"I will die, you will die. Why ashamed?"
"俺だって死ぬ,お前だって死ぬ.何が恥ずかしいんだよ."
— Departures (おくりびと, Okuribito, 2008), Kobayashi Daigo (小林大悟)
I don't hate the concept of Love nor do I love the concept of Hate.
The abstract idea of love, not a person or a thing. People just love the things that come with love and what creates it. Take a person who generally likes being given flowers, being spoiled, being taken to a nice picnic on the beach, and seeing themselves getting married at twenty-five.
This is all a fantasy of love.
They love the love they want to receive from whoever and whatever. They don't love the source of the love they're getting. They could have all the things they want in a partner, yet not love the partner itself, but the qualities that indicate the mental image and idea of love. Their insane, jealous and stupid, believes their looks brings them everything because they fell in love with it.
Insane sick egoist.
This is what I'm up against.
I'm about to snap. They don't get this, neither are they superior.
Hamper and prevent.
Dominate and control.
But it isn't so constricted.
Greedy, exploitative.
An average person that believes they're entitled because they find themselves drop dead gorgeous, criticizes other people and threatens their life. It's to prevent them from tipping over.
Both are such beautiful and romantic concepts yet I keep running away anyway.
I run and run until my foot catches a garbage can and the world tilts sideways. The metal clatters against the alley wall, loud enough to wake someone, loud enough to get me killed if anyone's listening. I hit the ground and my abdomen screams at me.
Right.
The sword wound. Just a bit of a sword wound.
That's what I told myself when I took the hit job from a no-name syndicate, and that's what I'm telling myself now, bleeding through my fingers onto someone's trash.
Should've known better.
The alley smells like rot and rain. The garbage can I knocked over spills its contents across the concrete, old wrappers, a broken bottle, something that used to be food. My blood mixes with the grime. I press my palm harder against the wound and feel the wet heat pulse against my hand.
Not deep enough to kill me.
Probably.
But deep enough that I can't keep running, and if I can't keep running, the men behind me will catch up, and then the wound won't matter.
I lean my head back against the wall. The bricks are cold. The sky above the alley is the color of old steel.
Love and hate. Beautiful concepts. Romantic, even. People throw themselves into them, they let themselves be consumed. I've watched it happen. I've watched people destroy themselves for the idea of a person, for the shape of a feeling they couldn't name. I told myself I'd never be that stupid.
Yet here I am. Bleeding in an alley. Running from something I can't outrun. Taking jobs from syndicates that don't care if I live or die because the alternative was sitting still long enough to think about what I was doing.
I shift my weight and the wound protests. My hand is slick. The blood has started to drip onto the concrete, a small dark puddle spreading toward the garbage.
I should get up. I should keep running. The men behind me won't stop just because I've stopped. They're professionals, or close enough. The kind of men who finish what they start.
I don't get up.
The sky doesn't change. The cold doesn't change. My hand pressed against my abdomen, my blood on the ground, my thoughts running in circles around something I don't want to name.
Both such beautiful concepts. Love. Hate. And me, running from both of them, tripping over garbage in an alley, waiting for the end to catch up.
Should I commence in execration now or should I commence in devotion now. The interrogative prostrates itself across the vestibule of my cognition with the insufferable persistence of a supplicant who will not be denied audience.
How exquisitely abominable this sensation.
How utterly, how comprehensively, how almost theologically dreadful.
It is not pain in any taxonomy I have previously catalogued, not the somatic shriek of the abdominal laceration, not the familiar ache of musculature pushed past its covenant with endurance, not even that particular species of cerebral torment that attends the recognition of one's own imminent cessation. It is something anterior to all of these. Something that dwells in the interstice between the conception of an emotion and its corporeal manifestation, inhabiting that liminal space with the patient tenebrous malevolence of a thing that knows it cannot be evicted because it predates the architecture of the house itself. The awful feeling has no referent, no object, no vector.
Irradiating everything it touches with the slow inexorability of necrosis through healthy tissue.
I cannot countenance its continued residency.
I cannot share a thoracic cavity with it for one additional respiration.
The imperative to flee. Its overturned garbage and its indifferent firmament but from the very phenomenological texture of this moment, this specific and unbearable configuration of consciousness, becomes absolute.
I press my palm against the wall. The brick abrades my skin with an almost tender indifference. The wound in my abdomen registers its objection to verticality with a bright flare of protest that I acknowledge and disregard in the same instant.
I push myself upright. The world performs a slow, nauseated gyre around me before settling back into its accustomed coordinates.
And I begin, once more, to run. Simply away. Simply elsewhere. The blood continues its patient exodus from my body, and my feet continue their arrhythmic percussion against the concrete, and the awful feeling continues its residency, undiminished, unbanished, running alongside me.
And then I stop.
Because something ahead of me has made the continuation of forward motion untenable. A figure. A person, perhaps. My vision has degraded to the point where certainty is no longer available. The edges of the shape refuse to resolve into anything my perception can categorize. It is small. Humanoid. And everything surrounding it, the ground, the walls, the very atmosphere has been subjected to some fundamental reorganization that my mind struggles to parse.
The terrain around the figure has been disassembled and reassembled according to a logic that does not correspond to any principle of architecture or physics I have encountered. The concrete slabs of the alley floor have been separated from one another, each piece isolated by a gap of perhaps two inches, and then reconnected in a configuration that respects the original adjacency of the segments while disregarding the concept of planar continuity entirely. It is a jigsaw puzzle that has been solved incorrectly yet produces a coherent image nonetheless. The pieces fit. They should not fit. They fit. The walls have undergone a similar treatment. The bricks have been disarticulated from their mortar and rearranged in patterns that suggest the original wall in the way a reflection in disturbed water suggests the object that cast it. The spatial relationships between things have become negotiable.
How insane.
I step closer.
The men who had been pursuing me are visible now in the far distance, retreating, their silhouettes diminishing, they must have recognized something they lack the vocabulary to describe and have decided, quite sensibly, that description can be deferred indefinitely. How lovely. I would wave if I had the energy. I would thank them if I thought they deserved thanks.
I step closer. The figure resolves slightly. Very slightly. The blur around it is not a property of my failing vision but a property of the figure itself, as though the air in its immediate vicinity has been instructed to behave differently than air elsewhere. I step closer still. The gaps between the concrete segments do not widen or narrow as I traverse them. The pieces do not shift under my weight. They hold. They should not hold.
A sound reaches me. Small. Rhythmic. Liquid striking a solid surface in discrete, individual impacts. The sound of tears. The sound of a child crying.
I am close enough now to see the figure shudder with each sob. The small shoulders rise and fall. The hands are pressed against the face in that universal posture of juvenile despair, the one that communicates to the world that the world has been cruel and the self has been insufficient and the combination of these two facts is more than a small body can contain.
How awful.
I open my mouth. Words emerge.
They simply exit my throat and enter the atmosphere and arrange themselves into a question that I recognize as my own only after it has already been asked.
"What is wrong?"
What am I doing?
Does it matter?
The question hangs in the air between us, a small and fragile thing, utterly inadequate to the circumstances that produced it. I am bleeding from a sword wound in an alley that no longer obeys Euclidean geometry, speaking to a child-shaped blur whose tears are falling onto reassembled concrete, and I am asking it what is wrong as though the answer could be anything other than a gesture at the totality of everything.
The figure looks at me.
The eyes find my face through the blur and the rain that has not yet begun to fall but is about to. The mouth opens. The voice is small. The voice is very small.
"I want to live."
The tears increase. The sound of them striking the ground becomes a metronome, a pulse, a second heartbeat in the space between us. The figure's shoulders shake with the force of a grief that predates language, predates thought, predates the category of things that can be comforted by words.
And then it begins to rain.
