Volume 5 · The Last Set
Written by Luke Rhodes · Translated by Haruka Aoki · Art by Kagumi Nishijima
Draft (Final)
bleedingcherub.neocities.org
The Buzzer
2022 · Yokohama
The apartment was small but it was hers.
Not Ayako's. Not a house that had always belonged to someone else and been lent to her the way you lend a coat. Hers — first month and last paid from money she had earned, her name on the lease, and a key to a door no one else could open. She had signed the papers herself. She had read every line the way you do when it matters.
She was fifty years old and it was the first door in her life that locked from the inside on her terms.
The kids were gone. That was the shape of it. Yasu had his own place near the band’s practice space; Keiko had moved in with a friend from the yoga studio and filled her place with plants and warmth and other people's problems, solved before breakfast. The house they had all grown up in — Ayako's house — had emptied out around Yasuko one child at a time until it was just her and the rooms and the sound of a kettle nobody else came to pour.
So she had found this. Two rooms and a window that caught the afternoon. She had furnished it slowly, from scratch, buying one thing at a time and paying for each before she bought the next, which had taken longer and cost more and been worth every extra month.
Her mother had not understood.
Ayako's arguments had all been practical. That was the thing about her mother — nothing was ever a command, only a concern. The neighborhood was far. Furnishing from nothing was foolish when the house had everything already. Spring was a better time to move than autumn. The rent was money thrown at a problem that did not exist, when there was a whole floor sitting empty at home.
Every reason was a reason to stay. None of them said the true thing, which was: if you can pay your own rent, I have nothing left to give you, and if I have nothing left to give you, I do not know how to be your mother.
Ayako would never say that. She may not have known it in words. But Yasuko had spent her whole life learning to hear the sentence underneath the sentence, and she heard this one clearly.
She had thanked her mother for every concern. She had signed the lease anyway.
For twenty years Ayako had never once called ahead.
This was not rudeness. It was architecture. If she called first, Yasuko could say not today — and a door you can be turned away from is a door with a lock you don’t hold the key to. So Ayako had simply appeared. In the genkan, in the kitchen, at the top of the stairs, with a box of peaches or a bolt of cloth or nothing at all. The knock had its own quality, low and unhurried, the knock of a woman who was already inside the family and only observing the formality of the door. Yasuko had always known it was her before she opened it. You cannot say no to a person who is already standing in your kitchen. That was the whole design, and Ayako had built it without ever once admitting it was a design.
But this apartment had a buzzer.
Yasuko had not chosen it for that. It came with the building — a small panel by the street door, a button, a camera, a screen upstairs by the entry. But the first time she had seen it she had understood what it was, and something in her chest had gone very still. As if she realized that this small thing was the key to unlimited freedom.
Down there, her mother could not simply appear.
Down there, her mother would have to press a button. And wait. And be let in.
It was a Tuesday when the buzzer rang.
Yasuko was at the table with tea going cold in front of her. She knew before she looked. She had known the knock for twenty years, and she knew this too, the way you know the weight of a full keg or an empty one — a thing either there or not.
She went to the little screen by the door.
Her mother was in it.
The camera made her small and gray and slightly wrong, as cameras do, all the authority washed out of her under the streetlight. She was in her everyday yukata, silver hair pinned as she had pinned it every day of Yasuko's life. She was standing very straight. She had pressed the button once — only once; Ayako would never press it twice, would never let the machine see her need it — and now she stood in front of the camera she did not fully understand, composed, waiting, because there was nothing else the building would let her do.
She had never in her life had to wait at a door in her own family.
Yasuko stood with her hand near the button that would let her in.
She thought about the peaches her mother used to appear with. She thought about the house that had taken them in without a word of blame and charged them, quietly, for twenty years. She thought about her own children, grown and gone and never once made to feel they owed her. She thought about a girl in a garden somewhere across the city, peeling a mikan as a dead woman had taught her.
The contrast between: Love that keeps accounts and Love that keeps none, meeting on either side of this little video screen.
Her mother's face waited in the cold little screen, and for the first time in fifty years the choosing was, at last, entirely Yasuko's.
She looked at the button.
She pressed the button.
The lock released down at the street — a small electric sound, there and gone — and on the screen her mother tilted her head at the noise she did not quite understand, and then the door gave under her hand and she stepped through it and out of the frame, into the building, on her way up.
She would never know she had been let in. She would think, as she had always thought, that she had simply arrived.
But Yasuko knew.
She put the kettle on for two and set out the good cups, and waited for the knock she had known her whole life — and this time had chosen.
She would give her mother the afternoon, and ask for nothing.
She had never needed anything in return.
She was Yasuko.
The knock she had never been able to refuse,
she answered at last as a thing she could choose.
The Man in the Back
2024 · Miura, Kanagawa
The wind off the harbor had been shifting all afternoon, carrying the smell of low tide and diesel fuel across the gravel lots behind the fish market. James had spent the hours checking the seals on the transport crates, his mind occupied by the small, heavy details of the late-season haul.
He was resetting the latch on a storage locker when Nami found him.
She had her coat pulled tight against her throat, her face flushed from the walk down from the upper street. She didn't offer a greeting, and he didn't expect one. They stood together in the gray light of the bay, two people who had spent decades reading the small variations in each other's weather.
"She's playing tonight," Nami said. Her voice was flat, level, but there was a hard certainty underneath it. "Down at the hall by the old canal. It's the first date of the tour."
