she said. "It was my fault. I should have announced myself." She looked down at her vest, then back up at him. "I do this at home too."
He laughed, uncertain. She smiled correctly. The moment closed.
Hasegawa-san sent her to the stock room with a dry shirt from the lost-and-found and the unspoken instruction to be quick about it.
The stock room had its usual quiet. But it had always run on a timer — trade the rig, check the count, back up the stairs before the section missed her. This time nothing needed her. No rig, no count. Just a wet shirt and a room with no job in it.
Riko unbuckled the harness, set the keg down in the corner, and peeled off the wet vest. She stood for a moment.
The dry shirt was a concert tee from a few years back — Bleeding Cherub, Ghosts of the Past tour. She'd never heard of them. She peeled off her wet shirt, dropped it in the laundry bin by the door, hung the vest on the hook above it, and pulled the dry one over her head. She sat down on a crate.
She hadn't meant to sit. But the quiet came up around her, almost solid. She sat in it and let it.
She was eight years old.
December. A train platform she could still feel in her bones — the cold rising up through the soles of her shoes, the sky the particular white of a sky that has not decided yet. She could see her own breath. She remembered being pleased by this: the small visible proof of herself in the cold air. She kept breathing out just to see it.
Baba had reached into the cloth bag she always carried — the one that smelled like cedar and something warmer underneath, something Riko had no word for yet. She took out a mikan.
She didn't peel it the way you'd expect. She began at the outside, working her thumb around the circumference, separating the segments through the peel before she opened it, so that when she finally pulled it apart the fruit was already in pieces, already arranged, already ready. No fumbling. No mess. No moment where you had to wait. It was the motion of someone who had been doing this longer than Riko had been alive — unhurried, precise, refined down to something that no longer needed to think about itself.
She held a segment out to Riko without looking down. The way she did everything: as though it had already been arranged. Care was not something you performed. It was something you prepared in advance, quietly, before anyone had to ask.
The mikan was sweet the way December things are sweet — not warm exactly, but settled. Dense. Patient. Like something that had been waiting in its own skin long enough to become entirely itself.
The train arrived. Baba put the rest of the mikan back in the bag and took her hand. She didn't say anything. There was nothing to say. She had already said it as she said everything — before the moment, before the need, in the quiet preliminary language of someone who loved you before you arrived and would love you after you left and had simply been doing it all along in the interval, without announcement.
Her pocket buzzed.
She came back to the stock room — the crates, the fluorescent light, the wet vest on its hook. The buzzing stopped before she got the phone out.
Fifteen missed calls. All from the same number. The screen still lit from the one she'd just missed.
She called back.
Her mother picked up on the first ring.
She listened. The stock room was ordinary around her — the crates, the fluorescent light, the dry concert tee, the wet vest on its hook. Everything exactly as it was.
A tear ran down her face. She didn't wipe it. Her hand stayed in her lap. She kept listening.
She tasted the sweetness the day had kept,
Then the phone lit up in her hand, and she wept.
The Hollow
2022 · Yokosuka, Kanagawa
Hasegawa-san looked at her when she asked. Not long — just a moment, the look of a man deciding something. Then he nodded once and told her to leave the rig.
She was out the door in three minutes.
The train after nine on a weeknight was nearly empty — a few salary-men asleep against the window, a couple of teenagers, nobody who needed anything from her. She sat with her hands in her lap and watched the stations go past and did not think about what she would find when she got there.
She had learned somewhere that thinking about a thing too hard before you arrived at it didn't help. You got there. Then you dealt with it.
She got there.
The hospital smelled the way hospitals smell — clean in a way that is not quite the same as the clean of a house, something underneath it that the cleaner is working against. The waiting area off the main corridor had blue plastic chairs in rows and a vending machine in the corner with one light out and a reception counter along the far wall.
Jiji was near the counter.
He was not talking to anyone. He was simply sitting on one of the blue chairs nearest to it, both hands folded in his lap, looking at nothing. He was wearing the cardigan he always wore in the evenings — the brown one with the small pull near the left elbow that Baba had meant to mend for years. He looked very small.
Riko sat down beside him.
He looked at her. His eyes were clear but his face had done something she had not seen it do before — all the animation gone out of it, the terrible jokes retired, the warmth still there but very far away, like a lamp behind thick curtains.
"She just fell," he said. His voice was even. Almost reasonable. "It's okay. She does it all the time — you see, her feet are large for someone her size. She trips. She always trips." He looked back at the counter. "She'll be fine."
