Chapter 5 – A Smile That Lies

Tokyo smelled like ambition. Even the wind seemed in a hurry, rushing between tramcars and swallowing the voices of strangers. I arrived at thirteen with a suitcase full of books and a heart full of cracks, ready to play the part I had been rehearsing for years: the harmless fool.

Middle school was a theater, and I was determined to become its most dazzling clown. I had learned at home that laughter could disarm even the sharpest glare. Among classmates, it was a weapon of survival, a shield made of sound.

On my first day, I made them laugh. Not a polite chuckle—real laughter, the kind that bursts like a firecracker in the throat. I tripped over my own geta on purpose. I mimicked the pompous headmaster until tears rolled down their faces. They crowned me “the funny one,” and I wore the title like a mask that fit too well.

The teachers praised my “cheerful nature.” Boys invited me to secret rooftop lunches. Girls giggled when I passed, their eyes bright with the illusion that I was happy. I smiled for them all, dazzling, effortless—so effortless they never saw the sweat in my palms, the ache in my jaw, the dread curling in my gut like a sleeping snake.

Every night, I went home to the boarding house and stood before the cracked mirror, practicing smiles like a pianist drilling scales. Upturned lips. Bright eyes. Hide the hollowness. Repeat.

“Perfect,” I whispered to my reflection. “Perfect mask.”

And yet, the cracks showed when I was alone. In the stillness of midnight, when the city’s laughter died, my own felt like a corpse in my throat. I wrote to keep from choking—stories about clowns who danced until their bones snapped, about men who drowned while smiling.

One afternoon, as I was gathering my books after class, a girl approached me. She was small, with hair like black ink and eyes too gentle for this sharp-edged city. I didn’t know her name. She didn’t ask mine.

“Why do you always joke?” she said, her voice soft as rain.

I blinked, startled. No one had asked me that before. Not my brothers, not my tutors, not even the ghosts in my dreams.

So I smiled—habit, reflex, curse—and said the first truth that clawed its way up my throat.

“Because,” I murmured, “if I stop laughing… I’ll have to cry.”

Her eyes widened, as if she had glimpsed the corpse behind the clown’s paint. For a moment, I thought she might say something—something that could save me or ruin me—but the bell rang, and she slipped away like a shadow into the sea of uniforms.

I never saw her again. But her question lingered, echoing in the hollow chamber of my chest: Why do you always joke?

That night, I wandered the streets instead of returning to my room. The city pulsed with neon lights and the hum of trams, but I walked as if underwater, each step heavy with something nameless. My feet led me to a bridge—a thin spine of steel arching over a river black as ink.

I stood there for a long time, watching the current coil and twist like a serpent in the dark. The water whispered to me, its voice softer than silk: Come. I will hold you better than they ever did.

And for the first time, I understood what it meant to want to disappear—not out of anger, but out of exhaustion. To slip soundlessly from a world that never asked for you, never needed you, never loved you except in fragments you could not keep.

“One day,” I whispered to the river, my breath scattering like broken glass in the wind, “I’ll cross this water and never return.”

The river said nothing. It didn’t need to.