The drops arrive singly at first, then in pairs, then in a coherent sheet of water that descends from the sky with the dispassionate efficiency of something that has been scheduled and will not be delayed. The rain falls on the reassembled concrete and the disarticulated bricks and the retreating men and the crying child and my upturned face. It washes the blood from my hands. It washes nothing from my mind.
Oh, the rain.
I extend my hand toward the child's head.
I am not a person who extends hands toward crying children.
But the hand is moving anyway, crossing the distance between my body and the small blurry figure.
As my fingers approach the child, they begin to come apart.
The shredding starts at the tips. The skin opens in fine lines, as though drawn by a blade too sharp to feel. The subcutaneous layer becomes visible for a fraction of a second before it too separates, and then the muscle beneath, and then the bone, peeling back in layers with the methodical indifference of an anatomical diagram being disassembled page by page. There is no blood. The vessels have been severed so cleanly that they have not yet registered their own division. The pain arrives a moment later, bright and specific and almost academically interesting in its purity. My index finger has been reduced to its constituent elements. My middle finger follows. The metacarpals of my right hand are now visible through the widening gaps in my flesh, white against the red, a small and private architecture that was never meant to be seen from this angle.
I keep reaching.
The shredding advances up my wrist. The cuff of my jacket disintegrates into threads that separate and drift and vanish before they touch the ground. My radius and ulna are now partially exposed, the periosteum glistening wetly in the dim light of the alley. The pain has become something that exists in a separate room from my consciousness, a room I can hear through the wall but have chosen not to enter. The child's head is very close now. The blur around it has intensified, or perhaps my vision has degraded further, or perhaps the distinction between those two explanations has ceased to be meaningful.
My palm makes contact with the child's head.
The shredding stops.
It simply ceases, as though the phenomenon had never occurred, as though my hand had always been whole and the memory of its disassembly was a brief collective hallucination shared by myself and the concrete and the rain. The wounds remain. The blood remains. But the process that created them has been suspended, and my palm rests against the child's head with the gentle finality of something arriving at its destination after a very long journey.
"Then let's live."
The words exit my mouth without premeditation. I do not know what they mean. I do not know if I mean them. I do not know if the condition of meaning something has any relevance to the present circumstances. The child looks up at me through the blur, and the tears are still falling, and the rain is still falling, and my blood is still falling, and all of these liquids are mingling on the reassembled concrete in a small and temporary hydrography of suffering.
Then the world begins to move.
The child warps the space around us with an intensity that exceeds anything I have witnessed. The alley disassembles itself not piece by piece but all at once, every coordinate simultaneously becoming every other coordinate, and we are in District 12, and then we are in a place I do not recognize with a sky the color of infection, and then we are in a basement filled with the sound of machinery, and then we are in a field where the grass has been burned black, and then we are in another alley, and another, and another. The transitions occur at a rate that my perception cannot process. I am standing still and I am being hurled through space and the difference between these two states has been declared irrelevant by whatever force the child is exerting on the fabric of the real.
We stop.
An alley. District 12. Still. Quiet.
The rain has followed us,
Or we have followed the rain,
Or the rain is a constant that exists independently of location.
The walls are ordinary walls. The garbage is ordinary garbage. The sky is the color of old steel, which is the color it always is, which is the color it has always been.
My bleeding has worsened. The sword wound in my abdomen has been aggravated by the transit, or perhaps simply by the passage of time, or perhaps by the cumulative insult of everything that has happened since I tripped over that garbage can in an alley that feels now like it existed in a different lifetime. The blood is no longer dripping. It is flowing steadily and unhurried. My vision has begun to narrow at the edges, a slow aperture closing around the central image of the child standing before me in the rain.
"Let's live."
The child's voice is small. It is the same voice that said "I want to live" in the impossible alley with the reassembled concrete. The same cadence. The same weight. But the pronoun has changed.
I try to respond. My mouth opens. The words do not arrive.
My consciousness departs.
Let's live.
[生きよう]
The sound of tapping water on my head wakes me.
Ah. The rain.
It drip drip drips against my skull, then drop drop drops, and I lie there for a moment with my eyes closed, letting the water find the contours of my face. The child is nowhere to be seen.
The ground beneath me is wet concrete and the sky above is wet steel and I am alive, which I had not expected to be.
The wound on my chest is gone.
I press my hand against the place where the sword cut should be. The fabric of my jacket is torn, my shirt beneath is torn, but the skin underneath is unbroken. No pain. No blood. No evidence that anything had ever happened except the ruin of my clothes and the memory of a blade entering me that I can still feel if I think about it too hard.
How lovely. The world has blessed me with one more chance. I always find that endearing, the way the world does that sometimes.
I sit up slowly, testing my body. Everything moves the way it should. The blood on my clothes is dry now, stiff and dark, marking me in patterns I'd rather not examine too closely. The rain continues to fall, washing the alley clean, washing nothing else.
Today I have a job at the funeral service. How troublesome.
I stand. My legs hold. I start walking.
The child. My mind turns the image over as I move, the small body, the blur, the tears hitting reassembled concrete.
Is that some kind of new technology's failed attempt?
Or is someone trying to play god with our fate?
Or is it the so-called Distortion I've been hearing about lately?
Too many possibilities for a man who should be focused on staying alive. But I let myself muse for a few blocks. The rain makes everything feel slightly less immediate, like the world is a photograph developing in reverse.
My jacket and t-shirt still bear the bloodstains and tears.
How odd.
I should be fine enough to not get tracked by those syndicate grunts who chased me. What a familiar experience, though. Running through alleys.
Rain.
The taste of my own blood in my mouth. I remember the day I ran with my beloved when I was much younger. Such a long time ago. The memory surfaces and then subsides, leaving no ripple.
I will just need to live quietly now. My dream died a while ago. Maybe this job won't be so bad. I'm already familiar with corpses, so I won't mind.
I continue walking. The walk becomes a jog, then a run, my boots splashing through puddles that have begun to form along the uneven pavement. The rain comes down harder. The city blurs around me into streaks of grey and muted color.
How bothersome.
I told that child to continue living, but I don't know if living is worth continuing. I said it without meaning it, which is the only way I know how to say things. And now the words sit in my chest like a stone, heavy and unexamined.
The funeral service is at another place. I'll make it in time if I keep this pace. I'll clock in. I'll do the work. I'll come home. And tomorrow I'll do it again. That's what living is, apparently.
I run through the rain toward the rest of my life.
I reach the building as the rain decides to fall even harder.
Feeling a bit personal.
Standing outside longer would be asking for a cold, and I've had enough unpleasantness for one morning. The sign above the door is unlit, the windows dark. Closed. Strange. I glance across the road to the clock on the corner building. Six in the morning. This place should be open by now.
Well, it wouldn't hurt to open the door and go in. I'll be working here anyway.
I push the door. It isn't locked. How odd. The owner must place a lot of trust in humanity. What a foolish guy.
The lobby is small, which I expected. Small business, small lobby. A front desk with a dying plant in the corner. A few chairs. A notice board with flyers that look like they've been there long enough to become part of the wallpaper. The air smells like dust and old paper and something floral underneath it all.
I walk past the lobby and push through another door.
The room beyond is surprisingly spacious, and it's full of greenery. Potted plants line the walls, vines crawl up wooden trellises, ferns spill over the edges of shelves. The light from the high windows filters through leaves and casts soft green shadows across the floor. I didn't expect a place built around death to have this much life in it. It's almost funny.
"Sorry, I couldn't greet you at the lobby."
A woman's voice, directly behind me. I turn. She's standing close enough that I should have heard her approach, should have felt the air shift, should have noticed something. I noticed nothing. She's dressed modestly, plain clothes, hair pulled back, no jewelry. Age is hard to place in this light, but I'd guess around thirty or younger. Her face is calm, the kind of calm that doesn't come from peace but from discipline. She holds out a towel.
"Here," she says. "To clean yourself up."
