[MA 15+ - Contains themes of depression, suicide, and psychological distress]
Tokyo never slept, and Mahitaro Yasachiru had long stopped wishing it would.
The city's insomnia had become his own—a perpetual wakefulness that blurred days into nights, shifts into eternities. At thirty-seven, he existed in the spaces between the neon glow and concrete shadows, a ghost wearing human skin, moving through fluorescent aisles that smelled of rotting produce and industrial cleaning solution.
The overhead lights at Tokyo Fruits Market hummed with a frequency that burrowed into his skull. Sixteen hours into his shift, Mahitaro felt that vibration in his teeth, in the hollow of his bones. His reflection in the freezer glass was barely recognizable—sunken eyes like bruised fruit, skin the color of week-old meat, a hunched posture that made him appear decades older than he was.
When did I stop looking human?
The thought arrived unbidden, clinical, as if observed from somewhere outside his body. He'd been dissociating more frequently lately—moments where he'd find himself staring at his hands as if they belonged to a stranger, or discover he'd been restocking the same shelf for an hour without memory of the repetition.
"Oi, Yasachiru."
The voice slithered through the hum of refrigeration units. Mahitaro's shoulders tensed involuntarily, a Pavlovian response cultivated over years.
His boss emerged from between the aisles like something predatory, all sharp teeth hidden behind a beneficent smile. Takeshi Kurosawa had perfected the art of cruelty disguised as concern—each word delivered with the gentleness of a knife slipping between ribs.
"You're looking pale today," Kurosawa observed, tilting his head with false sympathy. "Are you eating enough? Getting rest? You know I worry about you."
The words landed like stones in Mahitaro's stomach. This was the ritual—the reminder, coated in honey, that Kurosawa knew. Knew about the incident. Knew about the dead child. Knew about the years Mahitaro had spent in prison for a crime he didn't even commit, framed by someone whose face he could barely remembers through the fog of trauma.
"I'm fine," Mahitaro whispered, the words automatic, meaningless.
"Of course you are." Kurosawa's hand landed on his shoulder, the weight of it like a shackle. "You're my hardest worker, after all. What would I do without you?"
The hand squeezed once before releasing. Kurosawa walked away whistling, leaving Mahitaro frozen among the crates of wilting vegetables, his breathing shallow, his vision tunneling.
You could quit, a voice whispered in his mind—young, naive, belonging to a version of himself that had died long ago. You could walk away.
But where would he go? The city remembered. Tokyo kept receipts on people like him, catalogued their failures in the collective memory. Every job interview that ended in polite rejection after a background check. Every apartment application denied. Every stranger's eyes that lingered too long, recognition sparking: Isn't that...?
The fluorescent lights flickered, and for a moment, Mahitaro saw something else in the glass reflection—not his face, but the face of a seventeen-year-old kid, eyes wide with terror, blood on his hands that wouldn't wash away no matter how hard he scrubbed.
He blinked. The vision dissolved. Just the lights playing tricks.
It's getting worse, he noted distantly. The hallucinations had started six months ago—brief flashes at first, easy to dismiss as stress or exhaustion. But they'd been intensifying, bleeding into reality with increasing frequency.
The rain began as Mahitaro's shift ended at 2 AM, fat drops that exploded against the pavement like small suicides. He stood under the store's flickering awning, smoking a cigarette he didn't remember buying, watching the neon reflections shatter and reform in puddles.
His phone buzzed. A message from his father: Your mother and I are moving to the countryside next month. You're coming with us. Not a discussion.
Mahitaro stared at the words until they lost meaning, individual characters separating into abstract strokes. The cigarette burned down to his knuckles. He dropped it, watching it drown in a puddle, the ember dying with a soft hiss.
He should go home. Sleep. But the thought of returning to that cramped apartment—where his parents moved through their alcoholic haze like ghosts haunting their own lives—made his stomach constrict.
Instead, he walked.
Shinjuku at this hour was a study in contrasts. Salary workers stumbled from bars, their laughter too loud, desperate to convince themselves they were having fun. Worker scouts called out with mechanical enthusiasm. Somewhere, an adult was crying in an alley, her sobs mixing with the puddles of the rain.
Mahitaro drifted through it all, untouched, invisible.
The streets knew him. He'd mapped every corner during his countless insomnia-driven wanderings. Here was the bridge where a business person had jumped three years ago—flowers still appeared there sometimes, weather-beaten and sad. There was the construction site where a worker had been crushed by falling scaffolding. Over there, the crosswalk where a student had stepped in front of a train.
Death marked the city like graffiti, visible only to those who knew where to look.
Tokyo is a graveyard, Mahitaro thought. We're all just waiting our turn.
He arrived at work the next day to find Kurosawa waiting, that same venomous smile in place.
"Mahitaro, a word?"
The back room smelled of cardboard and mildew. Kurosawa closed the door with exaggerated care, the click of the latch deafening in the small space.
"I heard about your parents' move," Kurosawa began, settling into his chair with the satisfaction of a spider at the center of its web. "The countryside, how quaint. Good for them, really. Fresh air. Quiet."
Mahitaro said nothing. His hands were shaking. He clasped them behind his back.
"The thing is," Kurosawa continued, examining his nails with studied disinterest, "we've hired someone new. Bright kid, picks things up fast. And with you moving so far away... well, it's not practical, is it? For the business."
The words arrived slowly, like the delay between lightning and thunder. Mahitaro understood their meaning, but his brain refused to process the implications.
"I could tell yesterday, you know," Kurosawa said, leaning forward. "The way you kept opening your mouth like a fish, working up the courage to tell me. It was written all over that pathetic face of yours. You've always been so easy to read, Mahitaro. So transparent. It's almost embarrassing."
