The city lights of Tokyo had always felt like a suffocating blanket to Tanaka Wakashi. Now, the weight was gone, replaced by the suffocating silence of the countryside. He stared out the window of their rattling, secondhand moving truck, the urban sprawl shrinking into the distance, a gray, miserable knot tightening in his chest.
His mother, Akari, sat beside him, her small frame rigid, shoulders hunched. She gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles, her gaze fixed on the asphalt ribbon unspooling before them. She hadn't cried since the funeral, not openly. But the set of her jaw, the way she clutched her worn purse, spoke volumes about the grief that had hollowed them all out.
It had been six months since his father, Kenji, had gone. A sudden, cruel heart attack that had left a gaping void in their cramped apartment, and an even larger one in Wakashi's world. Kenji had been the boisterous, laughing one, the one who'd made even their poverty feel like an adventure. With him gone, the poverty was just… poverty. A suffocating reality that had forced them out of their tiny Tokyo rental and towards a small, dilapidated house Akari had inherited from a distant relative. A house in some village Wakashi had never heard of.
Sakuragi Village. The name itself sounded like a sigh.
Wakashi, at thirteen, was already taller than most of his classmates had been, a gangly, uncoordinated beanstalk. His face was unremarkable, a collection of average features that blended into the background. He wasn't handsome, wasn't ugly; he just was. After his father died, that ordinariness had curdled into something sullen. He'd stopped trying in school, skipped classes, and gotten into pointless scuffles. "Problematic child," the teachers had called him, their voices laced with thinly veiled pity. He hated their pity more than their judgment.
Akari had endured it all with a quiet stoicism that sometimes felt more crushing than any outburst. "We need a fresh start, Wakashi," she'd whispered one night, her voice raspy from unshed tears. "Away from here. Away from… everything."
He hadn't argued. What was there to argue for? His life in Tokyo had become a series of empty days, haunted by ghosts he couldn't shake. Maybe a new place, even one named after cherry trees in perpetual bloom, would be different. He doubted it.
The truck veered off the main road, onto a narrower, winding path lined with towering cedars. The air grew cooler, carrying the scent of damp earth and distant woodsmoke. Fields stretched out, green and vast, under a sky that felt impossibly large without the concrete canyons to contain it. This was nothing like Tokyo. This was… nothing.
"We're almost there," Akari said, her voice a little brighter than it had been in months. Wakashi grunted in response, pulling his cheap headphones tighter over his ears, though no music played. He just wanted to shut out the world.
Sakuragi Village wasn't just rural; it was defiantly coastal. The road, which had been a ribbon through fields, now threaded along a coastline where the deep blue of the Pacific met a rugged, rocky shore. The air that rushed in through the truck's open window was thick with the scent of salt and iodine, a stark contrast to the exhaust fumes of Tokyo. Fishing boats, small and weathered, dotted the horizon like scattered toys.
Their new home was a single-story, weather-beaten house perched precariously on a slight incline overlooking a narrow, winding path that led down to the beach. It smelled faintly of old wood, dust, and something indefinably marine. Inside, the rooms were small, the tatami worn, and the furniture sparse – just the few pieces they'd managed to bring. It was a step down, in every tangible way, from their Tokyo apartment, yet Akari looked around with a quiet, almost hopeful resolve.
"It's clean," she murmured, more to herself than to Wakashi, as she ran a hand over a dusty wooden sill. "And the air… it's good for you."
Wakashi just dumped his backpack in the corner of what would be his room – a tiny space with a single window offering a sliver of the distant sea – and wandered out. He couldn't shake the feeling of being trapped, the vastness of the ocean outside somehow mirroring the emptiness inside him. He started walking, aimlessly at first, then drawn by the rhythmic crash of waves.
The coastal path was narrow, winding between low-lying scrub and occasional, gnarled pine trees. The pebbles crunched under his worn sneakers, a sound swallowed almost immediately by the ocean's roar. The wind tugged at his too-long hair, whipping salt spray onto his face. He walked for what felt like hours, the ceaseless motion of the waves a strangely hypnotic, yet unsettling, presence. There were no bright signs, no flashing neon, no constant hum of traffic. Just the sea, the sky, and the silence. It was overwhelming in its simplicity.
The next day, Akari walked him to Sakuragi Middle School. It was a modest, two-story building, its paint peeling in places, surrounded by a small asphalt yard. The school felt even smaller than their new house, a stark contrast to the sprawling concrete academies of Tokyo. The other students, already forming small, tight-knit groups, glanced at him with the usual mix of curiosity and wariness reserved for newcomers, especially tall ones who radiated an aura of disinterest.
His first few days melted into a monotonous blur. Classes were simple, the teachers quiet and patient, a world away from the demanding, bustling classrooms he'd left behind. He sat at the back, observed, and offered minimal responses. He ate his lunch in silence, usually by himself, watching the other students. There was a small, dusty field behind the school, often occupied by a handful of boys kicking a worn-out ball, but Wakashi barely registered it. His days were spent in a dull routine: school, a walk along the coast (always the coast, its vastness both calming and terrifying), dinner, sleep. Rinse, repeat.
Every morning, the sound of the waves would wake him, a constant, unchanging rhythm. Every evening, he'd fall asleep to the same sound. It was a stark, quiet life, devoid of the familiar chaos of Tokyo, but also devoid of the sharp edges of pain. It was a dull, flat existence, neither good nor bad, just… present.
He was just a tall, unremarkable boy drifting through unremarkable days, the ghost of his father a dull ache, the future an unwritten, uninteresting blank. He didn't know yet that the very monotony he resented, and the familiar crash of the waves, were setting the stage for something entirely different. He also didn't know that on the worn-out field behind the school, a small, worn football was waiting to introduce him to his true self. And just around the corner, perhaps even already on that very field, was the person who would unknowingly unlock it.