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My lone footsteps carried me through the night streets, as though a fleeting shadow passing through the city, seen and quickly forgotten. I mindlessly stepped into an alley, my mind feeling numb as I relived the days, weeks, and months that the cycle continued. After memorizing the fastest route home, I saw no point in taking any other path, and so I followed what I knew best like a broken record endlessly looping the same song.
“I told you I don’t have your mon[E]y! Give me another day to work something out,” a voice rang out in passing from two men speaking with increasing hostility. I averted my gaze.
“Please, just a few yen. I have a daughter,” a woman begged a familiar tune. I averted my gaze.
“Is it… the storm in the mountains, or the wind in the pines~♬” a drunkard slurred a song only partially comprehensive as he stumbled out of the doors of an izakaya. I averted my gaze.
“We have the finest sensations to quell your hunger!” a seductive tone called amidst it all. “You there, young man. Won’t you come in?”
I averted my—
“Come on now. Don’t just ignore me.”
A firm hand gripped my arm, forcing me to a halt. My mind reeled for a moment before I glanced at the immodestly dressed woman that it belonged to, peeking up at me through her eyelashes and flashing a smile that dripped with honey-scented venom. Though I had passed by the eatery that took me no time to recognize as a covert brothel countless times, I was unused to receiving even an ounce of attention in passing.
“Look at you, all skin and bones,” she hummed, her trained hand squeezing my bicep in a way that felt wholly violating. “Why don't you come in and enjoy yourself? We provide all manner of meals to suit your fancy.”
She winked, sending a renewed wave of discomfort rolling in my chest. The fact that the establishment roared to life only in the late hours when nobody would realistically be sitting down for a meal only cemented my understanding of its nature.
“Um… No, thank you,” I mumbled quietly.
“What was that?” she whispered in response as she leaned in closer, her warm breath puffing against my neck.
In a louder [V]oice, I repeated, “No, thank you.”
I tugged my arm free from her grasp as I said as much, stumbling to the side in an attempt to create distance. Despite that, her wide eyes glimmered with predatory enamorment, and the neon signs around us painted her in a malevolent red light.
“Wait—” she began to say, yet her next step towards me made my body spring into motion, and without another thought, I darted from the street as though a mouse escaping the jaws of a feline.
“If you ever change your mind, you know where to find us!” her voice echoed in a final attempt to ensnare me with her easy words. “We would love to have you!”
By the time I reached the end of the back street, my breath had already become short and haggard. For fatigue had claimed me long before, and even the briefest physical exertion seemed to push my body to its limits by the end of the day.
SMACK!
I felt the slam of my body against the pavement before I even registered that I tripped. Upon impact, a puddle that had formed from the rainstorm hours before splashed up to envelop me in an icy embrace that left my clothes drenched. If my renewed adrenaline wasn’t enough to push me from falling into the mental haze that came with days that dragged on as carbon copies of the last, the cold that soaked into my skin made sure I was wide awake—even though I knew it wouldn’t last.
Laughs pealed from passersby. Were they laughing at me, or just humored by conversations that left them blissfully ignorant of everything around them? Regardless—or maybe expectedly was the right word—no hand reached down to offer its aid, and so I clambered to my feet and kept moving, joining the crowd of faceless bodies that moved mechanically through the main street like a train bolted to a track.
Despite the brevity of our contact, the pungency of the woman’s perfume still seemed to desperately cling to me, and I subconsciously found my pace quickening, as if in an attempt to outrun it.
When I finally reached my apartment and stepped inside, the chatter of the outside world was replaced by a deafening silence the very moment the door closed behind me. At the same time, the light that came with it was cut off, leaving me shrouded in a darkness that was only interrupted by the floaters that lingered in my eyes from the luminescence of Shinjuku.
I didn’t bother changing out of my soaked uniform—not even taking off my shoes, for that matter. What point was there in any of that? It was nothing but wasted time, the time I could have spent studying or working. Studying or working. Studying or working.
My bag—the lifeline that stored every n[E]cessity for school, work, and everything in between—dropped to the floor with a heavy thunk, the place it would stay until morning. And stumbling from exhaustion as my hands trailed along the walls to find my way in the dark, I collapsed onto the couch, sucking in a deep breath as if it were the first time I was allowed oxygen in the past 24 hours.