I take the towel. My eyes don't leave her.
"How did you sneak up behind me?" I ask. "I should have heard you."
She tilts her head slightly, as if considering whether to answer honestly. Then she says, "I've taken many lives with those kinds of footsteps."
The sentence hangs in the air between us, dry and even. No threat in it. No pride either.
I wipe the rain from my face with the towel. The fabric is soft and smells faintly of soap.
"What a dangerous woman," I say.
She smiles. Small, polite, utterly unreadable.
"This way," she says, turning. "You're early. The others won't arrive for another hour. You can help me prepare."
I walk behind her, my boots leaving damp impressions on the wooden floor. The greenery on either side seems to absorb the sound of our footsteps, or maybe it's just that this place has a hush to it, the way certain rooms do. The way rooms built for the dead often do.
"How many others did you mention?" I ask.
"Only one more person will be working with us today," she says without turning. "The owner of this establishment."
That's a very small number of people to run a funeral service. I keep the thought to myself, but she must sense it, because she continues.
"People tend to avoid working for a fixer office with little fame."
I stop walking. She doesn't. I watch her move ahead for a beat before my feet remember what they're supposed to be doing. A fixer office. So this is a fixer office. Which means the job I signed up for the one I didn't read the details on, the one I assumed was just another body-moving gig because the listing mentioned corpses and I stopped reading after that is a fixer job.
There are times in life when the world simply decides for you. This appears to be one of them.
She doesn't realize I signed up by accident. Might as well go along with the flow of the world. How lovely.
"What's your name?" I ask.
She glances back at me, her expression unchanged. "Yuriko Kamimura. Pleasure to work with you."
I tell her mine. "Daigo Kobayashi."
"Kobayashi," she repeats, as if testing the weight of it. Then she nods once and keeps walking.
"What are we going to do today?" I ask.
"We'll prepare the tools for a casket-sealing ceremony. Nōkan[納棺]. A client's funeral will be held this morning or early afternoon. The Kokubetsushiki / Sōgi (告別式 / 葬儀) The farewell ceremony. It's typically performed between ten and one."
I nod, though I'm only half listening. The other half of my mind is turning over the word funeral, the word ceremony, the word farewell. Dumb, I think. Performing services for the dead. It's a fool's ritual. The dead don't need farewells. They don't need ceremonies. They don't need anything. The service is for the living, and the living are fools who have extra money on their hands and a need to believe that grief can be organized into something with a beginning and an end.
I don't say this out loud. I'm new here. It wouldn't do to insult the institution on my first day.
But the thought sits in my chest as I follow Yuriko through the greenery, toward whatever tools await, toward a job I didn't mean to take and a day I didn't expect to see. The rain keeps falling outside. The leaves catch the grey light and hold it. For a place built around death, there's an awful lot of living green in here.
The shelves are lined with objects I don't have names for, some I recognize from a distance, some I've only ever seen in passing.
She begins handing me items, one by one, speaking their names as I take them.
"The coffin, hitsugi[棺]. The deceased is already inside. We'll need to move it carefully."
I take one end. She takes the other. We carry it between us into the main hall, where the altar stands waiting. The weight is not what I expected. Heavier. Or maybe the dead are always heavier than you think.
"The portrait," Yuriko continues, setting a framed photograph of the deceased on the altar. An old man. Stern face. "The iei[遺影]. It watches the ceremony."
I set the coffin down and step back. The old man's photograph watches me from the altar, and I watch it back. We come to an understanding immediately.
"Funeral altar," she says, adjusting the flowers. "Saiden[祭壇]. Chrysanthemums. White ones. For mourning."
She works with a quiet efficiency, her hands moving through the ritual with the practiced ease of someone who has done this many times, or someone who has learned to move carefully through spaces that hold weight. She hands me the incense burner, the kōro[香炉], and shows me where to place it. Then the incense itself, senkō[線香], thin and fragrant. Then candles, rōsoku[蝋燭], and the holders for them.
"Buddhist memorial tablet," she says, placing it with both hands. "Ihai[位牌]. Depending on the tradition. The priest will know."
"The bell," she continues, holding up a small singing bowl. "Rin[鈴]. And this is the orin[おりん]. For the chanting."
I take them and set them where she indicates. My hands are dry now from the rain outside. The towel did its work. But I feel like I'm carrying something else, something I can't wipe off.
"The priest will bring his own robes," Yuriko says. "Kesa[袈裟]. Sutra, kyōten[経典]. Prayer beads, juzu[数珠]. The wooden fish drum, mokugyo[木魚]. Those belong to him."
I nod. I have no idea what any of that means in practice. I've never been to a funeral. Or maybe I have, and I simply don't remember. Some things bury themselves.
"For the mourners," she continues, "we prepare the incense offering area. Shōkō[焼香]. And the condolence envelopes, kōden-bukuro[香典袋], if they haven't brought their own."
She hands me a small stack of envelopes. The paper is crisp. I set them near the incense burner.
"And for the farewell portion…" she pauses, looking around the room as if mentally checking her work. "Flowers. For the mourners to place in the coffin. Personal belongings, if they were approved for cremation. The hearse, reikyūsha[霊柩車], will be outside by then."
I glance toward the door. The rain is still coming down. The hearse will arrive in it, and the coffin will be carried out into it, and the water will fall on the polished wood and the white flowers and the people who came to say goodbye.
"The most important visual," Yuriko says, more to herself than to me, "is the arrangement. Coffin first. Then portrait. The flowers around it. The incense burner in front. Candles on either side. The priest stands here. The mourners offer incense there. And at the end, the flowers go into the coffin with the deceased."
She turns to me. Her face is calm. That same unreadable calm from before.
"Do you understand?"
I look at the altar. At the portrait. At the coffin with its heavy silence. At the flowers, white and waiting.
"Yeah," I say. "I understand."
Yuriko pauses mid-motion, her hands still holding a bundle of white cloth that I don't know the purpose of yet.
"The portrait we've set up is only a prop," she says, glancing toward the photograph on the altar. "The real one will arrive with the body at nine. Along with everything else."
I look at the old man's face in the prop portrait. A stand-in for a dead man. Even death has rehearsals, apparently. "So we have time to kill."
"Time to prepare," she corrects. "We'll clean. Set up the rest of the tools. Make sure everything is where it needs to be."
She moves and I follow. The next while passes in a rhythm I'm not used to, wiping surfaces that already look clean, adjusting chairs that were already straight, folding cloth that was already folded. The rain continues against the windows. The greenery drinks it in. The smell of incense hasn't been lit yet, but I can smell it anyway.
The door opens.
A man steps in from the lobby. Old. Sixties, maybe seventies, which is rare in this city. People tend to die young here. But this man hasn't. He carries his age with the comfortable weight of someone who has made peace with the passage of time. Short dark hair, neatly kept, with noticeable gray. Broad face. Weathered. The face that has seen things and decided to remain calm about it. He wears dark formal clothing, Western-style, clean and precise.
The owner. Has to be.
Yuriko straightens slightly and greets him without surprise. "Hi, Mister Sasaki."
He glances between her and me, his expression unchanged except for something that might be the faintest trace of dry humor at the corner of his mouth. "Yuriko. You're already getting our new person acclimated, I see."
"He arrived early," she says. "I showed him the setup."
Sasaki nods slowly, then turns to me. His eyes are not unkind, but they are assessing. Not the way an employer assesses a new hire. More like the way someone who's spent decades reading people measures the shape of someone new. After a moment, he speaks.
"You don't look like someone who knows his way around a funeral."
The observation lands without weight, just an honest reading of what's in front of him. I get the sense he doesn't waste time on pretense.
"I don't," I say. "I learn as I go."
He makes a quiet sound, not quite a laugh. "That's how most of us started." His hands fold behind his back as he moves further into the room, taking in the altar, the flowers, the carefully arranged tools. "Though most of us weren't bleeding through their shirt on the first day."