James had looked out toward the breakwater. A coastal freighter was clearing the mouth of the bay, its lights already burning against the coming dusk. He did not ask how Nami knew. He did not ask why Lilly hadn't written to tell him herself. In their family, the lines of communication were rarely straight, and the things that mattered most were often left to be discovered by accident or by necessity.
"The girl has work to do," James said.
"You should be there to see it," Nami replied.
She had turned then, walking back up the gravel slope toward the town before he could give her an answer. James stayed by the water for another ten minutes, until the freighter was nothing but a single white spark on the dark horizon. Then he had wiped his hands on his canvas trousers, locked the storage locker, and walked into the town center.
He had not told Nami he was going. He had not told Lilly. He had bought the ticket himself, in cash, at a convenience store counter, and he had worn his working clothes—the heavy wool and dark cotton in which he was simply a man who had come from a northern harbor and was going back. He did not want to alter the room. He did not want to cause a shift in what was happening on the stage.
He wanted to see his daughter.
He stood at the back of the venue, because the back of the venue was the correct place for a man in his position. His position was simple: he was not the point, not the subject, and not the one who was owed anything here. He stood there as he stood at the stern of a vessel—out of the current, watching.
The show had started.
She was at the piano for the opening—three songs that moved through the register from low and slow to something that climbed. Her back was to him. She played with her whole posture engaged, her shoulders hunched over the keys, the same posture she had kept since she was small and he had listened from the hallway.
He thought: she plays like this because of the sea.
He did not mean he had taught her. He meant the sea had shaped him into someone who left, who returned, and who left things behind only to find they had grown without him. She had grown in his absence. The music had grown in his absence. He was responsible for the absence, not the growth; he understood this ledger, and he stood with it.
Then she began the song he had feared.
He knew it from the first bar. Distant Sea. He had it on the record at home and had never once made it to the end. He had turned it off both times, an accounting a man is allowed to make with his own leaving when he is alone in his own front room.
There was no reaching for the dial now.
He was at the back of a crowd that had paid to be here, pressed in on every side, a plain man who had come precisely so as not to be seen. He could not walk out—walking out meant movement, and movement meant she might find his face in the dark, which was the one thing he had come to prevent. He could not skip the track. He could only stand and take the full weight of it, to the final bar, for the first time.
It was a song about the water that took him out and brought him back, and about the woman on the shore who never once let him feel the draft of his own going. His daughter had written his whole marriage from the outside, from the window she had grown up watching it through. She had gotten the measure of it right. There was nowhere in this small, dark room to put a cargo that heavy.
She sang. Her voice was what it had always been, only more of itself. The years had cleared away the extraneous wood and left only what could not be broken.
He listened.
He was not a crying man. He had worked in weather his whole adult life and had developed the settled composure of someone who has learned that emotion and function must share the same deck.
The boat does not wait for your grief.
But this was not weather. This was his daughter.
A tear arrived. He let it go. He did not wipe it away.
He stayed for the rest of the set. He did not go forward when the house lights came up.
He did not go backstage. He did not look for her face in the crowd she came out to greet, though he could see her near the merchandise table. She was laughing at something said to her, one hand in her hair, easy and whole and herself.
He turned toward the exit, his back to the light.
In the ledger of his own head, he was proud of her. He had been proud of her since she was a small girl. It was not a thing that needed to be said aloud in this room, not to anyone, perhaps not ever. The pride was not a gift he could give her. It was a fact he could only carry.
As he neared the door, a voice cut through the noise of the departing crowd.
"Dad."
He turned.
She was running toward him, clearing the space between them without looking at the people she stepped around. She did not stop. She did not hesitate. She came at him the way she had when she was seven years old, launching herself forward, and he did what he had spent her whole life preparing to do.
He caught her.
The impact of her was solid, a sudden and welcome weight against his chest. He held her off the floor, his scarred hands locking behind her back to keep her steady. She buried her face into the rough wool of his collar, and for a moment, the crowd and the venue and the distance between them simply ceased to exist.
He'd come to watch unseen and disappear,
but his daughter found him, and pulled him near.
The Clearing
2024 · Kanagawa
The facility was forty minutes out, two trains and a bus, and Riko had made the trip enough times now that her body did it without her. She counted the stops out of habit and stopped counting somewhere around the point the city thinned into fields. That was the part she liked. The city let go by degrees, the way it had let go of them once before, on a different train, when she was too small to remember it and her mother was still someone who got on trains.
Visiting hours were two to four. She came at two.
She brought mikans. She always brought something — you did not arrive at a place like this with empty hands, that was just a thing she knew — and today it was a net bag of mikan because they were in season and because her hands had reached for them in the shop without asking her first.
Saki was in the garden. That was the first good sign. On the bad days she stayed in her room with the blind down; on the days there was something left of her, she was outside, and today she was on the bench by the wall with her face turned up to the thin autumn sun.
She was clear.
Riko knew it before she was close enough to speak — knew it the way she knew a full keg from an empty one, by a weight that was either there or wasn't. Some days her mother's eyes were a signal coming in from a long way off. Today they landed on Riko and stayed.
"You came," Saki said, like it was a surprise. It was not a surprise. Riko came every week. But she let it be one, because letting her mother be surprised by kindness was cheaper than correcting her and worth more.
"I brought these." Riko sat, and started on a mikan without being asked, working her thumb around the outside the way Baba had, separating the segments through the peel before she opened it, so it would be ready. She didn't decide to do it Baba's way. Her hands just knew the motion now. They had learned it from watching, and then one day it was hers.
