VOLUME 2 - EPISODE 5 - [CONTENT WARNING: MA26+]
[NARRATOR: Some stories need to be told in one voice. Not because other voices wouldn't be accurate — because some truths belong specifically to the person who lived them and translating them through another person's perspective changes something essential about what they are. This episode belongs entirely to Shoehead Glovehiko. His words. His telling. The complete version of what he's been carrying — not in fragments across multiple conversations, not assembled from records and research and pieces shared reluctantly, but whole. The way it actually was. From the beginning. From before Takeshi. From the family that existed before everything that ended it. Riyura asked him on the phone to come to Pan's bakery on Sunday morning and tell him everything. Not the managed version. Not the version edited for what others could handle. Everything. Shoehead came. He sat at the table by the window where the light came through in the specific quality of a Sunday morning. And he told it. This is what he said.]
[SHOEHEAD'S VOICE — COMPLETE]
I need to start before Takeshi. People always want to start with Takeshi because Takeshi is where everything changed and I understand that — I've told the story that way myself, starting with the accident because the accident is the hinge, the thing everything before and after rotates around. But starting there isn't honest. Starting there makes it sound like everything before was fine and the accident broke it. That's not true. The truth is more complicated. The truth is that what we were before the accident made us specifically vulnerable to what the accident did to us. So I need to start before.
My parents. My mother's name was Hana. My father's name was Hanuzawa. They were good people in the specific way that people are good when goodness hasn't been tested past the point it can hold. They loved each other genuinely. They loved me genuinely. And Takeshi they loved genuinely too. The house was — the house was warm. I mean that actually. Physically warm. My mother kept it warm in the winter in ways that cost more than we could easily afford because she believed that people needed warmth properly. Not metaphorically. Actually.
My father worked at a factory. Mid-level position. Enough to pay rent, to keep the house warm, to occasionally do something that was a treat rather than a necessity. Not wealthy. Comfortable enough that the not-wealthy didn't feel like a defining condition. My mother worked part-time at a bakery — not Pan's, a different one, a small local place two streets from our apartment. She brought bread home sometimes. The kind that was slightly wrong — the loaves that hadn't risen perfectly or had split on top — because the owner let staff take the imperfect ones rather than throw them away. We ate a lot of imperfect bread. I didn't understand until years later that imperfect bread was the measure of our specific economic position. At the time it just tasted like the bread my mother brought home. It tasted fine.
Takeshi was — he was very specific. That's what I remember most. The specificity of him. He liked the color of certain beetles. Not beetles generally — specific beetles. The ones with the iridescent shells that changed color with the angle of light. We found them sometimes on the sidewalk near our building and he would crouch over them for a very long time without touching, just looking. Watching the color shift. Naming the colors he saw in a sequence, because the colors arrived in a sequence and he'd identified the sequence and wanted to document it verbally.
He was five. And I was eight and I thought he was the strangest most wonderful person I'd ever encountered.
The day of the accident was not a special day. That's important to say. There was no occasion. No particular significance to the date. It was a Tuesday in the early afternoon, the specific hour when school had ended and the street was active with people and the specific quality of weekday after-school light that I can still describe in detail because I've been seeing it in my memory for fifteen years.
I'd found a beetle. Iridescent. The specific kind. I was across the street from where Takeshi was standing and I'd found it and my first thought was not about the beetle. My first thought was: Takeshi needs to see this. He needs to document the color sequence. That was genuinely my first thought.
So I waved. I called his name. I waved him across.
He looked at me. He smiled. He started across the street looking at me because I had called him and he was coming to me and why would he look at the road when his brother had called him and was waiting across it.
I need to stop here. I need to be honest about what the next part is. It's not dramatic. It wasn't the kind of moment that announces itself as terrible before it becomes terrible. It was just: car, Takeshi, the car not stopping. The specific sound. The specific way everything in my field of vision rearranged itself around what had happened. And then Takeshi on the ground and me on the other side of the street with the beetle in my hand and my brother on the ground.
I crossed the street. I sat beside him. Someone had already called emergency services — I could hear the distant sound of the response coming. I sat beside him and I held his hand and his hand was still warm and I sat there for a very long time while the warmth did what warmth does.
The car didn't stop.
I want you to understand what I mean by that. I don't mean it stopped briefly and then drove away. I mean it continued. The driver made a decision — in the moment or by instinct or through whatever mechanism people use when they encounter something they've done and choose not to stay with it — and the car continued moving and the street resumed its normal activity around the place where my brother was on the ground. The world just kept going. That was — that was the specific thing that I carried more than any other specific thing. Not just what happened to Takeshi. The car that kept going. The world that kept going. The Tuesday afternoon that simply continued.
My mother arrived before the ambulance. I don't know how — she must have been nearby, must have been told by someone who knew us, must have been reached through some chain of communication. She arrived and she saw and she made a sound I have never heard another human being make in my entire life. Before or since. A sound that had no relationship to anything created by regular human experience. Just — pure. Just the specific expression of a reality that exceeded the body's capacity to contain it through normal means.
That sound lived in the house for years afterward. Not literally. She stopped making it. But the quality of it — the quality of the reality that created it — never left the house. It stayed in the walls. In the warmth she still maintained because she kept paying the heating bills even after everything else started going wrong. She kept the house warm. That was the last thing she held onto. The house stayed warm even when everything else in it went cold.
The investigation. I was eight years old and I was present at every stage of it. I heard the conversations. I understood more than they knew I understood. The name Riyazo Shiko arrived in our apartment through documentation and phone calls and my mother's voice saying it in the specific register she reserved for things that needed to be said carefully because saying them at full volume would break something.