I glance down at myself. The bloodstains are still there, dried and dark against my jacket. The tear where the blade went in. I'd almost forgotten.
"An accident," I say.
"I'm sure." He doesn't push. Just looks at me for another moment before nodding toward a door at the far side of the room. "Spare clothes in the back. You can't stand at an altar looking like that."
Yuriko glances at me, then back at Sasaki, and something passes between them that I can't read. Then she returns to her work with the white cloth, and Sasaki continues his slow survey of the room, and I make my way toward the back door, leaving a trail of rainwater and dried blood behind me.
I start changing in the back room, my old clothes peeling away stiff with rain and dried blood. My hand moves to where the wound should have been. Where the blade went in. Where the child's impossible space shredded my hand and the world bent around me. There's nothing there.
I shouldn't think much of it. Life gave me another chance. How wasteful of it to give it to me.
I'm just a coward who keeps running away and away from his problems. I don't deserve it. But does anyone deserve anything anyway? This world is full of cowards. And the biggest coward of all is standing in this room, pulling a borrowed shirt over his head, pretending he belongs here.
I finish changing. The clothes don't fit, too big in the shoulders, too long in the sleeves. But they're clean and dark and formal enough for the work. It'll do.
I look into the mirror on the back of the door.
A small coward inside of big clothes.
The fabric hangs off me like someone else's life, and I'm just borrowing it for a few hours until the day ends and I go back to being whatever I was before.
I wonder what that child is doing now. Whether it existed at all. A manifestation of my struggle personified, perhaps. A brief hallucination born from blood loss and exhaustion. But telling it to live, telling a confused mind to continue was such a foolish thing to say. I had no right to say it. I have no right to offer anyone that kind of instruction.
I step out of the back room and return to the main hall.
Sasaki looks up as I approach. His eyes move over me and then he's walking toward me without a word. He stops close enough that I catch the scent of him, clean soap, old paper, a hint of incense that's soaked into the fabric of his clothes over years of work. His hands rise and begin adjusting my collar, my sleeves, the drape of the jacket across my shoulders. He tucks and smooths and pulls until the borrowed clothes settle into something resembling a fit.
"Not bad," he says, stepping back to look at me. "You look like you'll fit into the job."
I don't know what to say to that, so I say nothing.
He studies me for another moment, then adds, "After the job is done, if you want to stay on, there's a place here for you. Think about it. Take your time."
I nod once.
Sasaki doesn't push. He just gives the front of my jacket one final adjustment and turns away, moving toward the altar to continue his own preparations.
Yuriko is still working nearby, her hands precise as she arranges the white cloth. The rain continues outside, steady and indifferent. The greenery breathes. The prop portrait watches from its place on the altar, and I stand in the middle of it all, a borrowed suit, a borrowed job, a borrowed life, and wonder how long it takes before any of it starts to feel like mine.
The family arrives with the portrait and the body.
The portrait comes first, carried carefully by a man whose face is set in stillness. It shows a young woman. Very young. No older than twenty. The photograph caught her mid-smile. Poor thing hadn't yet learned how heavy the world could be. Or maybe she had, and smiled anyway.
I can't tell from a photo.
I can't tell from a coffin either.
The body is already inside when they bring it in. The coffin is simple, polished wood, and it moves through the room like a ship moving through still water. The family follows it, a small group, maybe six or seven people, their clothes dark, their faces hollow. They don't look at me. They don't look at Yuriko. They look at the coffin and the portrait and the altar, and they move toward those things like water moves toward the lowest point in a room.
Sasaki steps forward to meet them. His whole bearing changes, or maybe it doesn't change so much as it becomes more itself. This is his space. These are his rituals. He speaks to the family in a low voice, words I can't catch from where I'm standing, and they nod, and then the screens come out.
Yuriko helps him set up the screens, white cloth on wooden frames, arranged to create a private space around the coffin. The family settles into chairs on the other side of the room. The air shifts. The rain outside has softened to a murmur against the windows.
Then Sasaki begins.
He moves behind the screens, and the family watches the white cloth the way people watch a door they know will open eventually. I watch too. I can't see much from my angle, just the silhouette of him, the slow deliberate movements of his arms, the occasional glint of water in a bowl. But I can see enough.
He cleans the body. Not a full washing but it's symbolic. His hands move quietly with the authority of someone who has done this thousands of times and still finds meaning in the doing. Each gesture is unhurried. Each pause is intentional. The cloth rises and falls. The water catches the light.
Then he grooms her. I watch his silhouette lift a comb, draw it through her hair with the tenderness of someone handling something that might break. There's no hurry in it. No mechanical efficiency. It's the opposite of everything I know about how the City treats bodies.
He changes her clothing. The white garments are brought out.
Traditional, simple, clean.
His silhouette moves around the coffin, adjusting, arranging, dressing her for a journey I don't believe in. But watching him, I almost do. Watching him, I understand why someone would.
Then the encoffining itself. His movements become a kind of choreography, deliberate and exact, every gesture weighted. He arranges her in the coffin. He positions her hands. He places a few small objects beside her, personal things, things I can't identify from here but which clearly mean something to the family, because one of the women makes a sound when she sees them, a small caught breath that she stifles immediately.
The family is invited to participate. They approach the coffin one by one, each placing a flower, each pausing to look at her face for what might be the last time. Their movements are hesitant, reverent. A man who might be her father touches her hand and then pulls back quickly, as if the contact had burned him. A woman younger than her, maybe a sister, doesn't touch her at all. Just looks.
And through all of it, I stand at the edge of the room and watch.
The dead girl looks more alive than anyone here. Sasaki has given her that. His hands have restored something the City took the appearance of life.
The peace of it.
The dignity.
Her face is calm.
Her hair is neat.
Her hands are folded.
She looks like she could open her eyes at any moment and ask what she missed.
None of the living in this room look like that. The family looks hollowed out. Yuriko looks composed but distant. Even Sasaki, for all his quiet authority, carries the weight of someone who has seen too much. But the dead girl looks like she's finally stopped running.
And still, underneath the observation, my mind won't let it go. This is a fool's ritual. No one in their right mind would spend spare money on this. People die every day in this city. They die in alleys and gutters and on operating tables and in facilities that don't bother to learn their names. They die alone and unmourned and unwashed. What makes this girl different? What makes her worth the white cloth and the comb and the careful hands? Money. Just money. The whole ceremony is a transaction, and the dead girl is the product, and the family is paying for the illusion that death can be gentle.
But I keep watching.
And the truth is, the illusion is beautiful.
The ritual is beautiful. Sasaki's hands are beautiful in their certainty.
The way the family places their flowers is beautiful in its hesitation.
Even the rain against the windows sounds beautiful, like the world itself is participating in the ceremony.
I don't believe in any of it. But I can see why someone would want to.
Sasaki closes the ritual. He makes his final adjustments, steps back, and bows once to the family. They bow in return, deeper than he did, and one of them, the mother, I think, or an aunt, begins to cry quietly. The sound is very small in the large room. It mingles with the rain.
I stand at the edge of it all, the borrowed clothes hanging off my frame, and I think about the child in the alley. The one who said "I want to live." The one I told to keep living. I think about the dead girl with her calm face and her folded hands, and the living family with their hollow eyes, and Sasaki with his quiet grace, and Yuriko with her dangerous footwork, and me, the coward in the corner, watching it all happen as if I had any right to be here.
How lovely, I think. How utterly, utterly lovely.
And then I go back to work, because that's what I'm here for.
Sasaki finds me near the back wall, my hands still holding a bundle of white cloth I haven't put down yet.
"What did you see?" he asks.
The question comes without preamble, the way he seems to do everything. Not unkind. Just direct. He's standing close enough that I catch the incense smell again, sunk deep into his sleeves, and I wonder if it ever washes out or if it just becomes part of you.