Riko did not say anything. She put her hand over his.
He did not pull it away. He also did not seem to fully register it. He just kept looking at the counter and the closed doors beyond it.
They sat.
Saki was inside the room with Baba. Riko had not seen her. She hadn't known her mother was there until the nurse at the desk told her.
"Your mother is already with her."
Riko had nodded and gone back to sit with Jiji.
An hour passed. Maybe more. Jiji said nothing else. Riko kept her hand over his and watched the closed doors and did not think too hard about what was behind them.
Then the doors opened.
The doctor was a young man, younger than Riko had expected, with the expression doctors wear when they have something to say that they have said before and will have to say again and which does not get easier. He looked at Jiji first, then at Riko, then at Jiji again.
He said what he had to say.
Jiji did not move. He did not make a sound. It was as though the words had reached him and found nowhere to land — had simply passed through him and continued on their way. He sat exactly as he had been sitting, both hands folded now beneath Riko's, looking at the counter.
Riko asked if she could see her.
The doctor said yes.
The door to the room opened before she could stand up, and Saki came out.
She moved like someone very far inside herself — slowly, carefully, each step deliberate, as though the floor might not be entirely trustworthy. Her eyes were dry. Her face was open in a way that was worse than crying. She looked at Riko and Riko looked at her and for a moment neither of them said anything.
"I need to go for a walk," Saki said. "I just — I can't deal with this right now. I'm sorry. I need to go."
She went.
Riko watched her walk through the waiting area and around the corner toward the main doors and out of sight.
Then she stood up. Jiji's hands were still where her hand had been, folded in his lap, holding the shape of her grip. She looked at them for a moment. Then she straightened her shirt and turned toward the door the doctor was still holding open.
She went in to see her grandmother. The woman who raised her, the one who was always there for her when her own mother couldn’t be.
Standing in that doorway, she thought to herself I only have to get through the night. She only knew the room, and the light, and what was waiting for her inside.
She went in.
The room was small and very quiet. There was a window with the blind half drawn, a chair in the corner, a table with a cup and a small folded cloth on it. The light was low and even.
They had arranged Baba with care. The sheet was straight. Her face was turned slightly toward the window.
Riko did not look at her face. Looking at her face would make it too real, and Riko wasn’t ready for too real.
She looked at her hand.
It was resting at Baba's side above the sheet, palm slightly upward, the way a hand rests when it has finally let everything go. And in the curl of her fingers, catching the low light — mikan peels. Dry now, thin, the pale underside of the rind.
Riko stood very still.
Then she reached out and took the hand.
The cold hit her like something structural — not the cold of a room or a winter morning but the cold of absence, the specific temperature of a thing that used to hold warmth and no longer does. She had expected — she had not known she was expecting it until it was gone — the familiar grip. The dry skin, the careful fingers, the pressure that said: I have you, I have had you, I will have you.
There was nothing. Just the shape of a hand. Just the weight of it.
She stood there holding it and understood, for the first time, the difference between the word 'cadaver' and the heavy, cold fact of it. That the thing she was holding had never been the hand at all. That Baba had been something else, something that ran through the hand and the voice and the cloth bag and the train platform and the cedar smell, and that thing was no longer here, and what remained was the impression it had left in the world, like a shape pressed into cloth.
She looked up.
On the table near the bed there was a small cloth bag. The one that smelled like cedar. It was open. She could see the inside of it from where she stood.
"She came in with that mikan in her hand," the nurse said from the corner. "Wouldn't let it go. We tried — gently — but she held on. Right until the end. Then her hand just — opened."
Riko looked at the peels.
She thought about Baba in the garden. The early evening, the light going amber, the bag she kept near the door — getting one out, beginning to work her thumb around the outside the way she always did. Separating the segments before she opened it. Making sure it would be ready.
Because Riko would be coming home from work.
Because Riko would want one.
Because that was the kind of thing Baba knew before you knew it yourself, and prepared in advance, and had ready — before the moment, before the need, in the quiet preliminary language of someone who loved you before you arrived.
She had been getting Riko a mikan.
That was what she had been doing when she fell.
Riko stood in the small room with her grandmother's cold hand in both of hers and the mikan peels between them and she did not cry and she did not speak and she did not let go for a very long time.
Then she set the hand down gently — the motion of setting down something you are not finished with but must put aside for now. She straightened the sheet. She thanked the nurse. And she went back out to the waiting area.