She held a segment out without looking. Saki took it.
"You do that like she did," Saki said.
"I know."
They sat. Saki ate the mikan slowly, a segment at a time, and Riko peeled a second one against the possibility of it being wanted. The garden did the quiet work gardens do. Somewhere behind them a screen door opened and closed.
Saki watched her hands work the fruit. Something moved across her face — recognition, arriving from a long way off.
"You're nineteen now," she said. Not a question. "I keep forgetting, and then I look at you and there it is. Nineteen." A pause. "That's how old I was. Sitting on a barstool, certain I knew better than a woman who'd already lived the thing she was warning me about."
She turned the cup in her hands.
"You remember I told you about Shimizu-san. In the taxi, that day. I called her that — Shimizu-san — because I thought I'd lost the right to her name. That she'd stopped being my friend the minute I didn't listen to her."
Riko waited.
"I was wrong about that." Saki said it slowly, like it had cost her months to arrive at. "She wasn't like that. Yasuko—" and something eased in her face as she said the first name, like setting down a weight she'd carried so long she'd stopped feeling it. "Shimizu Yasuko. She would never have stopped being someone's friend over being right. That's not who she was. I spent all these years thinking I threw her away, and the whole time she'd have picked up if I'd called. I just couldn't believe anyone would still—" She stopped. "Shame lies to you. It tells you you're already gone, so you might as well stay gone."
Riko did not know the name. She filed it as she filed most of what her mother handed her on the clear days — carefully, without knowing what drawer it went in.
"If you ever find someone who tells you the truth when it costs them," Saki said, "you keep her. And you believe her when she forgives you. That's the part I got wrong — not the listening. The believing she'd forgive."
"I'll remember," Riko said.
She meant it. She filed that too.
She did not know, sitting in the thin sun with a second mikan already peeled and waiting in her hand, that she had already done the thing her mother was asking. That she had already found the woman who told the truth and stayed. That she called her something else — a warmer word, a word with no last name attached to it yet — and that the name her mother had just set down in the garden and the woman who had said you're home were the same person, and had been all along.
She would learn that later. In a room full of people, with the lights down.
For now she handed her mother the second mikan, and her mother took it, and the afternoon went on being ordinary, which on the clear days was the most you could ask of it.
She carried the truth in a bag full of fruit,
and the name of the answer, still filed at the root.
One Time, One Meeting
2023 · Yokohama
She had her mat strapped to her back and her tea in her hand and she was running three minutes late, which was not like her but was forgivable.
The morning was cold and clean. The kind of morning that felt purposeful — like the city had reset overnight and was offering something new. She liked these mornings. She liked the way her breath looked in the air, the way her shoes sounded on the pavement, and the way the route to the studio was so familiar it required nothing of her, leaving her mind free to be anywhere.
She was thinking about Lilly.
She knew the intense, burning focus Lilly put into everything she cared about. Keiko had been watching her since they were twelve—nine years of learning the shape of the rooms Lilly made. She didn't need to hover or crowd her. She would wait, and when Lilly was ready to take a breath, Keiko would be there with the kettle on.
This was not naive. This was how she had chosen to love.
She turned the corner onto the narrower street, the one with the shuttered dry cleaner and the planter that never had anything growing in it. She had taken this route four hundred times. She knew every crack in the pavement. Something was different today.
She saw him from a distance.
He was on the ground, or nearly — propped against the wall of the building with his coat pulled up and his head at the angle of someone who had stopped caring where they ended up. He was muttering something. She could not hear it yet.
As she closed the distance, she didn't see a ghost from her past. She didn't see anyone she recognized. He was a stranger. Just a lost soul who had run out of road, shivering against the concrete in the early morning shadow, disheveled and unkempt. He didn't register as a memory—he registered as a person.
And he deserved to be seen.
She did not walk past. She slowed her pace, adjusted her mat, and knelt down on the cold pavement beside him.
He was speaking to the brickwork, to the empty street, his voice a dry, repeating whisper:
"Want to be famous..."
Keiko didn't offer pity, and she didn't offer a lecture. She simply sat with him. She took the lid off her tea, letting the steam rise between them in the cold air, and placed the warm cup in his hands. For ten, fifteen minutes, she stayed. She sat in the quiet space next to his ruined dreams, offering him, with her tea, the one thing the city had denied him: a witness.
She listened to the quiet cadence of his murmurs until the shivering stopped, and the air between them grew still. The moment had reached its natural end. It had passed.
She stood up, adjusted her strap, and continued her walk.
Behind her, the man kept on — the same words, to the same empty street, offered now to no one but the phantoms.
He did not know the woman who had knelt beside him. He did not know she already carried more of the thing he had spent his whole life reaching for than his father's name had ever bought him.
He did not know her at all.
He never would.
The studio was four minutes away, but by the time she slid through the front doors, she was twenty minutes late.
Inside the studio, the room was already alive with the quiet, rhythmic sound of breathing. Her advanced students had not waited in idle confusion; they had already unrolled their mats, aligned their spaces, and begun their morning warm-ups on their own. They knew the practice, and they knew her.
Keiko quietly slipped off her shoes. She didn't offer a rushed, frantic apology. She simply offered a warm, grounded smile.
"Thank you all for starting," she said softly, her voice carrying the calm of the morning.
She walked to the front of the room, unstrapped her mat, and stepped into the flow of the class, taking her place at the lead to continue the session.
Nobody would know about the man on the street.