I take a moment before answering. The cloth in my hands is soft. Unused. It will be used again, or maybe it already has been, and that's the thing about cloth, it doesn't hold grief the way bodies do.
"A transaction," I say.
Sasaki waits.
"The dead don't need any of it," I say. "That was never for her. It was for them." I tilt my head slightly toward the family, still gathered near the coffin. "They paid to believe she's somewhere that cares about the temperature of the water."
He follows my gaze for a moment. The family has gone quiet now, their crying softened into something closer to breath. The mother, if that's who she is, is touching the edge of the coffin with two fingers, very lightly, like she's afraid of pressing too hard.
"And you think that's foolish," Sasaki says. Not a question nor an accusation either.
I shake my head once. "I think it's honest. They're buying an ending. Something with a shape to it. Most people don't get that."
"But you wouldn't pay for it."
"I don't know what I'd pay for."
We stand there while the rain does what it's been doing all morning. The greenery drinks it in. The prop portrait has been replaced now; the real one watches from the altar, that young face caught mid-smile, frozen.
"People say the dead look peaceful," I say, "but she just looked alive. More than anyone else in the room. You gave her that." I pause. "Or you sold it."
"I gave it," Sasaki says quietly.
"Most people can't tell the difference."
"Most people aren't asked to."
The words land somewhere in my chest and stay there. I don't have a response ready. The cloth is still in my hands. I've been holding it this whole time, and now I set it down on the table beside me, folding it once, then twice, even though it's already folded. My hands need to do something.
"Do you think there's a difference?" he asks.
I look at him. He's watching me with that calm, level gaze, not searching for anything, just waiting.
"Between giving and selling?"
"Between living and not dying."
The question sits between us for a long moment. I can hear the family beginning to move, chairs shifting, quiet words exchanged. The ceremony is ending. The hearse will be here soon. The rain will fall on the coffin as they carry it out.
"I don't know," I say finally. "I've been doing a lot of one and not much of the other."
Sasaki makes that quiet sound again, not a laugh, not a sigh, but something in between. He reaches out and adjusts the collar of my jacket, the same way he did earlier, small precise movements that make the borrowed thing fit a little better.
"There's a place here," he says, "if you want it."
I don't answer.
"Take your time," he says again, and then he turns and walks back toward the family, leaving me with the folded cloth and the rain and the question still hanging in the air.
What would I pay for?
I fold the cloth one more time, unnecessary, and set it down again. The white fabric catches the grey light from the window. It doesn't look like much. But it was in Sasaki's hands during the ritual, and it was in mine after, and now it's just cloth, waiting to be used again.
The girl's face. The peace of it. The lie of it, or the truth of it, or both.
The child in the alley, saying I want to live.
My own hands, whole again, nothing to show for any of it.
Then I go back to work.
The job ends at four. Yuriko pays me by the door, an envelope that feels too heavy in my hand for what I actually did today. Standing around, folding cloth, watching a dead girl get dressed for a journey I don't believe in.
I can eat through the week without thinking too much about what I'm eating. That's a rare thing.
"You did well today," Yuriko says. "For your first day."
"I didn't do much."
She glances toward the street, where the rain has finally stopped, leaving everything wet and gleaming.
"There's a public bath house down the street. You should clean up before you go home."
"The hot water sounds good."
"Take care."
I step out into the damp air. The city smells like rain and exhaust and the faint green of the plants inside the building, already behind me. The bath house is down the street and I walk toward it with the envelope in my pocket and my borrowed clothes still too big at the shoulders.
The evening is settling in. People move past me with their heads down, their own days done or still going. I think about the folded cloth. The white flowers in the coffin. The sound of Sasaki's voice, quiet and certain. The question he asked me that I still don't have an answer for.
What would I pay for?
I don't know. But the bath house is warm when I push the door open, steam drifting out into the cool air, and for now, that's enough. I'll figure out the rest later. Or I won't. Either way, the water will be hot, and I'll submerge myself in it, and for a little while, nothing will need to be anything but heat and water and the slow uncoiling of the day from my shoulders.
How lovely.
The noise hits me before I even reach the changing room. A man's voice, unbelievably loud, carrying through the walls like it has somewhere important to be. I pause at the door, already tired. The bath house is small. Nowhere to hide from a voice like that except underwater, and I can't hold my breath that long.
I bite the bullet and go in.
The changing room is empty except for a few baskets of clothes. I wrap a towel around my waist and step through into the washing area, steam curling up around me. The heat is immediate, settling into my skin.
The source of the noise is impossible to miss.
A man sits in the pool, talking at a volume that suggests he believes the whole world is his audience. Tall. Well-built. Blue hair, short and spiky, the kind of hair that looks like it fought the concept of combs and won. He's mid-sentence when I walk in, arms spread across the edge of the pool like he owns it.
"...so I tell him, you call that a wall? That's not a wall! That's a suggestion with delusions of grandeur! And he just stands there looking at me like I'm the crazy one, and I'm thinking, buddy, you're the one who built a wall in the middle of a street and expected ME to walk around it!"
Beside him, a kid with black hair. Far younger than me, but built solid, like someone who's been in enough fights that his body's decided to be ready for the next one. He listens to the speech with the expression of someone who's heard ten thousand variations of it and has stopped tracking which one this is.
"Bro," the kid says, flat. "That wall was load-bearing."
"It was in my way!"
"That's the same thing."
On the other side of the pool sits a third man. This one is enormous. Dark blue hair. Broad shoulders, muscular frame, easily twice my size. He doesn't speak. He just sits with his arms resting on the edge of the pool, watching the loud one talk, his expression unreadable.
The only empty spot in the pool is near them. Of course it is.
I lower myself into the water. The heat takes hold of me immediately, and for a moment, everything else goes quiet, the steam, the noise, the long day still stuck to my skin. Then the blue-haired man notices me and turns his full attention in my direction.
"Oh! New guy!"
I close my eyes briefly.
"Hey, new guy! You look like you just crawled out of something! Rough day?"
I open my eyes. All three of them are looking at me now. The kid with the black hair has the decency to look slightly apologetic. The big one just watches.
"Something like that," I say.
The blue-haired man grins wide. "Well, you're in the right place! Hot water fixes everything. That and a good meal. And maybe a fight. Not necessarily in that order." He points at the kid.
The big man inclines his head slightly. "A recent development."
"Best development!" The blue-haired man slaps the surface of the water, sending a small wave across the pool. "We're going places! You should come with us! Well, not right now. We're in a bath. But after!"
The kid sighs. "Bro. He doesn't even know us."
"That's how it starts! Nobody knows anybody, then suddenly you're in a bath together and it's destiny!"
I sink a little lower into the water. The heat is good. The noise is not. But the water is very hot, and for the first time all day, the tension in my shoulders starts to ease.
"Destiny," I repeat.
"Destiny!" the blue-haired man confirms, as if I'd agreed to something.
The big man watches me with calm, patient eyes. The kid shakes his head slowly, the way you do when you've accepted that some things are beyond your control.
"I have to turn that destiny down then."
The steam rises around us. The loud man keeps talking. The water holds me.
I let it.
The name exchange happens naturally enough. He offers his first, loud and unashamed, the way he offers everything.
"Kamina! The Great Kamina!" He says it like a title he's earned a hundred times over, like the words themselves have weight. Then he points at me. "And you?"
"Daigo Kobayashi."
"Daigo!" He repeats it back, testing it, then grins. "Good name. Strong. You from around here?"
"Not far."
The conversation drifts into mundane territory after that, where to get food, how the water's too hot, how the soap in these places never lathers right. The kid with the black hair joins in occasionally, his voice dry and grounded against Kamina's constant ascent. The big one says almost nothing, but his silence has a presence to it, like a wall that doesn't need to announce itself.
