Prologue

I had lived all my life believing I’d have no regrets when it came to the end. Maybe it was confidence, or maybe it was just my youthful ignorance. Nevertheless, it never changed until it was too late.

Before Mother passed, the last words she gave me as her parting gift were an apology.

“I’m sorry Riku. Please forgive me for not giving you the life you deserved.” She cried.

I was fifteen years old and I had no one but her. Apart from those words, she also left me with a good grasp of my education. I wanted to make her proud, and while I wasn’t the best in our class, I was by no means even close to being the worst.

No family was willing to take me in, and the comfort I was raised with up until that point in my life was forgotten. My relatives who offered no support to my single mother didn’t even shed a tear for my mother.

It was the same thing over and over again. She wasn’t their sister. She wasn’t their family. She was the daughter of a woman who whored herself and corrupted their father. Thus, I wasn’t their family.

They didn’t turn their backs on me. No, I wouldn’t give them that satisfaction. I turned my back on them before they got the chance to. I ran away and completely disappeared. Though I ran away and cut familial ties with a bunch of hypocrites to escape the status of a pariah, fate signed me up straight to a course for the underworld.

At first, I tried to get a job, some honest work. My search was hard, though it didn’t prove to be fruitless. I was able to get hired at small convenience stores or some laborious gigs. The gigs paid well, though it was hard to get rehired after. After all, a capable adult was better suited for this type of job than some runaway, starving kid. The convenience stores paid less, cheating me out of a full pay. It wasn’t hard to guess why they’d do that. I was a runaway kid who only finished his final year of middle school, and figured that I’d be an easy target for an unfair wage. Bringing it up only resulted in me getting yelled at and fired right on the spot.

Finding myself with not that much money for food or water, much less a house, I began committing petty crimes to survive. First theft, starting with food first and working my way up to pickpocketing money. When I discovered the existence of a fence, I began dipping my toes into burglary. This was what would lead to my faithful encounter with the yakuza.

It hadn’t even been a year, so I wasn’t too good at committing these malicious acts, so when I had done it to a member of the yakuza, I first received a knuckle to the cheek. I knew that a lot of rumours went around that even kids weren’t safe from them, so I prepared myself for the worst, though I guess I can consider myself lucky that I met Shuji, my official gateway to the underworld.

Apparently, Shuji empathized with me because he was also a runaway, though one thing led to another, and he became a yakuza. He decided to take a gamble on me, taking me under his wing. The man was superstitious, sometimes talking about his low karma and how it didn’t hurt to do some good once in a while to tip the scales even a little bit.

Shuji sponsored me, and I still got to attend high school. Some delinquents tried to stick out, though I was there more for learning despite being sponsored. After high school, I realized that I was already firmly tied to the syndicate. Shuji’s gang had given me their support, and now I needed to give something back.

Slowly over the years, my petty offences paled in comparison to my misconducts in later years. The job had corrupted me and developed me into a callous man. The underworld became my home, and the family I was in really became a family. Shuji was more like a brother to me than a father, yet I wouldn’t know what it felt like in the first place.

But just like actual callouses, which one can shed, my hardened heart could become soft once more. It happened after Shuji’s death. I was struck by grief. Thoughts I would’ve never given the time of day or taken seriously began to take root inside my head. Then I faintly remembered the comfort I’ve lost. The love given to me by my parent.