I vended my bed months ago, as well as anything but the bare necessities. When my mother and I sold the family house, we agreed that there was no point in clinging onto any nostalgic mementos, not when they could be exchanged for a few yen that might lighten our burdens if only a little. Of course, Mom insisted that I keep my own personal items, so I lied through my teeth saying I would. I was sure that she might have been disappointed when she finally became well enough to return home and see the apartment bare, but every day it seemed like even that was becoming a dream of what could not be.
Now, as I lay on the impossibly stiff couch—an item I only kept because its creaks and groans dissuaded anyone I might have pawned it off to—my vision swirled to the beat of my pounding head and warped the shadows that crept along the wall, making me unable to differentiate where the delirium ended and the fresh tears began. Such had become a display so common to me that I no longer knew what I cried for; my mother, myself, or maybe just every annoyance and stress of the day finally catching up with me. All I truly knew without question was that the last of my energy seemed to drain from my body through the stream that slipped down my cheeks, leaving me consumed by a tiredness that no amount of sleep could ever heal. And so it was as if my body didn’t even try, forcing me to stay awake for days unending.
My head fell to the side, seeing nothing but a pile of letters thrown haphazardly to the floor. Bills. Even the moon did not grant me mercy, the dull light it sent streaming through the window providing barely enough brightness to see, let alone read the senders. Despite that, I still knew that they were hospital bills from all different institutions. Surely apartment bills were also sprinkled among the stacks, and I did not doubt that the heftiest sum among them belonged to the debts from my mother’s creditors.
I never was a fan of math. How ironic it was that every moment of my life had begun revolving around numbers, and not just from the taxes. My eyes never left the clock, ears keen to the phantom tick, tick, ticking that seemed to follow me in my steps and remind me that every second I wasted only pushed my mother's health further into decline.
7:00 AM: wake up.
7:10 AM: eat breakfast.
7:10 AM: study.
8:30 AM: school starts.
4:00 PM: school lets out.
4:10 PM: study.
4:40 PM: visit Mom's ward.
5:00 PM: clock in.
7:00 AM: meal break.
7:00 PM: study.
1:00 AM: clock out.
1:05 AM: eat (if you can).
1:05 AM: study (if you can't).
1:30 AM: clock in.
5:30 AM: clock out.
Once I reached the end of the list, it was onto calculating my finances. For instance, the price of the week's food and supplies. 3 used to be my lucky number, but it seemed that lately, 1 meal a day was the only financial sacrifice I was willing to make—yet another dipping total. Unhealthy, maybe. But my schedule had become too full to make a priority out of afte[R]thoughts.
To keep myself motivated through the workdays, I would make a habit out of eating when I got out of work, and instead expend my breaks to review homework. The more I busied myself, the quicker that moment of release would come. It was a flawed but effective mindset. Now, by the time it did, worries would spiral about my headspace and make me feel too sick to stomach a thing.
Even stepping into the cold and comfortless space I called my home provided little ease. I could only rest as much as my insomnia-ridden bod[Y] would allow and wake up bright and early the next morning to live out the endless hell all over again.
If only I could have just one day off.
If only I could miss just one assignment.
If only I had taken just one more step.
I envy the days when silence was my comfort. Now, in such stillness, my mind always seemed to race with destructive ideas and fragmented memories of days past, as if trying to catch up with a life going far too fast to comprehend in the moment.
My employer seizing me by my collar, screaming and screaming until I could no longer make out a word from his mouth over the overwhelming static that replaced it in my head.
Peers snickering in the hallways, scuff marks from the bottom of their shoes staining the hours of work that they trample upon as if it were nothing at all.
The cold that spread through my fingertips when I held close the frail hand of my mother, laying as though a hollow vessel of the woman she once was.
Even images of my sister flashed in my mind. They were the memories I recalled with the most clarity, because nothing could rival the ache that gripped my hear[T] when I caught a glimpse of her in passing and she averted her gaze like everyone else.
Searching for anything to clear the thoughts from my head, I found myself digging through my pocket, pulling out my phone, and turning on the screen. To my dry eyes, the blue light was practically blinding.
I swiped away the messages from bosses and co-workers. “Fired” was the only word I had to read to understand their contents in full. It no longer held any shock value after I realized that such messages were a when and not an if in the workforce, it only meant that I would have to cut back on spending even more until I found a job to replace it. I already kept the lights off, left the thermostat temperature low, and bathed as little as I could get away with to keep the utility bills as inexpensive as possible. What else could be done?
While thinking about that, I mindlessly swiped away notifications in machine-like motions, pausing when I saw one that seemed to be from someone commenting on a social media post of mine. The only problem was that I hardly used social media, much less wasted my time making posts to entertain an absent audience.