She had not decided this as a policy. It was simply true — there was nothing to tell. A lost soul had needed a moment of presence, she had given it to him, and then she had moved on. She would carry the quiet of that encounter inside herself. She had been doing that her whole life. She was good at it.
What she felt as she led the class through their postures was a deep, resonant peace.
Only one choice, really. Keiko believed that you could not lock happiness inside yourself; it only lived in the space between people. To make others happy was to be happy.
She chose to be happy.
She paused to share the morning with a soul she didn't know,
Then carried what they shared inside, and softly let it go.
INTERLUDE: I’m With the Band — Bleeding Cherub
2022 · Upstairs Room, Yasuko’s House
[PODCAST INTRO: "I'M WITH THE BAND"]
(Music: A soft, lo-fi, slightly melancholic acoustic guitar loop—something that feels like it could be a B-side track from Cemetery.)
Host (Mark Sterling): "Welcome back to I'm With the Band. I'm your host, Mark Sterling. As always, this show is exactly what you make it: you tell me who you want to hear from, and I do the legwork to get them behind the mic.
For months, my inbox has said the same thing. Not the stadium recaps. Not the polished, PR-approved soundbites. You wanted them — what happens when the stage lights drop and the mics go cold.
You wanted Bleeding Cherub.
That's not an easy get. They don't do interviews, not really, and they rarely let outsiders in. But they said yes to one live fan chat, from the most intimate place they have — no PR, no time limit, no script. A laptop on a table, a few friends, and a stack of your questions.
If you've ever wondered why their music feels so raw, you're about to find out.
I'm with the band. And today, for the first time, so are you."
(Music swells for a second, then fades into the ambient sound of a room—the soft thud of a drumstick tapping a wooden chair, and the sound of a laptop being pulled across a table.)
The afternoon light slants through the shoji screens, gold and a little dusty. Someone's laptop is open on the table, angled toward all of them — Yasuko's idea, "so the kids can actually talk to people for once." Kage is curled near the heater, unbothered by any of this.
Lilly: pulls the laptop a few inches closer to herself without asking anyone. "So this is the thing. People type, and we just... talk to them." She glances at the screen like it might do something unexpected.
Keiko: leans into frame, already smiling. "Hi, everyone!" She waves, then catches herself. "Is that — do I wave? I don't know the etiquette."
Riko: is sprawled sideways with her chin on her arms, grinning. "You don't have to wave, Keiko, it's not a video call."
Keiko: undeterred: "I'm still waving."
Gumi: is in the corner with her sketchbook, not looking up. "She's still waving."
Yasu says nothing yet. He's got a chair turned backward, arms crossed over the top of it, watching the laptop like it's a stranger he hasn't decided about.
Lilly: glances around at all of them, then back at the screen. "Alright." A small, dry almost-smile. "Ask us something."
Q: What do you think is the ideal boyfriend? And Yasu — the ideal girlfriend?
Keiko: doesn't hesitate. "Someone who notices when you're tired before you say it. That's it. That's the whole thing." She tucks her knees up, pleased with herself. "Everything else you can build."
Lilly: doesn't look up from the laptop screen at first. "Someone who doesn't flinch when you're difficult." A pause. "Most people perform patience. I want someone who isn't performing." She says it flat, like a fact and not a wound, though the room goes very slightly quieter for a second.
Riko: breaks it before it can sit too long, voice light on purpose. "I just want someone who'd split the last piece of mochi with me instead of pretending they're full." She grins. "Low bar. I'm a simple woman."
Gumi: still not looking up from the sketchbook, voice quiet: "Someone who lets you be still. Doesn't need you to fill the silence to prove you're okay." A beat. "And doesn't ask you to explain the quiet."
Lilly glances sideways at her — a flicker of something, gone fast.
Yasu has been turning a drumstick slowly between his fingers this whole time. He doesn't answer right away — long enough that Keiko looks over at him, half-smiling, like she already knows what's coming.
Yasu: finally: "Someone who doesn't need saving." A pause, eyes still on the drumstick. "And isn't scared to say when she's not okay." That's all. He sets the drumstick down like the sentence is finished, and it is.
Keiko looks at her brother for a second longer than the moment requires, something soft and unreadable in it, then turns back to the screen like nothing happened. "Anyway. Next question."
Q: Bleeding Cherub lyrics have a lot of emotion in them — Lilly, do you get your lyrics from real life experiences?
Lilly finally looks up from the laptop, and there's a stretch of quiet that isn't hesitation — it's her deciding how much of the truth is for sale today.
Lilly: "Yes." Just that, at first. Then, dryer: "Did you think I was making it up? That would honestly be a more impressive skill."
Lilly: leans back, arms crossed loosely. "Everything starts somewhere real. A room. A person. A specific kind of silence after someone says something they can't take back." A small shrug, controlled. "What you hear isn't a diary entry, though. I'm not interested in confession. I'm interested in what's true about a feeling, not what happened. Those aren't the same thing."
Gumi: not looking up from her sketchbook, says quietly: "She edits reality until it's more honest than the original."
Lilly glances at her — there's that flicker again, fast, gone.
Lilly: "That's the nicest thing you've said about my work in a year."
Gumi: "Don't let it go to your head."
Lilly, back to the screen, voice cooling into something more guarded: "There's one album people ask about more than the others." She doesn't say the title. She doesn't need to — Keiko's gone very still on the other side of the room, the way she does when a door is about to be tested.
