I learned early that the world has a way of taking what you give and turning it into fuel for other people's fires.
My name is Takeda Haruto. I have a face people forget the moment they look away. I am fat, pasty, my hair flat from sweat and bad habits, my jaw blurred by flesh that never decided to be a jaw. I was born into the kind of life that teaches you to survive on scraps—scraps of affection, scraps of dignity, scraps of self-worth you gather and glue together until your hands bleed.
Which is how it started: poverty, and the softening of the soul that poverty encourages. My father worked two shifts and came home smelling like cigarette ash and soy sauce. My mother hummed and stitched and smiled in the empty, resigned way of people who know their dreams have already been pawned. We lived in a cramped apartment that always smelled faintly of cheap curry and detergent. There were holes in the futon and a single bent kitchen chair that held up everything from unpaid bills to the plastic bucket we used when the thunderstorm made the ceiling leak.
I learned trades in that cramped place—how to calculate change so the store owner wouldn't notice a few missing coins, how to lie just well enough for a boss to keep you one more week, how to laugh when someone called you loser because one day, you told yourself, you'd stop needing to be rescued. Pride was a manuscript I read but never quite memorized.
School was a blur of numbers and faces and the cold impression of being less than. Kids were cruel in efficient, ritual ways: nicknames, shoved into lockers, the practiced indifference of classmates who move like wolves in flocks. Girls, when they looked my way, either giggled with a friend or looked through me like glass. I learned to wear invisibility like armor. Not because I wanted to hide, but because hiding hurt less than being visible and disliked.
When I got my first job at the convenience store, the manager taught me how to stack sad little candies so they seemed like a feast. When I folded towels at the bento shop, my hands learned the exact crease patrons sought for their errands. Work taught me small miracles: that you can make the world kinder with enough effort, or at least the illusion of kindness. But love—real, expansive, expensive love—evaded me like a train that never stopped at my platform.
I had crushes the way other people had seasons. I fell hard and stupid and deep enough to burn. Each girl I loved taught me a new method of breaking. There was the college girl who took lunch money and left; the office woman who used my shoulder as a napkin and then complained about my breath; the bartender who traced my face for a laugh and then signed off with someone younger and prettier. With every woman, my savings thinned and my self-respect frayed. I justified the waste: "This time it's different." I lied to myself into hope until the lies became the rhythm of my days.
When you're poor and invisible, you become a merchant of illusions. I sold myself as "stable" when I was paycheckless, as "generous" when I was literally borrowing from the future. I learned to inflate my worth with dinners I couldn't afford and gifts bought with credit cards and the clumsy, aching sincerity of someone trying to purchase a soul. It never worked. People like me are excellent practice for the people who love practice, not the people who love for keeps.
I was framed once before, years ago—an accusation that stuck like gum in the hair of a child. That time, a woman with small eyes and a frantic voice screamed theft in a crowded market. I had waved a ceramic cup away because it looked about to fall; she caught the motion on her phone and later told the police in precise, rehearsed detail that I had shoved it into my coat. Her friends backed her story, and the crowd's faces hardened like clay. I remember standing under a fluorescent light while my boss told me he needed a "clean record" on staff; the tiny, bureaucratic cruelty of a man with enough moral dimness to throw another under a bus to save his rent. I paid a fine I didn't need to, said apologies I didn't mean, and learned a vital lesson: people prefer a simple villain to a complicated truth.
That first framing didn't break me. It educated me.
Each time a woman took me and then let me go, the wound closed over and taught a new scar pattern. One cheated me of money. Another of warmth. One of promises. I accumulated betrayals like someone collects stamps—dull objects you keep in a drawer because you hope eventually they'll form something meaningful. The more I gave, the less I received; the more I trusted, the easier the knife slid between ribs. There is an anatomy to betrayal: it always starts small, enlarges into demand, then blossoms into a performance in which they paint you as the monster.
By twenty-four, I had become an expert at rationalizing ruin. I told myself stories—about future me, about the one who would finally like the real Haruto buried below the fat and the debt. Then Ayaka arrived and taught me a new kind of unmaking.
Ayaka was the brightness that made other things look dull. She had hair the color of warm whiskey, skin that photographed perfectly, and a smile that seemed to hold secret harmonies. She moved like an expensive thing moved—purposeful, exacting, the way a glassblower shapes air into form. When she laughed, the world around me felt less like a scramble and more like orchestration. She told me I was special. She said I listened. She said it like she meant it. For a man who had been practiced on by life for cruelty, those were incisions of warmth.
She borrowed money and told me stories about why she could never hold a job. I did what I always did: I became her bank and her refuge. I bought her a winter coat she said she'd always wanted. I took loans to furnish an apartment she claimed she'd share with me someday, and when she asked for late nights, I told myself I was secure. I rehearsed future happiness like a line in a play.