Curiosity overwrote my lack of care over the matter, and I tapped on the notification. After a moment of buffer, the screen lit up, sudden videos of nude and conventionally attractive women in compromising positions reflecting in my retinas. I was grateful that the audio was muted—I might have feared what the tenant downstairs would think of me otherwise—but I didn’t feel any gut reaction to close the tab. Moreover, as I stared at it, my eyes seemed to glaze over.
Is this what men are supposed to be excited by? I thought. Cheap videos of actresses putting on distasteful performances in front of a camera?
How boring.
Two years ago I might have blushed. Now, my mind was clouded by an exhaustion too thick to even bother with the idea, only to consider why I was seeing it to begin with. Yet that question was quickly answered when I noticed that the video was shared by my own account.
Opening the account fully, I saw dozens of similar posts on the front page, all looking completely foreign to me. It was then that I realized I had likely been hacked, and judging by the scornful comments that the posts had received from users with names I scarcely recognized, I was the only one to realize that I was not responsible for sharing such things.
Suddenly, many of the whispers that reached my ears in passing made much more sense. Sleaze. Pedo. Porn addict.
I had thought that they were all nothing but mindless insults and baseless accusations thrown to the wind. That was all that any jeers I received were, anyway. Nobody really knew me. At the very least, I could now find relief in knowing that they were grounded in something I had—and would have—nothing to do with.
Yet… certainly there was no personal desire for people to do things so shameful. “Sex sells”, I remembered hearing that phrase on a TV show years ago. This must be the kind of thing they were talking about, being so desperate that you would sell your body for other people's pleasures just to bring in a bit of income.
Sex sells.
Surely more than a rickety bed or the occasional needless antique.
We provide all manner of meals to suit your fancy.
At a far steeper price than any worn couch could dream.
We would love to have you!
…
No. What was I even thinking? Maybe I had already begun reaching a place of lunacy. Sex workers were primarily women for a reason, men were hardly in demand in those kinds of fields. Besides, Mom would never forgive it.
As if confirming my undesirability, my phone screen went black from inactivity and I caught a glimpse of my shadowed face in the reflection. My skin was pallid and clammy, ungroomed hair falling in my sunken eyes. How long had it been since I saw my barber?
My sister's face flashed in my mind again, her brilliant smile and cheerful words. Then, her trembling form hunched over the bathroom sink, crying and crying as she washed away the blood that painted the once-white countertop. At that moment, she didn’t look much different than I did now, a miserable wreck that sobbed for a release that might never come.
For a while, I believed she was perfect, a ray of sunlight shining upon my own despair and making it just a little more bearable. That day was when I realized that even though the sun might create a pleasant warmth from a far distance, to be the sun itself, the blazing fire would surely consume you entirely. In that way, it was a stark contrast to the moon—a thing with no warmth to its body, yet no warmth to offer either.
When I considered it like that, I finally understood how I felt the very moment my sister and I parted ways after the divorce, and how I have felt ever since. The chilling loneliness of a moon with no sun to guide its path, forced to fill roles it was never made to accommodate for. With no sun to lig[H]t the sky, temperatures would drop, plants would wither, animals would die out, and with nothing to sustain them, humans would be soon to follow. How could the moon alone ever hope to create heat or renew life?
I always remembered the moment my sister stepped from the bathroom, the cracked door swinging open far too fast for me to play off my eavesdropping.
“We're out of allergy medicine,” she said, wiping at her reddened eyes.
Her mouth wore a smile. A perfect little lie. I could only wonder how many times she deceived me with similar looks.
Yet those lies were what carried us through our childhood and ensured we could maintain hope, even if it led to ruin for us both in the end. I knew that if I wanted to get anywhere by myself, I would have to learn to lie as she had. Those falsified sm[I]les were what people looked for in an employee. In a brother. In a son. Certainly, even the women who recorded the videos that now filled my phone had dark circles underneath their eyes, covered up by makeup and filters.
You don’t have to be happy to survive, you only have to make others happy enough for society to see you as indispensable.
This is what she meant when she said to guide with the affection of the moon, isn’t it? Ignite a path for others, even if you can never walk in its light.
As my free hand hung off of the side of the couch, I felt my fingers brush against another letter. The bills would only keep coming, and scrounging for jobs that barely paid minimum wage, I would continue fighting to be free of them until my body gave out and my mind was pushed to the brink of madness. How long could Mom survive under the meager checks of legal work? I always knew that it was only a matter of time before I gave in to the temptation of an immorally gained salary.