Then Kamina looks at me differently.
A settling of his attention, the way water finds a level. He leans back, arms spread across the pool's edge, and studies me with those eyes behind his sunglasses, why is he wearing sunglasses in a bathhouse and says, "You look like you'd run."
I blink. "What?"
"When it matters," he continues, unbothered by my reaction. "You look like the type who runs when it really counts."
The words hit lower than they should. I feel them in my gut, near where the wound should have been.
"Why do you think that?"
"Because I know people like you." He says it simply, without cruelty, without judgment. Like he's stating a fact about the weather. "Given the chance, they'll do whatever it takes. But when the moment comes, when the thing that matters is right there in front of them, they'll run. Not because they're weak. Because they've convinced themselves that running is the only thing they're good at."
I'm quiet for a moment. The steam curls between us. The kid glances at Kamina but doesn't interrupt.
"Then you've got me wrong," I say. "I'm not that complicated. I'm just a coward."
"Yeah," Kamina agrees, immediate and easy. "So am I."
I look at him. He doesn't flinch.
"Cowardice," he says, holding up a hand, "is where courage starts. It's the most honest thing a person can feel. But here's the thing, Daigo when a coward chooses to stand anyway, that's bigger than any hero's stand. Heroes don't feel the fear. You and me? We feel all of it. Every single drop. And we still get to choose."
The kid shifts in the water. "Bro, you've said this before."
"And I'll say it again until it sticks." Kamina doesn't look away from me. "The fear doesn't make you small. It makes you real. And a real person, one who's scared out of his mind but still moves forward, that's the most terrifying thing in the world. To the fear itself. To everything."
The water holds us both. I can hear the soft sounds of the bath house, the drip of a faucet somewhere, the low murmur of other patrons in a different pool. But this pool has gone quiet.
"What about you?" I ask. "What are you scared of?"
"Everything," he says, still grinning. "Losing. Failing. Watching people I care about get hurt because I wasn't strong enough. Dying before I finish what I started." He shrugs, the movement sending small ripples across the water. "But I wake up anyway. I get up. I move. Because if I let it stop me, then I'm not me anymore. And I like being me."
The big man on the other side of the pool speaks for the first time in a while. "He is insufferable about it."
"Thank you," Kamina says, as if it's a compliment.
I look down at the water. My own reflection wobbles on the surface, distorted, unrecognizable. The coward in the big clothes, now stripped down to skin and steam. The man who ran from a sword wound and told a child to live without believing a word of it.
"Running's not always wrong," I say quietly. "Sometimes it's the only thing left."
"Sure," Kamina says. "Sometimes. But not always. And if you're always running, you'll never know the difference."
The words settle over me like the heat of the water, sinking in past the skin.
"Anyway!" Kamina slaps the water again, breaking the mood with the same ease he'd built it. "This is Bro." He points at the kid. "Shmuel. He's the one who makes sure I don't get lost."
"I don't do that," Shmuel says.
"He does that. And this…" He points at the big man. "This is Rowbotham. New guy. Joined recently."
"I am still adjusting," Rowbotham says.
I look between the three of them. They're not what I expected from a bathhouse in District 12. They're not what I expected from anything. Kamina grins at me, and I can feel it, not the grin itself, but what's underneath it.
A force. A pull. Something that says along the line like get up. Move. Do something. Even if it's wrong. Even if it's stupid. Even if you're scared.
"You feel it, don't you?" Kamina says, still grinning. "That thing in your chest. That's not the heat from the water."
I don't answer.
"You don't have to decide now," he says. "But whatever you're running from? It's not going anywhere. It'll wait. It'll always wait." He leans back against the pool's edge. "The question is whether you're going to let it wait forever."
I close my eyes. The water is hot. My body is tired. The day is over.
But something in my chest has started to move.
Kamina looks at me through the steam, and for a moment, he's not grinning at all.
"Don't you wanna dance with the devil?" he says. "Just once?"
The words hang there. I don't answer. I can't. The steam curls between us, thick as the questions piling in my skull. How much love have I brought upon my mind? How much cowardice? They tangle together until I can't tell them apart anymore.
I stand up. Water sluices off my body. I don't look back at the three of them as I step out of the pool and head for the changing room. My clothes are still too big. The envelope from Yuriko sits in my pocket, heavy with money I haven't earned.
Then I'm outside, and I'm running.
The streets are dark now. The pavement is still wet from the rain. My feet find their rhythm without being told, the way they always do, the way they've been trained to do over a lifetime of evading the past and dreading the future. Such an awful thing, this life. Running from what's behind. Scared of what's ahead. And never, not once, standing still long enough to see what's directly in front of me.
I run until my legs burn. Until the buildings blur. Until I don't recognize where I am anymore, and then I keep running, because recognition was never the point.
The alley appears without warning. One moment I'm on a street, the next I'm in a narrow passage between two buildings, and there, at the far end, small and blurred and waiting, is the child.
I stop.
The figure doesn't move. The air around it has that same quality as before, that wrongness, like the world has been disassembled and put back together by hands that didn't quite understand the instructions. The ground shifts beneath my feet in subtle, impossible ways.
The child speaks.
"What does it mean to live?"
The same question. Or maybe it's a different one that only sounds the same. I stand at the mouth of the alley, breathing hard, my sweat cold on my skin, and I realize I have no answer for it.
"I don't know," I say.
The words fall out of me like stones. The child doesn't react.
I'm lost in everything. I don't know what this world is. I don't know what I am. Nothing but a coward. I will crumble. I've always crumbled. Give me something heavy enough and I'll break under it, the way I've broken under everything else. That's the whole of it. That's the entire shape of my existence.
Then why am I still here?
If I'm going to die a dog's death, the way I've always imagined, does it have to be this way? Crawling through alleys, running from shadows, letting the world push me wherever it wants? The world keeps giving me chances. The wound closed. The child found me. Kamina asked me to dance. Why? What does this world want from me? What could it possibly want from a man like me?
The child's voice comes again.
"What does it mean," it asks, "to be ruled by the past of one's self?"
I know that answer. I've known it for years.
"Being fate's fool," I say.
The words leave my mouth before I can stop them, and then I'm laughing. Or maybe I'm not laughing. Maybe the sound coming out of me is something else entirely, something that just happens to sound like laughter because it has nowhere else to go. How funny. How hilarious. How utterly, perfectly laughable.
I am fate's fool. I've been fate's fool since the day I was born, dancing on strings I never chose, running from a past that's always two steps behind me.
I look at the child. The blur. The small body. The tears that might be falling again, or might just be the rain that isn't falling anymore.
"Do you think I'll ever get the chance to face it?" I ask. "To face what I lost?"
The child doesn't answer. The alley holds its breath.
The funeral. The dead girl with her peaceful face. Sasaki's hands, so certain. The white flowers. The question about what I'd pay for.
"Then let's face it," I say. "For once."
I take a step forward. Toward the child. Toward whatever's waiting at the far end of the alley. The ground doesn't shift under my feet. My legs don't run. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I'm moving toward something instead of away from it.
I'm a fool. I'm a coward. I'm fate's fool and always will be.
But I'm walking.
Let's see what's forward of me.
"Falling into the void, yet it feels so familiar."
Then a voice from inside my head reach out to me.
"It's alright to feel ashamed for a fault that you do."
"But then why does the violence cause the silence?"
"Because silence is the only answer violence understands."
"But who are we mistaken for?"
"For those who came before. For those who will come after. For no one at all."
"Then what is it in your head?"
"Between the gate of life and death…"
"Zombie..."
"Another mother's breaking for her child."
"Which is the point of the past for whom I loved?"
"In your head, she was that."
"Yeah. She is my wife. Bearing my child."
"Facing what destroys oneself. Don't you want to rest?"
"How lovely. I would like to rest. But I will not feel ashamed."