The more I gave, the more elaborate her asks became. First it was minor—dinners and soft things. Then she wanted gifts that required three extra shifts. I gave. Because she was bait and I was the fish that bit and then told himself it was a noble death. She kissed me in ways that made me imagine permanence. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would wake up and listen to the soft rhythm of her breath and think the world had wound itself neatly—until the time she began to critique me.
"You're too slow sometimes," she said once, not unkindly. "I mean… you mean well, but you're so—predictable, Haruto."
Predictable is a kind word for the rhythm of being taken. Predictability is the friend of thieves. You show them the pattern and they choreograph a theft.
There were red flags, gestures like wind before a storm. Once, she encouraged me to attend a party where strangers fed me compliments in the language of a million other small slights. Once she asked me to cover for her when someone called and she laughed like it was a private joke. I pretended not to see. That was my failure: pretending blindness to avoid confrontation.
On that seventeenth floor, under neon shame and a bath that steamed like small lies, she whispered something into my ear that I later replayed in my head like a cursed recording.
"Choke me," she said, small and imperious. "I like being rough. Please."
We were indulgent that night—cheap champagne bought on credit, a show of intimacy I couldn't fully afford. She pressed her hand against my chest and asked me, with a voice that was all honey and instruction, "Do it harder."
I obeyed because desire is an obedient animal when it is starving. I wrapped my hands around her throat because she'd asked me to. She made a sound—half giggle, half plea—and I tightened. My muscles clenched in reflex, in the sort of clumsy, inexperienced way of a guy who had never been trusted to impose pain in the name of pleasure. There was a raw, guilty ecstasy in the transaction for both of us; I mistook the danger for consent.
The blade was there before I realized it. She'd placed it beneath the pillow like an actor prepped for a later cue. In one movement that was too fast and yet premeditated, she dragged it across her inner thigh. The soft fabric tore, skin opened, blood surprised the scene with a cinematic flourish. She mopped the air with palm and fingernail, sobbed like a struck animal, and then, with a precision that stunned me, she slapped herself across the face and let the sound echo like proof.
She screamed—loud, realistic, calibrated—and pulled her blouse open to display the wound as if it were a badge she had pierced into the narrative. Then she turned on the camera. The red light blinked. My entire world reduced down to a small, glowing rectangle of glass that would decide the calculus of guilt and innocence.
I tried to explain. "Ayaka—wait—this was your idea—" My voice was a cracked relay, the cluttered panic of a man trying to correct a hallucination. Her eyes were fierce and feral and obscene with triumph. She nodded like an actress fulfilling direction.
When the police came—because they always come when women scream in hotels—the door had already been roughed. Metal teeth angled against the wood. Voices on the other side, brisk with authority. The movement was cinematic: lights, the metallic clatter of fecal bureaucracy that drains dignity. They asked questions in official tones that sounded like verdicts.
"You assaulted her," the lead officer said, the words falling like a gavel.
"No—no, she—" I wanted to explain nuance: that consent had been given in the theatre of kink, that she'd asked for it. But what the world hears in a flash of blood is not nuance; nuance is for philosophers, not policemen. Her phone recorded my frame in its square of light: me, larger than the camera needed, the way someone bulky fills the negative space in a frame, her torn dress, her wet face. The tape would become the world's myth: Haruto the brute, Ayaka the victim.
She performed her wounded angel act with surgical skill, and the crowd's sympathy turned like mercury in a hand. My bosses were called. My phone filled with messages I didn't read. I could feel the social media axes grind in the distance—comments like hive stings, venomous and orthodox.
Why would anyone believe me? A fat man and a beautiful woman. Which story is more convenient?
They cuffed me because procedure is a river that carries people far from nuance. My mother's voice shrank to a thin paper after someone called and told her what had happened; she asked if I had eaten in the station and how long I'd be gone like they lived under a polite dictatorship. The press would later call me "youth of unknown employment" with a picture cropped to my worst angles. The world would love to put labels on a body it doesn't need to understand.
I remember standing on the seventeenth-floor balcony with the city spread below like a collection of stars you can no longer touch. My knees are not especially steady, but that night they held me. I looked down and felt not fear, but a relieved distillation of all the things that had been broken. The enormity of betrayal pressed like a thumb on my throat and the pressure—oddly—felt like mercy.
Ayaka watched me from the hotel doorway through the custody of flashing lights and thin policemen. She smiled at me like a merciless god. There was no room left for argument between the arch of a smile and the false testimony of a body that can make any narrative fit. My credit cards, the unpaid loans, the small identity I had built—everything collapsed into the shape of her accusation.
"Go ahead," she mouthed when our eyes met. "Do it. End it."
No one would believe me. My name would be shit; my mother's neighbors would whisper; my father would look at me like an odd insect inspected with absent concern. The future, the one I had pretend-bought like a cheap suit, folded into a pamphlet of shame. I thought about jail and the sentences people use like props—custodial periods, fines. I thought about my parents' faces and how they would turn when their son was on the internet under a headline that never explained nuance. I thought about waking every morning and finding strangers' pity folded into their contempt.
Better to die than to be remade into a thing I did not recognize.