Lilly: "I'm not going to talk about that one today. Ask me about literally anything else from it — the chords, the structure, why I picked a certain key — and I'll talk for an hour. But not what it's about." A beat. "Some things are research. Some things are just mine."
Keiko says nothing, but reaches over and rests a hand briefly on Lilly's knee — not a comment, just a presence — before pulling back to let the moment pass on its own.
Riko: gently steering: "Okay but the chords thing — is that true for all of it, or just the one you're not telling us about?"
Lilly: grateful for the exit and not hiding it: "All of it. I write the feeling first, then I go looking for the chord that's lying about the same thing the feeling is."
Q: Being the newest — and youngest — member of BC, do you feel you bring something to the table the band needed for so long?
The question lands soft, and for a second Riko's usual quickness goes quiet — not gone, just gathering.
Riko picks at the hem of her sleeve before she answers, like she's deciding whether to deflect with a joke or actually say the thing. She goes with the thing.
Riko: "I used to think I was just — lucky. Wrong place, right alley, right cedar box." A small laugh, not quite steady. "Like I showed up and they let me stay because it would've been rude to kick me out."
Gumi: without looking up, quiet but immediate: "That's not why."
Riko glances at her, surprised by how fast that came.
Lilly: picks it up smoothly, like she and Gumi rehearsed it without rehearsing it. "You came in already knowing how to take care of people. The rest of us had to learn that from each other, slowly, over years. You walked in with it installed." A small, dry almost-smile. "Mildly annoying, honestly."
Keiko: is beaming at this point, the way she does when something true is being said out loud in a room she loves. "You see things we stopped seeing. The line weight thing, the negative space — you notice when something's off before any of us do. That's not luck. That's an eye."
Riko: voice a little thick now, trying to laugh it off: "Okay, stop, I'm going to cry on a livestream—"
Yasu: finally speaks, low, not looking up from the drumstick he's turning. "You ask if people are okay. Actually ask. Wait for the answer." A pause. "Nobody else in this room does that as well as you do." That's the whole sentence. He goes quiet again like he's used up his words for the hour.
Riko stares at him for a second, genuinely thrown — that's the most he's said directly to her in one go.
Gumi: dryly, still not looking up from her sketchbook: "Careful. He likes you now. It's permanent. He can't take it back."
Yasu: flat: "I can hear you."
Gumi: "I know."
Q: For each of you — dog or cat?
The question gets an immediate reaction — Kage, asleep by the heater, twitches one ear like he knows he's being discussed.
Keiko: answers before anyone else can even breathe in. "Cat. Obviously cat. Have you met Kage?" She gestures at the sleeping grey lump like it's Exhibit A.
Gumi: finally looking up from her sketchbook, almost offended on principle: "Cat." No elaboration needed. She feeds strays. The question answers itself.
Lilly: considers it for a beat longer than the question deserves, which is very on-brand. "Cat. Dogs are too honest about how much they like you. It's exhausting to be loved that transparently." A pause. "Also I respect something that ignores me on purpose."
Riko: grins. "See, I'm gonna say dog, and you're all gonna act like I betrayed the household."
Gumi: deadpan: "You have betrayed the household."
Riko: laughing: "I just like the enthusiasm! Someone's happy to see you when you walk in the door, no conditions, no —" she gestures vaguely at Kage "— judgment in the eyes."
Lilly: "Kage doesn't judge you. He evaluates you. There's a difference."
Yasu has been quiet, predictably, drumstick turning slow between his fingers. When he finally answers, it's short, like always.
Yasu: "Dog."
Everyone looks at him.
Keiko: delighted, leaning forward: "Wait, really? You? Mister 'I trust no one for the first six months'?"
Yasu: not even glancing up: "Dogs decide fast. Once they're loyal, that's it. No games." A beat. "I respect that."
Gumi: quietly, almost to herself: "...that explains a lot about him, actually."
Lilly: smirks at the laptop screen. "Noted for the record. Yasu identifies with golden retrievers."
Yasu: "I didn't say that."
Lilly: "You didn't have to."
Q: Yasu — how is it being with all these girls?
Yasu actually pauses on this one — not the usual measuring silence, but something closer to genuine thought. The drumstick stops turning.
Yasu doesn't look up right away. When he does, there's the faintest something at the corner of his mouth — not quite a smile, but adjacent to one.
Yasu: "Loud."
The room immediately erupts in protest before he even finishes.
Riko: "Excuse me—"
Keiko: laughing, swatting his arm: "We are not loud, you're just quiet, there's a difference—"
Lilly: dry, not looking up from the laptop: "He's not wrong."
Gumi: equally dry, still sketching: "He's not wrong."
Yasu waits for it to die down, completely unbothered, like he knew exactly what he was starting. Then, quieter, more honest:
Yasu: "It's good." That's it at first. Then, because the room is watching him and waiting, he gives a little more — which for Yasu is a lot. "I grew up being the one who had to watch everything. Manage everything." His eyes flick toward Keiko for half a second, something old and careful passing through. "Here, I don't have to. Someone's already noticed. Someone's already got it." A shrug, like he's closing the subject. "It's good not being the only one paying attention."
Keiko goes very still for a second — the specific stillness of hearing something her brother doesn't usually say out loud — then leans her head against his shoulder without making a thing of it.
Lilly: breaking the moment before it gets too soft for the room to handle, glancing at him sideways: "So what you're saying is, you like being outnumbered."
Yasu: flat again, already back to himself: "I didn't say that either."
Lilly: "You didn't have to."