And… after losing my job—or, one of them—I did have a late shift that needed to be filled.
If you ever change your mind, you know where to find us!
I couldn’t help but wonder if she saw right through me, engraving those words deeply into my mind just knowing I would come crawling back eventually.
Why make her wait? It would only delay the—
My phone began to buzz in my hand, tearing my attention away. Instinct told me to feel annoyed at the disruption, but it was a short-lived reaction, replaced instantly by a tightening in my chest the moment I read the caller's name. I answered without a moment of hesitation and silently raised the phone to my ear.
“Yuzuki?” a weak voice spoke into the receiver.
“Go back to bed, Mom,” I replied gently.
“I assure you, I've rested more than enough. You know how erratic my sleep schedule has been lately,” she sighed. “I'm sorry. You were sleeping, weren't you?”
She must have heard the thickness in my voice.
“No. It's fine.”
“Don't tell me you're still up studying.”
I should be.
“Sorry.”
“You know that isn't good for you. How much homework do they have you doing?”
Too much.
“Nevermind that. What's going on? Do I need to come up there?”
I sat up, the sudden motion creating a splitting pain in my head.
“No, no…”
As she muttered as much, I gratefully fell back into place, attempting to clear the brai[N] fog away so I could listen intently to every word.
“I just noticed that you left your wallet here. I was going to leave you a voicemail,” she spoke slowly. “You know I would bring it to you if I could, but—”
“It's okay. I'll come by to get it tomorrow.”
…
“Yuzuki, are you doing okay?” her voice crackled.
My hand shook, every complaint and trouble threatening to spill from my lips at once. When I was a child, I went to her for everything, letting her cradle my trembling body as I sobbed against her chest. I wished so desperately to be able to do that again, just once.
But these troubles were ones I could never plague her with.
“I'm just tired is all,” I whispered. “Is the new medication helping?”
“I… Yes.”
The weariness in her tone told me otherwise, and I wondered how a situation could grow so dire that the best thing a mother and son could do for the other was lie. I quickly lost my desire to ask anything more, not wishing to burden her with questions she surely had no positive answers to, and so I allowed silence to speak in my place.
The quiet was something we were both comfortable with. Some of the best moments I spent with her were when neither of us spoke, simply enjoying each other's presence. I remembered the winter night we huddled together on the couch, bundled in blankets to compensate for the broken AC unit and wordlessly watching a TV show neither of us were really interested in. Or in the spring when she was feeling well enough to go on a walk along the riverbank that ran behind the old house, and we listened to the tranquil birdsong overhead from the moment we left to the moment we returned, not wishing to interrupt it with chatter.
And yet the dreadful silence that hung over our heads during the phone call was a frightening thing, nothing like either of those warm memories. It was not out of choice that we kept our conversation brief, but out of the understanding that nothing but painful topics clouded our minds, and bringing light to such things would offer no relief from our worries.
“I won't hold you up,” she finally said.
And still she wavered, as if neither one of us wanted to end the call. After she had begun slipping in and out of consciousness at more frequent rates, I noticed that neither of us had been saying [G]oodbye. Maybe we feared that any goodbye left room for it to be our last.
“Mom?” I forced out, a sudden burst of desperation tugging at my heart, as though if I couldn't get the words out then, they would never reach her.
“Hm?” came her soft reply.
“I love you.”
Even if everything I said became muddled with white lies and half-truths, there was at least a small bit of comfort in knowing that those words would always be honest.
“I love you too, Yuzuki. I really do,” she replied, and I couldn’t tell if her voice broke from tears or a bad connection. “Get some good sleep.”
Nothing consumed me with an insurmountable emptiness like the dull hum of a static line that filled the silence in her place.
Feeling more like a zombie than a person, I pulled the phone from my ear and dropped my eyes to the screen once more, taking little time to find my barber’s number among my few contacts.
Despite the guilt that overcame me, alongside it came resolve. For the second the call went dead, I had already decided that I would never hear a voice drained of life from the other end again. I would obtain the funds required and then some to get my mother the treatment she needed, no matter the price or how much shame I would bring to myself doing it.
Once she's back on her feet, it will all be worth it.
It will all be worth it.
I spun the phrase in my head again and again, determined to do so until I believed it.
If it was a body they needed, it was a body I would give them, and I would undergo as many reformations as it took to form a lie convincing enough for the job. After all, there was still one thing I had yet to sell.
Mom would never forgive it. I knew she wouldn’t.
And that was why she would never find out.