Jiji was exactly where she had left him. He had not moved. The brown cardigan, the folded hands, the blue plastic chair — all of it exactly as it had been. As though time had simply not reached him here.
He looked up when Riko came back.
"She will be okay," he said. His voice was the same even, reasonable voice as before. "She just fell. She has large feet, you know. She always trips."
A woman in scrubs came up to Riko. She was older, with the manner of someone who had done this part of the job many times and had learned to be very gentle about it.
"I'm so sorry," she said softly. "I hate to ask at a time like this. But when you're ready — there are some things we'll need to go over. The death certificate needs to be received by family. And we'll need to discuss the arrangements — for her care, going forward."
She meant the body. What happened next with the body.
Riko nodded. She looked at Jiji, still in his chair.
"He's her husband?" the woman asked.
"He's — he needs a few more minutes. Can I handle the paperwork first and we sort out the rest tomorrow?"
The woman looked at her. Took in seventeen years of her, the borrowed concert tee three sizes too big, the fact that there was no one else in the waiting area who was going to step forward.
"Of course," she said in a calm, heartfelt way. "Come with me."
Riko followed her to the desk. She was given a clipboard and a pen and four forms she did not fully understand, and she read each one carefully before she signed her name or wrote her phone number or indicated that yes, she was a family member, and yes, she would be the point of contact, and yes, she understood what each box meant, even when she didn't quite yet.
It took twenty minutes. Jiji did not move from his chair the entire time. Once, she glanced back at him and he was looking at the closed door to the room where Baba was, still with that faraway expression, still with the terrible reasonable story running on a loop behind his eyes.
When she was done the woman took the clipboard and told her someone would be in touch tomorrow about the next steps, and gave her a card, and said again how sorry she was.
Riko thanked her. She put the card in her pocket. Then she went back to Jiji, crouched down in front of him so they were at the same level, and took both his hands in hers.
"Jiji," she said. "Let's go home."
He looked at her. Something moved behind his eyes — not understanding, not yet, but the first far edge of it, like weather on the horizon. He did not say anything else about Baba's feet.
He let her help him up. She kept hold of his arm and walked him slowly through the waiting area and down the corridor and out through the main doors of the hospital into the night air.
One turned and walked out, one sat still as stone,
So she walked to the door, and she walked it alone.
The Teapot and the Pen
2022 · Yokosuka, Kanagawa
This was her home.
It had always been her home — more than anywhere Saki had ever briefly landed, more than any apartment her mother had cycled through. Baba and Jiji had been the fixed point. She had grown up in these rooms, under this roof, in the smell of cedar and good tea and Jiji's terrible morning jokes. Saki had drifted in and out of her life the way weather does — present sometimes, absent often, never quite landing. Baba and Jiji had simply been there, every day, the way the foundation of a building is there. Not always seen but always relied upon.
Now there was only Jiji.
He was not eating unless she put food in front of him. He was not sleeping so much as sitting in his chair until the light changed and then sitting in it some more. He told the same story about Baba's feet every day, in the same even reasonable voice, and Riko listened to it every time as though she were hearing it for the first time, because that was what he needed.
Saki had not come back. Riko had learned to not put much effort into this.
Riko had called twice. She had not left a message the second time because she did not know what to say that the first message had not already said.
She cooked. She did the dishes. She went through Baba's things slowly, only what needed to be handled, leaving the rest where it was because moving things felt wrong and also because Jiji seemed to take some comfort from the objects being in their places — the good teapot, the cloth bag on its hook by the door, the slippers that nobody had put away.
She left Baba’s slippers. They were large — Jiji had not been wrong about that.
The hardest part of that week was not the grief, exactly — she did not have room for grief yet, there was too much to do. The hardest part was the small, ordinary ways the house kept expecting Baba and finding only absence. The kettle clicked off in the morning and nobody came to pour it. The garden had gone untended, as gardens do within days, as though the plants could already sense the change of hands. There was a rhythm the house had run on for fifty years and Riko was now the only one trying to keep time, and she was doing it from memory, by feel, in a house full of cues she had only ever watched and never had to execute alone.
Jiji did not seem to register most of this. He was present as a photograph is present — the shape was there, the face, the familiar cardigan, the pen he carried from room to room without ever quite reaching a surface to write on.
But the thing that animated him, the thing that made the terrible jokes necessary and the crossword worth finishing and the lamp worth sitting under even if it was too dim — that thing had followed Baba out of the house.