Gumi: not looking up: "She's going to keep doing that to you for the rest of your life."
Yasu: "I know."
Q: From Yasuforever2022 — Yasu, will you marry me?
The room goes quiet for exactly one beat — and then Keiko absolutely loses it laughing, burying her face in Riko's shoulder.
Keiko: wheezing: "Yasuforever2022 — Yasu, someone has committed to this—"
Riko: grinning, holding Keiko up: "That's a whole branded username, that's not a bit, that's a lifestyle—"
Gumi: not looking up from her sketchbook, deadpan: "She's been planning this since 2022. Respect the dedication."
Lilly is watching Yasu over the top of the laptop with the specific patience of someone who knows exactly how long this is going to take and is enjoying every second of the wait.
Yasu says nothing for a long moment. Drumstick still. He's not embarrassed, exactly — more like he's actually considering how to answer a joke seriously, which is somehow funnier than if he'd just laughed it off.
Yasu: finally: "No."
The room groans in unison, half-disappointed, half-delighted that he actually answered at all.
Yasu: completely unbothered, already turning the drumstick again: "But I appreciate the loyalty." A beat. Then, almost — almost — gentle: "Stick around for the music instead. That's the better deal."
Keiko: still laughing: "Did Yasu just let someone down kindly? Write this down, this is historic—"
Yasu: "I'm always kind."
Lilly: dry, not missing a beat: "You said one word to her and it was 'no.'"
Yasu: "It was a kind no."
Q: Gumi — do you take requests for your artwork? I have a chapel ceiling that needs a painting.
Gumi actually looks up fully this time — sketchbook lowering into her lap, pencil going still between her fingers. There's a flicker of real interest in her face, the kind that doesn't show up often.
Gumi: quiet, careful with the question like she's turning it over: "A ceiling. In a chapel." Not quite a question — she's just letting the size of it sit with her.
A pause. Then, almost to herself: "I've never painted anything that big. Or anything that someone has to look up at to see." Another pause, longer. "That changes what it needs to be. Ceilings aren't compositions, they're — " she stops, searching for it " — weather. People aren't looking at it the way they look at a page. They're standing under it."
Riko: leaning in, delighted: "Okay but that's such a Gumi answer, you've been asked one sentence and you're already doing the art theory thing—"
Gumi: not looking up, dry: "You asked."
Lilly: arms crossed, watching her with something almost proud: "She doesn't do requests, for the record. She does commissions. There's a difference, and she will explain it to you for forty minutes if you let her."
Gumi doesn't deny it. She goes quiet again, thinking, pencil tapping once against the sketchbook.
Gumi: "I'd want to know what the space carries before I touch it. What it's for, who stands under it, what they're feeling when they look up." A beat. "I don't paint blind. I paint what's already there and just hasn't been seen yet."
Keiko: softly, watching her friend with real warmth: "That's the most words she's said about her own work all week, by the way. You should feel honored."
Gumi: finally cracking the smallest almost-smile, eyes back on her sketchbook: "I'm not promising anything. But — tell me about the chapel."
Q: From Littlelovebearhug — if I want to be like you when I grow up, Lilly, what should I start to do now? I am in 6th grade.
Something shifts in Lilly's face the second she reads it — the dry edge softens, just slightly, like the question caught her somewhere she wasn't braced for. She doesn't answer right away.
Lilly sets the laptop down on her knees properly, like this one deserves both hands.
Lilly: "Sixth grade." A pause, quieter than her usual register. "Okay. First — don't try to be like me. Try to find out what YOU actually sound like, underneath what everyone tells you you're supposed to sound like. That takes longer than people think, and it's the only part that matters."
Keiko has gone soft watching her, hands wrapped around her tea, not interrupting.
Lilly: keeps going, a little more practical now: "Write things down. Doesn't matter if they're good. Feelings, weird thoughts, a sentence that sounded right at 11pm — keep all of it. You'll go back later and find the one true thing buried in ten pages of nothing." A beat. "Most of what I write now started as garbage I almost threw away."
Gumi: not looking up, quiet: "She's not exaggerating. I've seen the notebooks."
Lilly: dry again for half a second: "Those are private, Gumi."
Gumi: "Not anymore, apparently."
A small laugh escapes Lilly — quick, almost surprised at itself — before she turns back to the screen, gentler again.
Lilly: "And learn an instrument if you can. Doesn't have to be piano. Just something where your hands learn the feeling before your brain does. Music gets into you faster that way." A pause, and then — careful, like she means it more than the rest: "And be kind to people. Genuinely. Not because it gets you anywhere — it doesn't, always — but because the version of you that does that anyway is the one worth becoming."
Riko: voice soft: "Lilly, that was almost warm. Are you feeling okay?"
Lilly: already retreating back into herself, dry again: "Don't tell anyone. I have a reputation."
Keiko: smiling into her tea: "Too late. It's being livestreamed."
Q: You're writing the biographical novel titled Is This Fate? — the same title as one of your albums. Do you believe in fate, or do you believe we make our own?
The question lands heavier than the last few — the room actually quiets for a second, even Kage shifting near the heater like he felt it too.
Keiko: is the one who breaks the silence, though more thoughtfully than usual, turning her cup slowly in her hands first. "I think... fate gives you the door. You still have to walk through it." She glances toward Yasu without making it obvious. "Someone still has to decide to carry the suitcase. Fate doesn't carry it for you."