It was a thought that felt like electricity. And then my feet walked me to the edge.
When you stand somewhere very high with the air sharp and cold and the city's lights blinking like indifferent stars, you get the sense of small objects pulled into a gravity greater than yourself: all the little humiliations, all the missed chances, the loans, the betrayals fold into an acute point. The thinnest filament of thought becomes an arrow: I cannot live in a world that will believe her.
I spread my arms like a fool and imagined the wind sympathetic. It was a very small moment: the neon of Tokyo refracting in rain puddles, the smell of cigarette smoke, the hollow sound of sirens like practiced sorrow. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the other side. Maybe there would be an afterlife. Maybe it would be apocalyptic fire or monotonous gray. Maybe I'd vanish into nothing. Any of that would be cleaner than the life waiting for me.
I stepped forward.
Pain did not come. There was no violent impact and no iron anthology of broken bone. Instead—I swear to the small god of my broken life—there was a sound like wind through fingers, a sensation like being unstitched from a garment. The air lost its taste of city concrete and became wide and honest. My stomach did not go up into my throat. My vision did not whiten into a soft blur of overexposed images. It was as if some benevolent director had cut the scene differently, as if the world decided to be kinder than any of us were entitled to believe.
When I opened my eyes, for a long time I did not know what to call the place. The horizon flattened to a bleached line. Grass—tall, honest, springy—ran under my palm. The sky was a blue so clean it was almost obscene. No city smog, no neon, no constellations of apartment lights. I tasted air that had not been sifted by engines or stale tobacco.
I lay there and listened to my heart. The world exhaled an unfamiliar peace. There were no ambulances, no recording phones, no crowd—just silence and the distant hum of unknown insects. My body felt heavy in a new way, like a man who no longer believed in being watched.
"Where the hell am I?" I whispered aloud and the sound belonged to me like a small miracle.
I remembered the balcony, the glass of the railing warming my palms. I remembered Ayaka and her smile like teeth. I remembered the camera and the crouched policemen. Then I remembered the fall. And finally I smiled because the smile was sharp and unexpected and tasted of a criminal's joy.
"An isekai, huh?" I said. My voice was rusty and cruel. "Of course. I die and some narrative trope picks me up. Figures." There was a bitter laugh bubbling up like rust in a pipe—part mockery, part relief. The idea of being in a fantasy world was ridiculous. The idea of starting again at the top of some plotline was even more ridiculous. But the world had given me a second hand; what could I do but grasp it?
I sat up. My belly protested, a deep, exhausting complaint. I was still fat, still ungainly, sweat crusted into my hair. The clothes I had on were the same—jeans that pinched, a t-shirt that had seen better months. I patted my pockets. Phone—miraculously there, dim and cracked; wallet—lighter than I'd remembered; nothing else. No passport to a new life. No manual to survival.
I began to walk, because people in maps and books always walked when the scene called for it, and because the alternative was lying and letting myself dissolve under the sun like a bad memory. The grass whispered underfoot. The wind felt honest. For the first time in years, the urge to scam someone did not come from spite but from survival. There is a subtle difference: spiting is petty; surviving is an art.
Hours stretched like thin muscle. The sky burned to a pale afternoon. My feet rubbed painfully in my shoes. The hills gave and took and gave again. I should have been young enough to manage the trek, but my body had been trained in small indignities, not distance. My thighs felt leaden. I cursed the past versions of me who had let themselves become domesticated straw. I cursed everything and everyone because that is how a man who has been hurt for years learns to be.
The city appeared as a thin contradiction against the horizon: walls of stone, a haze of smoke, a suggestion of life. Relief is an animal that runs fast and without shame; when I saw the first tower I wanted to collapse there in a heap and sob and let someone else write the next stanza of my life.
I approached the road like a thief approaches a guarded door. The path was lined with rough stones and the occasional figure—farmers with bundles, a child with a wooden hoop. Eyes regarded me with curiosity, quick and evasive. I must have looked like something out of a dream: a disheveled fat man in urban clothes that clashed with a world not yet used to them. I felt like a costume someone had mislaid.
My body could not keep up with the mind's insistence. My knees trembled. The sun argued with my skull. I had not eaten for hours, not since the hotel bargain-champagne. Hunger hit me like the truth. It was a sharp, cunning pain that focuses attention with a surgeon's bluntness.
When the gate came into view—two wooden arms lugged with iron and a crowd that kept their own private distance—I tasted metal in my mouth. The last forty meters were a catalogue of small betrayals: my legs slowed in treason, my breath got short, vision went silver at the edges like a camera being retuned. My hands found the ground. I remember the dirt under my face, the sour smell of sweat and sweat again.
There were hands on me: calloused, kind, skeptical. Voices above said words I could not parse, though comprehension—like curiosity—came unsought.
"Is he… alive?" someone asked.
"Bring water!" said someone else.
The sky above tilted into a smear. The world narrowed to the feel of hands and the cotton of a shirt. My last coherent thought—abraded but shimmering—was simple and irreverent