His hands had made things. For fifty years Jiji had been a blacksmith — a good one, known past his own prefecture, the kind whose knives and tools people waited a year for and paid what he asked without a word. He had worked iron until it did what he wanted, and the wanting had been patient, and the iron had always, in the end, agreed. Out in the world he'd had a name. In this house he had never been the one with the name — this was Baba's house, Baba's community, Baba's rules, and he had married into it the way you move somewhere warmer and never once miss the cold. He had shaped metal all day and come home to a woman who ran everything, and he had liked it that way. Now the same hands carried a pen from room to room and never set it down. There was nothing left in the house that needed shaping. No one left to come home to.
Riko watched him carry his pen to the table and back again. She watched him sit by the window for long stretches, looking at the garden with an expression she could not read, something between patience and the absence of patience, something that had moved past waiting into wherever waiting goes when it gives up on the object.
She made tea. She brought it to him. He thanked her as he always had — formally, slightly unnecessarily, in a way Baba had always teased him about — and she thought: he is still in there. He is still in there. He still knows you are here.
She held onto that.
A week after Baba, Riko woke early to a house that was too quiet.
Not just still — houses are still in the early morning. This was something else, something with a texture to it, a quality of absence that pressed back when she opened her eyes. She lay still and let it register. She had learned, in the last seven days, to trust the thing her body knew before her mind had caught up.
She got up.
The kitchen was empty, but that was ordinary — Jiji had never been a kitchen person in the mornings, Baba had run the kitchen and Jiji had appeared when things were ready and complimented everything and stolen food off her plate. Riko turned on the lamp over the counter and stood in the small yellow circle of it for a moment, listening.
The house was the same kind of quiet as before.
She went to the small room off the kitchen — the one with the window that looked onto the garden, the one where he did his crossword every morning under the lamp Baba had always said was too dim for reading. She stopped in the doorway.
Jiji was at his table. He was in his chair. His pen was in his hand. The crossword was open in front of him.
He looked, from the doorway, like a man who had fallen asleep mid-thought.
She said his name.
She already knew.
She crossed the room and put her hand on his shoulder. He was the same temperature as the room. The pen was still loosely held between his fingers, pointing at a clue he had not quite reached. She looked at the crossword. He had gotten further than she expected — most of the top half was filled in, the handwriting careful and even, the same handwriting she had watched fill in crosswords her entire life. He had almost finished. He had been close.
She stood there for a moment with her hand on his shoulder in the dim morning light, in the house that smelled like cedar and Baba's cooking and fifty years of a life lived in the same rooms, and Riko understood.
He had not wanted to stay.
Not in the sense of giving up — nothing so dramatic. But like a man who had been in one place for so long that the place itself was the other person, and when she was gone the rooms became just rooms and the chair became just a chair and the crossword was just marks on paper and there was nothing left that required him to stay in it. He had loved her that completely. Fifty years of a marriage that had begun as an arrangement and become the architecture of everything he was.
He had told terrible jokes every morning of his life because she was there to not quite smile at them.
There was nobody left to not quite smile.
Riko tried Saki first. The phone rang and rang. She waited through the full ring cycle and then the voice mail and then she put the phone down. She had already left two messages. A third message would change nothing.
She called the number on the card in her pocket instead. Then she sat down on the floor beside his chair, her back against the table leg, and waited for them to arrive.
She did not cry. She was not sure yet where the crying was. She thought it might be somewhere further ahead, past the forms and the phone calls and the second set of arrangements she would now need to make, in some quieter room she had not reached yet.
She looked out the window at the garden. The light was coming up now, slowly — the morning gray giving way to something thin and pale, the early light of a morning that would eventually be ordinary. The plants Baba had tended were still there, still in their places. The small stone at the corner of the path that Jiji had moved from somewhere else years ago and set there for no reason he had ever been able to explain. The whole of it just sitting there in the new light, unchanged, waiting for someone to come out and tend it who was not coming.
She sat with him in the dim light and the cedar smell and she waited. She did not move from the floor. She kept her back against the table leg, close to him, as you stay close to someone you are not ready to leave yet even when you know there is nothing left to stay for.
When they arrived she let them in. She stood in the hallway while they did what they came to do, and she looked at the good teapot on the counter and the cloth bag on its hook and the slippers by the door, and she thought: I will have to call someone. I will have to make a list. I will have to do the second set of things she had already begun to understand were hers to do.
But not yet. Not this minute.
She stood in the hallway and she let the dim morning light come through the kitchen window and fall on Baba's things, and she did not move until they asked her to.
He had loved her so long she had made him her own,
And when she was gone, he followed her home.