"Is shame not already in you?"
"It is."
"Then why carry it?"
"Because to set it down would be to forget."
"Is forgetting not peace?"
"No. Forgetting is a lie."
"Then what is remembrance but self-inflicted wound?"
"A wound that tells me I lived. I was there."
"Was there not enough pain in that?"
"There was enough. And yet I stand."
"You barely stand. You crawl through alleys. You bleed. You run."
"I run. But I stop, too."
"And when you stop, what then?"
"Then I face it."
"Face what? The end of all things? The quiet dark?"
"Face what I lost. Face what I am. Face the forward of me."
"And if that forward is just more running?"
"Then I'll run again. Until I don't have to."
"Don't have to? Or can't anymore?"
"Either way, I'll have chosen it."
"Is choice not just another illusion? A pretty word for what the world already decided?"
"Then let it be pretty. I'll hold it anyway."
"Even if it breaks you?"
"It has already broken me. And yet I'm here."
"Barely."
"Barely is enough."
"Enough for what?"
"To ask the next question."
"And what question is that?"
"How much of me is left after the breaking?"
"Less than you think."
"Then I'll use what's left."
"For what?"
"To face it."
"You keep saying that. Face it. Face it. As if you know what it means."
"I don't."
"Then why say it?"
"Because saying it makes it true enough to reach for."
"And if you fall again?"
"Then I'll fall. But I'll fall facing forward."
I speak them out loud, one after another, the words spilling into the void like water from a cracked vessel.
A hundred and one ways I want to die.
I want to die with a sword through my chest in an alley no one remembers.
I want to die drowning in the rain with my mouth open.
I want to die from the cold that comes after the heat of running.
I want to die with my back against a wall and my eyes open, watching it all end.
I want to die quietly, a small thing in a loud city.
I want to die so loudly the world has no choice but to notice.
I want to die before I disappoint anyone else.
I want to die after proving everyone wrong.
I want to die with my boots still on. I want to die with no shoes at all, my feet bare against the concrete.
I want to die holding a weapon I don't know how to use.
I want to die holding nothing, my hands empty and still.
I want to die in a bed I don't own.
I want to die on the floor of a room I've never seen.
I want to die with the taste of cheap coffee on my tongue.
I want to die with the taste of blood, my own, warm and metallic and final.
I want to die before the sun comes up.
I want to die after it sets, when the streets go quiet and the neon hums.
I want to die surrounded by people who hate me.
I want to die alone.
I want to die with my name on someone's lips.
I want to die forgotten.
I want to die in the rain.
I want to die in the heat.
I want to die where the air is clean and I can smell the trees.
I want to die choking on smoke in a burning building.
I want to die falling from a high place, the wind screaming past me, the ground rising like a promise.
I want to die with my hands around someone's throat.
I want to die with my hands around no one's.
I want to die mid-sentence.
I want to die before the sentence is finished, the words still unformed in my mouth.
I want to die with a joke half-told, the punchline lost forever.
I want to die with a secret buried in my chest.
I want to die with no secrets left.
I want to die having said everything.
I want to die having said nothing at all.
I keep going. The void doesn't stop me. The voice doesn't interrupt. The words keep coming, and I keep speaking them, because they've been waiting for so long and now they're finally out and they won't stop.
I want to die in the arms of someone I loved.
I want to die with no one touching me.
I want to die in the water, sinking, the light fading above me.
I want to die on the shore, the waves lapping at my feet.
I want to die in the dark where no one can see my face.
I want to die in the light where everyone can.
I want to die with my eyes open and my hands shaking.
I want to die still. I want to die in a fight I started.
I want to die in a fight I ran from and then came back to, too late, always too late.
I want to die with my teeth gritted.
I want to die with a smile on my face that means nothing.
I want to die because I'm tired.
I want to die because I'm not tired enough.
I want to die because the world is too much.
I want to die because I am too little.
I want to die because I'm a coward.
I want to die because I'm not enough of one.
I want to die because I don't know what else to do.
I want to die because I've forgotten how to do anything else.
I want to die because dying is easier than changing.
I want to die because changing is impossible.
I want to die because I tried to change and failed.
I want to die because I haven't tried at all.
The words echo. The void holds them. I listen to my own voice and I don't recognize it.
I want to die with my wife's name on my tongue.
I want to die with my child's name.
I want to die before I forget the sound of her laughter.
I want to die after I've forgotten, because remembering is worse.
I want to die with the smell of her hair still in my nose.
I want to die when the smell has faded and I can't bring it back.
I want to die with her hands on my face.
I want to die knowing I'll never feel them again.
I want to die because she did.
I want to die because I didn't.
I want to die because I couldn't save her.
I want to die because she saved me, once, and I never thanked her properly.
I want to die because the world kept spinning after she stopped.
I want to die because it should have stopped too.
I want to die because it didn't.
The void is very quiet.
I want to die because I told a child to live.
I want to die because I meant it.
I want to die because I didn't mean it.
I want to die because I don't know which is true.
I want to die because I'll never know which is true.
I want to die because it doesn't matter.
I want to die because it does matter, and I can't figure out how.
The list goes on. I don't count. I don't know if I've reached a hundred and one or if I've passed it or if I'm still going. The words don't stop. They keep coming, and I keep speaking them, because the silence at the end of them is the only thing that scares me more than the words themselves.
And then, for a long moment, nothing. The void doesn't answer. The voice doesn't answer. I'm alone with everything I've just said, and I'm still here, and the words have changed nothing.
I breathe in. I breathe out.
"I want to die," I say, one more time, quieter now, almost a whisper. "But I also want to see what's forward of me."
The words hang in the dark. And then I take a step.
"Yet what I want contradicts what I need."
"A hundred and one ways I need to live."
"Another contradiction. How predictable."
"I need to live because she didn't get to."
"You wanted to die because she did."
"I need to live because the world kept spinning. I need to see where it goes."
"You wanted to die because it should have stopped."
"I need to live because I told a child to live. I need to mean it."
"You said you didn't know if you meant it."
"I need to find out."
"Curiosity is not a reason to live."
"It's enough for now."
"Now is not forever."
"Now is all I have."
"You wanted to die in the rain. Now you need to live in it?"
"I need to live through the rain. To see what comes after."
"After is more rain. Then dark. Then nothing."
"Then I'll need to live through that too."
"You wanted to die with your wife's name on your tongue."
"I need to live with it there too. I need to carry it forward."
"Carrying it is what breaks you."
"Then I'll be broken and alive."
"You wanted to die because you're a coward."
"I need to live because I'm a coward. Because I know what running costs. Because maybe a coward who stands is worth something."
"Is that what you tell yourself?"
"It's what I'm learning to tell myself."
"Feel ashamed?"
"Hell no."
"You said you felt shame."
"I said I carried it. That's different."
"Different how?"
"Shame is a wound. Carrying it means I survived it."
"Survival is not living."
"Then I need to learn to live. I need to try. I need to fail. I need to try again."
"You'll fall."
"Then I'll need to get up."
"And if you can't?"
"Then I'll need someone to help me up."
"No one will come."
"The world gave me a child. The world gave me a chance. I need to believe it gives more."
"Belief is fragile."
"I need to hold it anyway."
"Your needs are endless."
"They're stronger than my wants. They're heavier. They pull harder."
"Even now? Even falling?"
"Even now."
"Then fall."
Then from the sky I fall.
The void breaks open. Light rushes in, real light, the grey-gold light of a City sky at dawn. The wind screams past me. The ground rises up like a promise.
And the child is in my hand.
Small fingers curled in mine. Warm. Real. The impossible body, the blur, the tears that asked what it means to live, all of it there, clutching my hand as we plummet toward the earth.
I will live to protect this child. I will live because the world gave me another chance to fix myself, and I would be a fool to waste it. For what will happen to me, who knows. But I will face it. I will carry it. I will not run.