Yasu doesn't look up from the drumstick, but something tightens slightly in his jaw — he knows exactly what she just referenced, even softened the way she said it. He says nothing yet.
Gumi: speaks next, slower than usual, like she's been waiting for this question her whole life without knowing it. "I don't believe in fate. I believe in inheritance." A pause. "You get handed things you didn't choose — a face, a house, a silence at the dinner table. What you do with what you were handed — that part's yours." She looks down at her sketchbook, at lines only she can read yet. "I draw the things I was handed. That's the only way I've found to make them mine instead of just... mine to carry."
Lilly: waits for the room to settle before she speaks — her usual rhythm. "I don't think fate is a force. I think it's a story we tell backward." Dry, but not dismissive. "You make a hundred small choices nobody notices, and then one day you look back and call the pattern 'fate' because that's easier than admitting you built it yourself, decision by decision, mostly by accident." A beat. "I called the album that on purpose. Not because I believe in it. Because I wanted to ask the question and let people sit in not knowing."
Riko has gone quiet in the particular way she goes quiet — present, but somewhere else for a second. When she speaks, it's softer than her usual deflection-laugh.
Riko: "I used to think fate was just the thing you tell yourself so the bad stuff doesn't feel as random." A pause. "But then there's the cedar box. The alley. This room." She looks around at all of them, something unguarded in it. "I don't know how to call that an accident. I don't know how to call it fate either. I just know I'm grateful for whatever it was."
Yasu: finally speaks, low, after the room's gone quiet enough to let him. "Fate's a word for the things that happen to you." He sets the drumstick down. "What you do after — that's the only part I trust." A beat, and his eyes flick briefly to Keiko. "I didn't wait for fate when I was eight. I made a choice." He doesn't elaborate. He never does. But the room understands the weight of it anyway.
Keiko reaches over and rests her hand lightly on his for a second — no words, just there.
Lilly: quietly, almost to herself, closing the moment without forcing it: "Maybe that's the actual answer. Fate hands you the question. You're the one who has to answer it."
CLOSING
The laptop camera light blinks off-screen as the session winds down — chairs shifting, tea cups being gathered, the particular looseness of a room exhaling after holding something for a while.
Keiko: waves at the screen, bright as ever. "Thank you all so much for being here! This was so fun—"
Riko: grins, already reaching for her bag. "Yeah, seriously — these are some of my favorite questions we've gotten. Like and subscribe, for real, it actually helps us a lot."
Lilly: closes the laptop halfway, glancing at it one last time. "Hit the bell. Apparently that matters." Dry, but there's warmth under it now that wasn't there at the start.
Gumi: is already back in her sketchbook, but she says, quiet, without looking up: "Thanks for asking real things. Most people don't."
Yasu stands, drumstick tucked behind his ear out of habit. He doesn't say much — just a short nod toward the screen.
Yasu: "Appreciate it." That's his whole goodbye, and somehow it's enough.
Kage stretches by the heater, unbothered, as the shoji light starts to dim toward evening.
[PODCAST OUTRO: "I'M WITH THE BAND"]
(Music: The lo-fi acoustic loop fades back in, underscoring the host's voice.)
Host (Mark Sterling): "And that was Bleeding Cherub—unfiltered, as requested.
I want to thank the band for letting us drop in on their space. It's rare to find artists who are as guarded about their process as they are honest about the result, and I think we all caught a glimpse of exactly why this band resonates the way it does.
If you enjoyed this session, let me know who you want to hear from next. The inbox is open, and I'm already looking at the list for the next episode.
I'm Mark Sterling, and this has been I'm With the Band. Thanks for listening."
(Music swells—a slightly more upbeat, driving rhythm this time—and then fades to silence.)
Yasuko's Song
2024 · Yokohama
Eight hundred seats. It was the biggest room they'd ever played.
There had been a time — not long ago, the four of them still practicing in Keiko's front room — when eighty would have been a good night. Then a hundred. Somewhere in that climb — a few hundred packed into a fogged-out room in Meguro — a girl with a phone had called the smoke the smaze, and the name had stuck to all of them, the band and the crowd both. Then the places with actual dressing rooms, actual sound guys who knew their names by the second song. Eight hundred was new. Every seat was full, and there were people standing at the back who had paid too much for the privilege and did not seem to regret it.
Yasu was behind the kit twenty minutes before the doors opened.
He did this always. Not superstition — the kit was just the one place in any room where he knew exactly what he was. Not the son. Not the brother. Not the big man people found quieter than they expected. The drummer. He sat in it the way other people sat in prayer.
He ran the first half of the set in his head. Not the beats — he didn't need those anymore. Just the shapes. The breathing of the thing.
Keiko came up beside him at ten to eight.
The main curtain was still drawn, a wall of velvet between them and the house, and the sound of the room filling came through it — a low sea-swell of voices, boots, glasses.
She didn't say anything at first. She stood in the dim with her bass across her shoulder and looked at the seam where the curtains met. He could feel the thing that happened to her before certain shows — the frequency shifting inside her, something old checking its own charge. She hid it from the world these days. Back here she wasn't hiding it at all.
"She's here?" he said.
"Backstage. With Gumi." A pause. "She seems like herself."
Yasu nodded. That was enough.
Their mother had no talent for pretending. What it had cost her to get here — the years she'd locked her own music away so theirs could have the room — he would not say out loud tonight. He wouldn't say it ever. The dreams she'd put down had come back to her as a gift, and the gift was that her children had built a stage and were about to hand it to her.
He just kept time.