The lawyers. I understood lawyers later — at eight I just understood that strangers in suits arrived and the strangers in suits were on the other side of the thing and the other side of the thing had more suits and the more suits meant the outcome was going to be what it was going to be. My mother went to every hearing. She got ready carefully for each one. She sat in those rooms with the specific dignity of someone who understood that dignity was the only thing she had that the suits couldn't take and she wasn't giving it up.
The outcome was what it was.
What happened to my mother after the outcome is the hardest part to say in a way that's honest without being — without being something I'm not ready for this to be. So I'll say it plainly. She loved Takeshi. She loved him the way you love the most specific person you've encountered — the beetle documenter, the color sequence namer, the five-year-old who crouched over iridescent shells with the focused attention of a scientist. And the loss of him had a specific shape. And the outcome having the shape it had gave the loss an additional shape. And the two shapes combined into something that the warmth couldn't compensate for anymore, no matter how high she kept the heating bills.
She deteriorated. Not dramatically. Not in the way that makes clean narrative sense. She deteriorated the way people deteriorate when grief has been building for years inside a person who is using every available resource to appear functional and the resources run out one by one. Gradually. Incrementally. The warmth staying until near the end as evidence that something was still being maintained. As evidence that she was still trying.
I was sixteen. I will not describe the anniversary night in detail. What I will say is this: what happened was the specific product of accumulated years of what the accident and the outcome had done to us both. I was sixteen. She was in the most acute crisis I had ever seen her in. Something happened in the house that night. And I went to the police the next morning because going to the police was the honest thing. I told them what happened and I stayed in what happened rather than getting in a car and continuing to drive.
That's the difference. That's the only distinction I've been able to find between what I am and what the driver of that car was. I stayed. Two years in detention. The record sealed. Released at eighteen.
Jeremy High. The friend group. Socksiku. The culinary school. The philosophy of making food for people you loved because making food for people you loved was the opposite of the car that kept going — it was the deliberate choice to stay, to nourish, to be present rather than absent in the specific way the driver had been absent.
And then Riyura's father's name in the news. And the connection assembling itself. And the carrying getting heavier and Sakura coming with the records and showing me the connection and me making the choice I made.
I'm not going to tell you the choice was right. It wasn't. The choice was the weight being too heavy and me putting it somewhere wrong because I didn't know how to put it somewhere right.
What I know is this. Takeshi's color sequence is still in my memory. The iridescent beetle. Yellow first, then green, then blue, then a purple that wasn't quite purple. He documented it verbally the first time we found one together. He said: yellow, green, blue, almost-purple. In that sequence. I've been carrying that sequence for fifteen years the same way I've been carrying everything else. But that one I carry differently. That one I carry because it's his. Because it's the most specific thing I have left of the most specific person I've encountered.
Yellow, green, blue, almost-purple. That's all. That's the whole story. That's what I've been carrying.
[END OF SHOEHEAD'S TELLING] - EPILOGUE: THE TABLE BY THE WINDOW
Pan's bakery. Sunday morning. The light coming through the window in the specific quality of a morning that didn't require anything from the people sitting in it.
Shoehead had been talking for a long time. The bread between them had gone cold. The tea had gone cold. Neither of them had touched either after the first few minutes.
When he finished, the bakery was quiet around them. Pan behind the counter, not looking over, giving the table by the window the specific privacy of someone who understood when a space needed to contain something without witnesses.
Riyura sat across from Shoehead and didn't say anything for a while. Then: "Yellow, green, blue, almost-purple," he said. Shoehead looked at him. "In that sequence," Riyura said. "That's what he documented."
"Yes," Shoehead said.
Riyura looked at the table. At the cold bread. At the cold tea. At the specific ordinary surface of a bakery table that was holding something that wasn't ordinary.
"I'm going to tell you something," Riyura said. "And I want you to hear it as exactly what it is. Not as comfort. Not as me trying to make it smaller. Just as the honest thing." He paused. "My father made a choice. He chose to keep driving. And everything that followed — the managed outcome, your mother, the anniversary night, everything you've been carrying — those are the specific consequences of that specific choice. Not of what Takeshi did. Not of what you did in calling him across the street." He paused again. "The beetle moment was not your fault. Sharing it was the right instinct. You were eight years old and you found something interesting to you both and you wanted to share it with your brother. That is not the thing that killed him. The thing that killed him was a person in a car who chose to keep driving."
Shoehead looked at him.
"You've been carrying the wrong weight," Riyura said. "You've been carrying: I called him. I waved. He was looking at me." He paused. "That's not the weight. The weight belongs to the father of mine who kept driving. It has always belonged to him. Not to you."
The bakery was very quiet. Pan set fresh bread on the table. Warm. Without ceremony. Just: present. There. Shoehead looked at the bread. At the warmth of it. At the specific quality of something made carefully for people who needed it.
He picked it up. Ate it.
The weight didn't leave. It wasn't that kind of morning. But something in its configuration shifted — slightly, incrementally, in the specific way that honest things shifted impossible weights. Not resolved. Redistributed. Put back where it belonged rather than where it had been sitting.
Yellow, green, blue, almost-purple. In that sequence.
Takeshi's sequence. Documented verbally. Carried forward by the brother who called him across the street and has been carrying it ever since and is still here. Still carrying it. But differently now. In the right direction. Toward the thing rather than away from it.
That was enough. It was always enough.
TO BE CONTINUED...