I will protect this child. I will learn what it means to live.
And I will do so gladly.
The ground catches us. Or maybe we catch the ground. Either way, we stop falling.
And I'm still here.
"Let's go," I say to the child. "Let's see what's forward of us."
The words tear out of me like something that's been waiting to be said my whole life.
"DANCE WITH THE DEVIL JUST ONE TIME!"
My voice echoes across the sky, swallowed by the wind and the light and the impossible altitude. The child's hand is still in mine. The ground is still far below. And then something inside me—something I didn't know was there, something that must have been waiting since the alley, since the rain, since the moment I told the child to live—busts out of me all at once.
[Effloresced E.G.O :: Shuppatsu]
White. It starts at my chest and spreads outward, not like clothing being put on but like something that was always underneath finally showing itself. A white outfit of death, funeral white, the color of mourning and departure. It wraps around me in clean, deliberate folds, an undertaker's coat, a traveler's shroud, the formal wear of someone who has stopped running and turned to face what's coming. The fabric is bright enough to catch the dawn light, and for a moment, I'm brighter than the sky.
Then the staff manifests in my hands. Wooden. Simple. The kind of staff a pilgrim might carry, or a priest, or a man walking toward his own funeral with full knowledge of what awaits him. It hums against my palms with a power I don't fully understand and don't need to. I swing it downward, beneath me, and the air responds.
A cold wind erupts from the motion. It pushes against the void, against the fall, against gravity itself. I feel it catches us and lifts us upward, higher, into the grey-gold light of the City sky. The wind howls past my ears. The staff steadies in my grip. The child's fingers tighten around mine.
I look at the child.
The blur around it has changed, or maybe my eyes have changed, or maybe this has given me a new way of seeing. I can almost make out features now. The shape of a face. The suggestion of eyes looking back at me.
"You are invited to my funeral," I say, and my voice carries over the wind, clean and certain. "So live until then."
The child looks at me. And for the first time, I think I see something like recognition in that impossible face.
The cold wind holds us aloft. The world spreads out below us, vast and indifferent and full of things I will never understand. But I'm here. I'm alive. I'm not running anymore.
I'm a coward who decided to stand.
I wonder how many I can invite to my funeral.
The thought comes unbidden, drifting through my mind as the cold wind carries us higher. My funeral. The words feel strange, like a suit I haven't tried on yet but already know will fit. I turn them over, and then a name surfaces, bright and insistent.
Kamina.
Of course. He'll need to be there. He'll need to see what I become from the view of the living toward the dead. A witness. A man who pushed me forward when all I wanted was to fall. He deserves that much. He deserves to see the end of what he started in a bath house in District 12, with his loud voice and his impossible certainty and his question about dancing with the devil.
I look at the child in my arms. The blur has resolved further now. Features emerging from the distortion like a photograph developing in reverse. Small face. Small hands. The shape of a person, choosing itself in the light.
A girl. She will be a girl.
"Mika Kobayashi," I say, and the name settles into the air between us, heavy and real. My wife's name, carried forward. My wife's memory, given new breath. "To honor her. And you will be my daughter."
The child looks at me. The wind howls. The city sprawls below, indifferent to everything I've just decided.
I don't care what she was before this. I don't care what shape she takes tomorrow. I will face it when it comes to me if I haven't come to it first. But before that, I will face it again. The past. The wound. The reason I ran for so long.
I'll need to make an altar. For my wife. I still have her picture somewhere, buried in what's left of my life before all this. I'll find it. I'll set it up. I'll face it every day until facing it doesn't feel like dying.
And then.
Then what's stopping me from making the whole world attend my funeral?
The thought lands with a strange kind of weight. Not ambition. Not pride. Just a quiet certainty that I'm done hiding. I'm done shrinking. I'm done letting the world decide what I'm worth. If I'm going to die, I'll die with my head up and my feet forward and a crowd at my back.
The cold wind shifts. The staff hums in my grip. The child, Mika, clings to my coat, her small fingers tangled in the white fabric.
I will not be ashamed to live from now on.
The words don't leave my mouth, but they settle into me anyway, into the hollow places where the shame used to live. And for the first time in as long as I can remember, I'm not running. I'm not hiding. I'm not waiting for the end to catch up.
I'm moving toward it.
With my daughter in my arms and my wife's name on my tongue and Kamina's voice still echoing in the back of my mind, I'm moving toward everything I've been too scared to face.
And I'll face it.
For all of them.
______________________
_________
___
The years between then and now are a blur of small rooms and quiet routines, of learning to cook and learning to read, of watching my father face things that made other men turn away. I didn't always understand what he was doing. I still don't. But I understand enough.
He died when facing an impossible foe.
That's what they told me. That's what the people who knew him whispered to each other when they thought I couldn't hear. An impossible foe. A fight he could have run from. A fight he chose.
I once thought my father was a lonely man. Someone without many friends. Someone who kept to himself and didn't know how to reach out. I was wrong.
The funeral hall is full.
There is no one here bound to him by blood. No uncles. No aunts. No cousins. Just me. And yet the room overflows. Faces I don't recognize, faces I half-remember from the corners of his life. Fixers. Shopkeepers. A woman with dangerous footwork who taught me how to walk quietly. An old man with calm hands who performs the ritual now, moving around the coffin with the same grace my father once described to me, years ago, in a voice that sounded like he still couldn't believe what he'd seen.
The ritual unfolds like a memory. The white cloth. The careful hands. The flowers, white and waiting. The smell of incense, heavy and sweet, filling the room until it feels like breathing in something sacred.
Then a person with spiky blue hair approaches me.
He's tall. Broad. He moves through the crowd like he belongs here, like he belongs everywhere. His grin is enormous, too big for the occasion, too bright for a funeral. But there's something to be proud of. Something almost tender.
"Your father," he says, "was a coward."
I look up at him. His smile doesn't falter.
"The biggest coward I ever met," he continues, and his voice carries the kind of warmth that makes the words sound like a compliment. "He ran from everything. From his past. From himself. From anything that might've asked him to stand still long enough to feel something."
"But when it mattered…" He pauses. The grin softens, just slightly. "When it really mattered, he stood. A coward who stands is worth more than a hero who never had to be afraid. Your father knew that. That's why he could do what he did."
He says it like I should understand. Like I already do.
"Yeah," I say, and my voice is steady. "He is a coward. A big coward."
The man grins wider. "That's right. And you should be proud of him."
Then the ritual reaches its final stage.
The closest person to my father must see his face one last time before the corpse is burned. That person is me.
I step forward. The hall goes quiet. Even the incense seems to hold its breath. The old man with the calm hands steps aside, giving me space, and I stand before the coffin and look down at my father's face.
He looks peaceful. More peaceful than I've ever seen him in life. The lines of worry have smoothed away. The tension in his jaw has released. His hands are folded across his chest, and someone maybe the old man, maybe one of the mourners has placed a small white flower between his fingers.
I look at him for a long moment. The man who taught me to walk. The man who told me to live. The man who ran and ran and then, finally, stopped.
Then I reach into my pocket and pull out a photograph.
My mother. The only picture he had of her. He kept it on a small altar in our home, and every morning he would stand before it with his head bowed, and I would watch from the doorway, and he never once asked me to join him. He just stood there, facing something I couldn't see.
I place the photograph in the coffin beside him.
"Live until then," I whisper. "That's what you told me. So I'll live. And I'll see you at the end of it."
The old man steps forward and begins to close the coffin. The white cloth moves. The flowers shift. And for a moment, the light falls across my father's face in a way that makes him look like he's smiling.
I step back. The crowd parts for me. The spiky-haired man is still watching, and when I meet his eyes, he gives me a single nod.
The coffin is carried toward the flames.
And I stand there, my father's daughter, and I will not run like he did.