The set opened with three from the third album — the familiar frequency, the one the room came for. From there they moved forward through a catalog Keiko had spent two weeks pacing until the seams disappeared. She was the architect of the momentum. Yasu built the rhythm she designed, Gumi rooted it, Lilly turned the silence between notes into a second instrument. That was the four of them. It always had been.
Near the end of the set, Keiko's hands came off the strings.
It wasn't a mistake, and the song didn't fall. The band caught the gap as they always caught each other — Gumi half a step left, her guitar swelling to cover it, Lilly's piano filling the air. Keiko paused six beats, maybe eight, her eyes fixed on the dark of the wings where their mother had become visible. Then she dropped the bass back into the rhythm, dead on time, as if she'd never left.
Yasu didn't look over. He didn't need to. He knew exactly who his sister had seen.
Gumi had put her in the third row.
Family seat. Riko had counted the rows on her way in out of habit — she counted things in new rooms, it was how she stood in them — and stopped at three, because three was where Gumi pointed, and family didn't have to count.
She'd watched the whole set from there. Yasu behind the kit, keeping the thing running so the others could come apart on top of it. Keiko out front, deciding where the night went. Gumi in the dark on the left, adding the one note nobody wrote down. Lilly at the piano, being the reason. She loved watching them work. She'd told them so, more than once, in the flat way she said true things so they wouldn't get heavy.
The last song came. She could feel it was the last one — the room could too, that held breath before a thing ends.
Then Keiko stepped to the mic.
"My mom came tonight," she said.
The room quieted.
"She doesn't usually. She lets this be ours." Keiko glanced at Yasu. "She's here tonight. Yasu wrote the beats. Lilly and I wrote the words, and we couldn't finish it without Gumi — so it belongs to all of us, I think. But it's for her." A pause. "Please welcome to the stage, for the first time — my mom. Shimizu Yasuko."
The name went in sideways.
Shimizu Yasuko. Riko had heard it before. A garden, a clear day, her mother lucid for once, turning a cup she wasn't drinking. Shimizu Yasuko. She was my friend. I should have listened to her. Riko had filed it the way she filed what Saki gave her on the good days: carefully, without knowing what drawer it went in. She had not taken it out since. It came out now on its own.
Okaasan walked into the light.
Riko's hand was already in her bag. She didn't remember reaching. Her fingers found the envelope as they found the harness buckle in the dark — before she'd decided to. The photograph. She'd carried it so long it had stopped being a decision.
A man. A boy. A small girl. His other family.
She did not look at the man. She looked at the boy — at how he stood a half step in front of the girl, shoulder turned, the whole small body arranged around keeping her behind it. She knew that arrangement. She'd watched it all year. Yasu moving through a room so Keiko was always on the inside of him, the way you carry the thing you won't put down.
The boy in the photograph was doing it before he was tall enough to reach the man's hip.
She counted, because counting was what she did when the floor moved. One man. Two children in a picture. Two children on a stage. A man beside them then, a woman between them now.
The count did not come out even. It came out as family.
On stage, Yasuko took the second microphone like people hold things they aren't sure they've earned. She stood a little behind Keiko — not shyness. She was making it clear whose night it was, and choosing to be a gift in it rather than a presence.
Lilly began to play.
Yasuko's voice, when it came, was not the voice of someone performing. It was the voice of someone speaking clearly in a language they'd stopped using for a long time. Clear because of the disuse. Clear as a room is clear when the windows are opened after winter — a little cold still, a little startled by the air.
She knew every word. Of course she did.
Lilly's voice met hers in the second verse, and that was the thing no microphone had ever caught — how those two voices held the same space without crowding it, found the interval and stayed in it. Two instruments that had barely rehearsed together and had always known this song.
In the bridge, Gumi played one thing Keiko hadn't put there. A single line, low and spare, that resolved a hair off the written arrangement — not better, just true in a way that was Gumi's. Keiko heard it. Didn't look at her. Smiled.
The last verse was both of them, weaving back and forth to end as one. The band fell back to almost nothing and let the voices carry, and the room went so quiet Riko could hear the people around her decide not to breathe.
She sat in the third row with the photograph in her lap and her mother's voice in her ear and did the arithmetic no one had ever handed her, and got — for the first time in her life — an answer that came out to more people than she'd started with.
She didn't stand. She didn't call out. Whatever this was, it was hers first, and she'd learned from the best of them how to carry a thing quietly until you knew what it weighed.
The final note rang, faded, died.
The room came back to itself slowly, as rooms do after certain things. Then it was loud. Then it was very loud. Yasu hit the snare once, because that was the only thing that made sense. Gumi laid her palm flat on her strings. Keiko lifted her chin in the small nod that meant: this is what we did, and it was real.
Yasuko stood with the microphone in both hands and looked at the room, and the room looked back.
She did not cry. She was Yasuko.
She bowed.
In the third row, Riko put the photograph back in her bag. She would take it out again — tomorrow, or a year from tomorrow, when she knew what to do with it. Not tonight. Tonight she had a family on stage who didn't know yet that they'd gained one more, and a woman up there who had once walked into the dark with everything she owned in a single suitcase and had just been handed a room built entirely of the people that suitcase saved.
Riko stood, with everyone, and clapped until her hands hurt, and kept the enormous new fact of it — for one more minute, for as long as the applause lasted — entirely to herself.
She had gone looking for where the art came from.
She had found her family.
She poured every year of her silence into a song,
And the girl in the third row learned where she belonged.