Chapter 2 – House of Shadows

There are houses where silence is golden. Ours was lead—heavy, suffocating, sinking into the bones of anyone who dared to breathe too loudly.

The Oshimi estate sat like a crouching beast on the edge of the countryside. Its walls were lacquered with pride, its corridors long enough to lose yourself in—if you were a child small and useless enough to vanish. I learned early how to disappear in that house.

I was eight when I first understood what I was in my father’s eyes: a mistake.

It happened on a winter evening when the house smelled of persimmons and cold ink. The fire crackled in the great hall, warming everyone but me. I had slipped away from my tutor’s lecture about arithmetic—I hated numbers; they were cruel little tyrants—and hid behind the paper screen near the veranda. That was my favorite hiding place, the one where I could hear voices without being seen.

My father was speaking to my eldest brother, Hiroshi—the perfect son. Hiroshi’s back was a straight line even when he knelt, his hair slicked into obedience. He was fifteen, and already people whispered that he would inherit Father’s empire of influence.

“This family,” Father said, his voice like polished steel, “is built on consequence. Power. Men who shape the world with their hands, not waste it on… nonsense.”

His pause was deliberate, a blade raised before the strike.

“This one…” I heard the rustle of a sleeve, the faintest gesture toward me though he couldn’t see me behind the screen. “…he’s useless. A mistake.”

Something cracked inside me then, though I didn’t cry. Crying was dangerous in that house; tears were an admission of guilt. So I did what I always did—I smiled. Behind the screen, alone in the cold draft, I stretched my lips until my cheeks hurt. A silent, perfect mask.

I should not exist. That thought rooted itself so deep I can still feel its thorns now, years and rivers later.

My mother sat nearby during that conversation, silent as the screens themselves. She was a porcelain doll in a pale kimono, her hands folded like wings clipped short. She never spoke when Father carved his judgments into the air. Perhaps she thought silence was kindness. Perhaps she thought I was strong enough to endure. She was wrong.

After Father left, Hiroshi lingered a moment. I peeked through the sliver of the screen and saw him adjust his collar, pride swelling in his posture. He had been sharpened into a weapon, and I—well, I was something soft and dull, left to rust in a corner.

That night, I crept into the library. It was a cavern of forgotten words, smelling of mold and quiet rebellion. I ran my fingers over spines of books like a priest touching relics. Here, no one demanded I be useful. Books asked nothing of me but my hunger.

I found a tattered volume of stories—Western tales translated badly into Japanese. The sentences limped, but I devoured them as if they were forbidden sweets. Stories of men who failed, who wept, who wandered aimlessly. Men like me, though I was only eight and barely understood the weight of my kinship with their despair.

That was the night I decided something: if I could not be a man of consequence, I would be a man of words. Not the rigid words of politics my father worshiped, but words that bled, words that confessed, words that curled like smoke around a broken soul.

I began to sketch too—strange, jagged figures in the margins of my notebooks when tutors weren’t looking. They said I was distracted, ill. Perhaps they were right. I was sick, but not of the body. My illness was existence itself.

By day, I endured the tyranny of numbers, the tyranny of expectations. My father’s voice haunted every page of my arithmetic: “This one… useless.”

By night, I let ink run wild across paper, a black river swallowing every syllable of my secret rebellion.

No one noticed at first. I was quiet, obedient in appearance, the perfect little shadow. Shadows don’t speak. Shadows don’t dream. Shadows simply cling to the feet of greater men.

But I dreamed. Oh, how I dreamed.

I dreamed of vanishing. Of slipping so far from that lacquered prison that not even Father’s voice could find me. Sometimes, I imagined myself floating down a river, my body limp, my smile serene. It was a beautiful thought then—death, like an open door in a locked house.

I am writing this now, from a place beyond the locks and the doors and even the walls of flesh. And I wonder: did the boy who hid behind that paper screen ever stand a chance? Was his fate sealed with that single sentence—“He’s useless”—spoken so casually it could have been weather talk?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. But if you are listening, if you still care to know how a child’s wound can become a man’s grave… then stay. The story is only just unfolding, like the first petal of a flower destined to rot in the vase.