Something hot and acidic rose in Mahitaro's throat.
"The truth is, you've been dead weight for a while now," Kurosawa said, his voice taking on a casual cruelty, as if discussing the weather. "Slow, mistake-prone, that defeated slouch you've perfected. Customers complain about you, did you know that? They say you make them uncomfortable. Something about your energy. Too heavy, they say. Like being near a corpse."
The room tilted slightly. Mahitaro gripped the edge of a shelf to steady himself.
"So here's what's going to happen." Kurosawa stood, brushing imaginary dust from his sleeves. "Don't come in tomorrow. Or the day after. Actually, just don't come back at all. We'll mail your final check. Minus deductions for the produce you damaged last week, of course."
He moved toward the door, then paused, turning back with an expression of mock concern.
"Oh, and Mahitaro? Try not to do anything stupid, alright? I'd hate to read about you in the news. 'Former Employee of Tokyo Fruits Market...' Bad for business, you understand."
The door clicked shut.
Mahitaro stood alone in the back room, surrounded by boxes of inventory, the fluorescent light buzzing overhead like a trapped insect. His vision was doing strange things—the edges of objects blurring, colors bleeding into each other like watercolors in rain.
He could see himself from above, a small figure hunched in a cramped room, barely distinguishable from the products waiting to be discarded.
Merchandise with an expiration date, his mind supplied helpfully. Past due. Destined for the trash.
His legs carried him home without conscious direction, autopilot through familiar streets. The rain had intensified, soaking through his jacket, his shirt, his skin, until he felt waterlogged, bloated, like a body fished from a river.
His parents' apartment smelled of stale smells and cheap sake. His father was sprawled on the couch, face flushed, eyes glazed. His mother stood at the kitchen counter, refilling her glass with mechanical precision.
"I lost my job," Mahitaro said to the room.
His father grunted, attention never leaving the television.
His mother laughed—a short, bitter sound like breaking glass. "Of course you did. What did you expect?"
"I thought—"
"You thought what?" She turned to face him, and Mahitaro saw in her eyes something he'd been trying not to acknowledge for years: contempt. Pure, undiluted contempt. "That you deserved better? You, with your record? You're lucky anyone hired you at all. But that's over now, isn't it? So you'll come with us to the countryside. Not because we want you there, but because what choice do you have?"
The words should have hurt. On some level, Mahitaro knew they were designed to wound. But he felt nothing—or rather, he felt the absence of feeling, a numbness so complete it was almost peaceful.
He walked to his room, closed the door, and sat on the edge of his bed, staring at the wall where cracks formed patterns like a map to nowhere.
The hallucinations started subtly. A shadow in his peripheral vision that moved wrong. A whisper that might have been the wind or might have been voices. Then, more insistently, shapes began to form in the darkness—figures standing in the corners of his room, watching with empty eyes.
You're breaking, the clinical part of his mind observed. This is a psychotic break. You should seek help.
But who would help him? Who had ever helped him?
The figures in the corners multiplied, pressing closer. Mahitaro recognized some of them—classmates who'd turned away when the accusations started, teachers who'd looked at him with suspicion and disgust, the judge who'd sentenced him with such conviction, so certain of his guilt.
And there, in the center of them all, the child. The one he supposedly killed. Small, pale, accusatory.
"I didn't do it," Mahitaro whispered to the apparition. "It wasn't me."
The child's mouth opened, but what emerged wasn't a voice—it was that sound again, that terrible high-pitched hum that seemed to come from inside his skull. The fluorescent light flicker-flash of interrogation rooms and prison cells.
Mahitaro pressed his palms against his ears, but the sound only intensified. The walls were breathing now, expanding and contracting like lungs. The floor felt insubstantial, as if he might fall through it at any moment into some deeper, darker place.
This is it, he realized with sudden clarity. This is the edge. One more step and I fall completely.
The thought should have terrified him. Instead, it brought relief.
He found the rope three days later near a construction site, coiled like a snake in the rain-soaked dirt. His hands closed around it with a sense of recognition, of fate fulfilled.
No one looked at him as he carried it home. He was invisible, had been invisible for years. Just another shadow in a city full of them.
The preparations took on a ritual quality. He moved the computer chair to the center of his room with precise care. Tied the rope to the ceiling beam his father had installed years ago, back when they still pretended to be a family. Tested the knot's strength, pulling against it until his palms burned.
Through his window, Tokyo glittered indifferently. Millions of lights, millions of lives, none of them his.
It's funny, he thought, climbing onto the chair. I spent so many years trying to prove I didn't kill anyone. And now I'm about to kill myself.
The rope was rough against his neck, the fibers biting into skin. For a moment, he hesitated, some primal survival instinct screaming at him to stop, to reconsider, to choose life even if that life was unbearable.
But then he saw them again—the hallucinations, the ghosts, the accusations made manifest. They filled every inch of his room, pressing in from all sides, their weight suffocating.
This is the only way out, he told himself. The only answer left.
He kicked the chair.
The drop was brief—inches, maybe a foot. The rope went taut. His body's weight pulled against the noose, cutting off air, blood, everything. His hands clawed at the rope instinctively, legs kicking in empty air, the most primitive part of his brain refusing to accept what the conscious part had chosen.
The room dimmed at the edges, darkness creeping inward like water filling a sinking ship. His lungs burned with the need for oxygen they couldn't access. His heart hammered wildly, uselessly, fighting a battle already lost.
Finally, he thought as the darkness swallowed him completely. Finally, it ends.
TO BE CONTINUED...