His mother’s mood set the tone of every single day.
For as far back as Kazushi Migiwa could remember, that had been his life.
To a casual observer, they’d probably seemed like the sort of family one could find anywhere: a mother devoted to education and to her timid, serious only son.
To Kazushi, the pair were more like a warden and her prisoner.
When he got home from elementary school, his mother would tutor him one-on-one.
No, tutor wasn’t the word. It had been nothing that gentle. As his monitor, she’d sat with him until so late at night, it was technically morning. If he dozed off even briefly, she’d hit his head with the textbook and dash tea into his face.
“Why must you make me angry?!” she always said.
When Kazushi silently submitted to her scolding, she’d rebuke him with “Why don’t you say something?! Answer me!”
Then he’d be locked in the bathroom all night. The eyes of the neighbors were probably the only reason she didn’t shut him out of the house. He had water to drink, at least, but it was freezing cold in winter, and at night, the room was pitch-black.
In an attempt to warm up a little, he’d sit on the heated toilet seat, hugging his knees. At times like that, he felt as if his body would either dissolve into the darkness or become a corpse.
If only that would happen, Kazushi thought, it would make everything easier.
Even so, he kept earning the highest grades in his classes, right up until the end of his last year of middle school. He made it into the best escalator school in the prefecture, but it wasn’t long before he stopped being able to attend.
Every time he got into his uniform and stood in the entryway, his body grew terribly heavy. No matter how his mother cursed at him or hit him, he couldn’t make his feet take a single step.
He became a shut-in and stopped attending school. And now that it had happened, he felt as if he’d always known he’d end up like this. He’d never meshed with the rest of the world. He felt like he’d been born not as a human but as some other, worthless creature.
At first, his mother made frequent trips to the school to talk with the counselor and Kazushi’s homeroom teacher. When they decided to expel him, she tried desperately to make him attend cram school for the high school equivalency exam. And finally, Kazushi became something that simply didn’t exist.
Just like his father.
His father worked at a government office. He’d come home at ten on the dot every night, have an evening drink with whatever leftovers happened to be in the fridge, and stare vacantly at the television.
Hearing a child crying in the bathroom all night long didn’t seem to bother him. He’d just do his business in a plastic bottle instead. At this point, when Kazushi tried to picture his face, all he could remember was the fact that his tortoiseshell glasses had always been cloudy with fingerprints.
If you switched the TV for a computer, Kazushi was about the same.
The only difference was that his mother wouldn’t even tolerate the sight of Kazushi. Just being there was enough to get him railed at, hit, taunted, and crushed.
It was as if he were a cockroach in human form.
At some point, Kazushi took to waiting until his mother went to bed, before crawling out of his room and raiding the fridge to fill his belly and keep himself alive. He was a pest who lived in the shadows of the house.
After five years had passed, he ran into his mother in the kitchen late one night.
A bag of prescription medicine had been tossed carelessly onto the table. The name of the hospital printed on the side told him she was a patient of the behavioral health department. There was nothing Kazushi could say to her, though.
He’d turned his back on the fluorescent light and was trying to blend into the gloom of the hallway when he heard a tuneless, singsong voice.
“Good boy, good boy, good-for-nothing boy.”
It was his mother. She was sitting at the table, head drooping, gazing steadily at the prescription bag.
“You steal into the kitchen late at night to scavenge food, and when the light comes on, you run. You’re just like a cockroach.”
Then she looked at him. Hatred, resentment, contempt—she’d taken all the emotions ready to explode out of her and converted them into tears that ran down her cheeks.
“To think this thing is my child.”
And then…
“Why are you alive?”
Don’t look at me.
The next thing Kazushi knew, he’d hauled off and punched her cheek with everything he had.
His mother went over sideways, falling out of her chair and hitting the floor hard.
She fixed him with a frightened glare; her face had gone past pale white to blackish. Was it anger, shock, or fear? He couldn’t tell from her eyes.
Once he’d hit her, though, he couldn’t stop.
He choked her, punched her, kicked her.
His father had apparently come home right at ten as usual, but although he saw his son straddling his mother and beating her and heard his wife scream, “Help me! He’s going to kill me!” he just spent all night staring vaguely at the TV.
The next morning, his mother crawled out the front door, and she never came back. Kazushi left the house two weeks later.
He’d come home just once after that.
Maybe his parents had ended up divorcing. The house was just an empty shell with a FOR SALE sign on it.
After that, he went into free-fall.
It was as if he’d stumbled through a trapdoor: He fell headlong, with no way to stop.
At first, he lived out of net cafés and tried to find a job through Hello Work and help-wanted magazines. He was a high school dropout who’d only completed middle school, though. He had no fixed address, no ID, and no one to act as his guarantor. With such a wealth of “nothing,” he had no chance of finding decent work.
He managed to register on a smartphone help-wanted site and find day labor gigs at warehouses and factories, but every job was inundated with applicants. He was lucky if he got two days of work a week.
As his money dwindled, his clothes developed sweat stains, and his greasy hair started to smell pretty rank. Since he didn’t have a decent place to sleep, there were always dark circles under his eyes, and his mind was hazy around the clock.