Chapter 3 – Masks at the Dinner Table

The house was a shrine to silence. Even laughter, when it came, sounded like a sin committed in daylight.

Dinner at the Oshimi estate was a ritual. We knelt on tatami mats around the low table, dishes arranged like offerings—rice white as surrender, soup trembling in its lacquered bowl. My father sat at the head, a general surveying his troops. My mother sat to his left, her posture flawless, her face carved from porcelain. My siblings—five in all—arranged like stepping stones across a river I would never cross.

I was eight, or maybe nine; what does it matter? Time melts when you spend your days rehearsing how to breathe without offense.

That evening, the air was heavy with miso and menace. Father had returned from the prefectural office, his mood black with politics. His brows were iron bars. No one dared rattle them.

The meal began as all meals did—with the soundless clatter of chopsticks and the faint hum of Father’s disapproval. Hiroshi, eldest and eternal favorite, spoke of his studies with the eloquence of a statesman. Father nodded, satisfied. Then his eyes slid to me, and the temperature of the room dropped.

“What did you learn today?” His voice was a blade testing its edge.

My tutor had spent the afternoon drilling me in arithmetic—a language that mocked me with its cold precision. I could have lied. I almost did. But something in me—reckless, desperate—refused to crawl this time.

Instead, I smiled. Wide. Too wide. A clown’s grin painted on a funeral mask.

“I learned,” I said, pausing just enough for drama, “that numbers are like Father—stern, merciless, and impossible to love.”

The silence that followed was a living thing. It crawled up the walls, slithered across the tatami, coiled around my throat. My siblings froze mid-bite. My mother’s eyes widened, then dropped like a curtain.

And then—against all laws of this house—Hiroshi laughed. A short, startled bark, but laughter nonetheless. My second brother snickered. Even little Aiko, our youngest sister, clapped her hands like a delighted sparrow.

Father’s glare could have cracked stone.

“What nonsense,” he said finally, each syllable dipped in venom.

But I saw it—the flicker of something he could not name, a tiny fracture in his monolith of authority. Anger, yes, but also… confusion. He had expected submission. He had received theater.

That night, lying in my futon, I replayed the scene until it glowed in my mind like a forbidden lantern. They had laughed. At me, because of me—no, for me. And in their laughter, I had felt something close to power.

I understood then what would take most men a lifetime to learn: the world forgives the fool. The clown is untouchable. You cannot despise what amuses you.

If I became their fool, maybe they’d forget to hate me.

It began innocently—jokes at dinner, exaggerated bows, a pratfall or two. Soon, I could read their moods like a map: Father’s storms, Mother’s silences, Hiroshi’s smug sunlight. I navigated them all with a painted smile.

And oh, how they laughed. My father never joined, of course, but he tolerated my antics as one tolerates a performing dog—an oddity, but harmless. My mother’s smiles were brittle glass, yet I collected them greedily, as if each one might mend the crack inside me.

I became indispensable at gatherings. “Shinzuo, tell that story again,” relatives would say, their voices sticky with sake. And I would, spinning tales like a spider spinning silk, binding myself in the very threads I thought would set me free.

Outwardly, I was dazzling—quick with a quip, generous with laughter. Inwardly, I was hollow as a gourd, rattling with secrets. No one saw the boy staring at the ceiling at 2 a.m., whispering prayers to gods he didn’t believe in: “Make me real. Make me wanted. Make me anything but this.”

One night, after a particularly raucous dinner where I had them all in stitches—except Father, whose jaw was granite—I lingered in the corridor. The moonlight pooled on the polished floor like spilled milk. I crept to the mirror at the end of the hall.

What looked back at me was a stranger—cheeks flushed from forced laughter, eyes ringed with shadows. I stretched my mouth into the grin they loved so much, the grin that shielded me from their contempt.

“Perfect mask,” I whispered. My breath fogged the glass. “Perfect lie.”

And then I laughed—softly, bitterly—because I knew the truth: masks are not worn; they grow. They graft themselves to your skin until you forget the face beneath.

Perhaps you think this is melodrama, the whining of a privileged child. You’re not wrong. But tell me, reader—have you ever felt invisible in a room full of people chanting your name? Have you ever drowned in applause?

I have. And this was only the beginning.